This just ran in the weekend edition of Halifax’s Chronicle Herald. It was written by writer/journalist Allison Lawlor.
“Calling herself a writer of female-centric adventure stories, Lunenburg-based author Jo Treggiari’s latest novel is a young adult thriller that is both gripping and chilling to read.
“I had to go in really deep,” she said during a recent interview. “There were times when I scared myself. When I was editing in the middle of the night and my dog would bark and I would jump.”
Blood Will Out is written in a dual narrative following Ari Sullivan (a teenager trapped in a well by a sadistic killer) and the killer himself. It was published this summer by Penguin Teen and unfolds in alternating perspectives. Until Ari is shoved down a well, she happily spends her days in her small hometown of Dempsey Hollow with her best friend, Lynn. As the book progresses, readers learn through the killer’s creepy monologues that Ari may not be the only intended victim.
“Most kids shoot rabbits, songbirds, gophers, water rats, anything that moves. I was not most kids. It wasn’t only about blasting something out of existence. It was so much more than that,” the killer tells readers early in the novel.
“…I learned something about myself. It was this: I wanted to kill something big, something that would fight me hard for its life. And I wanted to feel what it was like when that life was extinguished. Get close, lie down next to it and feel its last breath caress my cheek, the wild thumping of its heart under my palm until finally that too was stilled, the cloud fogging the bright eye. I wanted to climb into its skin to feel the exact moment of death.”
The idea for Blood Will Out came to Treggiari as a simple visual image of a teenaged girl who wakes up at the bottom of a cistern, injured and stuck, and can’t remember how she got there. The story unraveled as Treggiari asked herself more questions. How did she get there, what if she didn’t just fall in, what next? The idea of a serial killer took root in Treggiari’s imagination. What were serial killers like as youths, how did they grow up? What made them the way they were?
“I had to do a lot of research,” she said. “But I wanted the serial killer to be my own.”
She read interviews with some of America’s most notorious serial killers including Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and learned about their pasts and their psyches. She used that information to develop her own fictional character.
“I regretted at times having had the idea,” she said. “This book did scare me which is a little odd since I wrote it.”
While the book is a thriller meant to entertain readers, Treggiari knew she couldn’t end it tragically, but instead with a sense of optimism and perseverance.
“There has to be hope always,” she said. “Not just for young adults, but for all people.”
Treggiari raises other questions in her book like the importance of friendship, which is highlighted in the relationship between Ari and Lynn.
“In the middle of all this darkness is this beautiful, shining thing,” said Treggiari. “It is a beautiful friendship at the heart of it all.”
A single mom with two kids ages 11 and 16, Treggiari intimately understands the audience she is largely writing for.
“I love writing characters who are young adults because it is a time in your life when it is all about firsts,” she said, referring to monumental experiences like first love. “There is an urgency.”
“I have endless respect for teenagers. I try not to be condescending,” she added.
Born in London, England, Treggiari has been writing for as long as she can remember. At age eight, she started revising classic fairy tales, making the evil characters even worse, and the princesses grittier. She spent 30 years living in the United States, in California and New York, where she trained as a boxer, wrote for a punk magazine, and owned her own gangster rap indie rock record label.
While on vacation in Nova Scotia, she fell in love with the province’s natural beauty and slower pace. In 2011, she and her family moved to the South Shore. That same year her book Ashes, Ashes, a young adult, post-apocalyptic adventure, was published by Scholastic Press. It went on to win awards and become a bestseller.
“Writing is such a passion of mine,” said Treggiari, whose first book was published in 2006. “It is probably the biggest joy in my life outside of my family and friends.”
When she’s not home writing in solitude, you can find her along the shore walking her two dogs, or at Lunenburg’s Lexicon books, where she is one of the co-owners of the independent bookstore. She enjoys sharing her love of books with customers.
“I have stacks of books,” she said. “I will never get to the bottom of my to-read list.””