The Scariest Place in New Jersey Set the Stage for Her Novel

Caitlin Mullen was driving through the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, midway between her house in Princeton and her mother’s on the Jersey Shore, when it struck her that this desolate, dense forest was the perfect backdrop for her next novel.

“It’s eerie,” Mullen, 38, said of the 1.1 million-acre swath of woodland that covers portions of seven counties in the Garden State. “You lose cell service here. You feel completely isolated. You might be the only person on the road for a long stretch.”

On a drizzly Monday morning, we were the only people at Franklin Parker Preserve, right at the center of the Pine Barrens, not counting the driver of a car with tinted windows who skedaddled the instant I pulled into the parking lot.

The sky glowered and grumbled as Mullen and I set out on a tour of the place that inspired her new mystery, “Heather,” which came out on June 9. It begins with a North Jersey narcotics detective moving back to the Pine Barrens to become the chief of police in her hometown. Once there, she immediately arrests her mother.

“After this showstopping opening scene,” our crime columnist wrote, “Mullen unspools a narrative of corkscrew complexity involving decades-old unearthed remains, even older family secrets and the ways in which young women are preyed upon.”

As in Liz Moore’s best-selling thriller “The God of the Woods,” untamed wilderness plays a starring role in “Heather.”

“There’s something slightly unnerving about this landscape,” Mullen said cheerily, hoisting a bandanna-bedecked sporty backpack on one shoulder. (She also had bug spray, two ponchos and two umbrellas.)

Pine and cedar trees, gnarled and spindly, spread around us in every direction. The only sounds were the crunch of our footsteps and a trill of birdsong so plaintive, it sounded as if the avian population was calling for reinforcements.

Mullen led the way to an old cranberry bog, then to a weed-choked railroad track once used by the Blue Comet line, which whisked passengers from Jersey City to Atlantic City. She noted the dizzying flatness of the terrain, which makes it hard to keep your bearings: “You have no vantage points. You can’t see where you’ve come from. You can’t see what you’re heading toward.”

She used this sense of discombobulation to full effect in her book, as did the creators of “The Sopranos” in the famed “Pine Barrens” episode, where Christopher and Paulie nearly freeze to death trying to find their way back to civilization.

Mullen spent her early years on the western edge of the Pine Barrens and her teen years outside Atlantic City after a stint in upstate New York. Her father and grandmother worked at casinos. She worked as a receptionist in a casino spa, in a boardwalk T-shirt shop and at several local restaurants — “a bunch of stereotypical New Jersey jobs,” as she put it.

When Mullen went to Colgate University, “I would say I was from South Jersey and friends would say, Oh people live there? They thought it was completely unpopulated. It’s actually this incredibly vibrant place where people feel passionate about conservation. That’s why it still exists the way it does.”

Mullen pointed out wild blueberries — we sampled a few, delicious — and described the many species of orchids and carnivorous plants tucked into the marshlands around us. She spoke of swimming with her cousins in lakes “so tannic they look like tea” and canoeing and fishing with her father, who died suddenly during her sophomore year of college. He was 47.

“It was a rupture in my life,” Mullen said. “I think that shows up in my work in ways that I can see and in ways that I can’t see.”

Few of the characters in “Heather” have two parents. All of them are searching for something they can’t find, mourning someone they’ve lost. The woods they hide in or run from are riddled with sinkholes, a hallmark of the Pine Barrens (and a handy metaphor).

After college, Mullen got a master’s in English at New York University and studied writing at SUNY Stony Brook. She worked in publishing — at Bloomsbury, Norton and Hachette — and at Word Bookstore in both Jersey City and Brooklyn.

One of her favorite books to to sell was “All Things Cease to Appear,” by Elizabeth Brundage, a recommendation from her graduate school adviser, Susan Scarf Merrell.

Mullen said: “It’s set in the ’70s, it’s got a murder, it’s got ghosts — literal ghosts. I was like, You can do that?”

She added: “I learned to articulate what I loved about a book, to think about things from a reader’s perspective. It helped me refine my taste.”

Mullen decided to give her victims a voice, a resolution she’s kept in both of her novels.

Her Edgar Award-winning 2020 debut, “Please See Us,” was inspired by the unsolved murders of several women whose bodies were dumped behind an abandoned hotel in a marsh in Atlantic City.

“I think Cait could set a novel on the moon and it would be remarkably grounded and feel completely true,” Merrell wrote in an email, “but it is also true that her love for New Jersey and her understanding of it is complete.”

In the early months of the pandemic, Mullen moved from Brooklyn Heights to Princeton with her family. Her daughter was starting to crawl; her husband was balancing his laptop on an air conditioning unit; they needed more space. At first, Mullen admitted, “I didn’t want to go back to Jersey. I’d done that.”

She started writing “Heather” in 2022, after her son was born. (She is now a mother of three.) Over the next two years, she made regular trips to the Pine Barrens, visiting abandoned factories and ghost towns scattered across the area. She explored state forests, and joined a guided moonlight hike through Franklin Parker Preserve.

“My husband was always like, ‘Text me when you start your walk,’” Mullen said. “The text wouldn’t go through and I’d be like, ‘Well, no one knows where I am.’”

The idea was both liberating and frightening. Legend has it that the Jersey Devil haunts the Pine Barrens; you can’t grow up in New Jersey without fearing his wrath. She recounted the basics of the story while strolling: a 13th child born with a goat’s head, bat’s wings and hooves. (Were those red eyes watching us, I wondered. Nope, just the painted flares marking our trail.)

Then Mullen led us to the ruins of Brooksbrae Brick Factory, a 15-minute drive down Mt. Misery Road, a spooky byway lined with white crosses memorializing car accident victims.

We scrambled over another stretch of train track, stepped around a puddle the size of a kiddie pool and walked down a short, trash-strewed path to a clearing in the woods. A light drizzle had turned torrential, but Mullen was undeterred.

“This was meant to be a state-of-the-art factory,” Mullen said, pointing to a warren of moldering walls and tunnels dating back to the early 1900s. The owner died; a pair of caretakers perished in a fire. The factory never opened.

In “Heather,” Mullen sets a high school party at Brooksbrae. Her descriptions of its Technicolor graffiti are evocative, but seeing the place in real life was a different story. Littered with beer cans, crushed Solo cups and a rotting watermelon, the vibe was downright creepy.

Mullen said, “I’m always scared when I come here that someone’s going to pop out of the woods.”

The launch event for “Heather” was in a more sedate corner of the state, at Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, about an hour north of the Pine Barrens.

“I am obsessed with the book,” said Kate Czyzewski, the event coordinator, buyer and manager of the store. “New Jersey is such a cool and scrappy and historical state, we need more stories about it. And this one is so atmospheric.”

Czyzewski has sold around 50 copies of “Heather” so far and compared it to “The Correspondent.” She said, “It’s one of those novels where the more people that have it in their hands and read it and pass it on to a friend, it’s gonna spread like wildfire.”

Mullen said it’s been especially gratifying to hear from readers from the Pine Barrens, who’ve thanked her for representing this mostly unsung place.

Ultimately, she described herself as happy to have moved back to New Jersey, where her family has deep roots.

“There’s so much mystery here,” she said, glancing at the wet trees and rain-slicked road. “It’s still unknowable in a lot of ways.”