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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author J.R.R.R. Hardison, whose latest novel is Demon Freaks. Here is the publisher’s description:

It’s the night before the SAT test. The forces of darkness are stirring.

Twin brothers, Bing and Ron Slaughter, know they’ve got to cram like their lives depend on it because their college plans sure do. If they don’t ace the test, they’ll be doomed to spend the rest of their days flipping burgers at the McDonald’s their parents run. That’s why they hatch a plan to meet up with the members of their punk band, the Ephits, spend the night studying at a secluded cabin in the woods, and maybe squeeze in a little jamming. What could go wrong with a brilliant plan like that?

Ancient evil. That’s what.

As a cataclysmic lightning storm rolls in, Bing, Ron and the rest of the Ephits find themselves tangled in a sinister plot to summon a demon. Yes, demons are real. To survive the night, the band must find a malevolent artifact, battle bloodthirsty monsters and stand against the most dangerous and powerful foe humanity has ever faced…the Golfer’s Association.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for J.R.R.R. Hardison:

I do OK in caves, but I don’t love them. It’s an imagination thing. I see possibilities — and I see them more clearly the darker my surroundings get. People get lost in caves, they get trapped in them, drowned in them. They succumb to hypothermia, starvation, bad air. And there are bugs. Troglobites, they call them. I’m not fond of bugs, especially not odd, pale, never-seen-the-light-of-day, bulging-blind-eyed troglobites that might get on you while you can’t see them, or worse, crawl up your nose when you’re dead.

My cave paranoia increases in regards to the safety of other people. That’s not because I’m altruistic. It’s just because I’ve always been pretty lucky, and I feel like I would probably blunder my way out of any subterranean void in which I was lost. But my luck doesn’t extend to other people, like my wife, and I don’t trust my adventurer skills anywhere near enough to believe I could help someone else if something went wrong. If a part of the cave floor gave way and a fellow explorer was hanging over the edge of a lightless abyss, I’m pretty sure their desperate fingers would slip through my clumsy grasp. If underground floodwaters suddenly surged around our necks, it seems like a foregone conclusion that I’d be unable to hold my breath long enough to pull my submerged companion from the icy deluge. And if a falling stalactite pinned a loved one, my well-intentioned but misguided attempt to get help would only result in blind wanderings that would doom her bones to molder in eternal darkness.

All of this is a long way of saying that the scariest part for me in writing Demon Freaks was a sudden silence in the lightless void below the craggy slopes of Mt. St. Helens. I’d decided to visit some caves to prepare for writing the sequence in which two of the central characters are lost in a maze of tunnels and caverns under the clubhouse of the evil Golfers’ Association. For the record, it is a mistake to first research the dangers of caves before physically going into them. Google searching turns up a wide array of stories that all begin by coupling a cave name with the capitalized word disaster, and then end with people dying. The Nutty Putty Cave Disaster, the Mossdale Cavern Disaster, the Cave Creek Disaster…the list goes on. The National Speleological Society also keeps a handy official Journal of Record of Caving Accidents and Safety Incidents that tracks American caving mishaps going back to 1961. The incident entries in this journal are suggestively spare, like, “Fatality. Falling stone,” and “Fatality. Fell into pit.”

After all that reading, it was with some trepidation that I found myself joining various cave tours and forcing myself to hang back just far enough from the group to lose sight of the others. But I never felt really unsafe. Even if I managed to get separated from the group, a guy with a walkie talkie would undoubtedly track me down, or another tour would come along in ten minutes. More often than not, a tour guide would just say, “Sir, please keep up.”

So that’s why I finally decided to visit a nearby cave on an unguided tour with my wife. At 2.5 miles, Ape Cave is the longest continuous lava tube in the continental United States. It’s not a particularly dangerous cave, but as the website ominously informs you, “No cave can ever be considered completely safe.” They urge you to wear warm, heavy clothes (it’s generally about 42 degrees inside), to bring at least two light sources with spare batteries, and to never touch the walls. Never touch the walls? Yes. They harbor “cave slime,” which sounds like it might eat you alive, but is actually just an important food source for the troglofauna — the various creatures that live in the cave.

On the drive out to the cave, I managed to get myself a little worked up about the whole thing, much to my wife’s amusement. This was going to be just the two of us, inside miles of inky dark lava tube, no guide to pull our bacon out of the fire. She was rolling her eyes, but I was almost ready to turn back. Then we arrived at the site and found it swarming with other weekend thrill-seekers and inexperienced cavers. It was not just going to be the two of us.

Yes, it was a very cool way to spend an afternoon. Yes, there were a few heart-racing moments that involved scaling a slick lava wall or scrambling on our bellies through narrow crevices. And yes, I saw a few fearsome cave crickets. But for the most part, it was a pretty tame adventure.

There was one moment we found ourselves alone and out of ear shot of the crowds. We were crouched below a bulging ceiling of blobby black rock in a section of tube about six feet across, and I suggested we turn off our lights to get a better feel for the darkness. The second we flicked our switches, we were blind. In the absence of other sound, my wife’s breathing seemed very loud. Then there was a soft scrabbling and the sound of her breathing stopped. It just stopped.

I listened, strained actually, to catch the whisper of another breath. I reached out, groping for her in the pitch. But there was nothing. Nothing. The eyes of my imagination opened wide and beheld every account of every caving disaster spread before me. “Fatality,” I thought. “Fell into pit.”

And then someone else’s flashlight beam hit us. There was my wife a few feet further than expected, caught in the act of creeping away, a big grin on her face. She insists that she was just “helping” my writing process by holding her breath so that I could feel the full effect of the cave. Me, I don’t believe that for a second.

Demon Freaks: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

J.R.R.R. Hardison: Website / Twitter

Jim has worked as a writer, screen writer, animator and director in entertainment and commercials since graduating from Columbia College of Chicago in 1988. He is the author of The Helm, which YALSA praised as one of 2010’s best graphic novels for young readers, and has directed animated commercial and entertainment projects, including spots for M&M’s, AT&T, and Kellogg’s. He co-founded Character LLC in 2000 and has given story advice to many of the world’s largest brands, such as Target, Verizon, Samsung, McDonalds and Walmart, and has even appeared on NBC’s The Apprentice as an expert adviser on brand characters. Jim lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two kids and two dogs. Fish Wielder, Jim’s debut novel, was released in 2016, and Demon Freaks, his second novel, was released in October 2017.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Tracy Townsend, whose debut novel is The Nine. Here is the publisher’s description:

A book that some would kill for…

Black market courier Rowena Downshire is doing everything she can to stay off the streets and earn enough to pay her mother’s way to freedom. But an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares.

The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, but when a frightened and empty-handed courier shows up on his doorstep he knows better than to turn her away. What he discovers leads him to ask for help from the last man he wants to see — the former mercenary, Anselm Meteron.

Reverend Phillip Chalmers awakes in a cell, bloodied and bruised, facing a creature twice his size. Translating a stolen book that writes itself may be his only hope for survival; however, he soon learns the text may have been written by the Creator himself, tracking the nine human subjects of his Grand Experiment. In the wrong hands, it could mean the end of humanity.

This unlikely team must try to keep the book from those who would misuse it. But how can they be sure who the enemy is when they can barely trust each other? And what will happen to them when it reveals a secret no human was meant to know?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Tracy Townsend:

It took every ounce of my will to keep from answering the phone on the first ring.

It was a Monday morning, and I was waiting for the call from the literary agent who’d read my manuscript with such fervor, we’d spent the last weekend chatting over email about my career. He’d read the whole manuscript in five days, then scheduled a call. We were to discuss a revise and resubmit, something he didn’t usually handle over the phone. This was Very Serious Business.

When my phone finally blazed to life, I did my best to be good. Disciplined. Focused. Professional. And I was, mostly.

I answered halfway through the second ring.

The conversation glowed with praise and visions of my potential. The agent had been looking for a writer of adult fantasy for while. He wanted something smart, nuanced, and dark. Something stylistically complex. He saw the right signs in The Nine. I listened. I paced. I always pace when I’m on the phone. It helps keep me from talking too fast. When we got to the part about the agent’s concerns, I had to sit down and take notes. Everything was fine (my now pent-up energy notwithstanding) until we got to his last concern.

“About the aigamuxa,” he said. “I’m not sure about them.”

My heart had been racing. Suddenly, it clogged with an emotion I couldn’t quite parse. Disappointment. Frustration. And, yes. Fear. I was ready to hear that he thought ogre-like antagonists with eyes on their feets were just too weird. Or that he wasn’t sure how they could be perceived as a threat, given that bizarre anatomy. I was ready for any of a half-dozen skeptical reactions to The Nine’s antagonist species, because I’d fielded them already with beta readers and critique partners. I wasn’t ready for this conversation, though.

“I think fantasy readers need a villain they can hate or fear. Something morally concrete. The aigamuxa,” he paused. “They actually have good reason to hate human beings. They were colonized and enslaved. Now they live on the margin of society, without any rights or security. Of course they hate people. Anybody would. How can you ask the reader to see them as the monsters?”

I blurted the words out before I could stop myself. “That’s not what I want at all.” So much for being professional.

My pen dropped from my hand, rolling off the notepad to sit beside my keyboard. What was I thinking? This agent had New York Times bestsellers on his list. Clients with movie deals secured on their debut novels. “Sold at auction” was quickly becoming his middle name. Why wasn’t I just saying, “Of course! I can change that!”?

“Let me explain,” I said, getting back to my feet to pace. I took a breath and tried to speak slowly. “The aigamuxa aren’t villains. They’re antagonists — the ones who oppose. And they are people. They may have claws and razor teeth and eyes on their feet, but they’re still people. They’re not wrong to hate humanity. I want the reader to recognize that. I want the reader to be afraid for the protagonists and to root for them and also recognize that what threatens them isn’t just evil for its own sake.”

“But readers need to know they’re on the right side. Tell you what. What if the aigamuxa are this proud warrior people and they lost some battle to humanity, and then got left alone to lick their wounds, so now they want revenge for the blow to their pride? Like Germany after World War I, perhaps?”

I shook my head. “My characters have done terrible things. They aren’t the good guys. And mankind isn’t, either. They’ve treated the world like it only exists to fuel their knowledge of divinity, or like it’s some kind of puzzle God wants them to solve. If they were only good, what’s so scary about a book that records God’s judgments? What would anybody have to be afraid of, if we could be sure we were in the right? I don’t want to coddle my readers. I don’t want a story with neat moral boundaries and tidy, clean conflicts. It’s full of wounded hearts and people who have been done wrong. Monsters should get the same treatment.”

Another pause. “It’s your story. You should do what you think is right. I’m just not sure that’s going to work.”

We talked a little more, then hung up. Months later, I sent him the revision. As it turns out, the agent didn’t think it worked, but another agent did, and offered representation just hours after the first emailed his regrets. We went on to sell my book of washed-up mercenaries and antagonists with just causes and heroes with baggage and existential uncertainties. Fighting to keep my monsters human (and my humans a little monstrous) was the scariest part of The Nine because it was a battle for the soul of the book itself. I hadn’t set out to do something simple with my readers’ hearts, even if might sell more easily or get better reviews. I had set out to explore what scares me about human nature, what hope we have of redeeming ourselves, and what happens when we’re called to account for the wrongs we’ve done.

I had to write a book I was too scared to give up on. I hope it scares you the same way.

The Nine: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Tracy Townsend: Website / Twitter / Goodreads

Tracy Townsend holds a master’s degree in writing and rhetoric from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from DePauw University, a source of regular consternation when proofreading her credentials. She is a past chair of the English Department at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an elite public boarding school, where she currently teaches creative writing and science fiction and fantasy literature. She has been a martial arts instructor, a stage combat and accent coach, and a short-order cook for houses full of tired gamers. Now she lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois with two bumptious hounds, two remarkable children, and one very patient husband. Her debut novel, The Nine, is the first in the Thieves of Fate series, published by Pyr November 14, 2017.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Mark S. Bacon, whose new novel is Desert Kill Switch. Here is the publisher’s description:

A Deadly Vegas Pursuit — with a Twist…

On an empty desert road, stressed-out ex-cop Lyle Deming finds a bullet-riddled body next to a vintage mint-condition 1970s Pontiac Firebird. When he returns to the scene with sheriff’s deputies: no car, no body. Does the answer lie in Nostalgia City, the retro theme park where Lyle works?

Nostalgia City VP Kate Sorensen, a former college basketball star, is in Reno, Nevada, on park business when she gets mixed up with a sleazy Las Vegas auto dealer who puts hidden “kill switches” and GPS trackers into the cars he sells to low-income buyers. Miss a payment — sometimes by as little as a few days — and your car is dead. Maybe you are, too.

When Kate’s accused of murder in Reno, Lyle rushes to help his blonde not-quite-girlfriend. Kate and Lyle plow through a deadly tangle of suspects and motives, hitting one dead end after another, as they struggle to exonerate Kate, catch a blackmailer, save a witness’s life, and find the missing car and corpse.

Desert Kill Switch is the second novel in this mystery series set in Nostalgia City, an Arizona theme park that re-creates — in every detail — a small town as it would have appeared in the mid-1970s.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Mark S. Bacon:

In 2013 a 43-year-old woman was found naked, dehydrated, burned from the sun and covered in cactus spikes. She’d spent five days in the Texas Chihuahuan Desert. She’d taken off her clothes in a vain attempt to cool off. Lucky to be alive, she had been hiking with her husband when they got lost. He managed to bring help.

A French couple hiking in the desert in New Mexico year later were not so lucky. The couple didn’t have enough water for their trek. The shadeless, 100-degree day brought dehydration, disorientation, heat stroke and death.

Deserts of the American Southwest, especially in summer, can be forbidding, unforgiving — and scary — places. The highest temperature recorded in Death Valley, California, was 134 degrees. In Arizona the record is 128. Weeks of 100+ are not unusual. Tarantulas, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters survive in the desert. People have a harder time. This is why I chose the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada as the centerpiece for my new mystery, Desert Kill Switch.

In peak summer desert heat you can lose almost a half-gallon of water just by sweating. Under these conditions, without water, you can feel the effects of dehydration within an hour. Overexertion and exposure can be a deadly combination.

Kate Sorensen, my tall blonde protagonist, is falsely accused of murdering a sleazy Las Vegas car dealer. When she thinks she’s exhausted every possibility to clear herself, she finds a witness who can help. But she and the young woman are stranded in the middle of the Nevada desert on an August afternoon.

People not familiar with the Southwest think that deserts such as the Mojave or Great Basin are filled with waves of bare sand dunes. But Sahara-like formations are the exception. Most of the Southwest desert is rocky scrubland, often mountainous, covered with chaparral, creosote bushes, sage, cactus and other plants that can survive in arid climate.

Kate and her young charge may be lucky. They found a road. But Southwest deserts are crisscrossed with little-used trails, abandoned mining roads and animal paths. Some desert soil is gritty sand, but much of it is fine. When you’re hiking along a desert trail, the dust coats your face and finds its way into every crevice of your body. Wipe the sweat from your brow and it leaves muddy streaks across your face.

With their water exhausted and the unrelenting sun beating down, the two female travelers trudge forward, their clothes sticking to their backs with sweat. Ahead they see a cloud. A car speeds toward them, kicking up dust like a brown ghost across the horizon. Someone has found them.

Inside the car however, are Chechen thugs, partners of the men who stranded the women in the first place. This new group wants to have some fun with the women — the blonde especially — then haul them to an even more remote spot where they’ll leave them without water, maybe without clothes. Their bodies won’t be found for months — if at all.

It was the most scary part for me writing it because I’ve lived in the Southwest much of my life and I know how dangerous the desert can be, how the heat and blinding sun can suck the energy out of you. The difference between 95 degrees and 110 can be the difference between functioning and frying. As I was writing, I could see the desperation that would quickly grip someone in Kate’s position. Even though I was in control of the story, the circumstances — to be realistic — could easily mean death for my protagonist and the other young woman.

Desert Kill Switch: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Mark S. Bacon: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Mark S. Bacon began his career as a southern California newspaper police reporter, one of his crime stories becoming key evidence in a murder case that spanned decades. After working for two newspapers, he moved to advertising and marketing when he became a copywriter for Knott’s Berry Farm, the large theme park down the road from Disneyland. Experience working at Knott’s formed part of the inspiration for his creation of Nostalgia City theme park. Before turning to fiction, Bacon wrote business books including Do-It-Yourself Direct Marketing, printed in four languages and three editions and named best business book of the year by Library Journal. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Antonio Express News, and many other publications. Most recently he was a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. He taught journalism as a member of the adjunct faculty at Cal Poly University — Pomona, University of Redlands, and the University of Nevada – Reno. He earned an MA in mass media from UNLV and a BA in journalism from Fresno State.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Douglas Wynne, whose new novel is Cthulhu Blues, the third volume of the SPECTRA Files trilogy. Here is the publisher’s description:

The Wade House has been reduced to ash, but the dreams that plagued Becca Philips and Jason Brooks when they slept in that abomination continue to haunt them. After years of facing trans-dimensional monsters in the service of SPECTRA, a few lingering nightmares are to be expected. But when Becca starts singing in her sleep — an ancient song that conjures dreadful things from mirrored surfaces — she fears that the harmonics she was exposed to during the Red Equinox terror event may have mutated not only her perception, but also her voice. It’s a gift — or curse — that she shares with a select group of children born to other witnesses of the incursion.

While a shadowy figure known as the “Crimson Minstrel” gathers these children to form an infernal choir, something ancient stirs on the ocean floor. And Becca, hearing its call, once again finds herself running from an agency she can no longer trust into the embrace of cosmic forces she can barely comprehend.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Douglas Wynne:

Unless there’s a large measure of luck involved, my son usually kicks my ass at board games. My wife recently had a good laugh when, following one of these whuppins, I exclaimed, “Daddy’s not a strategist! That’s why he doesn’t outline his books!”

When I wrote my first Lovecraftian thriller, Red Equinox, I knew the ending set the stage for a potential sequel, but as someone who doesn’t plan ahead much, I’m tempted to say that the scariest part was committing to writing a series without knowing how it would end. After all, when I’m working on a single novel, I get to go back and make changes to the early chapters in light of what I’ve learned along the way. Improvising the first draft frees me up to follow whatever path feels right for the characters, knowing that rewrites will give me the opportunity to fine tune and correct for continuity.

There are no rewrites for published books.

So it was a leap of faith for me to put plot lines out there that suggested certain story possibilities but for which I couldn’t predict the trajectory.

The biggest cliffhanger that I left dangling at the end of Red Equinox had to do with a generation of children born to witnesses of a cosmic terrorism event in Boston in 2019. In that first book Darius Marlowe — an MIT student and radicalized young member of the Starry Wisdom Church — takes the apocalyptic prophecies of his religion to heart and creates a device he calls the Voicebox of the Gods. The infernal machine is inspired by Darius’ occult communion with Nyarlathotep (H.P. Lovecraft’s dark analog of the Egyptian god Thoth) and is a hybrid 3D printed/lab grown larynx capable of producing harmonics that humans lost the ability to chant aeons ago. Darius mounts the larynx in a boom box and sets it off on a subway train in Cambridge, unleashing cosmic mayhem on the passengers. This union of ancient incantations with cutting edge tech alters the perception of the bystanders, allowing them to see and be seen by monstrous gods from another dimension. As you can imagine, all hell breaks loose.

By the end of the novel, all of the witnesses — with the exceptions of main characters Becca Philips and Agent Jason Brooks — have taken a drug called Nepenthe to shut their extra perception down. In the second book, Black January, children born of parents exposed to the harmonics exhibit the ability to perceive trans-dimensional entities and eventually develop biological mutations that enable them to sing mantras endowed with the power to align our world with that of the Great Old Ones.

In Cthulhu Blues, the third and final book of the SPECTRA Files Trilogy, another avatar of Nyarlathotep known as the Crimson Minstrel arises. Wandering between worlds, this shadowy figure appears to the gifted children in mirrored surfaces and lures them into a twilight realm via seductive music that resonates with the ancient power they have inherited.

Becca, our heroine, has no children of her own but becomes invested in finding and saving the child of a friend and even protecting the child of a family of cultists who may want to contribute to the apocalyptic return of their slumbering gods. Unfortunately, having refused the drug that would have shut her abilities down, Becca also has to contend with the mutation of her own voice and the possibility that she is herself becoming something monstrous, or something to be used in the service of monsters.

As a parent, I worry about all kinds of influences on my child. Everything, from the ingredients in his food to the contents of a phone in the hands of another kid on the school bus, presents potentially dangerous variables; more of them beyond my control with each passing year. I try to keep these in perspective. But I’m also aware that some otherwise rational members of my generation have succumbed to paranoia about vaccines, putting all of us at risk due to the fear that a trace of mercury (another name for the messenger of the gods) might alter their child’s brain.

It’s a powerful fear — the prospect that a child who depends on you for their wellbeing, your precious responsibility to whom you devote so much care and caution, so much nurturing and bonding, could change into something you can’t relate to in the same way.

Of course, that’s also what awaits us to some degree as our children grow up. And some of the best parents I count among my friends have navigated Aspergers and Autism with more grace and resourcefulness than most of us bring to lesser challenges. In other cases, we worry that our children will inherit the same mental and physical ailments that plague us, or our parents.

The mutations I put the children through in Cthulhu Blues are far more chilling than the ones most of us worry about in the real world. In the end, the trilogy without an outline worked out as if I had planned it (and I believe there’s always more intelligent design going on at the subconscious level than the writer is aware of). But imagining a red-robed minstrel with blue fire flickering in his hair, plucking a guitar and leading glassy-eyed children across a twilight shore to sing hymns to a cold blooded leviathan beneath alien stars…

For me, that was the scariest part.

Cthulhu Blues: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Douglas Wynne: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Douglas Wynne wrote his first dark fantasy novel at the age of fifteen but has never found the courage to take it down from the attic and read it. After a long detour through music school, rock bands, and recording studios, he came full circle back to fiction writing and is recently the author of five novels: The Devil of Echo Lake, Steel Breeze, and the SPECTRA Files trilogy (Red Equinox, Black January, and Cthulhu Blues). He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals.