A: Bleak Harbor does not exist in the real world, so far as I know. It’s a small town I created as the setting for my eponymous novel to be published Dec. 1. The town sits on an inland bay with a channel that winds out to Lake Michigan in southwestern Michigan. It is modeled on Saugatuck, Michigan, though it is situated some miles south of Saugatuck. Bleak Harbor was settled in the 1860s by Joseph Estes Bleak, a New Englander who came to Michigan and dug out a swamp where he built a timber mill and, eventually, a shipping port and steel mills. When the book opens, the industrial pieces of the Bleak empire have been sold off and the town is primarily a posh resort for summer visitors from Chicago and Detroit. As with my novels set in the fictional Starvation Lake, I have strived to make Bleak Harbor a character in the story.