Sparks novelist Carol Davis Luce leaves readers screaming for more.
By Chris Platt
She heard the woman scream. She saw the tall, bulky man squeezing the life out of her. After lowering the body to the ground, he turned and started toward the forest of saplings, where Roberta lay helpless in the mud. A voice echoed through the woods. The killer paused, glanced around uncertainly, turned back to her--everything went black.
--Night Prey
Carol Davis Luce admits she has an ability to see the dark side of things. Even when she was growing up in Southern California, when most kids were tuning in to the creepy tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
"I visualize menace in every corner," she says. "I'm not the person someone would want for company if they were alone and frightened. I often scare myself."
Luce is keeping lots of people company--and scaring them, too--with her third novel, Night Prey, a thriller set in the Reno-Tahoe area. Luce, who lives in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in Sparks, writes suspense novels about women who are stalked by murderers.
Three of her four books have been set in the Silver State. The first, Night Stalker, about a women pursued by a man who is supposed to be dead, takes place in Reno and Sparks. The second, Skin Deep, was set in San Francisco, but Luce returned to Nevada locales in Night Prey with a psychopathic killer who lives in the forest at Lake Tahoe and comes down the mountain to stalk innocent victims in Reno and Sparks.
Her latest work, Night Passage, was recently bought by Zebra Books and is scheduled to be in bookstores in early 1995. In Night Passage a 12-year-old murder case resurfaces in a fictional Central Nevada mining town. Gaming, forensic medicine, and kidnapping are mixed into the rural plot.
"I like to believe that the location is partially responsible for the popularity of my books," she says. "Two of the novels which sold out are those set in Nevada."
Luce, 49, has lived in Sparks since moving to the Rail City in 1969 from Downey, California, with her husband, Robert, and their three sons, Reg, Rob, and Ron.
"We had three young boys who wanted to hunt and fish," Luce recalls. "At first I dug my heels in. I didn't want to move to Nevada. But after six weeks of living here, I knew I'd never want to leave."
Luce began writing novels in 1984. She was driven, she says, by the one-dimensional quality of the books she was reading. "The suspense books didn't have enough romancing them, and the romance books didn't have as much suspense as I liked," she says.
"You've heard the old clich, of a person saying, 'I can write a better book than that,' then going out and trying it? That's how I got started. I went to the library and checked out some books on how to write. Then I went home and dug out a $10 typewriter I had bought at a garage sale, and I started writing."
Luce soon discovered that writing a book was easier than getting it published. "My first mentor, Gilbert Ralston of Genoa, once told me that I wrote like a housewife, whatever that means," Luce chuckles.
"My first novel took two years to write. It was unfocused, unskilled, and about 400 pages too long."
She cut the length, found a focus, and mailed off the manuscript. "The refection's quickly poured in," she recalls. After five years and several revisions a New York agent took her on, and Night Stalker finally was sold to Zebra Books.
Like all writers, Luce weaves personal experiences into her stories. "A few years back someone gave me a bunch of balloons," she says. "The balloons roamed the house, upstairs and sown, seeming to follow me. If I passed too close, they gave me a static shock. I wrote a horror short story about them."
When she needs inspiration, Luce often turns to the Reno Gazette-Journal and the Sparks Tribune.
"This is frightening to admit," she laughs, "but I get a lot of my ideas from real life--newspapers and true-crime accounts. And most of the time I must tone down the facts to make them more believable."
Luce likes to present real-life settings in her novels. In Night Prey she uses a friend's beach house at Lake Tahoe. Readers of her novels will recognize such settings a Victorian Square in Sparks, Washoe Medical Center in Reno, Reno Cannon International Airport, the casinos of downtown Reno, and various Lake Tahoe beaches.
She occasionally encounters road-blocks in the search for authenticity. While doing research for Night Passage, Luce and her husband visited the small mining town of Eureka, 240 miles east of Reno. She wanted to incorporate Eureka's historic tunnel system in her plot.
"The people of the town were very helpful until I wanted to talk about the tunnels. Then everyone clammed up," she says.
When she's not researching or writing, Luce enjoys swapping tips and war stories with friends in the Reno area who also are published writers.
The group includes Patricia Wallace, Terri Sprenger-Farley, Barbara Land, Kay Fahey, and Jo Ann Wendy. Luce says, "We try to get together every month or so to exchange publishing news or to congratulate, praise, or commiserate."
Lately, Luce has had good news to share. She recently sold stories to the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and writer's Digest. Zebra books has signed her to a two-book contract. She has more than 200,000 book in print. Hollywood also beckons. Republic Pictures has expressed interest in Night Prey, and actress Alonna Shaw, who starred in the action movie Double Impact, called last August to say she was interested in optioning Skin Deep for a TV movie or possible series.
Meanwhile, Luce is scouting locations for her fifth novel. The action will take place in Reno-area casinos, and Luce hopes her readers enjoy the romance, danger, and suspense while being scared out of their wits.
No longer was Roberta in the ballroom being interviewed for the news. She saw an oak bar, liquor bottles lined up under a plate glass mirror. She saw a TV, and she was looking at herself on the screen. She dropped her gaze and saw, reflected in the mirror directly opposite her, a fierce-looking man staring at the TV.
She heard the anchorwoman identifying her: "Live from the Rose Ballroom of John Ascuaga's Nugget, where Sophie Bennett and Roberta Paxton, directors of the Silver State Women's Center..."
Those cold black eyes stared unflinchingly at the TV. A wicked, knowing grin spread across his face.
She thought she would scream.
---NIGHT PREY
Photos by Gary Elam