The author who created the "Rambo" character a few decades ago is exploring the subject of time capsules in his latest novel.
David Morrell, who taught English at the University of Iowa from 1970 to ’86, says his new book "Scavenger" focuses on a high-tech hunt for a one-hundred-year-old time capsule, though the hunters are also being hunted.
"All my novels are thrillers. They have suspense and action," he says. "In this case, instead of writing about spies and similiar kinds of things, I was interested in writing a thriller that had a very eerie, creepy feel to it, that might be compared to almost a ghost story except that there are no ghosts in it."
The 64-year-old Morrell, who now lives in New Mexico, says he became fascinated by time capsules while researching the book. "Thousands and thousands of time capsules have been lost and when you think about it, they contain objects that are supposed to be really meaningful to the people who put the time capsule in the ground or in a cornerstone, and the whole idea there is that it’s like the meaning of life," Morell says. "The person putting it together considers it to be so important and then it gets lost."
Morrell says it’s been established that the obstacle race and the scavenger hunt are the oldest and most basic elements in story telling, so he decided to combine them both in one story.
"I had this line that kept going through my head which was basically ‘Sometimes the past is buried for a reason,’ so once they find the thing, then the question becomes, should they have opened it? It has a very, very eerie tone to it and readers are really taking to it," he says.
The book "Scavenger" is Morrell’s 29th novel, with 18 million copies of his books in print in 26 languages.
For more information, visit www.davidmorrell.net .