My mystery novel, Over the Edge, is set in a fictional town six hours north of New York City. The original idea for Pine Falls came from a psychological science fiction short story that I wrote, but in that story, it is barely a shadow of the hamlet it is now.

So how did I come up with the idea of Pine Falls in the first place? That’s an interesting question.

A few years ago, I lived Duncan, Oklahoma – a town of only 22,000 people. I was only there for eight months, but I got an interesting insight into how it would be to live in a place that small. There was an interesting dynamic to life there. Things moved more slowly and people seemed to worry about far less than we do living in larger – more robust – places. Further, when you live in a town that small, it becomes far easier to focus on the people living around you rather than your surroundings.

So, immediately, I knew that I wanted Pine Falls to be smaller than Duncan.

On top of that, I wanted Pine Falls to be picturesque – the kind of place you might go on vacation if you wanted beautiful, yet secluded, surroundings. I already knew that the story was going to take the main character to New York City, so I needed a place in that area. Six hours north of New York would put Pine Falls north of Albany and close to the Canadian border. On a map, there were few towns around that area – an apt place to put my fictional town. Now I just needed to figure out what it would look like.

A few perfect examples immediately sprang to mind.

First was the small town from Alan Wake (a psychological horror video game released a few years back). One early scene in that game has the players crossing a lake on a ferry. The town of Bright Falls is nestled on the other side of the lake, stretching up the side of a tree covered mountain. It’s a beautiful scene that offsets the horror of what is about to occur. It lulls the player into a false sense of security and imparts the preceding events with that much more impact.

Second, I thought about any movie set in a small town in the mountains (a good example would be the movie Insomnia). Most films featuring these types of towns as an unassuming locale for something terrible to happen. Again, the small town acts as a seemingly safe haven for the inhabitants of the story before terrible things start to go down.

Pine Falls quickly began to coalesce into something real. This is the first description of the town in Over the Edge:

As they drove, occasional gaps in the pine trees would offer glimpses of the small town below. Nestled in a valley between two mountains, Pine Falls was minuscule, a single stoplight marking the only major cross street. The buildings were old, turn of the century, but carried their weight well. At the very least, the city had character. It wasn’t a ski town like Beaverton to the East, nor was it a resort spot like Holly Hold further north, but that’s what made it special – or so Ethan was told. To those living here, the town was a small slice of paradise unmarred by the throngs of city dwellers that swamped most of the other small hamlets nestled in these mountains.  

Very unassuming. A perfect little island of peace far from civilization. I wanted the inhabitants of Pine Falls to feel as if nothing ever bad could happen there. That way, when the first death occurs, no one other than the main character – Ethan Carnegie – will think of it as anything other than the suicide that it looks like. And that’s what makes the setting such a wonderful place to tell the story of a string of murders. The initially picturesque place slowly beings to become more sinister as time wears on and the veil of perfection begins to tear.

And it does tear – right down the middle.

When all is said and done, Pine Falls is the most important character in the book. The murders that happen in Over the Edge are perpetrated because of Pine Falls rather than in spite of it and that’s an important distinction. That gives the town weight and transforms it into a character just as alive as any of the others.

The perfect place to tell a story.

The perfect place for murder.