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High on a hilltop in the desolate woods of northern Maine sits a very special house. There's a pretty pink room inside with pretty pink playthings. It's a room any child would love. Even a dead little girl like Angel Currie.
Theodore Currie is the world's leading physicist, but this great thinker has lost his mind. His daughter is dead and he wants her back. With a complete grasp of string theory at his command, Currie aims to entice Angel back from a place eternally unreachable.
The pink room is where lost loves come home. And you can't send them back.
Written by award-winning Maine journalist Mark LaFlamme, "The Pink Room" is a tale that plunges a desperate fist into the most sacred secret of them all. It's a tale of unutterable grief, of genius and of the science that may reveal the true nature of the afterlife.
LaFlamme, crime reporter and newspaper columnist, knows plenty about the dark spirit of humankind. For more than a decade, he has worked the gritty, forlorn streets of Lewiston, uncovering stories of violence and chaos. He knows the unforgiving climate of Maine and the intense curiosity of the people there. He grew up in Waterville, where he roamed the streets finding inspiration for hundreds of short stories. Indeed, the dubious workings of the human mind have always intrigued LaFlamme. This time he explores the darkest place of them all.
"Read ‘The Pink Room’ and introduce yourself to Maine's next great horror writer," says writer and editor Dave Griffiths, who's been reading LaFlamme's work for 10 years. "Mark is one of only a handful of horror writers who are comfortable telling his macabre tales from inside the belly of the beast."
Delve into the "The Pink Room" and you'll also meet Jonathan Cain, a novelist mourning the loss of his wife. His retreat this summer is the ominous Currie house in Aroostook County, a place so high up in Maine that it's north of much of Canada. Cain has come to investigate the last days of the famed, mad physicist. He has also come to learn whether there is some magic in the science of strings and in the mysterious pink room in the turret of the Currie house.
Enter the pink room, and experience a place where science meets terror.
Mark LaFlamme is available for interviews or appearances. You can read sample chapters and other material from "The Pink Room" at www.marklaflamme.com. Book sellers can order wholesale at www.booklocker.com.
Sun Journal
December 17, 2005Reporter Mark LaFlamme has his first novel published, "The Pink Room."
by Daniel HartillLEWISTON - Writer Mark LaFlamme sat on the couch of his home office and fidgeted beneath a poster of "Night of the Living Dead."
"You're going to out me, aren't you?" he asked, perched on the edge of his seat.
The veteran Sun Journal reporter wants people to know about his first published novel, a horror story titled "The Pink Room." That's why he agreed to the interview.
He doesn't want people to know his age.
"I've been lying about my age since I was 27," he said. His knees bounced in place. His eyes scanned the familiar room, as if searching for a place to hide.
"I didn't realize how hard this was," LaFlamme said of his first interview as subject rather than writer.
It's likely to be the first of many.
LaFlamme's novel is scheduled to arrive in local stores this week. Several Internet booksellers have begun peddling the story, and the author is already scheduling signings.
"The Pink Room" tells the story of a world-class physicist who retreats to Aroostook County where he builds a house in the woods. There, he hopes to bring his daughter back to life using a theoretical arm of quantum physics known as string theory.
The result is a bit of Stephen Hawking and a lot of Stephen King.
"I don't think I could avoid reminding people of King," said LaFlamme, a lifelong fan. However, he figures he owes more to Edgar Allen Poe.
"Everything he loved died," LaFlamme said. "I think what appealed to me was his rejection of the finality of death."
He was 6 or 7 years old when he discovered the author of "The Raven."
"I was a normal kid, but I had a creepy side," said LaFlamme, who grew up in Waterville. When his mom gave him a record album of Poe readings titled "Ghost Stories," he was hooked.
"I'd go in my room, turn out the lights and listen over and over," he said.
Soon he was writing his own short stories. By the time he was 12 or 13, he was composing long horror tales on a battered electric typewriter.
He sent a few off to magazines as he grew older. Some were published, but he cared little whether anyone read them.
"They were for me," he said. "I showed them to my mom or friends."
But the fiction never quite took. When he finished high school, he worked lots of different jobs, eventually landing at the Sun Journal. He was 27.
His job: covering the sometimes graphic crimes of Lewiston-Auburn.
It somehow meshed with his interest in horror.
"Mark's got a sick mind," said Dave Griffiths, a former Sun Journal editor. "It's a good kind of sick, though."
Both his home office and his newsroom desk are decorated with assorted haunted-house paraphernalia: fake rats, severed heads and limbs, witches and photos of Poe.
None of it is mean-spirited, though.
"It's how he handles the pressure of daily journalism," Griffiths said.
LaFlamme has done a lot of it.
A search of the newspaper's archives finds 3,800 stories by LaFlamme. Of those, "murder" is mentioned 200 times and "fire" shows up 777 times. He also writes a regular column and hosts a blog on the newspaper's Web site.
All of that experience informs the mayhem of LaFlamme's fiction.
Griffiths, who was one of the first people to read "The Pink Room," said the reporting has given LaFlamme's work enormous discipline
"Journalism is a great training ground for any kind of writing," he said. "You can't ramble on and on."
It has helped the content, too. LaFlamme has been to plenty of crime scenes, knows lots of cops and has interviewed FBI agents.
All appear in "The Pink Room."
He wrote it over six or eight weeks, pounding out 2,000 words a night after returning home from his beat. He finished the book one morning this spring at 4 a.m.
"I wanted to have a party and celebrate," he said. His wife, Corey, was sleeping. So were his neighbors.
"Instead, I went to bed," he said.
Perhaps middle age has set in.
He's 38.
Sun Journal
December 17, 2006Mark LaFlamme on... Mark LaFlamme
Sun Journal reporter Mark LaFlamme recently sat down with author Mark LaFlamme for a discussion about his new novel "The Pink Room." The interview alternated between friendly and antagonistic as the journalist pressed the novelist for answers about his book. The following is the result of the exchange.
Q: It's been said that you sleep until 1 p.m. each afternoon and then work the night beat at the paper. Tell me, where does this leave time for writing fiction?
A: That's a very good question, Mark. I write just about all of my fiction between midnight and roughly four in the morning. When I'm working on a novel, I write at least 2,000 words a night, no matter what. I often write more, but I won't leave the computer until I have at least 2,000 words of fresh copy. One time, I did a word count and found that I was eight words short of that goal. I had to go back and pound out eight new words just to maintain that discipline.
Q: What were the words?
A: "They found the severed limb the following day." Actually, I just made that up. But I may use it in future work.
Q: Considering the themes you write about in works of fiction, do you ever scare yourself?
A: Why, yes. Yes, I do. When I write, I'm surrounded by various ghouls and goblins I keep in my room. When I'm creating a particularly spooky scene in a story, I fancy I've seen one or more of them moving in on me from the corner of my eye. I also have my back facing the door, which was just really bad planning. On occasion, I'll wheel around in my chair, absolutely convinced that someone has crept in behind me. Sometimes, I need to go outside and shake it off.
Q: Not the bravest guy in the world, are you Mark?
A: Not when it comes to the world of the supernatural. At least I don't wet the bed.
Q: I heard you've written hundreds of short stories since you were a kid. Where do you get your ideas.
A: I'm glad you asked that, Mark. I understand most writers hate that question. Stephen King has a stock answer in which he quips that all his ideas come from a warehouse in Cleveland or something. Me, I've been dying for someone to ask.
Q: So, will you answer the question?
A: Right. I absolutely cannot go to sleep each night unless a mental movie is playing in my head. I call it my cerebral cinema. I need to have a story line going and characters to act them out as I'm drifting off. Usually, it's just a very simple scene to start with and the story develops as I go to sleep. I don't remember a time when I approached sleep without that happening in my mind.
Q: Is that how the idea for the Pink Room was conceived?
A: It is. I was trying to fall asleep one night when I conjured the image of a man walking down a very dark road at night. Just a man strolling into nothing, content and at ease. In my cerebral cinema, a car rolled to a stop beside him and a man spoke from inside. He said: "We understand you've been inside the house. We'd like to talk to you about that."
At the time, I was reading a lot of Discover magazines and books about quantum mechanics. The concept of string theory very naturally wormed its way into my mental storyline. A night or two later, I had most of the plot worked out. A night after that, I started writing "The Pink Room."
Q: How long did it take you to complete the novel?
A: Around six weeks for the first draft. At 2,000 words or so a day, that brought me up to roughly 85,000 words, a fair sized novel. But that's just plodding right through the story at a sprinters pace. After that, I had to go back and rewrite some really horrible sections, tweak a little, add elements of foreshadowing, etc. That takes longer and it's not as much fun.
Q: Is "The Pink Room" your first novel?
A: No. My first novel is tentatively titled: "Worumbo." It may eventually take on the title: "The Screaming Room." It's about government experiments with mind control at an abandoned Maine mill and a young newspaper reporter with blossoming psychic abilities. It was a blast to write. The story takes place in a city between Lewiston and Lisbon.
Q: You are aware that there is no city located there, are you not?
A: I am aware of that, Mark. But in my world, there is a rather large city called Myrtle right outside Lewiston. A lot of nasty things happen there.
Q: Will "The Pink Room" be your last novel.
A: Not a chance. I'm about to start a third. It will be about a man who nearly derails a presidential campaign by digging up his dead wife, or about a man who sees dead people every time he detoxes from alcohol.
Q: You're a strange person, Mr. LaFlamme. Did you have any friends at all when you were growing up?
A: I had lots of friends and many girlfriends, Mark. I was a normal kid in every way. Except I thought a lot about dead things at night. But hell, we all did that, right?
Q: Is "The Pink Room" just a long winded version of the Street Talk column?
A: No. I love writing the column but there are definite limits to what I can involve there. The same narrative voice might be present in the novel, but otherwise it's entirely different. The gloves are off when I create fiction. Things are described as I imagine them. There is no point where I have to rein myself in and say: "Okay. That's not appropriate for the readership." The landscape of the story is filled with violence and cruelty. Some of it is graphic. There might even be a nasty word or two in "The Pink Room."
Q: That's about all the questions I have for you. If I could just ask one more?
A: Shoot.
Q: Who's that coming in through the door behind you?
A: What... I can't... Who... I don't like you very much, Mark.