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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Aviva Bel’Harold, whose latest novel is Blood Matters. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Grief changes people.

Brittany used to be a normal teen. She ate like one, slept like one, and had typical teenage mood swings. But after she found her best friend dead, everything changed.

Grief might explain her loss of appetite and her lack of sleep. It might even explain why she sees her dead friend everywhere she goes. But it certainly won’t explain why everyone she touches develops bruises or why she’s attracted to the smell of blood.

And, she’s pretty sure grief doesn’t make you want to rip apart your boyfriend just to get closer to his beating heart.

But what happens when it’s the choices we make, not the creature inside, that proves the monster is in us all?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Aviva Bel’Harold:

I was 35 before I even considered calling myself an author, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.

If I were to be honest, I was a storyteller first and I’ve been a storyteller for as far back as I can remember. When I was nine, ten, eleven and all the way up to grade twelve I would walk to school completely oblivious of anything going on around me. Cars, dogs, other pedestrians and even trees would be missed because I was too busy telling myself stories more interesting than what the real world could offer. That is until I walked into what I missed.

Thankfully I survived this mostly unscathed.

I am told that in grade three my teacher took my mother aside and told her I had the skills to become a good author. My teacher said, “If you can ignore the spelling, just read out the words the way they sound. If you can get past that you’ll see that your daughter has written a complete, complex story with a proper beginning, an interesting middle and an amazing end.”

If you can ignore the spelling.

And therein lie all my problems.

At nine it might have been cute, too outright adorable, that I spelt every word phonetically (in other words — WRONG), but by grade twelve it was nothing short of embarrassing. My spelling hadn’t improved much in the 7 years it took me to get there (nor the decades since).

My teachers, my mom, EVERYONE tried to help me with this. But I was a lost cause, because I’m dyslexic.

I’m dyslexic. This means I can’t spell to save my life.

It isn’t anyone’s fault. Not mine because I did try to learn spelling. It isn’t the teachers, they tried to teach me. It wasn’t my mom’s, she tried too. If I could blame anything it would be bad genes or pick of the draw, but it’s not something I can change.

It is simply a reality. And it sucks.

I graduated sure that any job that required writing, or numbers, was out of the question for me. So I never dreamed of being an author. Never in a million years!

No, that’s not true…I actually did want to write my stories out, secretly, but I was too terrified!

Or, as I might spell it, TERRORFIED.

My biggest fear wasn’t of being rejected. It wasn’t “what if I can’t do this”. I never worried about character development, scene structure, tension, world building. I wasn’t concerned about any of that (because I felt fairly confident I knew what I was doing there). No, my biggest fear was that I would spell something wrong and the reader would laugh at me. Or worse — reject me because of this.

Story rejection is one thing, but personal rejection is too much. I’d had enough of that all through my school experience.

I never wanted to put myself in a place where I could be picked on, put down, made fun of, outcast or denied because I can’t spell (or I confuse words…really simple words like “chores and choir” or “angle and angel” and many more).

So, even though I dreamed about writing my stories, and even though I tried to write them out on a few occasions, I was never going to put too much stock into being an author. Instead being an author just became one of the stories I’d tell myself. In fact, I spent many hour amusing myself with the idea of spontaneous authorism: being discovered without actually having to put myself out there…because I was never going to put myself out there. I was the daydreamer and the storyteller — someone good to invite to a party because I always have some fun antidote…er…anecdote to tell.

That’s all I might have ever been if I hadn’t been challenged. By my oldest child, no less.

She wanted me to write out the story I’d told her, and, because I didn’t want to model cowardice, I had to do it.

Writing it was easy enough. Letting her (16 at the time) read it was almost as easy, she couldn’t spell much better than I could (poor thing inherited my dyslexia). Then she challenged me to get it published.

That’s when I had to face my biggest fear head on. I wish I could wrap this up with a cheerful announcement that I’m past this fear. Or even that I could say it’s gotten easer…

I can’t.

I won’t.

I don’t lie.

I am still afraid.

I’m terrified of someone pointing out my spelling mistakes. I hate seeing the squiggly red lines under words I haven’t spelt correctly. I get flustered when I can’t figure out how to spell it right to make the line disappear. I still have to brace myself against my fear of being “made fun of” for STILL getting words wrong (suit and suite/beer and bear/ bowl and bowel /thrown and throne…the list is very long and my editors can find my mistakes giggle-worthy at times).

Signings, when I want to put a heartfelt inscription into a book…what if I spell a word wrong there? Will the buyer want their money back? Will they hate the book because I don’t know the correct way to spell “nice to meat you” (or is it meet…Ugh!). Oh, and don’t get me started on spelling people’s names right! A nightmare.

I live with my scariest part every day, however, what I can say is that I’m happy with these things:

I like calling myself an author.

I like it even more that other people call me this.

Having my books published is worth the discomfort.

Having my books in readers’ hands makes up for all the terrors.

Hearing that I’ve gained a new fan, made an impression, inspired someone else more than makes up for everything I’ve had to go through to get here.

Aviva Bel’Harold: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

Blood Matters: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound / Books-A-Million / Book Depository / iTunes / Kobo

Aviva Bel’Harold writes young adult fiction: Horror, Science Fiction, ­Urban Fantasy, etc. — as long as the characters are young, full of life, and out for adventure. When she’s writing, you’ll find her curled up on a sofa with a pen and a pad of paper, surrounded by her adorable puppies. Born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver, Aviva Bel’Harold ­currently resides in Calgary with her husband, four children, and six dachshunds.

The Thief of Broken Toys by Tim Lebbon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was loving this spooky, haunting novella right up until the end. It was beautiful, lyrical, and melancholy, but also about hope and remembrance and moving past your grief. Lebbon skillfully maneuvers the reader through Ray’s stages of grief as he inches toward coming to terms with the new reality of his life. But then that ending happens. I couldn’t get into it. It’s too abrupt and weirdly unforgiving for a story that’s all about forgiving yourself. It’s unfair to both the characters and the reader. Where the novella ends is what, in a longer piece, might be the second act crisis that launches the protagonist toward a hopefully satisfying climax. We’re robbed of that here in a way that perhaps is meant to feel thematic but instead just left me unsatisfied. As always, your mileage may vary.

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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Nathan Ballingrud, who, for my money, is one of the best writers currently working in the short form of horror, fantasy, and the weird. His multiple award-nominated 2013 collection North American Lake Monsters is a must-read. His latest publication is a novella called The Visible Filth. Here’s the publisher’s description:

“Inside it’s all just worms.”

When Will discovers a cell phone after a violent brawl his life descends into a nightmare.
Affable, charismatic and a little shallow, he’s been skating across the surface of life in a state of carefully maintained contentment. He decides to keep the cell phone just until the owner returns and everything changes. Then the messages begin.

Will’s discovered something unspeakable and it’s crawling slowly into the light.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Nathan Ballingrud:

When I come to a horror story as a reader, I’m hoping to satisfy one of two cravings. One is aesthetic. If I can get a good rendering of some of the traditional trappings of the genre, I will leave sated and happy. These range anywhere from the brooding atmospherics of Stoker and his Carpathian vampire, to the Mi-Gos and their brain cylinders hiding out in Lovecraft’s rural countryside, to the baroque flourishes of Clive Barker and his Cenobites. Horror draws from a very deep well, and the possibilities here are all but inexhaustible. The other is psychological. This is the kind of horror that feels like a welcome attack, and leaves me feeling blighted and raw. The Appalachian dooms of Cormac McCarthy. The psychological vivisections of Joyce Carol Oates. This is a tougher target to hit. It’s a sniper shot versus the strafing of a machine gun. Sometimes you’re lucky and you get both, as you do in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, or in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (which is, for my money, the greatest horror novel yet written).

There are a lot of elements of aesthetic horror in The Visible Filth. You get your monsters crawling out of people’s broken heads. You get your cryptic messages from beyond. You get your cockroach swarms. I include that stuff because I love it. It satisfies the enthusiast in me, the part that would happily live in Transylvania or in Arkham, eager for a lifetime of bright, beautiful terrors. But ultimately, that’s all window dressing. For me, the real horror is psychological. Because these are the mundane horrors that we’re all subject to. They don’t carry the awful glamor of the Gothic or the surreal. They don’t leave us prostrate with holy fear. They just chew away at us with a vicious, microbial tenacity. We think we’re fine until we’re crumbling in upon ourselves.

There’s a scene in The Visible Filth, near the end, in which Will, our protagonist, is trying to break things off with Carrie, his girlfriend. (This is kind of a spoiler, I guess, but not a very serious one. It’s okay to keep reading; any story that’s worth a damn is not going to be ruined by minor spoilers.) He’s got it all planned out. He thinks he’s about to step into a wider, better life. But it doesn’t go the way he expects it to. Carrie is her own person, it turns out, and she has some ideas of her own. Nothing scary happens in this scene, other than the end of a relationship that leaves both parties wounded and a little self-hating. It’s my favorite scene in the novella, because I’ve been on both sides of that talk, and it’s awful either way. The story doesn’t end there — the big, set-piece horror ending is right around the corner — but for me, it’s the emotional heart of the story. It’s the real horror.

I’m not scared by the monsters. I’m comforted by them. Each genre offers its readers the consolations of the familiar; in horror fiction, that often means monsters, atmosphere, and threat. I’m scared by the human. I’m scared by the part of me that can’t bridge the chasm between myself and the person sitting across the table from me, who’s wondering who I am, wondering what thing it is inside me that causes me to do the things I do. As I wonder the same thing about her. I’m scared of what’s hiding in my own skull, and what might be hiding in yours.

Nathan Ballingrud: Facebook / Twitter

The Visible Filth: This Is Horror / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories, from Small Beer Press; and The Visible Filth, a novella from This Is Horror. His work has appeared in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and he has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his daughter in Asheville, NC.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All the stories in Link’s second collection are five-star stories. Her fiction is surreal, whimsical, fantastical, childlike in many ways, and yet it often goes to darker places than you’d expect. Put simply, it’s brain food. Her stories light up parts of your brain that don’t normally get lit up. On top of that, she makes it look so effortless with flawless prose and perfect turns of phrase.

However, reading an entire collection of her stories can be an overwhelming feast, or at least it was for this reader. Back to back, the stories meld together too easily and the concepts and tropes that Link frequently draws upon become more noticeable: animals as totems, magical bags that hold anything and everything, people who are dead but don’t behave dead, characters with names that aren’t names like Small and Soap and Germ and Alibi, and third-person POVs that become narrators who speak directly to the reader. Not that these are bad things. Link’s stories never bore, but read all together they can become thematically repetitive, which steals some of their magic.

Still, Link is in a league of her own and these stories are well worth your time and attention. My favorite is probably the title story, “Magic for Beginners,” but choosing a favorite from among these gems is a difficult task and one that’s likely to change every time I think about this stellar collection.

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