1–What is the title of your latest release? THE WEIGHT OF MEMORY 2–What is it about? Paul Elias receives a terminal diagnosis so he decides to take his granddaughter, Pearl, who he is raising, back to the isolated lakeside area where he grew up. But when they get there, Pearl begins having visions of things that relate to Paul’s teenage years and the mysterious death of his wife forty years ago.  3–What do you love about the setting of your book?  It’s eerie and isolated and really gives the two main characters the chance to work through the situation presented to them: trying to figure out what happened forty years ago, trying to figure out what is real. 4–How did your main character(s) surprise you?  Pearl became very dedicated to the idea of helping this mysterious person she meets in the woods—her courage and determination surprised me.  5–Why will readers relate to your characters?  I think we all want to know what’s waiting for us on the other side of death, and I think we all want to somehow make up for the mistakes we’ve made in the past.  6–What was one of your biggest challenges while writing this book…

Through Me, the Way Lightning struck and I flinched. The rain came down in hard pellets, but I kept watching Abe and Miho as they drifted away. I waited until they disappeared into town before I walked inside my house, dripping wet. The sound of the storm was a steady roar on the cedar shingles above me, but the stone walls, silent and still, filled me with a sense of safety. I didn’t light any lamps, and the gray afternoon filtered in through the windows. There was a small open area inside the front door of my house. To the left, a fireplace along the outside wall. To the right was a rather long, galley-style kitchen, and at the end of it a narrow space where I ate and wrote and spent time thinking. The wide double doors that faced out the back were open, but they were sheltered by the eaves of the house so the water wasn’t coming in. I stared at the plains sweeping away in a graceful downhill for a long, long way, covered in a dense curtain of rain that hit the ground before rising in a ghostly mist. I went into my bedroom, the…

It is late at night in 1985, and if you drive west from the small town of Gap, PA, on Newport Road, the fields are dark. After you go over the first hill, you can’t see the lights from the little league baseball diamond anymore. Soon, you drive past the one-room, Amish schoolhouse on the left, then up over another sharp hill, and by now the night has swallowed you completely. You can barely see the outline of the trees. If there would be a moon, it would shine bright as a single headlight. It would glance off the creek as you go over the bridge and slow to make a right-hand turn. But there is no moon, not tonight, and every time you slow the car, you can feel the darkness press in for a closer look. Keep driving. I want to show you something. You thought you were on a back road already, but you turn right on to South New Holland Road, and now the road is barely two lanes wide with no line in the middle. Again, the darkness gathers, both warm and scary. Soon the road sweeps to the left, to the northwest, but you…

About Shawn Smucker Shawn lives in Lancaster, PA, along with his wife and their six children. He is the author of Building a Life Out of Words and How to Use a Runaway Truck Ramp. THE DAY THE ANGELS FELL is his first novel. WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | GOOGLEPLUS Tell us a little about THE DAY THE ANGELS FELL. Where did you get your inspiration to write this story? I was cowriting a memoir with a man in Istanbul, Turkey, who was dying of cancer. The goal was to finish the first draft before he passed away, so it was an intense three weeks, and we spent a lot of time together. For the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with mortality—he was forty-nine years old, a husband, a father of two children—and I wondered how I would feel if that was me, preparing to die. When I got home from the trip I started talking to my children about what kind of story they would like, and together we came up with the basic structure for THE DAY THE ANGELS FELL. As I began to write the book, I realized that doing so was my…