A year ago, Jason Mott was working at a Verizon wireless call center—“talking to angry New Yorkers for 40 hours a week.” During four years at Verizon, he wrote two volumes of poetry, often writing at work. As he explains: “There becomes a pattern; there are only so many kinds of angry people.” He was also revising pages for a manuscript that would be plucked out of the slush pile by Michelle Brower of Folio Literary Management and land him a two-book deal with Harlequin Mira.
“The best-case scenario has happened at every step so far,” Mott says. He comes to BEA amid considerable buzz for his debut novel, The Returned, which centers on an elderly couple, Harold and Lucille Hargrave, whose eight-year old son, Jacob, returns from the dead after nearly 50 years, not as ghost or ghoul, but as his original self. A global phenomenon is taking place, with thousands of Returned reappearing. Chaos ensues as their numbers grow. Sound cinematic? A television pilot for ABC—produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B entertainment and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, written by The Killing’s Aaron Zelman, and directed by Emmy Award–winner Charles McDougall (The Good Wife)—has already been filmed. If the pilot is picked up, both the show and the book launch in September.
“It’s been full-speed ahead, with a very steep learning curve,” Mott says, thankful to Brower and the Harlequin Mira team for their guidance. “This is what I’ve wanted to do since I was 14. So few people are able to write full-time. I feel very privileged.” Writing became more than a hobby after his mother’s death in July 2001. At that point, the then 22-year-old Mott was working at a facility making rubber gaskets. “I had an opportunity to visit her the day before she died, and didn’t do it, because I still thought she’d be okay,” he says. “That still bothers me to this day.”
He cites John Gardner’s October Light, Jose Saramago’s Blindness, and growing up in North Carolina’s “hurricane alley” as inspiration for the novel, but the real origins are personal: “In July 2010, I had a dream that I came home from work and my mom was sitting at the kitchen table. We talked about everything that had happened since she passed. That dream drove the novel—to have that person back and have a moment to clear the air. If readers can find meaning and catharsis from the book, that’s fine with me.”
Mott signs ARCs of The Returned today, 10–11 a.m., at the Harlequin booth (1238). On Saturday, 10–11 a.m., he will appear on the panel “Water Cooler Books: On the Road to a Bestseller: Books that Buzz” at the Uptown Stage.
