Category Archives: Guest Posts

Guest Post by Matthew Warner

Dear Dad,

I never told you the details of my one-week stint in a psychiatric unit while in college. You frankly don’t deserve them, but they’re good fodder for this column about how to write emotional dark fiction.

I’m too old to care that this is too personal of a thing to share publicly. I own my skeletons, unlike you. It’s what gives the stories I tell an emotional engine. Characters who connect with readers on a gut level are more compelling than any supernatural horror I can imagine.

Your fecal screed to me of 2003 — the last time you ever spoke to me — sits in my craw. You couldn’t understand why I was so angry with you for cheating on Mom and divorcing her, so you attributed my reaction to mental illness. You wrote, “The mental breakdown that you had in college was when the bull should have been taken by the horns. But, like always, it was brushed under the rug to ‘go away.’ . . . It is clear that when you were medicated during the incident at JMU, the change in your personality was obvious and positive.”

Yeah. A short-term prescription for Navane, an antipsychotic, is what fixed my wagon. What a wonder drug.

You believe that in 1993, I had a psychotic episode, rooted in mental health issues I inherited from your own father. (Of course, you never said you suffer from any issues yourself. I guess manic depression is a recessive gene, huh?)

Here’s what really happened. I was having a hard time adjusting to university life. I felt like an outsider. I was always lonely, desperate to fill the romantic void. I had deep feelings of social inadequacy that dated back to being bullied in elementary school. The things that gave my life shape — my studies, my writing, my piano playing — weren’t enough. Religion might have filled that void, but I was too turned off by the ugly Christian fundamentalism I encountered on campus.

Worst of all, I was terribly anxious of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Although I couldn’t establish a long-term romance with anyone, I sometimes lured women into the sack. But I would stupidly not use protection, and then I would spend months driving myself down chasms of fear about whether I’d contracted AIDS. I couldn’t tell you about any of this. How could I? You were so judgmental.

You know what? I hadn’t grown up yet. I had issues. I didn’t exit puberty until age twenty-five, just in time for you to leave Mom for your aerobics partner. That’s my excuse.

Shortly before my twentieth birthday, a friend and I went skiing in Canada during spring break. We smoked a little weed and hit the slopes. One day, he brought out some psychedelic mushrooms, which I’d never had before. “These are really good,” he said as I ate them, not revealing that they were laced with amphetamine. Soon, I was not only skiing down the slopes, I was damn near doing cartwheels down them.

When we got home, I came down with bronchitis. And I didn’t take good care of myself. I kept attending classes and not resting. I became sicker.

Finally, I fainted during a music rehearsal at the Methodist youth fellowship. I fell backward off the piano bench and gave myself a concussion on the floor. The paramedics took me across the street to Rockingham Memorial Hospital. They did a blood test, and guess what they found? They assumed I was a drug addict. The ER doctors said they wanted me to get some “mild” counseling, and they would pursue legal channels if I refused. Next thing I knew, I was in the fifth floor psychiatric unit.

During the next week, the concussion and bronchitis improved, and as I came off the heavy medications they gave me, I started to feel like my old self. But something else positive happened during those thrice-daily group therapy sessions with people who’d attempted suicide or who were recovering from overdoses. I seized the opportunity to talk about my problems. I opened up about my anxieties and insecurities. I had private talks with a psychiatrist, who helped me browbeat myself into behaving more responsibly. Over the subsequent months, I may not have transformed into a happy, bushy tailed college boy, but I became a slightly more self-accepting one.

You never considered the possibility I may have taken a step toward maturity. Instead, this episode went onto your scoreboard, detailed in your letter, for Reasons Why Matt Is An Ungrateful Mentally-Ill Son And I’m A Good Father.

We have issues to work out, you and I. If you’re brave enough to read my new collection from Thunderstorm Books and Cemetery Dance Publications, DOMINOES IN TIME, you might appreciate how complex and passionate my feelings are about you. When a writer taps dark emotions, it makes for better dark fiction.

Maybe, Dad, you’ll understand how my stay in the psychiatric unit informed the story “At Death We’ll Not Part.” Maybe you’ll see how your divorcing Mom influenced “Second Wind.”

And hell, maybe you’ll grow up, too.

“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his blood.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Visit Matthew Warner at matthewwarner.com.

The Death and Resurrection of the Horror Shelf

October 16, 2015

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Guest Post by Annik Valkanberg

Starting in the late 1970’s, if you mentioned the word horror, people assumed you meant cheerleaders getting chopped up into kibbles by either a paranormal creature or a psychopath with an inordinate amount of hit points.

In fact, people were so used to Jason and Freddy that the reading public started to push back on the genre. Things got so bad that authors and publishers did strange things to say that their horror books were not horror…they were…ummm…thrillers! or suspense! Anything but the dreaded “H” word. Even retailers like Barnes and Noble, who once had several shelves labeled “Horror” which mostly meant “Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and a couple of others we accidentally picked up from the distributor”, began to pull those labels and switch it to Thriller! or Suspense! or even Cookbooks!

Those slasher movies were incredibly cheap to make, exploited partially-clad young women who would scream loudly when they met the antagonist, and made a boat-load of money in the theaters. The books weren’t as successful, which bled over into the other sub-genres of the horror market. Ghost stories, paranormal creatures who fell in love, apocalyptic zombie-fests were all tarred and feathered during the mid 80’s into the 90’s. The horror market collapsed, and the authors and publishers began to either publish titles under established categories like “thriller” or created new ones, such as “paranormal romance”. The latter didn’t even exist in the 1980’s, and now bookstores have whole sections dedicated to books such as Twilight. Amazon shows 18,834 ebooks in the Kindle Paranormal Romance category. It’s a huge market, and the romance crossover is bringing in people who didn’t read anything else but straight romance for years.

There are folks who do enjoy the slasher bloodfests, and whole sub-genres grew out of the grave of horror. Pioneers like John Skipp helped to create an even bloodier version of the slasher novel, and the Splatterpunk niche was born. Some authors combined some horror elements with bizarre, LSD flashback inspired bits and the Bizarro niche burst onto the scene. Carlton Mellick III’s novel The Haunted Vagina is an example which will make you wonder if the world isn’t ending tomorrow because now you’ve seen everything.

It’s been a couple of decades since the word “horror” was the proverbial kiss of death for a book. Self-published authors are poking their heads out of the shadows and using the word on their book covers. With the general acceptance of all of the new niches, especially paranormal romance, the publishing industry is including that word in the book descriptions and on dust jackets once again. It is important, however to always be vigilent about the book market. If something like the Great Horror Death ever happens again, you need to be aware of how the industry is reacting. It’s better to re-classify your book before the Big 5’s creaky machine gets around to it. Authors and small publishers need to keep on their toes, and that means reading what’s new and trending in the industry at least several times a week.

To risk getting caught twisting in the winds of market share just fills one with a sense of horror.

World Building in Dark Fiction

October 15, 2015

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Guest Posts World-building 1 Comment

Guest Post by Pamela K. Kinney

Whether your tale is set in a real place or an imagined one, you need to establish your characters’ world so that the reader can suspend disbelief and fully engage with the story. Not only horror, this includes from science fiction and fantasy. There must be reasons why a character or a whole slew of them reacts as they do in their world. Their actions, their thoughts, the reason they fall in love or hate someone, why they kill, every bit of their reactions comes from how their universe revolves. World building determines the place your characters live in.

World building is the process of constructing an imaginary world. World building in horror and dark fantasy often involves the creation of a back-story, maybe history, geography, ecology, supernatural creatures, and people for the novel, novella, or even a short story. The short story will consist of a scene unlike the longer novella or novel. This can be lesson from a sentence to a paragraph’s worth of world building.

The more differences to the mundane world you write into your plot, the more the writer should focus on getting those details right. Set them so they almost fade into the background, and that way, the reader will focus on the characters and the story. There is no need to info dump those aspects of the world right away in the first chapter or two.

It is not just the big details the writer should worry about, but those small things that can escape attention. Small details sharpen the world. Think of a movie. You have the main actors. But you also have the extras, or background as they are called in the movie business. You’re thinking, “No, extras aren’t that important, not when your hero or heroine are the real focus of the story.” Take a look at a haunted house story, It’s not just the humans who are stuck in the building and trying to get out. The house itself and the ghosts are the extras or background. All this makes your story a more rounded one.

Be consistent in your world building rules. Keep them as you delve deeper into the story. Once the manuscript is done, editing will help in catching these kinds of mistakes. I have files on all my characters in my stories, adding their traits, what they do for a living, and much more. This keeps straight my characters and the world they exist in. After all, if what you’ve written goes against any of the rules you’ve created in your world, then there has to be a logical, rational reason, reasonable to you, but most of all, to your readers. Such as if iron is poisonous to the fey, but suddenly later in the story, the character can touch a fence of iron, there must be a reason why they can do this at the time (maybe they had found a spell that enables them to). Don’t just have them unable to do something because it isn’t convenient to your story. Being consistent is what makes the suspension of disbelief your readers are willing to have if you do it right.

Your world’s historical past should not overwhelm or dominate your current story. If it does, then you will bore your readers, most of all, you’re writing the wrong fiction. A paragraph of it is all you need.

When writing fantasy, building a world that is extraordinary and vivid is often the heart of the tale, even the dark world of a horror novel. The stranger that fantastical world is, the more important it becomes for the author to create a reality that readers can relate to and make them feel part of it. Throw horror into the equation and now the writer must add a visceral component into the mix. When it comes to horror, Hell might be the world the writer is building. Don’t just stick to the physical horrors. Develop the emotional and psychological plight of it. For horror is about the emotion; the fear you want the reader to feel as they read. This would flesh out the horror world; make it 3D and not a flat world.

Magic is not only in high fantasy, but it can used be in dark fantasy or horror. Look at George RR Martin’s Games of Thrones—magic is as much a part of the frightening elements and monsters as the noble families plotting to kill each other are. There’s a reason tropes like magic is evil and black magic exist. Take deals with the Devil, or human sacrifice. Look at the world that JK Rowling built. How dark this young adult fantasy grows as it progresses, to more horror than light fantasy.

Now, get out there and start planning the world of your scary story. One that will raise the hairs on the back of the reader’s neck.

About the Author:

Author of Haunted Richmond, Haunted Richmond II, Haunted Virginia: Legends, Myths, and True Tales, and Virginia’s Haunted Historic Triangle: Williamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown, & Other Haunted Locations, Pamela K. Kinney has written fiction that enables her readers to journey to worlds of fantasy, go beyond the stars, and dive into the vortex of terror. One of her stories proved heart-stopping enough to be runner up for 2013 WSFA Small Press Award. As Sapphire Phelan, she also writes bestselling, award winning paranormal romance with dark heroes and heroines with bite!

Find out more about her at her websites: http://www.pamelakkinney.com/ and http://www.sapphirephelan.com/.

About the Book:

Travel to Petersburg, Virginia, and the surrounding areas of Colonial Heights, Hopewell, Prince George, Dinwiddie, and nearby Ettrick-Matoaca, Enon, and Chester to discover what spirits, monsters, UFOs, and legends await the unwary. Why are the Union and Confederate spirits still fighting the Civil War in the battlefields? Who is the lady in blue who haunts Weston Plantation House? Learn what the phantoms at Peter Jones Trading Post will do to keep from being photographed. Drink tea with runaway slaves still hiding on the top floor above the Blue Willow Tea Room. Are Edgar Allan Poe and his bride still on their honeymoon at Hiram Haines Coffee and Ale House? Why does the Goatman stalk young lovers? Meet the ghosts of Violet Bank Museum that greet guests at the house. Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.

Schiffer Publishing Amazon Barnes and Noble

It Lurks Within You

October 13, 2015

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Character Guest Posts Horror 2 Comments

Guest Post by Tonya L. De Marco

“I’m gonna kill you!”

How many times do we hear or say that every week? Chances are quite a few. It’s usually a harmless statement, but I like to think about the people that mean it. The people that silently scream it over and over in their heads while hiding it behind a serene smile. They march through everyday life as if in a masquerade, their faces reflecting only the emotions they choose to show us. Hiding behind the facades are images of spurting blood and victim’s pleas for mercy. The beast must be fed.

Those are the monsters I’m afraid of. And those are the monsters I’m inspired to transform into characters for my stories. Not the green alien creatures, werewolves, vampires or zombies…but the monsters that walk among us every day hiding in plain sight. The killer that sits in the next cubicle vetting her next victim. The classmate of our children who spends his free time studying blueprints of the school building rather than doing his homework. The ones that the neighbors and friends tell the reporters that “he was always so nice, so quite. He just stayed to himself.”

I’m intrigued by serial killers and, in particular, monstrous women. I think my fascination comes from the fact that I believe we all have demons deep inside of us that are capable of the heinous acts committed by these murderers. We all feel some hate or have a desire at one time or another for vengeance. What is it that keeps us from acting upon these impulses? What is different about them that allows their beasts the freedom to come forth?

Love and passion can turn to hate and thirst for revenge in the blink of an eye. So what makes someone follow through on those violent thoughts? What’s the difference between a person who “snaps” and may never kill again as opposed to someone that murders over and over again, carefully plotting and planning the crime? How are we, the normal people, able to control our rages? These are the questions I seek to answer in writing my dark characters.

My inspiration comes from real-life killers, past and present. The atrocities that humans are capable of inflicting against each another are far more terrifying to me than the stereotypical monster. I typically make my characters experience horrible things in their past to help explain why they might be the way they are. Research has shown that the amygdala is enlarged in the brains of sociopaths, which may lead to answers about what drives their urges.

Everyone has the potential inside themselves. Therein lies the biggest fascination for me. People will say, “I could never do that.” And, after seeing the movie SAW, many reiterated that they couldn’t make those life-and-death choices. I respectfully disagree. I invite those folks to sit down and meet their amygdala, the primitive brain. Constantly alert to the needs of basic survival, the amygdala would certainly trigger a “kill or be killed” reaction even in people that, in their higher brain, believe they have no capacity for.

I’m a petite red headed woman and even I carry this burden. For me, instead of applying a weapon to flesh, I feed my beast with pen to paper.

About the Author:

Tonya L. De Marco is a Costume Designer, Cosplayer, Model, and Author. She splits her time between the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. She’s been hooked on costumes and costuming since she was a preteen. Tonya has over twenty years of sewing experience which includes designing and sewing numerous costumes for school plays and local theater.

Tonya cosplays across multiple genres including anime, sci-fi, steampunk, Disney, comic book, and pin-up. She attends several conventions per year across the country and enjoys meeting and talking with people about cosplay. Tonya has been involved in costume contests/masquerades as both a participant and a judge—at different times, of course!

When she isn’t sewing or writing, Tonya enjoys spending time with her family, friends, and her three adopted miniature donkeys – Rogue, Storm, and Phoenix. Visit her at GuyAndTonya.com.