Mining Your Own Fears to Write Nerve-Shredding Horror
I’m pretty sure my house is haunted.
As far as I know, there have been two deaths here. There’s definitely a spot in the hallway which my cats run past like their paws are on fire. And a couple of weeks ago I had a real icy-finger-down-the-spine moment: I was going to bed at night, crossing the hallway, when I glanced to my right and saw a man crawling out of the kitchen doorway. When I looked again, he was gone.
In the seconds I stood there frozen, my brain supplied the reasonable explanation that maybe my husband was in the kitchen, and he’d just been stooping to pick something up from the floor near the doorway.
Then I heard him walking around upstairs. When I checked inside the kitchen, there was nobody there.
Did I lie awake in bed that night, listening for the sound of something dragging itself across the floor? Yes, I did.
Will I be using this as inspiration for a scene in a future book? Absolutely.
I was chasing ghosts long before I lived here, though. I’ve been on a few ghost hunts over the years, in stately homes and manor houses where people have reported having spooky encounters, though the creepiest experience I’ve had (at least until the Crawling Man) was in a castle where I heard someone running downstairs in the pitch black — and of course, there was nobody there.
But whether I discover something spooky or not, I love exploring creepy places around where I live in North Wales; ruins and cemeteries and even an abandoned village. I try to imagine the lives and events that have played out there, and how they’ve fallen into ruin. Naturally, my mind wanders to macabre places — and suddenly I have a nugget of an idea for a story.
A lot of what scares me goes into my horror novels. I find it helps to create an authentic sense of dread in my writing if it’s something that actually gives me chills.
My new YA horror, The Devouring Light, features two things which terrified me as a child (and they still do, honestly): quicksand and leeches. I think my fear of both these things stemmed from movies I watched when I was around five or six; the leeches were my misinterpretation of the ceti eels in Wrath of Khan, and the quicksand terror stemmed from a particularly brutal death scene in Krull. There’s also a sinister abandoned house called the Light which lures in its victims, then sinks its teeth in deep until there’s no way to escape.
For me, a lot of horror writing is about facing what scares me… or at least laying it bare so that other horror fans can squirm right alongside me. Tapping into my own fears makes it easier to lean into that sense of dread and consuming terror, then recreate it on a page.
I think that’s why I don’t mind that my house is haunted, and why I go ghost-hunting and exploring creepy places looking for inspiration — because if I find something that scares me, I usually find a good horror story there.
Discover the Book
When Haden Romero and her rival, Deacon Rex—alongside their bands, including Haden’s ex, Cairo—are stranded on their way to a rock festival, she thinks missing the gig is the worst thing that could happen.
She’s wrong.Marooned in treacherous swamplands with no way out, the group stumbles upon an eerie, decaying house. It seems like a safe haven, a place to wait out the storm.
The house, however, isn’t just abandoned—it’s been waiting for them.
Bodies begin to pile up. The walls start to close in. Twisted secrets come to light. And unless Haden and the others can survive long enough to escape, the house will claim them—forever.
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