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The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite the enormous amount of violence and death in this novel, I actually found it quite delightful! That’s thanks to of Hawkins’ breezy prose and sense of humor throughout, as well as his ability to write interesting, well drawn characters. There’s a lot of bold and original creativity on display here, and a truly fascinating magical system. I was ready to give this book five stars, but found it stumbled toward the end with clumsy expository dialogue, frequent mentions of antagonists who never show up (wherefore art thou, Billy O’Shea?), and the redemption of a character who has, for 300 pages, been irredeemable to the reader for his stunningly heartless brutality toward the children. He is presented in the end as having a good reason for his sadistic cruelty, but that reason is never fully explored or made comprehensible to the reader, and thus it all comes off as needless. There’s some stuff with the president that’s just silly, and Hawkins makes the mistake of introducing us to several of Carolyn’s fellow librarians, all of whom are interesting in their own way, and then completely removing them from the story off-page so that we neither get to experience their absence ourselves nor feel Carolyn’s emotions about their absence, which leaves us not feeling anything about it either.

It may sound like I’m complaining a lot about this novel, but that’s only because I loved it for so much of its page count and found the ending disappointing. I still highly recommend the novel — there’s a reason I’m giving it four out of five stars, after all — and I think a lot of readers will find it as delightful and wonderfully original as I did. But I can’t help feeling that something went wrong at the end, whether it was too much editorial interference or Hawkins simply losing confidence in what he was trying to accomplish. Perhaps if I were to take one of the books from Father’s library I might discover an alternate past where THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR had the satisfying ending that such an amazing novel deserves.

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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Jason Arnopp, whose new novel is The Last Days of Jack Sparks. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I read the novel in manuscript form back in March and really liked it. I think you’ll like it, too. Here is the publisher’s description:

Jack Sparks died while writing this book. This is the account of his final days.

In 2014, Jack Sparks — the controversial pop culture journalist — died in mysterious circumstances.

To his fans, Jack was a fearless rebel; to his detractors, he was a talentless hack. Either way, his death came as a shock to everyone.

It was no secret that Jack had been researching the occult for his new book. He’d already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed in rural Italy.

Then there was that video: thirty-six seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet was posted from his own YouTube account.

Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed — until now. This book, compiled from the files found after his death, reveals the chilling details of Jack’s final hours.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Jason Arnopp:

The Last Days Of Jack Sparks involves exorcisms (two of them, no less), a creepy YouTube video and generally supernatural shenanigans. You’d think that one of these malevolent elements would have sent the biggest shiver rocketing up my spine while I put the novel together, right?

But no. Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t want to describe the book’s creepiest moments too much (a ghost train becomes less frightening when you’ve had the contents detailed up front), the scariest part was most certainly structure, in one specific segment of the book.

If you’ve read the novel, you might be forgiven for thinking that the beginning and end would have been the scariest parts to get right, for one particular reason that would be spoilerific to detail here.

But no again. The scariest part was the middle.

Middles can be the very epitome of evil.

Like a fair few writers, I have what I believe to be a healthy distrust of structure. Or at least, that whole overly prescriptive structure thing. The Robert McKee thing: the hero absolutely must develop a phobia of geese on page 79 and all that stuff. Rightly or wrongly, I worry that such rituals could shut your mind off to great possibilities.

I do think in terms of three (or sometimes five) acts when planning a story as a whole, but beyond establishing some kind of skeletal, tent-pole structure, I prefer to roll up my sleeves and work out the rest as I go. This can make life extremely hard for me, but it feels as much a necessity as a choice. For one thing, I find it difficult to fully explore my characters’ heads while initially gazing down at the grand overview. I can only truly achieve this feat of imagination down at ground level, while chipping away at the coal face.

When I hit big problems along the way, that’s when I resort to structure. So I think of real, clinical structure as my fall-back plan, like some kind of rescue service. Scaffolding that I can apply to a crumbling or otherwise messed-up house. And at one stage, Act Two of The Last Days Of Jack Sparks sorely needed scaffolding.

Each story has three acts. Each act has three acts, and so on, until you’re looking at the beginning, middle and end of each scene, or even the beginning, middle and end of each sentence. I didn’t quite drill down that far, but something had to be done. It felt vital for Act Two to reach a big climax. This had to be in terms of character, as well as a major incident. I wanted this act to be a pressure cooker. Various cords that intertwine, while snaking their way towards one dynamite plunger. I often like to think about middles as endings: it’s always exciting when a story develops faster than the reader expects. But at this point, the structure just wasn’t getting us there. Act Two’s climax didn’t feel earned and the whole middle section didn’t feel right.

When a whole third of your novel feels wrong, trust me, that’s about as scary as it gets.

I felt certain that the content was pretty much okay, but the order of events was wrong. I pulled out some index cards — another sure sign that I’m getting desperate — and devoted each one to a scene. Then I stuck them up on the only wall in my study that isn’t covered with old shelved VHS movies (don’t ask). In fact, it was a window.

I tried so many combinations of those damn cards, it was like playing solitaire. Those cards went up on that window in three acts, five acts, 277 acts, whatever might work. They were colour coded to denote the various threads, as I searched for the perfect order of events. The order that would reflect both the internal and external lives of my arrogant celebrity journalist Jack Sparks. The order that kept the story motoring along. The order that would continue to deliver unnerving moments as evenly as possible (to this end, I stuck dayglow ‘scare stars’ on the appropriate scene cards).

After many dark nights of the soul, the cards finally clunked into place like the wheels inside a safe. Some rewriting was required, but that was a small price to pay. When faced with the terror of something not working, you’ll fly to the moon to make it right. And when Act Two finally seemed to work in terms of character, pacing and the fear factor, all the angst was worthwhile.

So, yes, middles can be evil, but every book throws up its own problems. In my second novel for Orbit Books, currently in development, the biggest issue is Act One being too long. My task is to boil it down, while not throwing any babies out with the bath water. You never can know what kind of fire any given book will require you to fight.

When you do hit a roadblock with your writing, it’s great to know that there’s a scientific rescue team on stand-by to ease your fear and dread. One that’s always primed to pull up outside your study with a truck load of scaffolding, index cards and neat gin.

Oh, did I not mention all the gin?

Jason Arnopp: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Last Days of Jack Sparks: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Jason Arnopp is a British author and scriptwriter. His background is in journalism: he has worked on magazines such as Heat, Q, The Word, Kerrang!, SFX and Doctor Who Magazine. He has written comedy for BBC Radio 4 and official tie-in fiction for Doctor Who and Friday the 13th, but The Last Days of Jack Sparks is the first novel which is entirely Jason’s own fault (though some may prefer to lay the blame on Jack…).

This week on The Scariest Part, we welcome back Jasper Bark, whose new novel The Final Cut and novella Run to Ground, both of which form part of an ongoing story cycle, were released this summer. Here are the publisher’s descriptions:

The Final Cut

The Final Cut is a genre busting mash up of crime, horror and urban fantasy. An imaginative and thought provoking tale that explores our need to watch and make horror fiction, examining not just the medium, but the purpose of storytelling itself. Taking in everything from ancient myth, to modern atrocity, this novel will entrance, mystify and appall you in equal measures, haunting you long after you’ve reached the very last line.

In an East London lock up, two filmmakers, Jimmy and Sam, are duct taped to chairs and forced to watch a snuff film by Ashkan, a loan shark to whom they owe a lot of money. If they don’t pay up, they’ll be starring in the next one. Before the film reaches its end, Ashkan and all his men are slaughtered by unknown assailants. Only Jimmy and Sam survive the massacre, leaving them with the sole copy of the snuff film.

The filmmakers decide to build their next movie around the brutal film. While auditioning actors, they stumble upon Melissa, an enigmatic actress who seems perfect for the leading role, not least because she’s the spitting image of the snuff film’s main victim. Neither the film, nor Melissa, are entirely what they seem however. Jimmy and Sam find themselves pulled into a paranormal mystery that leads them through the shadowy streets of the city beneath the city and sees them re-enacting an ancient Mesopotamian myth cycle. As they play out the roles of long forgotten gods and goddesses, they’re drawn into the subtle web of a deadly heresy that stretches from the beginnings of civilization to the end of the world as we know it.

Run to Ground

Jim Mcleod is on the run. He’s running from his responsibilities as a father, hiding out from his pregnant girlfriend and working as a groundskeeper in a rural graveyard. He’s running from a lifetime of guilt and bad decisions, but principally he’s running from the murderous entities that have possessed the very ground at his feet.

Jim has no idea what these entities are, but they’ve done unspeakable things to everyone in the graveyard and now they’re hunting him down. There is nowhere Jim can hide, nowhere he can walk and nowhere he can run that isn’t under the lethal power of the things in the ground. If he stands any chance of survival he must uncover the link between his murderous tormentors, three mysterious graves and an ancient heresy that stretches back to the beginning of time.

Run To Ground is a tale of extreme folk horror. It opens the reader’s eyes to a terrifying new breed of gods and monsters, but be warned, within these pages you’ll find blasphemy, brutality and unbelievably depravity the likes of which you’ve never read before. Think that’s too grandiose a claim? Why not put us to the test. Go on, click the ‘Buy now’ button, we double dare you …

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Jasper Bark:

In an advance review of my novella Run To Ground, in Mass Movement Magazine, noted music and book reviewer Jim Dodge wrote: “I’m not sure if it should be categorized as ego or genius but Jasper Bark is in the process of creating his own mythos.” In that single comment Jim summed up one of the scariest parts of my latest project. I’ve started a story cycle, beginning with the novel The Final Cut and the novella Run To Ground, which were released last month by Crystal Lake Publishing, and continuing in the novella Quiet Places, which appears next month in the anthology Great British Horror. Each tale is linked by a dark mythology that details a whole new pantheon of goddesses, gods and monsters.

As Jim rightly points out this could be considered as monumentally egotistical. Particularly when you consider that I’m following in the footsteps of genre giants like Lovecraft, Barker and Lord Dunsany. Comparisons to these writers are inevitable, and given their immense contributions to the field, it’s scary to think how my own work might stand up. It’s also worth noting that neither Lovecraft nor Dunsany was intentionally creating a mythos. The term mythos was only applied to a group of their stories years later, by other writers like August Derleth. So my efforts might be seen as doubly pretentious. As scary as this prospect was however, it wasn’t the scariest part of writing these books.

My mythos revolves around a historic blasphemy I learned of called the ‘Qu’rm Saddic Heresy’. This is an archaic set of beliefs that were considered old when the earliest records were written down. No writings by the heretics are known to exist, but we know they were persecuted as long ago as Ancient Mesopotamian times. Their beliefs and practices must have been unbelievably taboo to have been suppressed for over 5,000 years, and there’s something both scary and alluring to me, as a writer, about the heresy.

One of the things I like most about horror fiction is that is that it often touches on the theme of ‘forbidden knowledge’. Even as a small kid, the idea of learning something man was ‘never supposed to know’ fascinated me. Whether it’s Doctor Faustus summoning Mephistopheles, or Doctor Pretorius firing up the resonator in From Beyond, my favourite parts of horror fiction are those giddy moments of ecstatic revelation, when the veil of reality is torn asunder and the unknowable truths of reality are presented to the protagonist. Of course it invariable goes horribly wrong, and they pay a high price for that knowledge, but I still get an illicit thrill at the thought of it.

This may be one of the things Lovecraft was alluding to when he said: “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. What is more ‘unknown’ than things we haven’t learned yet, or were never supposed to know? Some of the most important discoveries, and the most essential knowledge, can only be attained by taking a flying leap across the gaping chasm of all that’s unknown and unknowable. What could be more scary than that?

Even still, that wasn’t the scariest part of writing these stories. The scariest part was allowing myself to write something I’d wanted to create since I was a child.

A while ago I cleaned a load of old notebooks out of my parent’s attic. Stolen school books I’d filled with stories, my first steps towards becoming an author. The earliest one dates back to when I was around eleven or twelve years old. It was filled with notes and story ideas for building my own mythology. From the youngest age I’ve been fascinated with mythology, from Greek and Norse tales to old Anglo-Saxon and African mythology. Most of my life, it seems, I’ve been gearing up to create my own mythology. It’s probably my longest held writing ambition.

You might be asking yourself what’s so scary about realising a life long ambition? Well, everything I guess. There’s nothing scarier than the realisation that the one thing you always hoped to do one day, is the one thing you have to do today, because you’re running out of time and you’ve run out of excuses.

For one thing, there’s the fear that what you produce, as a writer, will be so far removed from what you originally conceived, you might as well not have bothered. Nothing you write is ever as great as it appears in that white hot moment of inspiration and the longer you put it off, the more you worry you’re going to mess it up. There’s also the fear that you’re just not up to the job. That you’re never going to have the skill or the talent to make it happen. That was the scariest part of writing these stories, but it wasn’t scary enough to stop me altogether.

Because eventually I realised that unless I faced those fears, I was never going to be the writer I always wanted to be. If I didn’t try to realise my lifelong ambition then what was the point of being a writer in the first place? Yeah it scared me, but being a horror writer I should have realised that the best things I’ve ever done with my life (getting married, having kids, starting my dream project) were always the most scary. That’s why, as I’ve said before, the scariest part of writing anything is always the most important.

Jasper Bark: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Final Cut: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Run to Ground: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Jasper Bark is infectious — and there’s no known cure. If you’re reading this then you’re already at risk of contamination. The symptoms will begin to manifest any moment now. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no itching or unfortunate rashes, but you’ll become obsessed with his books, from the award winning collections Dead Air and Stuck on You and Other Prime Cuts, to cult novels like The Final Cut and acclaimed graphic novels such as Bloodfellas and Beyond Lovecraft. Soon you’ll want to tweet, post and blog about his work until thousands of others fall under its viral spell. We’re afraid there’s no way to avoid this, these words contain a power you are hopeless to resist. You’re already in their thrall and have been from the moment you clicked onto this page. Even now you find yourself itching to read the rest of his work. Don’t fight it, embrace the urge and wear your obsession with pride!

Devastating news. Gene Wilder has passed away at the age of 83.

Goodbye, funny man. The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory are all iconic films, but Young Frankenstein will always be in my top five and so much of that has to do with Wilder’s presence, timing, and delivery. In fact, I found him to be a warm and welcome presence in every film he was in. Rest in peace, Dr. “Frahnkensteen.”