One thing I keep coming back to when people ask where my ideas come from is this: the plot is fictional, but the fear usually isn’t.
That does not mean something in one of my books happened to me. Please do not read one of my horror novels and start building a criminal timeline of my life. 😂
What I mean is that I usually understand the emotion underneath the horror before I understand the whole plot.
I know what helplessness feels like.
I know what it is like to feel a room change before anything has actually happened.
I know what it is like for your body to register danger before your brain has caught up enough to explain why.
Sometimes it is footsteps.
Sometimes somebody’s voice changes.
Sometimes nothing obvious happens at all. You just know.
That interests me so much more than somebody jumping out from behind a door.
The scary part, to me, is often the waiting. The doubt. The few seconds where you are trying to tell yourself everything is probably fine while another part of you is already screaming that it is not.
That is the kind of thing trauma teaches you whether you want the lesson or not.
And I don’t need to recreate the trauma itself on the page to use what it taught me.
I can take the feeling and move it somewhere else.
That is how a voice in a tunnel becomes more than a creepy sound.
If the voice is random, okay. Creepy.
But if it is the voice of somebody you miss so badly you would give anything to hear them again, now we have a problem.
Now there is temptation.
Now there is grief.
Now you have to ask whether the person following that voice is actually making a stupid decision or whether they are making an incredibly human one.
That is the difference I care about.
The same thing happened with The Grief Counselor. The premise is horrifying, but what got under my skin while writing it was not simply the idea of a killer.
It was trust.
I had to write someone who genuinely understands grief. Someone who can sit across from a person in the worst moment of their life and say the right thing. Someone people believe is safe.
And then I had to get inside his head far enough to understand how he could also become something completely different.
That made me nervous.
I actually had to stop writing for a little while because I did not like where my brain had to go to make Elias Shepherd feel real.
That was new for me.
I grew up on horror. I do not scare easily. My granny always had horror movies on, and I have always loved Stephen King and all kinds of horror and thrillers.
But writing from inside the mind of somebody who could understand grief so intimately and still manipulate it?
Yeah.
That one bothered me.
And honestly, I am glad it did.
If something is going to frighten me enough to write an entire book around it, I want there to be something underneath the trope.
I do not want horror just because horror is supposed to be horrible.
I want the scary thing to have a reason.
The tunnel matters because of who might call from inside it.
The counselor matters because he is supposed to be safe.
The bones matter because they are sitting underneath a place that was ordinary five minutes ago.
That is where my stories usually begin.
Not with the monster.
With the thing underneath it that already scares me.