Red: Prologue: the Making of

Red was one of those stories where I had a great concept but no way really to begin the novel. Someone going for a job interview does not make a great opening. So, instead, I decided to begin at the end. "In the end is my beginning...", T.S. Eliot, etc. This gave the book something of a Tarantino-esque feel, very nineties. An unreliable narrator telling you what happened. The entire book is very nineties-coded though, obviously, there is that aura of 9/11 and Columbine throughout. The modern-mass-tragedies where, instead of being on a battlefield, you could be at the office or in a school and suffer catastrophe.