I Never Want to Write the Same Book Twice: A Guest Post by Chris Bohjalian

We really will follow Chris Bohjalian anywhere — and Las Vegas is the backdrop to our latest adventure. Chris has penned an insightful essay (exclusively for you B&N readers) on the inspiration behind his brand new novel and the journey that led him to write it. Here’s Chris, in his own words.

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If I were to give you a tour of the library in my house in which I write, you’d suppose that the books had been curated by a dozen different readers. Glancing at the shelves, you’d see (for instance) Martin Amis, Charlotte Bronte, and S.A. Cosby in the A’s, B’s, and C’s of my fiction. I devour the dour, cherish the love stories, and savor the serial killers. And that’s just the fiction: I’m as likely to enjoy Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus as I am military historian Max Hasting’s Armageddon. My reading tastes are eclectic. 

I approach my writing in much the same way.  

If I have one goal as a novelist, it’s this: I never want to write the same book twice. I think that’s because I like to be surprised even by own books. So, if you’ve read my novels – and it’s okay if you haven’t, there will never be an exam (at least not one administered by me) – you’ve noticed they’re as likely to be historical fiction about the first divorce in North America for domestic violence (Hour of the Witch) as a slow burn thriller about an emotionally damaged, functional alcoholic who wakes up next to a dead body in a hotel bed far from home (The Flight Attendant).  

But there are two things I believe my novels share. The first is dread. When my books work – and heaven knows, they don’t always – it’s foreboding, fear, and anxiety that keep you turning the pages.  

The other is their origins. In almost every case, I dove into a tale because two disparate elements struck me as an unexpected narrative cocktail. In my new novel, it’s the late Princess Diana and. . .Las Vegas.   

Hence the title: The Princess of Las Vegas.  

Despite the fact that Las Vegas has an actual Lady Di museum (in a tony shopping mall attached to a tony casino, of course), most people don’t think of Diana when they think of the city built in the desert that would become home to an awful lot of the world’s schemers and dreamers, its damaged and sad. That museum opened in late 2022, almost a year after I’d finished a first draft of this novel. But, clearly, I wasn’t alone when I saw a connection.  

Now, Princess Diana herself is not the star of the novel. Rather, because this is Las Vegas, it’s a Princes Diana tribute show performer. Think Elvis in a tiara.  

But I must admit, it also feels too soon to me write a novel about the Princess herself. The wounds are too raw and her family and friends both inside and outside the numerous palace walls must feel frustration at best and fury at worst when they see the complicated mother and sister and friend they knew transmogrified into a slattern after a prince or a saint without guile. (And it’s usually the saint, which is the sort of reduction that works in a sauce but not in a story.)    

And yet in our culture of celebrity, the draw is a riptide we’re powerless to resist. What did her life mean – because it sure as hell meant something. So, while my new novel is, on the surface, a tale of dangerous Las Vegas mobsters and a woman and her sister in over their heads at a failing casino, among the things I really wanted to explore are the evergreen draw of “the people’s princess” and our enduring fascination with all things “royal.” Underneath the drugs, the guns, the bodies (some dead), it’s a tale of two deeply scarred sisters, and how one – just maybe – can find salvation replicating a life that, alas, ended in a Paris tunnel. If Diana Spencer’s life was a fairy tale, it was written by Grimm, not Disney. I think that explains why – as a writer who lives for literary dread – I was drawn to it.