What Scares You? Reds Confess.

RHYS BOWEN:

Well, I've managed to survive another Halloween! I have survived weeks of all the old movies on TV being horror, of everyone else saying what fun they have had in haunted houses and even walking through a drug store and having a coffin suddenly open beside me and a hand coming out! Confession: I'm a wimp. I do not like to be scared. The only horror movies I've ever tolerated were the "Giant killer tomatoes swallow New York" variety. Anything to do with noises in the cellar or possessed dolls and I'm out of there. If I saw something like that I'd wake at every creak of my house for weeks.

So I guess I'm a scaredy cat. I was even trying to come up with a Halloween costume that didn't require a lot of work and thought of draping a fake spider's web over my hair with a fuzzy spider clinging to it. Tried it in the store and couldn't do. I knew the spider was fake. I could hold it in my hand and see it was fake. But the thought of a big black spider on my head was simply too much for me.

Another confession: I'm scared of spiders. I know they are good for our environment. If I find one in the bathtub I put a glass over it, slide a piece of paper under the spider and carry it out to be released in nature. So you see I'm good and humane. But my hand is shaking all the time. I did this rescue once when my friends and I rented a house in Sedona, AZ. Big spider on the ceiling. I tipped him into a glass, carried him out and released him into the creek. Then a friend showed his picture to our jeep tour guide. "Oh my God. That was a brown recluse," he exclaimed. I had had one piece of paper between me and the most venomous spider in the US!  And I was once in the Outback in Australia and went to the loo. As I shut the door and sat on the seat I watched a HUGE huntsman spider come and sit on top of the door. You know, the kind of spider that kills mice? And I knew if I tried to open that door it would drop onto my hand. I contemplated spending the rest of my life in that loo. Waiting for the spider to die of old age or get hungry and go hunting elsewhere. In the end I moved my hand oh so cautiously toward the latch, lifted it, moved the door inch by inch and then ran like hell, all the time imagining that the spider was now sitting on my back!

So good reason to be scared of spiders. But I'm also scared of moths. I don't like the way they flutter about. I met a black moth with a twelve inch wing span in Mexico once. We had seen it flying around the gardens and then the kids announced it had flown into our condo and into my bedroom. I laughed. "Nice try." Then I pulled back the drapes and....... it flew into my face. So good reason to be scared of moths too.

And I'm scared of the dark. Too vivid an imagination, I suppose, and growing up in a big old house that was definitely haunted. But I'm not scared of snakes, or heights, or even clowns. Bad reviews? Maybe. People hating my next book? Definitely.

So now it's your turn, Reds. What are you scared of?

HALLIE EPHRON: The dark. Seriously. Going into a cave with no flashlight, or even with one freaks me out. Walking in a forest in the dark. No thank you.

Spiders? Not so much. We have so many, and the ones in the house are usually smaller than a nickel and as far as I know they're not poisonous. I just scoop them up and take them outside where they can feast on mosquitos and flies. Love their webs. Except when I walk into one in the morning. Ick.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Huh.. That is such a good question. Crazy drivers, driving at night on highways.. I can imagine all kinds of horribleness. I can kind of handle spiders, though I really hate walking through a spider web.  I am not fond of centipede and millipedes,  either of which send me screaming from the room. Oh, and those waterbug things.  Dark streets, sure. But that's..just common sense.

The thing I am most afraid of is being surprised. If someone leaps out at me, I freak.

And I always think the garbage disposal is going to grab my hand somehow.

I am also inordinately afraid of food poisoning. If food is slightly off, or even might be, I toss it. Does that count?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm with you on the horror movies, Rhys. I've never understood why people like them. Can you believe I've never even seen Psycho??? Not afraid of spiders, or snakes (except sensibly.) Or bats. I don't get clowns, either, but I'm not afraid of them. I am, however, more than a bit claustrophobic. I don't like being packed in with bunch of people, and I don't like being underground. So you can see why I take the bus whenever possible in London. Rush hour on a packed tube train in a deep tunnel is not my idea of fun! And I always think, "What if the train stops and we're stuck here????" Which happens often enough that it's not pure paranoia...

LUCY BURDETTE: No, no I don't like to be scared either! When talking about movies they enjoyed, my family will often add "but not for you, too violent, or scary, or pick your adjective..." Rhys, when we were preparing for our trip to Australia, I started reading Bill Bryson's IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY. I had to stop partway through because of all the poisonous creatures he was describing. Did you read BLIND DESCENT by Nevada Barr? Her character had to go into deep, narrow caves, and so Barr did this to prepare for writing. Not for me--I'd have to switch to a different plot.

Debs, I don't like being in a crowded elevator either--I think being short is a disadvantage here because all you can see are the bodies pressed in around you. And I don't like highway driving either--too many crazies going way too fast and not leaving nearly enough room.

RHYS: Oh yes, Lucy. I agree about Australia. When I took my kids there for the first time my daughter Anne read out loud on the plane about every kind of lethal creature so that her siblings were freaked out when we went for a walk in the Bush. And I'm not really claustrophobic but like Hallie can't watch movies where divers have to squeeze through submerged caves.

But I don't have a fear of the garbage disposal. Pfew. However I now realize I am scared of the shower. I always worry about turning off the cold first and getting scalded or turning off the hot and getting frozen. What a bunch of neurotics we are. OR ON THE OTHER HAND, we are simply gifted with overactive imaginations, which is what we are such stellar writers!

So now it's your turn. What are you scared of?

Don't Blame Stephen King

RHYS BOWEN: Catriona McPherson is one of the most fun and funny people you're ever likely to meet. She has a brilliant and self-deprecating sense of humor (if you can understand her Scottish accent!) and the interesting thing to me is that she writes some dark and brilliant tales of suspense.
Today she's visiting Jungle Reds to celebrate the publication of her new book, The Child Garden. Welcome Catriona.

CATRIONA MCPHERSON:

Long before Pennywise in It, all children everywhere found all clowns everywhere absolutely terrifying. (I thought about presenting that as no more than my opinion, but  . . . come on, it’s an objective fact.)

And it’s not just clowns. The list of things that are supposedly cute, hilarious and/or adorable but are actually blood-curdling is a long one.  The Singing Ringing Tree aside (Google it if you were lucky enough not to be a kid in Britain in the seventies. Lock your doors first.), there’s The Wizard of Oz – her feet roll up! There’s speaking dolls with eyes that move and lips that don’t! My sister Audrey had one of these dastardly objects, called Rosebud. Always a sinister name thanks that other movie, right? Rosebud said innocent-sounding things like “”Can I have a biscuit?” in an accent like Julie Andrews’, but she didn’t fool me. Add ventriloquist dummies and automata and I think you’ll agree that hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Or maybe, just maybe, I was an over-imaginative wee girl.  The case for the prosecution can be put in a nutshell if we consider Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.  

One Christmas when I was young and impressionable I got a splendid volume called The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature (Collins) from my granny. It was chock full of delights, including two poems by RLS  -  ‘Bed in Summer’ and ‘A Thought’ - that were charming and adorable and proved that the treasury editors were miracle-workers. You know how they managed to get a two-minute trailer of Get Shorty with no effing and jeffing in it? Well, similarly, every other poem in A Child’s Garden apart from those two is as black as death and midnight.

Okay, slight exaggeration. Many of the other poems in it are disturbing to some degree and were too much for me, especially considering where I read them:  the shadowy reference reading room of a Victorian public library. There I sat, all alone, surrounded by carved wood the colour of graveyard dirt and velvet carpet the colour of old blood, drinking in such gems as these . . .

From ‘Windy Nights’: whenever the trees are crying aloud  (What?) … By on the highway, low and loud, by at the gallop goes he (He who? (He, the strange man you thought was the wind, who’s not the wind at all, who’s riding past your house.)) By at the gallop he goes and then by he comes back at the gallop again. (Oh, great.)

From ‘Shadow March’ (Shadow March???): All around the house is the jet-black night, it stares through the window-pane (Really? It doesn’t just gallop by? It stops and stares in the windows? Super. Anything else?) … All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tram- (You know what? I was fine with the window thing, actually.)

Or, from ‘Good and Bad Children’, the simple and straight-to-the-point threat of bodily harm: children you are very little and your bones are very brittle . . .

Yup, A Child’s Garden of Verses made a big impression on me. Then I grew up – Well, I grew tall – read Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot and forgot about it. And because I’m not a very deliberate kind of writer, I was as surprised as anyone when it bubbled back up and found its way onto the pages of a story I was writing last year. I can clearly remember seeing my heroine Gloria Harkness open a copy to read to her son at night when he was tucked up in bed. Really?  I thought. Apparently so. So much so that the book, published this week,  is called The Child Garden.

I’m giving away a copy of The Child Garden at Jungle Reds today. It’s not uniformly cheerful, I have to say; but it’s not as dark as that sweet volume of charming poems for children.

Catriona McPherson writes the Agatha and Macavity winning Dandy Gilver detective series, set in her native Scotland in the 1920s. The latest, A DEADLY MEASURE OF BRIMSTONE, won a third consecutive Left Coast Crime award this year. In 2013 she started a strand of darker (that’s not difficult) standalones. The first, AS SHE LEFT IT, won an Anthony award and THE DAY SHE DIED was shortlisted for an Edgar. THE CHILD GARDEN is out on the 8^th of September.

Catriona immigrated to America in 2010, and lives in northern California with a black cat and a scientist. She is proud to be the 2015 president of Sisters in Crime. www.catrionamcpherson.com

 

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

RHYS: Halloween is almost upon us. How could we forget? All the stores are full of creepy things—fake blood dripping from severed fingers, zombies rising from tombstones, the grim reaper waiting to grab the unwary.  And worst of all, fake hairy spiders in webs.  I have to confess that I’ve never been to keen on  Halloween.  I don’t mind the candy (and yes, I do buy about three packets too many of Snickers and Kit Kat) but I don’t like being scared.  I guess that’s why I don’t read or watch horror. It’s all too real to me. I can tolerate the type of horror movie in which giant tomatoes swallow Manhattan, but movies like the current Annabelle in which a doll is possessed by a demon and a baby is in grave danger…. There  is no way I’d ever want to watch.

Okay, I’m a wimp, I know. Or I am blessed with too vivid an imagination. I can tell myself they are only actors, but it’s no good. I’m actually not at all scared of snakes. I killed four copperheads when we lived in Texas.  I guess we all have silly, irrational things that we are scared of. Some people are scared of clowns. I’ll confess to being scared of the dark, of spiders AND of moths. I don’t like the way they flutter at me. And once my family rented a condo in Mazatlan, Mexico and we saw a black moth with a wing span of about eight inches (I’m not kidding). It was fluttering in the palm trees outside our condo.  I went out and when I came back the kids said, “Hey mom, that moth went into your bedroom.”
“Ha ha,” I said. “Very funny.”
“No, really,” they said.
I didn’t believe them. I went into the bedroom and started pulling back the blinds around each window. “You see” I said “You can’t scare me with your silly….” And then it flew out in my face.  My scream could be heard by passing cruise ships.
But as well as moths my other irrational fear is of showers. I’m always afraid I’ll turn it on and get a blast of cold water coming at me, Or I’ll turn it the wrong way and be scalded to death. So  I have to turn on the tap very carefully while still outside the shower, then ease myself inside. Silly, huh?
So Reds, do confess. Do you have any silly or irrational fears? Do you like being scared?

LUCY BURDETTE: wow, Rhys, I would have screamed too! Here's one of the things I hate most: house centipedes. The worst moment came two weekends ago. I'd brought my fancy black dress with feathers all around the knees. When I went to take it out of the closet, one of those creatures burst out of my feathers. I screamed and screamed and John had to go in there and hunt it down. I worried all night that there were more hiding in my finery!

I'm scared of other things, like crazy maniac drivers on highways, but that seems reasonable to me...

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: No. I do not like being scared. I do not like being surprised. And I do not like crawly things. If I saw a centipede? I would completely disapparate.  I recently posted a photo of a HUGE spider on Facebook, it was in our back yard and I was incredibly proud of myself for taking the photo without flinching. .Too much. If I see a spider in the house? Forget about it.  Why is that so scary? They are small, and not particularly fast. Once i had a BAT in my condo. I was by myself, so I knew I could either freak out or handle it. And I was alone. I mean--a BAT! It's a long story, but I prevailed. I am loathe to admit it, but if I see any kind of bug, I call Jonathan. Is that--awful?

Maniac drivers--they are ridiculously everywhere. And pedestrians who SAUNTER, or LEAP out, and are on the phone.. And I am the most scared of something bad happening to someone I love. But that's not silly.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I admit to getting creeped out when I'm alone at night in an old house or the library. I KNOW there's no one lurking in the dark and I don't believe in ghosts or other Hallowe'en-type phenomena, but it sets me on edge just the same. And of course, whenever my kids are traveling or driving or (and this is a BIG bugaboo) swimming in the river, I'm afraid Something Bad will happen to them. But like Hank, I can't really say that's silly.

I do have one that it genuinely silly. Ever since I read a scene in one of Lee Child's books where someone looks through the peephole in a hotel room and gets shot in the eye, I've been afraid to look through peepholes. Since I'm not a Russian mobster or corrupt military officer (frequent victims in Lee's books), I can rationally state my chances of getting shot in the eye are extremely low. But still.

HALLIE EPHRON: Lucy's house centipedes terrify me, too. They're like creatures from another planet. And they slither up from the drains. And... AAAAAGGGH!

And oh thanks, Julia. Now I'll be afraid to look through peepholes in doorways.

I get really creeped out by portraits where the eyes "follow" you. Walking through a spider's web and feeling it stuck to my face, wondering if the spider was in it... Not so much of things that go bump in the night -- it never occurred to me it could be ghosts when we had squirrels move into our attic. And I do love a good ghost story.