Fellow readers often tell me that now that I am focusing on writing novels, the next one should be a sequel to Doppelganger. The idea is that readers who enjoyed the first book will want to read the second one. This makes enormous sense. I wish I could cooperate. The problem is I am terrible at this sort of thing because my ideas seem to emerge from someplace over which I have no control. They are scattered like my laundry used to be when I was a bachelor, which is to say all over and without reason, if clothes can be unreasonable. I also began writing White Out before I completed Doppelganger so it’s just closer to being ready for prime time. Thus, whether we like it or not, the next novel out of the chute won’t be Doppelganger II (not yet), but White Out.

The idea for this novel first lodged itself in my cranium after I visited Barrow, Alaska — now known officially as Utqiaġvik. I was there researching my nonfiction book for National Geographic, Immortality Inc. Utqiaġvik is the northern most human habitation in the United States, so deeply inserted into the Arctic Circle that there is nothing between it and the North Pole except the wild waters of the Beaufort Sea. It is simultaneously one of the ugliest and most arresting places that I have ever seen — and for that reason, it insisted I make a mystery out of it.