Carpendale native releases his first novel, a thriller

Author will attend book signing this Saturday

For the Cumberland Times-News

CUMBERLAND — When Carpendale, W.Va., native Gary Clites sat down to write his first novel, the thriller “Seneca Wood,” he decided to set it in the two places he's spent his life, the Chesapeake Bay area and West Virginia.

"The book's about the Baltimore mob using West Virginia as a dumping ground for bodies and a place to launder money," he said. "From lumber to coal to inexpensive labor, people with money have, over the centuries, come into the state, exploited the resources, and taken the profits back with them. Why not the mafia?"

Clites, a 1978 graduate of Frankfort High School, will bring his work life full circle when he comes to The Book Center on Centre Street for a book signing on Saturday. He worked at the book store as a college student. "It's kind of amazing to have a signing at The Book Center," he said. "Working with my old boss, Lee Schwartz, to set up the event was really cool." Clites will sign books at the store from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday.

Clites sees the actions of the mobsters in his new book as a metaphor for the exploitation of his home state. In the novel, bodies are accidentally discovered by the WVU scuba team in Cheat Lake and the bad guys have to scramble to cover their tracks. They try to pin the crimes on Woodrow Garrett, an ex-reporter hiding from society in the Monongahela National Forest near the town of Seneca Rocks in West Virginia.

"The mob has taken over a chicken processing plant in the state as a way to launder money from drugs and protection rackets," Clites said. "Now, they're trying to build a housing development and golf course in the national forest and they want Garrett's land, so why not try to pin the murders on him?"

Clites says he got his inspiration for the novel while he was a student at West Virginia University. "When I was in college, my friends and I spent a lot of time at Cheat Lake, just a few miles outside of town," he said. "There was an old disused road there that ran to an old abandoned bridge to an island where a bunch of bikers used to party. One day, the school scuba team went diving in the area and found a dead body. I don't remember what the situation was, whether it was a suicide, an accident, or what, but while the police were investigating, they found a stolen car in the water near the bridge — then another car. Then they found a bunch of illegal slot machines, and other things. It was nothing as extreme as the things that happen in the book, but the idea of criminals using the backwater of the lake as a dumping ground always stuck with me. What would happen when the police discovered it? What would that push the bad guys to do?"

While he lives on the Bay now, Clites says it was natural to place much of his first novel in his home state. "Most of the book is set in the Monongahela National Forest around Seneca Rocks," he said. "It's an area I particularly love, and a location which I consider one of the most beautiful places in the world. I was visiting there a few years ago when the novel formed in my mind. Honestly, it was the place that drove my ideas to coalesce into a clear plot."

While thrillers are a popular type of book, they are seldom set in the mountains of West Virginia. "I wanted to take the traditional elements of a thriller, and move them to a less traditional setting in an oddball situation to develop a story that was a little more quirky and unusual than the traditional novel in the genre," Clites explained.

With food scares in the news these days, a book about mob involvement in the meat packing industry could be scary on a number of levels. Clites says the book, "is partly about how people relate to the food chain. We tend to think we are in control and that we are on top of things, but we're not. You've seen that in the news a lot lately. In the novel, nature asserts itself in some pretty ugly ways."

And then there's that question of exploitation. "It seems like everyone from the robber barons to big modern corporations have taken advantage of West Virginia's native resources, why wouldn't organized crime?" He says that was a factor in his decision to set the novel in the state: "Actually, the isolation of the mountains make it the perfect setting for a thriller. West Virginians are very used to having to fight for themselves, and that's what my main character has to do."

Clites is the son of local historian Gary Clites Sr. and his wife Betty and was a 1978 graduate of Frankfort High School and a former Cumberland Evening Times paperboy. Though he currently lives in Southern Maryland, his connections to the Cumberland area remain strong.

Seneca Wood (Casperian Books, 264 pp., $15), is available through bookstores and all online booksellers including Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, etc. For more information, to read the first chapter online, and for links to places you can get the book, visit the author's Web site at www.garyclites.com. The book contains adult language, adult situations and violence. It is probably not appropriate for younger readers.