Joshua Chaplinsky is the author of The Paradox Twins, Kanye West – Reanimator, and Whispers in the Ear of a Dreaming Ape, and on August 6, his latest book is ready to worm its way into your neural circuits. Letters to the Purple Satin Killer is in turns horrifying, illuminating, darkly hilarious, and always surprising. (It’s even occasionally shocking, and I’m not one to be easily shocked.)
I loved the book more with every page I turned, and I literally could not fall asleep after I finished it because I was still thinking about it. As when I read Chaplinsky’s debut novel The Paradox Twins, I found myself realizing I’d never read anything quite like it. Chaplinsky discusses his influences openly below, but his is a rare voice in genre fiction that doesn’t really have an analogue. He’s a singularly inventive, provocative writer, and I urge you to pre-order Letters to the Purple Satin Killer from CLASH books without hesitation.
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Are you still hesitating? Fine. Scroll on for the synopsis, book trailer, and for my conversation with Chaplinsky last week on Skype.
Jonas Williker is considered one of the most sadistic serial murderers of the modern era. This epistolary novel explores the aftermath of his arrest and the psychological trauma of those who lived through it.
The Pennsylvania native brutalized his way into the zeitgeist during the early part of the new millennium, leaving a trail of corpses across five states before his eventual arrest. All told, Williker was responsible for the rape and murder of 23 women, and is suspected in the deaths of dozens more. His calling card—a torn piece of fabric found on or inside the bodies of his victims—helped popularize his now ubiquitous nickname.
The Purple Satin Killer.
In the years following his arrest, Jonas Williker received hundreds of letters in prison. Collected here, these letters offer a unique glimpse into a depraved mind through a human lens, including contributions from family, the bereaved, and self-professed “fans.” They represent a chilling portrait of the American psyche, skewering a media obsessed culture where murderers are celebrities to revere. What you learn about the man from these letters will shock you, but not as much as what you learn about yourself.
Letters to the Purple Satin Killer started as a short story. Talk a little about that journey.
It was first published in Thuglit magazine by Todd Robinson. It was early on when I started writing short stories, and I knew I wanted to be published in Thuglit because it was a respected magazine, and I hadn’t really written anything crime-related up until that time.
So I was brainstorming ideas and I happened to be watching Making a Murderer at the time, and there were scenes with Steven Avery talking to his fiancée whom he had met while he was in prison. Something about him, a man in jail accused of murder, attracted her, so they were talking on the phone, and that kind of sparked the whole idea of people communicating with people in prison, women falling in love with men in prison, that sort of thing.
What are some of the other influences on the book, either real life or fiction?
There were a lot, especially after the short story and I started expanding it into a novel. I read a little bit of true crime stuff, the Ann Rule book about her relationship with Ted Bundy [The Stranger Beside Me]. My Friend Dahmer, the graphic novel. So those were some of the true crime influences.
And then just the epistolary genre. A big touchstone for me was The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, because I read that as a kid. Maybe a little too young to fully grasp the religious themes in it, but I just thought it was cool because it was a demon writing letters to his nephew. After I finished [writing the book] I read some newer epistolary stuff that I consider kind of retroactive influences on it, even though that’s not really possible. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca. Max Booth III wrote a recent book that was kind of epistolatory that I really liked, The Last Haunt. It was really more of an oral history, told via interviews, which still counts in my book.
In Letters to the Purple Satin Killer, you explore the audience’s culpability in our consumption of true crime. Aside from the research you did for the book, what’s your own relationship to the genre?
Like anybody else, I really enjoy true crime, watching true crime documentaries. It’s fascinating. Especially now with streaming, there’s just such a wealth of content. I watch all those documentaries. It started with Making a Murderer and then even before that with the documentaries about the West Memphis Three and that sort of thing. The Staircase. It’s fascinating. I think at the heart of it, they’re just great stories. They’re interesting stories and they’re mysteries, that’s a large part of the appeal.
Do you have any complicated feelings about that consumption on your own part?
Only more recently, since it’s become a topic on social media. You think about the people who are still alive who were affected by these crimes. And a lot of times you hear, after a new documentary comes out, the survivors will come out and object to the portrayal or just the way their grief is used as entertainment. And I understand that. If I was on their side, I’d probably feel the same way. It’s complicated. On one hand you feel like, ‘Well, this is a story being told and it’s newsworthy,’ but then it’s affecting real people. It’s a difficult situation.
Your previous book, The Paradox Twins, is also epistolary in nature. Were there any surprises in the process of writing this book versus that one, anything new you learned by writing another epistolary novel?
One of the main things I probably learned is: don’t write a book like this out of order, because it leads to a lot of logistical complications. Towards the end there, a big part of finishing the book was the collating of the different stories and the sequencing of the chapters, because all the letters are dated specifically, and you’ve got to take all these different events and dates into account, and it really became complicated at a certain point. It was important to me for it to work logistically, even if probably the average reader wasn’t going to do all the math and add up the timeline in their head and be like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this date doesn’t correspond to this.’ It was important to me that it be factually accurate for my own sake. So that was really tough.
I wanted to ask about the sequencing because, in addition to the letters being in chronological order, there’s obviously the delivery of certain clues and reveals. It’s very meticulously sprinkled throughout, especially towards the end. I’m just curious what that outline process was like. It does seem like a nightmare, but it comes across so smoothly in the book.
I really appreciate that because it was kind of a nightmare, and I did everything. I had charts, graphs, color coding, Excel spreadsheets. I printed the entire book out and organized it by the letters from each specific person and tried different orders and switched them around and stuff. Yeah, it was a logistical nightmare, and I probably would not do it that way again.
Did you know from the beginning that you didn’t want to include any letters from Jonas Williker, the killer?
Yeah, if I remember correctly, I think so. That started with the short story, and I’m trying to think why exactly I did it that way. I think I probably just thought it was a cool little flourish. To me, I just thought it was something to set it apart, I guess, kind of almost like a writing exercise. ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting if I just didn’t have letters from him? How would I be able to shape the story then?’
Was there a certain character whose voice you found either really easy or really difficult to channel?
It’s going to be a boring answer, but not really. I mean, I had a lot of fun writing most of them. I also concentrated really hard on trying to differentiate the different voices from one another. That was another thing that was really important to me. With so many characters I didn’t want the voices to just all sound like my voice. So while I enjoyed it, I was more concerned with not having everybody sound exactly the same.
You do a lot of interesting tonal shifts in the book. How did you balance the humorous with the tragic with the macabre? What was important to you in that process?
I think I thought about that less. Each character specifically lent themselves to a different tone, and I think that’s another thing that helped differentiate the tones of the different characters. Some were more humorous and some were a lot darker, and then that would play into the sequencing of the book. I wanted to spread it out, not have too many humorous characters in a row and not have too many dark moments in a row. So again, yeah, that was another thing that came into play in the sequencing of the novel.
Both here and in The Paradox Twins, you play with genre and structure in very innovative ways. Is that an approach that you deliberately take, or is that just your natural writing style?
That’s something that I personally really enjoy in books I read and something I look for, just structural flourishes and playing with narrative and mixing genres. They say, ‘write what you love,’ and that’s kind of what I’m doing. I’m writing the type of books I like to read and trying to write things I haven’t seen before and that I hope other people connect with.
Can you list a couple of those books that play with structure that have inspired you?
House of Leaves is obviously a big one. That’s a book I love. And even though maybe tonally it’s not very much like House of Leaves, The Paradox Twins, with the footnotes and stuff, that was definitely a big touchstone for me there. And Steve Erickson is a favorite author of mine, and he doesn’t necessarily do a lot of typographical or structural things, but he has a lot of dream logic in his books, so he’s a big influence there, as well.
You’ve talked about Letters to the Purple Satin Killer plenty lately on podcasts and in interviews. Is there something that you want to say about this book that you haven’t had a chance to tell readers yet?
Oh man. I guess I want to say that I’m having a conversation here about true crime and other people’s grief as entertainment and our obsession with murder, but I’m not really trying to make a moral point per se. It was important to me that I have each character not be so black and white in their morals. It’s not good versus evil. A lot of the ‘good’ characters say and do things that aren’t so great, and I wanted the book and the characters to be more fleshed out, not so explicitly fall on one side of an argument or another.
And I don’t want anyone to read the book thinking I’m preaching or making a point. I just wanted to include all of these different weird facets and put it out there.
I’m curious if there’s an audiobook version coming, because I feel like this would work so well as an audiobook.
Not yet. We haven’t talked about it, but that’s something I would love to do and it would be interesting to see how they would do it – if you had one person doing different voices or different actors doing different characters. I think that would be a really cool thing.
Tell me about the cover art for Letters to the Purple Satin Killer.
Matthew Revert did the cover. He’s done the covers of all of my books up until now, and I think he’s great. I’m so happy with his stuff. Before I had anything published, he was the guy that I wanted to do my book covers, and he’s done them all. They say, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ but I do think it’s important to have a really good cover that grabs people’s attention, and you just don’t want it to look shitty. I love his covers. I think my covers are great, and if they weren’t mine, I would see them on the shelf and be like, ‘Oh wow, this looks great. I’ve got to check this out.’
And you’ve worked with CLASH Books before. What’s that relationship like?
They’ve published all my books for the most part, so I don’t really know anything else, but they’ve been great, and I just really appreciate their mom-and-pop laidback style, and they let me do what I want. It’s been awesome.
When the book blitz is over, do you have a project simmering on the back burner that you’re excited to get into?
Well, I talk about it a little bit in the afterword [of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer]. I did have a work in progress I was working on before this book that I kind of put aside to write this book because I thought this book would be easier to finish first, which turned out not to be the case. And that’s more of a full-on horror novel, a short horror novel, and it’s pretty close to being done, at least in length. I’ve been tinkering with it, and I’m hoping to get back to that and finally finish it up.
If I’m remembering correctly, it’s an adaptation of a screenplay that you wrote?
Yeah, it’s an adaptation of a screenplay I wrote, just like The Paradox Twins, because I figured I did all this plotting and narrative work. So I might as well not let it go to waste because I want someone to read it, and no one’s reading those screenplays. [laughs]
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This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Follow Chaplinsky on Twitter, Instagram or through his author site, and pre-order Letters to the Purple Satin Killer from CLASH books NOW. (Seriously, do it.)
