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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Amy Grech, whose latest collection is Rage and Redemption in Alphabet City. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Amy Grech’s stories shock, like a sudden splash of cold water. This latest collection delivers gritty profiles of people snarled in the crime and seething anger of inner city New York at its most violent. Here you’ll encounter five dark tales — “Rage and Redemption in Alphabet City”, “.38 Special”, Cold Comfort”, “Prevention”, and “Hoi Polloi Cannoli” — actually 12, if you count the literary parts. These startling stories will convince you that Grech is a noir and horror writer you want to watch.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Amy Grech:

I’ve lived in New York City for 19 years now. When I first moved to NYC from Long Island, it was a much darker place than it is today. Back then, certain neighborhoods like Alphabet City and Hell’s Kitchen were covered in graffiti and had a reputation for being dangerous sections of the city, where crime ran rampant. These were not places where young, single women had any business being, but one of my good friends lived in Hell’s Kitchen, so I got a taste of that region of NYC on a regular basis, saw the crime firsthand, albeit from a safe distance, witnessed junkies desperate for a fix and got a sense that desperation bred contempt. I envisioned Alphabet City to be the same way, but much to my surprise when I went there to explore in the early 2000s, there was no graffiti to be seen, condos dominated virtually every street corner and self-absorbed hipsters replaced junkies, a crime-haven no more…

The scariest part of Rage and Redemption in Alphabet City occurs in the lead novella when Ruby Fuji invites Dr. Trevor Braeburn, an eye doctor, back to her apartment in Alphabet City after meeting him in a bar, knowing hardly anything about him. A potent cocktail of overwhelming lust, coupled with lax inhibitions, leads to poor judgment on Ruby’s part, with tragic consequences for the young girl. There’s Rage and Redemption to be had in Alphabet City once her older sister Gia and Mr. Fuji discover the culprit and take matters into their own hands. You might say the eye doctor set his sights on the wrong girl…

I felt extremely uneasy after writing that particular scene, especially because Ruby has unknowingly made herself vulnerable to the lethal whims of a proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. I don’t scare very easily, so it’s very rare for me to create a moment that strikes a nerve and lingers.

As a single woman living in New York City, one of my worst fears is that I’ll meet a guy at a local bar who is handsome, smart and after too many Margaritas, invite him back to my place, only to discover after we’ve hooked up that he has a gun or a knife and intends to kill me. Luckily, all of the guys I’ve dated have been pretty sane so far…

It’s an extremely dangerous, impulsive thing for a single woman to do, invite a stranger back to her apartment for a good time. And yet, thousands of single women do so every night in the Naked City. Some people might say these women are being reckless, setting themselves up for a fatal encounter. How much does she really know about him? Sure, she might know what he does for a living, where he grew up, when his birthday is, but she has no way of knowing if he’s a psychopath intent on doing her harm, until the macabre deed is done.

Amy Grech: Website / Google+ / Twitter

Rage and Redemption in Alphabet City: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Amy Grech has sold over 100 stories to various anthologies and magazines, including Apex Magazine, Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled, Dead Harvest, Expiration Date, Fear on Demand, Funeral Party 2, Inhuman Magazine, Needle Magazine, Reel Dark, Shrieks and Shivers from the Horror Zine, Space & Time, The Horror Within, Under the Bed, and many others. She has stories forthcoming in Detectives of the Fantastic, Volume II and Fright Mare. Amy is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association who lives in Brooklyn.

This week on The Scariest Part, I have the distinct pleasure of hosting my good friend Paul Tremblay, whose latest novel is A Head Full of Ghosts. I’ve known Paul for probably two decades now, and I’ve always been in awe of his writing skills. For all the amazing short stories and novels he’s already written, though, A Head Full of Ghosts might be his best yet. But don’t take my word for it. If you like what he has to say here, check out the book for yourself. I think you’ll agree it’s one of the best of the year. Here’s the publisher’s description:

A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends domestic drama, psychological suspense, and a touch of modern horror, reminiscent of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.

To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface — and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Paul Tremblay:

I tried to construct A Head Full of Ghosts so that reasonable minds could disagree as to whether there was something supernatural going on or the events of the novel could be explained rationally. And, was it an either-or type of situation with no crossover, or was it more like a you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate deal? I don’t know if I’m making sense, but I’m sad that my house is already empty of Halloween candy…

Anyway, for so many horror stories, the scariest part is the idea that reality isn’t necessarily as rational or as real as we think it is. That there’s slippage. And that slippage or liminal space is impossible to define, which makes it even more frightening. This idea of reality or the real story existing within the cracks of things is a big reason why I used as many pop cultural references as I could in the novel. I wanted to put the reader on initially sure, familiar footing, and then slowly undermine it all, bring everything into question, to continually having the reader wondering or asking what was real and what wasn’t. Scarier still is that we and our friends and our loved ones get stuck or trapped in those cracks. And then what the hell are we supposed to do then, right?

That all said, I think Merry gives my thesis statement (does a novel have a thesis statement? Work with me…) almost halfway through the novel when she says, “What does that say about you or anyone else that my sister’s nationally televised psychotic break and descent into schizophrenia wasn’t horrific enough?” Horror that truly terrifies, disturbs, and moves the reader isn’t ultimately about wanting to watch people suffer. Horror at its best is about our human inclination toward empathy, about wanting to and needing to understand why people do the horrible things they do and/or how we survive it, and having the courage to not look away. For me, the most horrific scenes/parts of the novel, the scenes that are most vivid in my own head, are the ones that are the least likely candidates to have a potential supernatural element intruding. These are the scenes of the family falling to pieces under the mounting pressures from all manner of outside forces and from their own bad decisions and personal failures.

There are two scenes in the novel that are the scariest parts of the book for me. One scene is at the end, post-attempted exorcism, and I don’t want to spoil it. The other scene hits at page 55. Merry just finished listening to her parents arguing and goes upstairs to find her older sister Marjorie sitting in the sunroom. Their fun conversation quickly dissolves into Marjorie matter-of-factly threatening to rip out Merry’s tongue. It’s when Merry (and the reader, I hope) realizes that she’s no longer safe in the company of her beloved sister (or her parents for that matter) and she doesn’t know what she or anyone else can do, or if there is anything they can do to help her sister. It’s when she realizes that the devil you know is not always better than the devil you don’t know.

Paul Tremblay: Website / Facebook / Twitter

A Head Full of Ghosts: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Paul Tremblay is the author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, In the Mean Time, and the forthcoming (June 2016) novel Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. He is a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and numerous “year’s best” anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children. He hates pickles.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Martin Rose, whose latest novel is My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he’s no longer a zombie. But after killing his brother Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie’s death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen — without Vitus, that is.

Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie’s messes, but tracking down his brother’s homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. The first of them is a convicted killer assumed to be safely behind bars. However, it appears he is still committing murder through his victim’s dreams. High on Atropine — the drug that once kept him functioning among the living — and lapsing into addiction, Vitus’s grip on reality takes a nasty turn when his own dreams begin slipping sideways.

Vitus’s problems multiply as he deals with his failed friendship with wheelchair-bound officer Geoff Lafferty, his wrecked romance with the town mortician Niko, government agents working for his father, sinister figures lurking in the shadows, and, least of all, the complications of learning how to be human again.

Secret agents, conspiracy theories, broken hearts and lonely souls, the siren song of prescription drugs…in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart, readers are invited to discover life after undeath, where there are no happy endings.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Martin Rose:

If you ask me what the scariest part of My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart is, it’s not the serial killer, who might be haunting the outer edges of half-forgotten nightmares, or the oily Inspector who pulls the strings of human frailty with malevolent, supernatural force, or even the heartless and emotionless Elvedina who dogs Vitus’s every step.

No, what wrings the sweat from me is the cautery.

If you don’t know what a cautery is, it’s an implement designed to burn a wound to sterilize it, staunch bleeding, and help with the healing. Modern day cauteries look so sleek and well designed you could mistake them for pens, and they even come with special tips by which they do their burning. But you haven’t lived until you spend a stint in a veterinarian’s office and on the day the tech calls out sick, they pull you into surgery and plug in a vintage cautery that burns red cherry hot in your hand like a devil’s claw.

I won’t go into the gory details of that surgery — suffice to say that the dog in question will live many happy, healthy years and didn’t feel a thing during his anesthetic — but then, if you’ve ever been in surgery, you probably didn’t feel a thing, either.

The incident stayed with me long after my time at the vet’s office came to an end. The innocuous two-pronged plug revealing the instrument’s outdated age, the minutes ticking by as slowly, the steel rod glows the deep, primal glow of forges, of black smith’s fires, a testament to how brutal medicine truly is — no matter what new and more sterile guises it takes. The healing fire of this most terrible instrument is still, at its base level, an instrument of medieval sensibility. In our modern age, we have forgotten what metal and fire can do in conjunction, the raw power it levers in the world. (Lord knows, my mother, a metalsmith, taught me that.) Our connection to metal and fire reaches deep into an alchemical past, and rings the bell of hidden subconscious. (Like the hot iron shoes forced onto many an evil stepmother in ancient fairy tales, or the vernepator cur, a terrier dog forced to turn a roasting spit by having a red hot coal thrown into the wheel with them to make them run faster.)

The work the cautery does keeps me up at night. It is the manner in which a cautery is utilized beneath the rim of consciousness, unseen during the twilight-sleep of surgery. After all, you don’t receive an itinerary of actions prior to being gassed into unconsciousness. Your hospital bill gives hint to what was done to you, but likely a cautery passed over your flesh and you didn’t flinch, whimper or sigh.

Likewise, Vitus Adamson in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart must spend his twilight hours beneath the glow of a cherry red cautery — the horror is not what happens, as in reality, we see little. It is the hint and the mystery of those unseen moments that churns in the mind and gives rise to suspicion, paranoia and fear. The fear resides in what happens when our attention is focused in the wrong direction and events unfold beneath our level of perception, knowing something was done to you, but not quite what. Fear in the hard choices between uncertainty or death, in giving one’s trust to strangers or monsters, as Vitus must in the moments he is pinned on a gurney, unable to fight back, and tumbling into unconsciousness, trusting that he will make it to the other side, trusting that the cautery will do the work of healing instead of the work of murder.

It is the necessity of the cautery’s sinister application to hurt and heal that terrifies, and renders it the scariest part. I entreat you to feel the burn in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart.

Martin Rose: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr

My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Martin Rose’s fiction spans genres with work appearing in numerous venues, such as Penumbra and Murky Depths, and various anthologies: Urban Green Man, Handsome Devil, and Ominous Realities. Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell, is a horror novel published by Talos in 2014, and has been recognized as one of “Notable Novels of 2014” in Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Melissa Groeling, whose latest novel is Lights Out. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Even when the lights are out, he can still see you…

Paul Holten’s profession doesn’t leave much room for doubt or conscience, but he’s reaching his breaking point. The nightmares are getting worse, the jobs are getting harder to finish, and the volatile relationship with his boss Aaron is falling apart. Now faced with the possibility of an impending death sentence, Paul makes the fatal decision to run. Drawn into one hellish situation after another, he’s forced to confront his dark past — and wonder if perhaps dying isn’t the better option.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Melissa Groeling:

Say you’re scared of heights and clowns and you’re stuck with one at the top of a Ferris wheel. What do you freak out about first — the clown or the height? Say you’re locked in a tiny room with no light and you’re claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. Which one makes you break out in a cold sweat first — the dark or the lack of space? Multiple fears abound but really, how do you decide which one takes priority? Or do you simply play dead and wait for rescue?

I realized about two chapters into writing Lights Out that playing dead would’ve made life a lot easier for my main character, Paul Holten. For him, fear is a constant presence and there were many, many times where I seriously thought that hey, I should really give this guy a break.

But fear is also a great motivator. It pushes Paul to stay alive, to stay one step ahead and if I were to narrow down the scariest of this book, I would have to choose:

The Tunnel and yes, it needs to be capitalized.

This is the place where, as someone in the book so delicately put it, “the trash is taken out.” It’s three-deep in goosebumps. It’s pitch-black. It’s cold. It’s filled with…leftovers and I don’t mean your mother’s meatloaf.

It’s a mixed bag of treats here — sheer panic, adrenaline and of course what we all fear in the dark: the unknown. Mix it all together and the only thing that comes close to The Tunnel’s creepiness is having your power go out. You know what that’s like, right? You’re sitting there, reading or watching TV and suddenly, you’re plunged into complete and total darkness. Everything becomes disoriented. You don’t know what direction to go in. You don’t know where anything is. Your furniture looks like crouching monsters, ready to sharpen their teeth on your bones. Then all the weird scenarios start going through your mind: maybe it’s just the breakers tripping or a car hit a telephone pole or maybe someone cut your power lines. Your brain races with all of these possibilities and then two seconds later (and admit it, it feels more like two hours), the lights come back on and you feel like a monumental fool for getting so worked up in the first place.

In Paul’s case, however, the lights never come back on. He plunges further and further into The Tunnel’s total darkness. Things that sound inhuman echo off the walls. His feet crunch through things that squeak — could be living, could be dead — and all the while, he can hear something scuttling towards him from behind. But he keeps moving. He has to because going back is much, much worse than going forward.

Melissa Groeling: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads / Instagram

Lights Out: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Apple

Melissa Groeling is a fiery redhead who grew up in New Jersey and now resides in the City of Brotherly Love. Only after she graduated from Bloomsburg University did she start to take her writing seriously. She’s a diehard New York Giants fan, loves chocolate and stalks cupcakes. Traffic Jam is her first young adult novel. Lights Out is her first dip into adult fiction.