You describe SCAVENGER as “a high-tech scavenger hunt for a hundred-year-old time capsule.” Where did you get that idea?

In the afterword, I mention a NEW YORK TIMES article that I came across several years ago. It was about a town in New Jersey that wanted to bury a time capsule in honor of the community’s hundredth anniversary. Then someone remembered that the town had buried a time capsule fifty years earlier. But where was it? After a long search, they decided that it was probably in front of the fire department—under a granite support for a bell that honors local fire fighters who died in the line of duty. The monument had been erected during the intervening years without anyone realizing that the time capsule might be under it. But no one was eager to desecrate the monument, so the capsule remains unfound. That newspaper article nagged at my imagination--the idea of a lost message from the past—until I couldn’t resist writing a novel about it.

What are some of the things you discovered about time capsules?
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They’re as old as history, but the first object to be explicitly called a time capsule was a torpedo-shaped object created by the Westinghouse corporation for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. It’s still buried there, but hardly anybody knows of its existence. Even so, it’s scheduled to be opened in five thousand years. Amazing optimism. The idea for it came from a similar project at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. In 1936, the school’s president became so alarmed by the rise of Nazism in Germany that he drained an indoor swimming pool and filled it with cultural artifacts of the 1930s, hoping to protect his world from what he feared was an inevitable cataclysm. Using a burial metaphor, he called it the Crypt of Civilization. The contents are sealed behind a stainless-steel door that won’t be opened for almost six thousand years. But as often happens with time capsules, the Crypt was forgotten until 1970 when a graduate student decided to explore the basement of a campus building and noticed the reflection of his flashlight off the stainless steel door. That student eventually became an official at Oglethorpe University and arranged for the campus book store to be put next to the Crypt. He also founded the International Time Capsule Society. SCAVENGER has all kinds of equally fascinating lore--the five most-famous, lost time capsules, for example, and the town that forgot seventeen of them.

What makes the search for the time capsule “high tech”?

I liked the idea of the contrast between the new and the old, of modern devices uncovering the past. My research led me to a new, increasingly popular scavenger game called geocaching. The sky is filled with global positioning satellites that help the military locate targets. Until 2000, civilian GPS receivers were accurate only to 25 feet. But that year, President Clinton signed legislation that allowed civilian receivers to be accurate within 10 feet. Almost immediately, the game of geocaching was invented. The idea is to hide something small, a dime-store trinket, for example, and then post the object’s map coordinates on an Internet site called www.geocaching.com. The game player enters the coordinates into a GPS receiver, then follows the direction a red needle indicates on the receiver. Sounds easy until you realize that all sorts of obstacles get in the way: buildings, fences, freeways, rivers. The player needs to figure out how to get around the obstacles. But even when the site is located, the cache is often so well hidden in plain sight that it’s hard to find. There’s a parallel game called letterboxing that uses clues instead of map coordinates. Although invented recently, these games have grown extremely fast and are played in almost every country in the world. SCAVENGER also uses the Internet capability of BlackBerry phones. Via a program called Surveillance LIVE, BlackBerry owners can call home and watch their living room via a webcam, or else they can watch webcam images broadcast from anywhere in the world. This device allows characters in SCAVENGER to view separate portions of the search.

The term “high tech” can also apply to video games, which figure prominently in SCAVENGER. What drew you to them?

The virtual world of video games is fascinating. At this moment, two million people are playing a “massively multi-player game” called ANARCHY ONLINE, in which players lead alternate lives on the planet of Rubi-Ka. They work on Rubi-Ka and buy homes and have careers. Many of them have much better lives in that alternate reality than they do in so-called real life. Half the male players choose to be women on Rubi-Ka. Precious imaginary objects that a player fails to obtain on Rubi-Ka are sometimes auctioned on eBay. This merging of realities is mind spinning. Time becomes relative. If a game has a timer, the chances are that the seconds don’t count down in conventional time. One minute in a game might be two minutes in the conventional world. The effect can be disorienting. Using video games as a metaphor, I decided to make SCAVENGER a combination of the two most popular types of games: a God game and a first-person shooter game.

SCAVENGER uses the characters of Balenger and Amanda from your previous novel CREEPERS. What made you revisit them?

I hardly ever return to earlier novels, but in this case, the characters so fascinated me that I knew there was a lot more to say. As their ordeal in CREEPERS showed, Balenger and Amanda are extraordinary survivors, and I thought it would be interesting to write a novel in which they and a handful of others are put in peril precisely because they’re survivors. I loved the paradox that their strength and resourcefulness are what make them targets. Also Amanda resembles Balenger’s dead wife, and I thought the psychological implications deserved to be analyzed. “He no longer called her by his dead wife’s name.” That’s SCAVENGER’s first sentence, and it sets the tone for the complex relationship between Balenger and Amanda. She may be the strongest female character in all my novels.

While SCAVENGER shares characters with CREEPERS, isn’t it also the opposite of your previous novel?

The primary emotion of CREEPERS was claustrophobia, all those tiny enclosed spaces within the long-abandoned Paragon Hotel. In contrast, SCAVENGER dramatizes agoraphobia. I’m reminded of the reason Alfred Hitchcock made NORTH BY NORTHWEST. In the 1950s, he directed several films that emphasized the confines of the set. Nearly all of REAR WINDOW occurs in the living room of one apartment, for example. VERTIGO has all those narrow staircases and gloomy shadows. Earlier, that creepy mansion in REBECCA felt awfully claustrophobic. And of course, later, Hitchcock worked with claustrophobia in PSYCHO. But in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, he set himself the opposite goal of making wide-open spaces feel threatening. I’m reminded of the famous scene involving Cary Grant and the cropduster in the cornfield or the climax in which Grant and Eva Marie Saint race across Mt. Rushmore. In SCAVENGER, characters are placed in a mysterious valley with a sky so wide that it makes them feel small and vulnerable. As Amanda notes, all her life she has lived in cities. Buildings and trees constantly obscured the sky. Now, for the first time, she encounters an overwhelming expanse while threats lurk everywhere around her. Fans of claustrophobia need not feel slighted, however. SCAVENGER has plenty of enclosed spaces, also.

In the novel, Balenger and Amanda are trapped in a deadly game called SCAVENGER. Is there any further significance to the title?

I’m a fan of novelist, John Barth, who once said that the most ancient sports, the obstacle race and the scavenger hunt, are also the oldest and most basic elements of story telling. I thought that would make a good definition for a thriller—an obstacle race and a scavenger hunt. For years, that idea stayed with me until finally in SCAVENGER I decided to make those two elements my central plot devices.

Play Scavenger The Game