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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 Harry Connolly. I was a big fan of his Twenty Palaces series and was very excited to hear he’d published a new trilogy called The Great Way. Here is the description of the first volume in the trilogy, The Way Into Chaos:

The city of Peradain is the heart of an empire built with steel, spears, and a monopoly on magic…until, in a single day, it falls, overthrown by a swarm of supernatural creatures of incredible power and ferocity. Neither soldier nor spell caster can stand against them.

The empire’s armies are crushed, its people scattered, its king and queen killed. Freed for the first time in generations, city-states scramble to seize neighboring territories and capture imperial spell casters. But as the creatures spread across the land, these formerly conquered peoples discover they are not prepared to face the enemy that destroyed an empire.

Can the last Peradaini prince, pursued by the beasts that killed his parents, cross battle-torn lands to retrieve a spell that might — just might — turn the battle against this new enemy?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Harry Connolly:

It would have been pretty simple to write a “Scariest Part” for one of the books in my previous series, Twenty Palaces. Those books were designed to loiter at the horror end of the urban fantasy genre, and each one had scenes that were meant to raise goosebumps.

But my new series is not so straight-forward.

Not that horror elements don’t belong in an epic fantasy. They absolutely do. I’m a hundred-percent pro Ringwraith. But scariness and (especially) horror rely on a wild imbalance of power between the source of the danger and the point of view character. The more agency the POV character has, the further a story or a scene will edge away from horror and toward fantasy or thriller. And some epic fantasy characters are lousy with agency.

Come to think of it, a horror/epic fantasy would be a fun thing to write…

Anyway, this is about the scariest part of my trilogy called The Great Way, and the part I want to highlight comes from the first book in the chapter that (and I don’t think I’ve said this online before) I’ve jokingly referred to as “Die Hard in a Fortress.”

The setup for the story (and the segment) is straightforward: the main character is Cazia, a young student of magic who has fled the capital city with her friends after it was invaded by monsters. They’ve taken refuge in a fortress on the frontier many miles away, but one of creatures appeared within the walls and attacked a whole bunch of people, including the king.

Cazia slew it with a spell, but no one is sure what these creatures are or where they came from. Also, the main character can not find her older brother, who was injured when they fled the invasion.

However, the reader is in a superior position to Cazia: they know the invading creatures carry (spoiler!) a curse that they spread by biting. The king has already begun to transform, and the creature Cazia slew was, in fact, her own brother.

So while she is outside the fort, still searching for him, alarms sound. Enemies are inside the walls. By the time her magic can get her back inside, the place appears deserted. No guards on watch. No staff in the kitchens. There’s no sign of Cazia’s friends, the only people she has left in the world. Nothing.

She quickly discovers that there are creatures inside the fort, and that these things — that seem so much like animals — have confined everyone, including her friends, inside a single building. Like hostages.

It’s this long chapter (the longest in the whole trilogy) that I’d call scariest, in part because it’s one of the few sections to make use of a reader-superior position, and in part because the reader knows that Cazia is going to risk herself — and the few allies she can find — to try to rescue the people who mean everything to hear. People the reader knows are already lost.

You can find out more about that first book here, or you can read the sample chapters I’ve posted on my blog.

Harry Connolly: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Google+

The Way Into Chaos: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

The Way Into Magic: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

The Way Into Darkness: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Indiebound

Harry Connolly’s debut novel, Child of Fire, was named to Publishers Weekly’s Best 100 Novels of 2009. For his epic fantasy series The Great Way, he turned to Kickstarter; at the time this was written, it’s the ninth-most-funded Fiction campaign ever. Book one of The Great Way, The Way Into Chaos, was published in December, 2014. Book two, The Way Into Magic, was published in January, 2015. The third and final book, The Way Into Darkness, was released on February 3rd, 2015. Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, beloved son, and beloved library system.

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.)

I’m very pleased to have as my guest my good friend, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and recent recipient of the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award Brian Keene. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Brian for well over a decade, and in that time I’ve roasted him at Necon, been roasted by him at Necon, and shared more than a few evenings full of drinks, laughter, and plans to dominate the genre. But most importantly I’ve seen his career blossom and his popularity as a writer grow with each passing year. It couldn’t have happened for a nicer, more deserving guy. Brian has published over forty novels to date, the most recent of which is The Lost Level. Here is the publisher’s description:

When modern-day occultist Aaron Pace discovers the secrets of inter-dimensional travel via a mystical pathway called The Labyrinth, he wastes no time in exploring a multitude of strange new worlds and alternate realities. But then, Aaron finds himself trapped in the most bizarre dimension of all — a place where dinosaurs coexist with giant robots, where cowboys fight reptilian lizard people, and where even the grass can kill you. This is a world populated by the missing and the disappeared, a world where myth is reality and where the extinct is reborn. Now, side-by-side with his new companions Kasheena and Bloop, Aaron must learn to navigate its dangers and survive long enough to escape…The Lost Level.

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

For me, the scariest part of The Lost Level was the novel’s central conceit — a character trapped far from home in an increasingly hostile and bizarre environment where everything is trying to kill him.

I’m a country boy, raised by country folks, and have always taken pride in the fact that I’m self-sufficient. These days, it’s trendy to be so. People call it “prepping” and there are books, television shows, websites, and trade shows dedicated to it. Growing up, we didn’t learn such skills because they were trendy, or because my parents and grandparents thought a coronal mass ejection would shut down the power grid and summon the zombie apocalypse. We learned them simply because we needed them. Just as a city kid learns skills which helps them traverse the streets and live in the metropolis, we learned how to field dress a deer or run a trout line across the river (to paraphrase the Hank Williams Jr. song).

As a result, I’ve always been confident of my ability to adapt to and survive any sort of adverse emergency situation. A few years ago, I fell off a cliff while hiking alone, toppled roughly twenty feet into a rain-swollen river, got washed downstream about a mile, escaped drowning and fought my way to shore, and then had to hike three miles out of the woods while bleeding from a gash that ran along the entire underside of my forearm.

In the dark.

This was no problem, nor did I have a problem supergluing the wound shut when I finally reached my home. “I can survive anything,” I said.

Which is why the universe decided to teach me a lesson not too long ago.

Until earlier this year, I lived in a remote cabin atop a small mountain along the Susquehanna River. Author friends who have visited there can attest to how far removed from civilization this home was for me. It was absolutely perfect, and I loved it. I chopped my own firewood, grew my own vegetables, and had a grand old time living as my forefathers did, and teaching my six-year-old some of those skills, as well.

Then the 2014 Polar Vortex hit, bringing hurricane force winds, below-freezing temperatures, and a metric fuck-ton of snow (that’s a valid measurement). In the first twenty-four hours, Central Pennsylvania was turned into a disaster area. Millions lost power — and heat. Roads were impassible. Even the National Guard were having a hard time of it. But not me. I sat on top of my mountain, fire roaring in the wood stove, laptop powered by the emergency generator, and feeling all proud of myself for once again being able to survive anything.

That’s when the Polar Vortex swung around for a second strike, dropping a tree on my generator, and two more through my roof. Not to mention the thirty or so more trees it dropped across the one dirt lane that led from my home down to the main road at the bottom of the mountain. The wood stove was unusable, the kitchen was full of snow, and the pipes quickly froze and burst. Within hours, my cabin was reduced to uninhabitable rubble (and just like health insurance and 401Ks, working writers seldom have homeowners insurance, because that’s something else we can’t afford). And we were trapped, unable to drive out because, even if we made it through the snow, my vehicle wasn’t going to transform into a robot and climb over the fallen trees.

It’s one thing to teach your child the same survival skills you learned from your father and grandfather. It’s another to make him live in a house that suddenly has no plumbing or electricity or heat. So, when the snow melted, we moved to an apartment in town. He is much happier because he has Cartoon Network again, and Minecraft, and doesn’t have to eat freeze-dried rations for dinner. And I’m happy because he is happy. And while, despite all its challenges, I vastly prefer living in the country over living in an apartment in town, I do have to admit I’m learning an entire new set of survival skills — like how to muffle the sounds of police sirens shrieking or the neighbors partying at 3 AM. In the country, I secured my trash cans so bears wouldn’t get into them. Here, we do the same to keep out feral cats.

We’re surviving.

And that’s what Aaron, the main character in The Lost Level, is doing, as well. He’s been transported to an alien dimension full of dinosaurs and robots and cowboys and lizard people. It’s a world where even something as innocuous as the grass can kill you. A world where, instead of him saving the Princess, the Princess repeatedly saves him, because he doesn’t yet possess the skills to survive there. He’s trapped there, with nothing other than what was in his pockets at the time. And he quickly discovers that no amount of readiness or prepping could suffice for what this strange new world has in store.

For me, the scariest part of writing the novel was putting myself in Aaron’s shoes, and remembering what it’s like to have your confidence and self-sufficiency shattered and eroded by helplessness and an all-too-consuming despair.

But you know what? You can survive helplessness and despair, too, as long as you don’t give in to fear.

Brian Keene: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Lost Level: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Apex Publications

Brian Keene writes novels, comic books, short fiction, and occasional journalism. He is the author of over forty books. His 2003 novel, The Rising, is often credited (along with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later film) with inspiring pop culture’s current interest in zombies. In addition to his own original work, Keene has written for media properties such as Doctor Who, The X-Files, Hellboy, Masters of the Universe, and Superman. Keene’s work has been praised by Stephen King and in such diverse places as The New York Times, The History Channel, The Howard Stern Show, CNN.com, Publisher’s Weekly, Fangoria, and Rue Morgue Magazine. He has won numerous awards and honors, including the World Horror Grand Master Award, two Bram Stoker Awards, and a recognition from Whiteman A.F.B. (home of the B-2 Stealth Bomber) for his outreach to U.S. troops serving both overseas and abroad. A prolific public speaker, Keene has delivered talks at conventions, college campuses, theaters, and inside Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, VA.

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 Ben Eads, whose latest publication is the novella Cracked Sky. Here is the publisher’s description:

Reeling from the loss of their only child, Stephen and Shelley Morrison learn that her killer has been found dead. What they don’t know is that his agenda goes far deeper than the grave. Beyond the storm, beyond the crack in the sky — where their daughter lies trapped with The Lost Ones — something is using Stephen and Shelley’s agony to fulfill its goals: Terrorize. Consume. Destroy.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Ben Eads:

Getting into the headspace of the characters in my novella, Cracked Sky, was by far the scariest part. Stephen and Shelley Morrison lost their only child in a car wreck thanks to a drunk driver. I don’t have any children of my own. At best, I could only imagine the pain they carried. Getting into the headspace of these poor souls was depressing and scary. The main theme of the novella is loss. In this case, a horrific loss of the highest magnitude.

So, the only emotion I could use as an anchor was what I felt after losing my job in mid-2008, during the biggest financial crisis we’ve seen since the stock market crash of the 1920s. Unable to find work, I lost both my house and my car. A dear friend committed suicide only a few months later. But there was something deeper, uglier: The antagonist who caused the car crash, Darrell Peakman.

It’s amazing what happens to people when they suffer a tragic loss. Sometimes, it could be something insignificant that sets them on the path to becoming a monster. Sadly, we see this on the news on a weekly basis. Darrell Peakman exemplifies the worst case scenario. He also lost his daughter, and will do whatever it takes to reunite with her, even if that means murdering people — and children — to get there. For him, death is just a barrier to be breached.

I spent a lot more time on Darrell than I did my main characters. To a certain degree, I had to be able to sympathize with Darrell. The last thing I wanted was to shortchange the reader. It got to the point where I had to find a healthy balance. After spending time in Darrell’s head, I would watch a comedy or take a nice jog around my neighborhood. Still, I couldn’t escape how Darrell justified these horrific acts.

Real-life monsters, once they start… just keep getting worse. The wreck and reuniting with Darrell’s daughter was just the beginning. He blames the world for what happened. Darrell feels justified in laying waste to the world — a world that he feels doesn’t deserve love. If you were to ask Darrell if he were evil, his response would be laughter. Hitler, Stalin, and Pot didn’t think they were evil. Quite the opposite. They felt what they were doing was the right thing, the only answer to a “problem” they couldn’t shake.

Darrell found a key, a way to reunite with his daughter in a nightmare world reflecting his worst traits and fears. But was that enough for Darrell to be happy? No. So he finds his anchor, his answer to what he sees as a problem, in Stephen and Shelley Morrison. He uses their grief, pain, and suffering to not only fulfill his goals, but to assure himself he’s not alone. More importantly, Darrell needs to feel — as his plan comes closer to fruition — that he’s morally correct and that his moral compass is working just fine.

For me, supernatural horror that’s driven by deep emotions and infused with real-life horror is the most frightening kind of horror. What Stephen and Shelley Morrison are forced to face is this human being who becomes a monster — literally and figuratively — and that’s the scariest part.

Ben Eads: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Cracked Sky: Amazon / Goodreads

Ben Eads lives within the semi-tropical suburbs of Central Florida. A true horror writer by heart, he wrote his first story at the tender age of ten. The look on the teacher’s face when she read it was priceless. However, his classmates loved it! Ben has had short stories published in various magazines such as Shroud Magazine and The Ashen Eye. He also has a short story appearing in the anthology Tales From The Lake Volume 2, which will be published by Crystal Lake Publishing in mid-2015. When he isn’t writing, he dabbles in martial arts, philosophy and specializes in I.T. security. He’s always looking to find new ways to infect reader’s imaginations. Ben blames Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Stephen King for his addiction, and his need to push the envelope of fiction.

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 E.M. Powell, whose latest novel is The Blood of the Fifth Knight. Here is the publisher’s description:

England, 1176. King Henry II has imprisoned his rebellious Queen for attempting to overthrow him. But with her conspirators still at large and a failed assassination attempt on his beautiful mistress, Rosamund Clifford, the King must take action to preserve his reign.

Desperate, Henry turns to the only man he trusts: a man whose skills have saved him once before. Sir Benedict Palmer answers the call, mistakenly believing that his family will remain safe while he attends to his King.

As Palmer races to secure the throne for the King, neither man senses the hand of a brilliant schemer, a mystery figure loyal to Henry’s traitorous Queen who will stop at nothing to see the King defeated.

The Blood of the Fifth Knight is an intricate medieval murder mystery and a worthy follow-on to E.M. Powell’s acclaimed historical thriller The Fifth Knight.

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

First things first. Historical fiction is not all about heaving bosoms, big dresses and/or kilts. Not at all. I write medieval. That’s the three and a half centuries from around 1150 to 1500. Believe me, there is so much that really happened in that time period that is the stuff of dreams for thriller writers. Or even possibly writers whose surname is Martin. I can’t of course cover it all but in my current novel, medieval thriller The Blood of the Fifth Knight, I have one of my main characters accused of sorcery. As with all historical fiction, there’s a lot of research that goes into the world building. What I found out about sorcery goes from the hilarious to the stomach turning to the genuinely terrifying.

The medievals liked natural magic, which for them was a type of science. Skilled practitioners performed it through charms, or through curses, the darker flip side. Particularly popular were aphrodisiacs. You could soak wool in bat’s blood and pop it under a woman’s head while she slept. This, apparently, would get her aroused. Ditto a stag’s testicles or a fox’s tail. You had to be very careful about slipping ants’ eggs into her bath as she would be so consumed with lust afterwards that she would leap on just about anybody. If it’s the husband that’s having bedroom problems, then herbed earthworms ground up in the appropriate food would do the trick. The unlucky chap also had to be careful about what he drank. If he swigged down the forty ants boiled in daffodil juice, then he could find himself impotent for the rest of his life. Downton Abbey this is not.

But you might find that the responses to curses weren’t a huge improvement. Arnold of Villanova wrote a tract On Bewitchments around 1300 in which he included remedies for impotence caused by magic. He recommended placing a rooster’s testicles under the married couple’s bed. Alternatively, you could fumigate the bedchamber with fish bile or smear the walls with the blood of a black dog. That’s a heck of a love nest. If you weren’t so keen on interior décor, you could just grind up the dried kidneys and testicles of vultures and drink that dissolved in wine.

Now, if this belief system had stopped at harmless/revolting practices, then it wouldn’t be very scary. But sorcery (a forerunner of what was to become witchcraft) was magic where it was believed that the power of the Devil was being invoked. It’s important here to understand the medieval mind and medieval Christianity in particular. The Devil wasn’t an abstract idea. He was real. Real and ready to take souls to hell. William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) wrote an account of the Sorceress of Berkeley and events from 1065. She was, according to William, ‘addicted to sorcery…skilled in ancient augury, she was excessively gluttonous, perfectly lascivious, setting no bounds to her debaucheries.’ She repented on her death bed and begged for her body to be saved from Satan, with her corpse sewed up in a stag’s skin, placed in a stone coffin and weighted with lead and iron and secured with chains. It was no good. A devil broke into the church and made off with her on the back of a barbed black horse. Fact, as far as medieval people were concerned.

With such evil in the world, someone had to do something about it. Enter the response of the Church. A popular punishment was excommunication, a terrible fate for the medieval sinner as it meant that they would never be able to enter heaven. Yet prosecutions for maleficent magic would go even further and we begin to see the practice arise throughout the middle ages of the burning of those suspected of their involvement with the Devil.

In a famous sermon preached by Bernardino of Siena in 1427, we see him link the use of charms with calling on Satan. Bernardino preached that if anyone were to encounter a practitioner of magic, the only response should be ‘to cry out: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Insidiously, he also encouraged people to report any instances of sorcery, for if they did not, they would share in the guilt.

The link between the practice of magic and full Devil worship was becoming ever stronger, mutating into the deadly phenomenon of witch trials. It is estimated that between the fifteenth and eighteenth century around 50,000 people lost their lives through burning at the stake or hanging.

So mixing up some powders in a glass of wine, putting a wood carving on a threshold, being seen to chant over a well: all of these could lead to a trial at which there could be little or no defense. To unspeakable, agonizing death. And all because the powerful in society held a belief that had no bearing in reality and were yet free to impose it and construct a regime of terror around it. Now, that, for me, is The Scariest Part.

E.M. Powell: Website / Facebook / Twitter

The Blood of the Fifth Knight: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Walmart

E.M. Powell is the author of medieval thrillers which have been #1 Amazon bestsellers in the US and the UK. Born and raised in the Republic of Ireland into the family of Michael Collins (the legendary revolutionary and founder of the Irish Free State), she now lives in the northwest of England with her husband and daughter and a Facebook-friendly dog. She is a regular blogger for English Historical Fiction Authors and a reviewer for both fiction & non-fiction for the Historical Novel Society. Her latest novel, The Blood of the Fifth Knight, is published by Thomas & Mercer.