Crime Files asks David Morrell why he was inspired to write this story.

Several years ago, I came across a New York Times article about a town in New Jersey that wanted to bury a time capsule in honour of the community’s hundredth anniversary. Then somebody remembered that one had been buried fifty years earlier, under a monument honouring local fire fighters. With no one eager to desecrate the monument, the time capsule remains unfound. That newspaper article nagged at my imagination – the idea of a lost message from the past – until I couldn’t resist writing a novel about it.

I found inspiration for the setting in Hitchcock’s film from the 1950s, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, in which wide open spaces feel threatening. I decided this was something I wanted to echo. My previous novel, CREEPERS, set within the enclosed confines of a long-abandoned hotel, left readers with an overriding feeling of claustrophobia. In SCAVENGER, by contrast, I wanted to reverse the emotional intensity by dramatising agoraphobia. I placed the characters in a mysterious valley with a sky so wide that it makes them feel small and vulnerable, where threats lurk everywhere.

I hardly ever return to characters featured in my earlier novels, but with Amanda and Balenger, the characters from CREEPERS, I knew there was a lot more to say. In CREEPERS a madman holds Amanda captive for many months but she has the strength and ingenuity to survive, and I thought in SCAVENGER it would be interesting to write a novel in which she and a handful of others, including Balenger, are put in peril precisely because they’re survivors.

The eerie tone of SCAVENGER really captivated me. When I learned that there were actual time capsules with names like the Crypt of Civilization and the Doomsday Vault, I couldn’t wait to let readers know about them.