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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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is Matthew Johnson, whose latest book is the short story collection Irregular Verbs and Other Stories. Here’s the publisher’s description:

keluarga: to move to a new village

lunak: to search for something without finding it

mencintai: to love for the last time

Meet a guilt-ridden nurse who atones for her sins by joining her zombified patients in exile; a lone soldier standing guard on a desolate Arctic island against an invasion that may be all in his mind; a folksinger who tries to unionize Hell; and a private eye who only takes your case after you die. Visit a resettlement centre for refugees from ancient Rome; a lost country recreated by its last citizen on the Internet; and a restaurant where the owner’s ghost lingers for one final party. Discover the inflationary effects of a dragon’s hoard, the secret connection between Mark Twain and Frankenstein, and the magic power of blackberry jam — all in this debut collection of strange, funny, and bittersweet tales.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Matthew Johnson:

When I first thought of doing a short story collection with CZP it seemed like a bit of an odd fit. After all, ChiZine is known mostly for dark fiction and horror, and my work tends more towards science fiction and fantasy; when I write horror it’s usually by accident — something that seems straightforward or even funny to me but which turns out to terrify other people. But the fact that the collection exists at all is because of a time when I scared myself: for me, in fact, the scariest part of Irregular Verbs was wondering whether I would ever write it.

Let me explain. There was a long period when, as a high school teacher with no kids, I had oodles of time to write. From September to June I was a teacher, not a writer, but for two months of the year I wrote full-time, eight hours or more a day at the keyboard. In just over five years of that schedule I wrote a lot of stuff, and some of it got a bit of attention: stories that got good reviews, or were included in Best Of collections, and even got translated into a few other languages.

Then, in the space of a few years, I left teaching and started a new job (the one I still have now.) Now I was working twelve months a year, facing a fearsome learning curve and — most importantly — doing work that I couldn’t compartmentalize off from my writing: designing lessons, creating educational computer games, and writing blogs, things that used the same part of my brain as writing fiction did.

And then my son Leo was born.

Don’t get me wrong: I love all my children more dearly than life itself. But Leo was not an easy baby. For the first five months of his life he was a colicky monster that could only be soothed by constant rocking and singing. For a long time, writing was completely off the table: I spent hours every night with Leo in my arms, sitting in an old rocking chair that had belonged to my wife’s grandfather. (He had been famous for his ability to calm babies, though by the time I knew him he only ever shared the chair with George, a reformed barn cat with demon eyes and needle-sharp claws.) What little energy I had left at the end of these nights was completely taken up by my day job, and as the months crawled by I began to wonder if I would ever write anything again.

Then, one night, something appeared in my mind that terrified me. The day before I had read Leo “The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle,” and now I had a thought that wouldn’t let me go: what if all of those portal fantasies, all of those stories about boys and girls being taken off for adventures in strange worlds — what if those stories were traps? What if they were lures, designed to trick children into following elves and talking animals to a very different, much darker destiny? Now that I had a child of my own to protect, held tight in my arms, the idea scared me so much it wouldn’t let go.

I spent the night working out who was luring these children, why they were doing it and where they were taking them. By morning I had the outlines of a story, “Beyond the Fields You Know,” that begins like this:

The boy was called Calx. He did not remember his real name.

He was not sure how long he had been at the House. He did not know how long it had been since he had seen his parents; their names, too were long gone, scraped away by toil and hunger. But he remembered their faces, and his bedroom with the biplane wallpaper and the Elmo sheets — and he remembered the Gnome with the Silver Key.

In the end it took me about six months to write it, stealing time while on planes and in hotels during business trips, but that didn’t matter: what mattered was that I was still writing, was still a writer. That gave me the will to put together a collection of my work and shop it around, and finally find a home for it at ChiZine.

I still write a lot more slowly than I used to, and — like most writers — I’m still working to find time and energy to write. (I am, in fact, writing this in an airport.) But ever since that night, I don’t doubt anymore that I will keep writing, and some of my favourite stories in Irregular Verbs are the ones that I’ve written since my kids were born. Because of the way that story scared me, the way it forced me to write it and wouldn’t let me go, I’m not scared anymore.

Matthew Johnson: Website / Twitter

Irregular Verbs and Other Stories: Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Powells / ChiZine / Goodreads

Matthew Johnson has published stories in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons and has published one novel, Fall From Earth, from Bundoran Press. His work has been collected in several Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Danish, Czech and Russian. While not writing or engaged in full-contact parenting he works as the Director of Education for MediaSmarts, an internationally known non-profit source of digital and media literacy resources where he writes lessons and blogs, designs award-winning educational games and occasionally does pirate voices in both English and French.

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is M.R. Carey, whose latest novel is The Girl With All the Gifts. I’m especially thrilled to have him on the blog today because I’m a huge fan of his alter ego, Mike Carey. His Lucifer comics series for Vertigo blew me away, and I was honored when he was kind enough to blurb my novel Dying Is My Business. Having him on The Scariest Part makes me very, very happy, and The Girl With All the Gifts sounds like an amazing new direction in his body of work. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.” Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh. Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children’s cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn’t know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

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

I was at a comics convention in Barcelona last week. It was a really great show, but one of the best parts, completely unanticipated, was that I got to hang out with Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, who are great company and great human beings. At one point we were talking about old British sci-fi shows, and Ian made an interesting comment. “We’ll be watching something, and a kid will be in danger — but we’ll think no, no way. They’re never gonna kill the kid. Unless it’s a British show. You guys won’t even think twice about doing that.”

I don’t know what the scariest part of The Girl With All the Gifts will be for an audience. It has a lot of tense moments, a few big shocks, more than a few gory scenes and tragic ones, but how you react to that stuff is very personal — and the biggest scares usually have other ingredients, other bits of emotional charge that modulate the fear and put an unexpected spin on it. A good horror story will take you to places you weren’t looking to go. That’s almost the entire brief, in some ways.

What I can talk about, though, is the bit that was scariest for me to write. There’s no contest. It was traumatic, and if I ever go into therapy I’m sure it will account for several sessions before the therapist throws in the towel and tells me that the technical term for what I am is a sick fuck.

My protagonist in Girl is…well, a girl. A ten-year-old, Melanie, who for various spoiler-related reasons has spent her whole childhood in an army base as a virtual prisoner. Only her captors don’t think of her as a prisoner. They think of her as a medical specimen. The pathogen that has infected Melanie normally has the side effect of erasing all higher cognitive functions. It turns you into an animal, essentially — and an animal dedicated to spreading the infection by whatever means. In a few cases, as with Melanie, that doesn’t happen. But the base personnel still believe that the infection is in the driving seat. This isn’t a little girl. It’s a disease that looks like a little girl.

And Melanie doesn’t think of herself as a prisoner, either. She’s never known any life apart from this, and she doesn’t know enough to question it. She likes and trusts most of the adults around her, thinks of them as her friends, and does as she’s told because at rock bottom she’s a good kid who thrives on praise and occasional tiny acts of kindness.

So anyway. There’s a scene in which Caroline Caldwell, the biologist in charge of the base’s research program, decides she needs a whole lot more raw data on what the disease does to the human brain — especially the brains of these kids who can still talk and reason after they’ve caught it. So she brings Melanie into the lab, straps her down on an operating table (with the help of another doctor, Selkirk) and prepares to dissect her. While she’s both alive and conscious. This last point isn’t random sadism: the infected kids don’t respond to anaesthetic so there’s no humane option.

I should pause at this point and add one significant detail. I was writing this scene on my tiny, creaky netbook, on the London Underground, on the way into town for a meeting. Commuters are sitting on either side of me, looking over my shoulder because what I’m doing is marginally more interesting than the haemorrhoid ads on the opposite wall of the carriage.

And what they’re reading is a scene in which two adults vivisect a child.

I had a strange moment in which my perspective tilted over. I saw the scene from an objective distance all of a sudden, instead of from right in the middle of it. And I had to stop. My brain just locked. I dried up in the middle of a sentence, shut the netbook down and put it away. I think it was about a week before I went back to the scene and finished it, and I had to creep up on it by writing the next chapter and then the one after before coming back to close the gap.

It wasn’t just the fact that this awful thing was happening to a child. It was the emotional payload of having Melanie — initially at least — going along with it because she doesn’t understand what’s happening and she knows and trusts the adults involved. It was the scariest part because it was an emotional and psychological tightrope walk over an abyss of all too believable and recognisable cruelty and abuse.

Cruelty to children. Despite what you may have heard it’s not easy, even for British writers.

But after that the scenes in which the characters are attacked and besieged by thousands of infected “hungries” in a derelict hospital that may be full of infected former patients were a piece of cake.

M.R. Carey: Website / Twitter

The Girl With All the Gifts: Amazon / Read an excerpt & order from other bookstores in the US, UK, and Australia

M.R. Carey is an established writer of prose fiction and comic books. He has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on X-Men and Fantastic Four, Marvel’s flagship superhero titles. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times graphic fiction bestseller list. He also has several previous novels and one Hollywood movie screenplay to his credit.

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is Alex Bledsoe, who is the author of several book series, including the Eddie Lacrosse novels and the Memphis Vampires novels. He also writes the Firefly Witch series of e-book chapbooks featuring stories about blind, contemporary Pagan princess Dr. Tanna Tully, the latest of which is Sight for Sore Eyes. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Tanna Tully, the Firefly Witch, encounters three people with extraordinary abilities that rival her own: a woman who opens a channel to the end of the world, someone capable of murdering a witch’s magic, and an old friend who now sees horrors that may or may not exist. Will Tanna have to help them, stop them, or destroy them?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Alex Bledsoe:

I’ve written four previous Firefly Witch ebook chapbooks, each with three stories in them. I’ve gotten good feedback from readers who enjoyed the depiction of modern Paganism, the elements of horror and fantasy, and the occasional side trip into the absurd (the most-mentioned story remains the giant-frog tale, “Croaked”).

So with that many stories already behind me, what could scare me about this next one, “Sight for Sore Eyes”?

Well, some stories come to you whole, in one big burst, while others require more thought and effort. The title story for this collection, though, did something I’ve never had a story do before. It bifurcated.

Essentially, what happened is that I reached the story’s climax, and could have taken it in one of two diametrically opposed ways. Both worked perfectly with the first part of the story, both gave it thematic weight, and both were (I believed) pretty darn interesting. But I couldn’t use both.

And for the longest time, I couldn’t decide.

In high school, we had to read an infuriating short story called, “The Lady, or the Tiger?” by Frank Stockton (you can read it here). Basically, the climax involved a prisoner standing before two doors, behind one of which was a beautiful woman he had to marry, behind the other a man-eating tiger. The princess, secretly his true love, knew which was which, and signaled him to pick a particular door. But…and this is the kicker…the story never tells you what came out, the tiger or the lady. In fact, it coyly pretends the question is unanswerable.

That’s pretty much the dilemma I found myself in. My two opposite endings were the equivalent of the lady or the tiger. I couldn’t use them both (the Firefly Witch stories are too linear to support that kind of metatextual David Foster Wallace-ing). So, much like the guy standing before the doors, I eventually had to pick. And I had no semi-barbaric princess to give me a clue.

I’m happy with the final result. It’s solid, it fits in with the other stories, and I think it says something about perception and belief that’s interesting. And perhaps somewhere in an alternate universe, I chose the other ending and was just as happy with it. But that dilemma was the scariest part of writing “Sight for Sore Eyes.”

Alex Bledsoe: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Google+

Sight for Sore Eyes: Amazon / Join the Facebook release party on Thursday, May 29th.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee, an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He now lives in a big yellow house in Wisconsin, writes before six in the morning, and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. His books include the Eddie LaCrosse series (He Drank, and Saw the Spider is the most recent), the Tufa novels (The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing), and two novels about vampires in Memphis in the Seventies (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood).

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is British Fantasy Award nominee Simon Strantzas, whose latest collection is Burnt Black Suns. On a personal note, I’ve known Simon for a few years now. I find him warm, funny, and incredibly smart. He was kind enough to let me stay in his guest room when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in the Toronto area in 2012, a favor that allowed me to be a part of an important convention I otherwise would not have been able to afford. I enjoy his fiction and his company very much, and I’m delighted and honored to have him as a guest on The Scariest Part. Simon already has a reputation for outstanding short horror fiction, and Burnt Black Suns is poised to bring him an even larger audience. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In this fourth collection of stories, Simon Strantzas establishes himself as one of the most dynamic figures in contemporary weird fiction. The nine stories in this volume exhibit Strantzas’s wide range in theme and subject matter, from the Lovecraftian “Thistle’s Find” to the Robert W. Chambers homage “Beyond the Banks of the River Seine.” But Strantzas’s imagination, while drawing upon the best weird fiction of the past, ventures into new territory in such works as “On Ice,” a grim novella of arctic horror; “One Last Bloom,” a grisly account of a scientific experiment gone hideously awry; and the title story, an emotionally wrenching account of terror and loss in the baked Mexican desert. With this volume, Strantzas lays claim to be discussed in the company of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron as one of the premier weird fictionists of our time.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Simon Strantzas:

I don’t find much frightening. At least, not when it comes to fiction. The real world is plenty frightening, of course, but the world of fiction — the world of my fiction — rarely is. True, I’ve never really aimed for fright, but the nature of writing Horror means it makes its presence known whether I intended it or not. It’s a simple, indisputable fact that no matter who you are, sometimes you get frightened. But a companion truth is that everybody gets frightened by something different, so no matter how hard a writer tries, he or she can frighten no more than a fraction of readers. For me, it’s an inefficient goal to strive for. I’d rather instead focus on affecting readers’ more reliable emotions.

Burnt Black Suns was a change of pace for me, book-wise. My fiction tends to be restrained; the horrors are quiet ones, and their job (I hope!) is to seep obliquely into the reader, invading via accretion, perhaps only revealling their true nature long after reading. The slow burn is a favourite technique of mine, no question, and sometimes it takes the entire length of a story for all those little pieces to cohere into something horrific, but with Burnt Black Suns I wanted something different. I wanted to get inside you.

I suppose in some ways this was a reflection of my wanting to better exploit what might be my primary fear as a writer: lack of control over my craft. History tells me I tend to prefer short, orderly pieces. The narratives in this book, however, spin out wider and wilder than ever before, and as I wrote them I suffered the less-than-pleasant terror that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Even the novelettes were unlike anything I’d attempted previously — both in terms of length and structure. For someone who had spent the preceeding decade writing only short stories, writing a book with four novellas was intimidating and terrifying. But also exhilarating. And enlightening.

I’m not the first writer to get lost in his own work, and I surely won’t be the last, but there were times in writing this book I didn’t know if I would ever be able to finish it, and I think that barely-contained terror informs the stories. There’s desperation there — not in the writing, but in the characters, in their reactions — a sense of spiralling out of control. My own fears infected my characters, helped to keep them off the path to safety, dragged them down into the dark. Putting together a book of short stories is so often about grabbing a handful written at a series of previous points and bundling them together. But a unified collection that is itself a journey to write can only provide its readers with a similar voyage, an equivilent transformation. At least, that’s the hope.

Burnt Black Suns is thus a triumph for me. The two novellas that together comprise half the book are different not only in style but in construction, yet still compliment each other in their outlook. Balancing them are two novelettes, one loud, one quiet, which are framed by a handful of short stories. This book, for me, was an ambitious one, and explores the full range of my weirdest work.

Writers often talk about how important it is to continue learning as time passes, and I’ve always assumed that meant no one’s prose is perfect, and that a writer must continuously sharpen and improve his or her use of language and style. Though I still believe that’s true, what I also suspect is meant is that a writer must continue to learn about him- or herself. Learn where the lines of his or her abilities are carved in stone, and where they’re drawn in dust. Where the demons are that can be called upon to dance and inform or inspire the work. Even after a quarter of my life behind the pen, I’ve learned that as terrifying as it may be to push into new realms and test myself, the results of striving for more are always worth the pain.

Simon Strantzas: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Burnt Black Suns: Amazon / Hippocampus Press

Simon Strantzas is the author of Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), and Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), as well as the editor of Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013). His writing has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.