News & Blog

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 Lincoln Crisler, whose debut novel is Skinjumper. Here is the publisher’s description:

MURDER IS ONLY SKIN DEEP.

Rose Bennett, a young, recently-widowed mother, comes face to face with a newly-minted murderer and learns that there are much scarier things than raising a child alone in an unfamiliar town. Terry Miller has discovered three things in a very short amount of time: his high school sweetheart’s been cheating on him with his father, killing is fun, and if he does it just right, he can switch bodies with his victims.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Lincoln Crisler:

One of the scariest parts in my first full-length novel, Skinjumper, doesn’t involve the main protagonist of the story — a single-mother working in a restaurant who discovers a brutal killer in her newly-adopted hometown. It doesn’t involve the killer’s unexplainable ability to “jump” his consciousness into the “skin” of his victims, either. The small bit of the supernatural I worked into the book does make for some interesting storytelling, at least according to the feedback I’ve received, but let’s be honest — that’s never going to really happen to someone. And after the first round of dead bodies she discovers, Rose, our heroine, is more or less on red alert for the better part of the novel.

There’s a part in the book, it happens about halfway through, that I think is far more terrifying simply because it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time. There’s a dishwasher outside a club our killer is stalking. He steps out into the rear parking lot to have a cigarette. The hairs are probably bristling on his bare arms in the cool air, still damp with wash water. Most likely, he’s taking a couple breaths of awesome fresh air, because the back end of any eating establishment is pretty damn rank.

There’s a stranger leaned up against a wall in our dishwasher’s usual smoking area, and our pal sidles up to the new guy and sparks up. He doesn’t seem to resent the intrusion. He might even welcome a few minutes of banter with someone not bringing him more crap to do. He certainly doesn’t expect to be murdered in cold blood and dragged behind a dumpster. There’s no way he figures his life will end just because a guy who’s killed a few people in fits of rage over the past few days simply wants to try his hand at the premeditated variety of murder.

Sure, the thought of your mind being invaded by the foul, psychic presence of a sociopath is a chilling prospect. So is getting your life’s blood sucked by a vampire. So is being eaten by zombies. But my book isn’t even the genre’s most recent example of how terrible humans can be to each other without otherworldly intervention — take a look at last week’s Walking Dead mid-season finale, for instance!

But of course, you can expect more than just the death of an innocent dishwasher between the pages of Skinjumper. You can check it out at the links below and enjoy a healthy body count, achieved through means both magical and mundane.

Lincoln Crisler: Website / Facebook / Twitter

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

Lincoln Crisler’s body of work consists of over thirty short stories, two novellas and editorship of two anthologies, most recently Corrupts Absolutely?, an anthology of dark superhero fiction. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, to include HUB Magazine, Shroud Publishing’s Abominations anthology and IDW’s Zombies vs. Robots anthology. His debut novel, first novel-length short story collection and third anthology as editor are all scheduled for publication in 2014. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association. A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia with his wife and two of his three children. He enjoys music, cooking, web design and comic books. Lincoln and his wife own a virtual assistant business, Crisler Professional Services. You can contact him at lincoln@lincolncrisler.info.

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.)

We’re doing something a little different on The Scariest Part. This week, we’re part of author Alex Hughes’s month-long blog tour in celebration of the release of Vacant, the fourth volume in the award-winning Mindspace Investigations series. And we’ll also be offering our very first e-book giveaway and taking part in an exciting blog tour scavenger hunt based on the board game Clue. You’ll find the details of both down at the bottom. But first, here is the publisher’s description of Vacant:

Nothing ruins a romantic evening like a brawl with lowlifes — especially when one of them later turns up dead and my date, Detective Isabella Cherabino, is the #1 suspect. My history with the Atlanta PD on both sides of the law makes me an unreliable witness, so while Cherabino is suspended, I’m paying my bills by taking an FBI gig.

I’ve been hired to play telepathic bodyguard for Tommy, the ten-year-old son of a superior court judge in Savannah presiding over the murder trial of a mob-connected mogul. After an attempt on the kid’s life, the Feds believe he’s been targeted by the businessman’s “associates.”

Turns out, Tommy’s a nascent telepath, so I’m trying to help him get a handle on his Ability. But it doesn’t take a mind reader to see that there’s something going on with this kid’s parents that’s stressing him out more than a death threat…

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Alex Hughes:

[Note: this post contains light spoilers.]

There were a lot of things about Vacant that scared me. First, taking Adam away from his comfort zone in Atlanta with Cherabino and police was incredibly scary. This character had defined himself for so long by other peoples’ expectations that breaking out of those put him in a cold sweat. I had to step back as a writer and ask myself some very difficult questions. What really makes Adam tick? And the answer, surprisingly enough, was fear.

Adam is terrified of failing, and more precisely, of being a failure. This is a fear that I’ve found in the mirror all too often, and the worst part about this fear is that it can never truly be banished. What if they find out I’m not really that good? What if I fall on my face and screw up? Adam’s fears in the book echoed my fears as I struggled with the book without the comforting repartee with Cherabino. I was terrified that I would screw this book up and not be able to write it, and Adam was terrified that he would fail Tommy, and that Tommy would die like he saw in the vision.

The strange part about Adam, as I got deeper into the book, the strange part about fear, is that there hits a point where you can no longer be any more afraid than you currently are. Adam looked into the very face of his death — and I, into the face of my struggles with the page — and we both found something more important than the fear. Having decided to move forward, having decided that we would finish, no matter the cost, the fear became less important. The mission became everything. If we failed, we failed. We must continue, if our minds bled from it.

I was certain at many points in the draft that Tommy would die. That Adam would have to face his real fear of failure, even if it meant he’d fall off the wagon. He would have to find himself lacking, and the world dim and small and horrible. If Tommy died, then nothing Adam did — nothing — would ever make him look himself in the mirror the same way ever again. And I was sure it was going to happen, certain in a way that made my heart pound and my stomach churn. Certain, in a way you only get from an outline and a heavily foreshadowing vision of the future. Nothing I could do — nothing — would save the boy I’d come to love.

And then the last piece, the worst piece. Tommy’s mother, who is no hero. To get inside her head, to crawl inside the skin of a woman like that (vague only to keep the spoilers minimal) — I had to embrace one of my personal definitions of petty evil, and understand what it was to be her. That was the scariest part of all. To know that Adam would be destroyed, a boy may die, a vision may come to pass in the worst possible way, and to get inside the head of a person who had played a huge part in it for ill — that was scary. Because it was true. I could be her, given enough time and choices. I could.

And I could be the boy, facing a known killer for hire who liked to play with his victims, a man who strangled face-to-face, slowly.

And I could be Adam, seeing it coming and powerless to stop it. I could be Adam, who I thought might fail, and be a failure.

This was a very scary book for me to write. The scariest part was understanding.

Alex Hughes: Website / Facebook / Twitter

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

Alex Hughes, the author of the award-winning Mindspace Investigations series from Roc (the latest of which is Vacant), has lived in the Atlanta area since the age of eight. She is a graduate of the prestigious Odyssey Writing Workshop, and a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers. Her short fiction has been published in several markets including EveryDay Fiction, Thunder on the Battlefield and White Cat Magazine. She is an avid cook and foodie, a trivia buff, and a science geek, and loves to talk about neuroscience, the Food Network, and writing craft — but not necessarily all at the same time!

Alex Hughes’s ongoing scavenger hunt Clue game ends on December 24th. The scavenger hunt checklist can be found here. For those playing, here is the latest clue:

(Update 12/23/14: The giveaway is now CLOSED!)

GIVEAWAY (Worldwide): Win an E-Book Copy of Any Mindspace Investigations novel by Alex Hughes — winner’s choice! (That includes Vacant, the latest novel!)

Here are all the details:

1) Leave a comment below to enter for a chance to win. Specify which Mindspace Investigations novel you’d like, and your preferred e-book format: epub or mobi.

2) Geographic restrictions: This giveaway is open to everyone worldwide. All you need is a valid email address to receive the e-book should you win.

3) This giveaway will end on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014 (9:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time). The lucky winner will be selected at random, notified, and announced shortly thereafter.

Looking for books this Cyber Monday? I’ve written a few. Horror, fantasy, action-adventure, noir, short story collections, novels, novellas, novelettes — you’ll find something for everyone on your list. (Well, almost everyone. Grandpa may not like a book about a twenty-something heroin addict fighting a centuries-old dragon, but that’s his loss, right?) Click here to browse.

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.)

I’m very pleased to have my dear friend and New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden as my guest. I’ve known Chris for well over a decade, I’ve hosted author roasts with him and been roasted by him, we’ve done signings together and just generally been big fans of each other personally and professionally. Chris is a prolific writer — to say the least! — but nothing he’s written has ever let me down as a reader. That includes his latest horror novel, Snowblind, which I loved and which is being released today in mass market paperback. Here is the publisher’s description:

ONE SMALL, NEW ENGLAND TOWN IS TAKEN BY STORM — AND NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME.

Once upon a time, Coventry weathered a horrific blizzard, one that left many people dead — and others mysteriously lost. Twelve years later, the town is still haunted by the snow that fell that one fateful night…and now a new storm is on the way.

Photographer Jake Schapiro mourns the little brother he lost in the storm and, this time, he will see another boy go missing. Mechanic and part-time thief Doug Manning, whose wife was never found after she wandered into the whiteout, is starting over with another woman — and more ambitious crimes. Police detective Joe Keenan has never been the same since that night, when he failed to save the life of a young boy…and the boy’s father vanished in the storm only feet away. And all the way on the other side of the country, Miri Ristani receives a phone call — from a man who died twelve years ago. Old ghosts are trickling back to life as a new threat rolls in. Could it be that this storm will be even more terrifying than the last?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Christopher Golden:

There’s a scene near the beginning of Snowblind that some of my local friends and readers have heard me read at several signings. Though I’ve read other scenes publicly, this is the one that I keep coming back to again and again. A boy named Jake wakes during the night in the room he shares with his little brother. He glances over to see that his brother is not in bed. Instead, the little boy — Isaac — is standing by the window, looking through the frosted, snowy glass at the blizzard raging outside. When Jake tells Isaac to go back to bed, Isaac can’t tear his gaze away from the storm.

“There are monsters in the yard,” he says.

Growing up, my brother Jamie and I shared a room for years. First the smallest of the bedrooms on the second floor of our split level home, but later — after our older sister moved out — a larger room at the front corner of the house. In a storm, the wind would blow hard enough that branches from a tree just outside would sometimes scrape against the house or make long-fingered shadows at the window. When the wind howled and the house creaked and the tree scraped the house, I would huddle deeper under the covers in a state of delicious fear, a frisson of terror that felt just a fractional, emotional twist away from glee.

Jake and Isaac are partly Jamie and me. You can see it in the irritated, impatient big-brotherness of Jake (sorry Jamie), and the kind of innocently fearful wonder of Isaac…right before something terrible happens. But there’s another vital influence in this scene, a very specific one. Many readers have rightly pointed out — and I’ve discussed in interviews — the huge influence of Stephen King on me as a writer and on Snowblind in particular. In fact, Snowblind is an homage of sorts to all of the wonderful small-town horror stories I read in the 1980s (some of them from the 1970s). The novel that most inspired me, however, is King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, with its interweaving of the relationships of an ensemble of small-town residents.

In this particular scene — the scariest part — I couldn’t help channeling my own childhood sharing a bedroom with my brother, as well as the fears of my youth. But the scene is also enormously influenced by Danny and Ralphie Glick from ‘Salem’s Lot. Perhaps because I shared that room with my brother, the relationship between Danny and Ralphie felt profoundly real to me. The scene when vampiric Danny comes to Mark Petrie’s window is one of the most vividly chilling passages I can remember reading.

You won’t see the Glick brothers — or the Golden brothers, for that matter — in that scene from Snowblind. In the mental landscape I create for myself while writing, those boys were always Jake and Isaac Schapiro. I honestly don’t think the scene would have worked, otherwise. I want you to be afraid for these little boys, frightened in the dark with the blizzard roaring outside and monsters in the yard, and if reactions to my public readings of that scene are any indication, it works its dark bits of magic just as I’d hoped.

I wrapped up my childhood fears in a little box, and now they are my gift to you.

One last note. These days, another family lives in the house where I grew up. Shortly after they moved in, they cut down all of the trees and pulled up all of the bushes in the front of the house. I wonder if it was because of that dreadful scraping and the long-fingered shadows of the branches.

Christopher Golden: Website / Facebook / Twitter

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

Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Strangewood and the upcoming near-future thriller Tin Men. He has co-written three illustrated novels with Mike Mignola, the first of which, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series, Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead, The Monster’s Corner, and the upcoming Seize the Night, among others. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world.