Andrew DeYoung is the author of The Day He Never Came Home, his first domestic thriller, and The Temps, a speculative novel about the end of the world. He works as an editor at a children’s book publishing company, and he lives with his wife and two children in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota.
Tell us about your book.
It’s all in the first line: “No one bothered telling Melissa that Thomas Danver was an accused murderer.”
Stay Away from Him is about a recent divorcee named Melissa who moves to a new city with her young son. At a dinner party thrown by some friends, she meets a charming man named Thomas Danver, and is encouraged by her friends to allow herself a harmless fling, with one little catch—whoops, Thomas’s prior wife Rose went missing and was presumed dead, and Thomas was suspected of her murder! But, they’re all friends of his too, and insist that he was unfairly accused and is a really nice guy! Prodded on by her friends, Melissa gets pulled into a whirlwind romance with Thomas when she gets an anonymous threat, or a warning: Stay away from him unless you want to die. Now Melissa needs to figure out what really happened to Thomas’s wife, to protect herself and her son.
The book is mostly told from Melissa’s POV, but it’s interspersed with some diary entries by Rose, Thomas’s first wife, and also with transcripts of therapy sessions between Thomas and his therapist where both appear to be lying and manipulating each other for reasons that later become clear. It was all so fun to write, and to cook up the twists and turns in the plot!
What drew you to the thriller genre?
I love a book that grabs me and doesn’t let go, a book that I have to stay up late flipping pages, and I get that experience most in the thriller genre. There’s something about the danger of a thriller, combined with the relatability of realizing that things like this really can happen to real people like me or people I know. Add in a bit of a mystery element, and you’ll have me completely hooked, pushing through to the last page for every surprising reveal.
What’s a recent thriller you loved?
I read it a while back but I’m still going to talk about Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True because it grabbed me so much and influenced Stay Away from Him in some ways. The two things I kept thinking while I was reading None of This Is True were “what the heck is going on here?” and “this is so nuts!” That combination of wanting to understand what was really happening, and finding everything so lurid and grotesquely fascinating was completely addictive to me. I wanted to write a book that was just as juicy, just as mysterious, just as twisty, and I probably took some inspiration from the mixed-media element to come up with the diary entries and therapy recordings in my book.
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Who is a fellow author you’d want with you if you were in a slasher movie?
Well I’d very much prefer not to be in a slasher movie but I guess if I was stuck in one I wouldn’t mind having my friend Joshua Moehling. I don’t think either of us would be particularly good at fighting off an axe murderer, but Josh has a cool-headedness about him that I think would come in handy when cooking up a way to get away from the killer. At the very least, I’m certain Josh would calmly remind me to run out the front door and not up the stairs where there’s no way to get out!
What’s the thing that scares you the most?
I’d say it’s the unknown, the things I don’t know that might be waiting to harm me. It’s dark outside—what’s out there? I’m walking into a room—is someone waiting for me? A stranger glances my way—random, or are they following me? As a fiction writer, my big imagination can freak me out, and it’s always the things I don’t know about that scare me the most, because my overactive imagination can go into overdrive. Maybe it’s why I write books about secrets. What you don’t know is the scariest thing of all.
What’s your favorite slasher movie of all time?
Is it cliche to say the original Scream? I mean, that has to be it for me. Scream came out when I was thirteen years old, which is kind of a perfect age to get the daylights scared out of you by a movie you’re probably a little too young to watch. My friends and I watched that movie so many times at parties and sleepovers after it came out. To this day, it’s the first thing I think of when I’m asked to think of a scary movie.
Which of your characters would you be most afraid to meet in real life?
So, the real answer is actually a spoiler for Stay Away from Him—the person I’m thinking about turns out to be totally terrifying, but I don’t want to tell you who it is! So I’ll go with a runner-up. In my prior book, The Day He Never Came Home, there’s a gangster character who is a guy you’d be best staying away from. But, I’ve got worse villains in my new book, for sure! You’ll have to read it to find out!
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Have you ever scared yourself writing a scene?
100%. The climactic scene of Stay Away from Him scared me so bad I had to put the manuscript down for a few days before I was capable of wrapping up the book. I won’t spoil it, though!
What’s creepier to you: an anonymous note, a neighbor who knows too much, or a familiar voice on the other end of the phone?
An anonymous note, for sure. There’s nothing more unnerving to me than the thought of someone who’s watching me, but they don’t want me to know who they are. Suddenly I’m imagining some unknown person hiding in the bushes, watching me while I sleep, stalking me online…
What’s your favorite “thriller trope” to write or read?
A person’s dark, secret past coming to light and causing problems in the present. For me, this trope brings that element of mystery—I need to know the secret!—while also reminding us that the past never stays buried. I especially like the secret past trope when it’s someone the main character thinks they know well, but they’re slowly realizing they don’t know them at all. If this trope is in your book, there’s a high probability that it’s going on my TBR!
Stay Away from Him by Andrew DeYoung
Recently divorced Melissa Burke has just moved to a new city, seeking a fresh start after her divorce. She meets the charming Thomas Danver, who was accused of murdering his wife three years ago but was cleared of these charges. Their romance blossoms until Melissa receives an anonymous note that forces her to confront the possibility that Thomas may not be as innocent as he seems.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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