Background and Key Themes

I have been working on Shallow Rock in one form or another for 40 years.  I finished it a few times, but I was never satisfied.  I made a lot of changes during the process, but the ending, the theme and the basic plot have remained the same.  The key themes of loyalty, the flexibility of truth/reality, and the outsider’s uneasy sense that there is more going on than meets the eye, held steady throughout.

The Characters

The story is told in tight third-person POVs of Mitch and Kelly.  I wanted the reader to only what they see, know only what they know, in order to convey the sense of  being an outsider, with the uneasy feeling that something ominous is going on beneath the surface that you don’t understand.  The line from The Hollies Witchy Woman (’72) kept running through my head: “there’s some rumours going round someone’s underground.”

Mitch and Kelly started out as platforms for differing points of view from which to observe the unfolding tragedy at Lost Lake, but they very soon asserted themselves and became full-blown characters.  The teenagers, Sarah and Bobby come right out of my childhood.  The rest of the inhabitants were made up from pure imagination; I have never met real ‘70s swingers (as far as I know).

The Location

The initial inspiration was the location.  We rented an old lumber camp on Benson Lake for several years when I was a kid.  The place had no plumbing and no electricity. I remember the fascination and fear I had of the place.  One night when I was eight or nine, I woke up alone in the pitch dark and saw the red glowing eyes of the woodstove.  It had a lasting effect on me. I was sure the place was haunted.  

I also had a fear of the deadheads which crowded around the dock. They seemed malignant and unavoidable.  I kept hitting them and fouling the propellor in the lily pads and other muck while I was trying to learn to run an outboard.  I wanted to capture those fears and exorcise them.

Lost Lake itself is a mix of Wendigo Lake in Ontario, Little Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks and Lac Caymant in Quebec, where a sheer cliff rises out of the water directly across from my wife’s family cottage.

The Smith family had a one-hundred-year lease on a hunting cabin on Wendigo Lake — almost the only structure on a lake that was so deep the bottom has never been found. This was also an inspiration for me.  The silence there was frightening, as was the caveman mask (representing the Wendigo) that my father used to put on and sneak around at night to scare first-timers to the lake.  It worked on me.  After the first time, I never went back.

The story is naturally set in the United States; the overabundance of guns, the unique, localized system of policing, and the cultural acceptance of violence (you might say, all the things that make it interesting) are not present in Canada.  Apart from the elevation — the terrain, wildlife, and ruggedness are the same as in the rock bound lakes of the Laurentian Shield. 

Hitchhiking

Hitchhiking and hitchikers play a small, but fundamental role in the story.  They were inspired by some of the people I met on the road, their stories, and the stories of other veteran hitchikers like my older brother.  There is a particularly dreadful feeling that descends on you when you are all alone on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. I had one particularly nervous night somewhere around Kamloops, B.C. in ’73, before I was picked up at 2 A.M. by a drunk who I am certain, to this day, was driving a stolen truck.  I am also convinced I was given a ride by Clifford Olsen, who only let me out of his car when I threatened him with my flick knife.  Of course, that could just be my writer’s imagination.  He did not kill his first victim until 1981, as far as we know.

Influence of Pop Culture

The village of Shallow Rock was heavily influenced by the hamlet in Deliverance, where the famous banjo duel takes place. 

There was definitely a soundtrack playing in my head, mostly CCR, (Bad Moon Rising and Run through the Jungle.)

This has got to be one of the best scenes in film for conveying a sense of being in an alien place right in your own country.

This is the best clip – it’s the interaction with the townspeople (“who’s pickin a banjo here?”) more than the actual duel.