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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Robert Masello, whose latest novel is The Einstein Prophecy. Here’s the publisher’s description:

As war rages in 1944, young army lieutenant Lucas Athan recovers a sarcophagus excavated from an Egyptian tomb. Shipped to Princeton University for study, the box contains mysteries that only Lucas, aided by brilliant archaeologist Simone Rashid, can unlock.

These mysteries may, in fact, defy — or fulfill — the dire prophecies of Albert Einstein himself.

Struggling to decipher the sarcophagus’s strange contents, Lucas and Simone unwittingly release forces for both good and unmitigated evil. The fate of the world hangs not only on Professor Einstein’s secret research but also on Lucas’s ability to defeat an unholy adversary more powerful than anything he ever imagined.

From the mind of bestselling author and award-winning journalist Robert Masello comes a thrilling, page-turning adventure where modern science and primordial supernatural powers collide.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Robert Masello:

Even though my books always have a supernatural element to them, and they get routinely described as “scary” in the promotional material and reviews, I seldom find them very scary myself. It’s not that I don’t try — I sit at my computer into the wee dark hours of the night, trying my best to give myself the shivers, but I’m usually too absorbed in questions of craft — have I set the scene up properly? have I chosen the right word? am I being too graphic, or, on the other hand, am I exercising too much restraint? — to lose myself in any visceral way. Sometimes, and this is the avenue into the scary for me, I’m able to tap into, or draw on, something from my own life that genuinely spooked me, and with any luck convey some sense of it to the reader.

In The Einstein Prophecy, there’s one scene in particular where I was able to conjure up some fear from my own past and insert it into the novel.

Most of the book takes place in the town of Princeton and on the campus of the university, where, when I was an undergraduate there, I spent a lot of time, as did most of my classmates, buried in the lower levels of Firestone Library. In your senior year, you were assigned a carrel, a private cubicle the size of a coat closet and with all of the same charm. It was furnished with a sliding metal door with a tiny window in it, and a desk and chair inside. There were a couple of shelves for the books you were using for your thesis research, a wastebasket, and that was about it.

My carrel was on the lowest level of all, at the very end of a long, dimly-lit corridor (they were all dimly-lit) and working late at night, I often found myself the last one there, surrounded by acres — and I’m not kidding — of towering book racks, groaning under the weight of over two million volumes. The university had one of the largest open-stack libraries in the world. The only sounds were the hissing of heating pipes and the occasional squeak of a book cart being pushed along, unseen, somewhere in the stacks, by an equally invisible librarian. In the novel, my heroine, a young Egyptian scholar named Simone, has been waiting for some maps she had requested from the Special Collections to be delivered, when she hears the book cart, and follows it on an increasingly maddening voyage into the labyrinth…until she hears something strange and realizes she might not want to catch up to it, after all.

The labored breath came again, closer than before. Lowering her head, she peeked through the stacks into the neighboring aisle. Something moved there, dark and indistinct, its back to her.

Ducking down and swallowing hard — her mouth was suddenly as dry as the Sahara – she inched away, down the narrow passage between two rows of books, and when she thought she’d put enough distance between them, stopped to take another glance back.

Over the top of a collection of atlases, she saw a pair of eyes staring back at her. Sunken, black, buried deep in a face the color of mud.

She bolted down the aisle, turning left at the end, then racing down another and turning right. She could hear the sound of padding feet — or was it paws? — keeping pace with her.

She ran harder, desperately trying to orient herself. Was she heading toward the stairs or another dead end? She had the vague notion that she was being deliberately stampeded, that her pursuer had no intention of overtaking her yet — that it was only playing with her, like a cat with a mouse. Tying to scare her to death.

Now it’s true that I was never actually chased by a menacing creature — real or unreal — through the murky corridors of the university library, but there was many a winter night, alone in my isolated carrel, when I got a serious case of the willies. Whether or not I’m able to pass that sensation along to my readers is a question only they can answer. But I’ve given it the old college try.

Robert Masello: Website / Facebook / Goodreads

The Einstein Prophecy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer (Charmed, Sliders, Poltergeist: the Legacy), and the author of many bestselling novels and nonfiction books, including Blood and Ice, The Medusa Amulet, and The Romanov Cross. His most recent supernatural thriller, The Einstein Prophecy, takes place during the Second World War, when Albert Einstein was attached to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Allies were racing against time, and the Axis powers, to unlock the lethal secrets of atomic energy. Published this past summer, the book occupied the number one slot in the Amazon Kindle store for several weeks. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Mia Marshall, whose latest novel is Lost Causes. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Aidan Brook has spent months living with the horror of what happened when she lost control of her magic. Now she’s searching for a way to manage her immense power, but she only hits one dead end after another.

On the run from a council intent on her death, Aidan, the bear shifter Mac, and the rest of her friends find themselves on a desperate chase across deserts and oceans in search of answers. Along the way, they encounter a living myth and a dual magic with secrets of his own — and they learn that the cure may be more deadly than the disease.

To save her own life, Aidan will need to confront the most dangerous foe she’s ever faced…herself.

Lost Causes is the fourth book in the award-winning Elements urban fantasy series.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Mia Marshall:

I write urban fantasy, not horror. Sure, there’s action and suspense and a few creepy characters, but no blood-stained dark hallways or anything really scary, like clowns.

I didn’t need any of that this time. The book scared me enough for all of us.

Every book I’ve written has its challenges, but you’d think by book four I’d have some idea what I’m doing. Ha. Hahaha. Oh god no.

From the beginning, this story terrified me. The first three books in the series were built around a central mystery. It was a deliberate choice, as I’d suffered most of my life from a bad case of Plot Deficiency and no genre is more plot intensive than a mystery. Left to my own devices, I’d write about an eternal road trip where characters I’m overly fond of banter a lot.

But while I was solving the mysteries in those first books, I added so many threads to the overarching plot that, by the time I got to Lost Causes, there was no room for a separate story. This time, I couldn’t hide in a mystery. I had to confront my previously incurable Plot Deficiency head on and find a story that didn’t hinge on a crime, suspects, clues, and a big reveal — and I had no idea what I was doing.

Then, just for fun, I was diagnosed with an actual illness. The details are dull, as most health details are, but the end result was it caused me to bond to my couch for days at a time. I’m pretty sure I now share DNA with my sofa from that period of my life.

So there I was, hoping desperately that my readers would follow me in this new direction when I didn’t even have a compass, and so damn sick I was only able to write every few days, if that. I floundered, producing a bunch of random scenes with no discernible plot. Sometimes, weeks passed between writing days, and in that time I would completely forget what I’d already written. I’m a pantser, having proved myself incapable of following an outline, so thinking ahead wasn’t an option.

In that first draft, characters changed motivations on a dime, the mythology was more contradictory than any religious text, and dead people reappeared in later chapters. The entire time, I was unable to hold the big picture in my mind. I had no idea what the book’s plot or themes were. The pacing was so jerky the manuscript actually shook in my hands while I reviewed it. It was a disaster, and every day for the better part of a year and a half, I was terrified it would never be anything but a disaster.

I was certain I was writing a mess so hot it could boil water. Plus, it was taking me so long I suspected my readers would have forgotten the series even existed by the time it was released. You know how most writers talk of the highs and lows of writing a book? For 98,000 words, I was on only one side of that spectrum.

And then, the magic happened. My treatment began to work, and I was able to write regularly again. I started editing and discovered that…well, it really was a hot mess. But for the first time, it was a completed hot mess. There was a beginning, middle, and an end, even if they didn’t make a single lick of sense when placed together.

One of the goals when editing is to make as few changes as possible. Keep the story, but change the transitions, clarify motivations, etc. If the book was a house, it would get a new paint job, some walls might get knocked down, maybe even get an extension, but the foundation would remain more or less the same. While my foundation was uneven, with more than a few rounded corners, it’s what I had to work with. I didn’t have time to rewrite the entire book, after all.

Instead, I took all those terrible, awful bits and found new ways to put them together, then I tried to hide the stitches. I remodeled that entire damn house. In the end…well, I pretty much rewrote the book anyway, but the foundation was the same. The story was the one I wrote while ill, tired, and positive I had no idea what I was doing.

When it went to my trusted betas, I braced myself for the worst. And…they told me it was good. Those things that worked against me while writing the book — the unpredictability and uncertainty — had created a story where the reader didn’t know what happened next. Well, of course they didn’t. I’d never known what was going to happen next. The thing that nearly destroyed me while writing it is now what gives this book life.

The scariest part of Lost Causes is now its greatest strength. And yeah, I feel like I’m dangerously close to giving a motivational speech here, but it’s what happened, and I’m so grateful it turned out this way.

And I hope I never, ever have to go through it again.

Mia Marshall: Website / Twitter / Facebook

Lost Causes: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Apple

Mia Marshall is the award-winning author of the Elements urban fantasy series. Before she started writing about imaginary worlds, she worked as a high school teacher, script supervisor, story editor, legal secretary, and day care worker. She has lived all along the US west coast and throughout the UK, where she collected an unnecessary number of degrees in literature, education, and film. These days, she lives in a small house in the Sierra Nevadas, where she is surrounded by a small but deadly feline army.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Loren Rhoads, whose latest novel is Kill By Numbers. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Former assassin Raena Zacari thinks she’s left the past behind. The Imperial torturer who trained her is dead, the human empire is disbanded, and she is finally free. But Raena is troubled by a series of nightmares that always seem to end with her shooting an ex-lover in the head. She needs to get her mind clear because there’s a flaw in the most commonly used stardrive technology and the band of media-obsessed pirates she’s fallen in with is right at the heart of the controversy.

With humanity scattered across the galaxy, Raena’s going to have to rely on the alien crewmembers of the Veracity to help her put the pieces together. It doesn’t help that the Templars — wiped out by a genetic plague while Raena was imprisoned — have left booby-trapped biotechnology scattered across the galaxy.

Kill By Numbers mixes a Philip K. Dick mindwarp with sweeping space opera that features aliens, androids, drug dealers, journalists, and free-running media hackers. It is the second book in Loren Rhoads’s epic In the Wake of the Templars trilogy.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Loren Rhoads:

At first, my grandmother seemed only a little dotty. If you visited her long enough, she began to tell the same stories more than once per visit. Each time, she would use the same words, the same inflections. When questioned, she gave the same responses. It was like her memories were on a loop. I would try to disrupt the tale, make the needle skip onto the next track, but it couldn’t be done. Talking with her was eerie.

Grandma was never diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. At that time, they could only diagnose it after an autopsy, when they could actually see the lesions on the brain. The doctors called what Grandma suffered from dementia. For the most part, it was benign. She wouldn’t have been unhappy, except that she repeatedly discovered that people she remembered had been dead for years. When that happened, she would grieve their losses all over again.

The worst part of the illness to watch was that occasionally the dementia lifted enough for Grandma to realize the horror of what was happening to her. It looked like she woke up inside a trap that she could only sporadically see the outlines of. She never cleared long enough that she could attempt to escape.

Twenty years after her death, I remember how terrible it was to watch her decline. Every time I forget a name or misplace an object or wonder where I parked my car, I think: is it happening to me? That terror, spawned by watching my grandmother struggle against her own mind, inspired events in my new novel, Kill By Numbers.

Former Imperial assassin Raena Zacari spent decades in solitary confinement, entertaining herself with her own memories. She’s made peace with who she is and what she’s done. Now that she’s finally out of prison, she’s looking forward to leaving the past behind and learning to live in the galaxy. She’s got a new gig, new friends, and a sweet old diplomatic transport to call home. The future looks promising at last.

But Raena’s memories are being hijacked. Again and again, she finds herself sucked back into her past, except that the memories are warped, twisted out of recognition. Often they end with her killing an ex-lover in increasingly brutal ways. Worse than that, the nightmares are coming faster and faster, with less time for her to question their reality in between. She’s finding it harder to tell the truth of who she is from these unfamiliar shadows.

If there’s no record of your past, how do you know what’s true?

If you’re used to relying on no one but yourself, where do you turn for help?

Once you’ve been honed into a weapon, is there any way you can keep your crewmates safe?

We tell stories to make sense of our lives. Sometimes there’s no way to heal the people who suffered in your past. I couldn’t have done anything to make life easier for my grandmother. Writing this book, though, I could finally confront the dissolution she suffered and give her some revenge on it.

Loren Rhoads: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Kill By Numbers: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Loren Rhoads is the author of The Dangerous Type, Kill By Numbers, and No More Heroes — the In the Wake of the Templars trilogy — all coming from Night Shade Books in 2015. She’s the co-author with Brian Thomas of a succubus/angel novel called As Above, So Below and solo author of a collection of travel essays from graveyards around the world called Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She’s also the editor of The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two and Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is John C. Foster, whose debut novel is Dead Men. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Roaring south in a black Cadillac, John Smith is on the road trip from Hell through a nightmarish version of Americana, a place of rotting hollows and dusty crossroads, slaughterhouses and haunted trains. He doesn’t know how he woke up after sitting down in the electric chair, where he got the black suit with the slit up the back or even the cigarettes in his pocket. All he knows is that there is a woman guarding a great secret and he’s supposed to kill her.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for John C. Foster:

I write about scary things. I enjoy reading about scary things and Dead Men has accurately been described as a nightmare. But nightmares don’t scare me much. I have them all the time, shake ‘em off and get on with the serious business of sleeping.

Making the decision to write a first novel was certainly scary, but mixed in with that fear was profound relief. After decades of toiling away in public relations and making a few forays into screenwriting, I was finally attempting what I had long said was my defining goal.

That first, blank page is fucking daunting, to be sure. Mixed in with that kind of fear was the certainty that I was an idiot. I’d never finish. I had no idea what I was doing. But the exhilaration of cracking the twenty-page mark and being so excited I had to call my gal in the middle of the workday just to share the news? That stuff knocks opening page jitters to the ground and kicks sand in its face.

Writer’s block left me wandering in confusion for weeks with no idea how to get back on track. It filled the pit of my stomach with a dull ache of unease. But I learned how to climb past that one and was gifted with not only moving forward in the story, but a bit more confidence. A sense of almost suffering a knock out in round five but coming back strong before the bell. I knew I’d get hit again but also that I might have a boxer’s chin. I might be able to take it.

And then one day I was done. I rewrote. Enter drudgery, but drudgery isn’t scary. And if you’re like me, you’re so intensely focused on this last phase that you have no idea the closet door is swinging open behind you to reveal something tall with knuckles that drag the ground and teeth built to crack bone.

Wham-bam, several drafts were done and it was time to get my book published. To send it out to people that weren’t trusted beta readers. To have it read by unknown folks who might be cruel, might confirm all those fears I thought I’d left behind. I was no longer in control. This bird had to fly on its own and I understood that for all of my newfound confidence, I had no idea if all this working and dreaming and learning had produced a book that was any good.

Terror.

Look, I’m a nobody without a literary pedigree or circle of publishing contracts. I had no way to shave the odds in my favor. Dead Men had to make it, be judged as a good book, all on its own.

That big thing from the closet was all over me.

Here’s the thing, having a novel published is something I had always held out before me to give me some hope in rough times, some excitement about the future. I realized at this point how much of my marrow coursed with this wish and was fearful of what might happen if the book face-planted. I was attending some writer’s events by this point and experienced the solid shock of reality. About writing one, two, three books before a publisher said, “Yes.” If they ever said, “Yes.” I was terrified that in my forties I didn’t have any reserves of foolhardy strength left if the publishing world told me my book was shit.

I began submitting it to a publisher here or an agent there. Carefully. Professionally.

I heard crickets.

Then my dad died and I lost any ability to combat this fearful phase. I put the book away and fled into my next novel, The Isle, where I drew on the pain of divorce and maybe drained a little of the wound from my dad’s passing. It was a long and internal book where I applied the lessons learned in writing Dead Men. I kept my eyes on the page and studiously avoided looking at the big scary thing salivating in the closet behind me.

Months later, maybe a year later, there’s a lot of haze in that part of my memory, I opened up Dead Men and wondered if I could shave a few thousand words. I did that and submitted it to Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing before continuing revisions on The Isle.

They said, “Yes.”

Not too long after, a second publisher said yes to a novel entitled Mister White. Two books were going to be published in the same year. The Isle has mostly sat unread but I plan to kick it out of the nest soon and give it a shot.

The fear isn’t gone but it’s not so big any more. I can take it.

John C. Foster: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Dead Men: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Kobo

John C. Foster was born in Sleepy Hollow, NY, and has been afraid of the dark for as long as he can remember. A writer of thrillers and dark fiction, Foster lives in New York City with his lady, Linda, and their dog, Coraline. Dead Men is his first novel and was published by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing in July 2015. His second novel, Mister White, will be published by Grey Matter Press later this year.