Scott Carson On The Chill

 

Why another supernatural book?

It’s a common question, both from readers who are excited to wander back to the dark side with me and those who scoff at ghost stories. (We all know that type – too sophisticated for such silliness. And we all know that ninety percent of them wouldn’t feel comfortable walking through a graveyard in the dark, either. Explain that one to me.)

But most of us embrace a good ghost story. We drift back time and again, savor a good scare, and then move on. Why do we feel that pull?

Supernatural. Emphasis on natural.

It’s October right now. I’m in Maine, and the fog today is so thick that I can’t see the mountain from my office window at all, and the mountain is usually hard to miss, as mountains tend to be. Right now, though? Could be the ocean out there. Could be nothing but trees. Maybe an overgrown orchard. Certainly, there’s an old cemetery; this is New England, there’s always an old cemetery. The point is, I don’t know what’s out there. I know what I can see – blood-red leaves shivering out of skeletal birch trees, blanketing dead grass – but it’s what I can’t see that grabs the mind.

That’s a central theme to THE CHILL, which was born when I read an article in the New York Times describing a very real threat to New York City that was grounded in the most boring of topics: infrastructure. Water tunnels. There are only three of them for the entire city, tasked with providing water to more than eight million people. Those water tunnels were blasted and dug out of ancient rock by forgotten hands. More than a dozen massive reservoirs in faraway Catskill mountain towns contain the supply of precious life-and-city-sustaining fresh water. In my early research, I found some mesmerizing old photographs. One stands out to me even now: a picture of a farmhouse on a flatbed truck. There are men sitting on the roof of the house, mountains visible just beyond. The truck is towing the house away from the farm where once it stood sentry. The farm and the town around it are about to become the basin for a few million gallons of water to quench a city’s thirst.

The name of that town? Neversink.

You can’t make that up. A drowned town named Neversink. Shadowed mountains holding the water for a city of skyscrapers and subways. And someone built that! Imagined it, designed it, built it…what a story that is. What a triumph. Of course, the builders ran into some problems along the way, frustrations and obstacles. There were the headaches with the upstate locals, issues like eminent domain money and relocated farmhouses, relocated graveyards.

Now, tell me how you consider a backstory like that and don’t think of ghosts? Multi-generation family farms, small town squares, old orchards and, yes, old graveyards. They’re all still out there…just underwater now. It is easy to forget the things you cannot see. All in the past. But the past, as Faulkner famously told us, is never dead. It’s not even past.

That line is one I reference whenever I’m asked what draws me back to the supernatural. It’s the idea of human hubris, human control. We move through a natural world so infinitely complex you could devote a lifetime to studying any aspect of it, from mountains to anthills, and still be learning new things each day. Against that backdrop and amid that reality, we humans are able to maintain a fascinating notion: that we are in control of things.

Anyone who has ever seen the aftermath of a tornado – and I have a few times now – can tell you just how quickly that sense of control over the natural world evaporates. Implodes. Shatters and scatters. We’re watching large battles with nature on a daily basis, from global pandemics to wildfires and hurricanes and landslides. Floods.

And still, many of us can believe we’re running the show. Most of the time, at least.

Then the sun goes down and the wind rises and even though we were absolutely certain we knew what the terrain looked like beyond that bank of fog, we begin to doubt ourselves. To wonder.

What if we were wrong? What don’t we know? What have we forgotten? And at what cost.

Keep the lights on. Out there in the dark and the wind and the fog, why, you could begin to believe you’re not really in control, at all…

The Chill by Scott Carson (aka Michael Koryta) is published by Welbeck in paperback original, priced £8.99.

In upstate New York a drowned village lies beneath the dark, still waters of the Chilewaukee reservoir. Sacrificed a century ago to bring water to the millions living downstate, the town's destruction was for the greater good . . . at least that's what the politicians said. Years later an inspector overseeing the dangerously neglected dam witnesses something inexplicable. It seems more than the village was left behind in the waters of the Chill; some never left at all. Now a dark prophecy comes to fruition. Those who remember must ask themselves: who will be next? For sacrifices must be made.  As the dark water begins inexorably to rise, the demand for a fresh sacrifice emerges from the deep . . .