Finally Out and Worth the Wait, The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes

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The most important cultural artifact from 2014 isn’t Taylor Swift’s 1989, Gwyneth Paltrow’s conscious uncoupling, or the Michael Keaton renaissance kicked off by the Oscar-winning Birdman. It’s I Am Pilgrim, the first novel by former foreign correspondent and screenwriter Terry Hayes and without a doubt the best spy thriller of the 21st century.

At nearly 900 pages, this literary doorstop follows Pilgrim, a misanthropic American intelligence agent who tries to stop a Saudi terrorist from releasing a deadly virus. Even after a decade, the memory of a scene in which Pilgrim dislodges a corpse’s eyes in order to use them to pass a biometric security checkpoint remains vividly terrifying.

Almost immediately after Pilgrim came out, a follow-up, to be called The Year of the Locust, was announced. A Pilgrim

film was in the works. Hayes wrote a screenplay. Directors were attached. New writers were brought in. Would Pilgrim become the next Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, James Bond—or all three? And then: silence.

It took Donna Tartt a decade to follow up The Secret History and Harper Lee 55 years to release Go Set a Watchman. Emily Brontë wrote only Wuthering Heights.

After a stint as an investigative reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, Hayes, 72, a ­British-born Australian, worked in Hollywood on such films as Dead Calm and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. He palled around with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Robert Evans. He met Heidi Fleiss and wishes he’d taken notes. He gave up screenwriting when an executive asked him to add a chimps-­versus-­humans baseball game to a draft of a Planet of the Apes remake.

“I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to write a novel,’ ” Hayes says. With his Hollywood savings, “I could agonize over it all and redo it and think more about it.”

I Am Pilgrim was a smash, and for the follow-up Hayes felt he could take his time. But there’s a difference between a few years and a decade. His readers waited with charged Kindles, filling the void with Jack Reacher installments by Lee Child and the senior citizens of the Thursday Murder Club. But nothing seemed to come.

“It wasn’t like I was sitting around drinking beer and playing skittles,” says Hayes. “I was working.”

American readers can finally get their hands on The Year of the Locust this month (Simon & Schuster, $32). It follows the global adventures of a misanthropic shadow operative spy named Kane and clocks in at 250,000 words. “I don’t think it’s a book until it’s 600 pages,” Hayes insists. “That’s what a psychopath I am.”

What took so long? Hayes spent time raising his four children. “I saw more productions of Aladdin than any person deserves to,” he says. “I don’t regret that.” And over the last 10 years he deleted a full 750,000 words, or as he describes it, “a lot of work to chuck away.” He adds, “The sensible business decision would be to bring out a book, then another. Clearly I’m not that sensible. But if I don’t do it the way I want to do it, why am I doing it at all?”

Hayes remains in talks with Hollywood about a Pilgrim adaptation. Recently Austin Butler has been circling the role. And the author insists he’s working on a sequel to Locust. “I’ve got a good idea on the plot, and I know those characters,” he promises. “The next book won’t take nearly as long.”

This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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