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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Lisa de Nikolits, whose newest novel is Rotten Peaches. Here is the publisher’s description:

Rotten Peaches is a gripping epic filled with disturbing and unforgettable insights into the human condition. Love, lust, race and greed. How far will you go? Two women. Two men. One happy ending. It takes place in Canada, the U.S. and South Africa. Nature or nurture. South Africa, racism and old prejudices — these are hardly old topics but what happens when biological half-siblings meet with insidious intentions? Can their moral corruption be blamed on genetics — were they born rotten to begin with? And what happens when they meet up with more of their ilk? What further havoc can be wreaked, with devastating familial consequences?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Lisa de Nikolits:

It’s 3a.m. in the morning. I am alone on a farm in South Africa, three hours north of Johannesburg. Three armed men are on their way to rape and kill me. They are armed with knives, hammers and metal pipes. They aren’t wearing balaclavas or trying to hide their faces in any way.

They have planned this down to the last detail, the lock on the panic room door is destroyed, the bolt rendered useless.

No one knows I am here. I came back without thinking or planning. I returned to my childhood home in haste and anger and I will pay the price with my life.

That’s a scene from Rotten Peaches. And you might think it was the scariest part to write but it wasn’t. It gave me goosebumps for sure and I felt every blow of the battle as if I were there and I was filled with utter exhaustion when it was over.

But I had faith in my protagonist to hold her own — in that instance.

Rotten Peaches has two protagonists and they are both damaged and dangerous women. Bernice and Leonie. There’s not much that scares them but at certain points of the book, they both lose control of their actions and that, for me, was the scariest part to write.

Being in a dangerous situation is one thing but when you are emotionally weakened and you let things slide away from you — well, that’s what scares me!

Bernice, protagonist #1, is conned out of a million bucks by her no-good lover. She’s down in the dumps (understandably!) and she decides to leave town. She’s drinking in an airport hotel bar and the barman asks her if she’d like to party and, on a whim, reckless and angry, she agrees.

She leaves with him in his broken down car, with no idea of where they are going. She smokes a joint and the world starts to spin out of control. They get to the party, a wild affair with fires burning in oil drums and naked people leaping in and out of the pool, with palm trees swaying in the wind and she takes more drugs, spurred by her anger. She wants to punish those who have hurt her by hurting herself even more. She loses sight of the bartender and she ends up alone. How will she get back to her hotel? This is Johannesburg, you don’t just call a cab. Plus she has lost her purse with her phone. She is surrounded by a bunch of drunk strangers and she’s stoned out of her mind. She is at her most vulnerable.

Leonie, protagonist #2, is betrayed by her lover. He left her to marry a sugar granny and her heart is broken. Leonie works the trade show circuit, selling cosmetics. She’s also a kleptomaniac with a penchant for self-medicating and she takes one too many Xanax to drown out the pain of having to see her lover with his new wife. Hardly able to walk, she accepts a security guard’s offer to escort her to her hotel room.

When there, he tries to rape her. How does she rally? I don’t want to give the game away!

I guess those are my own worst fears — that I could end up in one of those situations. One generally associates those sorts of things happening to kids but it can happen just as easily to adults. You get tired, right? You want to let off a bit of steam, or you’re hurt or angry and you just want to escape from reality for a while. But you may suffer devastating consequences.

My writing is all about catastrophic what-if consequences. My novels have been called angst-filled reading and Flare magazine said (of Rotten Peaches) that “you can’t look away” which is exactly my goal! Hook the reader in so that they can’t look away! And if I, the writer, don’t find the scenes scary, then no one else will — I am the first reader who has to be convinced and moved by the power of the prose!

Thank you very much for having me as a guest here today Nick, and I hope readers will enjoy this post!

Rotten Peaches: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound / Inanna Publications

Lisa de Nikolits: Website / Facebook

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has lived in Canada since 2000. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy and has lived in the U.S.A., Australia and Britain. No Fury Like That, her seventh novel, will be published in Italian, under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo, in 2019. Previous works include: The Hungry Mirror (winner 2011 IPPY Gold Medal); West of Wawa (winner 2012 IPPY Silver Medal); A Glittering Chaos (winner 2016 Bronze IPPY Medal); The Witchdoctor’s Bones; Between The Cracks She Fell (winner 2016 for Contemporary Fiction); and The Nearly Girl. Lisa lives and writes in Toronto. Her ninth novel, The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution, is forthcoming in 2019.

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m delighted to host my friend Christa Carmen, whose debut story collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, is already getting a lot of buzz. Here is the publisher’s description:

A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.

In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Christa Carmen:

Much of what we observe in horror films never results in the creation of fears or phobias in the everyday world that we inhabit. Sure, we may check the basement, or peer out the window into the shadowy backyard upon watching The Conjuring or You’re Next, but for the most part, we navigate the mundanities of life confident that our cars won’t turn evil, our dogs won’t turn rabid, and a day at the beach won’t turn into an installment of everyone’s favorite week-long television block of shark-based programming.

There is one horror film-founded fear, however, that’s not only warranted, but backed by statistics, perpetuated by home security system companies and gun manufacturers, and illustrated with dismal regularity on the local evening news, where reports of random break-ins and armed robberies roll in.

The home invasion narrative is one that can incite vivid fantasies; certainly you wouldn’t hide, trembling and helpless, beneath your bed. You would face your foe with courage, brandishing butcher knives from once-benevolent kitchen blocks, collecting other household objects with which to make your siege: bedposts, hairpins, car keys, golf clubs.

Needless to say, I felt that getting the final scene of my short story, “Red Room,” right, was imperative to highlighting a rather universal fear (what human throughout history has not placed the soundness of their shelter above most else?), to capitalize on that dread initiated with Marci’s discovery of the first inexplicable, gore-saturated photo on her phone.

The inspiration behind this story, appearing in my debut collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and first published in the January 2018 issue of Unnerving Magazine, is a bit more true-to-life than that of many of my other works of short fiction. The story is about a woman who, despite her fiancé’s belief to the contrary, is convinced she should be concerned by the gruesome photos appearing on her phone, and whose fear proves justified in a rather ghastly, albeit unexpected way.

On April 13, 2017, Tor.com published an article by Emily Asher-Perrin entitled, “The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror and the Intuition of Women.” The piece examines one of the most overdone tropes in horror: that of the woman who feels that something is off, but is disbelieved and brushed off by everyone, right up until the moment the chainsaw begins to rev, or zombies break down the door. The article discusses how every woman knows what this feels like, and how “women know that it’s their responsibility to prevent harm from coming to them.”

Not long after reading this article, something odd happened. I awoke the morning after a wedding to a series of photographs on my phone that I did not take. The photos were of two men in a bar, and they had an eerie, old-fashioned feel that lent them a patina of wrongness as palpable as any Instagram filter. The next day, at a post-wedding brunch, the topic of the mysterious photos came up. The reaction from several men in the group was that, one way or another, I had to have been the cause of these photos appearing on my phone. “You probably just screenshotted them from a website,” or “you must have accidentally downloaded them.” I don’t drink, so the activities of the night before were clear in my mind. This complete unwillingness to believe that the photos had appeared through no action of mine collided in my head with the echoes of Asher-Perrin’s article, and “Red Room” was the result.

With the story’s general idea established, I discovered very quickly that both the culmination of Marci and Caleb’s disagreements and the showdown between them and the deranged, dangerous men that had left visual evidence of an untold number of murders on Marci’s phone, would take place in the master bedroom, a location of regular discontent for the on-the-rocks couple.

To set the scene for those who have not yet read the story, Marci awakes alone in their room after yet another argument with Caleb. A floorboard creaks. The ceiling fan is still, the face of the alarm clock, dark. An exhalation of breath comes from the black pit of the closet. Gathering her courage, Marci sprints for the living room. She rouses Caleb, tells him there is someone in the house, and watches as he assembles those items — a flashlight and a butcher knife — they’ll require to make their stand. Together, they creep toward the bedroom.

The subsequent chain of events was heavily influenced by one particular scene in the 2008 Bryan Bertino-directed film, The Strangers, in which Liv Tyler’s character has already been terrorized by a series of slowly escalating assaults on her home, when out of nowhere, shattering the silence and causing the audience to feel as if their equilibrium has suddenly been thrown off-kilter, the needle drops on the record player and a song begins to skip, over and over and over again, the grating quality of the sound clearly adding to Kristen McKay’s inability to quell her panic.

Back in Caleb and Marci’s bedroom, the power flashes on. Music blares from the reanimated clock radio, and they shout to be heard over the deceptively upbeat chords of a techno song. It’s their final, bitter fight. The noise, chaos, bright lights, whirring ceiling fan, and high emotion provide the ultimate distraction for what happens next.

I won’t give it away, but I hope that those who read “Red Room” will be reminded of why they should lock their doors, bolt their windows, and most importantly, never, ever disregard a significant other’s warning when she says she feels like something’s wrong.

Maybe the unfortunate events of my story will do for you what all the young women begging not to visit secluded cabins in the woods could not. Maybe it will teach you to listen, and to believe. Then again, maybe it won’t. Who am I to convince you of the nefariousness of a few photographs?

I’m sure it’s nothing, after all. I’m sure everything will be just fine…

Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Christa Carmen: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Goodreads / Amazon Author Page

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m honored to host my good friend of many years and one hell of a writer, F. Brett Cox, whose long-awaited debut story collection is The End of All Our Exploring. Here is the publisher’s description:

The stories in F. Brett Cox’s debut collection move through multiple genres and many times and places, from the monsters of the 19th century to the future fields of war, from New England to the South to the American West, from the strange house at the top of the hill to the bottom of your childhood swimming pool. But whatever the time and place, and whether utterly fantastic or all too real, all of these remarkable fictions pose the fundamental question: what’s next? The End of All Our Exploring features 27 stories, and it also includes Cox’s unique historical notes.

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

One of the writer’s tasks that sometimes gets less noticed than others is the need to reread one’s own work before it’s published. Technically, it’s proofreading, I guess, but in preparing my collection The End of All Our Exploring: Stories for publication, I found myself rereading the stories carefully, more than once, in some cases for the first time in many years. Happily, the task turned out to be daunting, but not painful. I did not cringe at beginner’s mistakes or find myself regretting my editor’s decision to publish what is, for all intents and purposes, my collected stories to date.

But while I didn’t find myself thinking, “I wish I hadn’t written that,” I did find myself thinking, “How could I have written that?” Some of the stories, especially those I wrote earlier in my career, contain levels of grinding brutality that gave older reader me some pause. The father who puts the law above his family in “Up Above the Dead Line,” the couple bound within an inescapable curse in “Legacy,” the hierarchical cage that traps the young narrator of “What They Did to My Father,” the sledgehammer of oppression that keeps coming down in “Petition to Repatriate Geronimo’s Skull,” the quietly sinister systems of “Maria Works at Ocean City Nails” that leave no doubt the kids are not all right. How could I have written that?

Well, because that’s the world I found in reading the history of my own country, and that’s the world that waits outside the door every day. In “Legacy,” the character Constance says, “It doesn’t matter how careful we are. Terrible things happen for no reason.” In the story, Franklin, who loves her, has no reply to her statement, and as of this moment, neither do I.

What scares me about many of the stories in my book — several of which are taken from actual events — is that they are not just realistic, but real.

I should add, lest my publisher get nervous, that there are lighter moments in the book — some people find at least a couple of the stories pretty funny — and, in some of the stories in the book, there is a sense that forward movement is possible, that we don’t necessarily have to resign ourselves to being trapped within the systems that generate such terrible things. But even then, if you manage to move forward, there’s no certainty what you will find.

Someone once asked the philosopher Michel Foucault (whose Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison is scarier than anything in my book, trust me) why he thought everything was bad. “I don’t think everything is bad,” he replied. “I think everything is dangerous.”

I agree. Don’t ever give in to fear. But let’s be careful out there.

The End of All Our Exploring: Fairwood Press / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

F. Brett Cox: Facebook

In addition to the stories included in The End of All Our Exploring, F. Brett Cox’s poetry, plays, essays, reviews, and academic writings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004). He has served on the Stoker Award Additions Jury and is a co-founder, and current Vice-President of the Board of Directors, for the Shirley Jackson Award. A native of North Carolina, Brett is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. He lives in Vermont with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

My guest this week on The Scariest Part is author Ray Clark, whose new novel is Implant. Here is the publisher’s description:

Bramfield, near Leeds, a sleepy little market town nestled on the borders of West and North Yorkshire. Detectives Stewart Gardener and Sean Reilly discover the naked corpse of Alex Wilson, nailed to the wall of a cellar in his uncle’s hardware store. His lips are sewn together and his body bears only one mark, a fresh scar near his abdomen.

Within forty-eight hours, their investigation results in dead ends, more victims, no suspects and very little in the way of solid evidence.

Gardener and Reilly have a problem and a question on their hands: are the residents of Bramfield prepared for one of history’s most sadistic killers, The Tooth Fairy? The detectives race against time to stop the trail of horrific murders…

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Ray Clark:

I had a good think about the scariest part of the novel, and I even spoke at length to my editor about it and we both came to pretty much the same conclusion. I don’t think there is anything in Implant that falls in the really scary category, particularly not in the sense of a heart-pounding, jump out of your skin, nearly mess yourself, scary moment.

However, I think the overall concept of notbeing in control of any given situation is a particularly frightening one. As human beings we all like to control our environment, even if it’s something as simple as having friends over for dinner and you suddenly start to realize that you’re making a mess of a relatively simple meal you’ve cooked a dozen times or more. Running late for a meeting is another good example of losing control: you’re stuck in traffic, you’ve lost signal on the mobile and shortly afterwards you start to lose it. So, there are varying degrees of loss, most of which we can overcome. But if you are threatened by someone who has imprisoned you, is going to kill you, and who takes their time to explain how and why they have you, and what they’re going to do, that’s a whole different ball game: a brand new level of fear. As things progress, you can see that no matter what you do, there is no way out. Given that scenario, I imagine your heart will start to pound, very rapidly. As a writer you can control that situation perfectly by concentrating on your own fears before transferring them to the page.

There are definitely two very intense horrific scenes in Implant that fall into that category. They instill a sense of fear in the creeping-dread-of-what-is-about-to-happen sense. Both include victims who are isolated but treated in very different ways. With one, it’s a long drawn out affair in which the victim is held captive, and being forced — in a unique way — to part with information; the other is a scene set in the waiting room of a small country railway station. I take quite a bit of time throughout the novel to explain the gentle, rural setting where life is lived at a slower pace, with a small-town, tranquil yesteryear feeling. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, I describe what I believe to be an extremely cringe-inducing, spine-creeping scene that the police are faced with. All along, you instinctively know that no matter what they do — or attempt to do — things are going to end very badly for the victim. Hopefully, the rising panic the scene invokes causes a sense of fright in the dreaded anticipation of what is coming.

Even whilst I was writing it I could sense it all perfectly, and despite what I was doing, and the fact that I was also starting to inwardly feel uncomfortable, I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to make sure that everyone who reads that scene feels as I did — or maybe even as stressed out as the victim.

Implant: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound / Press Release & Official Trailer

Ray Clark: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Amazon Author Page

Ray Clark’s first published work in 1995 was a 3,000 word essay on the author Graham Masterton, with The British Fantasy Society for one of their in-house magazines. A book length adaptation, Manitou Man, followed in 1998. Ray is the author of several stand-alone horror and crime novels including, The Priest’s Hole (May 2012) and Seven Secrets (Jan 2015), published by Damnation Books. Calix (Nov 2012) and two short story collections, A Devil’s Dozen (Dec 2013) and A Detective’s Dozen (June 2015), published by Double Dragon books of Canada. Ray’s first full-length crime novel, Impurity, was published by Caliburn Press in 2016. The second, Imperfection, followed in March 2017 from Urbane Publications. Endeavour Press also released Ray’s stand-alone horror novel, Resurrection in June 2017. Implant is book 3 in the IMP series, published by Urbane Publications.