The Heavens Rise

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel exists in its current form largely due to the generosity of a man named Cory F. Heitmeier. Cory is a pilot with the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association, an organization that hasn’t always been treated kindly by writers in the past, and even though he’d never read any of my books, he agreed to take me out on a ship with him. We traveled the exact same journey Anthem and Marshall take in this novel, only no one got shot or transformed into a great winged beast by the time we reached the relief pilot in Chalmette. I’m eternally grateful to Cory, his Coast Guard commander and the other pilots at Vessel Traffic Control who took the time to answer my technical questions.

As always, I’m grateful to my best friend, business partner and cohost of The Dinner Party Show, Eric Shaw Quinn, who demanded that I get over my terror of boarding and disembarking a giant, moving ship by way of a glorified rope ladder and a swaying platform atop a crew boat. It was one of the scariest experiences of my life but I’m glad I did it and I think the book is all the better for it. (And if you haven’t listened to our Internet radio show, you should, because we’re funny. It’s always streaming at TheDinnerPartyShow.com. Special thanks to our team who kept the show running so smoothly while I was working on this novel’s revisions: our sound guy, Brandon Griffith; our computer genius, Brett Churnin; and our guest-relations dudes, Billy McIntyre and Nick Cedergren.)

New Orleans is a profoundly changed city as a result of Katrina, and I moved away several years before the storm hit. I was able to get a fine-tuned sense of her new, bruised spirit from friends who opened their homes and their hearts to me during the multiple visits I made there to research this novel. The book is dedicated to two of my good friends, Sid Montz and Christian LeBlanc, because they both played a major role in this process. But I also owe similar debts of gratitude to Spencer Doody, Phin Percy, Joyce Hunter and Ralph Mascaro, who did a wonderful job of driving me up and down the rivers and bayous of Lake Pontchartrain’s North Shore while I searched for the right location for Elysium.

I wrote several drafts of this novel before I submitted it to a publisher, and those drafts were given invaluable, probing reads by my agent Lynn Nesbit and my friends Marc Andreyko, Gregg Hurwitz, Becket Ghiotto and Eric Shaw Quinn. This was the first time my mother read an early draft of one of my novels and it was an interesting experience for both of us. Thanks, Mom. I hope I wasn’t too difficult. Thank God for email, huh?

I’m incredibly grateful this book found a home with Mitchell Ivers and Louise Burke at Gallery Books, two individuals who have made great contributions to my career as a novelist. With the gentlest of hands, Mitchell guided me through one of the most challenging processes a novelist can face—the total elimination of two major characters I had tried, in vain, to keep alive through various drafts.

I am also profoundly grateful to my attorney, Christine Cuddy, and my film agent, Rich Green at Resolution.

I’m blessed to have over 100,000 Facebook followers and whenever I post anything about my writing, they’re incredibly supportive. According to their various posts, they’ve been waiting for this book for quite a long time; I thank them for their patience and I hope it meets their expectations. I wonder if they’ll let me call them “mind monsters” now.