For Worse, a debut thriller by L.K. Bowen
Author Interview + Book & Author Info + Author Pet Corner!
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For Worse by L.K. Bowen
Wait Until Dark meets Gone Girl in For Worse, a debut thriller that pulls the reader deep into a dark web of sinister plots for marital revenge.
Ellie is leaving her husband … again.
After twenty-two years of marriage and an unsuccessful separation, she can’t take it anymore. On the surface, she has a picture-perfect relationship. Jeff has been a steadfast spouse. But what seems like loyalty is in reality an obsessive desire for control. Ellie is slowly losing her sight, which means she needs more and more assistance, and Jeff will stop at nothing to ensure she feels helpless and reliant on him alone.
Determined to escape her psychologically abusive marriage, Ellie turns to an online chat room full of like-minded women in the throes of divorce. Despite their anonymity, these women quickly become Ellie’s closest confidantes. The chat room is a refuge, a place to which Ellie can retreat for solace and support.
Jeff continues to be manipulative and cruel, using Ellie’s failing vision to gaslight her into questioning reality itself. Desperate for freedom, she sinks deeper into the online world and is drawn into the dark web, where she discovers a group of women with a shocking solution for ending a marriage.
To purchase For Worse click any of the following links: Amazon, Target, BAM, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Audible, Indigo, and Blackstone Publishing
Interview with L.K. Bowen, the Author of For Worse
For Worse centers on Ellie, who is in a psychologically abusive marriage. Tell us about Ellie and how she has navigated twenty-two years in that situation:
Like a lot of women, Ellie stayed in her unhappy marriage to Jeff because she didn’t want to put their daughter, Hannah, through the disruption of a divorce.
As Ellie puts it, she didn’t see how she could say to Hannah, I can’t live with him, but you have to (at least every other week, or whatever the custody arrangement might be). Throughout the book, Ellie gives hints as to how she managed in her marriage; one of her ploys was imagining that her pleasant, respectful workplace was her home, and her home was the office where she had a demanding, never-satisfied boss.
My personal favorite coping strategy is the Phantom Husband, that perfect partner that she conjures up whenever Jeff gets too obnoxious. She acknowledge the things that she loved about Jeff, his humor, their shared musical tastes, their joy over Hannah, and she tried to cling to those things as best she could. But she says at one point, when the ratio of good times to bad times goes from 80/20 to 20/80, it’s intolerable.
In For Worse, Ellie is also losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa, which you share with your protagonist. Describe that condition and why you chose to write that challenge that you face into her:
Retinitis pigmentosa, or rp, is a degenerative retinal disease that gradually destroys peripheral and night or low-light vision. It has a wide range of degeneration: some people are blind by age 20, and then there are people like me–and Ellie–who are well past 50 and still have about five to ten degrees of usable central vision in broad daylight.
Most typically sighted people have about sixty degrees of central vision, and then they have their peripheral vision for the sides and above and below. When people say, “I saw it out of the corner of my eye,” they mean their peripheral vision, which you really do need to get around and certainly to drive. I struggled with the idea of giving Ellie rp, but I knew I couldn’t write about a non-disabled person and I also knew that giving her the inability to drive would make her even more trapped in her marriage.
Once I accepted that she had what I have, everything opened up in terms of her personality and her situation. I felt an enormous freedom to finally really express how I feel about going blind, and what life is like as a vision impaired person.
We would love to hear about your road to publication with your debut, For Worse:
I had a crazy road to publication. I have a good friend, Sarah Skilton, who’s published seven wonderful novels–check out Fame Adjacent and the hilarious Ghosting: A Love Story–and I told her about my ideas for For Worse from the very beginning.
She was immediately a huge fan (“obsessed,” was her actual word). It took me years to write it and I’d pass her pages every few months and she was incredibly supportive and enthusiastic, so much so that when it was done, she offered to see if her agent would be interested in repping it. Her agent was, and took me on as a client, and gave me some incredible notes that made the novel so much better.
Then we took it to market and Blackstone Publishing scooped it up. It was insane. I’ve had a fantastic experience with both my agent and with Blackstone. And as for Sarah….well, her support and generosity have enriched my life immeasurably and inspired my own desire to pay it forward as well whenever I can.
You have worked in the entertainment industry in LA before turning your skills to fiction. What can you tell us about how that job contributed to your storytelling?
I work for a company that does casting support for the entertainment industry. It’s called Breakdown Services, and if you’re an actor, you’ll know exactly what it is … but if you’re not, you won’t.
Breakdown provides amazing services to casting directors, talent reps and actors, but my job specifically is to read scripts that are about to go into production that still need to be cast; I write descriptions of the characters for the talent reps so they can submit their actors who best fit the roles. There are four of us who do this full time, and we read everything from big studio movies (many of which go on to win Academy Awards) to indie features to TV pilots and episodics.
I have probably read thousands of scripts in my three decades with Breakdown Services. Though a novel is a more leisurely story-telling journey than a screenplay, reading scripts has–I hope–given me a knack for realistic/humorous/entertaining dialogue and a sense of structure and pacing.
What can we find you doing when you aren’t reading and writing crime fiction?
Working full time. Walking. Napping.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a new novel that was inspired by Ellie’s “Phantom Husband” in For Worse.
Here’s the logline: A woman successfully juggles a husband in New York and another husband in Boston–one of whom is imaginary. When a dead body is found on her worksite, she finds herself on the hook for the murder of a man who, as far as she knows, doesn’t exist.
Wow, I love this logline!
Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Writers:
I don’t really feel like I have any wisdom since I’m still so new at this. But one thing I’ve observed from my limited experience is, everyone has a different path, professionally and creatively; it’s important to find your own and not worry about anyone else’s.
Author Pet Corner!
Thank you for this. My beloved dog Chap died December 21, 2023 of congestive heart failure at age 10.
He was a great dog who would really look you in the eyes as if he were going to say something important (probably, “More food, please”). My family, my friends and I all miss him terribly and are grateful to memorialize him here.
I’m so sorry for you loss, but also how wonderful to have him in your life. What a beautiful boy.
L.K. Bowen
Debut author L.K. Bowen was born in Boston and made her way to Los Angeles to work in the entertainment industry.
Like Ellie, her protagonist in For Worse, Bowen has the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, which is slowly destroying her vision.
To learn more about rp and other degenerative retinal diseases, or to contribute to finding treatments and cures, please visit www.fightingblindness.org
Learn more about J.K. by clicking either link: Website & Instagram
Elena Hartwell/Elena Taylor
Header image from Pixabay
