Jon Bassoff's New Novel is More of What He Does Best: Unsettle

Jon Bassoff has just finished teaching his last English class of the day at Longmont High School. Behind him and over his shoulder, scrawled on a whiteboard, is evidence of his last lecture, including the term Orwellian. It's underlined and has a box drawn around it.

This is not surprising for a writer — and a teacher — like Jon Bassoff. Especially considering the conspiratorial roots of his just-released tenth novel, The Memory Ward. "With everything going on right now," he says, "it feels like time we return to [Orwell's] kind of writing."

Bassoff has a plethora of events coming up in relation to the launch of The Memory Ward. He'll be at the Boulder Bookstore on March 7, participating in Noir at the Bar at Romero's in Lafayette on March 12 with fellow authors Maria Kelson and Jennifer K. Morita, at Bricks on Main in Longmont on March 13 in conversation with Molly Tanzer, and at Tattered Cover Colfax on March 28, when he'll appear with celebrated fellow author Erika Wurth.

At each of these venues, it's tough to describe exactly how to bill Jon Bassoff. As an author, he's been called many things over his years of writing and publishing with different houses: gothic-noir by one, psychological horror by another. Suspense, thriller, mystery. The labels change because, as Bassoff admits, nothing fits. "Every one of my books, I try to do something new," he says. "I'm sort of like a genre writer without a genre."

Bassoff actually finished The Memory Ward nearly three years ago, but that's how publishing works. "You finally get a book to launch, and by that time, you've already been working on other stuff and you have to go back to a project you haven't thought about for a while," he says, adding that he's written two other books since he finished this one.

That's not to say that Bassoff is casual about the importance of The Memory Ward as a project. "It was an idea that was floating around in my head for a number of years," he says. "It was brewing for something like six years, but I couldn't quite put all the pieces together. I knew I wanted to do something with a weird town as the focus. Where the protagonist felt like he was all by himself, and that everyone else was sort of watching him. Explore that sense of paranoia."

The result is a story that takes place in Bethlam, Nevada, a small town that feels homey and the people are friendly and familiar. There's no crime, there's little strife. Nothing to see but quiet satisfaction — until the local mail carrier discovers that not even the letters he's delivering are real. What follows is an unraveling of this small town and the one man — possibly the only person —  who understands that it's all veneer.

"There's a reason the name of the town is Bethlam," Bassoff remarks. "But it's purposefully vague." Is the name meant to invoke the Biblical Bethlehem...or the notorious London asylum they called Bedlam? "That's the question. It's like the beginning of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where at the very beginning, you see this sort of idyllic little town with the white picket fence, and then the camera continues underground it all, where you see the dirt and the bugs crawling around. That was sort of the ethos I wanted to have in the book."

According to Bassoff, readers say the book reminds them of some of the most memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone, which he says was unintentional — he claims not to have seen much of that Rod Serling classic — but makes sense just the same. "Even though the book takes place in our contemporary time," says Bassoff, "I wanted it to feel like the 1950s. So much paranoia going on at that time, along with this shift into suburbia and mass production and all that. And people getting left behind."

There are also some echoes of our current political climate here in America, though Bassoff rightly points out that this book was finished three years ago, in a different time. "I never try to write a book with overt politics," claims Bassoff, "because it just becomes contrived. But every book is political in its own way. Today, in this post-truth world we live in, where it's not so much about finding out what the truth is, but rather that the truth itself doesn't really matter? That sense ended up in this book. That idea of: what is truth? Everyone has their own version."

Bassoff says that The Memory Ward is "is in a lot of ways perhaps the most Jon-Bassoff-iest book I could write," he laughs. "It brings a lot of my interests and obsessions together. I've always been curious about memory and how memory messes with narrative in a good way. I've always thought about identity — how do we know who we really are? And honestly, every one of my books has a weird town in it, this place where weird stuff happens and can happen. Maybe it's just recency bias, but I really like this book right now. This one feels good."

Jon Bassoff will read from and talk about The Memory Ward at the Boulder Bookstore on March 7 at 6:30 p.m.; at Romero's in Lafayette on March 12; Bricks on Main in Longmont on March 13; and at Tattered Cover Colfax on March 28 at 6:00 p.m., where he'll appear with celebrated fellow author Erika Wurth. For more information, check out Bassoff's website.