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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Martin Rose, whose latest novel is My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he’s no longer a zombie. But after killing his brother Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie’s death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen — without Vitus, that is.

Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie’s messes, but tracking down his brother’s homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. The first of them is a convicted killer assumed to be safely behind bars. However, it appears he is still committing murder through his victim’s dreams. High on Atropine — the drug that once kept him functioning among the living — and lapsing into addiction, Vitus’s grip on reality takes a nasty turn when his own dreams begin slipping sideways.

Vitus’s problems multiply as he deals with his failed friendship with wheelchair-bound officer Geoff Lafferty, his wrecked romance with the town mortician Niko, government agents working for his father, sinister figures lurking in the shadows, and, least of all, the complications of learning how to be human again.

Secret agents, conspiracy theories, broken hearts and lonely souls, the siren song of prescription drugs…in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart, readers are invited to discover life after undeath, where there are no happy endings.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Martin Rose:

If you ask me what the scariest part of My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart is, it’s not the serial killer, who might be haunting the outer edges of half-forgotten nightmares, or the oily Inspector who pulls the strings of human frailty with malevolent, supernatural force, or even the heartless and emotionless Elvedina who dogs Vitus’s every step.

No, what wrings the sweat from me is the cautery.

If you don’t know what a cautery is, it’s an implement designed to burn a wound to sterilize it, staunch bleeding, and help with the healing. Modern day cauteries look so sleek and well designed you could mistake them for pens, and they even come with special tips by which they do their burning. But you haven’t lived until you spend a stint in a veterinarian’s office and on the day the tech calls out sick, they pull you into surgery and plug in a vintage cautery that burns red cherry hot in your hand like a devil’s claw.

I won’t go into the gory details of that surgery — suffice to say that the dog in question will live many happy, healthy years and didn’t feel a thing during his anesthetic — but then, if you’ve ever been in surgery, you probably didn’t feel a thing, either.

The incident stayed with me long after my time at the vet’s office came to an end. The innocuous two-pronged plug revealing the instrument’s outdated age, the minutes ticking by as slowly, the steel rod glows the deep, primal glow of forges, of black smith’s fires, a testament to how brutal medicine truly is — no matter what new and more sterile guises it takes. The healing fire of this most terrible instrument is still, at its base level, an instrument of medieval sensibility. In our modern age, we have forgotten what metal and fire can do in conjunction, the raw power it levers in the world. (Lord knows, my mother, a metalsmith, taught me that.) Our connection to metal and fire reaches deep into an alchemical past, and rings the bell of hidden subconscious. (Like the hot iron shoes forced onto many an evil stepmother in ancient fairy tales, or the vernepator cur, a terrier dog forced to turn a roasting spit by having a red hot coal thrown into the wheel with them to make them run faster.)

The work the cautery does keeps me up at night. It is the manner in which a cautery is utilized beneath the rim of consciousness, unseen during the twilight-sleep of surgery. After all, you don’t receive an itinerary of actions prior to being gassed into unconsciousness. Your hospital bill gives hint to what was done to you, but likely a cautery passed over your flesh and you didn’t flinch, whimper or sigh.

Likewise, Vitus Adamson in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart must spend his twilight hours beneath the glow of a cherry red cautery — the horror is not what happens, as in reality, we see little. It is the hint and the mystery of those unseen moments that churns in the mind and gives rise to suspicion, paranoia and fear. The fear resides in what happens when our attention is focused in the wrong direction and events unfold beneath our level of perception, knowing something was done to you, but not quite what. Fear in the hard choices between uncertainty or death, in giving one’s trust to strangers or monsters, as Vitus must in the moments he is pinned on a gurney, unable to fight back, and tumbling into unconsciousness, trusting that he will make it to the other side, trusting that the cautery will do the work of healing instead of the work of murder.

It is the necessity of the cautery’s sinister application to hurt and heal that terrifies, and renders it the scariest part. I entreat you to feel the burn in My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart.

Martin Rose: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr

My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound

Martin Rose’s fiction spans genres with work appearing in numerous venues, such as Penumbra and Murky Depths, and various anthologies: Urban Green Man, Handsome Devil, and Ominous Realities. Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell, is a horror novel published by Talos in 2014, and has been recognized as one of “Notable Novels of 2014” in Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Melissa Groeling, whose latest novel is Lights Out. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Even when the lights are out, he can still see you…

Paul Holten’s profession doesn’t leave much room for doubt or conscience, but he’s reaching his breaking point. The nightmares are getting worse, the jobs are getting harder to finish, and the volatile relationship with his boss Aaron is falling apart. Now faced with the possibility of an impending death sentence, Paul makes the fatal decision to run. Drawn into one hellish situation after another, he’s forced to confront his dark past — and wonder if perhaps dying isn’t the better option.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Melissa Groeling:

Say you’re scared of heights and clowns and you’re stuck with one at the top of a Ferris wheel. What do you freak out about first — the clown or the height? Say you’re locked in a tiny room with no light and you’re claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. Which one makes you break out in a cold sweat first — the dark or the lack of space? Multiple fears abound but really, how do you decide which one takes priority? Or do you simply play dead and wait for rescue?

I realized about two chapters into writing Lights Out that playing dead would’ve made life a lot easier for my main character, Paul Holten. For him, fear is a constant presence and there were many, many times where I seriously thought that hey, I should really give this guy a break.

But fear is also a great motivator. It pushes Paul to stay alive, to stay one step ahead and if I were to narrow down the scariest of this book, I would have to choose:

The Tunnel and yes, it needs to be capitalized.

This is the place where, as someone in the book so delicately put it, “the trash is taken out.” It’s three-deep in goosebumps. It’s pitch-black. It’s cold. It’s filled with…leftovers and I don’t mean your mother’s meatloaf.

It’s a mixed bag of treats here — sheer panic, adrenaline and of course what we all fear in the dark: the unknown. Mix it all together and the only thing that comes close to The Tunnel’s creepiness is having your power go out. You know what that’s like, right? You’re sitting there, reading or watching TV and suddenly, you’re plunged into complete and total darkness. Everything becomes disoriented. You don’t know what direction to go in. You don’t know where anything is. Your furniture looks like crouching monsters, ready to sharpen their teeth on your bones. Then all the weird scenarios start going through your mind: maybe it’s just the breakers tripping or a car hit a telephone pole or maybe someone cut your power lines. Your brain races with all of these possibilities and then two seconds later (and admit it, it feels more like two hours), the lights come back on and you feel like a monumental fool for getting so worked up in the first place.

In Paul’s case, however, the lights never come back on. He plunges further and further into The Tunnel’s total darkness. Things that sound inhuman echo off the walls. His feet crunch through things that squeak — could be living, could be dead — and all the while, he can hear something scuttling towards him from behind. But he keeps moving. He has to because going back is much, much worse than going forward.

Melissa Groeling: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads / Instagram

Lights Out: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Apple

Melissa Groeling is a fiery redhead who grew up in New Jersey and now resides in the City of Brotherly Love. Only after she graduated from Bloomsburg University did she start to take her writing seriously. She’s a diehard New York Giants fan, loves chocolate and stalks cupcakes. Traffic Jam is her first young adult novel. Lights Out is her first dip into adult fiction.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Robert Masello, whose latest novel is The Einstein Prophecy. Here’s the publisher’s description:

As war rages in 1944, young army lieutenant Lucas Athan recovers a sarcophagus excavated from an Egyptian tomb. Shipped to Princeton University for study, the box contains mysteries that only Lucas, aided by brilliant archaeologist Simone Rashid, can unlock.

These mysteries may, in fact, defy — or fulfill — the dire prophecies of Albert Einstein himself.

Struggling to decipher the sarcophagus’s strange contents, Lucas and Simone unwittingly release forces for both good and unmitigated evil. The fate of the world hangs not only on Professor Einstein’s secret research but also on Lucas’s ability to defeat an unholy adversary more powerful than anything he ever imagined.

From the mind of bestselling author and award-winning journalist Robert Masello comes a thrilling, page-turning adventure where modern science and primordial supernatural powers collide.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Robert Masello:

Even though my books always have a supernatural element to them, and they get routinely described as “scary” in the promotional material and reviews, I seldom find them very scary myself. It’s not that I don’t try — I sit at my computer into the wee dark hours of the night, trying my best to give myself the shivers, but I’m usually too absorbed in questions of craft — have I set the scene up properly? have I chosen the right word? am I being too graphic, or, on the other hand, am I exercising too much restraint? — to lose myself in any visceral way. Sometimes, and this is the avenue into the scary for me, I’m able to tap into, or draw on, something from my own life that genuinely spooked me, and with any luck convey some sense of it to the reader.

In The Einstein Prophecy, there’s one scene in particular where I was able to conjure up some fear from my own past and insert it into the novel.

Most of the book takes place in the town of Princeton and on the campus of the university, where, when I was an undergraduate there, I spent a lot of time, as did most of my classmates, buried in the lower levels of Firestone Library. In your senior year, you were assigned a carrel, a private cubicle the size of a coat closet and with all of the same charm. It was furnished with a sliding metal door with a tiny window in it, and a desk and chair inside. There were a couple of shelves for the books you were using for your thesis research, a wastebasket, and that was about it.

My carrel was on the lowest level of all, at the very end of a long, dimly-lit corridor (they were all dimly-lit) and working late at night, I often found myself the last one there, surrounded by acres — and I’m not kidding — of towering book racks, groaning under the weight of over two million volumes. The university had one of the largest open-stack libraries in the world. The only sounds were the hissing of heating pipes and the occasional squeak of a book cart being pushed along, unseen, somewhere in the stacks, by an equally invisible librarian. In the novel, my heroine, a young Egyptian scholar named Simone, has been waiting for some maps she had requested from the Special Collections to be delivered, when she hears the book cart, and follows it on an increasingly maddening voyage into the labyrinth…until she hears something strange and realizes she might not want to catch up to it, after all.

The labored breath came again, closer than before. Lowering her head, she peeked through the stacks into the neighboring aisle. Something moved there, dark and indistinct, its back to her.

Ducking down and swallowing hard — her mouth was suddenly as dry as the Sahara – she inched away, down the narrow passage between two rows of books, and when she thought she’d put enough distance between them, stopped to take another glance back.

Over the top of a collection of atlases, she saw a pair of eyes staring back at her. Sunken, black, buried deep in a face the color of mud.

She bolted down the aisle, turning left at the end, then racing down another and turning right. She could hear the sound of padding feet — or was it paws? — keeping pace with her.

She ran harder, desperately trying to orient herself. Was she heading toward the stairs or another dead end? She had the vague notion that she was being deliberately stampeded, that her pursuer had no intention of overtaking her yet — that it was only playing with her, like a cat with a mouse. Tying to scare her to death.

Now it’s true that I was never actually chased by a menacing creature — real or unreal — through the murky corridors of the university library, but there was many a winter night, alone in my isolated carrel, when I got a serious case of the willies. Whether or not I’m able to pass that sensation along to my readers is a question only they can answer. But I’ve given it the old college try.

Robert Masello: Website / Facebook / Goodreads

The Einstein Prophecy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer (Charmed, Sliders, Poltergeist: the Legacy), and the author of many bestselling novels and nonfiction books, including Blood and Ice, The Medusa Amulet, and The Romanov Cross. His most recent supernatural thriller, The Einstein Prophecy, takes place during the Second World War, when Albert Einstein was attached to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Allies were racing against time, and the Axis powers, to unlock the lethal secrets of atomic energy. Published this past summer, the book occupied the number one slot in the Amazon Kindle store for several weeks. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Mia Marshall, whose latest novel is Lost Causes. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Aidan Brook has spent months living with the horror of what happened when she lost control of her magic. Now she’s searching for a way to manage her immense power, but she only hits one dead end after another.

On the run from a council intent on her death, Aidan, the bear shifter Mac, and the rest of her friends find themselves on a desperate chase across deserts and oceans in search of answers. Along the way, they encounter a living myth and a dual magic with secrets of his own — and they learn that the cure may be more deadly than the disease.

To save her own life, Aidan will need to confront the most dangerous foe she’s ever faced…herself.

Lost Causes is the fourth book in the award-winning Elements urban fantasy series.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Mia Marshall:

I write urban fantasy, not horror. Sure, there’s action and suspense and a few creepy characters, but no blood-stained dark hallways or anything really scary, like clowns.

I didn’t need any of that this time. The book scared me enough for all of us.

Every book I’ve written has its challenges, but you’d think by book four I’d have some idea what I’m doing. Ha. Hahaha. Oh god no.

From the beginning, this story terrified me. The first three books in the series were built around a central mystery. It was a deliberate choice, as I’d suffered most of my life from a bad case of Plot Deficiency and no genre is more plot intensive than a mystery. Left to my own devices, I’d write about an eternal road trip where characters I’m overly fond of banter a lot.

But while I was solving the mysteries in those first books, I added so many threads to the overarching plot that, by the time I got to Lost Causes, there was no room for a separate story. This time, I couldn’t hide in a mystery. I had to confront my previously incurable Plot Deficiency head on and find a story that didn’t hinge on a crime, suspects, clues, and a big reveal — and I had no idea what I was doing.

Then, just for fun, I was diagnosed with an actual illness. The details are dull, as most health details are, but the end result was it caused me to bond to my couch for days at a time. I’m pretty sure I now share DNA with my sofa from that period of my life.

So there I was, hoping desperately that my readers would follow me in this new direction when I didn’t even have a compass, and so damn sick I was only able to write every few days, if that. I floundered, producing a bunch of random scenes with no discernible plot. Sometimes, weeks passed between writing days, and in that time I would completely forget what I’d already written. I’m a pantser, having proved myself incapable of following an outline, so thinking ahead wasn’t an option.

In that first draft, characters changed motivations on a dime, the mythology was more contradictory than any religious text, and dead people reappeared in later chapters. The entire time, I was unable to hold the big picture in my mind. I had no idea what the book’s plot or themes were. The pacing was so jerky the manuscript actually shook in my hands while I reviewed it. It was a disaster, and every day for the better part of a year and a half, I was terrified it would never be anything but a disaster.

I was certain I was writing a mess so hot it could boil water. Plus, it was taking me so long I suspected my readers would have forgotten the series even existed by the time it was released. You know how most writers talk of the highs and lows of writing a book? For 98,000 words, I was on only one side of that spectrum.

And then, the magic happened. My treatment began to work, and I was able to write regularly again. I started editing and discovered that…well, it really was a hot mess. But for the first time, it was a completed hot mess. There was a beginning, middle, and an end, even if they didn’t make a single lick of sense when placed together.

One of the goals when editing is to make as few changes as possible. Keep the story, but change the transitions, clarify motivations, etc. If the book was a house, it would get a new paint job, some walls might get knocked down, maybe even get an extension, but the foundation would remain more or less the same. While my foundation was uneven, with more than a few rounded corners, it’s what I had to work with. I didn’t have time to rewrite the entire book, after all.

Instead, I took all those terrible, awful bits and found new ways to put them together, then I tried to hide the stitches. I remodeled that entire damn house. In the end…well, I pretty much rewrote the book anyway, but the foundation was the same. The story was the one I wrote while ill, tired, and positive I had no idea what I was doing.

When it went to my trusted betas, I braced myself for the worst. And…they told me it was good. Those things that worked against me while writing the book — the unpredictability and uncertainty — had created a story where the reader didn’t know what happened next. Well, of course they didn’t. I’d never known what was going to happen next. The thing that nearly destroyed me while writing it is now what gives this book life.

The scariest part of Lost Causes is now its greatest strength. And yeah, I feel like I’m dangerously close to giving a motivational speech here, but it’s what happened, and I’m so grateful it turned out this way.

And I hope I never, ever have to go through it again.

Mia Marshall: Website / Twitter / Facebook

Lost Causes: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Apple

Mia Marshall is the award-winning author of the Elements urban fantasy series. Before she started writing about imaginary worlds, she worked as a high school teacher, script supervisor, story editor, legal secretary, and day care worker. She has lived all along the US west coast and throughout the UK, where she collected an unnecessary number of degrees in literature, education, and film. These days, she lives in a small house in the Sierra Nevadas, where she is surrounded by a small but deadly feline army.