ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interview with Jayne Anne Philips about different steps of her encounter with the Quiet Dell story. In Quiet Dell, history provides the blunt realism of the murders themselves, the ways in which the case evolved and came to light, and the ways in which the time and the era of the early 1930s in America processed and presented the facts. The "haunting" lies in what the facts mean, in the actual lives of the victims, particularly the child victims, who, unlike their mother, could not be "blamed" for reaching out to a cunning predator. Serial murderers are more or less alike in their pathology, but the story of Quiet Dell is specific because of the imagined lives of the characters and their intersection with a particular historical moment. If realism includes historical fact, the bedrock of the story, "haunting" refers to what is "poignant and evocative, difficult to ignore or forget, stirring, powerful, elegiac, indelible".
