News & Blog

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m pleased to welcome back Ray Clark, whose newest book is the re-release of Impurity, the first novel in the continuing DI Gardener series. Here is the publisher’s description:

A murder with no weapon or motive. A detective on edge. A community that wants answers.

One fateful night when off duty, DI Stewart Gardener intervenes in a street brawl and his wife is shot dead.

Trying to come to terms with this, he gradually returns to normal duties policing the streets of Leeds. Finding his wife’s murderer is never far from his mind, but with no leads and a hazy recollection of events, it seems hopeless.

Soon he is presented with a shocking case. A man is found dead in a grubby apartment, having been killed in the cruellest of ways. It is not long before another man meets the same fate.

The deaths are caused by a rapid and violent disintegration of the victims’ flesh. Pathology cannot ascertain the cause.

The only connection between the victims is they both worked seasonally as Santas, dressing up as Father Christmas and entertaining kids in grottos and such like. Who would want to kill such innocuous men as these?

The detective is flummoxed. The local community is ruffled. The press is having a field day. The top brass wants answers. Can DI Gardener overcome his grief and solve the case?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Ray Clark:

“Is your book scary?” she asked me, and before I’d had time to think about the answer, she said, “It looks it.”

And then came the next question: “Tell me,” she said, leaning forward, “what’s the scariest part?”

As I was desperately trying to think of an answer, I suddenly thought, being asked that question is — unless you count seeing the rejection slip landing in the morning post (or should I say your inbox nowadays).

When I think back to the time I spent researching Impurity, it came down to one clinical point: harbouring a very dark secret for many years, and then being found out.

Imagine living in constant fear of it: looking over your shoulder every day, spending your spare time in a guilt ridden slumber, working with people who think they know you, when all along, they wouldn’t give you the time of day if they knew the truth. You were doing wrong and you knew you were, but you couldn’t stop yourself; knowing that the past will eventually catch up with you, and when it does it won’t be very nice: because you’ll either be facing the person you wronged — or the police!

That is very much what happens in Impurity. When Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener investigates the discovery of a body in a run-down Victorian property in a suburb of Leeds, he knows he’s in for a tough time: ashen faced police constables testify to that.

Nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead.

The corpse of a seasonal worker living in very tatty conditions is bad enough, but someone has gone to great length to eradicate them by administering a flesh-consuming drug, resulting in the victim’s rapid and violent disintegration. Furthermore, pathology is unable to ascertain the cause. As the novel progresses you realize the scariest part concerns the victim: he’s still alive whilst it’s happening, and fully aware of the effect it’s having on his body, because it’s already been explained to him.

The really frightening thing for me however, is that after having spent considerable time with a chemist, I came to the conclusion that it might just be possible to achieve what the book is offering.

Now that is the scariest part!

Impurity: Amazon / Amazon UK

Ray Clark: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Amazon UK Author Page

Ray Clark is an award winning Yorkshire born author whose first big break came in 1998 with the publication of Manitou Man: The World of Graham Masterton (a biographical account of the author’s work), which was nominated for both the World and British Fantasy Awards. Since then, Ray’s writing career has been quite varied with publications covering short story collections (A Devil’s Dozen & A Detective’s Dozen), horror novels (Calix & Resurrection), stand-alone cross genre novels (Seven Secrets), and the highly acclaimed IMP series, featuring detectives Gardener and Reilly in the Yorkshire city of Leeds. Over the last forty years, Ray has also spent considerable time in the music industry working both in the UK and Europe as a guitar vocalist, and with a number of bands. These days, Ray divides his time between writing books and working live on the music scene, and helping to raise money for the OPA, a charity he feels quite close to. Ray’s London publisher, The Book Folks, are planning to release Book 2 in the IMP series, Imperfection, in time for Christmas.

A Hawk in the Woods by Carrie Laben
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been a big fan of Carrie Laben’s short fiction for years now and am pleased to discover her debut novel, A HAWK IN THE WOODS, is just as excellent. It’s chock full of dark magic, family feuds, and complicated characters with equally complicated relationships (which, come to think of it, sums up the idea of family pretty well). Laben’s prose is confident and adroit, and her narrative voice is strong and compassionate, even when her characters are being the opposite. Lurking just beneath the surface are some entertaining, surprising connections to H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story “The Thing on the Doorstep,” which adds an extra layer of depth to the novel, although familiarity with that tale isn’t necessary to enjoy and understand this one. A truly pleasurable and satisfying novel, featuring twin sisters you won’t soon forget, A HAWK IN THE WOODS, like so much of Laben’s fiction, is well worth seeking out.

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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Chad Lutzke, whose new novel is The Pale White. Here is the publisher’s description:

After being held against their will in a house used for sex trafficking, three girls plan their escape.

Alex: A hardened goth-punk who’s convinced she’s a vampire with a penchant for blood.

Stacia: A seventeen-year-old raised by an alcoholic mother, her fellow prisoners the only family she’s ever truly had.

Kammy: The youngest of the three — a mute who finds solace in a houseplant.

But does life outside the house offer the freedom they’d envisioned? Or is it too late, the scars too deep?

A coming-of-age tale of revenge that explores a friendship and the desperate lengths they will go through to ensure they stay united, held together by the scars that bind them.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Chad Lutzke:

Is the literary world deficient in female-centric coming-of-age horror? Indeed. They’re out there, but they’re sparse and certainly not on the tip of reader’s tongues when recommending a title in the COA subgenre. There is no sister book to accompany McCammon’s Boy’s Life, King’s The Body, or Simmons’ Summer of Night (though you could argue Grady Hendrix’s fantastic My Best Friend’s Exorcism adequately fills the void). So, who better to write one than a man, right?

That was the scariest part of The Pale White for yours truly.

I’m not so full of machismo that I can’t set aside my natural inclination to crack inappropriate jokes in front of my wife, holster a hand far beyond my waistband, and pretend that I don’t care if Ross and Rachel or Jim and Pam get together. As a matter of fact, I’m rather in tune with my feminine side. Just ask my wife, who recently laughed at me for tearing up during the last episode of Friends, and who teases me when I can’t even talk about the finale of Six Feet Under without my voice cracking.

I think I’m hyper-empathetic.

Consider the above my credentials for thinking I can pull off a first-person female POV set within a disturbing scenario. But not only was I writing in the voice of a young girl, this is a girl who had experienced extreme sexual trauma. Unfortunately, the aftermath of such a thing I have seen, so there was some ugly insight. The book needed to be hard-hitting but without being distasteful. It needed to be done with tact — much in the way I handled Stirring the Sheets (believe me, there were readers who wanted to stay clear of Sheets, thinking it is a necrophilia fest when in fact it is not). It needed to be something that frightens people almost too much to crack the spine but are glad they did.

When writing The Pale White, this wasn’t done with typical writer research, googling scientific theories, what guns hold which caliber bullets, how long it takes for a body to decompose, or what poison is untraceable. This was attempting to tap into something I didn’t have, at the risk of coming off as insensitive or apathetic. That was the scariest part.

It’s been said: “Write what you know.” If you take that literally, without diving into the deeper meaning, it’s nonsense. If authors actually took that to heart, there would be no Middle-Earth, no Frankenstein, no Hogwarts. Yet, when diving deeper, we actually do write what we know. I know sadness. I know trauma. I know loss. I know violence. And being an empath who has had some rather deeply profound relationships and experiences with women through my life, both platonically and romantically, I know enough to tell a story.

Maybe just being the witness, and then the messenger holding their flag, was the scariest part.

The Pale White: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Chad Lutzke: Website

Chad has written for Famous Monsters of Filmland, Rue Morgue, Cemetery Dance, and Scream magazine. He’s had a few dozen short stories published, and some of his books include: Of Foster Homes & Flies, Wallflower, Stirring the Sheets, Skullface Boy, The Same Deep Water as You, and The Pale White. Lutzke’s work has been praised by authors Jack Ketchum, Stephen Graham Jones, James Newman, Elizabeth Massie, Cemetery Dance, and his own mother.

The Glittering World: A Book Club Recommendation! by Robert Levy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of a young man returning to the place of his birth only to discover he was abducted as a child, although he has no memory of it, takes a supernatural turn in Robert Levy’s dark, sexy debut novel. A melancholy, thorny take on changelings and the Fae, Levy gives us four complex, indelible characters in Blue, Elisa, Jason, and Gabe, each of whom has their own secrets, their own desires, and their own way of coping with the strange and frightening circumstances that have befallen them. Levy wisely presents the Fae without too many overt details, implying that they are something language is inadequate at describing, which keeps the supernatural element satisfyingly mysterious and otherworldly throughout. Neither good nor evil, both beautiful and horrible, representing both complete freedom and the complete submission of will, Levy’s Fae are an incredible and compelling achievement, as is the novel itself. Highly recommended.

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