Royston Reeves on the Inspiration for The Weatherman

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I saw something on the local news that sent a shiver straight through me. This kid from a neighbouring college had gone out for drinks in Brentwood one Friday night and ended up accidentally killing a person.

After chucking out time, there’d been an altercation in the street. This kid had pushed someone, who’d tripped and fallen over backwards. The back of the guy’s head collided with a concrete kerb and he’d died instantly. One second they’re arguing, the next, the guy was dead. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the horror of that moment. The daft confrontation; maybe a bit of shoving. Angry shouting. Scuffling shoes on the pavement. Then that sickening, life-changing moment of impact. A split second of mortifying silence as everyone processed the horror. And then the screaming. I can barely imagine anything more horrible.

The most terrifying part is how normal the guy was.

I remember thinking how he was just like me. 

There but by the grace of God go I.

For months it kept haunting me. I kept wondering what would have gone through the mind of the perpetrator immediately afterwards.

What would I do? Hold my hands up and await the police? Try and pretend it wasn’t me? Run and hide somewhere? Curl up in a ball on the ground? There is no useful human action at that moment. The train has left the station and it’s coming down the track for you.

Scenarios like these are the ones that have always gripped me. ‘Ordinary’ people forced into extraordinary situations; having to adapt in real-time to dark and terrifying new realities. Trying to fight to keep things normal. That’s why I wanted to write The Weatherman in first person – to take readers inside that pulsing, plunging, desperate mindset.

The Weatherman is a journey through the stomach-dropping horror of a scenario like this one. In Will’s (the protagonist) case there is an added layer of deniability: nobody saw him commit his crime. It happened in one of central London’s rare blind spots, obscured from onlookers and CCTV.

It's fascinating how pliable human morality can be in situations as taut this one. We humans are capable of morally licensing ourselves for all sorts of things when fate triggers our survival instincts. Extraordinary pressure changes people and contorts personalities into dangerously capable new shapes. The book explores how a person can descend and lose themselves in the pressure of that process.

Making the setting visceral and real was so important to landing this concept. I crafted the story around Farringdon because I worked there for almost a decade and I felt like I knew its bones, from Smithfield to the Coin Laundry.

The whole place has such a bustling, metropolitan vibe during the day: City workers, street traders and people from creative industries share a noisy and eclectic space. Then at about half six people clock off and pub culture takes over. You see all sorts of things after dark. Students sitting on kerbs eating kebabs, football fans shouting into cones, street sweepers driving those little tuk-tuk things. But then you walk around the next corner, and you could hear a pin drop. Fifty yards away from all that activity, there’s just nothing. It can be like that in inner London. There’s this eerie urban desert of commercial spaces after hours- a perfect modern setting for a moment of misadventure.

The Weatherman isn’t framed around any particular moral position. It’s more like a series of fierce, challenging collisions as the protagonist tumbles down this brutal, anxious rabbit hole. The protagonist Will is not a conventional hero. Neither is he a figure to be disliked. I hoped for Will to represent the slightly flawed, self-biased everyman. His impulsive, erratic nature ends up fanning the flames of his own downfall, no doubt, but I hope readers find his journey an exciting trip down a chillingly feasible road.

The Weatherman by Royston Reeves. Published (No Exit Press) Out Now

I'm going to tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me.' Will's a nice guy. So when he takes a shortcut to the tube station after a few beers with his mates from work, he steps out of the way of the fellow who's staggering towards him. But he – deliberately – moves back into his path. They knock each other as they pass. Moments later one man is dead and another's life is changed forever. Or is it? There are no CCTV cameras. There was no one else in the out-of-the-way alley. Maybe the world doesn't have to end for Will after all. But there's always someone watching . . . and Will's life is about to implode.

You can follow Royston Reeves on X at @royston_reeves

“She looked a right miserable cow in that photo” - Behind the celebrity headlines we love! ny L C North

I’ve always had a certain fascination with celebrities. The who is dating who, going where, doing what, lure of glossy magazines. And based on the millions of weeklies sold every year, not to mention the tabloid headlines, and click-bait websites promising to tell all, I’m not the only one. 

And yet, alongside my fascination is an awareness of how strange the concept of a celebrity is, and how this group of individuals are treated in society. We place them on a pedestal and applaud their status in one breath, and in the very next, we seem to take great pleasure in pulling them back down. We consider them not like us. Not human. But delight in their mistakes. When they act human.

Weight gain woes

Too skinny

Did you see those spots?

Outfit malfunction

What was she thinking?

Miserable cow.

Every story comes with a sense that perhaps they deserve it. They chose to step into the spotlight, that harsh media glare, didn’t they? An entire grotesque industry has grown out of this twisted obsession. Paparazzi, editors, journalists and a whole lot more. But it isn’t just the magazines and tabloids anymore, it’s social media too. It’s not one headline, one story, but thousands and thousands of people commenting, sharing, chatting in tweets and posts, painting their own versions of the story, without ever considering the person underneath the sheen of that celebrity status. 

And let’s be honest, do any of us stop to consider how much truth there is behind the headlines? 

“Officially photos of Melanie Lange were hot property. Unofficially photos of Melanie looking miserable, upset or angry were the money shots”

Bill Cutting, former paparazzi photographer

This is a quote from my novel, The Ugly Truth. Bill isn’t real, but his words and the sentiment came from an interview with a paparazzi photographer who built his entire career following Britney Spears, snapping the “money shots” that will pay his bills. 

Let’s think about that for a moment. Rarely do we see a story about a celebrity popping into their local supermarket to buy groceries – that’s far too mundane. Far too normal. It’s the scowling red face of rage, the fuming set of a mouth, the teary fight with a boyfriend that hits the front pages. 

But peel that headline back and we might see a woman out to buy some flowers for her friend’s birthday. It’s a normal day. She’s running errands, getting on with life just like you and me. When suddenly, ten people with cameras appear and start shouting at her. 

“Melanie, Melanie, Melanie”

“Is it true you’re sleeping with your personal trainer?”

“Give us a smile”

“Where are you going? Meeting a boyfriend? A girlfriend?”

She tries to ignore it, telling herself - just as we do - that she signed up for this. But the group of photographers are all men and they surround her. Nowhere to go now. It’s intimidating. Scary. She starts to panic and has to push to get away. The flowers get squashed and now she’s upset and scared and angry, and she throws the ruined bouquet at the group and runs away.

The headline reads: MELANIE LANGE IN TEMPER TANTRUM, and the accompanying article tells us about a celebrity who snatched up a bouquet of flowers and threw them at an unsuspecting shop keeper. If we cared to look beyond the story (and that’s what it is) we’d see a work of fiction, and it was this concept of what lies behind the headlines that formed the inspiration for The Ugly Truth. 

I wanted to see the person and the truth beneath the celebrity and the headlines about them. The main character in The Ugly Truth is Melanie Lange. She is a fictional celebrity thrust into the spotlight at fifteen years old when she becomes one of Britain’s most sort after models. The two decades she spends in the spotlight draw parallels to the people and stories we know well. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Cole, and countless more. 

Imagine trying to balance on that pedestal day after day after day while the world around you throws rocks, grabs at you, tries desperately to pull you down. What do daily attacks do to someone’s mindset? What chance do their relationships stand of surviving? And who can they trust in a world where everyone is out to make money from them, including their families? 

When Melanie Lange disappears, her father, Sir Peter Lange, says she is being cared for in a private mental health clinic. But her ex-husband and best friend say she’s been kidnapped. The media will say whichever gets them the most views.

Told in the same Tweets, documentary transcripts and headlines we expect from celebrity news, The Ugly Truth asks whose side are you on? #SaveMelanie #HelpPeter

The Ugly Truth by L.C. North (Transworld Publishers Limited) Out Now

Melanie Lange has disappeared. Her father, Sir Peter Lange, says she is a danger to herself and has been admitted to a private mental health clinic. Her ex-husband, Finn, and best friend, Nell, say she has been kidnapped. The media will say whichever gets them the most views. But whose side are you on? #SaveMelanie #HelpPeter

More information can be found on her website.

You can follow the author on Twitter @Lauren_C_North and on Facebook.

Photo credit ©Ross Dean Photography

July Books from Bookouture

A Perfect Stranger is by Shalini Boland. Two marriages. Three little lies. Someone’s going to die… I hold my breath as my handsome husband walks through the door. I’ve planned the perfect surprise birthday party for him. Our friends are gathered and the champagne is flowing. But when I catch the look in his deep brown eyes, I realise I’ve got this horribly wrong. All evening my stomach is churning. And I can’t help but notice Danielle Baines speaking with Aiden. With her salon-styled hair, diamonds glittering on her ring finger and married to a rich businessman she has the kind of lifestyle I can only dream of. I’ve never liked her. And I know the feeling is mutual. So why is she here and what is she saying to my husband? Now it’s the end of the party and the man I love is confessing a secret that shocks me to the core. But it’s not what I was afraid of. It’s much worse. He says we have to take our son and leave the place we call home because our lives are in danger. I thought I knew everything about my husband. But suddenly he feels like a stranger. Should I trust him with my life?

I’ll never forget that day. It was blisteringly hot, and I begged our mother for an ice cream. As we left you with Dad, I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw your face. Minutes later, we returned to the end of the pier where we had parked your pushchair. Dad was asleep on a bench, and your little pink blanket was empty. You had vanished. Twenty-five years later. The morning of the anniversary of Jess’s disappearance starts like every other for her sister Kate – a rushed school run, a cold cup of coffee and a quick scan of the news for updates. But when her phone beeps with a message from an unknown number, everything changes.I know what happened to Jess. Finally, Kate’s a step closer to getting answers to the questions that have tormented her for so long. Why was her mother so angry that day? How did her father sleep through his own daughter’s abduction? And when the police car came screeching towards the pier, how is it that nobody saw a single thing? As she drives her young family to the seaside town to meet the mystery messenger, she feels uneasy. Who are they and why did they reach out now? But before Kate finds out, history repeats itself and her world is turned upside down once more.Then Kate receives one final, terrifying message… will her pursuit of the truth cost the lives of everyone she has ever loved? Find Me is by Carla Kovach.

Her Payback is by Emma Tallon. Scarlet Drew is sailing dangerously close to the wind with her new police detective boyfriend, John. Not everyone agrees with their illicit relationship, but so far they’ve managed to keep it a secret from anyone outside the family. If only her nemesis, cousin Ruby, wasn’t still hanging around, life would be perfect. Lily Drew is keeping a watchful eye on the building tension between Ruby and Scarlet – the last thing she needs is a war breaking out inside the family. But when people start going missing from a local boxing ring with close connections to the Drews, it puts the family back on the police’s radar and her worst nightmare is realised. With the police now watching their every move, it’s only a matter of time before the situation takes a dark turn. As Lily tries to regain control, another person disappears from the boxing ring, and this time it’s a Drew. Ruby finally has a chance to prove her loyalty to the family, but she’ll have to get over her rivalry with Scarlet first. Will the bitterness between the two cousins get in the way of saving one of their own? And just how long can Scarlet keep her relationship a secret before their entire world comes crashing down around them?

She’s the friend you trust with your life. But can she trust you with hers? When the police knock on my door to tell me that my best friend Kiara has taken her life, my world shatters. Ever since we met at university along with my husband, Nathan and her ex-husband David, the four of us have been inseparable. I can’t believe that, suddenly, she’s not here. The police say that Kiara fell from the balcony of her small, pristine apartment. But I refuse to accept that she jumped. I thought I knew Kiara better than anyone. But I soon find out my friend was keeping some big secrets. Talking to her ex-husband, David, I’m shocked. Was she really having an affair, like he claims Searching for evidence, I let myself into her apartment. My heart races as I find her diary and I read the name of her last appointment – Nathan. Why would she be meeting with my husband? And why didn’t he tell me? It soon becomes clear that everyone around me has been hiding the truth, and when the police call again and ask me to look at security camera footage from the night Kiara died, fear floods through me as I recognise her final visitor. Can I trust anyone in my life? And if someone did push Kiara that night, could I be next? Do I really Know You is by Sheryl Browne

Liar Liar is by L G Davis. He promised to keep my secrets. He never told me his… My husband and I are the dream couple: deeply in love, the envy of all our friends. He surprises me with roses and a beautiful diamond ring, and I prepare picnics for us to enjoy in the sunshine with our adorable son. It’s gestures like this that keep our romance alive. But nobody knows how frightened I am at night. Oliver promised he’d keep me safe, but strange things have started to happen in my home. My son is convinced that someone was in his room, watching him while he slept. And the white lantern on our porch has been smashed. One evening I could swear there’s a shadowy figure watching me through the window, lurking across the street. As I triple check that the doors are locked and kiss my son goodnight, I’m terrified that someone knows what happened before we moved here, and that soon everything I love will be taken away… Then Oliver comes home with blood on his hands on the same night our neighbour, one of my closest friends, goes missing. And I realise I am not the only one hiding a terrible secret. We are both lying. But when the truth finally comes to light, who will survive? And can I keep my son safe?

Your ex-wife didn’t leave you because of me. She didn’t abandon her little girl because of a couple of love notes in your jeans pocket. She left because she’s twisted, and she wanted to punish you. And she’s not finished yet. You have to believe me. If you don’t, there’s no knowing what she’ll do next… Becoming a stepmother is the best thing that ever happened to me. My favorite part of every day is picking Charlie up from school, watching her little rucksack bounce behind her as she skips over for a hug. I love the feel of those thin freckled arms around my waist. After a few rocky months of panic attacks when her mother deserted her, Charlie is flourishing. But the day Charlie’s mother Bronwyn returns without warning—showering Charlie with gifts and making promises she can’t keep—fear ripples through me. When I raise my concerns, no one wants to listen. I know I sound like the jealous new wife, but nothing is more important to me than Charlie’s safety. Me and Bronwyn have history. We both have dark secrets in our past, and I know the dangerous lengths she will go to get what she wants. But Bronwyn doesn’t know me as well as I know her. She doesn’t know just how far I will go to protect that little girl…Unforgiveable is by Natalie Barelli. 

The Mother In Law is by Karen King. He loves you now. He loved her first. I’ve fallen in love with a man called Sam. And he’s perfect, just perfect. It’s a whirlwind romance. And when our dream home falls through just before our wedding, we decide to move in with his parents. He says his mother, Evelyn, is the sweetest person. But I’m not so sure. She’s obsessively protective over Sam. She wants to know where he is all the time. She wakes us up in the morning, bustling into our room like he’s a small child, not a grown man. She doesn’t want me to be alone with him. And with every day that passes – as I keep having accidents I can’t believe are coincidental – I start to fear more that she doesn’t want me to marry her son. That she wants to be the only person he will ever love. Then I overhear an argument between her and Sam’s dad. Evelyn has a secret. And it changes everything I thought I knew about the family I’m marrying into. From that moment, I know that if I want to make it to my wedding day alive, I will need to be very, very careful…

Understanding Monsters, Surviving Monsters by Clea Simon

 

Nobody in our high school was completely surprised when Joel Rifkin turned out to be a serial killer.

Were we shocked? Sure. The quiet kind of nebbishy guy who took photos for our high school newspaper and yearbook, Joel never seemed like a threat. Was he awkward? Antisocial? Yeah, sure. But this was high school, when the best of us were only fronting. And those of us who spent our after-class hours on the Jet Gazette? Well, we were far from the coolest kids by any count. 

But were we surprised? Well, not really. Even discounting the bullying, which the press made so much of, we kind of knew something was wrong. There was a reason none of us wanted to get too close to Joel. Maybe we could sense the rage behind those thick glasses. Certainly, to the 17 young women he killed – sex workers who had fewer options when it came to avoiding intimacy – he was a monster.

My particular monster had a different face. A college classmate at an elite school, he was supposed to be a comrade. A colleague, if not a friend. At least that’s what I thought when he showed up at my door one night, maybe a month after we’d all moved in freshman year. He must’ve heard that I’ve been fighting with my boyfriend. I suspect the whole dorm heard us yelling, especially when R. stormed off and left me sobbing. And here he was with a pitcher of bullfrogs, a sweet lime drink offered in a spirit of camaraderie. Along with, that is, a shoulder to cry on until it turned into something more. An arm around my middle, pulling at me. Hands on my upper arms, holding me down.

For years I struggled with that disconnect. I was young. I had been stupid. Perhaps he had misread my signals. Maybe I had given some kind of consent, after all. Something that sounded like “yes” to a young man who might have been as drunk as I was, or so I told myself. But as I dealt with the aftermath – the unwanted pregnancy and its termination – I also had to acknowledge that there had been no further contact, no remorse and none of the awkward social outreach that one would expect from a comrade, a neighbour, and a classmate. 

Ultimately it was a letter from his roommate decades later that allowed me to see everything clearly. Ostensibly reaching out with an offer to answer any questions – once again, that shoulder to cry on – he was clearly seeking absolution. That I wasn’t ready to give, but I did take advantage of the offer and fired off questions. What I learned confirmed what I had come to suspect. No, I was not the only woman his roommate had targeted. In fact, he kept a bottle of over-proof rum purely to prey on vulnerable women. No, they hadn’t stayed in touch. Despite his complicity all those years before, my new correspondent claimed to actively dislike his roommate – and what he did. Would he call it rape? 

That’s where he drew the line. Instead, he talked about how his roommate would use alcohol to “try to have sex with women.” He was reaching out, he said, in the hope that I would be able to “let bygones be bygones.”

Was I shocked? Not really. I’ve lost that capacity, I think, at least in terms of certain forms of duplicity. More to the point, I realised then how far I had already moved on.

These days, I write crime fiction. It’s gratifying to set the world right, to see justice done. More important, with psychological suspense I can work through the impact of trauma and survival to allow my characters to achieve a full understanding of what happened and why. But even at my darkest, my books don’t deal with serial killers. What I write are the monsters I want to understand. The ones who live among us, with their smiling faces and social graces. The ones who know how to destroy us from the inside.

Hold Me Down by Clea Simon (Polis Books) out now

This riveting work of dark suspense from acclaimed author Clea Simon opens with Gal, a rock star for a hot minute twenty years earlier, back in Boston to play a memorial for her late drummer/best friend when she finds herself freezing on stage at the sight of a face in the crowd. The next day, the middle-aged musician learns that the man she saw has been killed – beaten to death behind the venue – and her friend’s widower charged in connection with his death. When the friend refuses to defend himself, Gal wonders why and, as the memories begin to flood back, she starts her own informal investigation. As she does so, she must reexamine her own wild life, her perception of the past, and an industry that monetizes dysfunction in a dark tale of love, music, and murder.

More information about Clea Simon can be found on her website. You can also find her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter @Clea_Simon and on Instagram.

Kelly Heard on Realism and Romance in a Pandemic

 

When people talk about the influence of COVID-19 on reading trends, the word that I always hear is comfort. Readers appear to be seeking out escapism, reaching for the dependability of formulaic genres, or rereading old favorites. Although it is too soon to know for sure, I can’t help but wonder if the pandemic will have a comparable effect on the way that we are writing. 

I’ve always attempted to keep the reins on my writing with a question: isn’t this too much? As in, too much coincidence, too much melodrama, just too much? At some point during lockdown, my drafts and characters began to answer no. The resulting books are full of foreboding, danger, and melodrama, and the settings are melancholy and wild. They are closer to psychological suspense than the women’s fiction I have usually written. As the long days of quarantine dragged into summer and then fall, I stopped asking quite so often. I have always been the type of reader who prefers to marvel at a story, rather than to outsmart it. But in making writing choices that were, to a degree, less than realistic, I couldn’t help but feel that I was breaking a rule somewhere. There is a word for that, though.

In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the present definition of novel is too broad. His theory of genre lays out, instead, four intertwined forms of book-length fiction, of which the novel is only one. Frye is long out of fashion when it comes to literary criticism, but his basic argument with our overuse of the term novel rings true, possibly even more today than when he wrote it in 1957. To illustrate his concept, I have written a brief summary of each of Frye’s four genres, along with an example from current crime and psychological suspense books.

The first two, and most common, are novel and romance (in this instance, romance as a form of prose fiction is distinct from the genre of romance novels). A novel is set within society, with pacing and plot dependent on causality—you could say, plot-driven. By contrast, a romance is more likely character-driven, set “in vacuo,” often in vast and wild natural landscapes, its stylized characters giving the form a “glow of subjective intensity.” Frye compares Jane Austen (novels) to Emily Bronte (romance) by way of example. In terms of psychological suspense, I would compare something like Minka Kent’s The Watcher Girl (a novel: plot-driven, a layered protagonist situated in contemporary culture: in the suburbs, on the internet) to Eliza Maxwell’s The Unremembered Girl (a romance: a breathtaking drama of a crime mystery, set out in the marsh, where the alligator, Old Brutal, lurks). Though these books achieve different goals, neither is less suspenseful or thrilling than the other. Where a novel deals with society, a romance deals with individuality, its natural landscape yielding to what Frye calls the “nihilistic and untamable.” I can’t help but think, when you see a thriller with a two-star review that says that it was too much about character rather than plot, that was very likely more romance than novel—not that either category has more claim to psychological suspense than the other. 

Frye’s third genre, the confession, is most closely linked to memoir. Frye’s prototypical confessions are those of St. Augustine and Rousseau. It would be unusual to find a contemporary book that is purely confession, which is as concerned with intellectual subject matter as with narrative. One is Travis Besecker’s Lost in Infinity, psychological suspense written as fictional memoir, which jumps from apparent tortured autobiography to thriller with ease. And the anatomy, the fourth genre, includes books that are part narrative, part catalogue of ideas, usually satirical. Think: Alice in Wonderland, The Circle, The Master and Margarita. Fight Club, satirizing toxic masculinity and consumer culture, shares some tendencies with this genre. Do these distinctions matter? Probably more to writers than to readers, but Frye would have answered that we ought to judge a writer in terms of the conventions they chose.

In terms of my own writing, the reminder that fiction deserves for us to judge it in terms of its own intent was enlightening. Suddenly, I wasn’t writing a dreamy, insufficiently realistic novel. I had a different goal all along, and I shouldn’t have needed a theorist to tell me so, either. Part of me is dying to ask everyone else out there: how has the pandemic changed your relationship to your writing? My anecdotal evidence, as a writer who spends a lot of time talking to other writers, suggests that many of us are experiencing a different relationship to realism than we used to—no need to wonder why. They always say it with a kind of guilt. But I think that is fine, if it’s validation that you need, not that you should need it. Occasional escape can be a form of sustenance or medicine. Romance as a form has never been a refusal of reality; it exists within reality, as a complement to it. As for me, for the foreseeable future, I will be sitting at the “nihilistic and untamable” table.

 Woman in the Water by Kelly Heard (Bookoutre) Out Now

I know my sister didn’t die by accident. Does someone know our secret? I swore I’d never go home to Brightwater. It would be safer for everyone if I stayed away. But now my sister is dead, and I am driving down the familiar highway, watching the sunlight glimmer off the lake, with the memory of her green eyes like a knife in my heart. I know Holly didn’t slip and drown out by the old boardwalk, surrounded by trees and dark water. She would never have gone there, if she had a choice. Her little girls need me now. I couldn’t save Holly, but I must protect them. Because if whoever killed Holly knows what we did all those years ago, out on the water, then I need to find them before they come after me. But how can I, when there are still so many things I don’t know about what really happened that night?

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @kheardbooks.

Mothers and Daughters in Crime Fiction by Miranda Smith

 

Being one of four girls, I’ve always been fascinated by the relationships between mothers, daughters and sisters. My latest psychological suspense novel, Not My Mother, gives these relationships a true crime spin.

Marion is celebrating her own daughter’s first birthday, an event she has spent several months planning. The party is interrupted when Marion’s mother, Eileen, is arrested. The police claim Eileen is not her real name. They allege Marion isn’t even her real daughter. Everyone suspects Eileen abducted Marion from her actual family when she was only an infant—the case has been referenced in the media for years as the Baby Caroline case. If Eileen has lied to Marion for her entire life, how can their relationship ever recover?

The idea for this story sparked when I envisioned a grandmother being arrested at her granddaughter’s birthday party. I wanted to explore what possible crimes this woman could have committed, and how her arrest would impact her relationship with everyone around her. 

I’m a big admirer of crime novels that explore this same theme. Here are some other great crime reads that focus on sinister mother and daughter relationships.

What Lies Between Us by John Marrs

At first glance, the relationship between Maggie and her daughter, Nina, appears normal. They have conversations, listen to music and eat dinner every night. However, we quickly learn Nina is holding her mother prisoner. Each night, Maggie returns upstairs and is restrained with heavy chains. This is Nina’s way of punishing her mother for everything she has done wrong.

What could Maggie have possibly done to deserve such treatment? And does Nina have secrets of her own? This is a brilliant and twisted read you won’t forget. You’ll question which character to root for throughout, and the ending is one you will not see coming.

The Half Sister by Sandie Jones

Still mourning the death of their father, sisters Kate and Lauren don’t always see eye to eye. Their relationship worsens when their Sunday lunch is interrupted by a knock at the door. The woman standing outside is named Jess, and she claims to be their sister. Each character has to process this news, while trying to understand how the revelation impacts their relationships with each other.

This is a tense thriller that brings into focus how siblings can grow up in the same household yet have completely different understandings of their childhood. We get to see how Kate and Lauren’s memories differ, all while trying to find out the truth about their parents.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn is famous for her best-seller Gone Girl, but her debut novel, Sharp Objects, is equally engrossing. The story follows journalist Camille as she returns to her hometown of Wind Gap. She has been tasked with writing an article about the young girls there who have gone missing, but instead she finds herself trying to solve the mysteries of her own past. She reconnects with her affluent mother, Adora, in hopes of solving past and present crimes.

This book is dark, atmospheric and begging to be read in one sitting. I loved reading as Camille processed events from her childhood through an adult lens, although some of the descriptions can be graphic and triggering. Still, this book serves up two great mysteries at once and has a last-page reveal guaranteed to make your jaw drop.

Baby Teeth (titled Bad Apple in the UK) by Zoje Stage

Is there anything more unsettling than a disturbed child? Now imagine if that was your child. That’s the premise of Zoje Stage’s debut, and it’s a chilling read from the very beginning. Suzette and her seven-year-old daughter, Hanna, have a strange relationship. Although Hanna is the perfect child in the eyes of her father, she has had numerous difficulties with teachers and babysitters. Add to this, Hanna is mute, and when she does finally speak to Suzette, what she says is frightening.

Witnessing the building tension between Suzette and Hanna is horrifying, and there are multiple twists that make you question what is really going on behind the scenes of this picture-perfect family.

If you’re looking for twisted family drama and shocking reveals, add these crime thrillers about mothers and daughters to your TBR!

Not My Mother by Miranda Smith, Published by Bookouture (Out Now)

What if the person you trust most in the world is lying to you? I’d heard of the Baby Caroline case, of course. When a baby is snatched from her mother’s arms, the whole country knows about it. I knew about the parents left lying by the swimming pool, the open window in the nursery. But I never dreamed it had anything to do with me. Today, my beautiful daughter turned one. We were unwrapping gifts and blowing out candles when the knock came at the door, and they took my mother away. The police say she’s not really my mother. That she stole me, thirty years ago. When I visit her, desperate for answers, she looks me in the eye, and says nothing. I can barely breathe. Is my whole life a lie? I have to find out, but the more I learn, the more scared I become. And soon I start to wonder, am I losing my grip on reality or is my own daughter in terrible danger?

Julia Haeberlin talks about We Are All The Same in The Dark

My thrillers always begin the same way—with a tiny visual in my head that won’t go away. In the case of BLACK-EYED SUSANS, it was the bird’s-eye view of a young woman lying in a field of yellow and black flowers with a bunch of scattered old bones.

A younger, wispier girl began to haunt me for WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK. She was wishing on dandelions on the side of a Texas road that yawned with desperate emptiness. I couldn’t see her face. But I knew two things for sure: She only had one eye. And she was lost.

The gritty atmosphere of this cold case thriller overwhelmed me, even sneaking into my dreams. An ominous Texas town had taken an ugly shape down the road, with a mystery of its own. I had already decided not to give it a name to enhance its creepiness and myth.

Even before I wrote the first word, I was warning my one-eyed girl not to go there. 

She didn’t reply. No matter how much I tugged her arm, she stayed in the shadows behind a barbed wire fence. 

This was a big problem for a novelist who is not an outliner. My characters always drive the plot on a twisted road where I can never see around the curve. Every day of writing, I want to be surprised as much as the reader.

I wouldn’t describe myself as someone who struggles with writer’s block, but when I’m typing cliches and blather, I know that I need to do one of two things. Go read poetry. Or research. 

Both open up my brain. As a writer, I need to fly with poetry’s bird of freedom when my words are too straightforward. And as a tactile journalist, I want all of my underlying themes—the Texas death penalty, mitochondrial DNA, or, in this case, prosthetics—to be based on solid ground, on the advice of experts.

I realized that for my character to reveal herself, she wanted my respect. I needed to understand as much as I could what it felt like physically and emotionally to be missing an eye. 

I began with Randy Trawnik, a legendary ocularist in Dallas, Texas, who can create a prosthetic eye so beautiful, so much a perfect twin to a natural eye, that women and men are able to keep them a secret. 

And they do. Beauty queens, actresses, professional athletes, models. Kids trying to navigate through the tribal phase of childhood. The thousands of other people who don’t want to be defined first by what they are missing. What did Shakespeare say? The eyes are the windows of the soul, and by extension the soul itself? Well, he was wrong.

I began to meet some of Randy Trawnik’s patients. An Instagram model whose eye was blown apart by a firecracker set off by a family member on her grandmother’s Oklahoma ranch when she was nine.

A teenager who could not remember a time she did not wear a prosthetic eye—almost since birth—and still only told her closest friends. 

A woman accidentally hit with a ping-pong ball by a boy she had a crush on, who started her freshman year of high school with a crude prosthesis she called her “teddy-bear eye.” 

And Lauren Scruggs, a popular athletic U.S. influencer, whose arm and eye were destroyed by a small plane’s propeller but who can do almost every single thing she did before the accident. 

She posed this question to me: “What do ‘disabled’ and ‘differently abled’ even mean?” 

When I hung up the phone with her, I decided to avoid using those labels for the rest of my life.

I broadened my scope, to a veteran and ex-cop who lost a leg but still trains SWAT teams, and a college student who lost a hand and almost her life when she slammed into the back of a car parked with its lights off on a dark highway. Now she works in the prosthetics industry herself.

Two ferocious female heroines began to take shape instead of one.

My perceptions of physical beauty, so muddled by stereotypes that persist on social media and beyond, were transformed into something deeper, more transcendant. 

I didn’t know what I needed to know. 

I find that I ask myself that a lot these days, as the world explodes in shocking ways around us, as we sort out the kind of humans we want to be.

I hope you will love the thrill ride of this novel but mostly I hope that it makes you think twice—about how we are either all missing pieces, or none of us are.

The two heroines, one without a leg, one without an eye, are no different than any of my other characters.

They are defined by their guts, maneuvering a path to redemption.

And isn’t that how we all want to be defined?

We Are All the Same in The Dark by Julia Haeberlin (Published by Michael Joseph on 6 August 2020)

It's been a decade since the town's sweetheart Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Since her disappearance, Tru's brother, Wyatt, has lived as an outcast, desperate to know what happened to his sister. So when Wyatt finds a lost girl, he believes she is a sign. But for new cop, Odette Tucker, this girl's appearance reopens old wounds. Determined to solve both cases, Odette fights to save a lost girl in the present and in doing so digs up a shocking truth about that fateful night in the past . . . the night her friend disappeared, the night that inspired her to become a cop, the night that wrote them all a role in the town's dark, violent mythology.

Nominees Announced for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards

In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL

The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio)

Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand (Little, Brown and Co)

Goodnight Stranger by Miciah Bay Gault (Park Row Books)

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Gollancz-UK/Flatiron Books-US)

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco)

Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton (MCD x FSG Originals)

NOVELLA

Into Bones Like Oil by Kaaron Warren (Meerkat Press)

Late Returns by Joe Hill (Full Throttle)

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht (Tor.com)

Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma (Tor.com)

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Gallery/Saga Press)

NOVELETTE

Black Bequeathments by Simon Strantzas (Dim Shores)

The Couvade by Joanna Koch (Demain Publishing)

“Deeper, Darker Things” by Steve Dillon (Deeper, Darker Things and Other Oddities)

Luminous Body by Brooke Warra (Dim Shores)

Pwdre Ser by Kurt Fawver (Dim Shores)

“Taproot” by M. R. Carey (Ten-Word Tragedies)

SHORT FICTION

“How to Become a Witch-Queen” by Theodora Goss (Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery)

“Kali_Na” by Indrapramit Das (The Mythic Dream)

“The Truth About Josh Enloe” by Nick Straatmann (Parhelion)

“The Well” by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (issue 55.1 of The Southern Review)

“Whistle, My Lad, and I Will Come” by Gina Ochsner (The Pink Issue of Fairy Tale Review)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

Collision: Stories by J. S. Breukelaar (Meerkat Press, LLC)

Every Human Love: Stories by Joanna Pearson (Acre Books)

Homesick by Nino Cipri (Dzanc Books)

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Riverhead Books)

Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)

Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud (Saga Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, edited by Ellen Datlow (Saga Press)

The Mythic Dream, edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien (Saga Press)

The Twisted Book of Shadows, edited by Christopher Golden & James A. Moore (Twisted Publishing)

The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison, edited by Preston Grassmann (PS Publishing)

Wonderland: An Anthology of Works Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Titan Books)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.

Details on the ceremony for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards will be forthcoming.

______________________________________________________________

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

Website: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org

Sleep, Dreams and Memory - The Inspiration for Under My Skin by Lisa Unger

There’s almost always a single germ for each of my novels. A moment, a line of poetry, a news story, a piece of junk mail. What happens next is -- a bit odd. I start to hear a voice, or a couple of voices. And these voices draw me through my narrative. I don’t have an outline. I don’t know who is going to show up each day or what they are going to do. And I certainly don’t know how the book is going to end.

For UNDER MY SKIN, it wasn’t a single moment, as there often is. It was something.

Carl Jung wrote, a phrase that’s been kicking around in my head for a while:

“Between the dreams of day and night, there is not so great a difference.”

It’s a short sentence, but as with many Jungian quotes there are layers of meaning here. The dreams of day and night – what did he mean by this?

We spend an average of 229,000 hours asleep during our lifetime. That’s more time than we spend eating, working, or driving – more than a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming. Still we’re convinced that our waking life is more real than whatever it is we’re experiencing when we close our eyes at night.

Between those two worlds – the waking and the dreaming worlds – is a doorway called hypnagogia. Maybe you haven’t heard that word before, but you’ve definitely experienced it. It’s the threshold moment where we have those bizarre dreams – we’re falling, or a bear leaps out from the shadows – and we’re startled awake. This connection between the adjacent worlds of waking and dreaming has been a point of wonder for me, as are other states where perception is altered.

For example, while I was researching another of my novels CRAZY LOVE YOU, I interviewed a clinical psychiatrist about fugue states and black outs. I had always thought that black outs were the result of repressed memory, or memories that got buried so deep that you no longer have access to them.  But he said no. That black outs are ultimately a failure of cognition, that at a certain point in intoxication, we stop taking information in altogether. Addiction alters our perception of reality.

And then, of course, there’s trauma –which is most certainly a brain event, as well as a psychological and emotional one. And one I’ve explored in other novels. This too is a state where our memory, our perception might be altered. I was speaking to a former Navy Seal who works with veterans suffering from the after-effects of blast and PTSD. And he talked about the spiral some of these soldiers find themselves in – untreated PTSD, which can lead to sleep disruption, which can lead to addiction, which unravels the support system of family and friends. In this state, reality starts to unravel to devastating result.

So, it wasn’t one of these things, but all of them I think that led me to start hearing the voice of Poppy Lang. In her journey, I wanted to explore the way the psyche copes with grief and trauma, the twin demons of addiction and sleep disruption, and how our own perception and memories can be as slippery and unreliable as our dreams.

Under My Skin by Lisa Unger published by HQ on 18th October 2018

Her husband’s killer maybe closer than she thinks… It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed… Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…