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Welcome to this week’s installment of The Scariest Part, a recurring feature in which authors, comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators tell us what scares them in their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. (If you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, please review the guidelines here.)

My guest is E.M. Powell, whose latest novel is The Blood of the Fifth Knight. Here is the publisher’s description:

England, 1176. King Henry II has imprisoned his rebellious Queen for attempting to overthrow him. But with her conspirators still at large and a failed assassination attempt on his beautiful mistress, Rosamund Clifford, the King must take action to preserve his reign.

Desperate, Henry turns to the only man he trusts: a man whose skills have saved him once before. Sir Benedict Palmer answers the call, mistakenly believing that his family will remain safe while he attends to his King.

As Palmer races to secure the throne for the King, neither man senses the hand of a brilliant schemer, a mystery figure loyal to Henry’s traitorous Queen who will stop at nothing to see the King defeated.

The Blood of the Fifth Knight is an intricate medieval murder mystery and a worthy follow-on to E.M. Powell’s acclaimed historical thriller The Fifth Knight.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for E.M. Powell:

First things first. Historical fiction is not all about heaving bosoms, big dresses and/or kilts. Not at all. I write medieval. That’s the three and a half centuries from around 1150 to 1500. Believe me, there is so much that really happened in that time period that is the stuff of dreams for thriller writers. Or even possibly writers whose surname is Martin. I can’t of course cover it all but in my current novel, medieval thriller The Blood of the Fifth Knight, I have one of my main characters accused of sorcery. As with all historical fiction, there’s a lot of research that goes into the world building. What I found out about sorcery goes from the hilarious to the stomach turning to the genuinely terrifying.

The medievals liked natural magic, which for them was a type of science. Skilled practitioners performed it through charms, or through curses, the darker flip side. Particularly popular were aphrodisiacs. You could soak wool in bat’s blood and pop it under a woman’s head while she slept. This, apparently, would get her aroused. Ditto a stag’s testicles or a fox’s tail. You had to be very careful about slipping ants’ eggs into her bath as she would be so consumed with lust afterwards that she would leap on just about anybody. If it’s the husband that’s having bedroom problems, then herbed earthworms ground up in the appropriate food would do the trick. The unlucky chap also had to be careful about what he drank. If he swigged down the forty ants boiled in daffodil juice, then he could find himself impotent for the rest of his life. Downton Abbey this is not.

But you might find that the responses to curses weren’t a huge improvement. Arnold of Villanova wrote a tract On Bewitchments around 1300 in which he included remedies for impotence caused by magic. He recommended placing a rooster’s testicles under the married couple’s bed. Alternatively, you could fumigate the bedchamber with fish bile or smear the walls with the blood of a black dog. That’s a heck of a love nest. If you weren’t so keen on interior décor, you could just grind up the dried kidneys and testicles of vultures and drink that dissolved in wine.

Now, if this belief system had stopped at harmless/revolting practices, then it wouldn’t be very scary. But sorcery (a forerunner of what was to become witchcraft) was magic where it was believed that the power of the Devil was being invoked. It’s important here to understand the medieval mind and medieval Christianity in particular. The Devil wasn’t an abstract idea. He was real. Real and ready to take souls to hell. William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) wrote an account of the Sorceress of Berkeley and events from 1065. She was, according to William, ‘addicted to sorcery…skilled in ancient augury, she was excessively gluttonous, perfectly lascivious, setting no bounds to her debaucheries.’ She repented on her death bed and begged for her body to be saved from Satan, with her corpse sewed up in a stag’s skin, placed in a stone coffin and weighted with lead and iron and secured with chains. It was no good. A devil broke into the church and made off with her on the back of a barbed black horse. Fact, as far as medieval people were concerned.

With such evil in the world, someone had to do something about it. Enter the response of the Church. A popular punishment was excommunication, a terrible fate for the medieval sinner as it meant that they would never be able to enter heaven. Yet prosecutions for maleficent magic would go even further and we begin to see the practice arise throughout the middle ages of the burning of those suspected of their involvement with the Devil.

In a famous sermon preached by Bernardino of Siena in 1427, we see him link the use of charms with calling on Satan. Bernardino preached that if anyone were to encounter a practitioner of magic, the only response should be ‘to cry out: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Insidiously, he also encouraged people to report any instances of sorcery, for if they did not, they would share in the guilt.

The link between the practice of magic and full Devil worship was becoming ever stronger, mutating into the deadly phenomenon of witch trials. It is estimated that between the fifteenth and eighteenth century around 50,000 people lost their lives through burning at the stake or hanging.

So mixing up some powders in a glass of wine, putting a wood carving on a threshold, being seen to chant over a well: all of these could lead to a trial at which there could be little or no defense. To unspeakable, agonizing death. And all because the powerful in society held a belief that had no bearing in reality and were yet free to impose it and construct a regime of terror around it. Now, that, for me, is The Scariest Part.

E.M. Powell: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Blood of the Fifth Knight: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Walmart

E.M. Powell is the author of medieval thrillers which have been #1 Amazon bestsellers in the US and the UK. Born and raised in the Republic of Ireland into the family of Michael Collins (the legendary revolutionary and founder of the Irish Free State), she now lives in the northwest of England with her husband and daughter and a Facebook-friendly dog. She is a regular blogger for English Historical Fiction Authors and a reviewer for both fiction & non-fiction for the Historical Novel Society. Her latest novel, The Blood of the Fifth Knight, is published by Thomas & Mercer.

The winner of the Alex Hughes e-book giveaway has been chosen and notified.

Congratulations to bn100! (You didn’t include your real name, so now you will forever be known as bn100, like a Star Wars droid.)

You will be receiving the e-book you selected soon!

Thanks to everyone who entered.

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Scariest Part, a recurring feature in which authors, comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators tell us what scares them in their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. (If you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, please review the guidelines here.)

I’m thrilled to have my good friend Helen Marshall as my guest. Her first collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side, blew me away, and her latest collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, looks to be just as amazing. Here is the publisher’s description:

GHOST THUMBS. MINIATURE DOGS.
ONE VERY SAD CAN OF TOMATO SOUP.

Helen Marshall’s second fiction collection offers a series of twisted surrealities that explore the legacies we pass on to our children. A son seeks to reconnect with his father through a telescope that sees into the past. A young girl discovers what lies on the other side of her mother’s bellybutton. Death’s wife prepares herself for a very special funeral.

In Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Marshall delivers seventeen tales of love and loss shot through with a profound sense of wonder. Dazzling, disturbing, and deeply moving.

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

Let’s talk dead cats.

Many people’ve told me how striking they find the cover of my new collection of short stories, Gifts for the One Who Comes After — striking being translatable into anything in the range of gorgeous, sad, creepy, disturbing and downright horrifying. I’ve had people tell me they won’t buy the book because of the cover. I’ve had people tell me they have to keep the book facedown. Several reviews of the book came out used blown-up copies of my author photo rather than the book cover.

And all this really intrigues me. Because the cover doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Here I suppose it’s worth me giving my usual disclaimer that I’m not exactly a horror writer — or I’m not a horror writer entirely — that I grew up avoiding horror movies like the plague and that it’s only in the last five years or so that I came to realize how really, seriously cool horror can be. And one of the reasons that I always feel uncomfortable saying I’m a horror writer is because my work tends to be dissonant rather than outright horrific. But what I find interesting about horror — not the genre but the emotion — is how complicated it is. Stephen King talks about three different types of emotions in this respect: terror, which is the fear of that which we cannot see or perceive fully, it is full of uncertainty and obscurity; horror, which involves actual perception of something horrid or monstrous; and revulsion, or, as he calls it, the “gag reflex” or “gross-out”.

Now this cover doesn’t look anything like a normal horror cover so it’s unclear to me what makes my cover so disturbing — except, I think, that it somehow manages to conjure up all three emotions, but none of them completely. The cover itself gives off a series of different signals to the reader. While at a glance it seems to show a dead kitten — and even I have to admit that the image of a dead kitten triggers a peculiarly specific set of sympathetic responses! — the longer you look, the less clear it becomes exactly what the creature is — the neck is too thick, the body truncated, the scales fantastic rather than horrific. The image is dissonant — it creates an uncomfortable sense that the image is at odds with itself and this, I think, is somehow more upsetting.

The cover comes out of a story called “In the Year of Omens” which Ellen Datlow bought for her anthology Fearful Symmetries. “That was the year of omens—” the story begins, “the year the coroner cut open the body of the girl who had thrown herself from the bridge, and discovered a bullfrog living in her right lung. The doctor, it was said by the people who told those sorts of stories (and there were many of them), let the girl’s mother take the thing home in her purse — its skin wet and gleaming, its eyes like glittering gallstones — and when she set it in her daughter’s bedroom it croaked out the saddest, sweetest song you ever heard in the voice of the dead girl.” This weirdly apocalyptic story follows a young girl named Leah whose family members all discover their own special omens; in fact, everyone Leah knows receives an omen — everyone except for her. The story hinges, in many respects, upon a moment when Leah comes across her baby brother’s omen: a tiny dead kitten covered with fine, translucent scales. But rather than recognizing the dead kitten as horrific, she places it for safekeeping inside a music box her father gave her. And just like the cover, the scene is somehow both horrifying and not at the same time: it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s creepy but somehow being all of those things makes it even worse.

Horror — as a genre this time! — is interesting because despite the fact that it ostensibly feeds on a sense of the unknown, the obscured, the ambiguous, it’s also one of the most predictable and patterned genres out there. We intuitively know how a horror story is supposed to go. And that makes it, in its own weird way, both comforting and predictable. But the horror that interests me most is the horror that’s utterly unpredictable, horror that consoles even as it condemns, horror that never lets the reader know exactly what it’s up to. Because, for me, not knowing is the scariest part.

Helen Marshall: Website / Twitter

Gifts for the One Who Comes After: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012), was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine. It won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and was shortlisted for a 2013 Aurora Award by the Canadian Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in September, 2014. She lives in Oxford, England where she spends her time staring at old books.

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Scariest Part, a recurring feature in which authors, comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators tell us what scares them in their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. (If you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, please review the guidelines here.)

My guest is Lincoln Crisler, whose debut novel is Skinjumper. Here is the publisher’s description:

MURDER IS ONLY SKIN DEEP.

Rose Bennett, a young, recently-widowed mother, comes face to face with a newly-minted murderer and learns that there are much scarier things than raising a child alone in an unfamiliar town. Terry Miller has discovered three things in a very short amount of time: his high school sweetheart’s been cheating on him with his father, killing is fun, and if he does it just right, he can switch bodies with his victims.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Lincoln Crisler:

One of the scariest parts in my first full-length novel, Skinjumper, doesn’t involve the main protagonist of the story — a single-mother working in a restaurant who discovers a brutal killer in her newly-adopted hometown. It doesn’t involve the killer’s unexplainable ability to “jump” his consciousness into the “skin” of his victims, either. The small bit of the supernatural I worked into the book does make for some interesting storytelling, at least according to the feedback I’ve received, but let’s be honest — that’s never going to really happen to someone. And after the first round of dead bodies she discovers, Rose, our heroine, is more or less on red alert for the better part of the novel.

There’s a part in the book, it happens about halfway through, that I think is far more terrifying simply because it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time. There’s a dishwasher outside a club our killer is stalking. He steps out into the rear parking lot to have a cigarette. The hairs are probably bristling on his bare arms in the cool air, still damp with wash water. Most likely, he’s taking a couple breaths of awesome fresh air, because the back end of any eating establishment is pretty damn rank.

There’s a stranger leaned up against a wall in our dishwasher’s usual smoking area, and our pal sidles up to the new guy and sparks up. He doesn’t seem to resent the intrusion. He might even welcome a few minutes of banter with someone not bringing him more crap to do. He certainly doesn’t expect to be murdered in cold blood and dragged behind a dumpster. There’s no way he figures his life will end just because a guy who’s killed a few people in fits of rage over the past few days simply wants to try his hand at the premeditated variety of murder.

Sure, the thought of your mind being invaded by the foul, psychic presence of a sociopath is a chilling prospect. So is getting your life’s blood sucked by a vampire. So is being eaten by zombies. But my book isn’t even the genre’s most recent example of how terrible humans can be to each other without otherworldly intervention — take a look at last week’s Walking Dead mid-season finale, for instance!

But of course, you can expect more than just the death of an innocent dishwasher between the pages of Skinjumper. You can check it out at the links below and enjoy a healthy body count, achieved through means both magical and mundane.

Lincoln Crisler: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Skinjumper: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Lincoln Crisler’s body of work consists of over thirty short stories, two novellas and editorship of two anthologies, most recently Corrupts Absolutely?, an anthology of dark superhero fiction. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, to include HUB Magazine, Shroud Publishing’s Abominations anthology and IDW’s Zombies vs. Robots anthology. His debut novel, first novel-length short story collection and third anthology as editor are all scheduled for publication in 2014. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association. A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia with his wife and two of his three children. He enjoys music, cooking, web design and comic books. Lincoln and his wife own a virtual assistant business, Crisler Professional Services. You can contact him at lincoln@lincolncrisler.info.