Latest Blog Posts — Page 8

Jennifer Anne Gordon is one of the hosts of the delightfully entertaining podcast Vox Vomitus and a true lover of all things Halloween. So of course we are soul mates, right?

She also writes creepy fiction and her novel Pretty/Ugly is currently on sale on Amazon for $.99. That’s right, kids. One dollar. What are you waiting for?

She has made her living as an actress, a magician’s assistant, a “gallerina”, a comic book dealer, a painter, and burlesque performer, and, for the past 10 years, an award-winning professional ballroom dancer, performer, instructor, and choreographer.

BUT WHAT SCARES HER? Let’s find out!

What is the scariest thing you remember from childhood?

The first time I really remember being afraid of something was when I was watching the Electric Company. I was probably about three-years-old. I don’t really remember why, but they showed an X-ray. I was mortified by the thought of bones. It scared me to see what was inside of us. The next day in pre-school I told some of the girls during lunch. One girl, I still remember her name, told me that at night sometimes she saw a skeleton walking around in her hallway.

I think that broke my brain a little. I was scared enough just thinking of an X-ray of an arm or leg, but to think that all the bones in a body could move without the actual body. Well, that was more than three-year-old Jennifer could handle.

I remember some sleepless nights after this and making sure that the hallway closet was closed tight, and that we kept a light on in the hall. I remember staying up most of the night staring into the hallway and just waiting.

The fear of the skeleton eventually went away, but what did stick with me was the need for a nightlight. I still sleep with one, and the need to have all closets closed tight before bed!

What is your weirdest fear?

I have an intense fear of eyes, specifically having to touch my eye or have someone else touch my eye. I can’t even have someone do makeup on my eyes, and I have never worn false eyelashes. (That’s saying something seeing as I have been a professional performer on some level for most of my adult life.)

I blame all of this on an unfortunate incident from second grade. It involved a very sharp pencil, me fainting in the bathroom, and then eventually getting sick all over my teacher—Sister Assunta—because, of course, this was in Catholic School.

The worst part of all of this (besides the sharp pencil in the eye) is that it happened on Hot Dog Day. So I also have a fear of hot dogs, and maybe this plays into why I became a vegetarian.

“I have an intense fear of eyes, specifically having to touch my eye or have someone else touch my eye.”

What are your phobias?

Eyes, spiders, ticks, heights, closed spaces, wide open spaces, going under water, accidentally dropping a baby, car accidents, being kidnapped, death by hammer, driving—yikes this is a lot.

And to answer the question people are probably asking themselves…yes, I am on anti-anxiety medication.

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It’s an exciting day here at What Scares You because I get to chat with Christopher Gonzalez, one of my favorite flash fiction writers and now my SFWP publishing sibling. Christopher’s collection, I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat, is showing up on “Must Read” and “Best-Of” lists everywhere and for good reason. It’s also got one of the best covers I’ve seen in a while! So go get yourself a copy and support Chris and also our favorite small press, Santa Fe Writers Project.

Now, then, let’s get down to business. How does Christopher feel about scary things? Read on to find out…

Do you believe in ghosts?

I’ve grown up with too many ghost stories not to believe in them. Mostly from my mom. She’s very much a child of the ‘70s. I’ve never had any supernatural encounters myself. Still, there’s something about being raised Catholic that instills this fear of demons and the demonic in you, this fear of evil, specifically, that doesn’t plague my adult life as much but was certainly a huge part of my childhood. Maybe that has to do with movies like The Exorcist. I believe that if there are ghosts, they aren’t all malevolent beings. To haunt isn’t always to want to do harm, even if harm can be a byproduct. I guess I also think about ghosts being alive in memory and regret, which gets away from what you’re really asking, though I think that sense of endless lingering connects the real ghosts with the emotional ones.

Do you enjoy scaring other people?

Not at all, really. I’m sure there was a time when jumping out from behind a door and yelling “boo” at a family member was peak humor. Now, I’m such a scaredy cat. My roommate could walk into the kitchen while I’m washing dishes, and even if I knew he was home, his sudden appearance in the space would cause me to jump. I hate it. I hate feeling so easily shaken. So I don’t much enjoy scaring others.

Do you have any horror movie dealbreakers?

Yes—I flat out refuse to watch most horror movies. I can do psychological horror and thrillers, with your everyday violence. Extreme blood and gore make me queasy, so that’s usually out. If there is comedy woven into the horror, I’m much more likely to stomach my fears and watch. Honestly, with horror movies, it’s the noises and jump scares that do me in. I’m such a baby that way. Even with the diet horror I have consumed, I’ve had to be forced to watch them. All that said, anything with demons or dealing with religion? Count me out. There goes that Catholicism again.

People often say death is their greatest fear. What are your feelings about death/dying?

My feelings about death and dying have shifted over the years. The first death I remember was a classmate’s passing in 4th grade. One day he was in class and the next week his parents appeared to retrieve his belongings. He was gone. I still think about him sometimes, the life he might have lived, and whether or not we’d have become better friends. Who would he become? I guess that was the thing: back then, with death, I thought about the what ifs and what might have beens. The past few months we’ve lost a lot of extended family to COVID, and death is now imbued with this feeling of injustice, of feeling robbed. This feeling that it didn’t have to be this way. I think this shapes my feeling toward death and has for several years before the pandemic. I guess I no longer think about death as this individualistic thing that either comes about because a person ages into it or how their health plays some kind of part. Yes, sometimes it’s random and unpredictable. Absolutely. But I’ve started questioning what factors can lead to one’s death, whether it’s state-sanctioned, racist and gendered violence, lack of medical access and opportunity in this country, economical weariness, or the confluence of it all. So I don’t know if I fear dying itself, but rather what kind of agency is stripped from us in death, that I have no clue what circumstances will lead to my own death.

What scares you most about the writing process?

That so much of it is about holding the mirror to yourself and interrogating what it is you truly feel about the world. Epiphanies and clarity don’t arrive without horrific revelations of past mistakes and regrets. Writing feels like excavation of the heart. It’s not all bad in there! But you never know what you’ll expose.

What is your greatest fear as a writer?

Every answer I think of feels disingenuous. More than anything, I’m afraid I’ll lose it. That I’ll slip into a life where writing has gone from the most pressing matter of existence to the backburner to a distant memory of what it was I dreamt about, woke up for, used to make sense of the world around me. That one day I’ll wake up and it’ll have been ten years since I last wrote. That I won’t miss it at all.

Christopher Gonzalez is the author of I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat (SFWP 2021). A recipient of the 2021 Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, his writing appears in Poets & Writers online, the Nation, Catapult, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions, among other journals and anthologies. He currently serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse magazine and lives in Brooklyn, NY but mostly on Twitter @livesinpages.

Back in early October, my good friend John Copenhaver said, “Hey, you might like this new book that’s out. It’s about a scare house.” And yes, dear readers, I definitely did love this book. James Han Mattson’s Reprieve was the perfect October read for me, and honestly, if you need some creepy in your life (who doesn’t?), you should pick it up now. It’s about so much more than a scare house–race, power, greed, fear. James knows his shit.

Since he created one of the creepiest scare houses in fiction, I’m thrilled to have him stop by here and talk with me a bit about what scares him.

What is your weirdest fear?

I’ve always had this strange fear of fish. It’s weird because I come from a fishing family—my brother is a charter fisherman, and growing up, we fished pretty regularly, both on the Great Lakes and on smaller lakes. I always despised it though, and in the scrapbooks, you can find pictures of me as a child standing away from the fish I’d just caught, not wanting anything to do with it. Their flopping always disturbed me, and I hated the soullessness of their eyes.  

How do you deal with fear?

Meditation really does wonders for a fearful psyche. Bringing yourself back to your physical self, your breath, and concentrating on the present moment clears your head and allows fears to, at least momentarily, subside.

What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?

I’m not usually all that scared by novels, but one scene that’s stayed with me over many years is the scene in Salem’s Lot when Ben Mears has to put a stake through the heart of his love-turned-vampire, Susan Norton. It’s both sad and gruesome, and the lead-up to the scene, and the aftermath, had me gingerly turning pages.

What is your favorite monster/villain?

Freddy Krueger, mainly because he doesn’t take himself too seriously; he’s campy and funny and weird, especially in the earlier Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Jason, Leatherface, Ghostface, and Michael Myers try to be foreboding in their silence, and it can work at times (the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains one of my favorite horror movies), but it’s just not as fun. And Pinhead, the only other major horror villain that talks a lot—well, he takes himself way too seriously.

People often say death is their greatest fear. What are your feelings about death/dying?

I’m not really scared of death. I’m scared of dying, for sure, because of how absolutely cruel it is, but the abyss afterward doesn’t phase me. I think that whatever form we find ourselves in after death is so unfathomable to our current consciousnesses that any contemporary depictions of it are bound to be absurd.

What’s scarier: attics or basements?

Basements. Attics seem easier to escape—they almost always contain a window, and their floors double as ceilings, making them rife with all sorts of noisy possibilities. Basements are much trickier, escape-wise, and they’re usually damp, dark, cold, and full of all things creepy-crawly.

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received grants from the Copernicus Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He is the author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A: 2017) and Reprieve (William Morrow/Harper Collins and BloomsburyUK: 2021), which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Library Journal, and Crimereads, and was a Fall 2021 Book Pick by The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, O Quarterly, Entertainment Weekly, and the TODAY show, among others. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine.

Happy New Year, all you scary folk! We are back with my first installment of WSY for 2022! Alice Blanchard writes the Natalie Lockhart mystery series, books set in one of my favorite places in the U.S.–Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, there are witches and murder and black magic and all kinds of delightfully dark things in her books, so get get ’em!

But first, read on to discover all the terrible things that haunt Alice, including some pretty awful childhood ghosts…

What are your phobias?

Okay, well, after getting a bad case of food poisoning, I developed a serious phobia about raw chicken.  Trust me, don’t Google it.  It’ll keep you up at night.

Do you have any horror movie deal breakers??

Yes, whenever there’s a hideous, homicidal monster out there, the characters shouldn’t split up and go looking for their lost cat.

Is there any fear you’ve overcome in your life? How has it changed you?

I used to be afraid of failure, but after countless misadventures and stumbles and pratfalls, I accept them as part of the path to success.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Yes, and not just because I grew up in a haunted house. My sisters and I used to play with a Ouija board when we were little, and I’d never do it again. It’s a long story, but… disembodied voices, footsteps in the attic, strange goings on. I’m convinced there was at least one ghost in that centuries-old farmhouse. 

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It’s my last scary interview of the year, and I’m pleased to chat with Thomas Pluck just before the holiday season takes over. I met Thomas at a Noir @ the Bar event many years ago, and I was impressed by his no-holds-barred style of writing, very noirish and gritty and real, but also writing with a heart and soul and a great sense of humor. This combination is hard to do, and it’s stuck with me over the years.

I’m excited for Thomas’s newest book in the Jay Desmarteaux Crime Thriller series, The Boy From County Hell. Read more about it and buy it from Down and Out Books. And check out that fantastic ’70s-vibe cool-as-hell cover, kids.

Now, what scares him, you ask? I just happen to know…

Is there any fear you’ve overcome in your life? How has that changed you?

I was afraid of fighting. I don’t like conflict in general. I want everyone to get along. So I never learned to fight until I was in my thirties, and I went all out. My best friend was training to fight mixed martial arts, and I joined him. It was a hardcore school run by a guy who fought bare knuckle in Myanmar. I lost any fear of someone throwing a punch at me after that. I’ve been hit so hard I couldn’t see, and I kept fighting. I don’t train there anymore—I like my brains unscrambled.

Do you believe in ghosts?

I don’t believe in the supernatural. But as I like to say, that doesn’t mean it’s not real. I don’t believe in God, either. But I was raised Catholic, so my attitude is, I may not believe in him, but he can still punish me. That’s how I feel about ghosts.

Do you have a recurring nightmare?

I used to have this awesome recurring dream about a Tyrannosaurus Rex chasing me down my grandmother’s street. I loved that dream. So, needless to say, I was a big fan of Jurassic Park when it came out.

What is your favorite monster/villain?

I like the Wolf Man. The old one, with “even a man who is pure of heart…” but I also love An American Werewolf in London. I like that it’s a curse, they are doomed. Because we all are. And I’m afraid of hurting the people I love. Not worried about eating them, but you know, emotionally. The werewolf legend ties into that well, for men. We’re the real monsters.

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Friends, I devoured Alice Henderson’s first book A Solitude of Wolverines. I’ve got an obsession for survival tales, and combining that with a great mystery is a perfect book for me. I love Alice’s heroine, Alex Carter, a female Rambo/MacGyver combo. I’m so excited to read the second in the series, A Blizzard of Polar Bears, which just published this month. If you’ve got a nature lover or a survivalist or a mystery fiend on your Christmas list, I’ve just solved ALL your problems for you.

And now on to Alice’s favorite scary things! She’s got some good ones here…spoooooky!

What is the scariest thing you remember from childhood?

I grew up around the corner from my grandmother, who lived in a beautiful old house built sometime in the mid-late 1800s. Strange things happened in that place. Rocking chairs rocked by themselves. Footsteps creaked down the upstairs hallway when no one was there.

Once I was playing in her attic alone, going through old books and photographs. My grandmother liked to scare me, and this afternoon I heard her creeping up the attic stairs. So I snuck to the top of the stairs, and when her footsteps reached the top step, I jumped out, intending to turn the tables on her. Only she wasn’t there. I raced down the stairs, calling for her. No answer. Then I happened to glance out of the window, where I saw my grandmother way in the very back of her yard, gardening. I tore out of there, and the attic door slammed by itself behind me!

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I do indeed believe in ghosts, and not just because of my grandmother’s place.

Once I was in the Stanley Hotel, that magnificent edifice in Estes Park, Colorado, that inspired The Shining. It was late at night, and I was standing in the billiard room. Not many people were still up, so I had the room to myself. Adjoining the billiard room was what I assumed to be a music room, as someone was playing the piano in there beautifully. But the double doors that separated the two rooms were closed, so I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to disturb the player, but I was curious, so I snuck to the doors and peeked through the crack to see who was playing. No one was. The music cut off abruptly. The bench in front of the antique grand piano was empty. The whole room was empty.

What is your favorite urban legend?

When I was a kid I remember hearing about mutant alligators growing to gigantic proportions in sewers and storm drains. My friend Becky and I would routinely explore this large storm drain in my hometown, going deep inside the dark tunnels, bent over with flashlights. More than once we heard something scrabbling down there, but instead of picturing alligators, for some reason we always thought it was rabid clowns out for blood or mutant carnivorous creatures that could see in the dark, with long, raking claws.

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I feel like I already know the answer to this question, and I’m sad to say the answer is: me. I scare Wanda. Or at least, this is what she tells me on my Instagram posts. If I can scare Wanda, then what else is she scared of? This is what I had to find out!

Wanda’s debut novel, All Her Little Secrets, published this month, and let me tell you, it’s a must-read. I had the special privilege of reading an early copy of this novel, and I was blown away. It’s a terrific thriller about a toxic workplace and what we’ll do for family, and I hope everyone reads it and loves it as much as I did.

Now, on to the scary stuff….

What is your greatest fear?

Outliving my children. If you’re a parent, you know what I mean.

What is your earliest childhood memory of fear?

There was a serial killer roaming through my city killing young girls and women. I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I would eavesdrop on my parents and listen to them talk about it. I was worried sick whenever my mom or my sisters would leave the house at night. Of course, I never told anyone about my fears, so I suffered in silence. I recall being relieved when again, eavesdropping, I learned the killer was caught. Although I read mysteries about serial killers, I don’t know if I could write one. It would mean tapping into that childhood fear. I don’t want to go there.

What is your weirdest fear?

You know those eighteen-wheeler trucks that haul cars stacked on top of one another? I’m always afraid of driving behind them for fear that the cars will suddenly break loose and fall down into the highway onto my car. Weird, right?!

What are your phobias?

I have a fear of “open heights.” I am fine with looking out of airplane windows. Not so much with looking down from the balcony of a twenty-story building. This made things interesting when I took my kids parasailing. Let’s just say I was very quiet. When we traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, we rode to the top of Mont Blanc in a cable car. It was probably the most fearful ride I’ve ever taken in my life. My husband has pictures. It was not my finest moment.

“It was probably the most fearful ride I’ve ever taken in my life.”

How do you deal with fear?

I try to attack it head-on. Like that parasailing experience with my kids—I was scared beyond words, but I didn’t want to exhibit behavior that my kids would emulate. I leaned into my fear and came out on the other side. Likewise, with that cable car up the side of that mountain. I was a sweating, panting mess, but I did it!

Do you enjoy scaring other people?

I do not enjoy scaring other people because they have a tendency to want to reciprocate, and I don’t like being scared. When I was little, my mom would let me stay up late with my older brothers and sisters to watch TV. They liked to watch scary movies and television shows. Once, I watched an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour where people were being killed off in a house, and the roads were washed out so they couldn’t escape. I was far too young to be watching something like that. My brother slipped away and returned to the room yelling and brandishing a fake knife. It scared all of us! That was my last time staying up late to hang out with the older sibs. It was also the first time I realized I don’t like scary pranks.

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Happy Halloween, my loves! And what better way to spend the spookiest day of the year than with one of the masters of horror, Jonathan Maberry! I’m thrilled to welcome Jonathan to What Scares You today, and I know that you will love his answers.

I recently read Don’t Turn Out the Lights, a story anthology Jonathan edited that’s a tribute to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and I knew I had to ask him to do this Q&A. The anthology is a tribute in the very best way–the stories in the book have the same fun and twisted feel to them as the original books, and they brought me back to my childhood immediately. I highly recommend you go buy yourself a copy now.

And now, for the Q&A:

What is your favorite urban legend?

I’ve always been a fan of the Jersey Devil, a cryptid (a creature not officially known to exist but believed by many people). I grew up in Philadelphia, right across the river from New Jersey, and I spent a lot of summers as a kid camping in the Pine Barrens, which is the home of that particular monster. It’s an old legend dating back to Colonial times, and one with plenty of creepy variations. So many people have claimed to have seen it, including Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who wrote about it in his diaries when he was in exile in America. Commodore Perry, one of our greatest naval heroes, claimed to have shot it down during an artillery exercise, but the thing got up and flew away. People report it all the time. It’s eerie, strange, inexplicable, and kind of fun. I will likely write a novel about it one of these days.

How do you deal with fear? 

There’s an old Samurai adage: “If you’re afraid of ghosts, sleep in a graveyard.” I learned that while studying jujutsu, and I’ve taken it as a manifesto. So, because I had a terrible fear of heights and falling, I signed up to learn skydiving. Yes, it was terrifying for about half the way down during my first jump, but then it became amazing. I’ve since went looking inside my head for other fears and applied the same process—confronting them head on, and thereby taking agency over them. It sounds weird, but it’s actually kind of fun. It’s like leveling up in a video game.

What’s something that most people are afraid of that you are not? Why aren’t you?

I’m not afraid of the “slasher with a knife” thing, which is so popular in urban legends and movies. I’m a 6’4” tall 8^th degree black belt and former bodyguard. I’ve dealt with attackers with knives, icepicks, and other weapons. That’s not on my list of things to fret about. I’m much more frightened by things like pandemics, politicians who put party over the needs of the people, and mishandled technology. Those things are beyond my skill set to combat, and therefore they unnerve me more than a little.

Do you enjoy scaring other people? Why or why not?

You’d think that because I write horror, I’d be delighted to scare the bejeezus out of people, but that’s not really it for me. I don’t write about monsters. Not really. I write about people who fight monsters, which is a heck of a lot different. My stories deal with people of all kinds —from ordinary folks to Special Ops shooters— who are confronted by something bigger and badder than them. In order to survive, and to protect the people they care about, they have to discover/learn information, get tougher, band together, and level up. It’s a celebration of what’s possible when people are pushed to their limits but also realize that they —and the ones they love—are really worth fighting for. This particularly matters to me because I grew up in an abusive household and I survived —and escaped it— by throwing myself into academics (to open doors via education that were otherwise closed to a poor kid) and by studying martial arts so that I was physically tougher than the threats I faced. That worked, and I spent the next 35 years teaching martial arts and self-defense to other people who needed that same advantage. Now I write stories about people overcoming apparently impossible odds. Sure, they might be frightened by the monsters in the book, but I want the readers to feel that it’s possible that my characters can be proxies for them, and they can see that their own survival is possible.

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