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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 Karen Heuler, a New York City-based author whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing socially for a while now. She’s the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Inner City, which was published by ChiZine Publications, the same award-winning outfit that published my novella Chasing the Dragon. (Coincidentally, Karen and I and fellow ChiZine Publications author Chandler Klang Smith are doing a reading together this Sunday, May 4th, in New York City. Details are here. Come see us!) Karen’s latest book is the novel Glorious Plague. Here’s the description:

When a virus leaps the species barrier, people start singing and climbing to the rooftops, to the bridges, to lamp post and road sign, steeple and water tower, singing gloriously, triumphantly, tirelessly—and dying. When it’s all over, Manhattan has to rebuild a new society, and it seems to be having a lot of help in the form of angels, gods, and walking myths. What’s real? And does it really matter? It does to Dale, searching for her missing daughter, and to Omar, an entomologist searching for the cure, if there is one, with little interest from those in the grip of the new order.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Karen Heuler:

Something caught my eye a while ago about a virus that hits insects and causes them to crawl to the top of the plant. Whatever eats the bug is a link in passing the virus along. Perhaps you’ve seen dead and dangling caterpillars hanging from branches, dark and liquid? That’s the virus.

What if it struck people? Of course these things don’t cross species barriers, of course not. That would be horrible. But if it did and people were forced to climb to the highest point (and how odd that a virus would have exactly this effect on the brain)… and at the same time sang … because heights and singing somehow came together for me… and as the virus struck you were overwhelmed with beauty, with glory, looking for the song that moved you to go higher and higher…

It fascinated me. I had these people on rooftops, lampposts, highway signs, in the crevices of the Palisades and on the struts of bridges. They sang from fire escapes, from tree tops, from construction cranes.

At the end, the survivors have to go on living, and none of them really understand that they’ve changed in ways they no longer notice. There’s a blurring between the real and the stories they’ve heard all their lives. Fairy tales and gods walk Manhattan’s streets even as people see an opportunity to be whatever they want to be, now that the social structure is broken.

But wait. By then I’ve killed millions of people, for the sake of a story.

That may not be scary to you, but it stuns me. When did I become the kind of writer who routinely killed so many people? It takes months, years to write a book—and for all that time the thing I thought about was killing them?

How far I’ve come. How far I’ve fallen.

I’ve been writing for a long time. And for many years, I never killed a character. I don’t think any of them died naturally, either. They could talk about death, think about death, but I liked them too much to kill them.

And then, oh a few decades back, I did start killing them. They died from car accidents, from heart attacks, from cancer or rare disease. I had one story where the author killed off a problematic character out of jealousy. It was a meta-kill.

And each time I killed, it got easier. I often found myself thinking, Would this story be better if someone died? Should I show restraint and only kill one? Which one? And how?

For years I didn’t notice how often I killed people. It was a device, a skill, a literary tool. Tolstoy killed people, Dostoyevsky killed people, I believe Jane Austen did as well, so there was a respectable precedent. Kafka did it; Poe did it; I was an aging English major and I would do it too.

That’s the thing about killing characters: once you start doing it you merely try to find a better way of doing it. You don’t stop. You refine. Apparently I’m the kind of writer who kills without hesitation, and without regret. I will kill again.

But I’m not the kind of writer who lingers lovingly on the kill, who smells the blood and touches the wound.

Bravo for me.

I don’t do death porn.

At least, not yet.

Karen Heuler: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Glorious Plague: Amazon

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 70 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Clarkesworld to Daily Science Fiction to Weird Tales. Her last book, a short-story collection called The Inner City, made Publishers Weekly’s “Best Books of 2013” list. Her latest book, Glorious Plague, has just been released by Permuted Press. She has received an O. Henry award, been shortlisted for a Pushcart prize, for the Iowa short fiction award, the Bellwether award, and the Shirley Jackson award for short 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. (Remember, if you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, check out the guidelines here.)

I’ve known this week’s featured author for more years than I care to say. I was a big proponent of his first novel, the Lovecraft-meets-Kerouac road trip Move Under Ground. His latest novel, The Last Weekend, has just been released by PS Publishing. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Meet Vasilis “Billy” Kostopolos: Bay Area Rust Belt refugee, failed sci-fi writer, successful barfly and, since an exceptionally American zombie apocalypse, accomplished “driller” of reanimated corpses. Now that all the sane, well-adjusted human beings are hunted to extinction, he’s found his vocation trepanning zombies, peddling his one and only published short story and drinking himself to death — that is, until both his girlfriends turn out to be homicidal revolutionaries, he collides with a gang of Berkeley scientists gone berserker, the long-awaited “Big One” finally strikes San Francisco, and what’s left of local government can no longer hide the awful secret lurking deep in the basement of City Hall. Can Bill unearth the truth about America’s demise and San Francisco’s survival — and will he destroy what little’s left of it in the process? Is he legend, the last man, or just another sucker on the vine? Nick Mamatas’ The Last Weekend takes a high-powered drill to the lurching, groaning conventions of zombie dystopias and conspiracy thrillers, sparing no cliché about tortured artists, alcoholic “genius,” noir action heroes, survivalist dogma, or starry-eyed California dreaming. Starting in booze-soaked but very clear-eyed cynicism and ending in gloriously uncozy catastrophe, this tale of a man and his city’s last living days is merciless, uncomfortably perceptive, and bleakly hilarious.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Nick Mamatas (warning: contains, um, adult language):

Asking a writer about the scariest part of their book is like asking a stage magician what the most magical part of his or her act is. The magician already knows the trick to sawing a lady in half—really, the lady’s flexibility is what makes the trick. The magician is just a bit of spectacle and handwaving, really.

There are antecedents to this. Kafka thought he was writing humorous short stories, and was reportedly bemused to hear that his friends thought his work to be grotesque and unsettling. (And Kafka’s work does have a subtle humor about it. “Because I couldn’t find the food that I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else,” the Hunger Artist explained, as he finally starved to death.) Some of the best writers hardly have any idea of what they’re writing.

I’ve rarely called my work horror, except for commercial—ha-ha!, there I go being funny again—reasons. I don’t terrify myself writing this stuff, or worry (or exult!) when I think of something that’s transgressive or taboo and put it in a story. Even when I’m writing a zombie novel.

The Last Weekend was a hard sell. Apparently zombie novels are so popular that nobody buys them anymore. My zombies weren’t even different; they’re slow, shambling Romero types. The real difference between The Last Weekend and the other ninety zombie novels being published every month is that it is not secretly about reveling in killing marginalized minorities focused on the sort of people who don’t normally get themselves involved in apocalypses: bohemians, drunks, and loners.

Every zombie fan knows that the heroes really get into trouble when a loved one becomes a zombie. No loved ones, no problem. In the book, protagonist Vasilis “Billy” Kostopolous calls the effect “anti-social Darwinism.” All that’s left in San Francisco, a town with lots of hills and almost no graveyards, are the awkward and isolated. The gung-ho heroes and the loving families were the first to die. Yay!

To write about marginalized characters requires being a bit marginalized. A couple of years ago, before the book was sold, I read part of it at the Science Fiction in San Francisco reading series. Billy has gotten a job with what’s left of the city government as a “driller.” If you have a relative who is about to die, you call 911 and a driller will be right over to put a hole in Uncle Ted’s head before he zombifies. In this scene, Billy was a little late to the gig and had to actually destroy the zombie-wife of the man who made the call. It didn’t go well:

“Okay,” I said, but the man, on his knees now, didn’t answer. I wiped my hand on some old magazine, but the paper flaked off and stuck to my palm in clumps. “Well, okay,” I said again. He started weeping. “WHAT?” I finally demanded. “What did you expect to actually happen here? I blow some air up her cunt and she comes back to life? Slice open the cuts, find her heart, and put it in a store window mannequin? Jesus Christ, you make me sick.” There was something in my hair; it felt like when I was a child and my father would shout “Eat it or wear it!” and turn a bowl full of pasta with the wrong brand of sauce upside-down on top of me.

During the reading, I didn’t notice any audience reaction. Afterward, I got an earful. Did you know that “cunt” is a bad word? Bad enough that members of a San Francisco crowd gasped when they heard it, and someone muttered into her cellphone about it during intermission. Nick said cunt! I was completely surprised. Bad words, coming out of the mouth of a first-person narrator in dialogue, upsets people? Upsets modern people who do things like go to literary events? Couldn’t Billy have just said “Blow some air into her lungs” like a good boy? No, of course not. I never even thought of something like that, and though I had a couple of years to change the line before the book was finally published, never even thought to do so. Actually, I just recalled the incident when Nick Kaufmann asked me to write about the scariest part of my book for his website. (PS: buy Nick Kaufmann’s novels. I’m writing this to lure you here. Just click on something!) Let’s all march in place and chant, “Cunt, cunt cunt!”

Anyway, the whole cunt thing was momentary, and small as far as these things go, but still interesting. Kill a few hundred million people in prose just to set the scene, have a bit of close-up physical and emotional torture of characters to get the story rolling, and what really upsets some readers is a degenerate anti-hero saying a bad word in the middle of a bad situation. The scariest part? Who knows? The last time I saw a magic act the friend who was with me couldn’t stop talking about the wig the magician’s assistant was wearing.

Nick Mamatas: Blog / Twitter

The Last Weekend: Amazon / PS Publishing

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Best American Mystery Stories, and many other magazines and anthologies. As editor of the Haikasoru imprint of Japanese science fiction in translation, he is at least partially responsible for any number of books, including the essay anthology The Battle Royale Slam Book (co-edited with Masumi Washington) and All You Need Is KILL: The Official Graphic Novel Adaptation, based on the book by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and with art by Lee Ferguson.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Scariest Part, a new, 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. I’m thrilled to have James Maddox and Jen Hickman as my first guests. Together, they’re the creators behind the ongoing digital comic The Dead. Currently, they’re also running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a graphic novel print version of the comic. Here’s a description of the series:

When Sam opens his eyes after dying, he expects to see heavenly clouds or hellfire. What he’s faced with instead is “The House” – a surreal and often-dangerous afterlife of interconnected rooms. As Sam travels deeper into this new world, he finds the strange creators of these rooms aren’t the only residents of The House. Here there be monsters, and if he isn’t careful, Sam’s stay will take a horrible turn.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest parts were for James Maddox and Jen Hickman.

James Maddox, Story and Writing

The Dead is the story of what happens after you die. And before you ask, it’s not a zombie comic. Rather, our story drops readers into an afterlife made up of rooms that are customized by its individual residents. These rooms have the ability to encompass the entirety of any imagination, so as you may have guessed, the settings for this book can get dark and surreal at times. Some of the horror concepts that emerge in The Dead are graphic in their violence, but the scariest parts for me are more subtle and cerebral than simple gore.

In issue two, I decided to show these two particular approaches side-by-side (i.e. human versus natural horror). Here we find a gang of zealots, the Seraphim, who have banded together to kill one of our main characters, Velouria. Though V and her hatchet bloody the ground with viscera and gore at the beginning of the scene, the advantage quickly turns against her. Soon the strength of the Seraphim’s numbers overcome Velouria and the gang of bastards prepare to deliver her to a gruesome and painful death.

Just before the violence against Velouria kicks into high gear, a monster to which I allude in issue one is finally revealed. Called “the Frail”, it takes the ghostly appearance of a beautiful and gentle woman. In our story, the Frail are creatures that look inviting, but cause mental instability in the nearby population. In this example, the Seraphim begin to attack each other and themselves, allowing for Velouria’s escape from danger. One man tears out his eyes, while another is stabbed through his stomach, a victim of a crazed ally. While at first glance this may seem to be supernatural as opposed to natural, there is no real reason for the Frail’s effects. They are a natural and elemental force in this world.

Unlike a human act of violence, the Frail doesn’t cause horror because it hates or covets. As the scene unfolds, we don’t see her become angered or upset. In fact, she seems concerned for the people who are tearing each other apart thanks to her presence. It’s like a tornado: from a distance it is awe-inspiring and beautiful in its enormity; but, up close a tornado is one of the most horrific and terrifying things you could experience. And whether you are a bystander seeing it from a mile away or unfortunate enough to find yourself in the thick of its fury, the tornado doesn’t care in the slightest.

Violence inflicted on one person by another who holds different beliefs is something we can understand on some level. Wars are fought over differences in belief and (mis)understandings. Even if our understanding is that something is sick and demented, it’s still able to be put it into a framework most of us can fathom. Because I am able to wrap my mind around it, this approach to horror is made more real and visceral, but has less of an overall hold on my imagination.

Perhaps this is why I tend to lean more toward the natural force when I read horror and why the Frail are the scariest part of my own work. I get people’s reasons for violence, as dark and disturbing as they may be, but a force such as the Frail (or a tornado, or a sandworm, or a werewolf, or an earthquake,) can’t ever have reasons that can be understood by a human mind. It is the human mind that fills in the blank spots, and with our speculation we make these things more frightening. Is there anything more terrifying than the stories and details that swell in our minds to explain the things bigger and more strange than us? For me, there’s nothing scarier.

Jen Hickman, Illustrations and Colors

For me, fear in storytelling arrives at the moment when we remember just how vulnerable a character (and by proxy we ourselves) is. It’s that moment before anything happens, when your protagonist is standing in his PJs while a lumbering monstrosity chases after him, when all you can think is, “Oh god! He’s just a pile of delicate biological systems that almost anything could destroy!”

In The Dead our protagonist runs into a bunch of these situations, teetering on the edge of safety and danger. What’s fun about the story is that James doesn’t stick with just one type of peril– there’s a little bit of everything. Fear of heights, ineffable Frail, beastly Wretched, backstabbing, and good old-fashioned well-armed zealots. For me, the scariest part is that there are many, many opportunities to remember just how easy it is to die.

The Dead: Website / ComiXology / Amazon / Kickstarter (As of this writing, there are only 9 days left to support their project, so if you’re interested, hop to it!)

James Maddox
After completing titles like the critically acclaimed The Horror Show and Nightmare Unknown, Maddox has continued his comic career with stories like The Dead, Clown, and the wildly anticipated Blue Nemesis. A versatile and prolific writer/creator, Maddox has only just begun to find and impress his audience. He can be found online at jamesmaddox.net and on Twitter as @jamescmaddox.

Jen Hickman
Jen Hickman is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Sequential Art program. Her credits in the comic industry include the successfully crowdfunded publications The Playlist Anthology and the digital sketchbook Tip Jar. She can be found online at umicorms.com and @umicorms.

Remember, if you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, you can read the guidelines here.

In the tradition of John Scalzi’s “The Big Idea,” Mary Robinette Kowal’s “My Favorite Bit,” and Chuck Wendig’s “Five Things I Learned,” and with their blessings and advice, I am very excited to announce that I will be starting a recurring, guest-written feature right here on my own blog: “The Scariest Part”! The first guest blog post should be appearing this week.

The guidelines are below and can also be found on this permanent page of my website: The Scariest Part. As of today, I am open to queries. Please read the guidelines very carefully before querying. Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you!

What is “The Scariest Part,” anyway?

The Scariest Part is a recurring guest blog feature in which authors, filmmakers, comic book writers, and game creators discuss the scariest parts of their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. The definition of “scariest part” is actually pretty flexible. It can be the scene that gave them the most chills, or some personal threshold they had to cross during the creative process. The goal is to help promote these new works to a wide audience of people interested in all things scary. A new guest blog will appear every week, give or take.

Hey, I write stuff and/or make movies! How can I be one of your guest bloggers?

Glad you asked! Anywhere from two months to one month before the official release date of your new work, send me an email at nick.kaufmann@gmail.com, with the subject line: “THE SCARIEST PART QUERY: [Your Name] [The Title] [Release Date].” (Please note: If your comic is monthly or otherwise ongoing, you can query me at any time.) In the body of the email, please give me a brief description of what you’re promoting. I’ll try to get back to you within a week to let you know if there’s space available. If you don’t hear from me after two weeks, feel free to check in with me to make sure I received your query. If I give you the thumbs up, I’ll assign you a run date for your blog post.

Just a heads up: Traditionally published books are more likely to get a slot than self-published books. That’s just the way I roll. Sending me angry emails about it won’t change my mind. Showing me you respect my guidelines might.

Do I also have to send you a copy of the book/comic/film/game?

Not unless I ask, but thanks for offering.

Hooray, you’ve given me a slot! Now what do you need from me?

Send me a short essay (as a Word file or equivalent, not in the body of an email) about the scariest part of your new work. By short, I mean in the 400- to 1,000-word range, roughly. Remember, you get to decide what “scariest part” actually means. Is it a scene that made you look over your shoulder even as you were writing it? Is it something so grotesque you were surprised that your own imagination came up with it? Is it a bit of real-world research you did that made you wonder how something so awful or strange could have happened? Is it confronting something difficult in your own life in order to better write about it? Consider this an opportunity to tell your audience what freaks you out, gets under your skin, or just gives you that indefinable frisson that all good scares provide.

Be sure to include a short bio. About 150-200 words should do. Also be sure to add any links you’d like to include, such as links to your website, your social media, and where to purchase the work.

In addition to your essay, I will need an image file of your book or comic cover, movie poster, or game box art. It doesn’t necessarily have to be high resolution, but the better the quality, the better it’ll look online.

Your deadline is one week before the scheduled run date. I’m flexible about deadlines, but please do not send anything earlier than that. Send your essay and your image file together to nick.kaufmann@gmail.com, with the subject line “THE SCARIEST PART ENTRY: [Your Name] [The Title] [Scheduled Blog Date].”

What’s with all the fancy-schmancy subject lines you’re asking for? Control-freak much?

Hey, I get a lot of email and I don’t want your queries or posts to get lost in the shuffle. Sue me.

Is there anything else I need to know?

Yes, two things, and they’re both important, so pay attention.

First, respectfully, I don’t have time to be your copyeditor or personal spell check. When you hand in your blog post, be sure it’s as free of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors as possible. Remember, you’re trying to entice your audience into purchasing the work you’re promoting. Take the time to put your best foot forward.

Second, I reserve the right to reject your blog post or ask for edits if it includes something I find offensive. I’m not easily offended, so I don’t expect this to happen often. However, I don’t take kindly to homophobia, sexism, racism, or any other kind of bigotry. If there’s something in your blog post that swims in those waters, you can expect to hear from me.

Okay. Anything else?

That’s it! Have fun with it!