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Consumed by David Cronenberg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fans of Cronenberg’s films will find many of his signature traits on display in his debut novel: a fetishistic obsession with technology (every electronic device mentioned in the novel is given its full model name and a rundown of its capabilities), a fascination with insects, a coldly dispassionate demeanor, and plenty of psychosexual kink. Unfortunately, where a dispassionate demeanor can set the tone of a film perfectly, it doesn’t work as well in a novel, making it very difficult to engage with the characters. It is to Cronenberg’s credit that the characters remain interesting even from a distance, but while the cannibalistic murder-mystery at the heart of the novel is compelling, when your story is this twisty and opaque you really need to nail the ending. Alas, in my opinion Cronenberg doesn’t. The novel ends too abruptly, which left this reader wondering what was happening. Perhaps that was Cronenberg’s intent, but as intriguing as the plot’s labyrinthine turns were, I was hoping for at least a moment of revelation to bring it all together. Still, I’m giving this one four stars because it held my undivided attention all the way through and even a lesser Cronenberg project is still something worth experiencing.

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Welcome to a special new 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.)

This is quite a distinguished week for The Scariest Part, because this time we’re spotlighting not one but two authors! (Click here to see F. Paul Wilson’s Scariest Part from yesterday.) I’m very excited to have John Goodrich as my guest today. He’s been a friend of mine for several years now, and I couldn’t be prouder to feature his long-awaited debut novel, Hag, which includes an introduction by esteemed, multiaward-winning horror author Laird Barron. Hag goes on sale today as part of Thunderstorm Books’ Maelstrom V three-book collector’s series, along with two new books by World Horror Convention Grandmaster Brian Keene. Here is the publisher’s description:

All David wanted was to rest and get better. He moved from Vermont to Boston to beat his cancer. Even before the boxes are unpacked, he and his best friend Sam notice an eerie presence in his new apartment building. The emaciated haunt is a roiling storm of fury with black iron claws and jagged metal teeth. She attacks David without reason or pity, and just when he thinks he knows her limits, she tears through them. Hag is a dark, brooding novel set in a blighted personal landscape. A story of deathless rage and enduring hatred.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for John Goodrich:

I want to tell you a little secret. Although my debut novel is a ghost story, I don’t really like ghost stories.

Before I started Hag, the novel that’s about to be published, I wrote a fantasy novel that I loved to pieces. I couldn’t get agents or publishers interested in it. That hurt. I loved my book. Still do. Someday someone will buy it. But it’s insanity to write a sequel to a book that hasn’t sold, so I decided to write something different, something I wouldn’t love quite so much. After some thought, I decided to write a ghost story.

The ghost story is the prototypical horror story, and humans have been telling them for thousands of years. Thanks to cultural saturation, ghosts are no longer automatically scary. Casper is a friendly ghost. A ghost mascot flogs breakfast cereal. So I knew I would have to add my own spice to make the story effective horror. Given how often the ground has been trod and retrod, I would also have to come up with something unconventional to make it stand out.

Looking for that new something, I read up on the classics: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s Hell House, Elizabeth Massie’s Homeplace (there’s a reason Hag begins with an H). I fell in love with these stories. They’re complex and brilliant, transcending the cliched sheeted phantom clanking its chains. These ghosts had agendas, personalities, and needs.

I decided to load my ghost with some unfinished business. This would give her depth of character, and provide the protagonists with a mystery to solve, rather then just standing around being terrified. So what kind of unfinished business make a story horror, rather than a mystery?

Some recent stories have altered their emotional hook from an existential fear of death to a naked fear of dying in pain. We read about people who die every day. Murders, accidents, and cancer all claim lives. But every now and then, we hear whispers of someone who did not pass away peacefully, surrounded by their family. The elderly woman who breaks her hip after falling on the kitchen floor, lying in helpless, blinding pain for three days before dying of dehydration. The child manacled to a brick wall, slowly dying of thirst and loneliness. The infected patient, fighting with all their strength, losing a little bit each day, organs failing one by one, painfully dragged toward the inevitable end. The terror of such cruel deaths is both heartbreaking and horrifying. Thus, the perfect thing to make my ghost violent and at the same time, understandable.

How far should I go? How far could I go? It had to be good. The ghost’s story was going to be the emotional center of the novel. If I made the character’s suffering weak, the story loses its driving force and credibility. On the flip side, did I really have the nerve to write the excruciating death of Chibuike, a character I had invented and cared about?

This was the scariest part. Most of my short stories have been Lovecraftian, cosmic horror, rather than anything about pain or physical suffering. I didn’t know if I could write a long, torturous death. I was afraid, and the fear of writing that chapter haunted me until I had to write it. To prepare I read Jack Ketchum’s merciless Off Season and The Girl Next Door. Ketchum is merciless but dispassionate in his description of atrocities. I would have to not tell the reader how to feel about awful things happening to Chibuike, even as I described them. I wrote an entire chapter describing the agonizing demise, imagining the horror consuming her as she clawed at her chains, groped for a light in the darkness, watched all light and hope be slowly, cruelly extinguished. It was an exhausting two weeks.

My work paid off. In his introduction to Hag, Laird Barron writes, “Chibuike’s anguish is most acutely felt for she reflects the very savagery and malice that tore her from hearth and home, peeled away her humanity, and snuffed her life. She cries the loudest and repays hurt with hurt.”

That’s what horror is about. Facing fear and seeing if it kills me.

John Goodrich: Website / Blog / Twitter

Hag: Order it as part of the Maelstrom V three-book collector’s set

John Goodrich lives in the haunted Green Mountains of Vermont, the last refuge of true Lovecraft country. His stories have been included in Steampunk Cthulhu, Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Undead and Unbound, and the Lovecraft E-Zine. Hag is his first published novel. He has spent the last year and a half writing about kaiju films on his blog. His other unhealthy obsessions include biplanes, Icelandic sagas, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, and semiotics.

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 especially happy to have New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson as my guest because I’ve known Paul for nearly fifteen years now and am delighted to call him a friend. He also happens to be one of those most talented, prolific, and accomplished authors I know. His latest novel, Fear City, features one of his most popular and enduring characters, Repairman Jack, in the final novel of the Repairman Jack: The Early Years trilogy. Here is the publisher’s description:

Rage, terror, and redemption: these are the stones upon which F. Paul Wilson builds the concluding chapter of Repairman Jack: The Early Years, the prequel trilogy focusing on the formative years of Wilson’s globally popular supernatural troubleshooter.

The strands of Jack’s life, established in the first two books, Cold City and Dark City, are now woven into a complete pattern.

Centered around an obscure group of malcontents intent on creating a terrible explosion in New York City in 1993, Fear City shows the final stages of young Jack becoming Repairman Jack. It is a dark and terrible story, full of plots and needless mayhem, with secret agents, a freelance torturer, a secret society as old as human history, love, death, and a very bleak triumph. Jack threads his way through this intricate maze, as people he loves are stripped away from him in a way that presages the later epic series of novels.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for F. Paul Wilson:

When the copyedited manuscript of Fear City arrived from the publisher six moths ago, I set about fine-combing the text. My copyeditor for the last dozen-plus years, Rebecca Maines, had done her usual excellent job of flagging inconsistencies and typos and the occasional verbless sentence. I always take extra time at this stage because it’s my last chance to sharpen dialog, hone descriptions, and make cuts before the book is typeset.

Things went smoothly until I came to Dr. Moreau.

Yeah, Dr. Moreau. I couldn’t resist naming a torturer known to all the clandestine services and organizations as La Chirurgienne after H.G. Wells’s vivisectionist. It seemed…right.

You have to realize it had been months since I’d sent off the manuscript and she’d kind of faded from my consciousness. But as I reread her passages, I kept thinking, What dark corner of my hindbrain did I plumb to find this woman?

The clichéd template of the torturer is Szell from Marathon Man. Adèle Moreau, on the other hand, is a cultured, rather brittle French woman with a thick accent. She was trained as a surgeon but developed a sideline of hiring out to extract information from people who don’t wish to part with it. She doesn’t think of herself as a torturer or a sadist, but rather a pain researcher — a “nociresearcher,” to use her term — and sees her interrogations as opportunities for scientific research.

She maintains a certain decorum about her work — e.g., she likes her subjects fully clothed.

“I find proximity to a naked human, how shall we say, distasteful. I can cut away to expose whatever area I wish to explore.”

That “explore” got me — and it came from me. Her specialty is the delicate, minimally invasive procedure.

“I abhor brutality—the fists, the truncheons, the waterboarding. And the mutilation of genitalia — dégoûtant! So crude. So unnecessary.”

Charlot, her pet Yorkie, stays in her procedure room when she operates and she occasionally feed him scraps.

What I found most disquieting on the reread was that I had no memory of sitting down and designing this lady from hell. Perhaps I’ve been turning stereotypes on their heads so long it simply came naturally. If the cliché is an ex-Nazi or an Albanian thug, I’ll use a genteel professional — a female instead of a male — and give her a French accent, evoking the culture that gave us the Impressionists. Think Monet’s lilies…floating on blood.

Maybe that’s all it was…unconscious habit. I took comfort in that.

But then I came to her specialty, known as “IV,” and all comfort vanished. “IV” stands for “Infernum Viventes,” Latin for “Living Hell.” It is, I would say, the nastiest, most diabolically evil thing you can do to a human being. I have no idea where IV came from. Perhaps it exists somewhere in fiction or real life, but I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. So I’ve got nothing to blame for it except my own id. And that’s scary.

The key word is “Living.” Because in our society, we would not let someone die after they have suffered this procedure. We will keep them alive for as long as modern medical science allows. Prolonging life…it’s what we do.

But if you’re the victim, the only thing you’d request — plead for if you could communicate — is death.

What is IV? Well, that would be a spoiler. And I don’t want to spoil one of Fear City’s centerpieces for you.

F. Paul Wilson: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Fear City: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

F. Paul Wilson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Repairman Jack novels, lives in Wall, New Jersey. In 2008, he won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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 New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper, whose latest novel is Forbidden Ground, part of the Cold Creek series. Here is the publisher’s description:

Let the dead stay dead…

Despite a traumatic childhood in Cold Creek, Ohio, the Lockwood sisters have reunited there for the wedding of youngest sister Tess to the town’s sheriff. Maid of honor Kate Lockwood is determined to break through best man Grant Mason’s defences. An anthropologist, Kate makes her living studying the dead. She is particularly interested in the prehistoric Adena civilization that once called the area home. A large burial mound sits on Mason family land, and Kate wants permission to excavate. But Grant refuses and tells Kate to stay away from the mound.

Kate respects Grant’s desire to honor his grandfather’s belief that the dead should not be disturbed. However, the more she researches the more it becomes clear that Grant is hiding something. When one of Grant’s friends is killed — and the sheriff is away on his honeymoon — the couple joins forces to assist the deputy in the investigation.

When Kate comes under attack she is certain it is connected to the burial mound. Grant seems concerned for Kate’s safety, but despite their explosive attraction she can’t help but be suspicious of his motives. Can Kate trust the man she’s come to love, or will the wrong decision be her final act?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Karen Karper:

As a child I was terrified by those old “mummy” movies or any about the dead stalking the living. Even today, I can’t stand to look at zombie movies. But the Egyptian cult of the dead with its elaborate tombs with sacrificed slaves and gifts meant for the afterlife still fascinates me.

So I was totally intrigued when I learned that there was an ancient society which left burial mounds with preserved bodies and artifacts throughout Ohio, where I grew up, live and write. This prehistoric Adena culture was perfect for my suspense novel, Forbidden Ground. But as I researched and wrote, I had to fight to keep myself from being, as we say in the heart of Ohio, “creeped out.”

Kate Lockwood, my heroine, is an archeologist who is desperate to lead a dig in what she believes is a major, untouched Adena tomb. But it’s on private property, and she can’t convince Grant Mason, the owner — her love interest too — to permit this. “Let the dead stay dead,” he tells her, his family motto started by his grandfather and father who once protected the tomb. But is he really hiding something else in there? As Kate works to sway Grant to her obsession, she starts to either imagine or experience visits from the dead interred in the tomb.

The Adena people are quite mysterious in their origin as well as in their mortuary practices. Early Ohio pioneers and some archeologists excavated Adena tombs and found corpses of their elite laid out on beds, surrounded by sacrificed slaves and relics. The most famous of the artifacts is called The Adena Pipe and has been recently named the state’s official artifact.

Named for a site where many remains were found, the prehistoric Adena left their burial mounds from the East Coast of the U.S. to the Mississippi River, where they flourished, then mysteriously disappeared. Remember that old 1970s book and movie Chariots of the Gods, which claimed brilliant ancient cultures could be the result of alien visitations? I’m not claiming that, but what a thought — maybe for another book, another time.

But the scariest part inForbidden Ground comes when Kate enters the tomb, and not of her own volition. Not only is there the danger of a cave-in, but the sights and smells in the tomb, and its possible still-living presences, hit her hard. It is the culmination of her dreams, but may also be the culmination of her life.

I felt I was trapped there with her and hope my readers do too.

Karen Harper: Website

Forbidden Ground: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Karen Harper is the New York Times bestselling author of contemporary suspense and the historical thriller, Mistress of Mourning. Forbidden Ground is the middle book in her edge of Appalachia trilogy, The Cold Creek Novels. Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Harper divides her time between Ohio and Florida. She is dying to excavate the two Adena mound tombs in Highbanks Park near her home, but, alas, she’s only a former Ohio State University instructor of English, not archeology.