In Lisa Unger’s latest thriller, hide-and-seek is anything but child’s play | Audible.com
In Lisa Unger’s latest thriller, hide-and-seek is anything but child’s play
With “Close Your Eyes and Count to 10,” Unger showcases another resilient heroine, this time on a secluded island amid a reality TV show that turns deadly.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole, and I'm excited to welcome award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger, known for her mind-bending psychological thrillers like , and more. Lisa is here to discuss her newest listen, Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Unger: Thanks for having me, Nicole. Excited to be here.
NR: It's great to have you. So, Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 takes place on a secluded island where an extreme game of hide-and-seek is taking place. What was your inspiration behind creating a story around a game of hide-and-seek gone wrong?
LU: The inspiration for a book can be sort of nebulous, there might be a news story or a line of poetry or even a photograph. Usually, it just kind of evokes some specific mood or idea or obsession. And then a lot of times I'll have some kind of obsession that I'm just researching and researching and researching, and then when I hear a voice, that's when I know that there's going to be a novel. I think it connects to something deeper that's going on with me, and then the story starts to find its way on the page.
For Close Your Eyes and Count to 10, the inspiration was pretty sudden and direct. I was actually on a trip with my family in the Azores, and we were about to hike the rim of a volcanic lake and we got rained out. This big storm swept in. The Azores are an archipelago in the Atlantic. There's nothing around, it’s like 1,500 kilometers from the coast of Europe, it's 2,500 kilometers from the US. So, weather sweeps in very dramatically, very suddenly. We were about to go on this hike, and this big storm rushed in and we just kind of went running back to the car. On the way back from that, we stumbled upon a structure in the middle of this island, this gigantic abandoned hotel, and it had giant signs in front of it, like Peligro and No Entra, and you know in any language, right? Obviously, stay away, dangerous, whatever. But I was like, "Well, they don't mean us, right?” [laughs].
I had my daughter with me, and maybe it wasn't my finest parenting hour, but as the daughter of a thriller writer, she's used to semi-safe excursions with her parents. We went into this hotel and started to explore it. It was just amazing, just this incredible structure that had been sitting abandoned since the ’80s. I would later learn it had been completely looted. It was covered in graffiti, nature was slowly taking it back, with trees coming up through concrete and vines hanging off of interior balconies. It was just the most, like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe we found this place." That was really that moment. I was like, "I will be writing about this abandoned hotel."
Meantime, I've been kind of semi-obsessed with the idea of these YouTube celebrities that the kids get these days—they get so excited about these particular personalities on YouTube—and what it means to be YouTube famous, where you have these millions and millions of followers and these completely rabid adolescent fans, and then in the rest of the world, and the world at large, maybe nobody even knows your name. I was interested in that kind of fame, and some of the stunts that are done online, like these games of extreme hide-and-seek that I would watch with my daughter, where people were hiding and you could see their cam, they were just kind of broadcasting all these different ways with body cams and whatnot. I just thought, "What a cool way to tell a story, from all these different sort of very modern perspectives."
For me, in a different generation from the people that are interested in that as their entertainment, I have a different perspective on it. I'm not native to it, so I see it from a different place. And so what does it mean to take this isolated place, this real-world place and kind of merge it with this virtual landscape of YouTube celebrity? What if you put these two pieces together, what happens? Those were really the two big pieces that were the inspiration for Close Your Eyes and Count to 10.
NR: Oh, wow.
LU: Yeah, that's the short answer.
NR: That is a great story. That's so cool that you explored an abandoned hotel. I would actually be super scared, I wouldn't be able to do it.
LU: It didn't seem that scary. It kind of seemed pretty solid. And there were other people who were equally unconcerned with personal safety also in there. So, we thought, "Oh, how dangerous could it be?" Probably it was pretty dangerous, but at the time we were just like, “Must go in there, must do it.” We have all this great footage as well from there. It's pretty funny to be able to be using that now to let people know about the book and stuff. It's pretty fun.
"In most of my novels, there's a female character who has been brutalized in some way, but in no way defines herself as a victim, and finds her own path towards what's next, what's the next strongest version of myself?"
NR: That's really cool. So, main character and contestant Adele is a single mother who is still recovering from a scandal that really rocks her marriage and home life. What was interesting to you about centering the story around a single mom going through such a struggle, especially since inspiration was also watching YouTubers? How did you get into the mindset of writing from Adele's perspective?
LU: Yeah, what happens is, I have these ideas and then I start writing. I don't really have an outline. I don't really have any idea who's going to show up and what they're going to do. I don't know, really, that much about the book. I definitely don't know how it's going to end. I just have these really strong voices. So, there was Maverick, he was a big voice for me. And then I started hearing Adele's voice, and Adele I think really interested me because she's strong in all the ways that women are strong, in all the ways that mothers are strong. She had been victimized by her husband's activities, but she's not a victim. And she's waded into this other part of life, her kids are really into gaming and YouTube, and she kind of has adopted it with her own page. In the book it's called WeWatch, it's not YouTube. It's my own personal creation because I don't like to have to follow anybody else's rules.
So, she wanders into this world as an influencer, as somebody who is taking her adversity and how she was raised and whatever her relationship with the technology is, but then adopting it because of her kids, the energy her kids bring into her life, and becoming this influencer for fitness and wellness. She loses all this weight and she gets really strong, she starts doing these competitions, and she starts to reconnect with this strong person that she feels like she used to be, before motherhood, before a marriage that fell apart and that was like quicksand underneath her, was nothing what she thought it was. And so instead of getting swallowed by that quicksand, she makes herself strong for her kids and kind of enters into this new phase of her life.
And I really love that.In most of my novels, there's a female character who has been brutalized in some way, but in no way defines herself as a victim, and finds her own path towards what's next, what's the next strongest version of myself?And that's kind of what interested me the most about Adele.
NR: I noticed that in some of your other listens that there is this resilience that you find in the characters, because the women characters are usually rocked with some kind of tragedy, or something's going on that disrupts their home life or just their life in general. Can you speak to that theme and what you wish to convey with that theme?
LU: Yeah, absolutely. All through the history of storytelling, there's always this idea of the hero's journey. And that journey is very often only reserved for men, it's the man's journey, he's the hero, right? But I think that there's another version of that story that is the female hero's journey. It is a story that has been told underneath this other story sort of all along. And that women have this kind of strength and resilience that is often overlooked because it's not the big show of yourself. It's not the kind of hero that gets all the attention.
So, I'm interested in that. Very often in life, things happen to us. We don't control what happens always. We have some choices within the context of what our life is. We make certain choices because maybe this door wasn't open to us, or we make that choice because we couldn't go that way or because we have this child to take care of, so I can't do this but instead I'm going to do that. We make all these choices all the time. We don't always choose what happens to us, but we do choose what we do next after the worst thing happens. You can curl up in a ball and just say, "I'm a victim, I'm never going to get over this, I'm never going to move on." And then that's true for you. Or you can say, "I've been victimized by this, and now I'm going to make a different choice and I'm going to fight my way to what's next if necessary." That's kind of what I want always for my characters. I want them always to be like, "Okay, I've been knee-capped, I'm on the ground, I've got dirt on my face. Am I gonna stay here, or what's next?" That moment of choice really interests me in my characters, not just the female characters, all of them.
NR: I was going to say, we also get to explore some other perspectives. I personally found the perspectives of Violet and Maverick pretty interesting. Did you have any characters that you found to be the most fun to write?
LU: I always am in love with all of my characters. If they're on the page, it means that I love them. They may be awful, they may be horrible, terrible people, but there's something about them that I love, or at least deeply empathize with, or am really curious about this personality type and how they survive. I had a lot of curiosity about Maverick because he's so much a product of our culture, he's so much like that person that gets lifted up now, even though he maybe is not deserving of that kind of adulation at all. But there's a piece to him that never gets lived and never gets experienced, I think, until later. Because there's more to him than just the person who's on the camera.
So, it was interesting for me to deep dive into him. And I have a very loud inner teenage girl. Like, there's a teenage girl in me, and she finds her way onto the page quite a bit. I always enjoy my teenager characters, especially, in this case, Violet and Blake, how they are a product of their culture, but they're also a product of their adversity. They are kids that had everything, then lost it. I'm always interested in that, what happens when your expectations of your life are thwarted at a young age. I think that kids are incredibly resilient, and they have an ability that a lot of times adults don't have, to kind of go, "Okay, this is what happened, I had all of this stuff and now it's gone. Now I have nothing, and I have to adapt to that." It's so much easier for them to adapt in some ways because they didn't have the mental model, necessarily, of what should be, what I deserve to have. It's just like, “This is what I had, and now I don't have it anymore.” That's kind of the kid's way of looking at the world. Like, "Okay, so what do I do? I'm just gonna, I don't know, play Red World," which is my fictional video game that comes up a lot in my books.
So, those pieces are really interesting to me. Adele, of course, and the book tells itself in a lot of interesting ways that I have not explored before. It tells itself through podcasts, it tells itself through video logs, it tells itself through WeWatch broadcasts. I was really interested in how that very current, very modern mosaic, how those pieces unified to tell one bigger story.
"That's what Vivienne does for my characters. She accesses them, she has empathy for them. She cares about the story. She's involved. And I can just hear that in every syllable."
NR: Adele, she bestows some really impactful wisdom, actually, on a podcast and the aftermath of the events in a way that really solidifies her growth over the story. What do you feel is the most important takeaway from this story?
LU: Well, there's a couple of major themes in the story that I feel were important to me. One of the themes is that nature beats technology, eventually. Maybe not right now, but sometime, eventually in the future, nature will win. The planet will protect itself. It will take itself back. And that is going to have very far-reaching consequences for all of us, right? I really do believe that, I believe in the power of nature and the power of the planet. It's evidenced sort of in the game. It starts out as one thing, it starts out as a game where we're competing for money, and when nature takes its place in the story, then everything is gone except for survival. How do we survive? Wild Cody says, "How do we live to fight another day?" That's the only prize at the end of that story. So, that's one of the major themes.
Then there's a piece of the story that I actually had to tap my daughter for. I had a question for her in the writing, which I usually don't ever talk to anybody about my book when I'm writing it, because it's fragile and you don't want to get into conversations about things. It has to be solid. One of the things I wanted to know from her is, how could the relationships that you develop in a game—because this is a new feature of our culture. There are these real-world relationships that you have with people through a game that people you may never physically meet or even talk to on the phone—how could a relationship that you start in a game impact your life in the real world? That was the other piece that I wanted to explore, was just the intermingling of these real-world relationships and the relationships that are formed over technology platforms.
Then I think the other major theme of the book is just that the things that we think are important, the things that we are told by our culture are important, are the least important things. What's important is that we love each other, that we take care of each other, that we lift each other up, that we help each other in crisis. And that is another major theme of the book. You maybe think you're competing for a million dollars, or that promotion, or that shiny bobble that you want, that you think, "I'm gonna be happy when I have that thing." But probably everything that you need to be happy you have right now. And that's being able to love the people in your life and to be loved by them, and to be a safety net for people, and to allow people to be that safety net for you.
NR: Amazing. Reality TV and game shows have been growing tremendously in popularity over the years with shows like The Traitors, Squid Games. Why do you think there's such a huge cultural interest in reality TV?
LU: Yeah, I think that we're voyeurs. I think it's a cognitive dissonance that keeps people hooked in to these reality shows. Because, all right, you're watching a so-called competition for money. In one case it was $500,000 on this Alone show or whatever. I don't know what the money is on Survivor or something like that. But here are these people living whatever life they're living, and then they've decided for some reason to come to some remote island and try to survive and play games with other people that they may or may not win, and then they might get sent home or whatever. And there's something kind of interesting about that, there's something a little bit primal about the concept of a game that you win or lose. Of course, in the game of life, you live or die, right?
So, there's a kind of a safe sort of vicarious competition or a feeling that you might get when you're watching. I think that keeps people hooked in, because it is very primal. It's a primal response to compete and to win and to lose and be devastated. And you want to watch people live that experience, the elation of victory and then just the devastation of defeat. I mean, even on some DNA level, on some primal level, you get it. You know what it feels like, even if you haven't been on an island trying to survive. So, I think that keeps people really hooked in.
At the same time, it's not real. It's very performative. Some producer is picking the most difficult personalities to commingle with each other so that there's the most possible drama. And then, of course, there's also the awareness that everybody brings to it that they're being watched, right? So how real can it actually be? How real are your reactions when you know that you're performing for a camera, even if you don't have a script in front of you? I think it's all of these pieces that keep us really hooked in to that kind of viewing. And it was definitely something that I wanted to look at in the book.
NR: That is very true. As a reality TV addict myself, I can relate to what you said.
LU: Yeah. You get something out of it, right? I mean, you get something out of fiction, too, of course, there's something vicarious there. But in that reality show, you almost can get more involved because you know that on some level these are real people.
NR: Very true. So, your narrator Vivienne Leheny has narrated a few of your other books, like Last Girl Ghosted, and your last listen, The New Couple in 5B. What is your favorite part about Vivienne's narration?
LU: This is the thing, whenever I listen to Vivienne reading one of my books, I get goosebumps. Whenever I hear her voice and how she imbues such a deep understanding of my characters into her voice, it's amazing. Every time, you get audition tapes for every book or whatever, and I have literally never heard anybody else in all my various projects whose voice is literally just giving me goosebumps. Every time she reads and I listen to her voice with my words, I feel very connected to her. And then I feel like she's brought something unique to the book that makes the audiobook something unique from the printed book. So, her involvement just adds another dimension to the story. She's just so talented, and she has such a beautiful, rich voice. I just love everything she does. And she's an amazing person.
NR: So, what made her the best fit to perform this story?
LU: I just think that she really could do anything, because she's just got that gift. I heard Meryl Streep interviewed once, and she was asked how she could so embody her characters. They were talking specifically about The Iron Lady, how she could so embody the experience of somebody who was completely unrelated to her knowledge of the world. She said that she believed that within every person is the seed of every other person, is the germ of every other person. And if you have empathy, you can access that person and bring that person to life on the screen. I feel like that's what Vivienne does for my characters. She accesses them, she has empathy for them. She cares about the story. She's involved. And I can just hear that in every syllable.
NR: That's great. So how did you come up with the title for the story?
LU: Oh, the title is always such a thing. The only thing I can ever say about a title is sometimes I have a title for my book, and sometimes I don't, when I'm writing. And the only thing that I know for sure is that if I have a title for my book that I absolutely love, that I know is the title, and that no other title could ever be the title, that is one that will not be chosen for the book [laughs]. That is the one that will absolutely not work. I don't know why this is, but I had this amazing editor, Erica, and a lot of times, I'll turn in my book and it'll have the title on it. And I know that when we get into the revision process and the editorial process, I know when she refers to the book as “the manuscript” that she doesn't like the title.
NR: A very polite disagreement [laughs]
LU: Then it's like, "Okay, I don't like the title." Or "Oh, marketing doesn't like the title" or "Oh, sales doesn't like the title." This is a little bit of inside baseball, but the title is not really the domain of the author. The book and the story is the domain of the author, but the title is really the domain of marketing. And they have their ideas, and usually they're right. So, for this particular book, my title for the book was Ready or Not, which I was super-duper married to, and even titled it before I started writing it and told my editor a year before I turned the book in that "This is the title, can we just block it so that nobody else gets a title that's similar" or whatever. She said, "Yes, we'll do that."
But then when it came time to really decide what the title of the book was, it just didn't have the right, even to me, the right intensity. It didn't have the right energy. There was something just flat about it. Then what happens is there's an email. It's usually me and my editor, my agent, and maybe somebody else, and everybody's back and forth, back and forth. It was like, “Close your eyes, count to 10, ready or not, here I come.” It's like this list that goes back and forth until finally there's one that everybody is like, "Oh, my God, that's it." And in this case, it was Close Your Eyes and Count to 10, which is a little bit of a longer title, but I think it works so perfectly for this book. It has that kind of intense and a little bit of that spooky, dark energy, but also it has a little bit of an element of play to it, which I think evokes the game. So, we wound up at that title and it's perfect. It's a perfect title for the book.
"I think readers and writers come to thrillers to kind of metabolize fear."
NR: So, what attracted you to the thriller genre in the first place, both as a writer and a reader?
LU: It's interesting because I think I've always had this just really dark and twisted imagination. Even as a kid, I had questions about the dark side. I had some pretty intense experiences as a kid, and was exposed to some things that were really dark when I was younger. I was already very, very curious about that type of thing. But when I had these experiences, I had even more questions about life and why people do the things they do? What makes somebody a monster? What makes somebody a hero? I had these big questions about that. So, it kind of manifested itself that way into my writing. I always loved mystery thriller, and I was a literary omnivore, I read wildly across genre. But I always did kind of tend to come back to that dark side.
Then when I sat down to write, it just became what I was writing. I don't know that I ever chose to be a crime-fiction, thriller, mystery writer. I don't know that I ever chose that, I feel like it kind of chose me. I think readers and writers come to thrillers to kind of metabolize fear. If you have fears about the world, you can work them out on the page. You might work them out by reading a book. It's the same thing like with the reality TV show—I can fight and win and survive.
Lee Child has a speech that he gives where he kind of famously says that he thinks the first story ever told was a thriller, and that it was probably art on the wall of a cave and it was going to be a story about how the hunter felled the beast to feed the village, or how the enemy was vanquished, or how whatever encroaching darkness was, it was beat back by the light. I think that those are the stories that we tell each other to make us braver in the dark, in the long, dark night. I think that that's kind of why readers and writers come to the thriller genre.
NR: I agree. As a fan of thrillers, I agree. There’s always a start with the dark curiosity, and then it's like, "Okay, let's explore it in a safe manner."
LU: That's right. Let's all come to safety at the end, some kind of safety, maybe not exactly what you were looking for, not maybe exactly what you were hoping for, but at least some kind of justice is served, because we all know in the real world, justice is not always served, but in fiction, hopefully it is, at least somewhat.
NR: That's very true. So, what's next for you after Close Your Eyes and Count to 10?
LU: I'm getting on the road for Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 in a little bit. The next book is done, so the book that'll publish in 2026 is almost finished. I'm in the final round of changes and revisions and stuff like that. I can't talk about it yet, I'm not ready. But I'll say it's a thriller. Bad things will happen, and there'll be some themes, specifically sort of my curiosity about nature and how it asserts itself. Some of those themes will have a cameo in the next book, in addition to other, of course, dark and twisty themes. So, I hope it'll keep you up all night, keep you up past your bedtime.
NR: Well, I'm the type to listen in one straight session.
LU: I love that. I love that.
NR: I will, actually. Are you a fan of Audible?
LU: I am. I love audiobooks, I really do. It's super interesting how different it is. It's a different kind of absorbing of the story. Like I was saying about Vivienne, the narrator brings such a life to the stories. I love being able to listen while I'm doing other things. That's one of the main things I love about audiobooks, and it's the same thing I love about podcasts or whatever. You can have that going for you while you're doing other things. That's probably not good, it's probably my multitasking mind, I have to have three things going at one time. So maybe that’s not the best, but that's one of the things I love about it.
NR: Do you have any listening recommendations from your personal listening library?
LU: One of my favorite books of the last couple of months is The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. It's about plants. This is like, obviously, my ongoing obsessions about the life of plants. I'm about to start Alison Gaylin's new book, We Are Watching, narrated by Jennifer Pickens. She's a friend and one of my favorite authors. And I just finished Alafair Burke’s The Note, narrated by Catherine Ho. Alafair's also a friend, and just an amazing writer, bestselling, award-winning and all that. Her new book, The Note, is just very twisty and smart, and lots of layered characters, which is my favorite kind of reading.
NR: Well, thank you for taking the time, Lisa. Listeners, you can get Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 on Audible now. Thank you.
LU: That was great, Nicole. That was so much fun. Such a fun chat.
