They’re Watching by Gregg Hurwitz

Gregg Hurwitz’s latest novel involves a struggling scriptwriter who “wants the limelight a little too badly and gets the attention in a way he doesn’t anticipate.” In the novel, They’re Watching, Patrick Davis walks to out his porch, picks up his morning newspaper and a package containing an unmarked DVD slides out. When he watches it, he discovers that he and his wife are being filmed, that someone is stalking them and recording them inside their house using hidden cameras. And it’s just the first of many DVDs he will receive.

Hurwitz says, “It turns into a chess match, where he tries to spy on the people spying on him, but they’re always set up one step further ahead. It becomes a really dangerous game. In the middle of this, his marriage, which was already on the rocks, comes under terrible strain. Soon it becomes a matter of life and death.”

Film rights for They’re Watching have already been picked up by David Dobkin (The Wedding Crashers, Shanghai Nights) and Jeff Kleeman’s Big Kid Pictures.

As if writing international bestselling novels wasn’t enough, Hurwitz keeps busy–very busy–acting as a consulting producer and writer on the TV show “V”, writing scripts for TV and feature films, and writing the scripts for graphic novels. Hurwitz says of writing the graphic novels for Marvel’s Punisher and Wolverine, “The editor-in-chief/executive editor of Marvel was a really big fan of one of my books and made me the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse–to pick any character from the Marvel vault and continue my own mini-series. I did the Punisher. That was really exciting. It’s my favorite book.”

If all that work sounds time-consuming, it is. Currently Hurwitz says he’s pretty my a “7 AM to 10PM writer.” Once the “V” season “gets broken” Hurwitz says he’ll cut back, but right at the moment there’s a lot of overlap. “When I’m just working on the novels it’s a more forgiving schedule, say 7:00 to 5:00, but when I have comic deadlines and scripts I’m writing around the clock.”

In his novels, Hurwitz tends to lean toward the Alfred Hitchcock Everyman-type of chess match narratives, “where all of a sudden a normal person is a pawn in some bigger conspiracy.” They’re Watching fits that mold precisely. “One of the things that’s tricky when you’re starting to feel paranoid is that even though you’re aware you’re paranoid, that doesn’t make it go away or diminish it. Eventually the DVDs Patrick Davis receives get incredibly invasive to him and his wife and they start to lead him to other places, so the question becomes: Where are they leading him?”

Hurwitz will start an extensive book tour on July 8th, focusing on Houston, Chicago, San Diego, L.A., and the Bay Area. He will also be present for a Marvel event in August called Shadowland. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children and when not writing–whenever that is–he likes to play soccer.