A World Beneath: Peter Blauner on his novel The Intruder

On a bitingly cold February morning, thirty-one years ago, my wife woke me with an urgent request.

“Get this kid outside. He’s been driving me nuts all night.”

We were young parents with a one-year-old son.

Out I went onto Broadway with a stroller. It was the winter of 1993. Crime, drug abuse and homelessness were rampant on the streets of New York. But crying babies with strong lungs tend to create their own social conditions.

Near the corner of 80^th Street, a group of disenfranchised men were hanging out and smoking in the doorway next to H & H Bagels. I was droopy-eyed and distracted from lack of sleep, so I paid them little mind.  Until one of them stepped out of the doorway, with a thick neck and exercise yard muscles straining the confines of a threadbare t-shirt. He planted himself right in front of my son in his stroller and cocked back a fist.

“Call the police on me now, motherfucker,” he said.

My hands were down on the stroller handles, leaving my son and my face unprotected. If the punch landed, there would be a lot of blood and tears. For once in his life, this man, radically under-dressed on a February morning and acting like he’d just got off the bus from Rikers Island, had the power.

A fierce scalding rage bubbled up from my gut that was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was powerful and it was primitive, and for a half-second I was committed to doing mortal battle with a homeless man on an Upper West Side sidewalk.

Then I heard his friends laughing and saw my son looking up at me. The man in my path dropped his fist and stepped aside with a mocking bow. I am quite sure that within seconds, he forgot the joke. I pushed on, past the riot gates of stores that had not opened yet. It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning. I was wide awake now. My son was singing a wayward tune to himself, but my insides still felt scorched.

The sun was rising over the Broadway rooftops to the east, casting a bright and clarifying light over the streets. I took a deep breath. This could be the beginning of a book, I thought. A family man turning to violence in the face of social disorder. But by the time I crossed the street to head back home, it occurred to me that readers and movie audiences had already been on that journey in Death Wish and Straw Dogs. Another angle was needed, and not just for commercial reasons.

I had already been thinking a bit about writing a story about a man losing his home and finding himself on the margins of society. To be honest, it was not an idea that instantly captivated many people in publishing. But I didn’t give a damn. I had always been more drawn to writing about outsiders and misfits, perhaps because deep down inside I believed that, given the right—or wrong—circumstances, I could have wound up as one of them.

By the time I got home, I understood I had to walk down both sides of the street. I needed to try to see things from the respectable bourgeois point of view and the outsider’s point of view simultaneously, and the conflict would sharpen and spark both like blades scraping against each other.

I dug into the research.

I spent time with a successful lawyer I knew. I write from my own emotions, but I try to absorb the details of other people’s lives to enlarge my own perspective. I thought about home ownership, raising children, and chasing social status. But I also began to explore the underworld. I visited the train tunnels deep beneath Riverside Park, where a group known as “the Mole People” lived. These were people who had either lost their homes for economic reasons or had been displaced because they no longer fit in above ground. Instead, they had built an alternative world beneath the surface. Some built sheds along the tracks, “stealing” electricity from the city above with extension cords routed through vents and plugged into street lights.

When I went down into the tunnel one night, with a young lawyer who worked with the homeless (or “the unhoused,” as they are sometimes now called) I found it the darkest place I had ever been—like being inside a mile-long coffin. But whenever a train hurtled past, or someone lit a crack pipe in the distance, you could glimpse perfect recreations of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks and Goya’s firing squad on the walls.

When I came back to see the sheds the next day, with a photographer and an intrepid reporter-sociologist who had been there before, a cast-iron skillet came flying at us, followed by a brick and then a rock. A “Mole Man” was running after us, screaming “get the fuck out of my house” with his pants falling down to his knees.

We went quickly up the crumbling stone steps, gray as Roman ruins, toward the sunlight and squeezed through the bent bars to get back into the greenery of the park.

After that experience, I began trying to understand what could bring someone to such a sunken place. I read a lot and volunteered for a year at a city shelter, listening to fragments of people’s stories. But the best thing I did was become friends with a gentleman named Lee Stringer, who lived in a subway platform at Grand Central Station (actually, a storage compartment), honing his drug habit and, later, his considerable skills as a writer. It was Lee who helped me not only understand the day-to-day existential experience, he gave me a road map to understand the journey that could lead someone so far from the mainstream.

“It’s not a straight line,” he told me. “It’s a series of incremental steps. Everything only makes sense in light of what happened right before.”

You can read all about Lee’s own journey from darkness into light in his own lyrical memoir, Grand Central Winter, which he wrote after he went into recovery. In the meantime, the path he uncovered led me to write The Intruder.

So did it work? Well, someone seems to think so—otherwise the novel wouldn’t have stumbled onto the New York Times bestseller list in the mid-1990s and be getting reprinted three decades later.

I used to believe The Intruder was about an era that was behind us. But as I write this, a new surge of homelessness is upon us. And it’s not only in New York now, but in places like San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, and even in some suburban communities. Every day, we see tragic and frightening stories of the dispossessed not just in the media, but in the makeshift encampments that spill out along the sides of our roads and at the train stations we pass through. We look at these people—our brothers and sisters—with pity and fear, then we look away. Sometimes because we’re indifferent. Sometimes because we’re disgusted. And sometimes because we think it could happen to us.

There is always a world beneath our world. And it’s easier to fall into it than you might think.

Copyright © 2024 by Peter Blauner. All rights reserved.

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About The Intruder by Peter Blauner:

Originally published in 1996, this critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling novel returns to print with the urgency of today’s headlines.

Jacob Schiff has a good career, a beautiful home in New York City, and a loving family. John Gates has none of those things. A psychiatric patient with a traumatic past, John received professional treatment from Jacob’s wife, with little success. Now, he’s following her and lingering near the Schiffs’s front door, menacing and harassing them at every opportunity, convinced that what Jacob has rightfully belongs to him instead.

But Jacob Schiff has endured some brutal experiences too, and he has an angry streak. When, in desperation, he decides to take action to protect himself and his loved ones, the encounter takes a turn he didn’t predict, and everything he was trying to save may be utterly destroyed. 

About the Author:

Peter Blauner is the author of nine novels, including Picture in the Sand (paperback edition, March 19, 2024), Slow Motion Riot (winner of the 1992 Edgar Award for best first novel from Mystery Writers of America), and The Intruder, a New York Times bestseller and a bestseller overseas. He first broke into print as a journalist, writing cover stories for New York magazine about crime and politics. He has written for numerous TV shows, his novels have been published in twenty-five languages and his short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, the bestselling author Peg Tyre. You can visit him online at peterblauner.com.