I interviewed Jennifer Percy about her book Demon Camp for the LA Times, which you can read here. And here are more reasons you may want to read it, before it may become a movie. In the right hands, it would make a really good movie. And it’s a little amusing to think of the quick and dirty found footage horror film it could make in the wrong hands. If you need more convincing, an excerpt from the book that ran in Harper’s is up now.
Here are a couple more questions from my interview that got cut for space; and I’m pretty sure not every author is traveling in Afghanistan on the eve of their book’s release:
ED: In the book you write “I can’t help but wonder if the United States is suffering from a form of cultural PTSD,” the persistence of wartime behaviors in peacetime, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that idea.
JP: You don’t have to have direct experience to have PTSD, you can become traumatized vicariously through images, through storytelling, there are theories that you can sort of inherit this trauma. My idea is not just that America has PTSD. Any country that has combat warfare and traumatic experiences, we’re suffering through cultural PTSD that we’re having a hallucination that we’re inured from trauma and warfare on our own soil. Warfare and paranoia is so inherent in our own society. its a kind of delusion that we’re all dealing with.
ED: Did the book get optioned? It would make a great movie.
JP: It just got optioned this week at Paramount. Luckily, I just talked to the screenwriter, and it will not be a terrible horror flick, like some of the other screenwriters that I talked to. She had a wonderful, subtle, psychological narrative, and it wouldn’t be me – like in the book – but another Jennifer Percy character, whose brother passed in the war and wants to talk to veterans.