Today on WoW, we’re joined by Brendan Reichs, author of the New York Times bestseller NEMESIS. Developing a writing or character soundtrack can be a great way to spice up your writing process and help sustain a mood or feeling while writing a particular type of material. Stay tuned for a bit more about NEMESIS below, but first, Brendan shares his soundtrack for one of his book’s key characters.
Noah has the same unique problem as Min—every two years, on his birthday, he is attacked and killed by a black-suit man. After each murder Noah wakes up in a barren cave a few hours later, unable to remember how he got there. Noah believes he suffers from psychotic breaks, and that the murders he remembers as real are really just sleepwalking nightmares. After all, that’s what his psychiatrist tells him, and surely Dr. Lowell has his best interests at heart. Right?
This playlist fits both Noah’s emotional state in Nemesis and the mood I aim for when I write his scenes. So it’s both a playlist Noah would own and his own personal soundtrack. If you don’t know some or even all of these songs, I urge you to check them out!
It’s been happening since Min was eight. Every two years, on her birthday, a strange man finds her and murders her in cold blood. But hours later, she wakes up in a clearing just outside her tiny Idaho hometown—alone, unhurt, and with all evidence of the horrifying crime erased.
Across the valley, Noah just wants to be like everyone else. But he’s not. Nightmares of murder and death plague him, though he does his best to hide the signs. But when the world around him begins to spiral toward panic and destruction, Noah discovers that people have been lying to him his whole life. Everything changes in an eye blink.
For the planet has a bigger problem. The Anvil, an enormous asteroid threatening all life on Earth, leaves little room for two troubled teens. Yet on her sixteenth birthday, as she cowers in her bedroom, hoping not to die for the fifth time, Min has had enough. She vows to discover what is happening in Fire Lake and uncovers a lifetime of lies: a vast conspiracy involving the sixty-four students of her sophomore class, one that may be even more sinister than the murders.
