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It’s hard to believe, but today marks the one-year anniversary of The Scariest Part! In that time, I’ve put the spotlight on 36 authors and their books, a selection ranging from first-timers to well known and bestselling authors, with books from micropresses and major publishing houses and everything in between. You can see all of them here.

It’s been a pleasure for me to host The Scariest Part on my blog, and I hope it’s been helpful to the writers who’ve taken part. It’s hard to gauge how effective these things are at driving sales, but if I helped get the word out to interested readers about books and authors they’d never heard of before then I consider it a success. Many thanks again to John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Chuck Wendig, whose own blog features were a big influence.

I’m happy to announce that The Scariest Part will continue! I look forward to seeing what its second year brings. I hope to bring in more filmmakers, comic book writers, and game creators, not just authors, but we’ll see how things develop. If you’re interested in being featured on The Scariest Part, check out the guidelines here.

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 Jasper Bark, whose essay below is one of my favorites I’ve run in this feature so far. It discusses an issue that all writers face at some point in their careers and really resonated with me. His latest book is the collection Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts. Here is the publisher’s description:

A word of caution gentle reader, these tales will take you places you’ve never been before and may never dare revisit. They’ll whisper truths so twisted you can only face them in the darkest hours of the night. They’ll unlock desires so decadent you’ll never wash their taint from your flesh.

All it takes is a single turn of the page and your taste in dark fiction will be transformed forever. So you have to ask yourself: “How daring do I feel…?”

Includes a foreword by Pat Cadigan.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Jasper Bark:

There were lots of scary parts to writing my latest collection, Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts. Believe it or not, the scariest part wasn’t walking away from a huge sum of money in order to do it.

A year or so ago I was writing a script for a major UK gaming company. It was tedious work, the people I was working with had no imagination and would unfailingly ask me to take anything imaginative or even halfway interesting out of the script. What was left was bland, pointless and often incomprehensible. As you can imagine it was soul destroying work, but the money was great and they’d also offered me two further contracts for even more money. I was set for several years.

But I was trapped.

Until my wife kicked my butt and told me I was never going to get anywhere as a writer if I kept on taking jobs simply for the money. I’d given up a well paid career as a film and music journalist to write full time and mostly I was doing hack work. That was no way to establish a name or a career as a writer. It didn’t matter how good the money was, she argued, if I was serious about becoming a real writer I should be doing something else.

Yes, I have a wife that awesome. Don’t ask me how I managed that. She’s impervious to mind control, blackmail or old school voodoo (believe me I’ve tried) so it’s probably down to pure dumb luck on my part.

So I walked away from the job to sit down and write horror stories, a genre with which I was increasingly becoming identified. It was terrifying but it wasn’t the scariest part.

Writing about what scares you as a person is a truly frightening prospect. You’re not going to scare your reader unless your story deeply scares you, that’s why you have to write about your own worst fears. However, admitting what frightens us most means making ourselves incredibly vulnerable to a bunch of strangers, because we’re publicly revealing our worst traits, our weakest failings and the ways in which we can be most deeply and irrevocable hurt. We do this in the hope that other people share those fears and, by facing them together, we can become stronger and more able to deal with them. But owning up to things that we rarely tell even our nearest and dearest is a scary prospect. However, it wasn’t the scariest part of writing this book either.

Squaring up to my blank laptop screen, and determining what I was going to say, in my one shot at leaving behind something of note for future readers, that was quite honestly the scariest part. That meant finding my real voice and accepting that it deserved to be heard.

For all the encouragement we get growing up and as an adult, we also face a certain amount of discouragement. The teacher who gives you a low mark on a great piece of writing because of its punctuation, the Goodreads reviewer who didn’t finish your book but gave it one star on account of the first chapter, the guy in the front row of your reading who yawns and snickers the whole time when everyone else is held rapt. The people who ask you what right you have to write the things you do, without ever once asking what right they have to ask that question.

Twenty people might tell you how much they loved your book and one person might tell you it stank and I can guarantee that’s the comment you’ll take away. We hang on far more tightly to negative feedback than positive, and sometimes it can build a wall between us and our confidence. It also feeds the little voice at the back of our minds that tells us we can’t write, anything we produce is rubbish and bound to fail, so we really shouldn’t try in the first place.

Overcoming that voice is a regular and unavoidable part of being a writer. Everyone who writes has to deal with it and it never becomes any easier, because shouting that false voice down is what finding your real voice is all about. It means proving that you not only have something to say, but that you can say it in a way that no-one else can and that’s why you deserve to be heard. That was truly the scariest part of writing this book.

I’m glad I faced that fear because it’s taken me to a whole new level as a writer. So far the advance reviews have all given the book five stars and it’s winning me new readers every day, many of whom have been kind enough to drop me a line and share their appreciation. So if I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s this:

The scariest part of writing something is actually the most necessary.

Jasper Bark: Website / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube

Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Jasper Bark finds writing author biographies and talking about himself in the third person faintly embarrassing. Telling you that he’s an award winning author of four cult novels including the highly acclaimed Way of the Barefoot Zombie just sounds like boasting. Then he has to mention that he’s written 12 children’s books and hundreds of comics and graphic novels and he wants to just curl up. He cringes when he has to reveal that his work has been translated into nine different languages and is used in schools throughout the UK to help improve literacy, or that he was awarded the This Is Horror Award for his recent anthology Dead Air. Maybe he’s too British, or maybe he just needs a good enema, but he’s glad this bio is now over.

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 Gary Haynes, whose latest novel is State of Attack. Here is the book’s description:

State of Attack sees the return of Special Agent Tom Dupree in another turbocharged political thriller from Gary Haynes. Tom Dupree must embark on his most dangerous mission yet: a desperate search to track down the Sword of Allah, a jihadist otherwise known simply as Ibrahim. But the closer Dupree delves into the knot of terror, betrayal and conspiracy surrounding the Sword of Allah, the fewer people he can trust — and the more deadly the race becomes. Special Agent Tom Dupree is back!

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Gary Haynes:

Initially, thinking about which scene from my new counterterrorism thriller, State of Attack, was the scariest part proved difficult. Darker than the first novel in the series, State of Honour, the second book revolves around a planned attack by Islamic terrorists, but this is no ordinary attack. Added to which it is based in war-torn Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, as well as the West. Should I describe writing about the drowning of an innocent couple? Should it be the violent interrogation of a Mossad operative? Should I describe the invisible and devastating threat to US military bases in the homeland? No, after just a few minutes, I knew exactly which scene was the scariest part.

Without the necessity for a spoiler alert I can say that the main character, Tom Dupree, a special agent in the US Bureau of Diplomatic Security, finds himself in Ankara, Turkey, tracking down a jihadist only known as Ibrahim. He is being protected by the Turkish mafia. Major players in the global smack trade and people trafficking, as well as prostitution and extortion, they maintain order and silence by fostering a reputation for prolonged torture.

Now I don’t care how brave someone professes to be, the thought of days, weeks even, of extreme physical abuse at the hands of sadistic experts is chilling. The baba, or local godfather, is a psychopath. I know a lot has been written about psychopaths so I wanted mine to be a different. He loves his little granddaughter and tends his beehives with her nearby. Nice. But when he describes what will be meted out to Tom in order to extract the information he desires he’s, well, not nice.

It is the juxtaposition of the everyday and the horrific that I find genuinely scary. One minute the baba is dripping honey onto his granddaughter’s tongue, and the next he is describing to Tom how he will look and feel when the screaming starts, the burning of flesh. Yuck! The sheer inevitability of it, the fact that seemingly nothing can be done about it, adds to the sense of complete hopelessness. A writer has to put themselves into that position, to get inside the mind of both the perpetrator and the potential victim, and that’s a difficult and scary thing to do.

To ratchet up the tension, the baba says that he uses an old Gestapo technique, too. Tom won’t give up his buddy, Lester Wilson, but the baba says his men will find him, and then the real fun will start. Strip two men naked and play a brutal game. Use one to get information from the other. Torture one to get the other to talk. Torture one and say it’s the other’s fault. Metaphorically bang their heads together and see which one cracks first. And these are heads full of psychoactive drugs, bodies kept alive by drip feeds. Nice.

Except, of course, I know there isn’t anything nice about this at all. It played on my mind. It still does. In a deep recess of my mind I have become a potential victim, and that my friends, is the scariest part.

Gary Haynes: Website / Facebook / Twitter

State of Attack: Amazon US / Amazon UK / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / iBooks UK

Gary Haynes studied law at Warwick University and completed his postgraduate legal studies at the College of Law. As a lawyer he specializes in commercial dispute resolution. He is very active on social media, especially Twitter, and blogs and comments upon writing, motivation, Middle East politics and counterterrorism. He keeps fit at his local boxing gym and by going for long walks by the coast and hiking on Dartmoor. He loves films, the music of Richard Wagner, Thai food and Portugal. Gary writes cinematic-style, intelligent, fast-paced, and action-packed counterterrorism/political/spy thrillers. He is writing a series of novels based on his main character, Tom Dupree, a special agent in the US Bureau of Diplomatic Security. His favourite quote is: You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.

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 Mike Pace, whose latest novel is One to Go. Here is the publisher’s description:

Tom Booker is a new attorney at a powerful Washington law firm. Texting while driving across Memorial Bridge, he loses control and crashes into an oncoming minivan carrying his own daughter and three of her friends. The minivan tips up on two wheels, about to flip over into the Potomac. Time freezes, he’s alone on the bridge. A young couple approaches and offers him a re-wind. The crash would be averted, the children saved. All he must do is kill someone every two weeks – anyone — a “soul exchange.” A moment later, Tom is back in his spinning car, but averts the deadly crash. He laughs about the hallucination, attributing it to bumping his head on the steering wheel when his car came to an abrupt stop. But his encounter wasn’t a hallucination. Two weeks later, the minivan driver is brutally murdered. Tom receives a text: one down, four to go. He has never shot — much less owned — a gun in his life, and now must turn himself into a serial killer or his daughter and her friends will die.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Mike Pace:

As a father of three, what scared me was the core theme of the book: Would I really do anything to save my child?

It’s very easy to respond, “Of course. A parent would do anything to protect his children.” But put yourself in Tom Booker’s shoes.

Texting while driving, Tom causes an accident on Memorial Bridge with a minivan containing five innocents, including his own daughter, Janie. When he regains consciousness, time’s frozen. He sees the minivan holding the children tipped up on two wheels, gasoline running from the gas tank toward frozen flames licking out from under the hood. The van’s about to roll over the bridge into the Potomac River and explode in a ball of flame.

Then a young preppy couple jogs up and offers him a “rewind.” He can rewind time for a few seconds and save his daughter, but there’s a price — he has to kill five random strangers instead in a soul exchange.

So, what do you do? You agree to the deal. Of course, you agree to the deal. You hear a loud WHIRRING sound like an old-fashioned tape recorder re-winding. Suddenly, you’re back in your car and you jam on the brakes, slamming your head into the steering wheel, and you avoid the accident.

You laugh at yourself and the crazy hallucination. Must’ve happened when you hit your head. Preppy demons from hell; wait till you tell your buddies. They’ll laugh their asses off.

Then your sister-in-law, Rosie, the driver of the minivan dies a minute after the weekly deadline. Then you receive a text message from the demons: One down, four to go. My God, could the hallucination have been real? Can you take the chance?

The idea for the book germinated from a conversation I overheard while sitting in a suburban mall food court. A young mother at the next table told her friend she’d do anything to protect her child. That made me think of bears. How often we’ve seen reports of humans straying too close to a bear cub and unleashing the fury of the mama bear. (Lots of people have weird thoughts in a mall food court. Don’t they?)

Then the question arose: would she really do anything? I pushed the idea around in my head while finishing my Chick-fil-A. Yeah, parents would sacrifice their own life for the life of their child, and of course any parent would kill someone about to murder his son or daughter. That’s easy. So, I asked myself, what would make the parent hesitate? What about killing someone who was not threatening his child? What about murdering more than one fellow human being? Would a normal soccer mom become a serial killer to save her daughter? How many lives would she be willing to take?

Then to ratchet up the conflict, what if you weren’t absolutely 100 percent sure your child would die if you didn’t kill the other person? Oh, and what if there was a deadline, and while you were struggling with this impossible decision, the clock was ticking.

In order to frame this dilemma it was important that the protagonist not be a tough guy. Tom Booker is not Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne. Instead, he’s a middle-class guy who grew up in the safe suburbs, never got in trouble with the law, attended a good college, has a good job, on the upward track. He never went hunting, never held, much less shot, a firearm in his life. So not only does he have to answer the question, Do I kill another human being who is not threatening me because there’s a chance if I don’t my daughter might die, he also has to figure out how to become a serial killer without being caught.

And then overlaid across these conflicts is the larger moral dilemma; morality implicates religion, which is based on faith, not fact. Tom doesn’t face a situation where a bad guy is holding his daughter hostage and threatens to kill her if he doesn’t murder a specific target. The threat instead comes from supernatural figures, not flesh and blood. Which requires Tom to believe in the supernatural.

All told, I tried to devise the set-up in a way that would pose an impossible choice to me personally. I wouldn’t consider myself a tough guy. I have very little experience with firearms. Like most people, I think I follow the rules. Never been arrested, never been in jail. Safe childhood, safe life. And I love my children.

So the scariest part to me is putting myself in Tom’s shoes.

I have the gun in my hand, pointing it at another human being who, despite his sordid past has never done me or my family any harm. The clock’s ticking. Can I take a chance the whole demons from hell thing was a dream? Rosie’s death could’ve been a big fat coincidence. That’s why the word exists. A few more seconds and it’s too late — they said my child will die a gruesome death if I don’t pull the trigger.

Can I take a chance?

Tick tock, tick tock. Showtime. SHIIIIIIIT!!

Mike Pace: Website / Facebook / Twitter

One to Go: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Mike Pace was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Illinois on an art scholarship, and graduated with a BFA degree. He taught public school in Washington D.C.’s inner city, while attending law school at Georgetown University. At Georgetown he was selected to the editorial board of Georgetown’s law review. Upon graduation, he clerked for a federal judge in Washington. Thereafter, he was appointed to serve as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. In that position he prosecuted numerous cases, including those involving murder and rape. He left government service to join a large Washington law firm where he specialized in commercial litigation. He subsequently took a position as general counsel to a national environmental services company headquartered in Annapolis, MD. After several years, he resigned in order to practice law part time, thereby allowing him the time to devote to his first love, creative writing. His critically acclaimed first novel, Dead Light, was followed by the just-released One to Go. Mike lives on the Chesapeake Bay with his wife and two dogs, Blueberry and Scout.