Small Towns, Big Secrets

Years ago, I spent a good deal of time on family farmland near Creston, Iowa, the kind of small town where you could set your watch by who was doing what and when. Every small town I have ever known seems to run on the same handful of fixtures. There is always a pastor everyone has an opinion about. There is always a police presence, usually one or two officers who know your car at a glance. There is always a hardware store where the owner can tell you exactly which aisle holds what you need before you have finished describing it.

And every small town has its gossip too, the one who can find out you had a rough morning before you’ve even finished having it. Say a hard word to your spouse in your own kitchen, and by supper, three people at the church potluck will ask, gently, if everything is alright at home. Nobody ever quite knows how she does it. I have long since given up trying to figure it out and simply accepted it as a kind of local weather system.

I was born in Houston, Texas, not to be confused with Houston, Alaska, and for most of my Alaska years I lived in Anchorage and Eagle River, which are their own kind of world, closer to a city than a small town. But between the family farmland near Creston and my time in Anchor Point and Homer, I have spent enough real hours in small towns to observe their unique dynamics. In a city, you can disappear into the crowd. In a place like Homer, you cannot so much as buy a card at the drugstore without someone mentioning it to your mother by nightfall. And yet, for all that closeness, for all that everybody supposedly knows everybody’s business, the real secrets, the ones that matter, still manage to hide in plain sight for years. Sometimes for generations.

That contradiction is exactly why I set my stories where I do.

Ravens Cove is small on purpose. So is the town by the lake in the book I am working on now. I could set a supernatural thriller in a big city, and plenty of wonderful books do. But there is something about a small town that makes the darkness feel more personal, and more possible. When everyone knows everyone, a stranger stands out instantly. When the whole town turns up for every funeral and every wedding, a secret that survives anyway becomes almost unbearable to imagine, because you start to wonder just how many people had to look away to keep it buried.

A secret that survives in a small town has to be protected by someone.

That is the sentence that sits underneath everything I write. A secret that survives in a small town has to be protected by someone. Not by distance, not by anonymity, but by a person, or a whole family, or sometimes a whole congregation, choosing again and again not to look too closely. That is far more frightening to me than any monster. Monsters are easy to write. Ordinary people quietly agreeing not to ask questions — that’s a whole different animal.

The gossip is not incidental to that, and neither is the character she always makes me imagine standing right behind her, the fellow who really has no business still driving but drives anyway, because nobody in town has quite worked up the nerve to say so. Real or invented, characters like that are part of what makes the contradiction work. A town that talks about everything, and yet somehow still manages to keep its worst secret for fifty years, is a town worth setting a story in. The very same busybody who knows your coffee order before you do can walk right past the one truth that would break the whole place open, and never see it, because she was never meant to.

I think that is true of more than fiction. All of us carry things a little like that, don’t we? Something we walked past for years without letting ourselves really see it. I do not think that makes us careless. I think it makes us human, and more forgivable than we usually give each other credit for.

So the next time you find yourself in a small town, and you meet the pastor everyone has an opinion about, or the woman who somehow always knows, look a little closer at the quiet ones too, the ones behind the counter at the hardware store, the ones who just wave from the patrol car. In my experience, and in my fiction, they are usually the ones holding the story together.

Mary Ann Poll is the author of the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast supernatural thriller series and host of the podcast Real Ghost Chatter. Learn more at maryannpoll.com.