An Interview with LT Vargus and Tim McBain

LT Vargus and Tim McBain are the evil geniuses behind the bestselling Amazon crime thriller, “Dead End Girl.” Today we bring you a no-holds-barred interview with this amazing writing team. We’ll learn how these authors began their dark journey, what makes Violet Darger and Victor Loshak tick, and what’s next for Vargus and McBain.

Q – How did the two of you decide to write together, and what makes your partnership so effective for crafting thrillers?

LT – Our first few writing projects together were actually movie scripts. We literally sat on the couch and sort of talked the whole movie out, line by line.

Writing a book together isn’t quite the same process, but I think writing those scripts did help us hone our method of writing as a team.

Beyond that, I think we have a similar understanding of stories, and similar taste. We’re drawn to the same emotional hooks.

Q – LT, your mom describes you as a “world-class swimmer” and “highly verbal.” At the same time? The band Tool in “Aenima” suggested California will fall into the sea and Arizona will soon have a bay. I’m wondering if you believe these talents will come in handy.

LT – I’m an average swimmer. Like, if you throw me in the middle of the ocean, I’m not going to drown… right away. But faced with some sort of freak Arizona rip current? I figure I’m toast. That’s OK, though. I’m sure my mom will come up with some hyperbolic way to describe my death. 

Q – Tim, you mentioned your love for epic fantasy in your blog. Give me your favorite series. If George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss never get around to writing the next books in their respective series (which seems quite plausible), what are the chances you and LT will step in?

T – A Song of Ice and Fire is my favorite. I don’t think George or Pat would ask us to step in, but I think we’d like to write something in the genre someday. Maybe.

Q – Violet Darger and Victor Loshak feel like the perfect foils for each other. How do you go about building their psychology, motivations, and vulnerabilities?

LT – We thought them up as a pair almost from the beginning, because it’s so much easier to get a character across if they have someone else to play off of. Tim always brings up how integral Sam is in the Lord of the Rings, and that it wouldn’t be the same story if Frodo was by himself.

Q – Can you walk us through your typical writing process? Do you outline heavily, or is it more intuitive and improvisational? Does one of you write the initial draft, while the other adds description and buckets of blood?

LT – We do a lot of initial brainstorming together, and then Tim puts together an outline. He’s really good at seeing the big picture and laying it out. Once we have an outline, we divide things up. Usually by character, but sometimes it’s more by sequences. I tend to write a lot of the opening chapters that have character introductions and backstory. Tim writes the villain chapters and a lot of the action sequences.

Q – Your books often explore moral ambiguity. What themes are you most drawn to, and why do you think thrillers are the perfect genre for exploring them?

T – I feel like there are a couple of layers at play. Thrillers are about anxiety in a lot of ways, and I’d say we’re both pretty anxious people so that kind of emotional content makes sense to us. I also think that there’s an outsider/other thing going on. Where older genre fiction set up outsiders to be feared and destroyed, thrillers are a more sophisticated look into that. They still generally work on that “defeating the monster” level, but they add some empathy and complexity to it.

I also feel like there is a kind of nihilism in the air these days that we’re incorporating into our books. I try to weave in these negative messages from modern life that seem to get under my skin. Sometimes I give them to the villian, and sometimes I give them to the hero.

Q – Have there been any unexpected reactions or interpretations of your plots from readers that surprised or scared you? Were the police involved?

T – I interpret some of the endings differently than the readership does, but I don’t want to spill any beans about that kind of thing. I think it’s better, maybe, if nobody knows exactly where the seams are.

Our books are loaded with all kinds of graphic violence and depravity, but one of our harshest criticisms was for having a particular dog breed bite someone. Dude felt the need to stick up for Chow Chows.

Q – The villains in your books are chillingly real. Where do you draw inspiration for these antagonists, and how do you ensure they’re not just caricatures?

LT – We watch and read a lot of true crime, so even though all of our villains are fictional, we try to incorporate some of those real-life details. A big thing we always try to get across with our villains is: what does this person think of themselves? What’s the story they’re telling themselves about their own crimes?

Q – Okay, Leonard Stump. Talk about a disturbing killer. I must know how you came up with this character. Combination of real serial killers? A tribute to the bodies you buried in Michigan before fleeing the state?

LT – Our initial inspiration for Stump was the question: what if Ted Bundy hadn’t been recaptured after escaping from jail? What if he’d remained at large for decades? As far as the specifics of Stump’s M.O., we borrowed some details from a real serial killer named Cary Stayner. 

Q – I’ll come out right now and say it. As much as I love Violet Darger, I’m a humongous Victor Loshak fan. What inspired you to give Loshak his own series, and does this series have a different vibe than the Violet Darger series?

LT – People seemed to connect with Loshak right from the start, so it was an easy decision to give him his own series. We brought in E.M. Smith as a co-author precisely because we wanted the Loshak series to have its own flavor.

Q – Give me five horror movies that influenced you guys. Do any bits make it into your books as easter eggs?

The Thing – I find myself drawn to very bleak endings, especially in horror. (I’ve pitched “and then everyone dies!” as an ending more than once when brainstorming.) The Thing totally delivers on that.

Alien – I’m not sure if there’s another movie that maintains tension like Alien. If we manage to come even close to that level with our books, I’d consider that a huge success.

The Descent – I’m super claustrophobic, and the idea of being lost in a cave or tunnel has made it into several of our books (Dark Passage, Countdown to Midnight).

The Silence of the Lambs – Both the movie and the book were a huge inspiration for us overall. We very much wanted Violet Darger to be our Clarice Starling.

The X-Files – OK, it’s not technically a movie, but we both grew up watching The X-Files, and I think it made a massive impression on us. The Mulder/Scully dynamic had a big influence on the relationship between Darger and Loshak. And even beyond the character angle, The X-Files knew how to tease out a story. We go back and watch some episodes every few years, and we always find something new to take inspiration from.

Q – Before your thrillers took off, you wrote The Scattered and the Dead series. How fascinating is it to write about the post-apocalypse? Besides “The Stand”, what are your favorite books in the genre?

LT – I have the sense that I’m maybe in the minority on this when it comes to post-apocalyptic writers… but if the shit ever hits the fan, as they say, I don’t have any survival fantasies. Like, not only do I think I wouldn’t survive… I wouldn’t want to. Things would be just too grim and frankly, probably pretty gross.

As for my favorite books in the genre: the Jubal Van Zandt books, hands down. It’s maybe not exactly a classic post-apocalyptic set up in that it takes place in the “Revived Earth,” which is the civilization humanity has rebuilt after some kind of cataclysmic event(s). Sort of cyberpunk/Mad Max. It’s a super fun series, and I highly recommend it.

Q – You guys have a huge readership and seem to market yourselves well. What advice would you give authors for getting their names in front of readers?

T – I think the best thing you can do is try to connect to readers emotionally with your book descriptions, titles, and covers. That’s the first impression, you know?

Bookbub is great. Amazon ads are great.

And if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities on the promotional side, I think it can help to remember that you’re just trying to get people to read a book. It’s not complicated.

Q – What’s the next book you’re writing, and what will readers love about the story?

T – We’re just finishing up the first in a Psychological Thriller series. The book is called Love Her Darkly, and it’s probably the twistiest thing we’ve written so far.

 

Thank you so much to LT Vargus and Tim McBain for taking the time to talk with us. Sign up for the Vargus and McBain newsletter and learn about their free book giveaways and…uh…pizza parties. And don’t forget to order your copy of “Love Her Darkly.”