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This week on The Scariest Part, my very special guests are Dean and Giasone “G” Italiano, founders of the multimedia production company P.I.C. Publishing. Dean and G are dear friends of mine whom I’ve known for over fifteen years now, and I’m delighted to feature them talking about two of their newest projects, the music CD From Skull Tavern and the novel The Starving Queen, of which this is the description:

Jasmine faces more tragic events than the average teen. Her overworked mother, Bev, doesn’t see her enough, and visiting her dad, “Slip,” often makes things worse. Even Jasmine’s deepening relationship with her boyfriend Jason can’t lift her spirits enough, and depression seeps in.

The Queen relishes the descent into misery, and she wants Jasmine. The Queen hunts the lonely and dejected, pulling victims into her Kingdom. Her bony hand is invisible while covering Jasmine’s mouth, the stench of her world’s black sludge and the eerie sound of her voice only penetrates the minds of her loyal subjects.

Family and friends can’t see the Queen, but they are worried as they watch Jasmine drift even further out of reach.

…And closer to the Queen.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Dean and Giasone both:

Dean Italiano

The Starving Queen started out as a short story back in 2003. Throughout the years, the story has taken on various forms and lengths until I reached a full novel length worthy of editing.

The Queen is a ten-foot tall skeleton who reaches into the real world and strips flesh off of her loyal subjects. This allows her to add flesh to her own frame to become physically stronger and live forever. The reader is shown how the Queen operates through two main characters, Jasmine and Jason, as they fumble through difficult times in their young lives.

But that’s not the scariest part. When writing this story, it was important for me to blur the lines between reality and the Queen’s world full of dark sludge and strict rules. In the real world, the rules we give ourselves become sacred so that we may become better people, successful, or simply acceptable. When we break our own rules, we feel like failures and become even harder on ourselves. But what if those rules came from an unhealthy place? A self-abusive place, where mental illness slips in unseen, silent and stealthy. That’s the Queen reaching in, taking a little tendril of skin here and there, still reasonable, still something that people would applaud you for doing. “You’ve lost some weight! You look fabulous!” Or, “I admire how hard you push yourself to get in shape.”

The psychological element of the Queen, to me, is terrifying. It happens every day to millions of people. She sneaks in, slowly gains power to the point of taking over, becoming dangerous, and then deadly.

I also worked with G on the new CD, From Skull Tavern. There’s a song that started out as highly experimental. “Bad Hair Day” is a tie-in with The Staving Queen novel, an example of what it’s like to live with a mental illness. We toyed with the idea of making it full of vocal tracks, singing and vocal sound effects, but it wasn’t clicking. When we went to apply music to the idea, it became musically scary to perform. If any musicians listen to the song, they will recognize the musical breakdown that happens. I suspect not everyone will catch it.

The scariest part for me was trying to vocalize a mental breakdown, and trying to show that even the smallest, most menial daily tasks can seem insurmountable. I wasn’t sure if I’d be successful with the lyrics, the vocal performance, or if what I hoped would be a frantic piece would just flop and end up sounding like screaming nonsense.

For both projects, I hope I did the subject matter justice.

Giasone Italiano

The album started as an idea; let’s write songs about scary monsters. We set out to make an anthology about iconic and creepy things, and tried to represent as many classic and cool monsters as we could. We had many ideas that never made it past a title and a few lines, and others that we flushed out into full songs. As it turns out, the scariest monster on the CD is not a movie monster after all. In the first verse of “I See Red”, we meet a killer who you don’t even know is a threat:

“It’s like any other day
Until my fingers start to twitch
I need a special kind of scratch
For a special kind of itch
I’m in your rear-view mirror
I’m behind you in a line
Walking past you in the subway
I always bide my time”

In this day and age of 24-hour news and instant information, the stories that upset me the most are the ones about seemingly “normal” human beings doing unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence. On our CD, the scariest monster is the one that you don’t see coming until it is too late.

The Starving Queen: Amazon / Kobo / In print direct from P.I.C. Publishing

From Skull Tavern: Amazon / iTunes / Spotify / On CD direct from P.I.C. Publishing

P.I.C. Publishing: Website / Dean’s Facebook / Dean’s Twitter / Giasone’s Facebook

Dean and Giasone Italiano live with their twin boys in Waterloo, Ontario. Dean has been publishing novels, short stories and poetry since 2001. Giasone has been performing and writing music as a solo artist or in bands since 1994. Together, they are P.I.C. Publishing, and have recently released The Starving Queen, the From Skull Tavern CD, and The Narrowing (a one-act play chapbook).

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gaiman has fashioned a novel full of great characters, incredible world building, well researched religious and mythological history, and smooth, marvelous prose…all, alas, in search of forward momentum. For a novel this packed with wonderful ideas, very little actually happens. I did enjoy it — these characters will definitely stay with me — but I found its lackadaisical, meandering structure and the protagonist’s mostly passive role in the story frustrating. More than one hundred pages pass before we’re clued into any of the characters’ goals or given any idea of what’s at stake, which made it hard for me to feel invested. As a result, I found the novel very easy to put down and wasn’t always in a rush to pick it up again. I’m glad I did, because the novel definitely picks up in its final third, but for me it was a slog getting there.

The middle of the novel, when Shadow is tucked away in the town of Lakeside, is particularly frustrating. Way too many pages are spent with Shadow simply trying to pass the time, from visiting library sales to chatting with his new neighbors, while Mr. Wednesday is off, unseen, doing things that are presumably more interesting and important to the story. Gaiman himself seems to recognize this issue and adds a last-minute mystery to the Lakeside community for Shadow to solve, and though Gaiman’s instincts are right in this regard, his fix is wrong. The Lakeside mystery is kept too distant from the main storyline, its resolution coming only after everything else is already finished, and as a result it all comes off feeling like an unnecessary addendum. It would have made a fine, separate novel, though.

A war between the gods should be exciting, but since we don’t get to see much of it at all the novel doesn’t reach the level of excitement I was hoping for. You couldn’t call AMERICAN GODS a fast-paced or tightly-plotted novel, but despite my issues it is a worthy one. I can see why it’s so beloved by so many — there really is a richness to the world and the characters Gaiman creates — but it just didn’t resonate with me that strongly.

View all my reviews

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author and editor Mark Matthews, whose new anthology is Garden of Fiends. Here is the publisher’s description:

The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin — drinking and drugging provides the height of human experience. It’s the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is a yearning as intense of any blood-thirsty monster.

The best way to tell the truths of addiction is through a story, and dark truths such as these need a piece of horror to do them justice.

The stories inside feature the insidious nature of addiction told with compassion yet searing honesty. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental deaths, and some of the most incredible names in horror fiction have tackled this modern day epidemic.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Mark Matthews:

In certain ways, the scariest part of Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror is that it is a reflection of the modern day epidemic of opiate addiction. Certain dark truths of our world require a piece of horror to do them justice. Facts aren’t always felt, but stories are, and fiction makes the reader feel the true devastation of addiction. Such is the case with these stories, where some incredible names of horror have portrayed addiction in all its brutal honesty. Jessica McHugh, Glen Krisch, and Max Booth III (as well as my own tale) feature heroin and opiate addiction, while Kealan Patrick Burke, John FD Taff, and Jack Ketchum tackle the insatiable, unquenchable thirst that is alcoholism.

On a more personal level, the scariest part is that addiction will remain in my own subconscious no matter how many years it has been since my last use.

I’ve used every drug that appears in this anthology, and it nearly killed me, but I’ve been clean over 24 years, and, after going back to school to become a licensed professional counselor, have worked in the field of addiction treatment for much of that time. Working with other addicts has helped me keep my own sobriety, but dealing with the cravings that remain never stops. I still dream about drinking. I still feel a jolt of lightening in my spine when I watch someone snort cocaine or crystal meth in a movie. I’ve come to expect the cravings and learn to live with them, and when I write dark fiction, the culture and pathology of addiction pervades, and writing is incredibly therapeutic.

I am so thrilled at the list of writers who appear in Garden of Fiends to portray this affliction. This anthology is a way of bearing this burden to the world. Not just my burden, but the burden of sick and suffering humans everywhere. As you read this, someone just shot up for the first time, and soon their body will be aching for heroin the way a vampire thirsts for blood. Someone right now is buying a half pint of vodka with shaky hands at the liquor store, trembling with terror. A mother just identified their daughter’s overdosed body at the hospital. Another is writing their son’s obituary. Everyday we hear horror stories such as toddlers found in the back-seat of a car with overdosed parents in the front or a batch of fentanyl-laced heroin killing scores of people over a single weekend.

The scariest part is that what’s inside this anthology is a mirror of our world, not a teleporter to another.

Here’s a brief summary:

A Wicked Thirst — Kealan Patrick Burke
An alcoholic’s incessant thirst for drink has caused a trail of devastation in his path. A blackout one night puts him face to face with the specter of his past. A powerful opening punch and quite simply vintage Kealan Patrick Burke.

The One in the Middle — Jessica McHugh
“The best way to take atlys is to inject it straight into the testicles,” thus begins Jessica McHugh’s excerpt from The Green Kangaroos, which blew my freaking mind (cliché as that sounds). Captures the tone, lifestyle and craving for heroin in a wonderfully transgressive fashion. William Burroughs himself would be proud.

Garden of Fiends — Mark Matthews
The father of a heroin addict is tired of his daughter relapsing, so he takes drastic measures to protect her. He thinks he’s cut out her disease, but he’s only made it spread. Pretty soon, there are addicts all over the city of Detroit trying to get his daughter high.

First, Just Bite A Finger — Johann Thorsson
This flash fiction piece is a lightning shot across the page. An addict keeps convincing herself she can quit her bizarre addiction — “She could quit if she wanted to, and she did, and went until Thursday evening.”

Last Call — John FD Taff
Last Call is about the type of alcoholic I am quite familiar with — one who frequents AA meetings, can’t stay sober, and often shows up drunk. His sponsor offers him one last chance at sobriety by visiting the most unusual of places: a liquor store. A perfect illustration of the family legacy of alcoholism.

Everywhere You’ve Bled and Everywhere You Will — Max Booth III
Max Booth’s story is about a recovering heroin addict who relapses after a bizarre turn of events and an infatuated (and quite creepy) girlfriend. It includes a bleeding penis, spiders, a Walmart worker, and Max’s unmistakable wit. Your jaw will drop.

Torment of the Fallen — Glen Krisch
Scarecrows, rats, syringes, and heroin are the ingredients for this Glen Krisch story. When you see real demons, sometimes the demon of addiction is all that will hold them back.

Returns — Jack Ketchum
Ketchum didn’t write this short story to serve as the perfect ending to Garden of Fiends, but he might as well have. This is a sweet, somber story about a Ghost visiting his alcoholic ex-lover, watching her drink herself to death, and trying to find his purpose for this return to his old life. I’m so grateful to have another one of my writing heroes included in Garden of Fiends.

Mark Matthews: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads / Amazon Author Page

Garden of Fiends: Amazon / Barnes & Noble

Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is a licensed professional counselor. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, Milk-Blood, and All Smoke Rises. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two daughters. Reach him at WickedRunPress@gmail.com.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author J. S. Breukelaar, whose new novel is Aletheia. Here is the publisher’s description:

The remote lake town of Little Ridge has a memory problem. There is an island out on the lake somewhere, but no one can remember exactly where it is — and what it has to do with the disappearance of the eccentric Frankie Harpur, or the seven-year- old son of a local artist, Lee Montour.

When Thettie Harpur brings her family home to find Frankie, she faces opposition from all sides — including from the clan leader himself, the psychotic Doc Murphy. But Lee, her one true ally in grief and love, might not be enough to help take on her worst nightmare. The lake itself.

Because deep below the island, something monstrous lies waiting for Thettie, and it knows her name.

A tale of that most human of monsters — memory — Aletheia is part ghost story, part love story, a novel about the damage done, and the damage yet to come. About terror itself. Not only for what lies ahead, but also for what we think we have left behind.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for J. S. Breukelaar:

I can’t tell you what the scariest part of writing Aletheia was, because it will spoil everything. You who have read the novel, know that about a third of the way in, the unthinkable happens. And that was the scariest part for me, not just because it was terror incarnate, but also because I didn’t plan it. Hand to God. I’m not being coy. I had totally different plans for Thettie Harpur, for everyone. But the story had to do itself. And that’s how it played.

That was fucking scary. I mean not just what happened, and how irrevocable it was, and how horrifying it was, and how my bleeding fingers made me write it in the second person. Scene by scene. Blow for blow. How even as I was writing it, I had no idea how bad it was going to get, and it got bad. It got very bad. I hated myself for even writing it. I scared myself. The tooth hurts.

And then, after it was written, I had no idea, really, what to do. How to go on after that, emotionally, psychologically, and artistically. How would I tell the rest of the story? I had already set up the parallel narrative — Thettie and Lee’s point of view in alternating chapters, but now what? I can’t go into it too much more, except to say, I was finished.

But the story wasn’t. It couldn’t end at that moment of total narrative collapse, but it was really difficult for me to see beneath its broken structure at that point. And there was another thing. It wasn’t just the story that had broken. It wasn’t just the characters who were looking at me in gobsmacked revulsion at what I’d done to their world. I was looking back at myself, and wondering what the story, as I’d told it, made me? I wanted to tell the characters that the story had broken my heart, too.

Stories have a way of biting the hand that feeds them. And the only way to go on is to bite back. Except I wasn’t sure how. I didn’t even really know what had happened. There I was with a story in shards, and I had no real idea of the logistics of how this terrible, plot shattering thing had happened. And I think it was that that allowed me to continue. I had set up a kind of unspeakable crime, but one of a nature so dualistic that the supernatural part of it remained a mystery, even to me. So, while the rest of the characters went about trying to figure out the true crime, I knew my job was to fathom the horror, the horror beyond the cruelly banal, beyond the everyday evil. And I knew that the only place I’d find it was beneath the lake.

So that’s how I managed to find my way back into the story. I went back out on the lake, and I bit Time right in the ass. I split the chapter I’d written before the terrible turn into two parts, leaving the first section in Part 1 and resuming the chapter in Part II, but I switched to present tense. I picked it up right in the middle of a storm on the lake out near the island, the island that was the clue to everything. To all the pain and all the hurt, the island that Time forgot so it had nothing but Time. In fact, the second scariest part was writing the ending. As I’ve spoken about elsewhere, the gifted author/publisher and my friend, J. David Osborne, read an early draft of the novel. It had most of the scary parts in it — including the shock turn halfway through. But my meta-fictional detective work was flawed, and I came up with a false ending that David didn’t buy. So that sent me back to the beginning again. And that was really scary. Not just the fact that I’d thought I’d finished the damn thing, and was scared as hell of looking at months of rewriting, but also because I had to go deeper. Deep into my own heart and dark thoughts in order to come to terms with what the island was, and what it always had been. I thought that I’d get away with just going to the second half of the novel, the part where it gets all messy and weird. But that didn’t do it. I had to go back even further.

Stephen Graham Jones writes:

Plot isn’t a line your story follows, it’s a chart of your characters’ decisions. And it’s only ever seen in the rearview mirror… [When things go wrong], back up, look for a place where the story should have branched, and keep backing up until you find it. Sometimes all the way to the point of conception. Then conceive better.

That was me. I had to go right back to the point of conception. Back to the second scene in the very first chapter, where Thettie steps on a hideous grin-shaped crack in the pavement that is no longer there, but re-cracks at her approach. Spider-webbing the shiny new mica surface right down to the soil, its weed-choked grin just as lying and leering as if she had never gone away at all. As if she’d stayed in Little Ridge with her beloved cousins Frankie and the wild-at-heart Cassie, and Frankie had never gone to war to get caught up with the crooked Doc, and Cassie had never stolen that credit card that brought deGroot vengeance down on her Sweet Sixteen, and Thettie had never let her two young sons go out on the lake alone — as if none of that had happened, and things had stayed rock ’n’ roll forever.

There is a point in the novel where one of the characters realises that s/he is the lake monster after all. That there has never been another. The scariest part of writing is that. That moment when you realize that you are the scariest bit. You are the reason to be afraid. That the fear is in you, and of you. And it knows your name.

J. S. Breukelaar: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

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

JS Breukelaar is the author of the novels Aletheia (Crystal Lake Publishing) and American Monster (Lazy Fascist Press), as well as the collection No Bunnies, out in October 2017, also from Crystal Lake Publishing. Her stories and poems can be found or are forthcoming at Gamut Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Lamp Light, Juked and elsewhere, including the anthologies, Welcome to Dystopia and Women Writing the Weird. She lives in Sydney, Australia with her family.