Here we are, in the greatest month of all. My various skulls are up. My house ghost Margery is outside keeping watch. I drink my cold brew out of a skeletal hand wine goblet. The leaves are changing. The creepy doll videos are in abundance. It’s a beautiful thing, my friends. Beautiful.
And I get to share it with Bobby Mathews, who is here today to tell us all about his greatest and deepest fears. I’ve only met Bobby once, very recently at Bouchercon when I weirdly went over to him and said hello like we’ve been besties forever and gave him a hug and he was gracious and kind about it and didn’t call security. But he’s got that kind of persona, an infectious sort of energy that makes you feel like you’ve known him a lot longer or better than you actually have. He also, according to his bio, makes the best grilled cheese sandwich, which is clearly a lie, since my dad makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches, but whatever. We’ll let it slide this time.
Anyway, onward! Tell us, what scares the crap out of you, Bobby?
What is your greatest fear?
As the years pass, fear of failure has become much more prominent in my mind. That fear is sometimes nearly crippling. I have two little boys, one just starting middle school and one in elementary school. I worry whether I’m properly equipping them to make their way in the world, and I alternately fear that I’m being too hard on them or too easy on them. I fear failing them, even though I know that I will at some point. I fear overreacting to a given situation or underreacting to it. Parenting is such an easy thing to get wrong, and I think everyone leaves unintentional scars on their children. My hope is that I leave as few as possible.
What is the scariest thing you remember from childhood?
When I was five years old, my parents went to a drive-in movie theater playing The Exorcist. The movie originally came out in 1973, Google tells me, so this must have been some kind of revival or second run down in the Deep South because it was 1976 or early 1977 by the time my parents and I went. Maybe it was playing in support of the sequel, I’m not sure. Regardless, my parents thought that I was asleep in the backseat of the car, and maybe I was for a time. But I was awake and wide-eyed by the time Regan MacNeil’s demonic head spun all the way around on her body. I stayed quiet and low in the back seat, barely breathing, until the movie was over. Then once the credits began and I knew it was over, I laid back down and shut my eyes tight. I don’t think my parents ever knew that I’d woken up.
Is there any fear you’ve overcome in your life? How has that changed you?
I used to be scared of heights, but when I was 14 or so my dad got me hired on under-the-table for a summer as a general contractor’s helper. Part of the job was toting bundles of shingles up to the rooftop, hammering in 2 X 4 boards so the roofers had a place to put their feet so that they could maintain their balance and work. Sometimes I laid shingles myself. I hoisted shingles, kegs of nails, boards, equipment, and swung a roofing hammer on top of a lot of houses for the next two years. I learned that I needed to respect heights—because if you lose your concentration, something could go wrong—but going up and down those ladders every day of the week changed the way I viewed heights. As far as changing me, the thing it taught me was that sometimes you just gotta get on with things despite your fears.
How do you deal with fear?
I start by admitting I’m afraid, even if it’s only to myself. I think there’s a dangerous (one might say toxic) element in some masculinity that says that men shouldn’t show fear. I think understanding that you’re afraid—admitting it—is a healthy step in dealing with fear. As a fiction writer, I may lie to readers, but I try not to lie to myself. If I can admit to being afraid, I can think somewhat logically about what to do next in a given situation. I subscribe to the notion that I first heard espoused by Oprah Winfrey: “Real courage is being afraid but doing it anyway.” Part of my writing process is that I try to do something every month that scares me. Submit somewhere that might laugh me out of the slush pile, put together an anthology, give a talk, lead a seminar … whatever “it” is, I try to just be afraid and do it anyway.
“Going up and down those ladders every day of the week changed the way I viewed heights.”
Have you ever had any paranormal experiences or premonitions?
To borrow a phrase from a couple of friends of mine (Hi Paul and Kent!), I think the veil is thin sometimes. I also think that our hunches and feelings about certain places or things often hinge on senses we may not know about. Once, several years ago, I had lunch at what was then a favorite restaurant. I like to dine alone and read while I do it, but some feeling made me restless that day. I could only get a few lines into the book … something kept doing the emotional equivalent of poking me in the ribs. I paid and left. A car came through the wall of the restaurant less than 10 minutes later. It wasn’t exactly where I was sitting, but it was close enough that I would have likely been badly hurt had I stayed.
