Posts tagged "novel"

What Scares You / April 13, 2024

What Scares You, K.T. Nguyen?

Today I welcome K.T. Nguyen to What Scares You. K.T.’s debut psychological thriller novel, You Know What You Did, will be released on Tuesday, April 16, and is already getting so so much buzz. I can’t wait to read it.

K.T. is a former magazine editor whose features have appeared in Glamour, Shape, and Fitness. After graduating from Brown University, she spent her 20s and 30s bouncing from New York City to San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei, and has now settled just outside Washington, D.C., with her family. K.T. enjoys native plant gardening, playing with her rescue terrier Alice, and rooting for the Mets.

And now we’ll find out what scares her…

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

When I was three years old, my family moved into a house on a street that ended in a ravine. My sister, six years older than me, told me disembodied feet walked the ravine in tall boots. She was the one who informed me Santa isn’t real, so I knew she was a straight shooter. I was terrified of the ravine for years. 

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

I used to be afraid of heights. Growing up, I couldn’t walk near the railing and glass on the upper floor of malls without feeling dizzy. I would have nightmares of sliding towards the edge, as if pulled by unseen hands, then plummeting. (Yes, I would wake up before contact.) As an adult, I’ve been able to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, traverse a long, skinny suspension bridge in Taiwan, and zipline in the Costa Rican rainforest (I did get stuck and needed the guide to rescue me).

What are your phobias?

Trypophobia. Irregular patterns of raised bumps or clustered holes trigger intense feelings of disgust in me and set off obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. In recent years, researchers have examined brain activity and found that many phobias, like trypophobia, trigger disgust, not fear, in subjects. In my debut thriller You Know What You Did, the main character Annie battles disgust-driven OCD. 

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

A “resort casino” in Henderson, Nevada. Because of my contamination-based OCD, which I manage beautifully with medication, I dislike hotels, even the finest five-star luxury boutique accommodations. This particular Sin City-adjacent hotel did not fall into that category. I was there for work, and my boss told us, “Sleep with your coats on girls!” It wasn’t particularly dirty, but an invisible layer of misery coated everything. Long, skinny hallways poorly lit; a sad smoky casino in the basement; a subterranean gift shop that sold paintings of big-eyed girls.

“Long, skinny hallways poorly lit; a sad smoky casino in the basement; a subterranean gift shop that sold paintings of big-eyed girls.”

Do you enjoy scaring other people?

Not without consent, i.e. not in real life. However, if a reader opens my book, a psychological thriller tinged with horror, then they expect to experience disquiet, surprise, electric thrills. I want to deliver that!

What’s your favorite horror movie or television series?

My favorite horror movies are Jordan Peele’s. His form of social horror and his images of distorted reality make my blood run cold. In terms of television, the imagery in Twin Peaks terrified me for years. Nothing scares me more than distortion, disproportion, wrongness in everyday surroundings. 

What animal scares you the most?

Only recently have I overcome my fear of opossums. Despite their beady eyes, sharp snouts, and bald scaly tails, opossums are shy creatures who are key to keeping suburban rodent populations in check. While I’ve made my peace with the possum, I am still not a fan of the maned wolf. Their disproportionately long legs frighten me. There is one in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., that my daughter made us visit. We didn’t see the animal, but our noses were filled with the pungent odor of maned wolf urine, which is known to smell like cheap cannabis.

What’s creepier: clowns, dolls, or wax figures?

Clowns, because there is a human under that makeup. See: John Wayne Gacy.

What Scares You / April 13, 2023

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 / June 13, 2022

What Scares You, Tiffany Meuret?

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. 

What Scares You / February 29, 2020

What Scares You, Shannon Kirk?

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.