When bestselling suspense novelist Chevy Stevens worked as a realtor in her 20s and 30s, she abided by two rules. If possible, she avoided hosting open houses by herself. And she never followed male clients to a new floor. “I’ve always been an anxious person,” Stevens says on a video call from her home in Nanaimo, a city on the southeastern edge of Vancouver Island. “And anxious people tend to think worst-case scenario.”
Over the past 15 years, Stevens has spun her anxieties into a string of successful thrillers. First came Still Missing, her smash-hit 2010 debut, which follows a realtor recovering from a year of captivity after she was kidnapped from an open house. Stevens’s subsequent efforts mined tension from cults (Always Watching), violent exes (Never Let You Go), warped family dynamics (Never Knowing), and serial killers (Dark Roads), to name a few subjects.
As is the case with so many architects of literary nightmares, it’s hard to walk away from a conversation with the 52-year-old novelist believing she could house such horrible thoughts. While chatting from her couch, Stevens wears a bright pink graphic tee with a picture of a strawberry on it, her wide, green eyes perpetually shining. “Everyone who’s ever read me is like, Huh, you don’t seem like your books,” Stevens says with gleefully sloping Canadian vowels. “And I’m like, Well, I’m not goth.” In her spare time, she likes to watch other people react to Taylor Swift albums on YouTube. (“I guess I’m an analytical person,” she muses.) She’s also pretty into TikTok.
The author’s latest novel—her eighth—is The Hitchhikers, a road-trip-gone-wrong thriller out in October from St. Martin’s.It follows Tom and Alice, youngish spouses from Seattle who plan to drive a rented RV across Canada to the 1976 Quebec summer Olympics. Devastated by the death of their infant son, they hope that the change of scenery might reignite their dying marriage.
While in British Columbia, Tom and Alice meet a crunchy young couple named Ocean and Blue and invite them to their campsite for dinner. Soon, the older pair start feeling pangs of parental affection for the younger duo and welcome them aboard their RV for a few nights. After glimpsing a newspaper headline, however, Alice learns that their guests are actually fugitives named Simon and Jenny, and they’re wanted for murder. Before long, she and Tom become hostages in their own (mobile) home, forced at gunpoint to aid the young runaways in evading arrest.
The book—whose jittery, escalating set pieces include a brutal Dairy Queen robbery and a days-long standoff at a farm near the border of British Columbia and Alberta—came to Stevens in a dream. A self-proclaimed “big believer in the universe,” she says it’s not an unusual workflow. The precise details are fuzzy, but Stevens recalls being trapped in an RV and unable to help her husband, who was being threatened by some sort of intruder. “I mean, carjacking is one thing, but with an RV, they literally have a place to stay,” Stevens says. She knew the idea had legs.
Stevens was born Rene Unischewski—Chevy Stevens is a combination of her late father’s nickname and her older brother’s first name—in a small farm town called Shawnigan Lake, about 45 minutes north of Victoria. Her parents owned a ranch, which Stevens and her brother were expected to work on, but Stevens frequently snuck away to the woods or a hayloft and read whatever she could get her hands on: Harlequin romances, Stephen King thrillers, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. She was “always, always, always” reading, she recalls, but never had a sense that she could making a living from books. Not even in middle school, when she wrote a story about a woman poisoning her husband with dog food. (“Apparently thrillers started young,” she jokes, raising her eyebrows.)
Instead, Stevens enrolled in and then swiftly dropped out of art school, unable to “get obsessed” with making visual art, as she puts it. Restaurant and sales jobs followed, then real estate, which paid well and offered its share of welcome challenges, but Stevens knew in her soul that she wasn’t doing what she was meant to do. After a bad breakup in her early 30s and a brief sojourn to her friend’s island cabin accompanied by her dog, a bottle of Yellowtail, and Sex and the City on DVD, she decided she wanted to give writing an earnest effort.
She started and then stopped a doomed memoir before turning to fiction, shaping her open-house anxieties and lifelong interest in psychology into what would become Still Missing. She looks back on that novel’s early drafts with a mix of wincing embarrassment and awe at her gumption. “Thank God for naivete,” Stevens says, shaking her head. “Truly, ignorance is bliss. If somebody sent me what I first wrote, I would have been like, Um, maybe take some classes.”
She kept at it, though, refreshing her writerly toolkit with The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation and increasing her words per minute with steady instruction from Mavis Beacon. Empowered by online forums and a visit to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, Stevens quit her job and lived on savings for two years, harnessing her early-30s singledom and childlessness to do some serious dream chasing. When she finally had a manuscript, she sent it to editor Renni Browne at the Editorial Department, who liked it enough to link Stevens with WME’s Mel Berger. He’s still Stevens’s agent today.
Berger’s early feedback proved transformative. When Stevens was conceiving Still Missing, she thought it was women’s fiction. It wasn’t until Berger told her that her manuscript lost too much steam in the second half “for a thriller” that she even realized she’d written one. “I thought I’d written a book about a woman’s redemption and recovery,” Stevens says. “I was way more interested in the psychology of getting over shitty stuff than the thrill.”
Now that she’s used to the suspense genre, though, she’s come to appreciate its virtues. “There’s a sense of being able to make things right, a sense of justice” in a thriller, she explains. “It’s a satisfying feeling, knowing that you were able to solve something for someone. It makes me a little bit less ragey at how shitty the world is.”
These days, Stevens is less anxious. She lives with her husband, their 12-year-old daughter, and a pair of dogs, happily tuning in to true crime podcasts and tracking down morsels of old Hollywood gossip. (Jayne Mansfield is a perpetual fascination.) She’s been successful enough to avoid the grind of genre fiction’s traditional book-per-year schedule, which she acknowledges is “bad for business, but I can’t
do it and I don’t want to do it. Most literary authors are allowed to go 10 years. Donna Tartt? Sure!”
All that space has lowered Stevens’s blood pressure a little. But it’s also allowed her mind to wander toward “what really scares the shit out of me.”
At present, that’s “freaking ghosts, man,” she says. She’s toying with the idea of her next book being narrated by a dead woman who haunts her living lover’s wife, describing it as “Single White Female but, like, the haunted version.”
One can almost picture the eager teen girl devouring it in a hayloft several years down the line.
