Iowa City native pens thrilling ‘Descent’ on literary ascent

IOWA CITY - On the cover of Tim Johnston's new novel, 'Descent,” one finds this blurb from author Alice LaPlante: 'A riveting literary thriller of the can't-stop-turning-the-page, stay-up-all-night variety.”

A glowing recommendation to be sure, but not necessarily indicative of what the Iowa City native thought he was up to as he penned the book.

'It was never intended to be a thriller,” he says in an Iowa City coffee shop. 'I never thought of it as a thriller ... I spent a lot of time writing the best novel I could write. To my mind, I couldn't write a thriller to save my life because I don't know how they're done.”

Johnston has plenty of kind words for his publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, but he admits he has 'sort of rankled at” the decision to market the book as a thriller. 'I've gone through a little bit of an identity crisis,” he says, 'and I'm trying to be cool about it as best I can.”

His bona fides are certainly those of a literary fiction writer. As an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, he focused on creative writing, earning his way into a course taught by John Leggett, then director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He went to grad school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and then worked as a carpenter for the next 25 years, writing, as he put it, 'in the interstices of building stuff.”

He published a novel for young adults in 2002. His 2009 short story collection, 'Irish Girl,” won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, and many of the individual stories in the collection garnered honors. The title story caught the eye of David Sedaris, who included it in an anthology he edited, and the humorist and essayist has been a champion of Johnston's work ever since.

A year as a visiting professor at George Washington University convinced Johnston that teaching might be a good path for his career as he continued to write. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis.

While 'Descent” has some of the hallmarks of a standard thriller, Johnston offers a much richer reading experience than the cover blurb might suggest. Johnston brings to life a family ripped apart when a daughter is kidnapped in the book's opening passages. What follows is as much a meditation on the nature of the world and our place in it as it is a tale of suspense. At the heart of the book is the difficult question of whether anything other than luck - good and bad - controls our individual fates.

'I'm not a religious person at all,” Johnston says, 'but I do marvel at how the world works ... how one small thing can change your life.” He believes it's in our nature to seek patterns and meaning. 'As human beings, we're always trying to connect the dots.”

'Descent,” like the stories in 'Irish Girl,” is dark, often nearly overwhelmingly so. But Johnston says the version of the story he was originally considering was even bleaker.

'I spent a lot of time writing under the idea that it would have an ending that was ambiguous at best and maybe worse,” he says. But halfway through the book, he found himself stymied, and he set 'Descent” aside for quite a while. He found his way again once he saw a different path to follow.

'I realized I wanted a different ending for these characters,” he says.

Johnston was tight-lipped about his next project, but he was quick to say he believes it would be 'doomsday” to try to write another so-called thriller.

'I think I just have to write the story I want to write,” he says.