Lauren Reding

Lauren Reding grew up in rural Virginia. She earned a BA in English from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Reding enjoys planting native perennials, playing video games, going for walks, and shooting the breeze.

Her new novel is The Killer in the House.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title for The Killer in the House tells you a couple of important things. First, obviously, there’s a killer! But, to me, the bigger clue in the title has to do with the domestic setting: the house itself and the secrets inside.

In the book, down-on-her-luck Renee takes new a job as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family that’s also trying to get a fresh start. The father, Ed, has just been exonerated of the high-profile murder of his first wife, thanks to a sensational true crime podcast. Now, he’s excited to reunite his family and face the world again, a triumphant and vindicated man.

But from inside the house, Renee sees the secrets Ed’s family hides from public view. As she folds laundry and washes dishes, she begins to suspect that danger still threatens the family, and she can’t help but take risks (and then bigger risks) to assemble the whole story from the clues that never made it into the podcast, clues hidden inside the house’s four walls.

What's in a name?

In the real world, our birth names are a reflection of our parents and what expectations they had for us when we were born. When I name a character, I spend a lot of time thinking about that character’s parents. I figure out what generation those parents belonged to, and what kind of people they were. I think about how their values would be reflected in the name they would choose for their fictional child.

Many of the characters in The Killer in the House feel tension between their parents’ expectations and what they want for themselves, and they seek to make a name for themselves, metaphorically or literally.

A teenager in the book goes by a nickname in an effort to redefine herself as separate from her parents while another character takes...a more drastic approach.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are definitely harder! The beginning of a novel has to set everything in motion: the characters’ motivations, the inevitable disasters that will strike them, and the reader’s expectations for what they hope, or fear, will happen.

The beginning of The Killer in the House went through many revisions, but I always knew how it needed to end: with our protagonist losing one option after another, until she has no choice but to face the danger head-on.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think there’s a little something of me in every character I write, good guys and bad guys alike. Even though I don’t always condone what the characters do, I still have to fundamentally understand them as people. I try to find at least one motivating thing we have in common. Maybe it’s the fear of being judged by others or the desire to escape grief and loss. Maybe it’s the ambition to impress people or the desire to do the right thing. Everything else about the character can be completely different from me and my experience, as long as we share that one knowable thing.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

For this novel, I think you can guess that I did listen to a lot of true crime podcasts! I particularly appreciate the long-form investigative podcasts where journalists spend months or even years collecting interviews, scouring archives, and working tirelessly to speak for the voiceless in a thoughtful, responsible way.

I have so much respect for this kind of journalism! And I think the fictional podcasters in my book could stand to learn a little from their hardworking real-life counterparts.

Visit Lauren Reding's website.

--Marshal Zeringue