Note: This blog post is taken from the author’s website.

The made-up word thickafog is a wonderful example of the inventiveness of our human language. Maine lobstermen use the word to answer the question: “How was it out there today?”  Answer: “Thickafog.”

In writing the novel, I wanted the fog to play a central role in the mystery, on both a literal and figurative level. On the literal level, the fog is frequently dense on the island or lurking just offshore, a constant presence, a constant obfuscation. Even on the sunniest of summer days, the fog can be felt whispering its way into the sunshine. The fog creates the core mood of the novel and plays a role in the tragic events that transpire.

But it’s the fog inside narrator Jon Davis’s head that is of more importance, as he battles his drinking problem, starting and stopping across the span of the novel. Because the reader sees him at times lucid and at times a blackout drunk, we realize he cannot be trusted as he presents his side of the story. When we learn he is a prime suspect in the murder of his father, we enter his mind, his fog, as he struggles to make sense of events around him. The novel is told in part from his first-person perspective, and then juxtaposed against an omniscient point of view, so the reader can make her own way through the plot attempting to determine what is true and what is not.

The novel’s time-puzzle structure, where we move forward and backward with threads holding the narrative together, along with the changes of point of view, create a fog in the reader’s mind. This is a psychological mystery and the reader must pay close attention to understand what is unfolding and where we are in time.

Ingrid Backlund, the “Island Queen,” is in a fog of her own as she battles her cognitive decline. The wealthy and well-educated granddaughter of a prosperous island granite company owner, she is apparently being stalked by the narrator’s father, who has a foggy past of his own from his years living in Florida. Ingrid’s loss of short-term memory makes it difficult for the reader to know how reliable she is as the police investigate the murder of Jon’s father, which we learn about in the opening paragraph of the novel.

Ingrid’s son, Kevin, is trying to protect her but has a drug problem of his own and is not a trustworthy character. Meanwhile, the majority of the islanders are hardworking, caring people forming a compassionate community upended by the opening murder, as well as other tragic events that follow. For the reader, it becomes a challenge to separate the good from the bad as the fog thickens and the plot introduces new characters and crimes that shake the community. We see many instances of good coming from bad, but also bad coming from good. We see unexpected random acts of kindness alongside horrible crimes committed against good people. The novel is filled with infinite dualities within individual characters, their beliefs, and their struggles.

For me, the best fiction raises as many questions as it answers, and there is a constant tension in Thickafog between events transpiring as divine acts or as random, meaningless occurrences. This, too, is the central thematic fog of the novel, which I hope stimulates thought by the conclusion.

— Caleb Mason