CHILDHOOD FEARS As Dead Silence is my first horror novel, I suppose it’s more a tour of what scares and intrigues me than anything else I’ve written. Horror, to me, is always both sides of that coin—not just the frightening but also what lures us in for a closer look. I’ve always been fascinated by haunted houses, both the real ones (old houses with an eerie aura to them) and the carnival version. In fact, when I was a kid, we lived in a small town that had a yearly festival, including rides and games…and a haunted house. Looking back on it now, I know it was just a trailer, literally. A semi-trailer that you entered on one side and exited through the other. It made use of small spaces, flashing lights, loud noises, and blasts of air to create “terror” more than anything genuinely scary. But it worked. I still remember that sweaty, closed-in feeling of not being able to breathe. It was more my own anticipation of what might come than anything frightening in the moment. (The sensation I also recognize now as a precursor to a full-blown panic attack, which I hadn’t, at the time, experienced.) I bolted out of there, going backward through the house—avoiding unknown frights by revisiting the ones I’d already survived—much to the embarrassment of my “too cool for this” twelve-year-old friends and the annoyance of the ride operator. So, writing about a haunted house—in this case, the Aurora is more like a haunted luxury cruise ship, but still—for my first horror novel seemed completely natural. And setting “my” haunted house in space allowed me to up the stakes of the story—you can’t just run away from a scary place in space, especially if that location (creepy ship) is the only thing keeping you alive. Beyond that, I don’t have one specific childhood trauma that influenced the creation of this particular story. In fact, it wasn’t until I started considering this article, that I could see the DNA of my own long-standing fears within Dead Silence. And now that I see them, I’m not sure how I missed them! I’ve always had an overactive imagination. But that frequently meant as a child, I would have trouble with distinguishing reality from my nightmares, especially when still half-asleep. Two instances immediately leap to mind, both vivid examples of that difficulty. In the first, I was on the family room couch after already having had a nightmare of some kind, and as I watched, a hand appeared on the back of the sofa above me. I can still see the moonlight on it, turning everything that pale shade of blue. Even now, thinking about it makes my heart beat faster. When I spoke to my mom about it, she told me that at the time, 1981 or so, there were advertisements all over television for a horror movie called The Hand. (I found the trailer for it on IMDb, and it is a treat.) She suspects my nightmare originated with seeing the ads for the movie. In terms of its influence, I’m not going to spoil a particular scene in Dead Silence, but let’s just say…you’ll recognize it immediately when you reach it. The hilarious part of this is that my little kid brain transformed the hand into the Hamburger Helper hand, which was even creepier to me at the time. As for the other instance, this is going to sound strange, but I hate whispering. Like, if you’re going to tell me a secret, that’s fine. But whispering from across the room or where I can’t immediately determine the source? Nope, no, huh-uh. Horror movies that make use of those vague whispering sounds in the background are incredibly effective for me. And those ASMR videos that were so popular a couple of years ago? Literally make my skin crawl. Some of my issues with whispering might simply be discomfort with feeling like I’m missing something. I have scar tissue in one of my ears, and I don’t hear well on that side. So it’s an anxiety-inducing feeling, perhaps a survival thing, to feel as though you can’t quite pin down what’s happening and where. All the easier for a saber-toothed tiger to be sneaking up on you, you know? But I suspect it has more to do with a nightmare from, again, childhood. I don’t know the source for this one, and neither does my mom. All I can tell you is what I remember: I sat up in bed, convinced there were people crouching and whispering at the foot of my bed, where I couldn’t see them. I called to my parents: “The boys are whispering, whispering by my bed.” Ugh. Goosebumps even now. Because even though I know now it was a dream and no one was there, I can still feel my certainty that they were there, that I’d heard them whispering. Claire and her crew encounter a great many whispers and voices that they can’t quite identify as they make their way through the halls of the Aurora, and I love it. In a fictional setting. Funny sidenote: when I was writing one of those scenes, I was at a Starbucks with my laptop. And I was into it—head down, noise-cancelling headphones on. But as I’m detailing a phantom touch against Claire’s cheek, I feel a hand brush the back of my neck. My heart immediately leapt into my throat, along with a scream that came out more like a gasp. When I whipped around in my seat, I found…a beaming toddler at the booth behind me. Her parents, having completely missed that their child touched me, both looked at me like I was crazy. So much for writing creepy scenes in public! I love horror for its opportunity to explore what both repels and fascinates us, and I hope you enjoy the deep, dark corners of Dead Silence and the Aurora…and my mind, apparently. Dead Silence will be available from Nightfire Books in hardcover, eBook, and audio digital download on January 25, 2022. Dead Silence |
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