{"id":2351,"date":"2025-03-22T04:26:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-22T04:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2351"},"modified":"2025-03-22T04:26:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T04:26:32","slug":"christopher-null","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2351","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Null"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Null is an award-winning journalist, editor, and novelist.<\/p>\n

Null has more than 25 years of experience working in business and technology journalism, having worked as a top editor for PC Computing, Smart Business, and New Architect magazines early in his career. He was the founding editor in chief of Mobile PC magazine in 2003, and later spent over four years writing about tech daily for Yahoo! as \u201cThe Working Guy\u201d and six years as the tech columnist for Executive Travel magazine.<\/p>\n

Today he continues to write regularly for Wired, TechHive, and numerous other outlets. His commentary on the business and tech world has been featured by CNN, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, and many other media outlets. He also publishes the website Drinkhacker, which covers the world of wine and spirits.<\/p>\n

He is the author of two novels: Half Mast and The Cul-de-sac<\/a>. Half Mast was heralded as \u201cthe best of contemporary American fiction\u201d by the New York Resident, while The Cul-de-sac was named one of \u201cthe most anticipated thrillers of 2025.\u201d His nonfiction book, Five Stars!, a how-to guide for aspiring film critics, is often used as a textbook for film criticism curriculum at a number of colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

TBE: The Cul-de-sac features multiple narrators, each with distinct voices and perspectives. What challenges did you face in balancing these different characters, and was there one character\u2019s voice that came to you more naturally than others?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> The voice of Alex, for sure. My first novel, Half Mast, is about Alex\u2019s tragic story as a teen, so I\u2019d already had a lot of experience writing in his voice and developing his character. He\u2019s also just someone I feel I \u201cunderstand\u201d intuitively \u2013 though I think all of the characters in the book have something relatable to them. By the way, you don\u2019t need to read Half Mast before The Cul-de-sac, but it may increase your appreciation for it.<\/p>\n

TBE: The setting\u2014a quiet, isolated cul-de-sac where \u201cnothing ever happens\u201d\u2014becomes almost a character itself. What inspired this particular setting, and how did you develop the eerie atmosphere that permeates the neighborhood?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> The cul-de-sac is a real place, more or less. It was directly inspired by the street on which I lived for about 10 years, though it is not really so sinister in real life, and all my neighbors were wonderful people. It was the trees that really made the setting in my mind. Our house was on a lot covered with massive oak trees, some as old as 250 years, so everything was always in shadow and the ground was absolutely thick with underbrush. Living there definitely set me in the right mood to write the book.<\/p>\n

TBE: Peg\u2019s transformation throughout the novel is fascinating\u2014from seemingly harmless widow to someone capable of shocking violence. Did her character arc surprise you as you were writing, or did you have her journey mapped out from the beginning?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> It was a total surprise, and the plot changed dramatically as I was developing the story. Peg was originally going to be just another victim, and the late-book twists were completely different than what you see in the final draft. The final book, I think, is so much better.<\/p>\n

TBE: Alex\u2019s deteriorating health and his past create an interesting moral ambiguity around his character. How did you approach writing someone who\u2019s both vulnerable and potentially dangerous?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> I think it comes naturally for me. Good characters have multiple dimensions and are never all good or all bad. Part of putting together a good thriller is figuring out where that balance lies, and how it shifts over the course of the story. I\u2019ve always tried to create sympathy for characters who may not be absolute pillars of society, to see if I can make readers understand what \u201cmade them that way\u201d and whether or not that makes them evil.<\/p>\n

TBE: The generational conflicts between teenagers like Eliza and Jean Claire and the adults in their lives run throughout the novel. What interested you about exploring these tensions, particularly in a setting where secrets and violence lurk just beneath the surface?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> I have two children who are now young adults (and out of the house), so teen angst is something I\u2019m very conversant with. Of course, I had all these same motivations myself as a child \u2013 the desire to escape, the belief that no one could possibly understand me, a severe lack of direction, a yearning for true friendship<\/a>. I definitely didn\u2019t want to put teens in the book who were going to lack personality and just be YA-friendly pawns that would move the story forward. They had to be just as conflicted and nuanced as everyone else.<\/p>\n

TBE: The novel builds tension through both what characters know and what they\u2019re hiding from each other. How did you manage the flow of information to readers while maintaining suspense about what might happen next?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> The decision to tell the story from constantly shifting perspectives helped with this. The reader is continually moving into someone else\u2019s brain, and usually the new character doesn\u2019t know what happened in the previous chapter because they weren\u2019t part of the action. The book is linear \u2013 every chapter occurs in sequence, and the chapters never overlap in time. Deciding whose POV to switch to each time was a careful decision made to intentionally keep the reader and the characters on their toes\u2026 and turning pages. It was a divisive choice, though. Some readers find it too complex. But it\u2019s right there in the name of the book.<\/p>\n

TBE: Klaus Fischer appears relatively briefly in person but casts a long shadow over the story. What went into creating this character whose actions continue to affect everyone even after his death?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> It\u2019s the snowball effect<\/em>, right? The conspirators have every chance to \u201cdo the right thing\u201d but never take it, and the consequences eventually arrive, as they must. The bill has to be paid. Klaus himself is a bit of an enigma since, as you note, he does not have as much page time as everyone else, but I did want to create a portrait of a serial killer who is hiding in plain sight \u2013 and whose actions are completely unpredictable. Klaus\u2019s job is to provide the spark that ignites the plot, so I really just tried to have as much fun as I could with his backstory.<\/p>\n

TBE: The ending leaves readers with Eliza about to make a discovery. What went into your decision to conclude the story at this particular moment rather than revealing what she finds?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> The ending of Eliza holding the key was planned from the beginning. To me, it\u2019s a poetic moment that sees Eliza finally \u201cgrowing up\u201d and remembering the advice Alex has given her since the beginning. Her life is about to take a very tragic turn once that door is open, so I wanted to at least give her an ending that had some faint sense of hope in it. That said, I felt that most readers would understand what she is about to find without me having to force it on them. No one really has a happy ending in my books. I don\u2019t know how to write them.<\/p>\n

TBE: Throughout the book, characters make choices about when to speak up and when to stay silent about what they know. What drew you to explore this theme of complicity and the weight of keeping dangerous secrets?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, right?<\/em> A lot of my work explores the damage that secrets, lies, and especially guilt do to the psyche \u2013 and in The Cul-de-sac I was trying to up the ante by asking how that changes when those secrets, lies, and guilt are all shared among multiple people. How would that burden be split among the conspirators, if not evenly? And what would happen if one of them finally cracked? There is no honor among thieves, after all.<\/p>\n

TBE: After spending so much time in this neighborhood with these complex characters, do you ever imagine what might happen next for Eliza, Jean Claire, or even Peg? Is there a particular character whose future you\u2019ve thought about beyond the pages of the novel?<\/h4>\n

Christopher Null:<\/strong> All the time. And readers have been very vocal on this front, to the point where I did write an additional chapter that serves as an epilogue to help ease some of the burden on readers who absolutely needed to know more. You can find it here: https:\/\/tulepublishing.com\/2025\/02\/spoiler-author-christopher-null-talks-about-that-suspenseful-ending-for-the-cul-de-sac\/. I\u2019m working on a new book that\u2019s not related to these characters right now, but I\u2019m not ruling out a sequel to The Cul-de-sac down the line.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Null is an award-winning journalist, editor, and novelist. Null has more than 25 years of experience working in business and technology journalism, having worked as a top editor for PC Computing, Smart Business, and New Architect magazines early in his career. He was the founding editor in chief of Mobile PC magazine in 2003, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}