Jim Krusoe has just published Toward You, the third book in his Resurrection Trilogy (if you’re still playing catch-up, the first two are Girl Factory and Erased). He was kind enough to stop by The Open Bar for a discussion of trilogies, and how his own came to fruition.

I’m sure some writers must know exactly where their books are heading from the moment they unscrew the tops of their fancy fountain pens. Others just keep birthing novels like, well, triplets. As for me, the idea of a trilogy never even surfaced until I began writing its third installment, Toward You.

To back up a bit: as nearly as I can figure out, there are really only two sorts of trilogies—sequential or thematic. My own rule is that whichever type it is, we ought to be able to read its books in any order (which means that the most popular trilogy of all, The Lord of the Rings, isn’t really a trilogy, but just one long sausage divided into wieners).

Of the two kinds, the sequential seems generally the most popular. In other words, after a writer finishes a book, there’s more to follow, and then still more. Faulkner’s Snopes, Robertson Davies’s three Deptford novels—even the Theban and Orestian plays—are sequential; for each we can construct a time line that links the parts, even though we don’t need to read them in any particular sequence.  The thematic type includes the three Antonioni films L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’eclisse, Rosselini’s films, arguably Dante, and, I guess, me.

It’s my method that’s to blame for my own trilogizing. It takes at least a complete draft of a book for me to figure out which pieces of the puzzle are on the table and which are still lying on the floor with the cat. As a result, I usually work on two books at a time (but not at once), revising the first while I’m trying to find the heart of the story in the second. This helps because, in the first place, it gives me something to do while I’m waiting around to get some perspective on the more-finished book, and in the second place, I like being interrupted. If I can put a book down for several months and then pick it up and still be interested, that’s a good sign that something’s cooking. This jigging back and forth from one book to another, once begun, will generally stretch out over three or four years. It’s frustrating, for sure, but on the other hand, when I finally do figure out the parts that are needed, there’s a lot left over.

In what became the Resurrection Trilogy (a wonderfully pretentious title, considering its cast of numbskulls), it worked like this: I was between drafts of Girl Factory, a story about a man struggling to bring back to life several women trapped in suspended animation, so I decided to start something new and unrelated. I’ll write about Beauty, I high-mindedly thought, but the more I wrote, the more horrified I became as Beauty morphed disastrously into taxidermy. Then, even worse, the aging taxidermist turned out to be a teenage boy. I tried to picture the kid staring out the window of the garage where he stuffed his animals. What do you see out there? I asked him.  After a long time, as from many a teen, the answer came back, Nothing.

And then, while I paced around my carpet, trying to trick the boy into a better answer, my mother died. She’d basically been fine, and I’d called one night, a Friday, to say I planned to drop by the next day and to bring along her grandson. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m all right,” she said, and paused, “only a little odd.” Which in itself was a little odd, because usually when I asked that question she’d reply with a fairly extensive list of maladies, all minor, all of which I’d heard before.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” But then, for some reason—why, I still don’t know—that Saturday morning I changed my mind about bringing my son, who was eight, along with me, even though I knew she’d be disappointed. I arrived to find the door locked, and when I let myself in I found her dead, sitting up in bed, with a very surprised look on her face. I called the paramedics, who called the police, and after they arrived a young cop offered—somewhat amazingly—to sit with me if I needed company. I told him no thanks and called my sister. She came.  We made arrangements. We put away the dishes that had been left in the rack to dry.

Driving back that day—it was afternoon by then—I began to wonder when we start to die, exactly? The easy answer is at birth, of course, but more to the point, had the process already begun when I spoke to my mother the previous night? Had I heard something in her voice that told me not to include my son the next day? Could the beginning of that process somehow be pinpointed, like the tumble Ivan Ilyich took while hanging drapes? Do we receive some sort of heads-up on our last day? More to the point, I guess, would I? I got home and life took its course. Many months later I changed the character in that opening scene to a woman, not a teenager at all, though she still looks out a window, and the book, Erased, became the story of a son searching for his dead mom. I asked myself, What next? Certainly not a trilogy.

To fill in the time between drafts, and because I wanted to find out how a person who does a great wrong to another can carry on with life afterward, I began a new book. In this case, a man neglects to provide a piece of information that might have saved a young girl’s life. I ran through a couple of drafts and put it away, but when I picked it up again, I found myself asking, Who could care about anyone so self-centered? Experimentally, and basically out of revenge, I began to write a section in the voice of the dead girl. I wrote another, and then another. To my surprise, they had an urgency the earlier draft lacked.

Eventually it dawned on me that I wasn’t all that much interested in how this guy justified his acts; I really wanted to see if I could bring the dead girl back to life. After all, I had killed her through literature; maybe literature could achieve the opposite effect. So Toward You turned out to be my attempt to redeem my own careless mistake by bringing Dee Dee (the girl) back from death. And it was only at that moment that I understood that all three of the books are trying to contact the dead in one way or another. Together, they represent three different approaches to the same problem, like a Venn diagram, in which circles overlap. The overlapping area here just happens to be the spongy turf between life and death, and yes, all three books were needed to cover the subject.

There are writers who, dropped by a parachute into the most dangerous jungle in the world, will not only be able to direct their chutes so they don’t break an arm or leg, but will also return with a riveting yarn and a little extra muscle mass in the bargain. These writers, I imagine, besides having talent also had well-adjusted childhoods, ones that prepared them to face the unknown with confidence and hope. Then there are other writers, who, dropped anywhere, however resplendent, can only repeat the bleak nightmares they left behind. These latter had unhappy childhoods—and for them each novel is just another failed attempt to make things right; an endless trilogy, or series of trilogies, that lasts their whole lives. They are doomed to stand before a single door, to turn the knob this way and that, and wait in vain for it to open.

Do we have a choice into which camp we fall? I doubt it, either by reason of genes or circumstance. In “The Knock at the Manor Gate” Kafka has his character conclude by asking, “Could I still endure any other air than prison air?” And that’s a good question. Three sides are the minimum needed to make a triangle, and I think a trilogy, comic or otherwise, can serve in a pinch for a cage.

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Girl Factory, Erased, and Iceland; two collections of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions; as well as five books of poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.