Author Archives: Justin Evans

Providence Journal gives The White Devil props! http://artsblog.projo.com/2011/06/new-thrillers-cover-history-and-ter.html “The White Devil” (Harper Collins, 368 pages, $24.99) Justin Evans’ daring tale of an American ne’er-do-well teenager adrift in the famed English boarding school Harrow, reads like “A Separate Peace” with murder thrown into the mix. The mystery behind that involves none other than a giant of [...]

The 20th and 21st centuries had horror to spare–but there’s still nothing quite like the slow build of horror in the hands of a 19th century master like Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, after Turn of the Screw, is probably the best, tightest, and most pure form of [...]

I was writing my current novel, The White Devil, which is set in a London boarding school I had attended in 1988, and I was doing research. I didn’t want to foot the expense for a round trip to London to refresh my memories. First, because I am cheap; and second, because what I needed was [...]

I found a passage to read on Wednesday that will not require me to do an embarassingly bad English accent. Actually I can do pretty decent English accents, but they have to come to me, usually with the help of several drinks. All the characters’ voices are in my head… but they don’t sound the [...]

This appeared Sunday: An American teenager, Andrew Taylor, arrives at an elite British boarding school fresh from a drug scandal at his New England prep. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the poet Byron who attended Harrow in his day. The face earns him the lead in a play being written by an outcast professor. It also brings [...]

Business trips give me a view of other big US cities (besides NYC), and I am writing and posting this on a plane 30,000 feet in the air (thanks to Virgin America and in-flight wifi) gazing down at the dusty geological crags that make up the American West, and I am thinking about Los Angeles, [...]

I hallucinated smells from my mid-teens to my early twenties. To tell the truth, I never really thought about it–which is to say, I never understood it was unusual–until one Christmas Eve dinner when we had another family over. I can’t remember how it came up, but somebody made a reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography [...]

Team WD just found out that Christian Coulson, the actor who played Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter movies, is doing the audio for The White Devil. Allow me a moment to dissolve into Harry Potter fan-dom. I “read” all the Harry Potters… on audio book. Jim Dale’s BRILLIANT readings made a great series even [...]

Send me a link to your favorite ghost story, or email it to me at justin@justinevans.com, and I will post it. Here’s one of mine. It’s one of the Japanese ghost stories I read as research for this book. Old school. Hold onto your ears. It begins: “More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, [...]

Watching someone close to me die of lung cancer, over several months, is both numbing and sensitizing at the same time. I am hyper-sensitive. I walk around feeling bloated with emotion, ready to pop, waiting for that unexpected moment where the floodworks will begin and I will totally lose it. And like a bloated person, [...]