Christopher Graves awoke in his friend's Arkansas room, not remembering where he was. A hooded man loomed casually in the corner, staring at him. His heart raced as he mentally clawed his way out of the haze of sleep; meanwhile the man maintained his stance, calmly, eerily staring at him. As the headlights from a car outside "shifted the shadows in the room," the man disappeared and Graves was left with only his adrenaline and the haunting feeling left by a man who was never there: only the spectre of a dream between sleeping and waking. While most of us would shake off this unsavory moment quickly with a yawn and a cup of coffee, Graves was lured to dig deeper and he came out with the award winning psychological thriller SINNER.
Born in Mt. Vernon, Missouri, Graves spent the first five years of his life in the Marshfield area—between Springfield and Lebanon. But at age five, he and his siblings had to leave the area suddenly and change their names. They moved around a lot for a while; he says this added a lot of excitement and mystery to his life as a kid. Graves thinks this is where his interest in the thriller genre really began. While the whole experience could have been very frightening for him and his siblings, Graves credits his mom for turning a potentially scary situation into a character building one. His mom, "shielded [him and his siblings] from the fear," Graves told LakeExpo.com. "She would tell us a story of three magical children that each had a special magic skill and contributed to their team, so life wasn’t scary but exciting."
As a teenager he came to the Lake of the Ozarks for a fishing trip with his dad. He remembers waking up early to go fishing, jockeying for the best fishing spot on the Lake. This wasn’t the kind of fishing you did for an hour or two: his dad and the guys they were fishing with were committed to staying on the Lake all day. Graves remembers it was a great experience for him as a teenage boy, especially because he was the only one who caught anything all day. It was experiences like these that helped Graves “uncover” the fictional backstory of the masked man from his dream. As he began researching hooded and masked villains throughout history, he discovered a vigilante group called Bald Knobbers who originated from Missouri in the late 1880s. While originally he was drawn to them because of their shared Missouri origins, the more he learned, the more his main character took shape.
From the book's description...
“Its prologue opens in Douglas County, MO, just 50 miles from the Bald Knobbers’ first meeting on April 5th, 1885 in Kirbyville. Readers are taken back in time to the year 1887, where Minerva Yates lies on a dusty patch outside her local brothel waiting to die. Met with enormous misfortune, she and her bevy of soiled doves are the latest targets of the infamous Bald Knobbers. Paul Adison, a teenage member of the group, stands mask-less between his disguised counterparts—surrounding the terrified young women who fear the worst. Declaring his devotion to the Word, Paul initiates the act of moral justice, dragging the sinful women to their deaths.
Now, more than a century later, a devilish character emerges from present-day Eastern Pennsylvania. Clad in a goat-horned hoodie, middle-aged Zeke is a modernized version of his Bald Knobber grandfather, Paul Adison. Speaking almost exclusively in verses quoted directly from the King James Version of the Bible, Zeke believes his crusade has been ordained by God himself, which gives him the ultimate consent and mandate to capture and cleanse. As he encounters more and more 'tainted' souls in and around Pennsylvania throughout SINNER, it becomes clear this malevolent serial killer will stop at nothing in pursuit of his moral quest.
Strong and colossally resilient female characters, like the flawed and severely destructive Sylvia and the scrappy, tenacious Dani, influence and propel Zeke’s entire journey.”
The character of "Zeke" was inspired by the masked man standing in the corner, from Graves' Arkansas dream. During his research, one unsettling piece of familiarity that Christopher Graves uncovered was that an original and prominent Bald Knobbers member was named Charles Graves. The family has yet to determine if there is an ancestral connection, but for Chris it was a sure sign that his story was going in the right direction.
Check out SINNER at Amazon.com.
SINNER was originally written as a screenplay that won Best Psychological Thriller Script by the New Hope International Film Festival. Graves spent the next five years fleshing out the story into a book which will be available April 5. Graves has worked as an actor most of his life, creating and writing in With Friends Like These. He has also been in Sneaky Pete, Divorce, The Blacklist, Shades of Blue, and Nurse Jackie. After years in front of the camera he said, “writing my own words and then putting them in front of other people is scary.” He credits his success to the support of his wife, who does not like the horror/thriller genre, but who he says is “such a smart actor and strong study” that she was able to give him crucial guidance along they way. And of course none of it would have been possible if a waitress from Mount Vernon had not always told him that, “No matter where you come from, you are responsible for what you want to live and how you want to be.” Graves says his mom is an incredibly strong force who made sure a young boy born in a small clinic in Mount Vernon, Mo. could grow up to be anything he wanted to be, including an actor, filmmaker and award-winning screenwriter carving out his success in Manhattan.
Read more about SINNER & shop for the Kindle or paperback version at Amazon.com.
