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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.)

We’re doing something a little different on The Scariest Part. This week, we’re part of author Alex Hughes’s month-long blog tour in celebration of the release of Vacant, the fourth volume in the award-winning Mindspace Investigations series. And we’ll also be offering our very first e-book giveaway and taking part in an exciting blog tour scavenger hunt based on the board game Clue. You’ll find the details of both down at the bottom. But first, here is the publisher’s description of Vacant:

Nothing ruins a romantic evening like a brawl with lowlifes — especially when one of them later turns up dead and my date, Detective Isabella Cherabino, is the #1 suspect. My history with the Atlanta PD on both sides of the law makes me an unreliable witness, so while Cherabino is suspended, I’m paying my bills by taking an FBI gig.

I’ve been hired to play telepathic bodyguard for Tommy, the ten-year-old son of a superior court judge in Savannah presiding over the murder trial of a mob-connected mogul. After an attempt on the kid’s life, the Feds believe he’s been targeted by the businessman’s “associates.”

Turns out, Tommy’s a nascent telepath, so I’m trying to help him get a handle on his Ability. But it doesn’t take a mind reader to see that there’s something going on with this kid’s parents that’s stressing him out more than a death threat…

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Alex Hughes:

[Note: this post contains light spoilers.]

There were a lot of things about Vacant that scared me. First, taking Adam away from his comfort zone in Atlanta with Cherabino and police was incredibly scary. This character had defined himself for so long by other peoples’ expectations that breaking out of those put him in a cold sweat. I had to step back as a writer and ask myself some very difficult questions. What really makes Adam tick? And the answer, surprisingly enough, was fear.

Adam is terrified of failing, and more precisely, of being a failure. This is a fear that I’ve found in the mirror all too often, and the worst part about this fear is that it can never truly be banished. What if they find out I’m not really that good? What if I fall on my face and screw up? Adam’s fears in the book echoed my fears as I struggled with the book without the comforting repartee with Cherabino. I was terrified that I would screw this book up and not be able to write it, and Adam was terrified that he would fail Tommy, and that Tommy would die like he saw in the vision.

The strange part about Adam, as I got deeper into the book, the strange part about fear, is that there hits a point where you can no longer be any more afraid than you currently are. Adam looked into the very face of his death — and I, into the face of my struggles with the page — and we both found something more important than the fear. Having decided to move forward, having decided that we would finish, no matter the cost, the fear became less important. The mission became everything. If we failed, we failed. We must continue, if our minds bled from it.

I was certain at many points in the draft that Tommy would die. That Adam would have to face his real fear of failure, even if it meant he’d fall off the wagon. He would have to find himself lacking, and the world dim and small and horrible. If Tommy died, then nothing Adam did — nothing — would ever make him look himself in the mirror the same way ever again. And I was sure it was going to happen, certain in a way that made my heart pound and my stomach churn. Certain, in a way you only get from an outline and a heavily foreshadowing vision of the future. Nothing I could do — nothing — would save the boy I’d come to love.

And then the last piece, the worst piece. Tommy’s mother, who is no hero. To get inside her head, to crawl inside the skin of a woman like that (vague only to keep the spoilers minimal) — I had to embrace one of my personal definitions of petty evil, and understand what it was to be her. That was the scariest part of all. To know that Adam would be destroyed, a boy may die, a vision may come to pass in the worst possible way, and to get inside the head of a person who had played a huge part in it for ill — that was scary. Because it was true. I could be her, given enough time and choices. I could.

And I could be the boy, facing a known killer for hire who liked to play with his victims, a man who strangled face-to-face, slowly.

And I could be Adam, seeing it coming and powerless to stop it. I could be Adam, who I thought might fail, and be a failure.

This was a very scary book for me to write. The scariest part was understanding.

Alex Hughes: Website / Facebook / Twitter

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

Alex Hughes, the author of the award-winning Mindspace Investigations series from Roc (the latest of which is Vacant), has lived in the Atlanta area since the age of eight. She is a graduate of the prestigious Odyssey Writing Workshop, and a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers. Her short fiction has been published in several markets including EveryDay Fiction, Thunder on the Battlefield and White Cat Magazine. She is an avid cook and foodie, a trivia buff, and a science geek, and loves to talk about neuroscience, the Food Network, and writing craft — but not necessarily all at the same time!

Alex Hughes’s ongoing scavenger hunt Clue game ends on December 24th. The scavenger hunt checklist can be found here. For those playing, here is the latest clue:

(Update 12/23/14: The giveaway is now CLOSED!)

GIVEAWAY (Worldwide): Win an E-Book Copy of Any Mindspace Investigations novel by Alex Hughes — winner’s choice! (That includes Vacant, the latest novel!)

Here are all the details:

1) Leave a comment below to enter for a chance to win. Specify which Mindspace Investigations novel you’d like, and your preferred e-book format: epub or mobi.

2) Geographic restrictions: This giveaway is open to everyone worldwide. All you need is a valid email address to receive the e-book should you win.

3) This giveaway will end on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014 (9:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time). The lucky winner will be selected at random, notified, and announced shortly thereafter.

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 my dear friend and New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden as my guest. I’ve known Chris for well over a decade, I’ve hosted author roasts with him and been roasted by him, we’ve done signings together and just generally been big fans of each other personally and professionally. Chris is a prolific writer — to say the least! — but nothing he’s written has ever let me down as a reader. That includes his latest horror novel, Snowblind, which I loved and which is being released today in mass market paperback. Here is the publisher’s description:

ONE SMALL, NEW ENGLAND TOWN IS TAKEN BY STORM — AND NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME.

Once upon a time, Coventry weathered a horrific blizzard, one that left many people dead — and others mysteriously lost. Twelve years later, the town is still haunted by the snow that fell that one fateful night…and now a new storm is on the way.

Photographer Jake Schapiro mourns the little brother he lost in the storm and, this time, he will see another boy go missing. Mechanic and part-time thief Doug Manning, whose wife was never found after she wandered into the whiteout, is starting over with another woman — and more ambitious crimes. Police detective Joe Keenan has never been the same since that night, when he failed to save the life of a young boy…and the boy’s father vanished in the storm only feet away. And all the way on the other side of the country, Miri Ristani receives a phone call — from a man who died twelve years ago. Old ghosts are trickling back to life as a new threat rolls in. Could it be that this storm will be even more terrifying than the last?

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Christopher Golden:

There’s a scene near the beginning of Snowblind that some of my local friends and readers have heard me read at several signings. Though I’ve read other scenes publicly, this is the one that I keep coming back to again and again. A boy named Jake wakes during the night in the room he shares with his little brother. He glances over to see that his brother is not in bed. Instead, the little boy — Isaac — is standing by the window, looking through the frosted, snowy glass at the blizzard raging outside. When Jake tells Isaac to go back to bed, Isaac can’t tear his gaze away from the storm.

“There are monsters in the yard,” he says.

Growing up, my brother Jamie and I shared a room for years. First the smallest of the bedrooms on the second floor of our split level home, but later — after our older sister moved out — a larger room at the front corner of the house. In a storm, the wind would blow hard enough that branches from a tree just outside would sometimes scrape against the house or make long-fingered shadows at the window. When the wind howled and the house creaked and the tree scraped the house, I would huddle deeper under the covers in a state of delicious fear, a frisson of terror that felt just a fractional, emotional twist away from glee.

Jake and Isaac are partly Jamie and me. You can see it in the irritated, impatient big-brotherness of Jake (sorry Jamie), and the kind of innocently fearful wonder of Isaac…right before something terrible happens. But there’s another vital influence in this scene, a very specific one. Many readers have rightly pointed out — and I’ve discussed in interviews — the huge influence of Stephen King on me as a writer and on Snowblind in particular. In fact, Snowblind is an homage of sorts to all of the wonderful small-town horror stories I read in the 1980s (some of them from the 1970s). The novel that most inspired me, however, is King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, with its interweaving of the relationships of an ensemble of small-town residents.

In this particular scene — the scariest part — I couldn’t help channeling my own childhood sharing a bedroom with my brother, as well as the fears of my youth. But the scene is also enormously influenced by Danny and Ralphie Glick from ‘Salem’s Lot. Perhaps because I shared that room with my brother, the relationship between Danny and Ralphie felt profoundly real to me. The scene when vampiric Danny comes to Mark Petrie’s window is one of the most vividly chilling passages I can remember reading.

You won’t see the Glick brothers — or the Golden brothers, for that matter — in that scene from Snowblind. In the mental landscape I create for myself while writing, those boys were always Jake and Isaac Schapiro. I honestly don’t think the scene would have worked, otherwise. I want you to be afraid for these little boys, frightened in the dark with the blizzard roaring outside and monsters in the yard, and if reactions to my public readings of that scene are any indication, it works its dark bits of magic just as I’d hoped.

I wrapped up my childhood fears in a little box, and now they are my gift to you.

One last note. These days, another family lives in the house where I grew up. Shortly after they moved in, they cut down all of the trees and pulled up all of the bushes in the front of the house. I wonder if it was because of that dreadful scraping and the long-fingered shadows of the branches.

Christopher Golden: Website / Facebook / Twitter

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

Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Strangewood and the upcoming near-future thriller Tin Men. He has co-written three illustrated novels with Mike Mignola, the first of which, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series, Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead, The Monster’s Corner, and the upcoming Seize the Night, among others. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world.

Welcome to a special new 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.)

This is quite a distinguished week for The Scariest Part, because this time we’re spotlighting not one but two authors! (Click here to see F. Paul Wilson’s Scariest Part from yesterday.) I’m very excited to have John Goodrich as my guest today. He’s been a friend of mine for several years now, and I couldn’t be prouder to feature his long-awaited debut novel, Hag, which includes an introduction by esteemed, multiaward-winning horror author Laird Barron. Hag goes on sale today as part of Thunderstorm Books’ Maelstrom V three-book collector’s series, along with two new books by World Horror Convention Grandmaster Brian Keene. Here is the publisher’s description:

All David wanted was to rest and get better. He moved from Vermont to Boston to beat his cancer. Even before the boxes are unpacked, he and his best friend Sam notice an eerie presence in his new apartment building. The emaciated haunt is a roiling storm of fury with black iron claws and jagged metal teeth. She attacks David without reason or pity, and just when he thinks he knows her limits, she tears through them. Hag is a dark, brooding novel set in a blighted personal landscape. A story of deathless rage and enduring hatred.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for John Goodrich:

I want to tell you a little secret. Although my debut novel is a ghost story, I don’t really like ghost stories.

Before I started Hag, the novel that’s about to be published, I wrote a fantasy novel that I loved to pieces. I couldn’t get agents or publishers interested in it. That hurt. I loved my book. Still do. Someday someone will buy it. But it’s insanity to write a sequel to a book that hasn’t sold, so I decided to write something different, something I wouldn’t love quite so much. After some thought, I decided to write a ghost story.

The ghost story is the prototypical horror story, and humans have been telling them for thousands of years. Thanks to cultural saturation, ghosts are no longer automatically scary. Casper is a friendly ghost. A ghost mascot flogs breakfast cereal. So I knew I would have to add my own spice to make the story effective horror. Given how often the ground has been trod and retrod, I would also have to come up with something unconventional to make it stand out.

Looking for that new something, I read up on the classics: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s Hell House, Elizabeth Massie’s Homeplace (there’s a reason Hag begins with an H). I fell in love with these stories. They’re complex and brilliant, transcending the cliched sheeted phantom clanking its chains. These ghosts had agendas, personalities, and needs.

I decided to load my ghost with some unfinished business. This would give her depth of character, and provide the protagonists with a mystery to solve, rather then just standing around being terrified. So what kind of unfinished business make a story horror, rather than a mystery?

Some recent stories have altered their emotional hook from an existential fear of death to a naked fear of dying in pain. We read about people who die every day. Murders, accidents, and cancer all claim lives. But every now and then, we hear whispers of someone who did not pass away peacefully, surrounded by their family. The elderly woman who breaks her hip after falling on the kitchen floor, lying in helpless, blinding pain for three days before dying of dehydration. The child manacled to a brick wall, slowly dying of thirst and loneliness. The infected patient, fighting with all their strength, losing a little bit each day, organs failing one by one, painfully dragged toward the inevitable end. The terror of such cruel deaths is both heartbreaking and horrifying. Thus, the perfect thing to make my ghost violent and at the same time, understandable.

How far should I go? How far could I go? It had to be good. The ghost’s story was going to be the emotional center of the novel. If I made the character’s suffering weak, the story loses its driving force and credibility. On the flip side, did I really have the nerve to write the excruciating death of Chibuike, a character I had invented and cared about?

This was the scariest part. Most of my short stories have been Lovecraftian, cosmic horror, rather than anything about pain or physical suffering. I didn’t know if I could write a long, torturous death. I was afraid, and the fear of writing that chapter haunted me until I had to write it. To prepare I read Jack Ketchum’s merciless Off Season and The Girl Next Door. Ketchum is merciless but dispassionate in his description of atrocities. I would have to not tell the reader how to feel about awful things happening to Chibuike, even as I described them. I wrote an entire chapter describing the agonizing demise, imagining the horror consuming her as she clawed at her chains, groped for a light in the darkness, watched all light and hope be slowly, cruelly extinguished. It was an exhausting two weeks.

My work paid off. In his introduction to Hag, Laird Barron writes, “Chibuike’s anguish is most acutely felt for she reflects the very savagery and malice that tore her from hearth and home, peeled away her humanity, and snuffed her life. She cries the loudest and repays hurt with hurt.”

That’s what horror is about. Facing fear and seeing if it kills me.

John Goodrich: Website / Blog / Twitter

Hag: Order it as part of the Maelstrom V three-book collector’s set

John Goodrich lives in the haunted Green Mountains of Vermont, the last refuge of true Lovecraft country. His stories have been included in Steampunk Cthulhu, Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Undead and Unbound, and the Lovecraft E-Zine. Hag is his first published novel. He has spent the last year and a half writing about kaiju films on his blog. His other unhealthy obsessions include biplanes, Icelandic sagas, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, and semiotics.

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 especially happy to have New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson as my guest because I’ve known Paul for nearly fifteen years now and am delighted to call him a friend. He also happens to be one of those most talented, prolific, and accomplished authors I know. His latest novel, Fear City, features one of his most popular and enduring characters, Repairman Jack, in the final novel of the Repairman Jack: The Early Years trilogy. Here is the publisher’s description:

Rage, terror, and redemption: these are the stones upon which F. Paul Wilson builds the concluding chapter of Repairman Jack: The Early Years, the prequel trilogy focusing on the formative years of Wilson’s globally popular supernatural troubleshooter.

The strands of Jack’s life, established in the first two books, Cold City and Dark City, are now woven into a complete pattern.

Centered around an obscure group of malcontents intent on creating a terrible explosion in New York City in 1993, Fear City shows the final stages of young Jack becoming Repairman Jack. It is a dark and terrible story, full of plots and needless mayhem, with secret agents, a freelance torturer, a secret society as old as human history, love, death, and a very bleak triumph. Jack threads his way through this intricate maze, as people he loves are stripped away from him in a way that presages the later epic series of novels.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for F. Paul Wilson:

When the copyedited manuscript of Fear City arrived from the publisher six moths ago, I set about fine-combing the text. My copyeditor for the last dozen-plus years, Rebecca Maines, had done her usual excellent job of flagging inconsistencies and typos and the occasional verbless sentence. I always take extra time at this stage because it’s my last chance to sharpen dialog, hone descriptions, and make cuts before the book is typeset.

Things went smoothly until I came to Dr. Moreau.

Yeah, Dr. Moreau. I couldn’t resist naming a torturer known to all the clandestine services and organizations as La Chirurgienne after H.G. Wells’s vivisectionist. It seemed…right.

You have to realize it had been months since I’d sent off the manuscript and she’d kind of faded from my consciousness. But as I reread her passages, I kept thinking, What dark corner of my hindbrain did I plumb to find this woman?

The clichéd template of the torturer is Szell from Marathon Man. Adèle Moreau, on the other hand, is a cultured, rather brittle French woman with a thick accent. She was trained as a surgeon but developed a sideline of hiring out to extract information from people who don’t wish to part with it. She doesn’t think of herself as a torturer or a sadist, but rather a pain researcher — a “nociresearcher,” to use her term — and sees her interrogations as opportunities for scientific research.

She maintains a certain decorum about her work — e.g., she likes her subjects fully clothed.

“I find proximity to a naked human, how shall we say, distasteful. I can cut away to expose whatever area I wish to explore.”

That “explore” got me — and it came from me. Her specialty is the delicate, minimally invasive procedure.

“I abhor brutality—the fists, the truncheons, the waterboarding. And the mutilation of genitalia — dégoûtant! So crude. So unnecessary.”

Charlot, her pet Yorkie, stays in her procedure room when she operates and she occasionally feed him scraps.

What I found most disquieting on the reread was that I had no memory of sitting down and designing this lady from hell. Perhaps I’ve been turning stereotypes on their heads so long it simply came naturally. If the cliché is an ex-Nazi or an Albanian thug, I’ll use a genteel professional — a female instead of a male — and give her a French accent, evoking the culture that gave us the Impressionists. Think Monet’s lilies…floating on blood.

Maybe that’s all it was…unconscious habit. I took comfort in that.

But then I came to her specialty, known as “IV,” and all comfort vanished. “IV” stands for “Infernum Viventes,” Latin for “Living Hell.” It is, I would say, the nastiest, most diabolically evil thing you can do to a human being. I have no idea where IV came from. Perhaps it exists somewhere in fiction or real life, but I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. So I’ve got nothing to blame for it except my own id. And that’s scary.

The key word is “Living.” Because in our society, we would not let someone die after they have suffered this procedure. We will keep them alive for as long as modern medical science allows. Prolonging life…it’s what we do.

But if you’re the victim, the only thing you’d request — plead for if you could communicate — is death.

What is IV? Well, that would be a spoiler. And I don’t want to spoil one of Fear City’s centerpieces for you.

F. Paul Wilson: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Fear City: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

F. Paul Wilson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Repairman Jack novels, lives in Wall, New Jersey. In 2008, he won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.