I’m afraid of everything.
Well, almost everything. Puppies and cupcakes, for instance, are fine. I’m afraid of appendicitis, tornados, carbon monoxide poisoning, aneurisms. I’m afraid of mirrors in the dark, of unfinished basements. I’m afraid of blindfolds and hydroplaning and blood clots and every minor ache I feel inside my body. And then there’s the fear that haunts me most of all: repressed memories.
Memory repression is a phenomenon that fascinates and terrifies me in equal measure. The idea that I might have lived some traumatic experience that I simply can’t remember chills me to the bone. Who knows, then, when those memories might bob to the surface again, altering everything I know to be true? And worse: if we can’t trust our memories, how can we trust that we know ourselves at all?
This question is at the center of my latest thriller, Behind the Red Door, in which a woman who suffers from acute anxiety comes to believe that she has a connection to a decades-old kidnapping—despite having no memory of the sensationalized abduction itself.
In a lot of ways, Behind the Red Door is a book about fear—how it paralyzes us, how it pushes us, how it tries to define us—so I knew I needed to let some of my own fears, big and small, infiltrate the story. The result was a process that felt both cathartic and harrowing, and it made me wonder how other thriller writers either utilize or avoid their own phobias when crafting their stories. After all, it’s a thriller writer’s job to, well, thrill their readers, but what is it that thrills—and chills—them? To find out, I reached out to some of today’s rising and bestselling authors in the genre, and I asked them to tell me their biggest fears.
Andrea Bartz, author of The Lost Night and The Herd: One of my fears—a common fear, but one we rarely discuss—is saying or doing something that makes me unlovable. That’s why I write female protagonists who seem to have it together but privately worry that they’re not enough…and, in their most vulnerable moments, they believe that if others saw the chinks in their armor, they’d turn on them. Shame is a powerful emotion, and I love using interior dialogue to bring characters’ deepest fears into the light. Sure, some readers hate them for it (deeming them “annoying” or “unlikable”), but forcing my characters to air their fears makes me feel braver, too.
Michele Campbell, author of A Stranger on the Beach and The Wife Who Knew Too Much: Are we all capable of murder under the right circumstances? That question scares me. I’m fascinated by the dark impulses that exist in the hearts of normal people when they’re pushed beyond their limits, or when they want something beyond all reason. That’s why I write psychological thrillers—to reveal the killer instinct that lurks within the best of us.
Samantha Downing, author of My Lovely Wife and He Started It: I can’t sit by the window on an airplane. As soon all the seats are full, I start to panic. Perhaps it’s claustrophobia, but it only happens on airplanes. There have been times I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid the window seat, I’ve been known to approach every airline employee until I find one that will switch my seat. Maybe I’m afraid of being sucked out the window? I don’t know, but the fear is real.
Layne Fargo, author of Temper and They Never Learn: For years, if I even saw a picture of a snake, I’d panic. Now I have one tattooed on me. Tamping down my phobia took serious therapy, plus desensitizing visits to the reptile house at the zoo, practicing deep breathing as I peered into the slithering enclosures. I still don’t like snakes, and if I saw a real one not safely contained behind glass, I’d run away screaming. But every time I look at the snake tattoo that curls around my ankle, it reminds who I want to be: someone who faces her fears, and turns them into something beautiful.
Wendy Heard, author of Hunting Annabelle and The Kill Club: I’m afraid of a lot of normal things: heights, serial killers, cancer. Weirdly, I feel like writing thrillers makes me a bit more fearful, not less, because of my intimate knowledge of all the things that can and do happen to people. My most outlandish fear: Pump jacks (the kind used to drill for oil). I am terrified of them. Why are they so big? What gives them the right? Also wind turbines. So huge. So creepy. So looming.
Mary Kubica, author of The Good Girl and The Other Mrs: For someone who writes suspense novels, I have a lot of fears: spiders; the dark; things lurking under my bed at night (I blame The Sixth Sense for this); that anything bad might happen to someone I love; death. Flying is one of my biggest fears, and one I have to face head-on on a pretty regular basis. I’m also a little superstitious. Aerodynamics aside, I’m convinced that buying a bottle of water and a bag of pretzels before any flight is the one thing that keeps me in the sky.
Vanessa Lillie, author of Little Voices and For the Best: When writing my second thriller, For the Best, I wanted to explore my fears about how I use privilege as a white woman in this country. It’s terrifying to me that much of my privilege is still undiscovered or only recently realized. I gave my main character a “perfect life” and then slowly stripped away what she’d been given, even as she clings on and expects more.
Megan Miranda, author of The Last House Guest and The Girl from Widow Hills: As a kid, my fears ranged from the small (thunderstorms, the dark, the possibility of ghosts) to the large (asteroids on collision course with earth, our general proximity to black holes). Yet I was also drawn to reading mysteries and thrillers, because, as the reader, you’re making your way through something, ultimately coming out the other side of it. Over time, I’ve grown out of some of those fears, or at least grown accustomed to them, and I definitely channel my own experience with fear when I’m writing. Even if I don’t share the particular fears of a character, it’s an emotion I connect to pretty authentically.
Mindy Mejia, author of Leave No Trace and Strike Me Down: My mother was extremely sick when I was a child. My earliest memories of her are in a hospital bed, and being told, “Don’t jump on mom. Don’t hurt mom.” The idea of her existence became very fragile to me and I grew up in fear of losing her. Even though her disease went into remission decades ago, I’ve never had a dream where she’s alive. It’s no surprise, then, that the parent-child relationship always features prominently in my work, and all the ways that relationship can be fractured or lost.
Wendy Walker, author of The Night Before and Don’t Look for Me: As a parent, it goes without saying that I live in constant fear for the safety and well-being of my children. That fear is at the heart of my next thriller, Don’t Look for Me, which is out September 15, 2020. I am also terrified of things that go bump in the night – that creak in the floorboard, the door squeaking on its hinges. When a sound like that wakes me from sleep, I’m up the rest of the night!
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