Two bestselling authors chat about Horror novel

As part of our monthly BingeBooks Book Club, we dove into a chat about Horror with two bestselling authors - and had so much fun!

I hosted and we jumped right into the conversation, where they discussed topics like:

- Their most recent book releases

- When in a book they introduce the suspense

- Different types of horror and suspense books

- How dread and suspense work together in a book

- Their favorite horror books

They also answered questions from the live reader audience. You can watch their video by clicking below - or continue reading to see the full transcript.

If you want to join in on our next book club, visit our Book Club page - we'd love to see you there! 

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Alessandra: All right. We are alive. I am so excited to be here with the BingeBooks Book Club, and today we are talking all about Halloween horrors, scary books, spooky stories, and bringing you two fantastic authors who both write in this genre or in these subjects areas. I'm so excited to be joined today. My name is Alessandra Torre. I am joining you with BingeBooks and I'm here today with Steffanie Holmes and Sarah Denzil, and welcome both of you guys. It's great to have you here.

Sarah: Thank you, it's so good to be here.

Steffanie: Thank you.

Alessandra: Well, I'm sorry. Well, we'll start this out, I promise. I can see the room is starting to fill up. And just as a brief introduction, I am a fellow author. I write a little bit of psychological suspense and erotic thrillers. But Steffanie, do you want to introduce yourself and give a little bit of what you write about in your background?

Steffanie: Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Steffanie and I basically write Gothic romance. So I write contemporary romance, I write paranormal romance, but it's got all those kinds of like gothy tropes that we love, like haunted houses and inheritances and family secrets, like hid girl and polar references and yeah, all that fun stuff, so that's what I do.

Alessandra: I love that. And you have a recent book. So Shunned, can you tell us a little bit about Shunned and what it's about?

Steffanie: I certainly can. So this is Shunned, which is the first book in the Kings of Ms. Ketonic prep series. And if you're familiar with romance, this is like a bully romance. So our heroine is a poor student, she gets a scholarship to a super-rich school, and she ends up being kind of tormented by a lot of the students at the school. But it turns out that there's something not quite right about the school. And what is so fun, well, what was fun for me writing this book is that it's basically a bully romance mixed with HP Lovecraft’s Cathol Mythos. And if you're a horror fan, you will know what that is. And you also see Cathol on my dress here, and so it was a lot of fun. And yeah, if you're a horror fan, you will recognize a lot of the references and things in this book, so it'd be really fun.

Alessandra: I love that. So Shunned's available now. And is it in ebook, paperback? Where can they find it?

Steffanie: It's an ebook it's, it's in Kindle Unlimited, it's in paperback, yeah.

Alessandra: Fantastic. Sarah, you want to introduce yourself?

Sarah: I'm Sarah A Denzil and I write psychological thrillers and suspense that are a little on the dark side; creepy action laws, scary secrets between sisters, a book to children, that kind of thing. A little bit of domestic thriller and a little bit of sort of creepy unsettling-ness as well.

Alessandra: I love that. And your most recent book, I'm not sure if it's your most recent, but I know the Housemaid recently come out, can you share a little bit about that?

Sarah: Yeah. The Housemaid is my most recent standalone. It's about a young woman who doesn't have... she's so grown up in poverty and she's not got an awful lot of money and she gets this great opportunity to go and work as a housemaid for this very, very rich family who live in this great big sprawling mansion with secret tunnels everywhere and little like peek holes hidden inside poor traits, that kind of thing. So she goes to work there, she's got this huge secret that her mom used to work there when her mom was younger. And then she heard the mum left her and she doesn't know what happened. So she kind of wants to uncover that at the same time. And then the strange diorama, turns up at the house with a doll dress just like her at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood. Yeah, so that's The Housemaid.

Alessandra: I love that. I have so many questions, but for mine, remind me to ask you - I'll just ask you now, both of you guys, at what point do you in a book, do you start to introduce like that something is not right or, you know, there is something suspenseful or scary a foot, when you're writing these sort of books? Like, with The Housemaid, is everything hunky-dory at the beginning and roses, and then suddenly, you know, you start getting it or from the very page one, at what point does that sort of unsettling feeling begin?

Sarah: I try and keep it as early as the can in the book. So The Housemaid is quite heavily inspired by Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. And she starts Rebecca with this amazingly descriptive view of the house, and the nature has taken over the house and it's empty, and it's just really gorgeous to read. So The Housemaid starts with the main character coming to the house and it's her first glimpse of the house. So the house is kind of very much at the forefront, and you can kind of tell right at the beginning that there's something not quite right with this place. And it links into the Gothic as well, because the setting is always such an important part in a Gothic literature. So yeah, I try and keep it right at the beginning, make people feel as unsettled as possible right away.

Alessandra: What about you, Steffanie?

Steffanie: I really like writing those kinds of books where you're kind of reading... when you read it the first time and then the unsettlingness creeps up on you, maybe 40 or 50% of the way through, but when you get the twist, you go, "Oh my God, I have to go reread the whole book." And when you re read the book, you realize it was there on page one and you didn't know it. And that's the kind of... I don't know if I always achieve it, but that's what I aim for. I want it on page one, I kind of want the secret hidden in everything, so that when you reread the book, you're like, "Oh my God.

Alessandra: I love that. And something that Sarah said and then you immediately followed up on it, which was what I was about to ask is setting, like when you were describing the house and coming up to it, and I was like, and Steffanie mentioned writing a lot of times haunted houses, or that Gothic feel. I imagine that setting is so important and is often, I would think almost like a character of itself. So, is setting something that you decide early on in the writing process as you're outlining, or are you an outliner, and how early on do you decide on that and does that play a role?

Sarah: Oh I do tend to outline, but sometimes, like they can be detailed and then they can just be a very quick sketch. For The Housemaid, I feel like the setting was really important. It was kind of the first element of the story, and then everything sort of came around the setting. So for that book, it was definitely the first thing that I put together in my mind and then introduced it into the outline and thought about who lives there and who's going to arrive there and that kind of thing. And yeah, and I loved inventing all the little secret tunnels and where they led as well. So for my other books, setting is always super important to me as well because I live in Yorkshire, I usually end up someone's on at the mall at some point. It's very Wuthering Heights so I can't help myself.

Steffanie: I'm so jealous if you living in Yorkshire, I love it so much. I'm very similar. I don't outline, I basically just write as I go. But [inaudible08:53] is probably the first character I come up with, like even before the protagonist. Because I'm a bit of a goth, and so here, my husband and I, we love to travel. We spend a lot of time going to abandoned castles and haunted houses and I used to be an archeologist, so I'm really fascinated and kind of old buildings and crumbling things in ruins. And so, I often take a lot of those things and put them into books. Like the book I'm writing at the moment; I went to this old monastery on Creech, the Island of Creech. And there was this refrigerator with the bunks would eat and they were having a stand against the invading Turkish forces, and the monks went to the refectory and they had all the gunpowder in there. And then in stage, rather than giving themselves up to the Turks, they they set the gunpowder a light, and so they martyred themselves in order to avoid being captured. And you go into this refrigerate and it's got a beautiful mural on the end of the last supper, and then it's got no roof and it's all black and charred and there's no roof because the roof was blown off and it's just so haunting. And I was like, and that was 15 years ago when I visited there. And then suddenly I was like, I'm going to grab that and I'm going to put that in the book. And that's what's really amazing. That book is a book called Pretty Girls Make Graves, which is another like creepy university, very kind of Oxford University, in England an old monastery. It's a contemporary romance but it's very, very Gothic, so there's no like supernatural elements, but it's a very like secret societies and all that kind of good stuff.

Alessandra: I never really knew prior to this chat what Gothic; I often see it show up as a sub genre. I'll see horror and then I'll see Gothic, and sometimes Gothic/Accult, but I didn't really know what it was in my mind. But I think Steffanie, how you described it like early on made perfect sense. Is it often in a timeframe or has ties to an older timeframe and is there haunting elements often normal elements?

Steffanie: Yeah. I mean, I think Gothic [inaudible11:34] is kind of a collection of tropes. And if you love the Gothic, you sort of know what they allow. It's not very like, often the creepy things, the horror element is not like front and center. It's not Freddie Kruger, like slashing up the place. It's a ghost that you don't see. It's often a little bit psychological. It's very [inaudible12:03]. and because Gothic was very popular in the Victorian period, things that the Victorians found interesting or creepy, you know, show up a lot; so old houses, and that's kind of psychological element because of the institutions and things like that.

Alessandra: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And Sarah, your books, some of them have paranormal, but most of them, the evil is inside a human, is that correct? I mean, it's very evil.

Sarah: Yeah, most of mine the psychology of the characters really drives the suspense. I do sometimes writes about different sort of psychological disorders as well inside the books. But more often than not, it's about regular people thrown into crazy circumstances and they have to try and survive for one thing, and deal with the trauma of what's happening to them or what happened to them in the past. I have written one supernatural book, which is actually set in a Romanian monastery, funnily enough. But I wasn't able to go and visit Romania because it was during the first lockdown, I think, when I was writing it. So lots of Google image, searches and books about Romania. It's also quite Gothic inspired. I studied psychology at university, but I took one module on the Victorian Gothic novel, so a lot of what I write now is actually really influenced by Victorian Gothic novels. I think they're so suspenseful and so richly written that it creeps into everything that I've written ever since, I think.

Alessandra: I love that. I've recently just a week or two ago, did a chat with another author who was a horror author. And he said that the element... I said, you know, what is it that makes a horror novel? And in my mind, and this shows how ignorant I was. I was thinking it was like blood and guts and slashing and Freddy Krueger. And I loved his answer, which was completely the opposite of what I expected, which is, he said dread. And he kind of was like, it's not even that gory, at least his aren't. He said, I don't even have a lot of blood and guts, but he said, it's the dread, it's having that anticipation that is coding every page or carrying with the reader through till the end. And I loved that. And then my next question was, well, how do you add that to the book? You know, I mean, how do you keep that tension high and keep that dread? And it was hard. I think it's one of those invisible things that we do as authors that'd be hard for us to describe. But do either of you have a great answer for that, how you introduced dread, or keep that suspense or keep that reader kind of like on the edge of their seat and not sure what's going to happen next?

Steffanie: Oh, that's too fun.

Alessandra: I don't know. I don't know an answer for that.

Sarah: I think it can be in an instinctive thing that we learn from reading of books that have such great suspense. I think one thing that really gets into my skin is when there's something not quite right, it's kind of normal, but not quite normal. There's a scene in one of my books called One for Sorrow when the main character wakes up and she doesn't know what is wrong, she just knows that something in her room isn't the same as it usually is. And it takes her a while, and he's moving through the house. She suddenly figures out what that thing is and it's that her front door is open and she could smell the breeze coming in through the house, but she couldn't figure out what was different in her room. She just knew that there was something different. And that means her door's open, it means someone has been in her house. And I think that's kind of the dread that, you know, there's something wrong and you don't know what it is, and you're just waiting to find out what it is. And if you're in inside the character's head, experiencing everything they're experiencing, then hopefully that dread kind of comes off the page and gets into the reader and gets into their skin as well.

Steffanie: I really definitely agree with that. I think so much of dread is not knowing, and it's also waiting. Like, you have to wait in their characters because you've only got the information that they have got and what they've got is what the hell was going on. I think also the good thing about horror is that it always plays on usually one specific fear that the main character has and horror either in a very overt way with like a literal monster or in more of a psychological way, plays on that one specific fear. And all through the whole book, the character is trying to like stop this thing from happening, you know, stop themselves from being killed or stop their child from being taken or something, you know, like that one really specific fear. And in the end, they have to face the fact that they have to move past their fear. They have to face the fact that that thing is literally going to happen, they're going to lose their life. They're going to lose this thing that they love, and they have to move past that and go, okay, but I'm going to do this thing, whatever it is to fit the monster even though I'm going to die. And that's the point where, you know, that's kind of, that's the climax and I love that so much.

Alessandra: I agree. And I think looking back at my own writing, I think another way you can stretch out that dread is when your character is confronted or is creeping up to whatever, and then they reached the doorknob and then you cut that scene. And then you go and you explore a different part of the story for a period of time. And the reader the whole time is like, "Well, what's behind the door?" I mean, it just stretches out that agony for a little longer, and it can be cheesy, you got to be careful with using it. But I love doing that. I love kind of leaving them hanging for a period of time to kind of stretch out that climactic moment or many cliffhanger.

We were talking as we had a BingeBooks team meeting earlier, and we were talking about like the scariest books we've ever read or the scariest stories. And when you're younger, it's easier for you to be scared. Movies can cheat because they have music and sound effects. Just music alone, whenever I get scared - as an adult, when I get scared and I'm watching something, I just mute the TV because as soon as you take away the music, it's not nearly as scary. Like it's the music that freaks me out. But I was curious with both of you guys, what's the earliest memory you have of a book or movie that really freaked you out, like your earliest or your initials scare. Do you have one?

Sarah: I was different. I never really get scared when I'm reading. I had a few that have really stuck with me because they're disturbing. I think maybe with books, it's different that you don't jump when you read in the page or you don't think, I can't...

Alessandra: I've never...

Sarah: You might sort of close the book and think about it in a week's time. And so, realize that you've modified your behavior because of how creepy that book was. Well, I'm a big fan of Point Horror. I've got the T-shit on today, so Point Horror and row teen.

Alessandra: I don't know what that is. Is that show?

Sarah: Oh, really?

Alessandra: Not cool

Sarah: Point Horror books - I think we had them in the US as well. Basically, like goosebumps and those sort of really thin paperback short novels for young adults. They were really popular in the nineties and the two thousands. I used to read...

Alessandra: I definitely had R.L. Stine and Goosebumps. I don't think it was Things that go Bump in the night, but there was some show that would come on Friday nights and it like always freaked us out, but it might've been an American thing. So the audience says for them, it was the Amityville Horror. Am I pronouncing that correctly, and Eric for him it's The Exorcist. I've heard The Exorcist is a really scary novel.

Sarah: I've only seen the movie and that messed me up for a while because I was too young.

Steffanie: I loved the book cause because I was raised as a Catholic and it's got this like wonderful all like dark imagery and it's just great.

Sarah: I definitely need to read it.

Steffanie: I was also a big Goosebumps fan and it's weird because the theory first Goosebumps book and the whole series when I was able to read, when I was, I don't know, seven or eight or something, is we it turns out that spoiler alert. It turns out everyone in the new and the new town that they've moved to is dead. And the scene right at the end where the main character, she trips over the graves at then all this creepy cemetery and realizes that everyone in the town has grave and the cemetery, and holy crap, it was creepy. But then, every other goosebumps books, and I read all of them and my sister and I love horror. And so, my mom would buy us one book each month when they came out, and we'd argue over who got to read it first, and so we read every single book. And everyone after that one was really funny, but not really scary. Yeah, they were all a bit silly, but I always remember that first one, that very first one.

Alessandra: I love that premise. I'm going to have to look that up. And this leads into a great question from one of the audience David, he said, what inspired you to write horror? So was it that early reading of scary books and that was what you naturally gravitate towards or something else?

Sarah: Yeah, I think so. Like I said, I really loved Victorian Gothic novels when I was younger, and Dracula was one of my favorites. So Dracula, Daphne du Maurier, Point Horror books, yeah, I love suspense. I actually didn't get into thrillers until I was older because I was never really that into crime, you know, following the detective kind of novel. And then we had this wave of women's psychological thrillers about the dangers at home with female characters for the first time in... well, not for the first time, but the majority of them were female characters and that was kind of new and interesting. And I suddenly realized that there was a whole other genre that I could read and love and write. So yeah, it started with there's old Victorian books and it just kind of progressed as I got older into thrillers too.

Steffanie: I guess it's interesting. I'm very similar. loved horror growing up. I was obsessed with like sort of Victorian Gothic novels, especially in university. And I had this whole other side where I trained to be an archeologist. I spent a lot of time hanging out at old creepy houses and ancient ruins and things like that. It was just in my blood. But if you want to be technical, you know, I write romance which is on the surface, very, very different to horror, but I actually sort of find it's, you know, fear and lover in a lot of ways, two sides of the same coin. You know, you can only fear if you love something. You can only fear the loss of your child if you love your child. You can only fear losing your life if you love the life that you're living too. You know, if you there's people you love that you don't want to leave behind. I think that that really resonates with me and that's why I can't write a romance novel if it doesn't have a bit of horror in it.

Alessandra: Would you be able to write a horror novel that didn't have romance?

Steffanie: I think so. So actually in December, I get to put aside the romance for a little bit, and after 50 books, I'm going to write my first psychological thriller where it doesn't have to have a happily ever after, and we're quite excited to give it a go.

Alessandra: It's very freeing. I was the same way. It was all romance. I had written in erotic thriller, but all romance and then writing psychological thrillers. It's like, I had this huge opening, like, oh my gosh, I can kill off my main character. I can make my main character a bad person, you know I can do anything, you know, where with romance, you're very tied into these rules that you kind of have to follow. And so, I'm excited to see Steffanie what you do and where you go with that, s exciting stuff. We only have a few minutes left, anyone in the audience if you have any questions, don't be shy, jump in. We got a comment from Katie. My dog's very upset about this. But she said, "Silent Child was her first psychological thriller, and got me into this genre. Then I became addicted to scary books. Thanks Sarah."

Sarah: Thank you Katie.

Alessandra: I love that. And I haven't read, but someone mentioned John Saul, I guess that's how you pronounce it. I don't know that author. And we do have a question from Eric. He said, have you ever tried writing completely out of your comfort science - bright fun with happy endings, for instance?

Sarah: No, I went to a writing workshop or a writing retreat kind of thing. And at the beginning, they asked everyone to just sort of do some free writing about a specific genre two people going to meet each other. And about five lines into my free writing, one of them was associate path, so I can't. I can't do it.

Alessandra: Yeah. Your mind doesn't work in happy. I have another question; has there been any weird or funny stories in terms of researching to write a horror or to write a psychological suspense? I know my search history, internet search history, I'm shocked no one's ever knocked on my door and said, what is going on? Who is this crazy person in here? But I was curious, I know Steffanie, you've been to a lot of scary places. And Sarah with your researches, I hate to put you on the spot with that, but is there any stories that come to mind?

Sarah: When I was researching Romania, it just sounds like a really gorgeous country and I would love to go, until I found out about the Romanian tarantula, and that really caught me off.

Alessandra: Bigger than a normal tarantula?

Sarah: I would think so, yeah.

Steffanie: It's quite funny because that was good. Well, we actually got to go to Romania for about six months before COVID happened. And that was my whole big dream to go to Romania because I'm doing a vampire series next. In the middle of Romania is Poenari Castle, which is [inaudible29:37] who Dracula was inspired by, his actual castle. There's a castle in Romania called Bram Castle, that is the castle that Bram Stoker had, you know, looked at in a picture book and we had all the Dracula castle, that's actually not related to fled the Impaler at all. So I wanted to see Poenari, which is Vlad's, actual castle. And our whole trip to Romania was geared around being able to get to this castle. It's quite difficult to get to... it's not difficult to get to, it's off the beaten path a bit. And we get there, we get to Romania and I go to organize all this stuff to get there. And it turns out that a family of beers had moved into the castle.

Alessandra: A family of what, of bears?

Steffanie: Of bears, like roar, like bears.

Alessandra: Oh, bears.

Steffanie: Bears, so a family of beers has been moved into the castle ruins and you don't want people walking up to this castle while bears are living there. And so the Romanian government, and I think this is kind of lovely; rather than going in and moving the bears, they've said, no, the bears can have the castle now, so no tourists until the bears move on. It was so delightfully Romanian I thought, after spending a couple of weeks in the country, that just seems, yup, that's Romania, I love it.

Alessandra: Oh my God. I love that. That's fantastic. We have two more questions. I know we're over time, but we'll let you go just if you have time for two more questions. Jen says, is there anything you absolutely won't write about in the horror, specifically in the horror genre because it scares you too much?

Sarah: Yeah, I can't do gore really. I've written violence and it's been blunt, but series gore, I can't read it and a I can't write it. I actually have a needle phobia and a bit of a blood phobia, which is ironic for a thriller writer. So, yeah, gore, no.

Steffanie: I sort of think to a certain extent in terms of like, things that I'm afraid of. I think it's like best to like run towards those things instead of run away from them because it shows you where that like really deep emotion is, and that's what makes horror really horrifying. I probably kind of similar, I struggle with quite like magical horror, like amputations and like experiments, so that's probably not going to appear very much in my books. But in saying that, I can sort of right now... what I was saying this right now, I couldn't think of like a couple of scenes in a couple of my books that fit in that space and they were squeamish to write. So yeah, I probably would say, no, there's not a thing I wouldn't touch.

Alessandra: I was going to say that I wouldn't write any torture scenes because my big fear, like Sarah you're afraid of needles and blood. My big fear, you know, when I go to sleep at night is that I'm going to be tortured at some point in time. And s,o I was going to say that, but then I remembered and it's a funny story. I remember we were driving on a road trip and I'm riding in the passenger seat because you know we write wherever, and I was writing a scene where the character was getting interrogated and he was having his fingers cut off, and he was refusing to share this girl's location because he was in love with her. And my husband asked like, you know, interrupted me in the middle of my creative genius and asked what I was writing and I told them. And he pulled over the car and he's like, I'm not going another foot if you do not give this character his fingers back. Because it was a character who was in a wheelchair and he is a hacker. And he was like, there's no way you're cutting off hacker Mike fingers, that's his livelihood, you know, he's going on and on. And he would not go any further until I gave him his fingers back, so I did. I gave him all his fingers back. And so then I was like, I guess I did write torture scene, but I was trying not to be too gory. And then our last question, I got it from another reader, but it matches closely to one that we got from one of our team members. What do you read for a break from the scary stuff?` But the other question that we got was, is there a horror book or Gothic book that you would recommend, you know, something other than what you've written? So, we can end on that question.

Sarah: Oh, what do I read to break? I don't take any breaks and I'm honest.

Alessandra: The latest draft of our novel.

Sarah: Probably young adult books. I do like [inaudible35:17], I used to write young adult books as well, and I used to write young adult horror with ghosts in them too. So yeah, it's a little bit lighter. It's young adult fantasy. Sometimes regular fantasy though, not as often these days, because they're so long, it's a big commitment. And in terms of book to recommend, well I love Dracula. It's one of my favorites. I think it still holds up today. There are some themes that are very dodgy in today's climate, but it's such a well-written Gothic novel. And Rebecca is so good too. It's not particularly scary, but the suspense, it just pulls you in from the first page to the last page. Recently I've read a really scary book called Naomi's Room, but check trigger warnings for that because it's very scary. It was so well-written, so that's my recent favorite, but my overall favorites, Dracula, Rebecca, maybe Wuthering Heights or a bit of Gothic. There's definitely some horror elements in Wuthering Heights as well. So, I like the classic, I think.

Steffanie: We have very similar taste, very similar. I read a lot of romance books. I really like angsty stuff, so I love a really angsty young adult books. Yeah, I love that vibe, especially if they're really funny, but yeah, they got to have lots of angst. I love Rebecca, that's probably one of my favorite books of all time. I love to Shirley Jackson's we have always lived in the castle and you know, a lot of people Haunting of Hill House is their favorite, but for me, we have always lived in the castle just that, oh God, it's just the imagery, the character, just everything about it is just perfection. I recently read quite a good one called 13 Stories, which was a horror, and it's a big sort of high rise building and each chapter, there's 13 chapters, each chapter follows one person who lives in one apartment in that building. And each chapter's like a little self-contained horror story. And then at the end of that chapter, the person who that horror story was about receives an invitation to a party on the very top floor. And then, the final chapter of the book is all those people attending this party. It's just, wow, it's very wow. I was very worried that the party wouldn't live up to the hype of the previous chapters, but it did.

Alessandra: I think that book's on sale right now. If you're watching a replay, it probably won't be, but I'm going to have to check that out because the cover is also very dramatic. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you both so much. Thank you, guys, to all the readers who joined in. And if you're interested in finding out more about these fabulous women and reading their books again, Steffanie do you have the cover to show it of Shunned? Yep. There's Shunned and you can find out more about Steffanie at Steffanieholmes.com. You can see all of her novels there. And Sarah, her latest, The Housemaid is available now and you can find out more at sarahdenzel.com. Thank you much. Thank you guys. We appreciate it. And we will see you at our next BingeBook Book Club chat, which is going to be with thriller author, Andy Maslen. We hope to see you guys back for that.