I was out and about today, refilling doggy prescriptions, when I passed the street my main character lives on in Hunter. I did what any other right-thinking person would do and stopped to take a picture. The neighbors glared and a couple of people honked at me, but it’s Boston so that’s par for the course. (Okay, Medford. Close enough.)
The point, of course, is that I can do that. I can stop and take a picture of almost any important location in Hunter. I can take a picture of Luis’ house, because I used to walk past it on my way to the grocery store. Kevin’s condo is based on the place I used to live. Donovan’s place is pulled from an actual real estate listing, near State Police headquarters.
And, of course, King Phillip’s Wood Conservation Land is real too. I’ve wanted to write about it since I got hideously lost there with my dog, probably nine years ago or so. That’s how I found out about Captain Lightfoot – the ruins of his inn are real. The rock, dedicated to some poor soul allegedly tortured to death, is real. I tripped over it. My dog peed on it.
I wrote Hunter because I wanted to celebrate all of the creepy little places and things in New England that don’t get a lot of air time. Everyone knows about Lovecraft and the Salem Witch Trials. They should be talked about. They’re just not the creepiest things about New England.
We really do wallow in our creepy here. We love our spooky old graveyards right in the middle of residential areas. All of those old battlefields and old execution sites are well marked and not hidden away. Somewhere in Boston is a book bound in human skin. (At the request, believe it or not, of the donor.)
We also have a healthy respect for the creep factor around here. There’s a swamp near my house, the name of which translates as “The Devil’s Swamp.” In other areas (like, say, where I grew up) colonists or settlers would probably drain said swamp, build on said swamp, and then spend the next four centuries complaining about mold, damp basements, and mosquitoes. Then they’d complain about mosquito spraying, and the inevitable side effects of mosquito spraying…
Around here, we just avoid the Devil’s Swamp. We don’t build in it. You’re welcome to go frolick in there if you need to, but we’re not sending anyone in after you. You were warned. It’s in the name. It might be bad because of devils and ghosts, or it might be bad because of bad water and mosquitoes, but we’ll accept the fact that it’s nasty and not try to put houses in it.
So yes, Hunter is a work of fiction, and if you run into the ghost of a nineteenth-century serial killer maybe don’t try to be friends with it. The locations are real. The myths and legends are also real, coming from places I’ve seen and touched and gotten muddy in.
It’s fiction, but its bones are real.