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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Claudine Kapel, whose latest novel in the Ryan Cole adventure series is A Chance of Light. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Spaceships don’t just disappear…

When an alien spaceship vanishes after crashing in the Mojave Desert, Ryan Cole and his team are tasked with finding the craft and securing its cache of advanced technology.

The investigation proves perilous as others are also hunting for the ship, including arms dealer Antoine Drake and his alien allies.

When Cole agrees to help a woman from his past, it leads to a dangerous encounter with Drake and startling revelations about the alien presence on the planet. He finds himself in a race against time to uncover the location of the spaceship and the nature of its mission.

But discovering the secrets of beings from other worlds comes with a price. Because when humans and aliens collide, the truth can be deadly.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Claudine Kapel:

Back in school, they taught us there are three types of conflict in a work of fiction: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself. But science fiction introduces a fourth kind of conflict: human versus alien.

What makes such a battle notable is the clear lack of a level playing field. When push comes to shove, the aliens generally have the advantage — both physically and technologically. So whether they’re invading or just wreaking havoc, alien adversaries can yield a clash of epic proportions, one in which the likelihood of victory for humans — or even the survival of our species — seems unlikely.

That’s why science fiction can ignite a primal fear: that of being the hunted instead of the hunter.

What makes such stories so engrossing is our own acknowledgement — even if in but a whisper of a thought — that nasty aliens could be real, and could even be heading our way. Consider the significant amount of media attention that physicist Stephen Hawking garners whenever he speaks about the potential threat that aliens could pose to life on Earth.

Nevertheless, the possible nature of life elsewhere in the cosmos continues to be source of fascination for many people, scientists included. This has fueled the development of models that contemplate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, as well as scientific efforts to send signals into space in a bid to make contact.

In A Chance of Light, hero Ryan Cole lives on an Earth where aliens have already made their presence known to a select few. Cole observes that Albert Einstein, when asked what question he would pose to the universe if he could get an honest answer, said he would ask whether the universe was friendly.

Cole himself is initially unsure of what he thinks the answer to that question would be. After all, he has tangled with less-than-friendly aliens and has the scars to prove it.

Yet life has a way of bringing things into balance. So while Cole must confront formidable alien adversaries, he also garners help from beings from other worlds who become his allies and teachers.

But always the question remains for each of us to answer: Do we believe the universe is friendly? Einstein suggested it was a pivotal question, because our stand regarding this one transcendent issue can shape how we respond to the events that unfold in our lives.

It’s something that can be scary to consider, particularly the next time you’re looking up at the night sky and pondering what might lie out there, beyond the stars.

Given the vastness of the cosmos, it seems arrogant to believe that Earth is the only planet in the universe that sustains intelligent life. But the questions linger: If there is life out there, will it come calling? And what might that contact be like?

Those are questions that fuel the imaginations of scientists, writers and people in general who wonder about the place of humans in the cosmic order of things.

And as for when we might finally make contact with beings from other worlds, no one can really say.

But then again, perhaps they are here already.

Claudine Kapel: Website / Goodreads

A Chance of Light: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBook / Kobo

A Darker Rain is Claudine Kapel’s first novel. She lives in Toronto and enjoys books, music, and travel. When not working as a consultant, she can be found writing, reading, or contemplating what else may be out there.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Brian Moreland, whose latest collection is Blood Sacrifices. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Some evils require sacrifices.

From the author of Dead of Winter and The Devil’s Woods come four tales of blood-tingling horror:

The Girl from the Blood Coven

In this short prequel to “The Witching House,” when Abigail Blackwood claims her hippy commune family has been massacred, Sheriff Travis Keagan and his deputies investigate. They discover there’s more than weed smoking going on at Blevins House. Much more.

The Witching House

Sarah Donovan is scared of just about everything, but she helps her adventurous boyfriend investigate the old, abandoned Blevins House, scene of a forty-year-old unsolved massacre. Little do they know the house is hungry for fresh prey…

Darkness Rising

When Marty Weaver encounters three killers who like to play sadistic games with their victims, his own scarred past is unearthed. And when his pain is triggered, blood will flow…and hell will rise.

The Vagrants

Beneath the city of Boston, evil is gathering. While living under a bridge with the homeless, journalist Daniel Finley witnessed something that nearly cost him his sanity. Now, with a book published about the experience, he’s caught between the Irish mafia and a deranged cult preparing to shed blood on the street.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Brian Moreland:

Blood Sacrifices is a collection of three novellas and one short story inspired by two of my favorite authors, H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker. I love how both authors create feelings of dread with their prose and fill their stories with fantastic monsters, ancient gods, and a sense that there are other realms beyond the ones we can see. Each story in my collection is about ordinary people encountering extraordinary horrors that come from alternate realms, especially “Darkness Rising” and “The Vagrants.” And each story has at least one scene that frightened me as I wrote the scene.

In the opening short story “The Girl from the Blood Coven” and its novella sequel, “The Witching House,” what started out as a haunted house story turned into something more when I began to discover the mysteries of what made the house haunted. It began in 1972, when a coven of witches were murdered inside the three-story rock house. Sheriff Keagan and his deputies are the unfortunate souls who have to investigate the house that had once been a hippy commune, isolated in the backwoods of East Texas. If you were to drive through some of that thick pine country, just some of the country roads are scary enough, and so are the people who live deep in the pines. What Sheriff Keagan discovers inside the Old Blevins House gave me chills as I wrote the story.

“The Witching House” takes place forty years after the massacre. Sarah Donovan, her new boyfriend, Dean, and a married couple, Meg and Casey, are members of an urban exploring club that likes to explore abandoned haunted buildings. When they hear that the Old Blevins House has been boarded up for decades, they decide it would be fun to break in and explore it. What they soon discover is that the house is more than just a little haunted. There’s something living down in the basement that’s hungry for human blood.

Now, the basement has always been a scary place for me. There’s an otherworldly feeling I get when I go underground or inside a tunnel. When I was younger I was afraid of the dark and claustrophobic, while at the same time being a curious explorer who liked to scare myself for the adrenaline rush. I once explored the water drainage pipes that ran beneath the neighborhood. I crawled on all fours through a maze of tunnels through pitch darkness, spider webs, with all my fears of death prodding me along. I ended up crawling out of a sidewalk drain about a mile away from where I started. I also enjoyed walking through abandoned houses, especially ones with basements, even though they spooked me.

I remember visiting a house with a basement that had a dirt floor, and there was something creepy about going down those slatted steps into that dark, cave-like cellar. That basement inspired the scenes that I wrote for my two witch stories and “Darkness Rising.” And my exploration of urban tunnels inspired the abandoned subway tunnel scenes beneath Boston that I wrote for “The Vagrants.”

For me, one the scariest parts of Blood Sacrifices is when the characters go down underground. At one point in “The Witching House,” Casey and Meg get separated and Casey goes looking for her in the basement. Here’s an excerpt:

The cellar smelled earthy, like a creek after a heavy rain. At the bottom was a dirt floor. White mushrooms clustered in the corner. Casey’s hiking shoes sank into damp, black soil that hadn’t seen sunlight in over a century. He saw fingers moving in the dirt, and his breath caught in his throat. It was an illusion brought on by a sudden fear. The fingers were actually earthworms poking their heads out to observe this giant intruder.

Casey stepped over them and ventured into the gloom. There was a chill down here that prickled his skin. A few cold drops dripped onto his neck and rolled down his back, making him shiver. Tilting his headlamp up, Casey saw beads of dampness clinging to the ceiling. The wood overhead was covered in a skin of black mold. Spores of the stuff floated in the air; he inhaled them, tasted the blight on his tongue. Another drop of moisture struck his forehead and ran stickily down his cheek. He wiped away the scourge and moved on, eager to find his bare-skinned nymph.

The basement was as pitch-black as any underground cave. Impossible to tell how far it went. The more he pressed, the more he kept finding dark upon dark. There seemed to be nothing down here except dirt and mushrooms and moss-covered walls. The deeper Casey walked, his mind kept going back to the witches who had vanished in this house. A question burrowed at the back of his brain: If all the cult members were murdered, who killed them?

Casey will soon discover the answer to that question. Inside the basements of abandoned houses and old buildings of the stories that make up Blood Sacrifices, I tapped into my fears of the dark underground places that can lead us to other worlds where fantastic horrors have been waiting for us to enter.

Brian Moreland: Website / Blog / Twitter / Facebook

Blood Sacrifices: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Samhain Publishing

Brian Moreland is a best-selling and award-winning author of novels and short stories in the horror and supernatural suspense genre. In 2007, his novel Shadows in the Mist, a Nazi occult thriller set during World War II, won a gold medal for Best Horror Novel in an international contest. The novel went on to be published in Austria and Germany under the title Schattenkrieger. Shadows in the Mist, Dead of Winter, and The Devil’s Woods are his currently available novels, as well as his Kindle short-story The Girl from the Blood Coven and the novella it led into called The Witching House.  Now, he has released the full-length The Devil’s Woods. His novella, The Vagrants, was released in 2014, and another, Darkness Rising, in 2015. He loves hiking, kayaking, watching sports, dancing, and making guacamole. Brian lives in Dallas, Texas where he is diligently writing his next horror novel.  When not working on his books or books for other writers, Brian edits documentaries and TV commercials around the globe. He produced a World War II documentary in Normandy, France, and worked at two military bases in Iraq with a film crew.

Believe it or not, today marks the second anniversary of my ongoing blog feature The Scariest Part!

It’s pretty amazing that it’s been two years already. The feature is still going strong, even if it doesn’t always run every week anymore, and we’ve had some truly great authors join us. This year alone we’ve hosted Nathan Ballingrud, Kristin Dearborn, John C. Foster, Jonathan Janz, Mia Marshall, Loren Rhoads, Paul Tremblay, and so many more.

If you’ve got a project coming out that you’d like to promote on The Scariest Part, check out the guidelines here. Just a reminder: my guests have been overwhelmingly book authors, but I’m interested in featuring comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators, too!

Here’s to many more years of The Scariest Part!

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is author Jonathan Janz, whose latest novel is Children of the Dark. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Will Burgess is used to hard knocks. Abandoned by his father, son of a drug-addicted mother, and charged with raising his six-year-old sister, Will has far more to worry about than most high school freshmen. To make matters worse, Mia Samuels, the girl of Will’s dreams, is dating his worst enemy, the most sadistic upperclassman at Shadeland High. Will’s troubles, however, are just beginning.

Because one of the nation’s most notorious criminals — the Moonlight Killer — has escaped from prison and is headed straight toward Will’s hometown. And something else is lurking in Savage Hollow, the forest surrounding Will’s rundown house. Something ancient and infinitely evil. When the worst storm of the decade descends on Shadeland, Will and his friends must confront unfathomable horrors. Everyone Will loves — his mother, his little sister, Mia, and his friends — will be threatened.

And very few of them will escape with their lives.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Jonathan Janz:

First of all, thank you for having me on, Nicholas! I really appreciate the opportunity to visit.

There were several scenes in Children of the Dark that forced me out of my comfort zone, not the least of which because they involved violence and children. As a father of three kids under the age of ten, this was painful enough. I can’t imagine any of my kids coming to harm, and I certainly didn’t want the kids in my novel to be hurt or threatened either.

But in the waning moments of the book, I was forced to place two of my most beloved characters in mortal danger, and because of the circumstances of the situation, only one of them could survive. In her outstanding review of my novel, author A.E. Siraki wrote, “Janz knows how to tug at the heartstrings of readers and to cause maximum amounts of anguish. Without spoiling the plot toward the end, there is a Sophie’s Choice moment that I thought was incredibly emotionally resonant and for me, Janz has proven yet again what an evocative writer he is.”

The mention of the William Styron novel Sophie’s Choice was particularly gratifying to me because it captures the difficulty of the moment for my central character (Will Burgess), who is forced to choose between two of the people he loves the most — arguably the two people he does love the most. I could have waffled and allowed both characters to live, but given the situation in which they found themselves, the veering onto this avenue would have rung false. Above all, an author must be true to the story and true to the characters, because without that, a narrative loses its integrity.

As alluded to earlier, the characters between Will must choose are both children. I’m OCD anyway and prone to intrusive thoughts, and due to this psychological/emotional problem, I’m besieged by frightening thoughts about harm coming to one of my own children anyway. I have nightmares about it. In my waking hours, our house becomes fraught with danger. Like a Final Destination movie, I begin to view every setting we inhabit as a hostile, sentient entity intent on doing my kids harm.

Writing the aforementioned scene in Children of the Dark forced me to confront those debilitating fears and to allow the unthinkable to happen to one of my favorite characters. Leading up to this scene, I was gripped by a suffocating sense of dread. I was assaulted by images of the tragedy occurring, haunted by the soon-to-be uttered screams of my doomed character. And while harm coming to a fictional character is infinitely preferable to harm happening to someone I love, the former occurrence reminds me of the latter possibility.

On the day I wrote the scene, my already over-active OCD and intrusive thoughts shifted into trembling-hand, sweaty-forehead mode. I assumed my accustomed spot in my writing chair like a man about to blast into space in an experimental shuttle. And as my fingers quaked and typed, quaked and typed, I found myself cringing, my stomach roiling. When it was over, I set the computer aside, lowered my head, and supported my brow with an ice-cold palm. I felt enervated, hollowed out. I was already in mourning for my character, who after all deserved nothing that happened to him/her, who only deserved happiness and joy. Who would now never breathe again.

Sometimes we have to venture into shadowy realms in order to capture the truth of a story. In Children of the Dark, I found that truth, but not without enduring a severe test of endurance and grappling with my darkest fears.

Jonathan Janz: Website / Twitter / Goodreads / Amazon Author Page

Children of the Dark: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Jonathan Janz grew up between a dark forest and a graveyard, and in a way, that explains everything. Brian Keene named his debut novel The Sorrows “the best horror novel of 2012.” Library Journal deemed his follow-up, House of Skin, “reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.” 2013 saw the publication of his novel of vampirism and demonic possession The Darkest Lullaby, as well as his serialized horror novel Savage Species. Of Savage Species, Publishers Weekly said, “Fans of old-school splatter punk horror — Janz cites Richard Laymon as an influence, and it shows — will find much to relish.” Jonathan’s Kindle Worlds novel Bloodshot: Kingdom of Shadows marked his first foray into the superhero/action genre. Jack Ketchum called his vampire western Dust Devils a “Rousing-good weird western,” and his sequel to The Sorrows (Castle of Sorrows) was selected one of 2014’s top three novels by Pod of Horror. 2015 saw the release of The Nightmare Girl, which prompted Pod of Horror to call Jonathan “Horror’s Next Big Thing.” 2015 also saw the release of Wolf Land, which Publishers Weekly called “gruesome yet entertaining gorefest” with “an impressive and bloody climax.” He has also written four novellas (Exorcist Road, The Clearing of Travis Coble, Old Order, and Witching Hour Theatre) and several short stories. His primary interests are his wonderful wife and his three amazing children, and though he realizes that every author’s wife and children are wonderful and amazing, in this case the cliché happens to be true.