News & Blog

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author J. H. Bográn, whose new novel is Poisoned Tears. Here is the publisher’s description:

Retired Dallas private investigator Alan Knox dislikes New Orleans so much he won’t even drink Abita, the local beer. It all goes back to the day his knee and his promising pro football career were wrecked in a Superdome game with the Saints. But when his estranged son calls and asks for help finding a missing fiancée, the guilt-ridden Texan heads for the Big Easy where he soon finds himself in trouble up to the tops of his snakeskin boots.

What starts off as a missing person case turns into a hunt for a serial killer who uses exotic poisonous animals to dispatch his victims. Painfully aware he can’t go it alone, Knox joins forces with an over-the-hill journalist and an unfriendly police detective as he navigates the dark streets and seedy bars in search of his prey.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for J. H. Bográn:

When I conceived the idea for a serial killer using poisonous animals to disguise the deaths as accidents, I knew I had to deal with creatures. I chose the ones that scared me the most! Although I can’t list them here, I can refer to the first one as the cover artwork already gives it away.

The structure scorpion usually appears on any top ten list of dangerous creatures, and I researched it extensively and it became the protagonist of the very first scene I wrote for my novel Poisoned Tears.

The scene shows my killer looking upon the first victim, a woman in her twenties, bound and unconscious lying on the floor. Then I go into the details of handling the scorpion and making the little animal sting the woman. Without emergency medical treatment she’s as good as gone. The killer makes sure she doesn’t get any.

Several of my writing friends commented on how ominous and scary the scene was, one even compared it to something out of a Stephen King novel — with my apologies to Mr. King.

The subsequent revisions included a change on the identity of the victim (which created a problem as they were from different places and even races). I also varied the length and various details that were cut, brought it back, cut again, rewritten, left unused, and then brought back again at the behest of my editor. As you can see, I played with all of its details except one: its placement. I was adamant about using that scene as the opening sequence for I deemed it the perfect attention grabber.

Later I showed the opening chapters at various writing workshops with publishing professionals, the feedback came in two extremes. There were ones who loved it, others not so much. A publishing professional shared her comments from the heart. “It’s a turn-off for me when I see women my age murdered on the first page,” she said.

The above comment made me realize that the scene, as polished as it was by that seventh draft, was the scariest part of the book. In an almost metaphysical sense, it scared me as well, when I feared the scene would stump the book’s road to publication.

Exceptional times call for exceptional circumstances, right? By the time I signed a contract with Rebel e-Publishers, I reached a compromise: Keep the scene, but in a different place in a later chapter. As it turned out, the first scene I wrote for Poisoned Tears became the one that went through the most changes before it saw the light of day. Now I’m just hoping readers, the ultimate critics, enjoy the book and that particular scene.

J. H. Bográn: Website / Amazon Author Page / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

Poisoned Tears: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Smashwords

J. H. Bográn, born and raised in Honduras, is the son of a journalist. He ironically prefers to write fiction rather than fact. José’s genre of choice is thrillers, but he likes to throw in a twist of romance into the mix. His works include novels and short stories in both English and Spanish. He has also worked on scripts for motion pictures and domestic television in his home country. Poisoned Tears is his third novel in English and has already garnered positive reviews and recommendations. Jon Land calls it “a splendid piece of crime noir,” while Douglas Preston says it’s a first class roller-coaster ride. He’s a member of The Crime Writers Association, the Short Fiction Writers Guild and the International Thriller Writers, where he also serves as the Thriller Roundtable Coordinator and contributor editor for their official e-zine, The Big Thrill.

This week on The Scariest Part, I’m delighted to have as my guest my dear friend Bracken MacLeod, a very talented writer whose debut collection is titled 13 Views of the Suicide Woods. Here is the publisher’s description:

From the author of Mountain Home and Stranded, comes Bracken MacLeod’s first collection of short stories.

These stories inhabit the dark places where pain and resignation intersect, and the fear of a quiet moment alone is as terrifying as the unseen thing watching from behind the treeline. In the titular story, a young woman waits for her father to come home from the place where no one goes intending to return. A single word is the push that may break a man and save a life. The members of a winemaking community celebrate the old time religion found flowing in the blood of the vine. A desperate man seeking a miracle cure gets more than a peek behind the curtain of Dr. Morningstar’s Psychic Surgery. A child who dreams of escaping on leather wings finds rescue in dark water instead. Looking back over a life, a homeless veteran must decide to live in the present if he wants to save his future. In a Halloween Hell house, a youth pastor must face the judgment of a man committed to doing the Lord’s work. Fiery death heralds the beginning of a new life. A man who has been carrying pain with him his entire life gives up his last piece of darkness. And a still day beneath the sun illuminates the quiet sorrow of the last feather to fall.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Bracken MacLeod:

For me, the scariest part of 13 Views of the Suicide Woods is a common thread weaving throughout almost all of the stories, which is the sense of being swept away by inevitability. What I mean is the feeling of powerlessness in the face of something dark and undeniable, which in that moment cannot be undone or overcome. It’s not the moment where things begin to go wrong, but the one where a person becomes conscious that things have gone wrong and there’s no way back. It’s the realization of it.

Several years ago, I was driving home from a friend’s house after a late night out gaming. It was about half past two and I was dead tired and had an hour on the road still ahead of me, so I was trying to get home quickly. But it was snowing, and I was going a little too fast in the storm and lost control. The car started to fishtail and while I was doing my best to correct the slide, it just kept getting worse. And before I realized how bad things had gotten, I was spinning completely around at 60 miles an hour on black ice headed for the median strip. I wasn’t sure when I hit the snow bank in the middle of the interstate whether the car was going to stop, or flip and roll into oncoming traffic. All I did know was that there wasn’t a thing I could do to prevent the car from sliding into it. The direction I was headed in was inevitable and the outcome — whatever it would be — was beyond my ability to alter.

We go through life focused on all the things we have planned, the things we’re doing right now, and then, all of the sudden, that instant arrives and you’re spinning out into the median — out of control, out of time, out of options. The only thing there is to do is hold on to the wheel, ride that moment, and hope it isn’t your last.

That’s the feeling I mean.

At some point in almost every one of the stories in 13 Views of the Suicide Woods, there’s an interval where the main character has this realization that they’re being swept away in the tide of something more powerful than they are. The choice they have is whether to swim with or against the current pulling them down. But by the time they grasp what’s happening, none of them can stop it.

If I were pressed to pick the very scariest of these moments, it would happen in the titular story. There’s a scene at the beginning where a character named Skip has gone to the woods intending to kill himself (he feels drawn there — more on that in a minute). He ties a noose, climbs a tree, and scoots off the end of the branch with the rope around his neck. And in that moment, as he’s falling, he understands with perfect clarity that this action is irreversible. He’s done a thing which has set the end of his agency in motion, and it’s too late for second thoughts. He chose to hasten inevitability and the existential realization is terrifying to him.

That one is scariest for me because while a person might walk into a bar with a gun, or an airplane engine could fail, those events are out of my control and largely unpredictable (to the extent that they’re extremely rare occurrences). However unlikely, one’s participation in them is forced; no one chooses be to a part of those experiences. Skip slipping off the branch is deliberately stepping into the void and letting go of control. As someone who occasionally experiences what the French call, L’appel du vide, it’s a terrifying idea to me. Standing on the edge of some high place, I often feel the pull in my body to just step out. I’m not suicidal, but the feeling is there, physical and intrusive. It’s my mind that prevents me from turning the wheel into the side of the underpass entrance or taking that step off of the subway platform. But then, I am not a dualist; my mind is a consequence of my body, and that’s what frightens me. Like a babysitter getting a call to check on the kids, the will to live and the death drive are coming from the exact same place.

Sigmund Freud wrote that “the aim of all life is death.” That is literally true to the extent that nothing living will continue to exist in that state perpetually. It’s the intersection where deliberate survival meets the inevitability of mortality that is the scariest part.

Bracken MacLeod: Website / Amazon Author Page / Facebook / Twitter

13 Views of the Suicide Woods: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Bracken MacLeod is the author of the novels Mountain Home, Stranded, and Come to Dust. 13 Views of the Suicide Woods is his first collection of short fiction. Stranded, released last year by Tor Books, has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. He lives in New England with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Lisa Black, whose new novel is Unpunished. Here is the publisher’s description:

Maggie Gardiner, a forensic expert who studies the dead, and Jack Renner, a homicide cop who stalks the living, form an uneasy partnership to solve a series of murders in this powerful new thriller by the bestselling author of That Darkness.

It begins with the kind of bizarre death that makes headlines — literally. A copy editor at the Cleveland Herald is found hanging above the grinding wheels of the newspaper assembly line. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner has her suspicions about this apparent suicide inside the tsunami of tensions that is the news industry today — and when the evidence suggests murder, Maggie has no choice but to place her trust in the one person she doesn’t trust at all….

Jack Renner is a killer with a conscience, a vigilante with his own code of honor. He has only one problem: Maggie knows his secret. She insists he enforce the law, not subvert it. But when more newspaper employees are slain, Jack may be the only person who can help Maggie unmask the killer — even if Jack is still checking names off his own private list.

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

The ostensibly scariest part of Unpunished occurs when Maggie finds herself in a darkened, isolated area of a large factory-like setting with a man she now realizes could be a multiple murderer. But the physical situation is the simple part; the truly unsettling aspect lies in the internal debate. What to do? Scream for help (unlikely to be helpful anyway) and then be unable to explain why if it arrives? She’d look like an idiot. Attack first — but if she’s wrong then this perfectly innocent, nice man will want to know why an apparently sensible grown woman suddenly threw a hissy fit to rival that of a freaked-out housecat. She’d look like an idiot. Do nothing to avoid guessing wrong, and wind up horribly murdered because she didn’t want to make a fuss. She’d feel like an idiot, though it wouldn’t matter much at that point because she’d be freakin’ dead. Stand there and debate it some more while he sharpens up his knives and locks the door?

It’s a dilemma.

It takes us decades to learn to trust our instincts, years of repeated warnings to listen to our inner voices — if you see something say something, etc. — and still the natural inclination is to hesitate. We’d feel terrible if we made a mistake. We’d feel terrible if we hurt someone’s feelings. Almost as bad as we’d feel if they plunged a knife into our torso and spilled our intestines onto the floor.

Anyway that’s one part of the book. But what I find much more scary than this particular scene is the overall arc of the series and its effect on Maggie’s life. In the first book — spoiler alert — she kills someone. Not with much aforethought but with definite malice. She could blame it on shock, trauma, fear (though not self-defense), but she knows that those are unworthy excuses. She knows what she did and isn’t exactly sorry…but every day more comes to realize that her life has irretrievably changed. She can’t tell anyone, obviously — that would not only risk incarceration but the loss of her career as a forensic scientist, which pretty much is her life. She can’t tell her friends, she can’t tell her only sibling, a brother to whom she’s been very close since the death of their parents. She’s not remotely tempted to tell her ex-husband, just as well since he’s a homicide detective. It must be like losing a limb — you forget, momentarily, and then at some point in the day you move to pick up a glass with a hand that’s no longer there and run smack into a wall of oh yeah, I can’t do that any more. There will forever be a wall between her and other people. She can’t have a drunken night out with the girls, or whispered conversations with a lover. She will have to think before she speaks for the rest of her life, always parsing her words, monitoring herself for a slip. She escaped justice only to give herself a life sentence.

And that’s what I find scary. That one decision could affect every minute of every day for the rest of our lives. One wrong (or right) impulse, a momentary distraction, an unanswered phone call, and our happy little lives could dissipate before our eyes like the wisp of smoke after a trigger pull.

Lisa Black: Website / Twitter

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

Lisa Black has spent over twenty years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland, Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police department. Her books have been translated into six languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Lori M. Myers, whose new story collection is Crawlspace and Other Stories of Dark Fiction and Horror. Here is the publisher’s description:

A windowed storefront, a foreboding brothel, a wine cellar, a burial plot. Small spaces surrounded by thick walls, bolted with padlocks, weighed down with wet earth. This story collection of dark fiction/horror by award-winning writer Lori M. Myers is about the mystery and danger of closed-in rooms and wombs; of the mistaken belief that being inside equals safety. It doesn’t; not in these crawl spaces…

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

The inspiration for my story collection titled Crawlspace originated by simply reading and listening and then answering the question, “What if…?” Sometimes an idea sprang from reading an innocent new story or overhearing a conversation or by simply allowing my mind to wander during long walks. As these stories were completed and compiled, I began to notice the thread that linked them — a thread that both surprised me and yet didn’t.

So let’s rip this apart, shall we? I don’t consider myself claustrophobic by any means, but as I wrote these stories in my writing life, I noticed some revelations going on in my real life. It was in those moments (for instance, being stuck in crowded narrow hallways) that my breathing felt more constrained. I’d find myself shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers and yearned for the sea of humanity to part, to rush toward an exit door and find freedom, fresh air. I didn’t know its origins. I’d always equated indoors with safety, but the more I researched and examined the human condition, the more I realized that cramped places shut out a sometimes scary unknown if our imaginations take over.

I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and not understanding why Vera Miles, all alone in that wretched house, got curious about a closed door leading to the basement. She was a few steps from the entrance door, a few blessed steps. Needless to say, I questioned her judgment. It appears that many other horror film characters took Vera’s lead and chose to turn the knobs of doors with ominous noises coming from the other side rather than leaving the place and phoning 911.

So I looked at my stories, asked myself what scared me, and the response was proof that having four solid walls around my fictional characters didn’t equal safety. I made bad things happen each and every time. In “Heartland Flyer,” a house serves as refuge (or is it?) from a train that kills; in “Dante’s Window,” close quarters become the “monster”; in the title story, “Crawlspace,” both the womb and the grave signify evil; in “Scar Girl,” even a Ferris wheel’s gondola becomes something other than an amusement.

Experts say that claustrophobia is an irrational fear of enclosed spaces, especially if there seems no way to escape. It could stem from our childhoods, like being left in a closet for long stretches of time or perhaps being in a crowded elevator that gets stuck between floors, neither of which happened to me. But I definitely felt it in those crowded hallways. Why?

Perhaps, when it came right down to it, it was my parents’ story that became my book’s focus and ultimately my own. Growing up, I knew little of my European parents’ experience during World War II. I knew they were Holocaust survivors, but discovered that they lived in a bunker in the Polish forest for more than three years. “Holes in the ground,” my father later told me. They would change their location often, finding another bunker to “live” in, never revealing to others in hiding exactly where their crawlspace was located for fear of being found out. That bunker became both sanctuary and a threat. A small enclosed space, yet a wrong move, a sneeze, could mean discovery, torture, death. Deep within my childlike wonder, I’d ponder what it was like for them. I’d put myself in that bunker with the monsters hovering, scouring the woods. There was no safe place in my imagination and that bunker didn’t provide one either.

We may breathe that sigh of relief as we settle in those crawlspaces, but once the door is locked and we’re inside those solid walls of wood, plaster or dirt, who knows who might be already right there, gnashing its teeth.

Lori M. Myers: Website / Facebook Group / Facebook Author Page / Twitter

Crawlspace: Amazon

Lori M. Myers is an award-winning writer of creative nonfiction, fiction, essays, and plays, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Broadway World Award nominee. Her works have been published in more than forty-five national and regional magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her plays and musicals have been performed internationally and across the United States and Canada. Lori is an adjunct professor of writing and literature, and senior interviews editor for Hippocampus Magazine. She holds an MA in creative writing from Wilkes University and resides in New York.