Posts tagged "Mary Higgins Clark Award"

What Scares You, Lori Rader-Day?

There is definitely something about that feeling of being somewhere new and far away, alone, and realizing that no one really knows where you are. In this interview with Lori Rader-Day, she starts off with that hint of fear, and it’s definitely one that I can relate to. I distinctly remember the moment, during my first week of studying abroad in England, when I was sitting on a bench on my new college campus with no one around and realizing that I could disappear right then and there and it would take a while for anyone to notice. It’s truly a chilling feeling.

Lori touches on a bunch of other fears here that I think many of us can relate to, and her fiction can be equally as chilling and introspective. It’s exciting to know we have a new LRD novel on the way–The Death of Us is releasing in October 2023, and it features a mother who will stop at nothing to protect her son when the discovery of a submerged car stirs up buried secrets and a small town’s vengeance. Pre-order your copy now.

And find out what else scares her…


What’s the scariest place you’ve ever been?

I’m just back from traveling to Alaska, where I suddenly realized how vulnerable you are traveling solo. No one knows precisely where you are…

The scariest place I’ve ever been, though, was on a group trip. I was on a trip with Ball State University, my twice-over alma mater and where I worked for nearly ten years, visiting Asia. While in South Korea, we got special permission and careful escort to go the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea—a tiny little place carved out and primarily used for talks between the two countries. It’s not a tourist spot. You had to dress a certain, respectful way and be careful of your actions while you were there, so that the photos that were absolutely being taken of you couldn’t be used as propaganda against America or South Korea. There was a building right down the middle of the border so that North Koreans stayed in their country and South Koreans stayed in theirs, even as they were meeting across a table. A microphone cord delineated one country from another. I asked if we could step over the cord. So technically I have been in North Korea—very briefly. I was glad to get back over that cord and then out of that place. It felt like a place where anything might happen.

What is your greatest fear?

My greatest fear is probably that my husband will make me a widow. I know, I know, we all gotta go sometime, and the alternative, that I will make him a widower, isn’t great either. But it’s mostly about the timing, that he might make me a—OK, I wanted to say YOUNG widow but that ship might have finally sailed. Anyway, they say you should write about what scares you, right? So I wrote my (Edgar Award-nominated, hi) novel Under a Dark Sky to explore those feelings. (It’s about a young widow who is afraid of the dark.) Writing that book didn’t exorcise the fear, but at least I can say I cleaned out the metaphorical closets a bit.

These days I’m afraid I or someone I love will be killed in a mass shooting. The odds just keep getting better. What do we do about this?

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

I used to be gut-sick scared of public speaking. Hated it. Got through high school speech by the skin of my teeth; changed my major in college to avoid another speech class. There’s some statistic out there about how most people would rather shave years off their life than speak in public, and that felt true to me.

On the occasion of my first public reading, I was making myself absolutely sick with dread, until I realized that getting the chance to read my work in public was part of the success I had dreamed of my entire life, that I was working so hard for. That realization didn’t cure me, but it gave me enough courage to get up on the stage that night. And then I just kept saying yes to opportunities until I didn’t get nervous anymore. Now? Give me a mic. I live for it. My high school speech teacher came to one of my events a few years ago and was astounded.

Now that it doesn’t scare me to speak in front of an audience, I’m more confident in my abilities and can make sure the audience has a good time, too. I think it would be difficult to be a publishing author without some comfort with public speaking. 

Lori conquering her public speaking fears at the 2017 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference, her first keynote speech.

 How do you deal with fear?

My examples so far show you exactly how I tend to deal with fear. I face it. I hand it to a character and inspect it from all angles, or dig deep for why I’m in a position to face a fear. Now, we’re not talking about all my fears, here. Spiders? No, thank you. I’m not facing a big spider if I don’t have to, and so far in my life I haven’t found a reason to have to face a big spider. Are there places in the world I’d like to visit, except for their spider population? Yes. But there are plenty of places in the world I want to see, some of them not known for spiders. Or…caves. I can barely type the word caves. *shudder* That’s all I’ll say on the topic. I’m not facing that one. Shut up.

What scares you most about the writing process?

I love writing the beginning, and I love writing the ending, once I know what it is. I don’t usually know what it is until pretty late in the game. The middle scares me. The beginning is where you hook the reader, ask them questions. The ending is where you reward the reader, answer the questions you’ve asked. The middle is where I can get lost, but it’s also where I figure out what I’m writing and why. All the discoveries about character are made there, and then I revise the beginning in support of them. I love the process of discovery in writing, but it’s also daunting, every time.

What is your greatest fear as a writer?

I’m scared that I won’t get another idea, or that I won’t be able to pull off the next idea I have. Or that something will happen to me, health-wise, that will keep me from doing this, long-term. I’m almost two years out from a breast cancer diagnosis, done with treatment, but in the early days of chemotherapy, I wondered if I would ever write another book. It was a scary place to be, because I’ve always been a writer, from a very young age. Who would I be, if I couldn’t be a writer anymore?

On a more daily basis, what scares me is that I’m somehow letting down my readers. My personal goal is always to try something new each time out—to scare myself, just a little, I guess—but that I’m entertaining myself, not readers. Maybe I would sell more books if I were a different sort of writer. I guess I worry I’m not the right kind of writer.  

What’s the scariest story you’ve ever read? Is there a particular scene that really haunts you still?

I remember the first time I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” It blew my mind. A piece of assigned “literature” about crime that pulled zero punches? The story was first published in 1953, so I expected… something else, I guess, but even 70 years later, I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone. That first time I finished it, I thought… “You can DO that?” Well, Flannery could.


Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and others. Her latest book, forthcoming October 2023, is The Death of Us (Harper Collins.) Lori lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

What Scares You, Carol Goodman?

I’m very excited to chat with Carol Goodman for this installment of What Scares You. Carol’s books are among my favorites of all time. They are filled with spooky houses, buried secrets, myth, Gothic imagery, writers and artists, and ghosts. With all that swirling around in her mind, how could this interview not be interesting? Read on to find out what scares Carol.

What is your greatest fear?

That something will happen to my daughter. 

What is your earliest childhood memory of fear? Or the scariest thing you remember from childhood?

I remember when I realized that people died, specifically that my parents would die someday and that I would die someday. I would like awake at night obsessing over that, and finally the only way I could overcome my fear was to make up a story where my family and I were transported to a planet where we would all be immortal—at least, I think I included my family in this fantasy at first. Eventually it was just me who got to go live on the planet and be immortal. This fantasy was really comforting until I became a parent, and then I couldn’t resort to it because I somehow knew I wouldn’t be able to bring my child with me. What self-respecting child wants to go live on a planet with their mom?

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

See above: Mortality conquered by fantasy. Also, I used to be frightened of being alone in a house, but mostly I’m not anymore.

What is your weirdest fear?

None of my fears seem weird. 

Do you believe in ghosts?

My daughter recently answered this question with: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them.” I love ghost stories, but if I actually saw a ghost, I’d completely lose it.

What is your favorite urban legend?

I remember hearing “The Claw” when I was a teenager and being terrified that I’d be out parking with my date and hear that scritch-scritch-scritch on the roof.  There was a version of it, too, where the woman is driving and people are pointing at her car with horrified faces and when she gets home she realizes there’s a madman on her roof—or maybe a corpse? That terrified me because of the idea that other people could see the danger you were in but you couldn’t.

Do you have a recurring nightmare?

For years I had the classic school anxiety nightmare in which you are sitting down for an exam and realize you’ve forgotten to come to the class all semester, only in my version the exam would be in my Greek class (I took Greek for two years in college) and my Greek teacher Mr. Day would be towering over me like Zeus, brandishing a lightning bolt, and the exam would be in Sanskrit.

How do you deal with fear?

I make up a story that’s even worse than the thing I’m afraid of, and then I write that story. For example, when I was in my early thirties I’d separated from my husband and gone to live at my parents’ house with my two-year-old daughter. I was afraid that my life was over, that I’d have to live with my parents forever, and that my soon-to-be-ex-husband would kidnap my daughter. So I thought: this could be worse; what if I hadn’t had my parents to come home to? So I made up a story about a woman in similar circumstances who takes a job at her former boarding school so that she’ll have housing and childcare. The only thing she has to worry about is the vengeful figure from her past wielding an ice-pike. Somehow I found this comforting, and it was the origin of my first novel, The Lake of Dead Languages. 

What scares you most about the writing process?

Every morning when I sit down to write I feel a little frisson of dread. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with exposure—the sense that I’ll have to peel away the protective layer between my inner self and the world—and, worse, that there won’t be anything there when I do.

What is your greatest fear as a writer?

That I won’t have anything left to write.

What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever written?

I recently wrote a scene in which a man saws his own hand off. That was scary.

Do you have any horror movie deal-breakers?

I hate whenever anything happens to a character’s hands.  And yes, I know that contradicts the answer above.

“I recently wrote a scene in which a man saws his own hand off.”

What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read? Is there a particular scene that really haunts you still?

The Shining was for a long time the scariest book. The Kubrick film absolutely terrified me the first time I saw it (in the movie theaters when it first came out) and haunted me for years. Probably when the twins appear and say “Come play with us.”  When I read the book years later I was amazed that the book was AS scary. I also remember being really creeped out by Superstition by David Ambrose. Billy O’Callaghan’s The Dead House scared me, so then I read it a second time.

In which post-apocalyptic scenario are you most likely to survive and thrive: 28 Days Later (zombies), The Stand (sickness kills all but a few), or The Last Policeman (asteroid hits Earth)?

Well, given our present situation, let’s hope it’s The Stand. I really wouldn’t do well with zombies, and I haven’t read The Last Policeman.

What’s worse: being haunted by a demon or having a stalker?

I’ll take the human stalker.  Demons are definitely scarier.

You are renting a remote house with a few close friends when all the electricity cuts out. Are you the friend who goes down to the basement to check on the situation? If not, what do you do when someone else does, and you hear them calling your name from that dark basement? (Assume your cell phones don’t work out there in the remote wilderness.)

Since I am the Mom in my house, I am ALWAYS the one who goes down to the basement to fiddle with the circuit switches even though I LOATHE the basement. So yeah, I’m the one who goes down. I’m calling for you now. Taaarrraaa …. Come play with me … foreverrrrr ….

Carol Goodman is the author of twenty-one novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize, The Widow’s House, which won the 2018 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and The Night Visitors, which won the 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family, and teaches literature and writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz.