Kyle asked Stacy Willingham:

What inspired you to write “A Flicker in the Dark”?

Stacy Willingham I've always had a fascination with criminal psychology and true crime, so serial killers are intriguing to me. The vast majority of murders take place due to very common emotions (things like love, lust, jealousy, greed, vengeance, etc), so while the majority of people would never act on those emotions and take another life, we can at least understand the emotion. With serial killers, however, it's almost impossible for a normal person to wrap their mind around why their commit their horrible crimes. All that to say, one day, I was watching a documentary and a picture popped up on the screen. It was of Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. At that point, BTK had murdered ten people already and nobody knew his identity yet, including his family, and it hit me right then that if strangers had a hard time understanding a serial killer, I couldn't imagine how their families must feel. It felt like an Earth-shattering betrayal that would have repercussions across every aspect of your life, and the idea of A Flicker in the Dark was basically born in that moment. I wanted to tell the story of a serial killer through the eyes of his daughter, because through those eyes, the villain suddenly became much more complicated.

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