I’m so excited to welcome one of my very dearest friends to the site today. John and I met a very long time ago in grad school at George Mason University and became insta-friends. It helped that we admired each other’s writing and that we each had a love for creepy things. Our writing styles are very different, but we did take a somewhat similar path by both starting out in a very literary MFA program and then veering back to our childhood love of crime and mystery.
John’s debut, Dodging and Burning, is excellent and was nominated for nearly all the awards for a good reason. John himself is pretty excellent, too. Read on for more about his deepest, darkest fears.
What is your earliest childhood memory of fear? Or the scariest thing you remember from childhood?
When I was a child, I was obsessed with the paranormal. I lost my father to lung cancer when I was eight, so you’d think that was the reason, but I have memories of being enthralled with ghosts well before his death or the onset of his illness. Fascination with the unknown—that morbid curiosity—has always been with me. I remember seeing ghosts as a kid. I’m certain now that I summoned them from my imagination after hours of staring at the Time-Life books series Mysteries of the Unknown, but what scares me is that, as a child, I really thought I saw a black shadow gathering density and shifting in the corner of my bedroom, or an old decaying farmer walk into my room and sit on my legs in the middle of the night. I mean, I just imagined it, right?
