Interview: “Final Walkthrough” by Lou J. Berger

In “Final Walkthrough,” Lou J. Berger sends a man back to his family’s old farmhouse to settle an estate—and settle a score with the past. What begins as a quiet homecoming becomes something far darker, as the pond behind the house gives up secrets that should have stayed buried.

Interview Questions

Did a real place or moment inspire part of your story?

Not exactly. I recently moved from Denver to Central Florida and we are now on a lake, nothing like the dark pond in the story. In Gillsville, Georgia there is a house that is no longer in the family, once owned by my great aunt Dora. I spent the summer in Georgia back in 1975 or so and my grandmother, recently widowed, took me up to that house in Gillsville where her sisters were. There are elements of the house in the story that bear strong echoes to the house in Gillsville.

Did the story start with the ghost, the water, or something else entirely?

I’m not really aware of horror as a genre other than knowing that it exists and that some of my dear author friends write in it. For me and my neurodivergent brain, I can’t quite understand WHY people read horror. It’s disquieting, for me, and I struggle to find the ability to “escape” into horror stories as a way of counteracting our world. You [Jamie, the editor] gave me the insight and the inspiration to write this story and I’m eternally grateful. That said, the question’s answer must begin with the fact that I wanted to write what my brain TELLS me that horror is: an everyday situation that goes sideways and gets progressively worse. I think I nailed that, even if the entry ramp is slow.

Have you ever been somewhere that felt haunted to you?

No, alas. My brain doesn’t believe in haunting at all, so I am very interested in finding an actual haunted house, eventually, where the noises I hear the things that happen are NOT easily explained away. I get the uncanny valley and how it can make somebody recoil in horror, but that’s a base-brain reaction that also tells us that anybody different from us is the monster. And that is a road oft-taken by my fellow humans to dehumanize others. No thank you.

What part of writing this story stuck with you the longest?

The viewpoint of the young man who cannot reconcile the monster that is, or was, his grandparent and how he blindly pledges irreversible fealty as if it weren’t self-delusional and self-destructive. Which it was.

Did you discover anything new about your characters while writing this story?

I regret that I wrote yet another validation that people can be irretrievably evil through selfishness and a complete lack of empathy. I regret my main character’s decisions toward the end of the story and wish there’d been a way to save him from himself.

Was there a moment where the story changed direction on you?

The green fireflies gave me pause because it created, in my mind, the first hint of “otherness” that isn’t easily explained. It is a subtle introduction to the slippery slope that the story path MUST follow and it’s subtle as all get-out. I liked writing them and I liked how my protagonist wondered about this departure from normal but then didn’t pursue it. Foreshadowing of his future operating on assumptions that normalcy is in place.

Does water mean something special to you personally, or was it just the right element for this tale?

When I was a young tyke, I helped my very-young brother who was hand-over-handing his way around our residential pool in South Florida. My father was momentarily distracted and young Jimmy slipped and couldn’t, in his panic, re-grab the side of the pool. Despite being only three years older, I was able to instantly swim over, grasp his wrist gently, and lift him out of the water to hold the edge again. He coughed, swiped at his eyes and said “fenk yew”. I don’t believe I saved his life, or anything that dramatic, but my unthinking response to help him was an important lesson for myself. To use water as a vehicle of hidden darkness was fun and I would say that my relationship with water is a strong one. In a perfect home, water would be nearby and, of course, I’m calmed by the presence of a backyard that slopes into a lake here in my new home with Kelly in Central Florida.

MeeMaw delivers her confession in a tone described as “matter-of-fact, like she was describing how to can peaches”—the domestic register persisting even through horror. That tonal choice is doing a lot of work. Was that voice something you found early, or something you calibrated as the story developed?

It’s been part of my writing since I began. One of my formative influences when it comes to writing was Robert B. Parker, whose SPENSER series really clicked into my brain. His writing style was spare and unforgiving and I remember reading a scene he’d written in which Spenser was having a conversation with somebody, there was verbal badinage taking place, and then in the next sentence-long paragraph Spenser pulled his handgun and shot the man. There was no lead-up to the violence, it happened in the space of two breaths and it froze me in place, stunned that it had happened. See, I wasn’t ready for it and I wouldn’t have pulled a gun to kill somebody like Spenser had just done. This established for me the joy, the frisson, of sudden, deliberate violence imposed on somebody else as a matter of a calm, rational decision backed by experience. Experience that I simply don’t have. For me, as a reader, it was humbling and exciting to have been a “part” of a conversation between characters and, suddenly, I was an accomplice. My portrayal of MeeMaw was exactly thus, because she went from kindly granny to a monster in the blink of an eye. The discerning reader will note that it was sneaking up all along, but I, in my innocence, could see myself being blindsided by her casual recitation of easy murder.

PeePaw is perhaps the story’s most tragic figure—a gentle man who died believing everyone thought him a monster, and who waited in the light for a wife who manipulated him into that death. He’s barely on the page, yet his presence haunts every scene. How did you approach building him from absence?

I am haunted, dare I use that term, by the presence of people who are so in love with another that, when it becomes crystal clear that that somebody is also an irredeemable monster, the love doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t falter. He died knowing fully who she was and doing nothing to stop it. He wanted to protect her, even if it meant his own loss of face to the community. It is exactly his viewpoint of looking at the world that drives our protagonist, his grandson. This explains how both were good men who gave their all to protect the woman that they both adored.

The act of forgiveness is the story’s trap—Robert’s most humane impulse becomes the mechanism of his destruction. What drew you to forgiveness as the pivot point?

The most horrific thing I can imagine is the sacrifice of a parent for a child or, in this case, the repeated sacrifice of a good man to protect a beloved woman. Think, if you will, of the father in Life Is Beautiful who engaged his son with a made-up game to protect the young tyke from the horrors of Nazi genocide and how, at the very end of the movie, his final sacrifice to protect his son has him acting like a clown mere seconds before, offscreen, he is machine-gunned to death. Forgiveness, as a human decision, is probably the most brave behavior of all.

The final image—the pond surface smoothing to glass, reflecting only stars—is quiet and almost beautiful after everything that’s just happened. What were you reaching for with that ending? It feels less like closure than like erasure.

Ah. I can see your point in this. It’s certainly NOT erasure. Rather, it’s the implacable indifference of nature to mankind despite our best efforts to render nature harnessed. The stillness of the water encompasses the life and death that happens under the surface and belies the violence that can exist during a waterspout or a hurricane. Water is the universal presence in human life and we tame it, harness it as steam for energy and motion, and drown in it by the thousands every year. We are made of water and we always, eventually, return to water.

The title works on at least two levels: the real estate walkthrough Cindy arrives to do, and Robert’s final, literal walk through the dock. Did the title come early or late in the writing process, and were there other titles you considered?

I struggle with titles, for the most part, and consider it a gift when a title is provided for me to work with. Either it lands with a clunk, the gifted title, or it waltzes in wearing a feather boa and casually flips an entire story on the table. “Here, darling, write this,” the title murmurs insouciantly. And so I do. In THIS case, the title was late to the party. I wanted to have a character utter the words somewhere in the story, and the Cindy character says them. It’s a bridge between the world of normalcy that our hero leaves: an appointment for her to come see that something has gone off-kilter. The “final” in the title is meant to be foreshadowing for our eternally-trapped dude but, also, a casual everyday term that carries no malice aforethought whatsoever. Like calling your last stop during an airplane flight the “final destination.”

The green lights in the pond reeds appear early as something Robert almost dismisses—fireflies, maybe a different species—and then return at the story’s climax as something far more terrible. How did you think about planting that image? Did you always know what those lights were, or did they reveal themselves to you as you wrote?

The green-lit fireflies were deliberately introduced as a sort of quiet indication that things weren’t normal, weren’t alright, weren’t going to be predictable. To me, that’s what horror is: a normal day that turns sideways and never recovers.

What are you working on now—and what’s fun or exciting about it?

I’m trying, yet again, to spread my wings and write a full-length novel. Me and my ADHD are close friends but also bitter stepbrothers, as I’m just fine writing something of short length but the demands and requirements for a long-form story require a pacing, a rigor, and a responsibility that my autistic demand avoidance actively resents. So, yet again, I’m working on a first novel. I have several begun and stopped after just over 20K words each. They sit there, beautiful and glowing. And incomplete. I know how the story goes, so why bother to write it? Why, indeed? A cozy mystery novel has a formulaic structure and I think I’ve got it all plotted out just fine, leaving enough room for the characters to step in and impose their own self-wills against my carefully-laid outline. “Lou plans, his characters laugh.” If you will.

About the Author

Lou J Berger lives in Littleton, Colorado with his high-school crush and two rescue dogs. A member of SFWA, he has been published in Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge magazine, and a host of anthologies. He is STILL working on his first novel.

Find out more about Lou at loujberger.com

Read the Story

“Final Walkthrough” appears in Haunted Waters, available now from Blackbird Publishing.

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