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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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is M.R. Carey, whose latest novel is The Girl With All the Gifts. I’m especially thrilled to have him on the blog today because I’m a huge fan of his alter ego, Mike Carey. His Lucifer comics series for Vertigo blew me away, and I was honored when he was kind enough to blurb my novel Dying Is My Business. Having him on The Scariest Part makes me very, very happy, and The Girl With All the Gifts sounds like an amazing new direction in his body of work. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.” Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh. Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children’s cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn’t know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

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

I was at a comics convention in Barcelona last week. It was a really great show, but one of the best parts, completely unanticipated, was that I got to hang out with Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, who are great company and great human beings. At one point we were talking about old British sci-fi shows, and Ian made an interesting comment. “We’ll be watching something, and a kid will be in danger — but we’ll think no, no way. They’re never gonna kill the kid. Unless it’s a British show. You guys won’t even think twice about doing that.”

I don’t know what the scariest part of The Girl With All the Gifts will be for an audience. It has a lot of tense moments, a few big shocks, more than a few gory scenes and tragic ones, but how you react to that stuff is very personal — and the biggest scares usually have other ingredients, other bits of emotional charge that modulate the fear and put an unexpected spin on it. A good horror story will take you to places you weren’t looking to go. That’s almost the entire brief, in some ways.

What I can talk about, though, is the bit that was scariest for me to write. There’s no contest. It was traumatic, and if I ever go into therapy I’m sure it will account for several sessions before the therapist throws in the towel and tells me that the technical term for what I am is a sick fuck.

My protagonist in Girl is…well, a girl. A ten-year-old, Melanie, who for various spoiler-related reasons has spent her whole childhood in an army base as a virtual prisoner. Only her captors don’t think of her as a prisoner. They think of her as a medical specimen. The pathogen that has infected Melanie normally has the side effect of erasing all higher cognitive functions. It turns you into an animal, essentially — and an animal dedicated to spreading the infection by whatever means. In a few cases, as with Melanie, that doesn’t happen. But the base personnel still believe that the infection is in the driving seat. This isn’t a little girl. It’s a disease that looks like a little girl.

And Melanie doesn’t think of herself as a prisoner, either. She’s never known any life apart from this, and she doesn’t know enough to question it. She likes and trusts most of the adults around her, thinks of them as her friends, and does as she’s told because at rock bottom she’s a good kid who thrives on praise and occasional tiny acts of kindness.

So anyway. There’s a scene in which Caroline Caldwell, the biologist in charge of the base’s research program, decides she needs a whole lot more raw data on what the disease does to the human brain — especially the brains of these kids who can still talk and reason after they’ve caught it. So she brings Melanie into the lab, straps her down on an operating table (with the help of another doctor, Selkirk) and prepares to dissect her. While she’s both alive and conscious. This last point isn’t random sadism: the infected kids don’t respond to anaesthetic so there’s no humane option.

I should pause at this point and add one significant detail. I was writing this scene on my tiny, creaky netbook, on the London Underground, on the way into town for a meeting. Commuters are sitting on either side of me, looking over my shoulder because what I’m doing is marginally more interesting than the haemorrhoid ads on the opposite wall of the carriage.

And what they’re reading is a scene in which two adults vivisect a child.

I had a strange moment in which my perspective tilted over. I saw the scene from an objective distance all of a sudden, instead of from right in the middle of it. And I had to stop. My brain just locked. I dried up in the middle of a sentence, shut the netbook down and put it away. I think it was about a week before I went back to the scene and finished it, and I had to creep up on it by writing the next chapter and then the one after before coming back to close the gap.

It wasn’t just the fact that this awful thing was happening to a child. It was the emotional payload of having Melanie — initially at least — going along with it because she doesn’t understand what’s happening and she knows and trusts the adults involved. It was the scariest part because it was an emotional and psychological tightrope walk over an abyss of all too believable and recognisable cruelty and abuse.

Cruelty to children. Despite what you may have heard it’s not easy, even for British writers.

But after that the scenes in which the characters are attacked and besieged by thousands of infected “hungries” in a derelict hospital that may be full of infected former patients were a piece of cake.

M.R. Carey: Website / Twitter

The Girl With All the Gifts: Amazon / Read an excerpt & order from other bookstores in the US, UK, and Australia

M.R. Carey is an established writer of prose fiction and comic books. He has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on X-Men and Fantastic Four, Marvel’s flagship superhero titles. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times graphic fiction bestseller list. He also has several previous novels and one Hollywood movie screenplay to his credit.

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is British Fantasy Award nominee Simon Strantzas, whose latest collection is Burnt Black Suns. On a personal note, I’ve known Simon for a few years now. I find him warm, funny, and incredibly smart. He was kind enough to let me stay in his guest room when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in the Toronto area in 2012, a favor that allowed me to be a part of an important convention I otherwise would not have been able to afford. I enjoy his fiction and his company very much, and I’m delighted and honored to have him as a guest on The Scariest Part. Simon already has a reputation for outstanding short horror fiction, and Burnt Black Suns is poised to bring him an even larger audience. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In this fourth collection of stories, Simon Strantzas establishes himself as one of the most dynamic figures in contemporary weird fiction. The nine stories in this volume exhibit Strantzas’s wide range in theme and subject matter, from the Lovecraftian “Thistle’s Find” to the Robert W. Chambers homage “Beyond the Banks of the River Seine.” But Strantzas’s imagination, while drawing upon the best weird fiction of the past, ventures into new territory in such works as “On Ice,” a grim novella of arctic horror; “One Last Bloom,” a grisly account of a scientific experiment gone hideously awry; and the title story, an emotionally wrenching account of terror and loss in the baked Mexican desert. With this volume, Strantzas lays claim to be discussed in the company of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron as one of the premier weird fictionists of our time.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Simon Strantzas:

I don’t find much frightening. At least, not when it comes to fiction. The real world is plenty frightening, of course, but the world of fiction — the world of my fiction — rarely is. True, I’ve never really aimed for fright, but the nature of writing Horror means it makes its presence known whether I intended it or not. It’s a simple, indisputable fact that no matter who you are, sometimes you get frightened. But a companion truth is that everybody gets frightened by something different, so no matter how hard a writer tries, he or she can frighten no more than a fraction of readers. For me, it’s an inefficient goal to strive for. I’d rather instead focus on affecting readers’ more reliable emotions.

Burnt Black Suns was a change of pace for me, book-wise. My fiction tends to be restrained; the horrors are quiet ones, and their job (I hope!) is to seep obliquely into the reader, invading via accretion, perhaps only revealling their true nature long after reading. The slow burn is a favourite technique of mine, no question, and sometimes it takes the entire length of a story for all those little pieces to cohere into something horrific, but with Burnt Black Suns I wanted something different. I wanted to get inside you.

I suppose in some ways this was a reflection of my wanting to better exploit what might be my primary fear as a writer: lack of control over my craft. History tells me I tend to prefer short, orderly pieces. The narratives in this book, however, spin out wider and wilder than ever before, and as I wrote them I suffered the less-than-pleasant terror that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Even the novelettes were unlike anything I’d attempted previously — both in terms of length and structure. For someone who had spent the preceeding decade writing only short stories, writing a book with four novellas was intimidating and terrifying. But also exhilarating. And enlightening.

I’m not the first writer to get lost in his own work, and I surely won’t be the last, but there were times in writing this book I didn’t know if I would ever be able to finish it, and I think that barely-contained terror informs the stories. There’s desperation there — not in the writing, but in the characters, in their reactions — a sense of spiralling out of control. My own fears infected my characters, helped to keep them off the path to safety, dragged them down into the dark. Putting together a book of short stories is so often about grabbing a handful written at a series of previous points and bundling them together. But a unified collection that is itself a journey to write can only provide its readers with a similar voyage, an equivilent transformation. At least, that’s the hope.

Burnt Black Suns is thus a triumph for me. The two novellas that together comprise half the book are different not only in style but in construction, yet still compliment each other in their outlook. Balancing them are two novelettes, one loud, one quiet, which are framed by a handful of short stories. This book, for me, was an ambitious one, and explores the full range of my weirdest work.

Writers often talk about how important it is to continue learning as time passes, and I’ve always assumed that meant no one’s prose is perfect, and that a writer must continuously sharpen and improve his or her use of language and style. Though I still believe that’s true, what I also suspect is meant is that a writer must continue to learn about him- or herself. Learn where the lines of his or her abilities are carved in stone, and where they’re drawn in dust. Where the demons are that can be called upon to dance and inform or inspire the work. Even after a quarter of my life behind the pen, I’ve learned that as terrifying as it may be to push into new realms and test myself, the results of striving for more are always worth the pain.

Simon Strantzas: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Burnt Black Suns: Amazon / Hippocampus Press

Simon Strantzas is the author of Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), and Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), as well as the editor of Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013). His writing has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is author Michael Martineck, whose latest novel is The Milkman. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In Edwin McCallum’s world, nations are no more. The world’s assets are divided among three companies. When one of those assets is murdered, it’s McCallum’s job to figure out what it means to the bottom line. The bottom line’s on filmmaker Sylvia Cho’s mind, too. Who’s footing the bill for this documentary? And who’s the subject, this so-called ‘Milkman’? Systems engineer Emory Leveski knows and it looks like it might cost him his life.

With no governments, there is no crime. Any act is measured against competing interests, hidden loyalties and the ever-upward pressure of the corporate ladder. It’s a tough place for those who still believe in right and wrong. And for these three, it just got a lot tougher.

When Michael told me what he wanted to write about for this feature — man-on-man sexual violence — I was skeptical. Unfortunately, rape, regardless of the genders involved, is a topic that is rarely treated sensitively in horror fiction. More often than not, it comes across as exploitation, titillation, or a joke. Kudos to Michael, then, for handling this subject matter responsibly and respectfully. And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Michael Martineck:

Exhilaration in writing comes when a story takes off on its own. I love when the characters come alive and steer the plot, seemingly without me. In these moments I don’t write so much as watch and record. The result is a natural, flowing story. It is wonderful…until things go wrong.

The Milkman is set in a post-government world. I aimed to write a science fiction novel in which economics was the science being fictionalized. I wanted to see how the world might function relieved of state shackles. Sovereignties are the great counterweights in our economies. Without them we are free. Free from everything.

I don’t think we want to be free of everything, though. As with oxygen, humans require just the right amount of freedom to function properly. Too little and we have no lives, too much and, well, we go nuts. Social structures are our defense against cheating, stealing, assault, and sexual violence.

For some it is easy to forget that rape is not a sexual act. It is cruel anger, and most often an act of control, forcing submission. Most of the victims of this horrendous crime are women, and many writers and filmmakers use it as a shortcut to show a character is a “bad guy”. It so frequently objectifies women, stands in place of character, and proves to be lazy writing.

The Milkman includes a group of incarcerated men with little supervision. They develop heir own, violent micro-society. Rape kept making its ugly, ugly existence felt. I thought and fought its inclusion. The rape of men in fiction — when it shows up at all — is used as a way to remove a male character’s masculinity. It is a symbolic method of making him a woman — as if that’s something less than a man.

And so my struggle: to let the darkest parts of my imagination loose on my main character. To share the story of his victimization, avoiding the hackneyed and the misogynistic, and reveal a vital, heroic character. Can I show that a man — that anyone — is no less for having the crime of rape committed upon their person?

It started as a book about economics. Of course, economics is another topic so easily misunderstood. It is not the study of money or finance. It is human nature interacting with human nature. We all exchange through markets, formal and not so much. We all try to better ourselves, our positions and our stations in life. We want to get ahead. Dominate, if necessary. For some of us that might mean physical domination in the worst of ways.

The characters of The Milkman put their various motivations into play in a society in which only the laws of economics (and physics, of course) apply. And while many of the paths are conventional — the struggle for love, happiness, success — some of the techniques the characters used to achieve these results put me ill at ease, left me uncomfortable — freakin’ chilled me along my spine because, no matter how much it felt like my characters were real, all the nastiness still came out of my head and were my responsibility.

Not that it’s all misery. We, the people, can also be great batteries of compassion, endurance and heroism. While writing The Milkman, I never forgot that either. Humans make things work, regardless of how bad the backdrop. Which brings me to what may be the scariest concept in the book: a world in which only the bottom line matters is not that different from our own. My story took off, flew through a dystopia weird and wholly imagined, and landed in a place all too familiar. Frightening.

Michael Martineck: Website / Twitter

The Milkman: Amazon

Michael Martineck has been writing in some form or another since he was seven years old. More recently, he has written short stories, comic book scripts, articles and a trio of novels. DC Comics published some of his work in the ’90s. Planetmag, Aphelion and a couple of other long-dead e-zines helped him out in ’00s, which is also when he published children’s books The Misspellers and The Wrong Channel. Cinco de Mayo, a novel for adults, is now out from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, which is also the publisher of The Milkman. He lives in Grand Island, NY with his wife and two children.

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, check out the guidelines here.)

My guest is Scottish author Chris Kelso, whose latest novel is The Black Dog Eats the City. Here’s the publisher’s description:

You just can’t win.

You feel it before you see it, The Black Dog – the Cimmerian demon with baleful breath, diminishing the light wherever it tracks…

…the size of a large calf, its footfalls are silent – the portents of death hidden behind caliginous evil.

It squeezes into the soul. You know it because he scrunches your stomach into a tight paper-ball and forces it out through your anus.

Then you’re a goner…

You just can’t win.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Chris Kelso (heads up, this one’s got some NSFW language):

The scariest part of my latest novel, The Black Dog Eats the City hasn’t got so much to do with specific scenes or content, but more to do with my chosen theme in general.

That’s not to say there aren’t some pretty grotesque things in here mind you — I mean the opening scene is of a sexually perverse backstreet dentist removing a young girl’s teeth in a stock room. There’s also a lot of gratuitous sex, violence, rape, incest and whatnot littered throughout, so, please, bear with me!

If I’m being honest about things, the part of this book that really set my teeth on edge and had my toes curling into the bases of my feet actually occurred after the book was accepted for publication. The Black Dog Eats the City is about manic depression. Heck, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before in literature and some writers have been fairly successful running with it.

Granted the other books I’ve had out before this have all been equally repulsive, offensive, utterly abhorrent works of fiction, but this particular book had a lot of ME in it. It’s the first time I’d tried to capture a moment in time, stuck in the heart of a psychological nightmare. If I wanted to probe the subject and come out with an authentic extrapolation, to me that meant — no happy endings, no redeemable characters, very limited humour, loads of cut-ups and non-sequiturs thrown in to piss people off, the lateral insertion of confusing, irrelevant nonsense then place all that in a thermodynamically unstable universe.

That was how I went about it anyway. It was my way of communicating the black dog.

If you’ve suffered at the hands of mental illness then you’ll know how difficult it can be even just talking about it. So, yeah, it couldn’t sound more pretentious, but the thought of other people reading this scared me a lot. You might even say it’s the book I’ve worried about the most.

I should mention that I think Kate at Omnium Gatherum took a real risk putting this out and for her faith in The Black Dog Eats the City. I’m eternally grateful. It can’t be an easy thing to try and market, especially when it’s as dark and uncathartic as this book!

It might even also be, maybe, a little irresponsible of me to try to bottle the awful, poisonous feelings that accompany depression. Depression is an ugly motherfucker and, I mean, who the hell wants to read about that kind of agony all day?  No likable characters? Cut-ups and other crazy shit that make reading a challenging and cerebral experience instead of a straight up enjoyable one? Even I’d think twice about picking up something so inaccessible (well, not really). I was also terrified people would see all this non-linear content and not realise the insanity was my metaphor for depression, and that they would become frustrated by it. What if I hadn’t properly articulated my point? I’d be exposed as a fraud, as an irresponsible poser, as a pretentious wee cunt…

Now, I might very well be all those things, but I didn’t want YOU guys to know that about me! But it’s out there and my biggest fears have yet to be realised. People have been nice about it, people seem to get what I was going for. I won’t get comfortable yet. There’s still time….

Chris Kelso: Website / Twitter

The Black Dog Eats the City: Amazon / Goodreads giveaway (ends May 10)

Chris Kelso is a writer, illustrator and editor. His books in addition to The Black Dog Eats the City include: Schadenfreude (Dog Horn Publishing), Last Exit to Interzone (Black Dharma Press), A Message from the Slave State (Western Legends Books), Moosejaw Frontier (Bizarro Pulp Press),Transmatic (MorbidbookS) . He recently edited Caledonia Dreamin’ – Strange Fiction of Scottish Descent with Hal Duncan and is the co-creator of the anti-New Yorker, Imperial Youth Review.