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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Elizabeth Hirst, whose new novel is The Face in the Marsh. Here is the publisher’s description:

Kenzie is twenty-five, with two degrees and no job prospects. When her parents offer her a job curating their museum, Ettenby’s Log Palace, she accepts out of desperation, despite their history of family conflict. She arrives praying that her secrets will stay buried, and her hard-won mental health won’t relapse. Once at the Log Palace, Kenzie is fascinated by an unsettling collection of junk dolls found on the property. As she follows the thread left by the collection, she discovers a history of poltergeist activity, witchcraft and death on the small island housing the museum.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Elizabeth Hirst:

The Face in the Marsh started as a vivid nightmare, the kind that causes you to jolt awake in the middle of the night, heart racing, veins filled with pure lightning. I tell this story a lot when I’m at conventions, recounting how I saw and felt the museum, the staring of the carvings, the decaying little people made of pieces of discarded junk that crawl around under the surface of a still, lily-covered marsh. In my nightmare, I was there, living my main character Kenzie’s most terrifying moments. And yet, that wasn’t the scariest part.

Even in those early stages, I knew that the museum collection menacing Kenzie, the shack across the river, and the strange way that Kenzie could pop through reality like a cut in a film were only symptoms of something larger. Even in the nightmare, the carvings and the little mechanical people had only scared me because I knew there was something behind them, something animating them that was vast and empty and hungry.  That emptiness is mirrored in Kenzie herself, and for a long time, it lived in me.

Like Kenzie, I am bisexual. I grew up in a rural area where even the offbeat straight kids had a hard time getting along, and where nobody understood people like me. When I realized my own sexual orientation, I searched for years for somebody, anybody that could act as a positive role model, who could show me that I could grow up to be the successful person that I always wanted to be. I found only criticism and misconceptions from the people that were supposed to look out for me.

Feeling like my only choice was to forget about being bi or to face a bleak future, I tried my hardest to forget. Doing so came with a price, and that price was a facelessness that dogged me in all aspects of my life. ‘Just be yourself’ was the cruellest and most confusing thing that anyone could say to me during that time of my life. They might as well have been saying, ‘Just step in front of that firing squad. You’ll be fine. They’ll love you.’ Deep down, I knew who I was, and I was thoroughly convinced that I was a monster. But I summoned my own monster, just as Kenzie did, and as I think we all do in different aspects of our lives.

The scariest part is that there is a monster out there that distorts our features until we can’t see our own face in the mirror. It slowly alienates us from everyone we love, until the bonds are so eroded that all we feel is emptiness. It isolates us from human emotion, as if we are trapped behind glass that no one else can see. It leeches away our sense of self-worth until we are just a hunk of colourless goo that might as well be anything else, some water or a goose or a few pieces of junk that rattle around at night. That monster is real, and it steals faces every day.

I tend to write stories from start to finish with characters and themes in place but no clear idea of what the end will be. I dive into the mystery in the same way that readers will, and much of the tension in my writing is derived from the fact that when I was writing it, I also did not know what would happen. I did not know if Kenzie would kill her parents or save them. I did not know if she would conquer the faceless void or surrender to it. Writing this book meant stepping out in front of that firing squad not knowing if the guns were loaded. It meant staring into the faceless void that destroys so many queer people, wading through it and finding out what happens.

Did I come out on the other side? You’ll only know if you read the book.

Sweet dreams.

The Face in the Marsh: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Chapters Indigo

Elizabeth Hirst: Website / Twitter

Elizabeth Hirst has loved fantastic fiction since her father read her The Lord of the Rings and other classics as a young girl. She has worked as an animator, online game writer and founder of her own small publishing label, and during that time, representing the people, places and culture of Ontario has remained close to her heart. Find her at the beach, the museum, or watching cartoons with her husband Robin.

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m happy to welcome back author Tracy Townsend, whose new novel is The Fall. Here is the publisher’s description:

An apothecary clerk and her ex-mercenary allies travel across the world to discover a computing engine that leads to secrets she wasn’t meant to know — secrets that could destroy humanity.

Eight months ago, Rowena Downshire was a half-starved black market courier darting through the shadows of Corma’s underside. Today, she’s a (mostly) respectable clerk in the Alchemist’s infamous apothecary shop, the Stone Scales, and certainly the last girl one would think qualified to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders a second time. Looks can be deceiving.

When Anselm Meteron and the Alchemist receive an invitation to an old acquaintance’s ball — the Greatduke who financed their final, disastrous mercenary mission fourteen years earlier — they’re expecting blackmail, graft, or veiled threats related to the plot to steal the secrets of the Creator’s Grand Experiment. They aren’t expecting a job offer they can’t refuse or a trip halfway across the world to rendezvous with the scholar whose research threw their lives into tumult: the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers.

Escorting Chalmers to the Grand Library of Nippon with her mismatched mercenary family is just a grand adventure to Rowena until she discovers a powerful algebraic engine called the Aggregator. The Aggregator leads Rowena to questions about the Grand Experiment she was never meant to ask and answers she cannot be allowed to possess. With her reunited friends, Rowena must find a way to use the truths hidden in the Grand Library to disarm those who would hunt down the nine subjects of the Creator’s Grand Experiment, threatening to close the book on this world.

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

I’ve always been a little bored by Tolkien’s Ents. Don’t get me wrong. They have qualities that interest me: their vastness of size and mind, their sense of elevation beyond human concerns, their physical prowess. But their disinterest in the world beyond their forest, their stubborn slowness, their refusal to act until pushed, hardly inspire my imagination. In their cool nobility and remove, they are merely reactive characters.

The last time I was here using Nick’s space to talk about the scariest part of my novels, I wrote about creating monsters — the aigamuxa, nightmarish ogres with eyeballs in their feet — that are villainous and dangerous while still being sympathetic in The Nine. Active creatures. Advocates for themselves and the wrongs they have endured. As terrifying a threat as they posed, they are as “human” as the actual homo sapiens they live among. Now, with my sequel The Fall, I look at my world’s other sentient race, the lanyani, with a different sense of fear.

The lanyani are my answer to the Ents. They are not the noble guardians of the forest. They are the grasping, starving, furious remnants of a wilderness that used to be: the weeds growing up through the cracks in humanity’s world.

What do you do when something that doesn’t breathe air, that doesn’t bleed, that doesn’t have organs to pierce or bones to break, decides it wants to go to war with you? What can you do against beings that looks at your flesh and blood and think of it as nitrogen and phosphates they will use to enrich their growing empire’s soil? How do you negotiate with a thinking, planning, organized species that sees cleansing the world of human grime as the only rational solution for its own survival?

You can’t. You don’t. Because you’re dealing with aliens.

“Alien” tends to be a word we reserve for use in science fiction, not a fantasy series like mine, but it’s the word that fits the lanyani best. It derives from the Latin “alienus” — “belonging to another.” The lanyani belong to a world where flesh is weakness, something that can’t be grown through sheer will, shaped and planed, shed and reformed, hardened and thickened as the fiber of their arboreal bodies can be. They can tunnel through the earth, turn their bodies into weapons, survive crushing blows and severed limbs, split themselves to reproduce, and lie dormant long past the point we would imagine them dead. These creatures belong to an entirely different biology, and with it, an entirely different way of seeing the world.

And they’ve decided they don’t need us. Not anymore. The lanyani have learned to use our world, because nature rewards opportunists. They are thieves and fences, drug dealers, con artists, and mercenaries. So what if it is dirty work? They were born in the dirt. It’s where they thrive. And they know that if only they can claim enough of that soil for themselves, they’ll choke out humanity like a thicket full of kudzu. We might beg for their lenience, but it would make no difference.

Nature isn’t big on the concept of mercy.

The scariest part of The Fall is up to each individual reader to decide, of course. That’s the beauty of books. But for me, the story’s deepest terror lies in the fact that this time, the danger humanity faces doesn’t need our empathy or demand an equal place in our society. It doesn’t want to redress issues of social justice, or punish the wealthy and wicked for making slaves of its kind. It doesn’t even want an apology.

It wants to pull us up by our roots.

The Fall: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound / Audible

Tracy Townsend: Website / Twitter

Tracy Townsend is the author of The Nine and The Fall (books 1 and 2 in the Thieves of Fate series), a monthly columnist for the feminist sf magazine Luna Station Quarterly, and an essayist for Uncanny Magazine. She 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 the former chair of the English department at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an elite public boarding school, where she 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.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Brian Hauser, whose debut novel is Memento More: The Fathomless Shadows. Here is the publisher’s description:

Underground filmmaker Tina Mori became a legend in the late 1970s with a stolen camera, a series of visionary Super 8 shorts (The Eye, The Stairs, The Imperial Dynasty of America) and a single feature film, heralded as her masterpiece, Dragon’s Teeth. Then she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Was it foul play, or did Tina Mori go somewhere else? And if so, where? Could it have been the otherworldly Carcosa so often referenced in her films?

Through many layers, including letters, a ‘zine made by a teenage horror film fan, and a memoir written by Mori’s college roommate and muse, film historian and debut novelist Brian Hauser delves deep into Tina Mori’s life and legacy, exploring the strange depths and fathomless shadows situated between truth, fiction, fantasy, and the uncanny.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Brian Hauser:

Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is about many things that have the power to make me shudder in terror or stare into the distance, frozen with anxiety. It’s about the sometimes blurry lines between fiction and reality and how it feels when we no longer have solid ground beneath us. It’s a book about how the accretion of information can winnow away certainty and security. It is also about The King in Yellow and nightmare-haunted Carcosa and powers beyond our merely human ability to grasp. There’s a lot going on; I won’t lie. But all of that was well inside my comfort zone. Maybe that is a completely different blog post. (Dude, this is your comfort zone? Huh-uh.)

I’m here to tell you about the scariest part, though, and for me the scariest part was finding three of the four voices that tell the story. The narrator I didn’t have any trouble with was me, Brian Hauser. Memento Mori is a faux non-fiction story which is framed by a horror film scholar named Brian Hauser (hi), who is setting out to present the story of an obscure underground horror filmmaker from the late-1970s named Tina Mori. Writing in Brian Hauser’s voice is what I do. It’s my day job. No sweat. But this not-quite-Brian Hauser is claiming to have gathered together a series of documents that, together, weave a chilling tale about Tina Mori, the people whose lives she touched and influenced, and that dreadful place where black stars rise. The other three narrators in the novel are all women who have led very different lives from my own. Finding those first-person voices required not just imagination, but also empathy, and I knew that they would undergo a certain understandable scrutiny as a result.

The most harrowing voice was not actually Tina Mori or C.C. Waite, her college roommate. I connected with them as a filmmaker and professor, respectively (though they are both more than those things). The scariest part was trying to see the world of 1996 through the eyes of Billie Jacobs, 15-year-old suburban Riot Grrrl horror fan. There is a lot of me in Billie, despite the fact that in 1996 I was in my first year of active duty with Army intelligence. When I was 15, though, I was a crafty kid who was just as likely to be building and painting plastic models or lead miniatures as I was writing stories, but I was not into anything like punk. I liked music, but I didn’t have any kind of taste, genuine or affected. Billie found Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland and Bratmobile, bands who grabbed her by her core and shook her into a frenzy of awareness. Punk music and zines made her feel like she belonged to something she recognized and that recognized her, too. Trying to empathize with Billie and understand her hopes and dreams, her anxieties and her fears, was the scariest part, because I wanted to do her justice, and the gap between the two of us felt the biggest.

I want to do all my characters justice (at least artistic justice), and for Billie that meant letting her do most of the writing in her zine. I needed to be able to articulate her own childhood memories from her perspective in 1996 rather than my own. I had to report her nightmares as faithfully as I could. I confronted her yearnings and listened quietly for the things that made her catch her breath. I thought for a long time about who Billie would admit to being in public versus the person she could be in her zine, Final Grrrl. In perhaps the most dizzyingly terrifying moment, I wrote two punk songs that she could copy lovingly into the pages of her zine. It felt right to risk artistic failure to give Billie’s fandom a chance to live and thrive more than reportingly.

Whether or not I succeeded in doing right by Billie is largely up to you. She gets to tell you her part of the story, and if her nightmares intersect with yours, if her anxieties resonate with yours like a tuning fork, then I’ll feel like the two of you have met. Maybe you’ll meet in a used-record store, or in the horror section of a local video store, or maybe across the counter of her uncle’s copy shop. You might be ready to dismiss her as a punk girl out of central casting until you see the curious symbol inked into her denim in half a dozen different spots with a ballpoint pen, the figure that seems to be a letter but from no alphabet you have ever seen until now.

Have you seen it? Have you seen the Yellow Sign?

Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound / Word Horde

Brian Hauser: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Brian Hauser is from Carter-era Rust Belt suburbia. He grew up during the first generation of Dungeons & Dragons, the satanic panic, and classic 1970s horror films. He wrote his first novel thirty years ago, but he abandoned it, horrified at what he had done. This book would later track him down and demand a companion. When Hauser refused to comply on moral grounds, the novel stalked him, destroyed his life, and then disappeared onto an arctic ice floe. It was a whole thing.* Later, he spent quite a few years in and around The Ohio State University and Columbus, Ohio and has never really gotten over it. Hauser is one of those people who writes his first drafts on a manual typewriter (a 1956 Smith-Corona Silent-Super), because there is a time for Delete keys but that time is not during the first draft (and scanners with OCR are his friends). He has been a professor of film and literature, a filmmaker, and a soldier. He currently lives north of the Adirondacks with his partner and their two cats.

* h/t Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Meghan Holloway, whose new novel is Once More Unto the Breach. Here is the publisher’s description:

For readers of The Nightingale and Beneath a Scarlet Sky comes a gripping historical thriller set against a fully-realized WWII backdrop about the love a father has for his son and the lengths he is willing to go to find him, from a talented new voice in suspense.

Rhys Gravenor, Great War veteran and Welsh sheep farmer, arrives in Paris in the midst of the city’s liberation with a worn letter in his pocket that may have arrived years too late. As he follows the footsteps of his missing son across an unfamiliar, war-torn country, he struggles to come to terms with the incident that drove a wedge between the two of them.

Joined by Charlotte Dubois, an American ambulance driver with secrets of her own, Rhys discovers that even as liberation sweeps across France, the war is far from over. And his personal war has only begun as he is haunted by memories of previous battles and hampered at every turn by danger and betrayal. In a race against time and the war, Rhys follows his son’s trail from Paris to the perilous streets of Vichy to the starving mobs in Lyon to the treacherous Alps. But Rhys is not the only one searching for his son. In a race of his own, a relentless enemy stalks him across the country and will stop at nothing to find the young man first.

The country is in tatters, no one is trustworthy, and Rhys must unravel the mystery of his son’s wartime actions in the desperate hope of finding him before it’s too late. Too late to mend the frayed bond between them. Too late to beg his forgiveness. Too late to bring him home alive.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Meghan Holloway:

The scariest part is the beginning. I mean that in both senses of the word: fashioning the opening hook that will engage readers and setting pen to paper for the first time.

More important than a phenomenal cover, more pivotal than an engaging back cover synopsis, the first sentence, first paragraphs, first pages are often the deciding factor for readers. Readers are investing their time and money in an author’s work, and we have limited space in which we can make our sales pitch. We have to grab the reader on the first page to ensure they read to the last.

It can be a daunting task. When I finish a manuscript and begin my revisions, I inevitably find that I have begun the story in a place that does not have the impact I am aiming for. A close friend who has the dubious honor of being my critique partner read the roughest draft of Once More Unto the Breach and said, “Cut out the first chapter. It’s boring, and even though it’s nicely written, I don’t care. Chapter two is the beginning.” And he was right.

The beginning has to have the perfect balance of emotional resonance and intrigue. Preferences in style are subjective, but the writing itself has to be engaging. That opening segue into the story must leave the reader wanting to know more. Otherwise they will not continue turning the pages. And each time I finish a manuscript and begin the revision process, I keep in mind that where I have opened the story may not be the most gripping beginning.

My background is in library and information science, so to say that I love research is a bit of an understatement. But as much as I love research, I recognize the pitfall an author can become ensnared in. It is incredibly easy to become so bogged down in research to the point where you cripple yourself. I was hesitant to write a period piece once I began researching, because I realized that I could spend the rest of my life researching the WWII era, and I would still not know everything. It is easy to doubt your ability to portray an era authentically when you become mired in the research.

I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, in a region of the south where the landscape undulates in rolling hills and steep ravines, where rivers score the green forests and lakes are deep and cold. When I was a child, I was frequently on the water, and in the center of the lake near my home was a craggy island with a sheer cliff face. The island appeared prehistoric and atmospheric when we would paddle out to it. The climb up the cliff to the jagged cusp sixty feet above the water was daunting. The view from that high perch was even more so, and I found the longer I stood there contemplating that soaring drop I was about to launch myself into, the more frightened I became.

I felt that same tightness in my throat, that same flutter in my chest as I sat before an empty notebook with my research material spread out before me. I was stepping off into the unknown. I had made the climb; I had spent two years doing research. I had my lifejacket; I was prepared and had resource books and primary sources collected about me. I knew that it would be an exhilarating rush; the story was one I could not wait to tell and could not wait to share with readers.

In the end, despite the fear, all I needed to do was what my father yelled up at me from the boat as I was standing on the edge of that cliff: “Just jump!”

Once More Unto the Breach: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Books-A-Million / Powell’s / IndieBound

Meghan Holloway: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north. She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department.​​ She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat.