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This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Carrie Laben. I’ve known Carrie for many years now, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to watch her writing career flourish. Now her long-awaited debut novel has finally arrived, titled A Hawk in the Woods. Here is the publisher’s description:

When newscaster Abby Waite is diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness, she decides to do the logical thing…break her twin sister Martha out of prison and hit the road. Their destination is the Waite family cabin in Minnesota where Abby plans a family reunion of sorts. But when you come from a family where your grandfather frequently took control of your body during your youth, where your mother tried to inhabit your mind and suck your youthful energies out of you, and where so many dark secrets — and bodies, even — are buried, such a family meeting promises to be nothing short of complicated…

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Carrie Laben:

A Hawk in the Woods deals with many sorts of primal fears — everything from terminal illness to body theft and mind control to running from the law to deep-rooted betrayals by the people who should be our closest allies. There are also two separate gun fights, an oil tanker explosion, a car crash, and a mortal threat to an adorable Labrador Retriever.

The most frightening scene to write wasn’t any of those.

It also wasn’t the scene with the necromancy, or the one where the protagonists are arrested by a bad cop from a backwater jurisdiction, or the one where the titular hawk nearly scalps one of the main characters.

The scene that shook me while I was writing it takes place in an elementary school classroom, and if you were observing the characters from the outside nothing particularly dramatic happens. A teacher takes a dislike to the main character, Abby, and her twin sister Martha. After a classmate dies, she finally gives full vent to this dislike — first by confiscating the plastic beaded bracelet that Abby can’t help fidgeting with, and then by making her lead the class in prayer. Both of these actions seem minor, and if the teacher were defending herself she could easily make them sound reasonable in context — but their impact is maximum cruelty to someone who can’t fight back.

Quiet as it is, this scene functions as a hinge in the novel. Abby and Martha’s grandfather’s magic is what killed the other child, so in a way they are implicated — but they’re also innocent. The teacher’s aggressive actions intensifies the preexisting wedge between the twins and the other children. The teacher, in her role as an authority, chooses to play up the difference between Abby and her family and everyone else in the community — a difference Abby already recognizes, but in a different world might have overcome.

While I was writing this scene I found myself on the edge of tears several times. I’ve never experienced anything directly parallel, but I chose to draw from a teacher of my own who was convinced that I was cheating when I wasn’t. That sensation of being inescapably labelled, humiliated, and dismissed in front of an audience — and of being in the hands of an irrational authority with no recourse — was what I really wanted to capture.

I’ve never been in a gunfight, or an oil tanker explosion, or at a necromantic rite. But I’ve been a child and felt powerless while an adult — a teacher, who I was supposed to admire and respect — looked at me and categorized me and punished me based on that categorization. And that feeling obviously stuck with me. When I was labelled, I knew it was unfair but I also knew that protesting or arguing would do no good. This is what Abby senses as well. She’s in a no-win situation. She is powerless, and the powerlessness is terrifying.

But the momentary sense of powerlessness, while awful, isn’t the scariest part of this scariest part. Instead, it’s what happens after. For me, I had many other sources of validation — parents, other teachers, and a few friends who believed in me, hobbies and activities in which I could thrive, a life well beyond this one snap judgement (including growing up and writing a book! With names changed to protect the innocent, of course.) What Abby has, just about all she has, is a family history of dark magic — magic she won’t hesitate to use in self-defense, and continue to use down the years against a community that made her an outsider.

A Hawk in the Woods: Word Horde / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Carrie Laben: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Carrie Laben is the author of the novel A Hawk in the Woods, published March 26, 2019 by Word Horde. Her work has also appeared in such venues as Apex, Birding, The Dark, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, Okey-Panky, and Outlook Springs, as well as many anthologies. In 2017 she won the Shirley Jackson Award in Short Fiction for her story “Postcards from Natalie” and Duke University’s Documentary Essay Prize for the essay “The Wrong Place”. She has been a MacDowell Fellow and a resident at the Anne LaBastille Memorial Residency and Brush Creek. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and now resides in Queens, where she spends a lot of time looking at birds.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Ellen Butler, whose new novel is Fatal Legislation. Here is the publisher’s description:

Lawmaking can be a murderous affair.

If any day calls for a soothing glass of wine, it’s today.

One moment, Capitol Hill lobbyist Karina Cardinal is having a heated discussion with Senator Harper, who just torpedoed her latest health care legislation initiative. The next, after a cryptic remark, the senator is dead at her feet. Hours later, she’s still so rattled she wakes to a freezing apartment because she forgot to close her back door. Or did she?

When her boyfriend, FBI cybercrimes expert Mike Finnegan, is suddenly reassigned to work a new case, he’s got bad news and worse news. The bad: the senator’s death was no heart attack — it was assassination by a hacker disabling his pacemaker. Worse: Karina’s a “person of interest.”

Certain that status could change to “suspect” at any moment, Karina begins her own back-channel investigation into who could have wanted the senator dead. Of course, in Washington, that means playing politics and following the money trail. A trail that leads to more murders…and possibly leaving the door open for a killer to change her status to “dead.”

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Ellen Butler:

Often when we think of scary things — especially when we’re talking mystery/thrillers — we expect serial killers that gruesomely torture their victims, or a psycho who kidnaps a child, or a radical religious faction getting ahold of a weapon of mass destruction that threatens the lives of millions. Well, in Fatal Legislation, the scariest part is much sneakier and more sinister due to manner in which it subtly affects not only the victims in the book, but also the way in which it can affect every American who is electronically plugged in to society. Spoiler Alert: Fatal Legislation begins with the death of a senator. We soon find out that what seems like your run-of-the-mill heart attack is, instead, a targeted murder, using the senator’s own pacemaker to kill him. Yes, you read correctly, someone hacks the senator’s pacemaker and speeds it up so fast the blood can’t pump properly through his body, and boom — dead senator.

Science fiction! You might cry. If only that were true. The idea to kill off someone in this manner for one of my Karina Cardinal Mysteries came from a recall ad that ran on television the summer of 2016. That wasn’t the first or last recall notice for pacemakers. According to CNET, in May of 2018, “Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical) is recalling some 350,000 implantable defibrillators to help protect patients from any spy-movie style assassination attempts or other issues.”I reached out to a cybersecurity specialist to find out more about this phenomenon, and the answer I got was very unsettling. He basically said, “Anything with firmware can be hacked.” To counteract this, Abbott and other companies with pacemakers vulnerable to hacks have created firmware updates to forestall such a hack. Unfortunately, the fix is only good until another hacker finds a different weakness.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “I don’t have a pacemaker, so I’m safe.” Maybe you’re right. However, you might be vulnerable in a different manner — one that affects your right to privacy. Do you have a smart phone? Smart TV, smart refrigerator, maybe a smart HVAC system with a temperature that can be adjusted from afar. One of these items in your house may already have been hacked and been used for a nefarious purpose without your knowledge. Here’s a “for instance” that was explained to me, and the reason I’m not allowed to hook our smart appliances up to our wi-fi. Hackers that attack important systems and high visibility websites — such as government or financial institutions — will do something in the biz called D-DoS or a denial of service attack. Basically, making the site unavailable to users temporarily or indefinitely. In order to do this, a hacker will flood the intended victim’s server with a ridiculous amount of incoming traffic so legitimate users can’t get in. A hacker may have hacked your smart TV, or dishwasher, and is utilizing it to help with this D-DoS attack. . . and you’d never know it. These smart appliances are particularly vulnerable, because most manufacturers don’t continually renew the patches to keep out these types of hacks. If you have a computer or phone, you’ll notice the apps and software are being constantly updated. Not so with your fancy new air-conditioner.

Here’s another example of the insidious every day intrusion into your life. Perhaps you’re best friends with SIRI or an Alexa. Have you noticed that after talking about going on a trip to Bermuda with your friend, you suddenly start noticing ads for Bermuda hotels and travel packages popping up in your Facebook feed or Google search. Even better, did you hear about the couple in Oregon, who were debating which hardwood floors to put into their home? According to The Washington Post, the couple’s Amazon Echo recorded their private conversation and sent it to a person in their contacts list in Seattle. Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a staff technologist for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said that the intuitive nature of connected devices can mask their complexity and the possibility of malfunction. “The Amazon Echo, despite being small, is a computer — it’s a computer with microphones, speakers, and it’s connected to the network,” he said. “These are potential surveillance devices, and we have invited them further and further into our lives without examining how that could go wrong.”

We have welcomed these devices into our homes, purses and pockets. Yet, by doing so, we have made ourselves more vulnerable to cyber attacks and surveillance. The question is no longer if you’ll be hacked, it’s when. And what the fall out will be when you are.

Fatal Legislation: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / iBooks

Ellen Butler: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Goodreads

Ellen Butler is a bestselling author writing critically acclaimed suspense and award-winning historical fiction. Her experiences working at a medical association in Washington, D.C. inspired the Karina Cardinal series. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and the Office of Strategic Services Society.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Eliot Parker, whose new novel is A Knife’s Edge. Here is the publisher’s description:

Six months after a drug cartel infiltrated Charleston, Ronan McCullough continues to fight the drug war that plagues the city. His investigations are halted when the body of a mutual acquaintance, Sarah Gilmore, is found in the trunk of a burning car. In an investigation that takes him deep into the professional and personal life of the victim, McCullough discovers secrets lurking in her past, and a tangled web of personal and professional conflicts, suspicion, and betrayal. Was Sarah killed for those reasons or something larger? As Ronan seeks answers, his life and the lives of those closest to him are used as pawns in a deadly game that has no ending.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Eliot Parker:

There are several parts of my book that are scary. One scary component of the novel is the sheer level of violence that occurs, at times, in the book. The violence is not present by happenstance because it is necessary to move the plot of the story forward. For example, in the book, Ronan and the police are trying to manage a crime wave and increased drug activity that is plaguing Charleston, West Virginia.  Ronan gets pulled away from that work when the body of a mutual acquaintance, Sarah Gilmore, is found butchered in the back of a burning car. The investigation takes him deep into the personal and professional life of the victim. Ronan discovers some secrets in Sarah’s past and also discovers a tangled web of personal and professional relationship contacts. Ronan has to determine if those conflicts lead to her death or was it something larger, and Ronan gets some answers, and puts himself and his family into harms way. As I got into the story and got to know my characters on a deeper level, I realized that the only way Ronan McCullough was going to survive was to become more ruthless than his adversaries.

The work that Ronan does is dangerous work and the physical and emotional toll it takes on him in this book (like in the last book) is tremendous. Those feelings impact Ronan’s relationship with Ty and Nick (his nephew), who Ronan loves more than anything, but struggles to keep them away from his work and keep them safe as the story unfolds. Ronan and Ty have to hide their relationship so that Ronan is not ostracized as a member of the police department and that serves as another layer of conflict. There is a more dangerous, more deadly set of criminals that have moved into Charleston now as a result of what happened in Fragile Brilliance and as they ratchet up their lethal behavior, Ronan has to lift himself up to match the challenge. Ronan finds himself in this book having to fight “eye for an eye” in several moments in order to get the information and help he needs.

The scariest part of my book centers on the premise of the plot. A Knife’s Edge is a sequel to an earlier novel, Fragile Brilliance. One of the subplots in Fragile Brilliance involved Ty (Ronan’s boyfriend and an emergency room nurse) leading a fundraising team at Charleston Mercy Hospital. The hospital was trying to raise money for a new children’s cancer center. In this book, the money has been raised and the new wing has been built onto the back of the hospital. The hospital was able to complete the fundraising thanks to a donation from a new blood diagnostics company called BTech, who was promised a floor of lab space in the new hospital as a “thank you” for the donation. Also, due to a severe state budget crisis, the state of West Virginia no longer operates the state police crime lab in South Charleston, and instead has outsourced their blood analysis work for police investigations to BTech. I was at a bookstore a few years ago and I picked up a copy of Time Magazine. On the front cover was a woman named Elizabeth Holmes, whom the magazine had named as the most influential woman in the country. She founded a company called Theranos which created technology and equipment that could diagnose diseases, infections, illnesses, etc. in patients with just a drop of blood from the end of a finger. The idea was that hospitals and crime labs wouldn’t need all of this expensive equipment that has to be purchased and maintained. Instead, Theranos developed two machines that could do all the blood analysis work. Unfortunately, the company ended up being a fraud, but when I read the story, I started thinking, “What would happen if that type of technology made it into the wrong hands?” That’s when I decided to include it in my plot.

An emotionally “scary” part of the book for me as the writer was writing a sequel to a novel. This is the first time I have ever written a sequel. I think the scariest challenge when writing a sequel, for me, comes with characters. In the second book, you (as the writer) want to make sure that the characters remain true to themselves, but at the same time, you want them to grow and develop as the book progresses. That was a real challenge for me. However, it was so much fun spending time with all of these characters again.

A Knife’s Edge: Amazon

Eliot Parker: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Eliot Parker is the author of four thriller novels. His third novel, Code for Murder, was a finalist for Best Thriller Novel by American Book Fest in 2018. Eliot is a graduate of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. A recipient of the West Virginia Literary Merit Award and also a finalist for the Southern Book Prize in Thriller Writing, Eliot teaches writing and literature at Mountwest Community and Technical College.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Dino Parenti, whose debut collection is Dead Reckoning and Other Stories. Here is the publisher’s description:

An emotional sampler of life on Earth as it once was.

In this collection of sixteen dark, literary tales, disparate characters and their descendants twine and interconnect throughout America from the rural seventies to the post-apocalyptic, stitching together a nefarious mosaic of experiences.

Whether delving into the exploits of a murderous police officer and a lapsing priest engaged in a battle of wills in the sun-blasted dunes of Death Valley, or an anthropologist couple sorting their infertility issues after inadvertently unleashing an Ice Age killer plague, or a mysterious ferry in the Pacific Northwest holding the darkest secrets of a private eye’s final case, or a man so obsessed with touching the infinite that he eagerly volunteers for a one-way mission to preserve the final remnants of mankind, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories ultimately yields a kind of found almanac for human posterity.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Dino Parenti:

Many years ago I saw a news report about a rapid onset infection that mercilessly ate away at a man in Australia. It started as something seemingly benign — a minor nick from a farming implement as he dug a sluice canal from a stream to his crop patch. Within 72 hours, doctors had amputated both his legs in increments, and had started on his arms before he finally succumbed to full-body sepsis.

Years later, I read another similar account, this one in Canada about a woman, scratched by a squirrel she was hand feeding, who was likewise engaged in a race as to what would reduce flesh and bone from her body faster: infection, or the surgeon’s knife. This time I took note of the condition: necrotizing fasciitis.

It’s more common name is the flesh-eating bacteria, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t eat so much as quickly kills the soft tissue. And like a severe burn, the affected area needs to be either quickly treated or pared away before it starts to infect surrounding tissue, which it does at an alarming rate.

After the initial wave of horror and sympathy for these people overcame me, the writer within reared its head and began ticking off scenarios. How can this ghastly condition work itself into a story? Can this condition provide the ticking-time-bomb element in a narrative?

I’m not proud of my muse’s suspect timing, but all you writers out there know well of its fickle and often cold interventions.

The research of necrotizing fasciitis was, in a word (or two), bloody awful. The images of putrefying flesh and flaying skin have not left my mind, even four years since having written it. It was one of the most trying writing experiences of my life. I couldn’t help but imagine how I’d react to seeing these horrific things happening to my own body. But as shocking as it must be to watch pieces of you discolor, leak, shrivel, and blacken — only to then have a surgeon slice said piece from your body — I got to wondering about the psychological toll that must take on the victim. It happens so fast, is there even time to put it all in perspective in the way perhaps a longer-acting affliction like cancer might offer? To craft a coping mechanism to keep you from losing your mind over such a quick turnaround?

That became the challenge and thrust of my story, “Tooth,” contained in my collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories.

A college student named Clara, prideful of her looks and audacity, and freshly ensconced in a new relationship, is suddenly faced with having pieces of her quickly lopped from her head-to-toe. In the crafting of the story, it was soon made manifest that no intricate plot threads were required, no ticking-time-bombs or last minute recoveries as artifice. Rather, Clara’s challenge of dealing with her rapidly looming death became the thrust. The horror of resolving all your life’s fears and existential trials within a span of hours instead of decades, this as you’re being physically reduced in volume each day you still manage to remain alive. It became an obsession in a way, allowing myself to steep in the idea that this microscopic thing inside of you that few antibiotics in the world can tame is killing you through a kind of insidious, inside-out digestion. The thought suddenly reduced more grander external horrors — torture, burning alive, wild animal attack, plane crash, home invasion — to child’s play in comparison. Your own body failing you as the ultimate horror.

I now diligently wash out every little nick and cut before smothering it under a thick bead of Neosporin.

Dead Reckoning and Other Stories: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / IndieBound

Dino Parenti: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

Dino Parenti is a writer of dark literary and speculative fiction. He is the winner of the first annual Lascaux Reviewflash fiction contest and is featured in the Anthony Award-winning anthology Blood on the Bayou.  His work can be found in Pantheon Magazine, Menacing Hedge, Pithead Chapel, as well as other anthologies. He is a fiction editor at Gamut Magazineand a member of the HWA. His short-fiction collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories, was just released with Crystal Lake Publishing. When not purging his soul into a laptop thanks to a far-too-early exposure to Stephen King, Scorsese movies, and Camus, he can be found photographing the odd junk pile, building furniture, or earning a few bucks as a CAD drafter. He lives in Los Angeles.