I Me Mine or They Them Theirs? from James W. Ziskin

Which narrator do you prefer to write? To read? First or third? Which is more powerful? More trustworthy? Interesting? Easier to write? More fun to write?

I love writing first person narrations, especially in longer-form fiction. I’ve written third-person in short stories, but all my novels are written in the first person. My latest book, THE PRANK (July 2026), is the first time I’ve used two narrators: thirteen-year-old Jimmy Steuben and his seventh-grade English teacher, Patti Finch. In truth, if you count the newspaper articles I’ve dropped in here and there, you could argue there are three narrators in THE PRANK. And there’s even a brief guest narrator at the end of the book, the Hephaestus, New York chief of police. But he only handles one chapter, so we won’t count him.

What I like most about first person narrators is that they have an agenda. They may be hiding a secret or perhaps they have an axe to grind. Maybe they’re funny or observant in a quirky way. Or unreliable. What they’re not is neutral. They’re in the middle of the action. 

When discussing narrators, I often say that every word they write tells us something about the story AND about themselves. That doesn’t happen with a third-person narrator. Which is not necessarily a negative, but it’s a difference. Personally, I like it when the person telling the story has a dog in the fight. It gives the author a handy tool to ratchet up tension or conflict. And I believe it adds volume and dimension to characters, at least to the narrator. Do readers ever complain that a first-person narrator is paper thin? Maybe, but I would guess it’s less common than complaints about other characters being flat in a story. When you’re the one in the driver’s seat, you make the turns and decide when to brake and when to hit the gas. You—your character/narrator—are the driver, not simply a passenger.

So let’s take a look at how my first-person narrators handle some details differently in THE PRANK. First is a newspaper article—a Greek chorus, if you will—that narrates the inciting incident of my story:

As one would expect from a newspaper piece, this article gives the reader the known facts of the incident and little else. It’s great background for what happened, but there’s no emotion or personal agency here.

A later newspaper article illustrates how the reporter and my two narrators use very different voices to give information about one of the electrocution victims:

The newspaper:

Seventh grader Arthur “Artie” Lionel was a popular, fun-loving boy who followed the Hephaestus High School Red Raiders teams with fanatical devotion. He also rooted for the New York Giants, Yankees, and Knickerbockers. Doubleday gym teacher Stanley Litwaw recalled him as a fast runner, good rope-climber, and scrappy second baseman on the baseball field. “ He had a good glove,” he said. “And he was a fair underhanded foul-shooter on the basketball court.”

Teachers remembered Artie as punctual and polite. His parish priest, Fr. Anselmo, said he was a faithful, pious communicant at St. John’s on Washington Avenue and had served two years as an altar boy.

Color code: yellow=vanilla reportage. Human interest.

            green=faint praise used as filler

Jimmy Steuben, thirteen-year-old main character/narrator reacting to the article:

Well, that stuff about Artie was a load of bull. He rode the bench on the baseball team and was about as fast as a turtle when it came to running. And if managing to hit the rim on one out of ten foul shots was “fair,” then—okay—he was a fair shooter. Sure, he was an altar boy, but only because his ma made him do it. He always told Booker and me that the priest was a pain in the ass. Took too much time telling Artie to comb his hair and smooth his vestibules. I think that’s what he said his altar boy clothes were called. More mumbo jumbo. I saw Father Anselmo a couple of times. Weirdo with a sweaty forehead and Coke-bottle glasses. And Artie a pious communicant? Are you kidding me? He told me him and the other kids once put green JELL-O in the holy water. It was pretty funny, he said. Didn’t sound too “pious” to me. I would’ve loved to see that, though. Green JELL-O in the holy water.

Color code: orange=humorous, deprecating remark

            pink=slang, bad words typical of a 13-year-old                       boy in 1968 

            blue=malapropism or bad grammar

Patti Finch, seventh-grade teacher and other main character/narrator:

Artie…lacked maturity, yet he was one of the taller boys. Good looking with plenty of charm, he nevertheless would tease the girls and posture like a peacock at times, acting as if it were his birthright as a boy to expect attentions and indulgence from the females he wanted to impress. I heard he’d told his friends he’d felt up one of the girls in the class. That disappointed me. Oh, not that he had curiosity and desires. Those were the most natural things in the world for a pubescent boy. No. But bragging and besmirching the poor girl’s name, that was too much. I wanted to slap him for it when I heard it. Now that was all forgotten.

 

    Color code: gray=higher-register, descriptive language,                          appropriate for a teacher to use

Here, the newspaper sticks to the facts, but Jimmy’s personality shines through in his version. For one thing, he doesn’t seem as upset as you might expect about his pal Artie’s death. And for another, he betrays his feelings about religion and his own education with the words he uses. Patti uses better vocabulary and longer, more-complicated sentences, but she’s not afraid to employ some popular language of the time, e.g. “to feel up a girl.” And she shares a personal opinion teachers might not say aloud today, to wit wanting to slap her student.

All of this discussion of different voices should seem obvious and unnecessary, yet sometimes narrators can sound alike. Or maybe they have the exact same sense of humor. It’s important to try to avoid such pitfalls, of course.

One more example from my two narrators, Jimmy and Patti. As background information, I point out that, following the tragic electrocution deaths of the aforementioned Artie Lionel and a teacher named Rick Voohrees, Jimmy and Patti wind up spending lots of time together over Christmas break 1968. The secret that fuels the suspense in my story and in my narrators’ minds is that Patti was secretly dating Rick Voohrees and, unbeknownst to her, Jimmy Steuben is responsible for the accident that killed him and Artie. Patti’s intentions, while selfish perhaps, are not salacious in any way. Jimmy, on the other hand, has other ideas, just as you’d expect from a thirteen-year-old boy.

Patti

Jimmy was polite and friendly, and I think maybe he liked me more than simply as his teacher. A girl learns to recognize the looks from men and boys, after all. The leers, the stares, the open-mouth and vacant eyes… Some men are wolves when pursuing a girl, but Jimmy was sweet and innocent about it. I knew he wasn’t thinking of seduction or sex; he was too young and naïve for that. His was a puppy love, I figured, and I felt flattered that he was attracted to an “old lady” like me. Still, I had to remind myself to be careful, or next I’d be the teacher suspected of inappropriate “fraternization” with a young student.

Jimmy

“You’re a very sensitive young man,” she said to me. “I believe you feel things other boys your age wouldn’t understand.”

Yeah, I was sensitive. And all I could think was that I was feeling good and hot for her, right there in the kitchen on Christmas Eve. Oh, I’d never have the guts to make a pass at her, but that’s what I was thinking. She would never be interested in a thirteen-year-old kid anyways, even if I was going to be fourteen next month.

           Color code: red=descriptions of Jimmy’s feelings                                towards Patti

So which is better, first- or third-person narration? I’ll go out on a limb here and say neither one. They’re both strong in different ways. I’m happy to read both. Why, then, have I written only first person in my novels? Dunno. Maybe I enjoy exploring the personalities of my main characters from the inside.

I look forward to a spirited debate in the comments section.

 *****************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

 

THE PRANK. A picture clipped from Playboy magazine, a missing Swiss Army Knife, and a prank gone terribly wrong conspire to make Christmas 1968 a deadly holiday to remember.

 

“The Holdovers meets The Bad Seed,” THE PRANK features a charming but volatile thirteen-year-old named Jimmy Steuben. He befriends his seventh-grade English teacher, Patti Finch, just days after her boyfriend is killed in an electrocution accident while hanging Christmas lights on his roof. Patti desperately needs respite from her grief, and a chance encounter with Jimmy provides just that. Ignoring the dangers of a potential scandal, the mismatched pair begins spending time together over Christmas break. Patti finds solace in Jimmy’s company; Jimmy discovers desire and infatuation. But what Patti doesn’t know is that it was Jimmy who caused the tragic accident that killed her lover.

From two-time Edgar Award finalist, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winner James W. Ziskin, THE PRANK releases July 2026.

PLACEHOLDER—NOT THE OFFICIAL COVER

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The Voices in My Head — Come On In!

Do you write with multiple narrators? If so, do they have distinctly different voices? And if you don’t use multiple narrators, here’s a question for you: Which do you prefer to write—and to read—first person or third? Which feels more powerful? More trustworthy? More interesting? Easier to write? More fun?

By Dietrich

I like to use multiple narrators to explore the colliding perspectives within a story. Shifting viewpoints allows readers to see the same event through contradictory lenses, keeping tension high and the pace moving.

Jumping between characters reveals their motivations, blind spots, and raw desperation. It makes time jumps and location changes feel organic while staying rooted in character. I often experiment with blending first- and third-person in early drafts, but I eventually commit to whichever serves the story best.

Making characters distinct is key. In the early stages, I work at it; once they come alive, they take over and do much of the work themselves.

I aim for a neutral narrative voice—tight, punchy, and free of authorial intrusion—unless I’m deep inside a character’s head. An older, world-weary ex-cop might think in the gravelly, resigned rhythms of Nobody From Somewhere. A reckless young crook might sound jittery and profane, like in The Get. The shady figures in Crooked offer a chilling casualness that "good guys" lack. Whether male or female, young or old, the goal is authenticity—not slight variations of the same voice.

I gravitate toward the third person. It provides the freedom to move the camera, weave subplots, and build suspense through what characters don’t know. First person is intimate and immediate—putting the reader in the shotgun seat—but it can feel restrictive with a large ensemble cast.

Sometimes I experiment with both to heighten contrast: raw confession in first person against cooler observation in third. A great example of this is Slaughterhouse-Five.

Which is more powerful? For me, third person usually wins. It delivers gut-punch revelations while letting the subtext breathe. As for trustworthiness, neither is inherently reliable—unreliable narrators exist in both. However, first person feels more seductive because the reader is trapped inside a potentially warped worldview—think A Clockwork Orange or The Catcher in the Rye.

Third person feels smoother to write, like directing an ensemble cast rather than performing a monologue. It allows for more complexity and surprise. Still, I can’t imagine the masterpieces of Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain working in anything but first-person. 

The narrator’s voice must serve the story, not overshadow it. I’ve scrapped early drafts to switch perspectives when the original approach didn’t click. I try to keep my own views in check, though a sliver often sneaks in.

It’s about staying fresh and avoiding the same old road. If the voice doesn't pull me in while I’m writing, it won’t pull the reader in either. Fiction thrives on a voice that is distinct, honest, and sometimes dangerous. When it clicks, the whole thing sings.

First Person Problems - by Matthew Greene

Which narrator do you prefer to write? To read? First or third? Which is more powerful? More trustworthy? Interesting? Easier to write? More fun to write?

As a playwright, I used to think first person narration would come most naturally to me. After all, I traffic in dialogue, putting words into the mouths of others. One of the more satisfying parts of the writing process, I think, is discovering a character's vocal tics and habits, expressing thoughts in a way I never would. I love writing dialogue in my books and stories—it's the part that feels most natural, that flows most easily.

My first book was written in first person, with that deep POV that's key to cozy mysteries. But early feedback from editors and beta readers gave me some alarming news: my protagonist's voice wasn't coming through! And here I thought "voice" was the one part of the prose puzzle that I wouldn't have to worry about. 

As I set out to remedy this problem, I did all the things you might expect. I read each chapter aloud, casting myself as Tasha Weaver. I broke up long, clinical paragraphs of narration, opting to let Tasha editorialize as she told the story. I studied reality TV and the "talking heads" that provide commentary and character simultaneously. And through it all, Tasha got her voice.

(Of course, when I look back at that novel and work on its follow-up, I can't help but cringe a bit at some of the blander passages and wonder if there was more I could have done to distinguish my amateur sleuth. But we live and learn.)

When the time came to start a new project, I defaulted to first person narration. I had some hard-won experience, and I wanted the narrative to feel human and dynamic. But much to my dismay, I started feeling the same issues sprouting up. This protagonist's voice was flat and uninspired, recounting events rather than experiencing them. That's when I realized something...

I was getting stuck on a very simple—and entirely too literal—question: If my protagonist is narrating the book, how is he doing so? Does he know she's narrating? Is he literally sitting down at a keyboard to type this out? What if my character doesn't like to write? Should I imagine him dictating these words, like he's being interviewed for a documentary? Was I overthinking all of this?

Like I said, I was approaching this too literally. Maybe it's the fault of literary adaptations on film, where the screenwriter justifies expository narration by cutting away to a shadowy figure typing out the story years later. But when I thought about the protagonists I know and love, it was hard to imagine most of them sitting down to write a 70,000 word account of their adventures. So, how could I justify doing so in their voice?

I started to wonder if this was solely a "me problem." But, as it turns out, there's a term to describe the technique that had proven so elusive: unmediated first person. While a lot of first person narratives do imagine a scenario in which the narrator is literally writing the account and is aware of their readers (epistolary novels, for example, or Watson's narration of Sherlock Holmes), many present a voice that is more oral or internal in nature (Huck Finn or Patrick Bateman come to mind). It takes a reader directly into the narrator's mind without fretting about the mechanics of how these words ended up on the page.

The magic of fiction—go figure!

This realization has been so freeing, as I embark on this new first person project. (For the record, I got about 30,000 words into a draft in third person before I realized I needed to make the switch. Again, we live and learn.) I'm enjoying getting into this character's head and letting his voice come through, unencumbered by my overthinking. As is usually the case, the best work tends to happen when I get out of my own way.

PS: In the meantime, I wrote a short story in epistolary form that was included in Malice Domestic's Mystery Most Senior anthology this year. It's a fun one, so check it out!

Monsters and Metaphors by Poppy Gee

A ski lodge in Tasmania, during the summer. 

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Did you learn anything about storytelling from that? 

In the 1980s and 1990s, my siblings and I spent almost every winter weekend staying in a ski club on Ben Lomond, Tasmania. Our club was a communal lodge in which everyone sleeps side by side in big dormitories and shares the kitchen and lounge room. At that time, it was a free range place to be a kid. The adults would sit downstairs, drinking and revelling, and upstairs, the kids mucked around and did whatever they wanted. We liked turning the lights off and telling scary stories. I wrote one of the scary stories into my ski lodge mystery. This story has remained crystal clear in my mind ever since I heard it as a kid. 

TASMANIAN SKI LODGE, 1996:

The children flop on the cushions and mattress on the floor of the upstairs lounge. They cover their legs with blankets and turn eager faces to her.

“Turn off the lights,” she says. “Scoot in closer.”

In the dark their faces became ghoulish. Someone makes a ghostly noise and they giggle.

Willa begins. “A man and a woman – they’re a couple – are on a long drive, following an old logging road that snakes through the forest below Marsh Mountain. The road weaves past ancient rocks and enormous gumtrees.”

She savours the ripe silence of their anticipation.

“The man knows a shortcut, but the woman doesn’t want to take it. She wants to stay on the logging road. He insists, saying it will cut two hours off their journey. She falls silent as they turn onto a track. The trees grow closely together, blocking out the moonlight. They drive along, listening to the radio. Suddenly, the announcer cuts in.

‘We break this song with an urgent news bulletin. A man has escaped from the Mental Asylum, located on the edge of Marsh Mountain national park. His name is Morris Gruber.’”

The children scream at the mention of the serial killer.

“‘He’s dangerous. If you see him, police advise do not approach him. I repeat: do not approach. Call police immediately. Residents in the Marsh Mountain lowlands are advised to lock their houses. Stay inside.’”

The children squirm.

“The woman in the car is frightened. The road is rough and the car bumps along. Except for the headlights, there’s no light.

‘Maybe we should turn around,’ the woman says.

The man is quiet, thinking about it.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’m scared.’

‘There’s nowhere to turn,’ he tells her.

It’s true, the road is hemmed in with the dense forest. She locks her door, and the one behind her, and tells him to lock his side, too. The road narrows. Thin gnarled trees gather tighter like bars on a cage. The radio fizzles and spurts, the music distorts with static. The song is interrupted again. This time the announcer is panicked, but the static makes it hard to understand what he’s saying.

‘Warning… Marsh Mountain lowlands… Gruber…’ and then the radio cuts out.”

Silence follows, broken by nervous laughter. One of the boys hums dramatic horror movie music.

“Shhh,” someone says.

“They drive deeper into the lowlands, where the stunted old trees are leafless, and the wind blows down from the frozen mountains. Fog shrouds the windows. The woman rubs at the windscreen with her sleeve.

‘How much further?’ she asks.

‘We’re halfway.’ The man’s voice is trembling, he’s terrified.

The road becomes sandy and the tyres spin. The sand deepens and the car grinds to a stop. Fearfully, they climb out and try to push the car out of the sand trap. They push and push but it won’t budge. The wind whistles through the tree branches, and animals rustle in the underbrush. They hear devils fighting over a carcass and it sounds like children being strangled.

The woman starts crying and they get back into the car.

‘I think there’s a farmhouse not far along the road,’ the man says. ‘I could walk there and get help.’

‘I don’t want you to leave me,’ she says.

She begs him to stay. He tells her there’s no choice.

‘Lock yourself in,’ he says, ‘and hide under the blanket.’

And then, he leaves.

The woman huddles on the backseat, pulling the blanket over her. She hears creepy bush noises, creaking branches and helpless animal crying. And then, something else.

At first, she thinks she’s imagining it. But it gets louder. It sounds like a nail being dragged across a blackboard, a knife on a porcelain plate, a fingernail scratching down a window. She’s so scared she can’t breathe. She clenches the blanket and can’t bring herself to look.

A horrible voice calls through the night.

‘Open the door.’

It’s not a human voice.”

Willa repeats the words in a quavering screech, her fingers clawing in the air, like she’s scraping a windowpane. “‘Open the door’.”

No one is laughing now.

“The woman pulls the blanket back. In the moonlight, she sees a hand with long fingernails scraping the window. It’s Morris Gruber. She slides across the bench seat to the other side of the car and unlocks the door. She jumps out and runs in the direction her boyfriend went. Her heart pounds in her throat as she follows the thin, sandy road through the forest. She’s breathless, exhausted, and she slows down, listening. Silence.

Perhaps he’s not chasing her. Perhaps, she’s safe.

And then, she sees her boyfriend. He’s raising one hand, like he’s waving at her. Blood-covered, eyes unblinking, he’s impaled on a post. He’s dead.

She screams and bashes through the forest, trying to find somewhere to hide, to get away from the horror. The scrub scratches her legs, tears at her clothing. She hears Morris Gruber chasing her, but she keeps running. And then she feels pain in both her shoulders, as pfftt,” Willa claws the air, “ten fingernails pierce her skin.”

Screams fill the room. A smaller girl starts to cry, and Thom draws her onto her lap.

“Right now, he’s hiding in the ceiling of a lodge on Marsh Mountain, looking for his next victim.”

The kids scream and scramble around, bashing each other with pillows and smothering each other with blankets. It’s too much for one little girl, and Thom cuddles her until she’s no longer scared.

How did my love of these stories shape my writing? There's a subtext to every domestic horror story that reveals social anxieties and cultural fears. That's what interests me. This story is indirectly about the stigma of mental illness; female safety and the perils of female reliance on male protectors; fear of the Tasmanian wilderness where every year people vanish without trace, and issues of identity and class, as well as the fear of being cleaved off from the herd if we socially transgress. I like stories within stories and this one mirrors themes from the novel. The best scary stories are thought provoking, they linger with you, but they need to be exciting and entertaining too. 

Edith Maxwell's pouring poison

Catriona writes: It's lovely to be welcoming the woman I know as Edith Maxwell back to the blog today. Writing as Maddie Day, she's bringing out the third in a series of cozy wine-country mysteries set near where I live in California - in fact Edith came to visit while on her research trip pre-book one. Before I hand over, I want to say a big congratulations. Book three - you've got a trilogy. It's a thing now!  

Edith writes: Thanks for inviting me back to Criminal Minds, Catriona! I’m delighted to hang out here for a pre-celebration of A Poisonous Pour, the third Cece Barton mystery, which releases next Tuesday.

As this is the Criminal Minds blog, I’ve been thinking about the criminal mind. Describing a mind that way makes it sound like the brains of certain people are inherently criminal. But are they?

 I found an article in the American Psychological Assocation Monitor that points to an answer of Yes. People with a history of aggression and violence seem to have a smaller amygdala and one that functions differently. Toddlers who don’t react with fear to a fearful stimulus can be shown to have a higher incidence of crime later in life. (The good news is that the brain can be changed with appropriate approaches.)

I’m an author who mostly writes into the headlights, pulling apart the misty curtains as I go along discovering the story. That means I usually start with the victim and then pay attention as several plausible suspects make themselves known.

 Most of us, when confronted with a nasty or difficult or devious person, do not resort to murder. In my stories, I try to explore what would push someone over the edge to actually kill that person.

 In this book, we see that Regan Greene is definitely a difficult person at the vintage car show and wine tasting event when the book opens. Cece Barton, who brings her blue 1966 Mustang convertible as well as wine from Vino y Vida, the wine bar she owns, has a prime seat from which to observes the various entanglements Greene gets into.

No surprise, Greene ends up dead. A local artist worked as an admin for Greene and had plenty of conflict with her. The new hardware store owner had a past with Greene as well as new verbal tussles. Even the mayor of my northern California fictional Colinas has a run-in with the victim. And then there’s Cece’s elderly neighbor, Richard, who is a former journalist. He wrote an expose of Greene’s work at the district association, and the police seem to be interested in discovering if he went further than the article.

 

Which among these has the true criminal mind? Mind you, I don’t know anything about these characters’ amygdalas (and I don’t really want to, although I might explore that in a future book). One of them committed the homicide, though.

 Readers: Who’s your favorite fictional criminal? I’ll send a commenter a copy of the new book after I get my box of author copies.

Catriona adds: I'm glad it's just us, because we think that is a perfectly normal question and we all know we'll have a long list of answers! So's not to steal thunder, I'm gonig to leave my answer until the end of the day.

At the Memorial Day weekend classic car show and wine tasting, northern California wine bar owner Cece Barton witnesses heated discussions with local vintage car owners and overbearing association director Regan Greene. After Regan is later murdered, Cece once again enlists her twin, Allie, as her partner-in-sleuthing to clear the name of Cece’s elderly but muckraking neighbor. But they’ll have to act quickly to investigate various suspects in the case before the trail goes sour.

 

Maddie Day writes the Cece Barton Mysteries and other gentle and historical mysteries; as Edith Maxwell, she writes Agatha-Award nominated short crime fiction. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and a proud lifetime member of Sisters in Crime. Maxwell/Day lives north of Boston with her beau and their cat Martin, where she writes, cooks, gardens, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at edithmaxwell.com and at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.

Marianne Dreams, Catriona Screams

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

It’s Eric’s day, but he was too chicken to write about this. Juuuuuust  kidding. I’ve got a guest  tomorrow (Edith Maxwell / Maddie Day – it’s going to be a great post) but I’ve also got a book coming out next week and this topic is perfect for it and for me. Hm, the two things might not be unrelated.

Links and details here

In The Dead Room, newly widowed Lindsay Hale (née Lord) comes home to the house where she grew up and where her brother still lives, and gets lost all over again in what the cover-copy writer called “the thickening mist at the end of memory lane”. Isn’t that great?

The Lord family home is a bungalow inside the gates of a scrapyard – Lord’s Will Provide! – where Lindsay and John spent a childhood making pirate ships out of garden sheds and time machines out of dentists’ chairs. Until John grew up and turned to his own secret places where Lindsay wasn’t part of the plan.

People often ask if I am my protagonists, if my heroines are me. Here’s a bit of proof that I’m not. John’s den, for him and his big boy friends, is a place he calls “The Barrens”, a name Lindsay doesn’t understand. Lord’s Yard is anything but barren! It’s stuffed to the gunwhales.

As John knows though (me too and Angela on Monday as well), “The Barrens” is a reference to a notorious spot in Stephen King’s fictional Maine town of Derry, where kids hang out who shouldn’t, where things happen that definitely shouldn’t. Lindsay has never read about it.

But I bet a lot of us have. Because so many of us read Stephen King at what someone recently – who was that? – called “exactly the right age. Which is ‘far too young’.” I was one of them. Danny Glick at the upstairs window? Yeek. And Neil and I still share a look if poor old Rachel, who’s nearly twenty, attempts a jump and muffs it.

On my laptop where she believes she belongs

But that was enjoyable terror. After Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot, I went straight to The Stand, The Shining and the rest. I read the end of Dumas Key, all alone in my isolated Scottish farmhouse, during a powercut, by the light of a guttering candle. It was only when I closed the book, looked around and thought about going upstairs to bed, with the shadows leaping at me, that I reconsidered my choices. If memory serves, I phoned my mum.

But long before that there was a book that served me true terror, no enjoyment involved. It’s a kids’ book called Marianne Dreams, and searching for the jacket on Wikipedia yesterday gave me the absolute willies all over again.

Why? Marianne is a wee girl who’s ill in bed, amusing herself by drawing sketches of houses and people and trees and dogs, all the usual things. The trouble comes when she falls asleep, which is when the sketches – sprung to life – are waiting for her. She can walk in and out of the jagged, pencil doorways and talk to the stick-figure strangers. When she wakes up and scores through her drawings, all that happens in the next dream is that the people are stuck in the house, trapped behind those scored lines and screaming for help.

That book scared me for years. In fact, decades later, in that same farmhouse on a Scottish hillside but thankfully not alone this time, I saw a trailer for the film they made out of it and had a full-on panic attack.

Why? Well, I managed to go to sleep every night between the ages of five and fifteen only because I believed, tried to believe, worked at believing, that all scary things were imaginary and couldn’t do any real harm. Marianne Dreams, joining nightmares and waking reality with those thick, deep, pencil lines, threatened to destroy a very precarious, although functional, system.

And did I learn anything about storytelling? Oh, you know, this and that. Nothing that helps with Dandy Gilver or Lexy Campbell. But the standalones? Where all those women face down demons and triumph in the end? Or at least gain peace, purpose and found-family? What are they but me insisting that the scary things are imaginary – after all I imagine them – and so they’re powerless. I’m in charge now. I love watching all these women find their way through the Barrens and out the other side, before I send them off into their futures.

I hope anyone who goes back to the scrapyard to vanquish demons when The Dead Room comes out next Friday enjoys this latest journey too.

Cx 

Read 'EM and Learn by Eric Beetner

 What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

At the risk of being cliche, I borrowed my sister’s copy of Skeleton Crew by Stephen King and a few of those stories- The Monkey, Survivor Type, The Raft - scared me to the core. One summer I checked Jaws out of the library and remember that one scaring me, but also being struck by the “adult” nature of some scenes. Not in a violent or sex-filled way, but I remember one passage about Brody going to the bathroom hit me hard as something I knew was a private moment and I wasn’t sure I should be reading that about someone. These people were very real to me, not mere fictional characters on a page. I wanted to respect their privacy.

I read the requisite other King novels like The Shining and Carrie. I started watching an unhealthy amount of horror films and reading horror books, though mostly in short story form. I think horror works best in small doses like that. 

My takeaway from recognizing scares worked better for me in shorter stories was that suspense has a limit. You can stretch the rubber band taut only so far until it breaks. Tension needs to rise and fall. There need to be moments of release along the way. Trying to build suspense over the course of a 300 page novel is impossible. That became apparent early on and I use it every time I try to build suspense in a story, even though I’m not writing horror.

The unknown also stood out as the scariest thing. The best, most effective tales never explained too much. They didn’t show the monsters or feel a need to explain why certain mysterious forces were at play.

The unexplained force in The Raft would have lost its power if we knew exactly what and why. The reasons why The Monkey wants those people dead isn’t the point, and it’s more frightening when we don’t know.

I don’t read nearly as many scary books these days, but the ones that work on me often work for the same reasons. Sara Gran’s Come Closer terrified me and it is the sense of the main character’s loss of control that dominates that story. She knows something is wrong but doesn’t know why. Even when she realizes exactly what is happening to her, the why is never explained and it makes the whole thing so scary.

In life the lack of a why drives most of our anxiety. It can cripple us with fear. Of course it would work on the page.

Sometimes the simple act of confronting death would do a number on me. I don’t know if it was fear, exactly, but the trauma that I felt after reading Where The Red Fern Grows deeply scarred me, and many in my generation. There is a reason why in my latest trilogy I did NOT kill off the dog. I absolutely learned the power of depicting loss in a novel. Making us care for a character - even an animal - or creating a bond between two characters means that if we put the readers through a loss then you can create a lasting impression, though it might not be the one you want if it becomes a scar they carry with them for the rest of their lives.

When a writer goes to more extreme measures with violence or gore, and I’m thinking of someone like Joe R. Lansdale who writes some very effective horror stories that don’t shy away from spilling some blood, then it touches on a different part of our internally held fear. Just being forced to imagine such horrific images and scenarios can strike fear into us. Lansdale knows the difference between shock and suspense. He delights in shocking us, but those shocks only last a fleeting amount of time. Building longer, more sustained suspense creates a contrast and a counterpoint to the moments of shock. 

Fear remains one of the most impactful feelings authors can instill in a reader. Harder, in many ways, than even the notoriously difficult to elicit laughter. 

If there is a lesson here or a profound truth, it is that anytime of writing can offer a takeaway. There are thing other be learned from anything we read, regardless of genre.