Today we are joined by author Robison Wells, a rising star on the LDS suspense horizon. Rob, thanks for taking the time to grant us this exclusive interview.
Your new release, “The Counterfeit,” is the sequel to “ Wake Me When It’s Over,” which I recently reviewed. Do you have to read “ Wake Me When It’s Over” in order to enjoy “The Counterfeit?”
Technically you don’t. I’ve gone to great lengths to make it as stand-alone as possible, recapping the essentials of what happened in “Wake Me When It’s Over.”
However, I think readers would enjoy “The Counterfeit” much more of they’d already read “Wake Me.” I’d always planned them as a series, and wrote the books expecting them to be read in order. The decision to separate them—“Counterfeit” never even mentions that it’s a sequel!—was one made by the publisher’s marketing department. They felt that a stand-alone novel would sell better, in this situation.
So while I’ve tried to recap the essentials of what happens in “Wake Me,” there are some things—character arcs, overarching themes, etc—that you simply won’t understand if you don’t read both books.
In “Wake Me When It’s Over, “ we meet characters Eric and Rebekah, college students whose primary concern is making it to class on time. Then they find themselves embroiled in a scheme that would overthrow the world’s economy. How did you come up with the plot for this story, and make it sound so plausible? You aren’t planning something similar, are you?
The idea for the economic attack sprang from a PBS documentary I was watching. It was all about counterfeiting money, and they made the point that the main worry about counterfeiting isn’t that petty thieves are getting something for nothing, but that a mass influx of counterfeits into the economy lowers the value of the dollar. I took that idea and ran with it, imagining a terrorist group that was trying to destroy the value of the dollar.
But really, both “Wake Me When It’s Over” and “The Counterfeit” were written specifically because I’d graduated with a Political Science/International Relations degree and couldn’t find much professional use for it. So I used a lot of the ideas I’d studied and wrote some books.
In “The Counterfeit,” we discover that the plot to overthrow the economy is only a part of what Eric and Rebekah are up against. How did you create the plot for this book, and how long did it take you?
Well, that’s a good question, and I’ll try to answer it in a way that doesn’t give too much away.
It had always been the plan, from way back at the beginning of the writing process, that there’d be two organizations that were trying to save the world. Each of them were completely different, using different tactics and based on different philosophies, but both with the same goal. The first is Novus Ordo Seclorum, the economic terrorist group you mentioned above. They’re attempting to create world peace through a skewed kind of socialism—basically forcing economic equality on everyone. The second group (which I’m not going to reveal much about) was also trying to save the world, but using more militaristic means.
That was all planned from the beginning, and, as I mentioned above, was the result of having studied a lot of international theory and trying to find a reason to use it.
But a lot of “The Counterfeit” happened in response to readers’ comments after “Wake Me.” I got a lot of positive feedback over something that I’d included almost as a sidenote: someone explains the real reason that the Berlin Wall came down. The truth is that the Wall came down almost accidentally—a low level government official made an offhand remark about East Germany’s foreign policies, and it was misinterpreted by the public to mean that the Wall was coming down. So they all went down to the wall celebrating, and tore it down before the government even really knew what was happening.
Anyway, so many people had commented about how they’d enjoyed that, that I tried in “The Counterfeit” to include more stuff like that—little known facts about world events. As I was researching that, I stumbled onto some great conspiracy theories, and the book came together nicely.
It most certainly did come together nicely.
We’ll end this interview for today, but please be sure to come back Monday for the continuation of this conversation with author Robison Wells. And don’t miss his first novel, “On Second Thought.”