The interview opens:
Read the entire interview.Gabe Chouinard - The Dark River, the second in the Fourth Realm trilogy, throws many new kinks and twists into the saga of Gabriel and Michael Corrigan. Was it a difficult novel to write?
John Twelve Hawks - In one way it was easier, because I didn’t have to write pages and pages explaining the particular rules of this fictional world as I did in The Traveler.I had to remind people who read The Traveler of the realms and the barriers and the Evergreen Foundation, and I had to make it easy for someone who hadn’t read the first book to enjoy the second purely on its own, but mostly I felt like the race car had already been polished and fueled; I just had to get behind the wheel and go.
Gabe Chouinard - The first thing I noticed about The Dark River is just that – in contrast to The Traveler, it is a much darker novel, opening with a particularly harrowing scene. Is there hope left for the third novel?
John Twelve Hawks - I’m fundamentally a hopeful person. Sitting down to write The Traveler was the ultimate act of hope in my own life – hope mixed with a dash of stubbornness and anger. I don’t know if the next book will have a fairytale ending, but I truly believe that “goodness” has great strength against every form of evil.
The Page 69 Test: The Dark River.
--Marshal Zeringue