I am excited to be wrapping up the What Scares You year with C.M. Muller! My first-ever horror short story was published this year by C.M. in the very cool anthology Come October, which features a lot of very creepy stories about leaves (among other things) and is available here if you’d like to spook yourself.
C.M. also just edited the fourth installment of Chthonic Matter, which will be out on the 21st or you can pre-order now.
After you get all your ordering done, read on to discover all the things that terrify this master of horror…
What’s the scariest story and/or book you’ve read?
I’ve always been particularly fond of Jason A. Wyckoff’s story “Knott’s Letter” (Black Horse & Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2012), an epistolary tale that still gives me the creeps. As far as novels go, I would have to say that Michael Aronovitz’s Alice Walks takes top honor, a ghost story beyond compare. Both of these horrors have sunk deep into my DNA.
What’s your favorite horror movie or television series?
Lately, I’ve really enjoyed the weird films of Panos Cosmatos, which include Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy. He’s not very prolific, but has such a unique vision. One of his short films was featured on my newest favorite series: Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. While I loved each episode, I thought Panos’s contribution (“The Viewing,” starring Peter Weller) was the highlight.
What is the scariest thing you remember from childhood?
I must have been ten or so, and a friend of mine (who lived across the street) invited me over to watch Alien. We sat in front of his blocky “big screen” ’80s TV, growing more and more terrified as each scene washed over us. When the movie ended, it was dark outside, and I was absolutely terrified to cross the street. I ran as fast as I could to my front door, all the while imagining an acid-filled xenomorph hot on my trail.
Tiffany Meuret writes about “monsters and vicious women.” So, basically, we’re soul mates. If that’s not enough to intrigue you, check out her latest novel Little Bird, which releases this month. It sounds like a wild ride!
Freshly divorced and grieving the death of her father, Josie Lauer has caged herself inside her home. To cope with her losses, Josie follows a strict daily routine of work, playing with her dog, Po, and trying to remember to eat a decent meal–and ending each night by drinking copious amounts of vodka. In other words, she is not coping at all.
Everything changes when Josie wakes to find a small shrub has sprouted in her otherwise dirt backyard the morning after yet another bender. Within hours, the vine-like plant is running amok–and it’s brought company. The appearance of the unwieldly growth has also heralded the arrival of a busybody new neighbor who insists on thrusting herself into Josie’s life. The neighbor Josie can deal with. The talking skeleton called Skelly that has perched itself in Josie’s backyard on a throne made of vines, however, is an entirely different matter.
As the strangely sentient plant continues to grow and twist its tendrils inside Josie’s suddenly complicated life, Josie begins to realize her new neighbor knows a lot more about the vines and her bizarre new visitor than she initially lets on. There’s a reason Skelly has chosen to appear in Josie’s suddenly-blooming backyard and insists on pulling her out of her carefully kept self-isolation. All Josie has to do is figure out what that reason is–and she has only a few days to do it, or else she might find herself on the wrong side of catastrophe.
If that isn’t wild enough for you, read on to find out what scares her most…
Do you believe in ghosts?
No, never have, and yet I am fascinated by ghost stories, hauntings, demon possessions, you name it. I find them to be hugely terrifying, perhaps because of the loss of control. To have something intangible and untouchable interfere in dangerous ways with my bodily autonomy, my family, and my mind is probably my absolute greatest fear. I am a total control freak, so I think I would collapse under such pressure.
What are your phobias?
I am mildly claustrophobic. It doesn’t debilitate me, and I never even considered it until my therapist brought it up. I hate being hugged, laid on, or constrained in any way, even with blankets. I panic almost immediately. I also can’t sleep if anything is even remotely in front of my face, for example, a pillow billowing up around my face as I lay down or a blanket curled in front of me. That said, I have zero issues with elevators or other similar smallish spaces.
Do you have a recurring nightmare?
Oh yes. I have multiple recurring nightmares. My most prominent is of sharks, specifically great whites. I watched Jaws from a very early age (it was one of my favorite movies as a kid because I was a weird kid) and while I love sharks and find them to be some of the most interesting creatures on the planet, the idea of a set of teeth coming towards me from the black depths springs a very visceral terror for me. If there is water in my dreams, there is a shark. Every. Time. Never fails. I have had shark nightmares where the shark is chasing me underwater, where I have turned around just in time to see their open jaws snapping down on top of me, and I’ve been swallowed in one nightmare and lived inside the shark, similar to Pinnochio inside Monstro the whale. One of the worst I’ve had, though, was a nightmare where I could see the shark coming for my mom, and every time I yelled it froze time. The shark, my mom, everything froze. Every instance time restarted, the shark got closer, and every time I tried to warn her time stopped again. So I essentially watched helplessly as this shark came for my mom, eventually eating her because she could never hear my warning.
“The idea of a set of teeth coming towards me from the black depths springs a very visceral terror.”
Do you have any horror movie dealbreakers?
Excessive gore and torture. I don’t find it entertaining in the least, and the guts and bone and blood actually make me nauseous. Slasher films are something I almost never watch, both for these reasons and because I find some to be rote and lazy, hoping the guts will shock where the storytelling does not. I know there are excellent films in the genre too, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you about them because I am too weak-stomached to watch them.
What is your favorite monster/villain?
Jaws might be my favorite, for all the reasons I already listed. That shark haunts me to this day! Besides Jaws, however, another favorite is Medusa. Having a nest of snakes for hair and turning people to stone sounds like a feature, not a bug. Her heartbreaking creation aside, she and her gorgon sisters are incredibly badass.
Do you like Halloween? If not, why?
I mean…not really. It irritates and exhausts me more than anything. I really hate having to entertain people, and so having the entire neighborhood ring my doorbell all damn night is literally a nightmare for me. I usually leave the porch light off, take my kids to trick or treat near their grandparents’ house, and then come home and pray no one dares come to my stoop. It just gives me anxiety.
What’s more terrifying to you: freezing to death in a blizzard OR dying from extreme heat, lost in a desert?
A blizzard is far more terrifying, hands down. I live in the desert, and I think I tolerate the heat far better than the cold. In the heat, at least I know what to expect, even if it is killing me. There is also the added terror of being smothered and immobilized by snow that makes my chest tight.
How do you deal with fear?
Indignance and blind stubbornness, probably. I deal with the world by rationalizing everything and making game plans. So if fear levels me one day, by the next I am the type to unfurl a mental checklist of ways I am going to manage said fear or uncertainty. I am an expert at stuffing unwieldy emotions away and tackling things, which definitely is not a healthy approach, but it does get shit done.
Tiffany Meuret’s debut novel, A Flood of Posies, was published in 2021 with Black Spot Books. Her next novel, Little Bird, releases in June 2022. She has published multiple short works and poetry in various venues, which can be found on her website www.TiffanyMeuret.com. She lives in Phoenix with her husband, kids, and a menagerie of animals.
Let’s welcome Alma Katsu to the What Scares You blog! Her latest book, The Deep, is about the Titanic and hauntings, and it was released right smack in the middle of the current pandemic, so you should buy it to support her and read it to scare yourself silly.
Alma writes really terrifying books that freak out a lot of people, but she’s an absolute delight of a person. I had the pleasure of chatting with her at an event in D.C. late last year and immediately fell in love with her. So of course I wanted to find out what really scares her. You will not be disappointed!
What is your earliest childhood memory of fear? Or the scariest thing you remember from childhood?
I grew up in a very spooky little town in Massachusetts. It
seemed there was some horrific legend associated with many of the buildings and
such. There were a ton of old cemeteries, and two funeral parlors each a block
in different directions from my house. We lived in an old, rundown Victorian
that was also creepy as hell, and growing up Roman Catholic gives you this
weird, superstitious outlook on life. The total of all these experiences is
that I grew up believing in the supernatural.
I don’t believe in any of that stuff now. It’s a little sad that
all that kind of mystery has been taken out of my life. But I’d had a strange
career in defense and the intelligence business and been exposed to really
horrible things that people do (genocides! Mass atrocities!) and so stories
like that kind of pale in comparison. For a long time, I didn’t scare, really,
and now that I’m retired it’s only coming back to me slowly.
And I write horror stories! Oh, the irony.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Why or why not?
I don’t not believe in
ghosts but it’s getting harder to sustain this possibility every day. My
husband likes those ghost hunting reality shows and so we watch a fair amount
of them (I keep him company), and I haven’t seen anything that seems
conclusive, not to me. And yet we keep watching them.
What was your worst
nightmare ever?
When I was very young, I dreamed once that the earth ran out of water and some people were committing suicide by setting fire to themselves, because no one would waste the water needed to put them out. And my father decided this was what we’d do, so he had us sit in the living room and set the house on fire. I could see the flames devouring the house, but my family were all sitting on the couch, not budging, and finally I ran away from them because I didn’t want to burn, but I felt awful about not dying with them. Then I woke up, but the dream has stayed with me for decades.
Yeah, my home life wasn’t fucked up at all.
“I dreamed once that the earth ran out of water and some people were committing suicide by setting fire to themselves, because no one would waste the water needed to put them out.”
Is there anything you are terrified of eating?
Why?
By saying “terrified of eating” you imply that I’d actually
consider eating it. I stopped eating things I don’t want to eat a long time
ago. You have to understand, I’m half Japanese and grew up watching my mother
eat things that any normal person would not consider edible, like dried fish
heads. Saturday mornings usually began with my mother pickling tiny octopuses
in a jar. So, no, I cannot be shamed or cajoled into eating weird things.
The question of eating weird things came up, naturally, with my
book The Hunger, which is about the Donner Party. You cannot write about
the Donner Party without studying up on cannibalism or asking yourself if you
would consider resorting to cannibalism if the circumstances were right. (The
answer to that is no.) I found out, on book tour, that most people don’t want
you to bring up cannibalism at all but some people, a very small minority,
really really want to talk about it. And oddly know a lot about it.
What is your greatest
fear as a writer?
Probably the normal writer fear that I won’t be able to get the
current novel to work. Just because you wrote one book, or a dozen, it doesn’t
mean you’re going to be able to write the next one.
As for being able to write things that scare people, my hang-up
is not writing something that
completely freaks people out. Because of my time being around genocidaires and torturers (see above)
kind of burned out my front-end filter, and things that didn’t seem like a big
deal to me kind of freaked normal people out (read my first book, The Taker,
if you want to see what I mean).
One of the things I learned from that experience and from
writing horror novels is that everybody thinks that what they like is “normal”.
I get bad reviews from people who think my books shouldn’t be considered horror
at all, and from people who think they’re terrifying. And each one of them
thinks their level is set perfectly. It’s a challenge for all writers, how far
to take “it”, whatever the “it” is in your story. As artists, we’re supposed to
challenge people. The problem is too many people these days don’t want to be
challenged.
What’s worse: being haunted by a demon or
having a stalker?
I don’t mean to take the stalker thing lightly, but people underestimate how hard it is to be prosecuted for murder. I mean, if there was no known association between you and this stalker you could probably kill him, and they’d never connect you to the body or his disappearance. Problem eliminated.
Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of five novels that combine history with the supernatural. THE HUNGER (2018) was named one of NPR’s Favorite 100 Horror Stories and was nominated for a Stoker and Locus Magazine award for best horror novel. Her debut novel, THE TAKER, was one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2011. THE DEEP (2020), her most recent novel, is a reimagining of the sinking of the Titanic with a horror twist. Her first spy novel, RED WIDOW, will be published spring of 2021.
Shannon and I have never met in person, but I’m pretty sure we’d be fast friends. For one, we’re both awesome…..I mean, both writers. Writers of creepy things, interested in creepy things. And I think we both have a similar sense of humor (or, at the very least, I find her hilarious online.)
I loved her book, Gretchen, which was one of the most original and surprising and downright scary books I’ve read in a long time. And I definitely wanted to know more about what terrifies her. She graciously agreed to share.
What is your greatest fear?
Insanity, the kind in which you don’t know if you’re insane
and you take harmful actions in reality that have real consequences. I have
always, I think ever since I watched the Kathleen Turner film, Julia and Julia, had this unrelenting
fear. I was too young to watch Julia and
Julia, I think I was 14 or 15, either that or my developing brain seized
and froze on the absolute darkness of the film. In adulthood, with what I think (hope) is finally a fully formed
front lobe, I can contextualize and rationalize the plot of Julia and Julia. But frankly, I’ve never
been able to truly shake it. If you haven’t watched it, it is by far the
darkest film I’ve ever watched, and that’s saying a lot since in my adulthood,
I gobble (and even write) psychological horrors. In it, Turner plays Julia, a
widow, who imagines (or is it a paranormal experience?) her dead husband and
son are still alive. She flits back and forth between this fantasy and reality.
She becomes so twisted between fantasy and reality, she kills a man in reality
and winds up in the final scene in a hospital for the mentally unwell. It is
never clear if her turns in fantasy-land are real or not, but to me, the
watcher, there is no doubt that Julia was suffering psychotic episodes
throughout and didn’t know it. Anyway, this, this type of insanity, the type in
which you act out and harm another in reality, but don’t realize how upside
down you are, that is the most frightening thing in the world to me.
What are your phobias?
I am scared of stairs (falling) and of grapes (choking).
Do you have a recurring nightmare?
How timely this question. My worst nightmare and the most
recurring is one I’ve had since about 10 or 12. And it is so vivid and tangible
in my mind, still, at age 46, that I just wrote an entire novel around it (this
is my current WIP, The Peculiar House of
Fearz).
Here’s the dream: I’m seated, somehow confined to this seat
somehow, at a bare wooden table. Next to the table to the right is a window
with a single potted plant. To my left, and in the interior of the room, is a
rolling, grinding machine, which serves as a threat from my unseen tormentors
(and who are they? The dream never reveals). The looming threat is that I will
be “squished” in the rolling, grinding machine.
Who the hell knows what this dream means, or why it is
recurring. No idea! I just know this. To this day, I sort of cringe when I’m in
a room that is as bare and pastoral, old, antiqued like this one. Now, I grew
up in a house full of antiques, but there’s a certain unique quality about this
one that is hard to explain, and I have, indeed, encountered from time to time.
THE WINDOW PLANT OF TERROR!!!!
And I positively cannot tolerate single potted plants on
windowsills. I don’t put one on any of mine, and I cringe if I ever see that. I
know. Weird. Super weird. But that dream ruined plants on windowsills for me.
So watch out for Peculiar Fearz,
because this dream sunk in me so deep, I baked it all in that novel.
What scares you most about the writing process?
The knowledge that I will work myself into a sure panic with
every book every time I send it off and wait for the reaction. And knowing I
must endure the wait and the panic.
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever written?
I have an entire horror manuscript, named GOAT, in a drawer.
The simple explanation is that it’s based on the mythical goat man, but it
layers on that family traumas and a significant, physical assault on the main
character when she’s only seven. This manuscript has been fully edited twice,
gone through reads by my agent and her staff. I have notes to edit it further,
but I honestly just can’t do it. It’s been in a drawer a few years now. My mom
won’t read it; she says it scares her too much. And once, when I was in the
thick of the last round of editing it, I wound myself up so much, nightmares
and all, I feared a demon was talking to me through the NEST camera. It was
really just my husband playing a joke on me, but the fact that I allowed myself
to believe a demon for even a second, and the fact I didn’t just immediately go
to the logical conclusion that it was obviously my husband pranking me, led me
to seal GOAT away in a bottom drawer, and under several layers of file folders
on my computer. Not sure if I can ever return to it.
I have an entire horror manuscript, named GOAT, in a drawer.
Who is the best villain, fictional or in real life?
The best “villain” is Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ VEEP character,
Selina Meyer. My absolute favorite genre across everything is irreverent
satire. And VEEP is the apex pinnacle of irreverent satire. The Meyer character
is sooooooo totally a villain, the satirical representation of all the
horribles in modern U.S. politics. She is malignant narcissism; the only thing
that matters to her is winning the next election. Her wardrobe, like for all
excellent female villains, is absolutely fantastic. Honestly, the tip-top best.
She is a flat-out brilliant character, hilarious, and you hate to love her and
love to hate her all at once. The very best.
What’s worse: closed-in spaces or heights?
Closed-in spaces!
You are driving alone on a road at night and your
headlights illuminate a man standing alone with a lantern in the middle of the
road. What do you do? Also, is it more or less scary if it’s a little kid in
pajamas?
A little kid in pajamas is far more scary than Old-Man
Rivers with a lantern. The latter I’d pull over for and follow into a swampy
forest, allowing him to lead me to some haunted mansion. Thrilled for the
experience. The kid in PJ’s is obviously a ghost-demon meant to trap me in some
ninth layer of hell.
Not a ghost-demon…just Shannon and her son messing with photo filters. (Hopefully.)
Shannon Kirk is the international bestselling and award-winning author of Method 15/33, The Extraordinary Journey of Vivienne Marshall, In the Vines, Gretchen, Viebury Grove, and short stories in four anthologies: The Night of the Flood, Swamp Killers (TBP, 2020), Nothing Good Happens After Midnight (TBP, 2020), and Border Noir (April, 2020). Shannon is also a contributor to the International Thriller Writers’ Murderers’ Row. Growing up in New Hampshire, Shannon and her brothers were encouraged by their parents to pursue the arts, which instilled in her a love for writing at a young age. A graduate of Suffolk Law School in Massachusetts, Shannon is a practicing litigation attorney and former adjunct law professor, specializing in electronic-evidence law. When she isn’t writing or practicing law, Shannon spends time with her husband, son, and two cats.
But what we all want to know is: What scares you, LES? Read on to find out:
What is your
greatest fear?
I’m evenly afraid of illness, driving, heights, and spider
babies. These are all self-explanatory, except for heights: I’m great at going
up, but lose it on the way back down. I had to butt-scoot down the pyramids in
Tikal, while all these Guatemalan women in high heels trotted past me. Related–after
my first book tour, I developed a fear of flying. (That’s not my greatest fear,
just my most inconvenient one.) I guess the worst thing would be if I was
taking care of a sick spider-baby and I had to drive it to a hospital on a
cliff to see the only in-plan arachno-pediatrician.
What is your earliest childhood memory of fear? Or the
scariest thing you remember from childhood?
Earliest would be Uncle Steve’s
fingers. There weren’t a lot of them.
This would have been my scariest
memory had I known about it: There was a large, white iron crib
sealed up behind the wall of my old room. I was already grown when I spotted it
through a tiny hole in the paneling. When I asked my parents about it and they
said, “Oh, we had nowhere else to put that old crib,” like that was a
reasonable answer.
My parents were weird people who made weird decisions and weren’t very parenty. They treated me like a little crime-buddy and took me to abandoned houses to look for stuff left behind, and I was pretty scared that we would get caught by the bandits that lived there. Get it? I thought they were “bandit houses.”
Here’s a pic of a dude who thought my house was abandoned. Turns out he was stealing crap, like vases and towels, to sell at his mother-in-law’s weekly yard sale.
Most terrifying photo ever.
What is your weirdest fear?
Definitely horses. I have no idea why they don’t spend every
minute of the day trying to pound humans into jelly.
What are your phobias?
Street grates and hatches. Condiments. Toddlers with
pickles.
What is your greatest fear as a writer?
Two things: One, that I might get over it. Two, that I might
stick with it until long after people stop reading. You’ll be able to come see
me “write” as an exhibit at an historical village alongside the coopers.
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever written?
I wrote a kind of ghost story that appeared in The
Collagist called “A Picture of a Man in a Top Hat,” where the neighbor says
to the narrator, “Don’t look at me, and don’t look in the shed.” That’s
actually what a guy said to me on the bus one day, right as I was getting off
at my house. I went inside and stared out the back window at our shed until my
husband came home. I have a chapbook called Curio that’s mainly stories
I wrote after people were weird to me. People are often weird to me, by the
way.
What is your favorite type of monster? Why?
I love an original demon, a personal, closet-monster–like
The Babadook or Frank from Donnie Darko–as opposed to the unleashed-on-society
monster. Although now that I put those two side by side in my mind, maybe I
just like monsters with weird eyes.
What’s worse: clowns or spiders? Why?
Clowns, because they’re a drag. I love spiders. Remember
when I dreamed you had a spider baby? You never did, though. Not yet.
“Maybe I just like monsters with weird eyes.”
You are driving alone on a road at night and your
headlights illuminate a man standing alone with a lantern in the middle of the
road. What do you do? Also, is it more or less scary if it’s a little kid in
pajamas?
Both are pretty scary because I don’t drive, so it’s extra-bad if I’m out driving at night. That man and that little kid should just dive in the ditch and cling to each other and hope I don’t plow into them.
***
Laura Ellen Scott is the author of four novels, including THE MEAN BONE IN HER BODY and CRYBABY LANE, the first two books in the New Royal Mysteries from Pandamoon Publishing. The series is set in a fictional college/prison town in Ohio, and the third book, BLUE BILLY, is on the way. Seriously, it really is.
