Fictional Influence: Black Market Fiction

Close Enough to Kill

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:07:38 GMT

There’s a book called Hunting the Jackal, published in 2004 by a man named Billy Waugh, and if you submitted its contents as fiction to any editor in New York, it would come back in six weeks with a polite note about plausibility.

In the book, the protagonist tries to enlist in the Marines at fifteen, gets arrested hitchhiking across the New Mexico desert because he has no identification and refuses to give the police his name. He goes home, finishes high school with a 4.0, joins the Army at eighteen, and deploys to Korea with the 187th Airborne. He meets a couple of Green Berets on a train in Germany, volunteers on the spot, and earns one of the first berets issued by the newly formed Special Forces.

He deploys to Vietnam five times, where he trains irregular forces in the jungle, conducts night raids along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and is shot in the knee, the ankle, the foot, and the forehead during a single engagement at Bong Son. Left between the lines and presumed dead by the enemy, …

After the Betrayal

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:06:01 GMT

There’s a scene near the end of the first season of Netflix’s The Punisher where Frank Castle, played with terrifying sincerity by Jon Bernthal, finally gets the full truth about what happened to his family. He already knew they were gunned down in Central Park. He already knew it was staged to look like gang crossfire. What he learns, in that gutting final stretch of the season, is that his own commanding officer and a CIA operative orchestrated the entire massacre to bury an illegal heroin operation they’d been running in Afghanistan. Castle’s wife, his son, his daughter—all of them were killed as part of a cleanup operation designed to protect men who outranked him. His best friend, Billy Russo, knew it was coming and said nothing.

Frank Castle: Betrayed

The system that asked Frank Castle to kill on its behalf, that deployed him in a black ops unit so classified it didn’t officially exist and expected obedience, turned its full institutional weight against his family when he became i…

The Ronin Economy

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:02:48 GMT

Every American knows the story. A guy starts building something in his garage. Maybe it’s a computer, a delivery service, or some kind of better, faster software. He has no investors or even anyone who believes in his idea. Twenty years later, he’s on the cover of a magazine, and the journalist writing the profile calls him “self-made” as if the concept were novel instead of foundational to the entire national mythology.

We love this guy. We put him on motivational posters. We name business schools after him. We tell our kids about the young man who walked into a CEO’s office with nothing but a pressed suit and a firm handshake and walked out with a career. We treat self-reliance like a sacred American value, right up there with free speech and the Second Amendment, and we should, because it is.

So why does everybody act so confused when seventy million Americans actually go out and do it?

The American Ronin

In feudal Japan, a ronin was a samurai without a master. He carried the same swor…

The Pariah Author: Who Gets Forgiveness?

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:00:26 GMT

In 1994, a journalist named Lin Ferguson sat down to investigate a rumor. Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures was making the festival rounds, telling the true story of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand who’d murdered one of their mothers with a brick wrapped in a stocking. Kate Winslet was luminous as Juliet Hulme, the posh, tubercular dreamer whose friendship with Pauline Parker had curdled into something lethal. Ferguson wanted to know what had happened to Hulme after her release from prison.

She found her living in a converted stone barn on the Scottish coast, writing Victorian murder mysteries under the name Anne Perry.

By 1994, Perry had published fifteen novels. Her Thomas Pitt series was a bestseller. Her agent, Meg Davis, had no idea her client had beaten a woman to death at age fifteen. When Ferguson’s story broke, Davis called Perry in a panic, ready to phone the lawyers.

“I’m afraid it’s true,” Perry said. “You can’t ring the lawyer. It’s true. I am Juliet Hulme.”

Stra…

Likeable Characters are Killing Fiction

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:57:03 GMT

Somewhere in the Amazon reviews of almost every novel with a complicated protagonist, you’ll find it: “I couldn’t root for her.” “He was impossible to like.” “DNF because I didn’t care what happened to these people.”

Or the one-star review from someone who powered through the book anyway, furious that the author had wasted their time with a character who wasn’t nice.

This is the likability mandate, and it’s killing fiction.

“Likable” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Sorry to steal the politician’s favorite stalling phrase, but let me be clear about what we’re discussing. The demand for likable protagonists isn’t about wanting well-drawn characters, or characters with interiority, or characters whose choices make psychological sense. Those are reasonable expectations. The likability mandate is something else: the insistence that protagonists be good—or at least someone you’d want to get a drink with.

It’s the reader saying: I will only spend time with fictional people I approve of.

It’s …

The Double Exile

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:54:45 GMT

In 1994, if you wanted to know who played Dungeons & Dragons at the local high school, you had to earn that information. The guys who met in Tim Fenstermacher’s basement every Saturday didn’t advertise. They didn’t wear band shirts for games the way metalheads wore Slayer or Megadeth. You found out the same way you found out who was gay or whose dad hit them—through slow trust-building and careful confession. Someone would mention they liked fantasy novels. You’d mention you’d seen the Monster Manual at the bookstore. They’d glance around the cafeteria. If nobody was listening, they might tell you about their half-elf ranger.

Nobody wanted to be the kid who played D&D. The social cost was too high, and in the mid-nineties, the stakes felt existential in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who grew up watching Stranger Things. Those kids were worse than nerds. In the minds of concerned parents and local news anchors, they were potential cultists, possible Satanists, one bad gaming se…

The Three Books of Gillian Flynn

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:51:56 GMT

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.”
—Libby Day, Dark Places

Every time a book sells into the stratosphere, there’s an army of marketing experts who try to reverse-engineer its success. They advise publishers to mimic the cover, the blurb, the tropes… anything really, often charging insane consulting prices just to hold up a bestseller and say, “Do this… but different.”

Gillian Flynn wrote three novels and the third is the one that hit. Gone Girl sold over twenty million copies and spawned an entire subgenre of domestic thrillers with “Girl” in the title. Her second book, Dark Places, got solid reviews, a film adaptation that disappeared into VOD oblivion, and a readership that could generously be called “cult.”

Including me.

Those of us who consider ourselves honorary members of the Kill Club are often baffled as to why it was Gone Girl that took off when Dark Places was so …

I Wrote You a Death

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:49:12 GMT

The last thing anyone ever saw of Charlie Stine was a single bloody tooth. Root and all.

That’s what Jackson Reed has to go on when he starts investigating. His friend, an acerbic podcaster with a talent for saying inflammatory things, has vanished. No body. No crime scene. Just one molar, recovered from a location I won’t spoil, and enough unanswered questions to fill a case file.

Poor Charlie, the average thriller might want you to think.

Not me. At the time I wrote it, my feeling was more like: Fuck Charlie.

The Twitter Crush is a story about a girlie self-help guru who makes men disappear. Specifically, men who take pot shots at her work or, worse, look into her past. These men vanish. Nobody can prove anything. And her ghostwriter, the man who wrote the very words these podcasters mocked, slowly realizes that his missing friend might have had it coming.

The book doesn’t ask “whodunit.” You know who did it. The question is whether you approve.

I wrote the first quarter of this book in a…

The Silence After Gone Girl

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:46:56 GMT

What Happened to Gillian Flynn?

In Finding Forrester, Sean Connery plays William Forrester—a reclusive novelist who wrote one brilliant book, won the Pulitzer, and vanished from public life. The character is entirely fictional, but the archetype he represents is one we’ve been romanticizing for decades. JD Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye and retreated to New Hampshire; we’ve been obsessed with him ever since. Harper Lee gave us To Kill a Mockingbird and went quiet for fifty-five years. We made her a saint for it.

We love the writer who disappears. The hermit genius. The one-and-done legend who lets the record stand.

But there’s a catch: we only grant that mythology to writers who stop entirely. Writers who pivot—who keep working, just not in the form we want—don’t get the same reverence. They get suspicion. They get “What happened to you?”

Gillian Flynn hasn’t published a novel in thirteen years. Her Twitter bio reads: “yes, yes, yes, I’m writing the next book...I swear.”

Everyon…

THE DEAD LETTER SINS

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:44:57 GMT

Part One: The Inheritance

Mission Hills in January looked like a photograph from a magazine about wealth. The kind of magazine that didn’t acknowledge winter as an inconvenience, only as an aesthetic choice. Snow sat on lawns like it had been arranged there. Trees stood bare but dignified against a gray sky. The houses—mansions, really, though the people who lived in them would never use that word—were set back from the road behind walls and hedges and the particular kind of silence that money could buy.

Garrett Milligan parked his Civic on the street. It looked wrong here, like Comic Sans font in a legal document. Or any document, honestly. He sat for a moment with the engine off, watching his breath fog the windshield, remembering the phone call that had brought him here.

Margot’s voice had that clipped efficiency she’d inherited from their mother. No preamble, or “how are you”—they’d long since stopped pretending to care about each other’s lives. “Grandfather passed this morning. The …

Kansas City Gothic: Where the Underground Never Left

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:38:53 GMT

“If you want to see sin, forget Paris, go to Kansas City.” — Edward R. Morrow, Omaha World-Herald, 1936

The recent move of the Kansas City Chiefs from Missouri to Kansas had most of the country confused: “Wait… I thought Kansas City was in Kansas.” It is. And Missouri. The city is cut down the middle by the Missouri River, though united by common history–state lines be damned.

Wyandotte County—where Kansas City, Kansas, sits—is locally called “The Dirty ‘Dotte.” Most residents use the nickname with a kind of defiant affection. We’re not like neighboring Johnson County with its enviable average income level and near-nonexistant violent crime rates. The ‘Dotte still posts an astonishing murder rate, but because violent crime concentrates in a handful of blocks, most people barely notice. They drive past, windows up, and arrive home to tree-lined streets where it might as well be happening in another city.

This is how Kansas City works. Always has.

Drive through the Missouri side on a gray a…

Night of the Pillow: Short Story

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:29:59 GMT

On Owen’s first day working at the lab, he’d been informed of their two big rules: No food in the lab. And no politics. Break either of those rules, and you were out.

He hadn’t asked what precipitated those two big rules. They were reasonable enough. But now, alone in the lab on a Friday night, he took a moment to wonder if playing Real Time with Bill Maher on the wall-mounted television was a fireable offense.

Not that it mattered anymore.

“What are those little shits going to do? They can’t even fly in an airplane without an emotional support animal. Sorry, I won’t be taking budgetary advice from self-proclaimed autistics who can’t do fractions.”

Congressman Richard Brennan laughed at his own joke, looking at the rest of the roundtable guests to join in, which they did, but with the decency to raise their hands to their lips, half-covering their smiles.

“Damn Yankee, confirm your dispersal units,” Owen said into his headset, voice steady despite the rage that Brennan’s smugness always tr…

Stephen King's Boomer Horror: What The Stand and Under the Dome Tell Us About Generational Apocalypse

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:25:32 GMT

There’s something infuriating about watching a generation that has controlled every lever of American power for three decades still cast themselves as scrappy rebels fighting the system. The Baby Boomers—born between 1946 and 1964—have dominated the presidency, Congress, corporate boardrooms, and cultural institutions since the Clinton administration. They show no signs of stopping. The average age in the Senate hovers around sixty-five. We’ve watched octogenarians cling to Supreme Court seats until death rather than cede ground to successors. And through it all, they’ve maintained the mythology that they are the counterculture, the revolutionaries, the ones who would remake the world if only the entrenched powers would let them.

No writer embodies this maddening contradiction more completely than Stephen King.

King was born in 1947, ground zero of the postwar birth spike. He came of age protesting Vietnam, built his empire on Watergate cynicism, and internalized the Sixties catechism “…

Why We Root for the Rebel

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:22:51 GMT

There’s a story—perhaps apocryphal—about a singer summoned to perform for a dictator. When she refused, the tyrant threatened her with torture. Her response has stayed with me for years:

You can make me scream. You cannot make me sing.

That’s rebellion distilled to its essence. The dictator could destroy her body, but he could not actually make her do anything. The rapist can rip your clothes off, but he can’t make you undress. The thug can shoot your knees out, but he can’t make you kneel.

When you drill it down to the brass tacks, the only thing anyone can make you do… is die.

That’s a steep price, of course. And not one any of us wants to pay. But the stories that feature characters that are willing to make that sacrifice, if needed, have enduring appeal. We love stories of rebellion, all of us. Somehow, the stories that stay with us, the characters we carry long after we’ve closed the book, are almost always the ones who looked at the consequence of saying no and replied, “all right, …

The Underground Exists for a Reason

Kristin McTiernan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:07:43 GMT

“If your laws don’t include me, well then, they don’t apply to me either.” - Anita Crown, Bad Girls (1994)

I’ve spent years in the publishing world—as an author, an editor, and above all, someone who loves the craft of storytelling. For most of that time, I told myself the industry’s problems weren’t as bad as they seemed. Good work still found its way through. That if you just wrote something compelling enough, readers would find it.

That’s the power of social media, right?

Not really. I was wrong.

Not about the readers; they’re still out there, desperately looking for stories that keep them up until 2 a.m., even though they have work in the morning and they know—they know—they should put the damn book down.

It was the system I was wrong about.

If you had told me ten years ago that there would be popular novels with disclaimers on the first page, I’d have called you insane. “Warning, this book includes shit that’s perfectly normal in a thriller. Your mental health matters! Check the trigge…