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Join multiple award-nominated and critically acclaimed New York City authors Karen Heuler, John C. Foster, and Nicholas Kaufmann for a night of thrills, chills, and astonishment!

Come for the amazing stories, stay for the glamorous prizes*! What better way to spend a winter’s night?

Thursday, January 17th
7 PM – 9 PM
Otto’s Shrunken Head – 584 East 14th Street, between Ave A and Ave B

Karen Heuler is the author of The Inner City, In Search of Lost Time, Other Places, and others.

John C. Foster is the author of Mister White, Night Roads, The Isle, and others.

Nicholas Kaufmann is the author of Dying Is My Business, In the Shadow of the Axe, 100 Fathoms Below, and others.

Feel free to RSVP at the Facebook event page if you like. Hope to see you there!

* Prizes may not be glamorous.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Dino Parenti, whose debut collection is Dead Reckoning and Other Stories. Here is the publisher’s description:

An emotional sampler of life on Earth as it once was.

In this collection of sixteen dark, literary tales, disparate characters and their descendants twine and interconnect throughout America from the rural seventies to the post-apocalyptic, stitching together a nefarious mosaic of experiences.

Whether delving into the exploits of a murderous police officer and a lapsing priest engaged in a battle of wills in the sun-blasted dunes of Death Valley, or an anthropologist couple sorting their infertility issues after inadvertently unleashing an Ice Age killer plague, or a mysterious ferry in the Pacific Northwest holding the darkest secrets of a private eye’s final case, or a man so obsessed with touching the infinite that he eagerly volunteers for a one-way mission to preserve the final remnants of mankind, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories ultimately yields a kind of found almanac for human posterity.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Dino Parenti:

Many years ago I saw a news report about a rapid onset infection that mercilessly ate away at a man in Australia. It started as something seemingly benign — a minor nick from a farming implement as he dug a sluice canal from a stream to his crop patch. Within 72 hours, doctors had amputated both his legs in increments, and had started on his arms before he finally succumbed to full-body sepsis.

Years later, I read another similar account, this one in Canada about a woman, scratched by a squirrel she was hand feeding, who was likewise engaged in a race as to what would reduce flesh and bone from her body faster: infection, or the surgeon’s knife. This time I took note of the condition: necrotizing fasciitis.

It’s more common name is the flesh-eating bacteria, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t eat so much as quickly kills the soft tissue. And like a severe burn, the affected area needs to be either quickly treated or pared away before it starts to infect surrounding tissue, which it does at an alarming rate.

After the initial wave of horror and sympathy for these people overcame me, the writer within reared its head and began ticking off scenarios. How can this ghastly condition work itself into a story? Can this condition provide the ticking-time-bomb element in a narrative?

I’m not proud of my muse’s suspect timing, but all you writers out there know well of its fickle and often cold interventions.

The research of necrotizing fasciitis was, in a word (or two), bloody awful. The images of putrefying flesh and flaying skin have not left my mind, even four years since having written it. It was one of the most trying writing experiences of my life. I couldn’t help but imagine how I’d react to seeing these horrific things happening to my own body. But as shocking as it must be to watch pieces of you discolor, leak, shrivel, and blacken — only to then have a surgeon slice said piece from your body — I got to wondering about the psychological toll that must take on the victim. It happens so fast, is there even time to put it all in perspective in the way perhaps a longer-acting affliction like cancer might offer? To craft a coping mechanism to keep you from losing your mind over such a quick turnaround?

That became the challenge and thrust of my story, “Tooth,” contained in my collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories.

A college student named Clara, prideful of her looks and audacity, and freshly ensconced in a new relationship, is suddenly faced with having pieces of her quickly lopped from her head-to-toe. In the crafting of the story, it was soon made manifest that no intricate plot threads were required, no ticking-time-bombs or last minute recoveries as artifice. Rather, Clara’s challenge of dealing with her rapidly looming death became the thrust. The horror of resolving all your life’s fears and existential trials within a span of hours instead of decades, this as you’re being physically reduced in volume each day you still manage to remain alive. It became an obsession in a way, allowing myself to steep in the idea that this microscopic thing inside of you that few antibiotics in the world can tame is killing you through a kind of insidious, inside-out digestion. The thought suddenly reduced more grander external horrors — torture, burning alive, wild animal attack, plane crash, home invasion — to child’s play in comparison. Your own body failing you as the ultimate horror.

I now diligently wash out every little nick and cut before smothering it under a thick bead of Neosporin.

Dead Reckoning and Other Stories: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Dino Parenti: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

Dino Parenti is a writer of dark literary and speculative fiction. He is the winner of the first annual Lascaux Reviewflash fiction contest and is featured in the Anthony Award-winning anthology Blood on the Bayou.  His work can be found in Pantheon Magazine, Menacing Hedge, Pithead Chapel, as well as other anthologies. He is a fiction editor at Gamut Magazineand a member of the HWA. His short-fiction collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories, was just released with Crystal Lake Publishing. When not purging his soul into a laptop thanks to a far-too-early exposure to Stephen King, Scorsese movies, and Camus, he can be found photographing the odd junk pile, building furniture, or earning a few bucks as a CAD drafter. He lives in Los Angeles.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Lisa de Nikolits, whose newest novel is Rotten Peaches. Here is the publisher’s description:

Rotten Peaches is a gripping epic filled with disturbing and unforgettable insights into the human condition. Love, lust, race and greed. How far will you go? Two women. Two men. One happy ending. It takes place in Canada, the U.S. and South Africa. Nature or nurture. South Africa, racism and old prejudices — these are hardly old topics but what happens when biological half-siblings meet with insidious intentions? Can their moral corruption be blamed on genetics — were they born rotten to begin with? And what happens when they meet up with more of their ilk? What further havoc can be wreaked, with devastating familial consequences?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Lisa de Nikolits:

It’s 3a.m. in the morning. I am alone on a farm in South Africa, three hours north of Johannesburg. Three armed men are on their way to rape and kill me. They are armed with knives, hammers and metal pipes. They aren’t wearing balaclavas or trying to hide their faces in any way.

They have planned this down to the last detail, the lock on the panic room door is destroyed, the bolt rendered useless.

No one knows I am here. I came back without thinking or planning. I returned to my childhood home in haste and anger and I will pay the price with my life.

That’s a scene from Rotten Peaches. And you might think it was the scariest part to write but it wasn’t. It gave me goosebumps for sure and I felt every blow of the battle as if I were there and I was filled with utter exhaustion when it was over.

But I had faith in my protagonist to hold her own — in that instance.

Rotten Peaches has two protagonists and they are both damaged and dangerous women. Bernice and Leonie. There’s not much that scares them but at certain points of the book, they both lose control of their actions and that, for me, was the scariest part to write.

Being in a dangerous situation is one thing but when you are emotionally weakened and you let things slide away from you — well, that’s what scares me!

Bernice, protagonist #1, is conned out of a million bucks by her no-good lover. She’s down in the dumps (understandably!) and she decides to leave town. She’s drinking in an airport hotel bar and the barman asks her if she’d like to party and, on a whim, reckless and angry, she agrees.

She leaves with him in his broken down car, with no idea of where they are going. She smokes a joint and the world starts to spin out of control. They get to the party, a wild affair with fires burning in oil drums and naked people leaping in and out of the pool, with palm trees swaying in the wind and she takes more drugs, spurred by her anger. She wants to punish those who have hurt her by hurting herself even more. She loses sight of the bartender and she ends up alone. How will she get back to her hotel? This is Johannesburg, you don’t just call a cab. Plus she has lost her purse with her phone. She is surrounded by a bunch of drunk strangers and she’s stoned out of her mind. She is at her most vulnerable.

Leonie, protagonist #2, is betrayed by her lover. He left her to marry a sugar granny and her heart is broken. Leonie works the trade show circuit, selling cosmetics. She’s also a kleptomaniac with a penchant for self-medicating and she takes one too many Xanax to drown out the pain of having to see her lover with his new wife. Hardly able to walk, she accepts a security guard’s offer to escort her to her hotel room.

When there, he tries to rape her. How does she rally? I don’t want to give the game away!

I guess those are my own worst fears — that I could end up in one of those situations. One generally associates those sorts of things happening to kids but it can happen just as easily to adults. You get tired, right? You want to let off a bit of steam, or you’re hurt or angry and you just want to escape from reality for a while. But you may suffer devastating consequences.

My writing is all about catastrophic what-if consequences. My novels have been called angst-filled reading and Flare magazine said (of Rotten Peaches) that “you can’t look away” which is exactly my goal! Hook the reader in so that they can’t look away! And if I, the writer, don’t find the scenes scary, then no one else will — I am the first reader who has to be convinced and moved by the power of the prose!

Thank you very much for having me as a guest here today Nick, and I hope readers will enjoy this post!

Rotten Peaches: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound / Inanna Publications

Lisa de Nikolits: Website / Facebook

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has lived in Canada since 2000. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy and has lived in the U.S.A., Australia and Britain. No Fury Like That, her seventh novel, will be published in Italian, under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo, in 2019. Previous works include: The Hungry Mirror (winner 2011 IPPY Gold Medal); West of Wawa (winner 2012 IPPY Silver Medal); A Glittering Chaos (winner 2016 Bronze IPPY Medal); The Witchdoctor’s Bones; Between The Cracks She Fell (winner 2016 for Contemporary Fiction); and The Nearly Girl. Lisa lives and writes in Toronto. Her ninth novel, The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution, is forthcoming in 2019.

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m delighted to host my friend Christa Carmen, whose debut story collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, is already getting a lot of buzz. Here is the publisher’s description:

A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.

In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Christa Carmen:

Much of what we observe in horror films never results in the creation of fears or phobias in the everyday world that we inhabit. Sure, we may check the basement, or peer out the window into the shadowy backyard upon watching The Conjuring or You’re Next, but for the most part, we navigate the mundanities of life confident that our cars won’t turn evil, our dogs won’t turn rabid, and a day at the beach won’t turn into an installment of everyone’s favorite week-long television block of shark-based programming.

There is one horror film-founded fear, however, that’s not only warranted, but backed by statistics, perpetuated by home security system companies and gun manufacturers, and illustrated with dismal regularity on the local evening news, where reports of random break-ins and armed robberies roll in.

The home invasion narrative is one that can incite vivid fantasies; certainly you wouldn’t hide, trembling and helpless, beneath your bed. You would face your foe with courage, brandishing butcher knives from once-benevolent kitchen blocks, collecting other household objects with which to make your siege: bedposts, hairpins, car keys, golf clubs.

Needless to say, I felt that getting the final scene of my short story, “Red Room,” right, was imperative to highlighting a rather universal fear (what human throughout history has not placed the soundness of their shelter above most else?), to capitalize on that dread initiated with Marci’s discovery of the first inexplicable, gore-saturated photo on her phone.

The inspiration behind this story, appearing in my debut collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and first published in the January 2018 issue of Unnerving Magazine, is a bit more true-to-life than that of many of my other works of short fiction. The story is about a woman who, despite her fiancé’s belief to the contrary, is convinced she should be concerned by the gruesome photos appearing on her phone, and whose fear proves justified in a rather ghastly, albeit unexpected way.

On April 13, 2017, Tor.com published an article by Emily Asher-Perrin entitled, “The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror and the Intuition of Women.” The piece examines one of the most overdone tropes in horror: that of the woman who feels that something is off, but is disbelieved and brushed off by everyone, right up until the moment the chainsaw begins to rev, or zombies break down the door. The article discusses how every woman knows what this feels like, and how “women know that it’s their responsibility to prevent harm from coming to them.”

Not long after reading this article, something odd happened. I awoke the morning after a wedding to a series of photographs on my phone that I did not take. The photos were of two men in a bar, and they had an eerie, old-fashioned feel that lent them a patina of wrongness as palpable as any Instagram filter. The next day, at a post-wedding brunch, the topic of the mysterious photos came up. The reaction from several men in the group was that, one way or another, I had to have been the cause of these photos appearing on my phone. “You probably just screenshotted them from a website,” or “you must have accidentally downloaded them.” I don’t drink, so the activities of the night before were clear in my mind. This complete unwillingness to believe that the photos had appeared through no action of mine collided in my head with the echoes of Asher-Perrin’s article, and “Red Room” was the result.

With the story’s general idea established, I discovered very quickly that both the culmination of Marci and Caleb’s disagreements and the showdown between them and the deranged, dangerous men that had left visual evidence of an untold number of murders on Marci’s phone, would take place in the master bedroom, a location of regular discontent for the on-the-rocks couple.

To set the scene for those who have not yet read the story, Marci awakes alone in their room after yet another argument with Caleb. A floorboard creaks. The ceiling fan is still, the face of the alarm clock, dark. An exhalation of breath comes from the black pit of the closet. Gathering her courage, Marci sprints for the living room. She rouses Caleb, tells him there is someone in the house, and watches as he assembles those items — a flashlight and a butcher knife — they’ll require to make their stand. Together, they creep toward the bedroom.

The subsequent chain of events was heavily influenced by one particular scene in the 2008 Bryan Bertino-directed film, The Strangers, in which Liv Tyler’s character has already been terrorized by a series of slowly escalating assaults on her home, when out of nowhere, shattering the silence and causing the audience to feel as if their equilibrium has suddenly been thrown off-kilter, the needle drops on the record player and a song begins to skip, over and over and over again, the grating quality of the sound clearly adding to Kristen McKay’s inability to quell her panic.

Back in Caleb and Marci’s bedroom, the power flashes on. Music blares from the reanimated clock radio, and they shout to be heard over the deceptively upbeat chords of a techno song. It’s their final, bitter fight. The noise, chaos, bright lights, whirring ceiling fan, and high emotion provide the ultimate distraction for what happens next.

I won’t give it away, but I hope that those who read “Red Room” will be reminded of why they should lock their doors, bolt their windows, and most importantly, never, ever disregard a significant other’s warning when she says she feels like something’s wrong.

Maybe the unfortunate events of my story will do for you what all the young women begging not to visit secluded cabins in the woods could not. Maybe it will teach you to listen, and to believe. Then again, maybe it won’t. Who am I to convince you of the nefariousness of a few photographs?

I’m sure it’s nothing, after all. I’m sure everything will be just fine…

Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Christa Carmen: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Goodreads / Amazon Author Page