Barbara hated my first book. I knew exactly how to get my revenge

I write crime books, thrillers and horror movies, so I know a thing or two about vengeful characters. But I never saw myself as a vengeful person. That is, until I got a nasty email from a reader and spent way too long plotting my revenge. Let me explain …

My debut novel came out in 2018. It got a lot of love. Readers from all over the world sent me lovely emails, and it was an absolute joy to read them. But not everyone connected to the material. One reader compared my prose to a mattress tag. Another thought my male characters were too feminine, and my female characters were too masculine. One guy got very offended that I put a lemon tree in a climate where lemon trees wouldn’t typically grow.

Then I got an email from Barbara. I don’t know what Barbara looks like, but as I read her email, I pictured a compact woman in her 60s with fierce cheekbones and small, sinister eyes, staring intently at an old nicotine-stained monitor, thumping out her email so hard that the desk was shaking.

Christian White knew he should ignore the trolls. But that was easier said than done. Credit: Piccolo Angelo Photography

Barbara really didn’t like The Nowhere Child. It disturbed her. It made her angry. You think she would have stopped after reading the first chapter, right? Wrong. She read the whole damn thing cover to cover, tsking and shaking her head, probably, gasping aloud each time she turned the page. And there was so much she didn’t like. The story was unrealistic. I used too many swear words. My descriptions were lazy. My metaphors didn’t make sense. I cast religion in a negative light (in my defence, the book is about Pentecostal snake-handling).

But what Barbara hated most of all … what Barbara couldn’t forgive … what made Barbara so triggered that she just had to write and tell me … was all the gayness.

The central love story in The Nowhere Child is a flawed and complicated relationship between two men living in an isolated town in Kentucky during the 1990s. This offended Barbara both morally and spiritually. She spent most of her email stringing together homophobic slurs and listing all the ways I contributed to society’s downfall.

I spent way too long crafting a reply. I know you’re not supposed to feed the trolls, but I didn’t hold back. I hit the send button so hard it made my desk shake. But afterwards, I felt unsatisfied. A strongly worded email didn’t feel like enough. Then it hit me. I was writing my second book at the time – a crime thriller called The Wife and the Widow. That put me in a unique position to take revenge. I decided to create a character and name it after Barbara.

I asked myself what Barbara would hate the most. The answer was obvious. I had to make her a lesbian.

I don’t usually start with the name and work backwards. I like to give my characters entirely average and believable names that won’t distract the reader. Because names matter. Some even come with baggage. If you don’t believe me, ask a Karen. My best names have come from trawling obituaries. Dark, I know. Occasionally, I pull them directly from my life. In Wild Place, two brothers are named after my publishers, and in The Nowhere Child, my wife’s name is scrawled on a cursed wall. But these were friendly nods to important people in my life. This was the first time I’d considered using this power maliciously.

First, I tried to write Barbara as a bitter, lonely chain-smoker who judged and glared and felt black on the inside. But that felt like low-hanging fruit. It was too easy. Too expected. I asked myself what Barbara would hate the most. The answer was obvious. I had to make her a lesbian.

Thus, Barbara Eckman was born.

But as I fleshed out the character’s backstory, something strange happened. The Barbara in my story wasn’t small-minded and mean. She was hilarious and honest. She joined the police force because she wanted to help people. She met and fell in love with a kind-hearted and hilarious woman named Maggie, and soon they were expecting a baby. I started to care about Barbara. She stopped feeling like a Barbara, so her friends call her Bobbi.

The Wife and the Widow came out in 2019. It got even more love than my first book. More readers sent emails. A lot of those emails were about Bobbi. One reader felt a deep connection to Bobbi’s story. Another begged me to make Bobbi the main character in a series of books. Bobbi is by far my most popular character. Now she features in my new book – the first time I’ve used a recurring character.

There’s a moral in here somewhere. Something about the power of creating something instead of ripping something down. The value of turning a negative into a positive. Fighting hate with love. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that at the time. I just wanted revenge.

Christian White’s latest novel, The Ledge, is published by Affirm Press on September 24, $34.99; he is on tour from September 26. https://affirmpress.com.au/ChristianWhitetour.