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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, please review the guidelines here.)

My guest is E.M. Powell, whose latest novel is The Blood of the Fifth Knight. Here is the publisher’s description:

England, 1176. King Henry II has imprisoned his rebellious Queen for attempting to overthrow him. But with her conspirators still at large and a failed assassination attempt on his beautiful mistress, Rosamund Clifford, the King must take action to preserve his reign.

Desperate, Henry turns to the only man he trusts: a man whose skills have saved him once before. Sir Benedict Palmer answers the call, mistakenly believing that his family will remain safe while he attends to his King.

As Palmer races to secure the throne for the King, neither man senses the hand of a brilliant schemer, a mystery figure loyal to Henry’s traitorous Queen who will stop at nothing to see the King defeated.

The Blood of the Fifth Knight is an intricate medieval murder mystery and a worthy follow-on to E.M. Powell’s acclaimed historical thriller The Fifth Knight.

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

First things first. Historical fiction is not all about heaving bosoms, big dresses and/or kilts. Not at all. I write medieval. That’s the three and a half centuries from around 1150 to 1500. Believe me, there is so much that really happened in that time period that is the stuff of dreams for thriller writers. Or even possibly writers whose surname is Martin. I can’t of course cover it all but in my current novel, medieval thriller The Blood of the Fifth Knight, I have one of my main characters accused of sorcery. As with all historical fiction, there’s a lot of research that goes into the world building. What I found out about sorcery goes from the hilarious to the stomach turning to the genuinely terrifying.

The medievals liked natural magic, which for them was a type of science. Skilled practitioners performed it through charms, or through curses, the darker flip side. Particularly popular were aphrodisiacs. You could soak wool in bat’s blood and pop it under a woman’s head while she slept. This, apparently, would get her aroused. Ditto a stag’s testicles or a fox’s tail. You had to be very careful about slipping ants’ eggs into her bath as she would be so consumed with lust afterwards that she would leap on just about anybody. If it’s the husband that’s having bedroom problems, then herbed earthworms ground up in the appropriate food would do the trick. The unlucky chap also had to be careful about what he drank. If he swigged down the forty ants boiled in daffodil juice, then he could find himself impotent for the rest of his life. Downton Abbey this is not.

But you might find that the responses to curses weren’t a huge improvement. Arnold of Villanova wrote a tract On Bewitchments around 1300 in which he included remedies for impotence caused by magic. He recommended placing a rooster’s testicles under the married couple’s bed. Alternatively, you could fumigate the bedchamber with fish bile or smear the walls with the blood of a black dog. That’s a heck of a love nest. If you weren’t so keen on interior décor, you could just grind up the dried kidneys and testicles of vultures and drink that dissolved in wine.

Now, if this belief system had stopped at harmless/revolting practices, then it wouldn’t be very scary. But sorcery (a forerunner of what was to become witchcraft) was magic where it was believed that the power of the Devil was being invoked. It’s important here to understand the medieval mind and medieval Christianity in particular. The Devil wasn’t an abstract idea. He was real. Real and ready to take souls to hell. William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) wrote an account of the Sorceress of Berkeley and events from 1065. She was, according to William, ‘addicted to sorcery…skilled in ancient augury, she was excessively gluttonous, perfectly lascivious, setting no bounds to her debaucheries.’ She repented on her death bed and begged for her body to be saved from Satan, with her corpse sewed up in a stag’s skin, placed in a stone coffin and weighted with lead and iron and secured with chains. It was no good. A devil broke into the church and made off with her on the back of a barbed black horse. Fact, as far as medieval people were concerned.

With such evil in the world, someone had to do something about it. Enter the response of the Church. A popular punishment was excommunication, a terrible fate for the medieval sinner as it meant that they would never be able to enter heaven. Yet prosecutions for maleficent magic would go even further and we begin to see the practice arise throughout the middle ages of the burning of those suspected of their involvement with the Devil.

In a famous sermon preached by Bernardino of Siena in 1427, we see him link the use of charms with calling on Satan. Bernardino preached that if anyone were to encounter a practitioner of magic, the only response should be ‘to cry out: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Insidiously, he also encouraged people to report any instances of sorcery, for if they did not, they would share in the guilt.

The link between the practice of magic and full Devil worship was becoming ever stronger, mutating into the deadly phenomenon of witch trials. It is estimated that between the fifteenth and eighteenth century around 50,000 people lost their lives through burning at the stake or hanging.

So mixing up some powders in a glass of wine, putting a wood carving on a threshold, being seen to chant over a well: all of these could lead to a trial at which there could be little or no defense. To unspeakable, agonizing death. And all because the powerful in society held a belief that had no bearing in reality and were yet free to impose it and construct a regime of terror around it. Now, that, for me, is The Scariest Part.

E.M. Powell: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Blood of the Fifth Knight: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Walmart

E.M. Powell is the author of medieval thrillers which have been #1 Amazon bestsellers in the US and the UK. Born and raised in the Republic of Ireland into the family of Michael Collins (the legendary revolutionary and founder of the Irish Free State), she now lives in the northwest of England with her husband and daughter and a Facebook-friendly dog. She is a regular blogger for English Historical Fiction Authors and a reviewer for both fiction & non-fiction for the Historical Novel Society. Her latest novel, The Blood of the Fifth Knight, is published by Thomas & Mercer.

Gifts for the One Who Comes After by Helen Marshall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Marshall’s second collection both fulfills and exceeds the promise of her first. The horrors are personal in these seventeen effective tales, and the fantastic elements are dark and disturbing. I’ve previously likened Marshall’s work to Kelly Link’s, and that kind of anything-goes, character-driven imagination is certainly still on display in these stories, but the analogy feels reductive to me now. Marshall is swiftly carving a style of fiction all her own — deeply inspired by the likes of Link and Neil Gaiman and Robert Shearman, yes, but distinctly her own. This is a very strong collection, without a dud in the bunch. I’d be hard pressed to choose a favorite, but if I must I’d point to the collection’s centerpiece novella, “Ship House,” a weird tale about a haunted ancestral home in South Africa. The longest piece in the book, it gives Marshall the room to fully explore her characters and their situation, and leaves me itching to see what she could do with a full-length novel. Here’s hoping she’ll have one soon, because I’ll be first in line to read it.

View all my reviews

Every year, I keep a list of the books I’ve read between January 1st and December 31st. Mostly it’s for my own reference, but I know some people enjoy talking about books so I post it every year, too. The list does not include magazines, short stories, or individual comic-book issues — and with my good friend Genevieve Valentine writing Catwoman, I read more individual comic-book issues this year than I normally do! — but it does include things like chapbooks and graphic novels/trade comic-book collections. So, without further ado, here is the list of books I read in 2014, in the order I read them:

Normally, I aim to read 30 books a year, since that was my average for so long, but this year I managed to read 50. Of course, I read quite a few graphic novels at the start of the year and that always bumps the total up, since they don’t take as long to get through. I would be hard pressed to choose favorites this year — pretty much everything I read was strong — but Gone Girl and Dare Me were definite standouts.

One thing I notice in looking over this list is a dearth of short story collections. There’s only one: Strantzas’s Beneath the Surface. I guess this year had me more in the mood for novels than anything else. I hope to remedy this with more collections next year.

That’s it for 2014, folks! I hope you and yours have a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2015 filled with lots of great books!

Hanukkah and Christmas brought me many fine presents this year, including these t-shirts from Alexa, a bottle of Grey Goose vodka from my brother and almost-sister-in-law, an amusing, antique grammar guide from 1922 called S.O.S. Slips Of Speech and How to Avoid Them from my sister-in-law, and many more. Among those many more were a hefty sum in Amazon gift certificates. Here’s what I spent them on:

 The four Robert Aickman collections recently released by Faber & Faber. Aickman’s “strange stories” have been recommended to me many times over the years by readers whose taste I trust, but it wasn’t until I attended a panel about him at this year’s World Fantasy Convention in Washington, DC that I finally decided to take the plunge.

 Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters: Defending the Earth with Ultraman, Godzilla, and Friends in the Golden Age of Japanese Science Fiction Film by August Ragone. Because this is basically everything I loved as a child in one book filled with gorgeous photographs.

 Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy. Season 18 of the classic series got off to a rather tepid start with serials like “The Leisure Hive” and “Meglos,” but then it rocketed into the stratosphere with three of the best serials of the Tom Baker era: “Full Circle,” “State of Decay,” and “Warriors’ Gate,” commonly known as the E-Space Trilogy. In my view, each of them is a masterpiece.

 The Horror of Dracula. Christopher Lee. Peter Cushing. Hammer Studios. The launch of the greatest Dracula franchise of all time. ‘Nuff said.

 King Kong. One of my all-time favorite movies, now on Blu-ray. It comes with a book of production photos and commentary by Ray Harryhausen, Ken Rolston, Fay Wray, and Merian C. Cooper. This was a no-brainer.

 White Zombie. One of my favorite Lugosi films, now on Blu-ray. With Kino, you always know you’re getting a high quality digital remastering and some fine special features. This one comes with a rare Lugosi interview.

 David Cronenberg’s masterpiece, Videodrome, on Criterion Blu-ray. Like Kino, Criterion usually does a bang-up job with their releases. This one comes packed with special features, including commentary by James Woods and Deborah Harry, but mostly I’m interested in watching it with a clearer picture and better sound than my old VHS tape offered.

 The Maltese Falcon on Blu-ray. In many ways, it was this movie — not a horror film, as you might expect — that was the defining movie of my life. To me, it’s perfect from start to finish, and in the world of film noir it’s unmatched, except maybe — maybe! — by Double Indemnity. This one’s got lots of special features too, including, of all things, a blooper reel!

Now comes the hard part: finding time to read and watch them all!