Desert Discord is set in West Texas in the seventies. What led you to choose this setting? Is Duro based on a real Texas town? If so, what town and why?
Duro is a condensed and exaggerated version of Odessa, my home town. Like Odessa, Duro holds very little that is inherently interesting—the town sits on a high, flat slab of hard rock in the middle of nowhere. The only recreational areas are a few acidic artificial lakes on one side, and a crescent of high sand dunes on the other. The economy is based entirely on oil and gas—it’s too barren for anything else—and so people are forced to create their own cultural distractions.
The early seventies was an especially unsettled time in West Texas, when the known world seemed to be morphing into something unfamiliar and disturbing: strange-sounding music, radical ideas, distrust and rejection of authority, variations on traditional lifestyles. Some people wanted to be part of the change, while others saw it as a mortal threat and wanted to build walls against it, smoke it out and kill it. I think nothing in the world was more upsetting to the old order than the acceptance of homosexuality, which to some signaled the downfall of all moral structure.
Desert Discord includes such an interesting cast of characters. Where do you get inspiration for the characters you write about? Are they based on people you know?
Most of my characters are based at least obliquely on people I knew. The music teacher who inspired Mrs. Kellogg is the most obvious. She was a force of nature, a “connector,” as Malcolm Gladwell would say, and a Kennedy liberal. Also, the non-traditional family, the Piedmans, is based on a real one, as was their youngest daughter, a friend of mine, who at age twelve could easily have passed for seventeen. The inherent violence among young men was very real, as was the impulse to prove their manhood by attacking outsiders.
The idea for a character begins with something they do, then I work backward from there—if they do one thing, what else do they do, and why? One of my favorite exercises is to create “micro-characters,” people with their own back stories and motivations, who whirl into one or two chapters and have some impact on the other characters before going off on their own trajectory. In some cases, I remove them in a subsequent draft, but sometimes I leave them in. Morris Goudrault is an example. He’s just a hapless drug dealer who gets 40 years in prison for possession. Outrageous sentences like that were actually handed out in the early seventies. His function in the book is to show how crazy the world had become, and the idiotic risks the other characters are taking.
What happened to Del Ray after he left Duro?
I would guess he found peace with himself in Houston, if not happiness. That happened to a friend of mine—everybody knew he was gay, but nobody said it out loud. He tried to fit in and was miserable. After becoming suicidal and suffering useless “therapy,” he was rejected by his family and moved to Houston where he found people like himself and something like a normal life. Like Del Ray, he expressed the most homophobia of my friends in high school, though he was never violent.
Do you have plans for a next book? If so, can you share a bit about what those plans are?
I want to go back to the origins of Duro over 100 years ago, where we find a team of surveyors hauling their equipment by mule wagon across the Caprock, trying to locate a precise point on the map. The little-known mystical practices of the Freemasons will come into it.
Where it goes after that, I have no idea, but it will be fun to find out.
Questions for Discussion
What were some of the major themes of the book? Where did you see this described in the book?
Talk about the setting of Desert Discord. Was it important to the story? Would things have happened differently if the events took place in a bigger city, or another part of the country?
Andy and his friends let Tank take the fall for the marijuana. Do you think that Andy and his friends should have been honest about it and been held accountable for their actions? Does that change the way you view Andy and his friends?
Do you think that if Andy had lost his ability to perform any music and couldn’t compose music he would have been unable to forgive his attackers?
Do you think that Andy’s ability to compose music after the accident in ways he wasn’t able to before was why he was able to forgive his attackers?
What do you imagine happened to Del Ray after he left Duro? Do you think he ever felt remorse for putting Andy in the hospital?
Why does Ramona immediately think it was Andy who was responsible for Janey running away? Why does she not suspect the live-in boyfriend Reggie? Why doesn’t Janey go to some friend or outside party to complain that Reggie is being sexually inappropriate?
Do you think Jerry De Ghetto got what was coming to him for kidnapping the kids? Do you think he deserved to die the way he did? Did you empathize with him?
A major theme in Desert Discord is integrity. Which characters embody this? Which characters do not embody this?
What do you imagine happened to Del Rey and the other boys that beat up Andy and Simon? Do you think that the attackers got off too easy?
Why does Andy’s family refuse to bring a lawsuit against the boys who attacked him?
About the Author
Henry D. Terrell is a retired business writer and editor who lives with his family in Houston, Texas. He is the author of two other novels: Headfirst Off the Caprock and Wait Till I Come Down.
Email: [email protected]
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