What’s in a title?
Everything, of course!
The title of my novel, at its conception, was Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief. Sonny is the main character of the story and the “Santa Fe Chief” refers to both an iconic passenger train and a model, electric train that Sonny has in the book. This title worked well on a thematic level, and it has a sort of playfulness that I liked. The story, after all, is set in rural 1960, and Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief captured a sort of Saturday-morning-serial tone that I liked.
But as I worked and wrote more, Sonny and the Santa Fe Chief became either a happy promise that was never fulfilled or a joke too dark for the attitude and personality of the story. Sure, there is irony here (a lot of it), but there is also seriousness, sincerity—almost earnestness—and I wanted the title to reflect that combination.
In the end, my wife graciously helped me decide on the title: Abel, N.C. “Abel” is the name of the town where the story happens, and all the connotations and allusions of the name/word make it a nicely complex appellation. Here’s the first epigraph from the book—it’s Genesis 4.8: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.”
Most interesting about all this is that once I had decided on the title, really believed in it, thinking of it in terms of Abel, N.C. instead of Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief brought the whole story into focus for me, both thematically and tonally.