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Welcome to this week’s installment of The Scariest Part, a recurring feature in which authors, comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators tell us what scares them in their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. (If you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, please review the guidelines here.)

My guest is New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper, whose latest novel is Forbidden Ground, part of the Cold Creek series. Here is the publisher’s description:

Let the dead stay dead…

Despite a traumatic childhood in Cold Creek, Ohio, the Lockwood sisters have reunited there for the wedding of youngest sister Tess to the town’s sheriff. Maid of honor Kate Lockwood is determined to break through best man Grant Mason’s defences. An anthropologist, Kate makes her living studying the dead. She is particularly interested in the prehistoric Adena civilization that once called the area home. A large burial mound sits on Mason family land, and Kate wants permission to excavate. But Grant refuses and tells Kate to stay away from the mound.

Kate respects Grant’s desire to honor his grandfather’s belief that the dead should not be disturbed. However, the more she researches the more it becomes clear that Grant is hiding something. When one of Grant’s friends is killed — and the sheriff is away on his honeymoon — the couple joins forces to assist the deputy in the investigation.

When Kate comes under attack she is certain it is connected to the burial mound. Grant seems concerned for Kate’s safety, but despite their explosive attraction she can’t help but be suspicious of his motives. Can Kate trust the man she’s come to love, or will the wrong decision be her final act?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Karen Karper:

As a child I was terrified by those old “mummy” movies or any about the dead stalking the living. Even today, I can’t stand to look at zombie movies. But the Egyptian cult of the dead with its elaborate tombs with sacrificed slaves and gifts meant for the afterlife still fascinates me.

So I was totally intrigued when I learned that there was an ancient society which left burial mounds with preserved bodies and artifacts throughout Ohio, where I grew up, live and write. This prehistoric Adena culture was perfect for my suspense novel, Forbidden Ground. But as I researched and wrote, I had to fight to keep myself from being, as we say in the heart of Ohio, “creeped out.”

Kate Lockwood, my heroine, is an archeologist who is desperate to lead a dig in what she believes is a major, untouched Adena tomb. But it’s on private property, and she can’t convince Grant Mason, the owner — her love interest too — to permit this. “Let the dead stay dead,” he tells her, his family motto started by his grandfather and father who once protected the tomb. But is he really hiding something else in there? As Kate works to sway Grant to her obsession, she starts to either imagine or experience visits from the dead interred in the tomb.

The Adena people are quite mysterious in their origin as well as in their mortuary practices. Early Ohio pioneers and some archeologists excavated Adena tombs and found corpses of their elite laid out on beds, surrounded by sacrificed slaves and relics. The most famous of the artifacts is called The Adena Pipe and has been recently named the state’s official artifact.

Named for a site where many remains were found, the prehistoric Adena left their burial mounds from the East Coast of the U.S. to the Mississippi River, where they flourished, then mysteriously disappeared. Remember that old 1970s book and movie Chariots of the Gods, which claimed brilliant ancient cultures could be the result of alien visitations? I’m not claiming that, but what a thought — maybe for another book, another time.

But the scariest part inForbidden Ground comes when Kate enters the tomb, and not of her own volition. Not only is there the danger of a cave-in, but the sights and smells in the tomb, and its possible still-living presences, hit her hard. It is the culmination of her dreams, but may also be the culmination of her life.

I felt I was trapped there with her and hope my readers do too.

Karen Harper: Website

Forbidden Ground: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Karen Harper is the New York Times bestselling author of contemporary suspense and the historical thriller, Mistress of Mourning. Forbidden Ground is the middle book in her edge of Appalachia trilogy, The Cold Creek Novels. Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Harper divides her time between Ohio and Florida. She is dying to excavate the two Adena mound tombs in Highbanks Park near her home, but, alas, she’s only a former Ohio State University instructor of English, not archeology.

The first part of season 8’s two-part finale, “Dark Water,” is a triumph of style over substance. It’s also a big, honking mess. It’s an interesting mess — it plays with some compelling concepts — but a mess nonetheless. It’s also an almost direct clone of the 1985 Sixth Doctor serial “Revelation of the Daleks,” in which the bodies kept in cryogenic stasis at a far-future mausoleum called Tranquil Repose are being turned into Daleks. But anyway, there’s a lot to talk about with “Dark Water,” so let’s get right to it.

**MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.**

I call “Dark Water” an example of style over substance because, while there’s compelling drama on the screen for most of the episode, very little of it makes sense. Characters act out of character again. Established rules and precedents are forgotten or ignored in favor of the plot. Things happen purely to move the story along without an eye toward plausibility. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Clara threatens the Doctor with the elimination of all the existing TARDIS keys (apparently, there are seven of them) in the heart of a volcano if he doesn’t go back in time and save Danny’s life. They both react as if this is a real threat. If there are no keys, the TARDIS is lost to both of them and they’ll be stuck there forever. Except that the Doctor has been able to open the TARDIS doors with a snap of his fingers since season 4. Clara showed she could do it, too, earlier this season. So the threat involving the TARDIS keys is an empty one. It is a four-year-long precedent that is ignored solely for one scene in this one story — a scene that doesn’t make much sense anyway. Why is Clara acting this way? She leaps right to betraying the Doctor without even asking him to save Danny first. And then, just to make it even more frustrating, it’s all just a dream anyway. It didn’t happen. It was a psychic test of her resolve, which she apparently passed and now the Doctor will help her. So much for anything actually mattering. (But then we’re used to there being no consequences to anyone’s actions in the Steven Moffat era.)  Also, since when does lava destroy TARDIS keys? Has this ever been mentioned before? Clara says the Doctor mentioned it, but I have no memory of it. If it’s a conversation that happened off-screen, that makes it even lamer and, frankly, an unforgivable “sudden rule.”

Danny’s death is narratively problematic as well. Aside from being far too random — a car accident? Seriously? After everything else that he’s been through? — it is much too easy and much too plot-necessitated. Like Missy, whom we will get to shortly, his death is entirely outside of everything that’s been happening this season. Worse, it happens off-screen. For it to have any emotional impact at all, we need to A) see it happen, and B) have it be part of an actual story. Imagine if Danny had died at the end of the last episode, and then this episode started with Clara begging the Doctor to go back and change what happened. He could say no, and then she tries to blackmail him with the keys. That would work so much better than what we were given. But there has been very little story cohesiveness this season anyway. It seemed like there was going to be, what with the words “the Promised Land” showing up in two early episodes, much the way “Bad Wolf,” “Torchwood,” and “Saxon” did in previous seasons, but then…nothing. It was all “Where do you want to go today, Clara?” and “No, Danny, I’m not traveling with the Doctor again” instead. Which was terribly boring, really.

So yes, at the start of the season we had two episodes where robots from the future were looking for the Promised Land, as if it were a place that actually existed. “Dark Water” reveals it is instead a virtual reality of sorts called the Nethersphere, where the minds of the deceased (or near-deceased, I think, which would make more sense) are uploaded while their bodies are turned into Cybermen. So why are the robots looking for it? Why do they think it’s someplace they can physically find? Why are these robots from the distant future so interested in the Nethersphere when it clearly exists in contemporary London, not the future, and not somewhere in outer space? Also, where did the nice, English garden from “Deep Breath” go? Because now the Promised Land is an urban cityscape instead.

And speaking of being turned into Cybermen, what exactly is the purpose of the dark water itself? It would hardly be a draw to the mausoleum to go visit a loved one and see a fucking skeleton sitting in a water tank. The dark water seems to only exist for the big reveal. It looks cool when it drains away and we see the skeletons are actually Cybermen, but other than that it does nothing. Again, style over substance.

Let’s talk about Missy and all the inherent problems with the revelation that she is in fact a new incarnation of the Master. Time Lords are mildly telepathic with each other. It’s been mentioned a zillion times in the classic series, and hinted at in the revamp. This means the Doctor should immediately know that Missy is a Time Lord, and more than that, he should instantly recognize that she’s the Master, too. Remember, in the season 3 episode “Utopia,” the Doctor is able to recognize the Master’s presence through the walls of the TARDIS. But here, he only starts to piece things together when he feels that Missy has two hearts, and then recognizes that the Nethersphere utilizes Gallifreyan technology, and then finally he has to pester her to tell him her name. When you change established rules solely to fit the plot, it never works. Imagine one issue of The X-Men where Cyclops can suddenly control his eye beams without explanation, and in the next he can’t anymore and it’s never addressed.

Part two is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to rescue this storyline. Why, for example, is the Master making Cybermen? The Master has no love for them, and the one time they tried to work together, in the 1983 20th anniversary special “The Five Doctors,” the Cybermen attempted to kill him pretty much right away. So why is she making more now? What’s the connection? Also, how did the Master escape from Gallifrey after the events of “The End of Time, Part Two”? Why did he regenerate? And why the fuck is she going around calling the Doctor her boyfriend, as she did in “Deep Breath,” and planting a big kiss on him in this episode? (I’m asking why in terms of plot reasons. I already know why in terms of Moffat reasons: he has trouble imagining any female characters who don’t want to kiss the Doctor.)

And by the way, the Master would totally go on calling himself the Master, no matter what the sex of his new body is. You know that. She would never call herself the Mistress!

I could go on indefinitely, but I won’t, except for this one last thing. Moffat continues to write the Doctor as someone who yells “Do as I say!” at his companions instead of saying “Please trust me.” (The Eleventh Doctor did this, too.) Maybe I’m being silly, but that’s not the Doctor to me. It’s off-putting and makes me not like someone I’ve considered a hero since I was a child. Frankly, I don’t get why Moffat keeps doing it.

ChiZine Publications currently has the paperback of my Shirley Jackson Award-nominated and Thriller Award-nominated novella Chasing the Dragon on sale for less than the e-book! Go! Buy!