THAT CHILD IS FEARLESS BY PATRICIA LILLIE

Patricia Lillie grew up in a haunted house in a small town in Northeast Ohio. Since then, she has published picture books, short stories, fonts, two novels, and her latest, The Cuckoo Girls, a collection of short stories. As Patricia Lillie, she is the author of The Ceiling Man, a novel of quiet horror, and as Kay Charles, the author of Ghosts in Glass Houses, a cozy-ish mystery with ghosts. She is a graduate of Parsons School of Design, has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, and teaches in Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA program. She also knits and sometimes purls.

WEBSITE LINKS

Website: https://patricialillie.com
Twitter: @patricialillie
The Cuckoo Girls, publisher’s website: https://journalstone.com/bookstore/the-cuckoo-girls/

CHILDHOOD FEARS: That child is fearless.

How many times have you heard that or said it yourself? Exactly nobody ever said it about me. I was the kid who was afraid of everything. I wouldn’t ride the merry-go-round, convinced the horses would break loose and carry me away. This was long before I saw the Mary Poppins movie (which confirmed my fears were possible, so stop laughing) but movies didn’t help.

When I was five or six, an incredibly creepy live-action film version of “Red Riding Hood” made the rounds. My school showed it as part of their keep-the-kids-occupied-during-summer-break program. I don’t know what they were thinking. I survived that, but then ads for it began appearing on television. Although the wolf in the movie was a person in a wolf suit, the commercial featured a very realistic wolf. Just his head, surrounded by black. He stared at you and opened his mouth wide, all teeth and tongue, and the camera cut away. He was sheer evil, and I knew whatever he was about to do was far worse than swallowing Red’s grandma.

All I had to do was catch a glimpse of him, and I’d wake up in the night and see him poised to jump. He never got farther than the floor since my screaming both frightened him away and brought my parents to my room. I soon learned to shut my eyes when the commercial came on, but it sometimes took me unaware and the wolf returned. If he didn’t, I knew just because I couldn’t see him didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I began sleeping with my pillow over my head and my arms outstretched at my sides holding the blankets tight against the bed. Maybe, just maybe, if he couldn’t see me, I’d be safe.

And then there were the old movies. Creature from the Black Lagoon must have run one afternoon a month for a year. As an adult, the zipper in the Creature’s costume is obvious, but as a five-year-old, he followed me around for weeks, and the things that had happened off-screen, in those days of less explicit screen horror, kept me awake at night.

In Superman and the Mole-Men, the eponymous Mole-Men crawl through a child’s bedroom window. She rolls her toy ball toward them. They roll it back. At their touch, the ball glows. I never saw what came next. By then I’d learned to close my eyes and hide my head under the nearest pillow or blanket or whatever. I swear, that window looked exactly like the window in my room. I was an adult before I discovered the encounter was innocent. Nothing happened. The girl was safe. For ages, I saw the Mole-Men rolling the phosphorescent ball at her every time I entered my room. For years, in my head, she touched that glowing ball and—I didn’t know what came next, but I knew it was bad.

All of the above happened before I was seven. Shortly before my seventh birthday, we moved from the land of single-story houses built on slabs to the land of multi-story houses built over basements, and I acquired a whole new set of fears. Basements. How the hell could a giant house hover over a big hole in the ground? It was bound to collapse, probably with me underneath it. And if it didn’t—this time—what was lurking at the bottom of those steep stairs, just out of sight? To this day, I still have, shall we say, “issues” with basements, stairs, and dark corners.

When I was about ten, my cousin and I watched the 1963 version of The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It scared the crap out of both of us. In my memory, we are two little girls huddled together on the living room floor, unable to look away. The worst part was we never saw the monster or ghost or whatever it was. Even at that age, I knew if they would just show us the Big Bad, the fear would lessen, but by that age, I loved it.

Having made it to adulthood despite repeated trips to the basement, I now know most of my fears were the unknown, the unexplained. Those carousel horses? It wasn’t the running away; it was the where would they take me? Yes, it might be a great adventure, but it might be somewhere horrifying and deadly. The only way to find out was to go there, and I wasn’t having any of it.

To this day, the usual things, spiders for example, don’t scare me—when I can see them. But the thought of picking up a mitten that’s lain in a dark corner of the closet since spring, sticking my hand into it, and finding a big hairy spider…or a whole nest of them…excuse me, but I need to take a moment and pull myself together.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of self-examination to realize how this all made its way into my work and shaped me as a writer.

In 1826, Ann Radcliffe defined the main characteristics of Horror fiction as terror, the mounting dread that takes place in anticipation of an event, and horror, the disgust or revulsion that takes place after the event. Stephen King, William Nolan, and others have written that Horror is not about the monster behind the door, which once revealed will never be as big or as scary as we imagine it to be, but about the slow opening of that door. My work, like my childhood (and frankly, my adult) fears, generally depends more on Radcliffe’s “terror” than her “horror.” In the stories in The Cuckoo Girls, the threat usually lies just beyond the light, beyond the basement stairs and out of sight. Violence happens, but it is usually off-screen. The monster behind the door is sometimes seen but seldom explained. As Abby, the protagonist of The Ceiling Man, states, “I do not know who he is. I only know he is.”

Mothers and daughters. Sisters. Legacies and prophecies. The inevitable and the avoidable. The sixteen stories of Weird fiction and horror in The Cuckoo Girls, Patricia Lillie's debut collection, feature female protagonists of various ages. Young or old, they must deal with the expectations of their twisted worlds. Some can't escape their fate, some accept it—and some will burn it down.

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