If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’d be able to buy the Taj Mahal—well, at least on the lay-away plan. Depending on my mood, my automatic response to the question is either, “Wal-Mart,” or “Everywhere.” I usually get a chuckle from the first answer, but the second, although the true answer never seems to quite sink in. You can see it in their eyes, that lost but searching, “Huh?” even after a half hour’s worth of explanation. That’s always bugged me. I’m a writer doggone it, which means I should be able to give them a bit more clarity with words. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered I’d been using the wrong words all along…

A couple weeks ago I did a keynote address at a writers’ conference and when the address was over, a few people, all aspiring authors, came over to chat. One of them was an elderly woman dressed in purple stretch pants, a black t-shirt with pink letters that read, GIRLY GIRL across the front, and brown sandals. She had short white, every-which-way hair that gave new meaning to the word bed-head and the brightest, most beautiful smile I’d ever seen. After a short introduction, (I’ll call her Mildred) and the exchange of a few pleasantries, Mildred said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Not at all.”

“Where do you get your ideas?”

For a second, I was taken aback by the question. Not because I figured most writers knew the answer but because I was looking a story idea right in her face. (Can you imagine the adventures that might revolve around a character like Mildred?!) I already knew my standard answer, ‘Everywhere,’ was inadequate, so I tried a little experiment….

“What do you write?” I asked.

“Romance.”

“Okay - romance . . .” I glanced around the room.

The conference was being held in an old school building, circa 1920, that had been refurbished and now served as the city’s Arts Council facility. We were gathered in what used to be the school cafeteria, so I considered the location for setting. Then I scanned the room for a main character. It took only a moment to find him - a bow-backed old gentleman, standing by the snack table. He stood barely five feet tall and wore a faded blue suit, white shirt and tie, and a dark blue ball cap with WWII VETERAN stitched in gold on the front.

I put a hand on Mildred’s shoulder and as inconspicuously as possible, pointed him out. “See that man over there near the table? The one in the ball cap?”

“Yes.”

“Look carefully at how he stands, the fit of his clothes, the shape of his hands, the look on his face. See how he’s fidgeting?”

Mildred glanced up at me like I’d grown a second nose. “What about it? He might have Parkinson’s.”

“Maybe…but suppose he doesn’t? Suppose he’s nervous?”

“What would he be nervous about?”

“Think about where you are - an old school building, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what if…he was attending a high school reunion, only not his own. He found out about this place and event accidentally and after decades of searching for someone.”

Mildred let out a little gasp of excitement. “You mean like a long lost love?”

“Could be. But what if he’s here expecting to see another woman? One he’s never seen before - like his daughter?”

That was all it took to get Mildred off and running. Within minutes she had twisted the ‘what if’ every which way but loose and couldn’t wait to get home and start a new story, all of it based on the old man in the ball cap.

That little experiment not only gave me a new way to answer an old question, it once again proved something I’ve heard time and time again as a writer . . . it’s always better to show than tell.

Deborah LeBlanc is the author of Family Inheritance, Grave Intent, A House Divided, and Morbid Curiosity. Her latest book, Water Witch, is due on bookstore shelves this month. She is the current president of the Horror Writers Association. Learn more about Deborah at her official author website and visit her on MySpace .

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website .

In one of my English classes, I teach a 12-year-old kid, who for the sake of anonymity, I shall call "Tom." For the first six weeks back in September, I probably didn’t notice him much. Even in a nice middle-class school like the one I’ve been teaching in for the past year or so, our groups number about thirty so it takes a while to see past the big characters to the quieter ones. Tom is skinny with sandy hair and a naturally tanned complexion; he’s not too tall, not too small, sits in the middle row towards the side, and keeps his head down. The kind of boy that’s easy to miss for a while.

Tom isn’t a natural English student and NEVER puts his hand up; he definitely didn’t back then, anyway. He’s popular enough in his own way, and I get the feeling he’ll grow up into the kind of teenager that the girls will suddenly notice. In fact, only a couple of weeks ago the rest of the class were very quick to tell me that he was ‘dating’ Rebecca on the front row. And they both looked pretty happy about it let me tell you, and I was pretty happy that maybe at least one girl in the class would one day land on her feet with a good man, because bubbly as Rebecca is, maybe she’s got an early glimmer that still waters can run deep, and obvious isn’t always best.

But I digress.

I’d like to say that I started to pay attention to Tom because I’m an excellent teacher who can see the special in each and every one of the 150 students that step into En1 every weekday. I’d like to say that but it would be a lie. I’m human, and most of the time I’m just tired. I get up at 5:30 in the morning to write before school and I rarely get to bed before midnight between marking class assignments and more writing; so sometimes I’m not even sure what class is coming through the door before they get there.

No, I started to pay attention to Tom when I found out he’d missed most of the previous year in hospital fighting leukaemia. When I queried him about it, he just shrugged in that embarrassed way kids do, smiled easily, and said he was better now. When I checked the school records, it seemed things had been pretty touch and go for a while and not something to shrug and smile easily about at all.

Well, last Sunday Tom’s granddad blew his own head off with a shotgun. It was out of the blue and completely unexpected. They were by all accounts a close family, but then leukaemia in a child can do that, I guess. Maybe once Tom had conquered that threat, his granddad couldn’t hold back his own demons. Who knows? The family doesn’t, that’s for sure; there was no note. Again, you can only wonder why, and the emotional-vampire-writer in me wants to veer off and find or invent the story behind that cruel lack of note and explore that painful legacy, but again…

I digress.

All of Tom’s teachers were notified by email (don’t you just love modern communication? God forbid we should speak to each other face to face…), and the school secretary said that Tom would be back in school on Wednesday and to treat him gently but not to broach the subject because he was very traumatised and devastated by the whole incident.

Now I don’t need telling twice. I’m a writer. I don’t talk about feelings. Uh-uh. If I try, I get tongue-tied and end up just making a joke or getting moody and snappy. I’ve ended relationships without ever talking about what’s wrong. If something affects me, I write about it, preferably through a character that I’ve made much better equipped to deal with it than I am. It’s a major flaw, I know, but in this case, it was a flaw that kept Tom safe from interference from me.

As it was, Tom did indeed return to school on Wednesday and turned up at English, the same easy-going quiet kid as ever. I didn’t mention his granddad. I wouldn’t have known the right words even if I’d tried. Instead I just got on with the lesson.

Next Monday, we have Graham Joyce coming in to talk about writing and to answer questions and sign books. In preparation for this, we were looking at the very entertaining opening chapters of his three excellent YA novels, most of which make some reference to boy/girl relationships and all the humorous teenage embarrassment that goes along with those. Rather than focussing on the language analysis like most of my more professional colleagues were probably doing in their classrooms, we got sidetracked into talking about the general differences between boys and girls and the ways they flirted (amazing how very little is different between 13 and 36… God help them.).

Anyway, I found myself elaborately telling a story of when I was seventeen and a friend of mine dropped me off at a pub where a boy I really liked was sitting outside with a group of friends. Unfortunately, as I casually slammed the door and waved her away, I failed to realize that my long, elasticated-waist, goth-style skirt had caught in it. Oh, the shame as the mini metro pulled away, and tugged my skirt down with it…revealing a very skimpy pair of pink knickers to the world –and said boy -before my hammering on the roof of the car finally got my friend to stop and I could desperately reclaim my clothes, but unfortunately none of my dignity.

God, those kids laughed. And as I looked up, my own face as pink as those long-ago knickers, my inner self shocked that I’d actually shared the tale, my eyes met Tom’s. He was laughing so hard he was nearly crying and when he looked at me, he shook his head and smiled the sweetest smile I’ve seen in a long time, and I grinned back.

There was hope in that shy, sweet smile. After all the horror that he’d faced, there was definite hope that the world would get better.

We didn’t need to talk about his granddad. The smile didn’t need words, because when he was laughing hard like that, imagining his ancient teacher standing in the middle of the Edinburgh streets with her pink knickers on show, I could see that just like he’d beat the cancer, he would beat the shotgun.

He might not be the same as he was before it, the same way that he probably wasn’t the same as he was before the cancer, but he’d beat it all the same. And someday, when he was all grown up, he might take a moment and look back and wonder at just how amazing he was when he was a child.

A while back on a message board – and I’ve mentioned it in my forthcoming Tower Hill interview with DSM – I read a comment from a reader saying my stories often focussed on children in peril. It stumped me, it really did. I honest-to-God hadn’t realized that I did it, and it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to since. What is it that’s so fascinating about children and that makes us feature them so much in this genre? It’s not just me who uses them in horror. Lebbon’s done it. Keene’s done it. And King is the King of the kid fighting evil.

I’ve mused (no pun intended) on this a lot, especially now that I’m about to take a year out from teaching and not be around children every day. And I can only conclude that kids are just better at realizing the important things than us oldies. Because kids just don’t understand death, not in relation to them at any rate, and that makes the world a whole different place. Let me try and put my ramblings more plainly...

All adult fears are built around death.

Let’s take mine:

Fear of flying is actually fear of crashing which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of heights is actually fear of falling which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of deep water is actually fear of drowning/sharks which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of cancer is actually fear of rotting away which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Do you see what I’m driving at? We spend our whole adult lives with a niggling dark fear that we can do nothing about. And that makes it a pretty dull fear all things considered.

Children though...children don’t actually believe that death will ever happen to them which makes the things that scare them far more interesting; the fear of looking stupid, the fear of not being accepted, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of not being believed, the fear of being the only one to be afraid.

The fear of the monster under the bed isn’t fear of death. It’s the fear of that awful moment when the icy fingers wrap round your ankle and you know that things really do live in the shadows and adults really don’t know shit.

Children are open to stuff that we long ago put behind us. They’re willing to believe in good and evil, and worlds that exist in different dimensions, and monsters that live in the closet, but they’ll also let things go in a way that adults can’t. They’re too busy discovering the world to start disbelieving that it’s essentially a good place. They’re just not hardened and cynical like we are. They believe in true love. They believe that the truth will win out. They believe in fair and unfair, no matter how many times we tell them that life doesn’t hold with that.

Now I know that I’m generalizing. We live in a society where kids are stabbing each other to death on the streets of London for no good reason fathomable to anyone over eighteen years old. Twenty dead kids this year so far, which for England is unprecedented. The government is in a constant whirl of how to deal with it; knife amnesties, videos showing the grief of relatives, creative projects to distract young people from joining gangs, and so many other well-meaning schemes. But they forget one thing.

Children don’t believe in death. They don’t believe it will ever happen to them, so why would they put the knife down? Being in the gang is the adrenaline rush. It’s the belonging to a society that’s their own, outside of us. The death part happens to other kids. Their fears are far more complex. And children are, I’ve discovered after working in schools at both ends of the social spectrum, under all the image and different backgrounds, all pretty much the same. They’re us before the world got to us. They’re fascinating.

All the things that make children so interesting to use in writing are the same things that make horror a genre that I will always be drawn to write in. Horror isn’t about vampires, or zombies, or viruses, or the devil or any other symbolic monster that we use in our writing. Horror isn’t about death. Not for me anyway. It’s about the trial that people go through to come out at the other side. Horror is about characters fearing more than death. It’s about being afraid that you just won’t cut it. That maybe you haven’t got what it takes to be the hero. It’s about finding that kernel of strength that you never knew you had. It’s about people making sacrifices to save other people. Horror is all about the good stuff, the stuff we were made of when we were children. Don’t you get it?

For me, horror is about hope.

It’s about the sweet smile three days after the shotgun.

And who wouldn’t want to write in a genre like that?

Sarah Pinborough is the author of five mass-market horror novels, The Hidden, The Reckoning, Breeding Ground, The Taken, and her latest, Tower Hill - all published by Leisure Books in New York. She also has a novella called The Language of Dying due out from PS Publishing in the UK in December 2008. Her short stories can be found most recently in Summer Chills (Carrol & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, and the upcoming British Invasion from Cemetery Dance.

Publishers Weekly has compared Sarah’s writing to Dean Koontz and Bentley Little.

When not writing, Sarah spends most of her time thinking about what to write next, talking to her cats, planning an escape to America and drinking wine. She currently lives and works in Milton Keynes, England.

Visit her official author website and MySpace page.

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.

Granted, I’m a total newbie to publishing, with just two books plus an upcoming anthology out in the last two years. But even though I was mostly toiling in Hollywood for the previous ten years and reading only for, you know, pleasure instead of to check out the market, I was still somewhat aware of what was out there in bookstores and grocery racks. And I’m quite sure there used to exist a genre called “horror” and you could buy it in stores under the label “horror” and people called “publishers” bought it and published it, and people called “readers” bought it and read it. Stephen King was, well, the king of it and Anne Rice was the queen of it (but was she? More on that later…) but there were all kinds of other authors who also wrote it. And you could walk into a store and find it and buy it.

Cut to now, and I am much more aware of what is on bookstore shelves because my books are on them as well, and I’m much more aware of what publishers buy because it’s now my living. And this is what I see: Barnes & Noble has no horror section at all. None. There are aisles of mystery, and romance, and thriller, and Sci-Fi/fantasy, but no horror at all. Borders stores still have horror sections, but not anything like a horror aisle - not like the mystery aisle or the romance aisle or the sci-fi aisle. It’s more like a horror bookcase. A few Borders stores have a whopping total of two waist-high bookcases - one for paperbacks and one for hardcovers.

And publishers like St. Martin’s and Harper Collins tell their new authors who are writing horror not to call their books “horror”. We don’t even use the H-word at St. Martin’s. What we’re really writing is thrillers or supernatural thrillers, just in case you were wondering. And look, I’m fine with that. Call it whatever you want, just get it out there.

But I’ve got to ask - what happened?

I’m asking this not rhetorically and not as someone who actually has the answer that I’m waiting to spring on you at the end of this essay. I really would like to know.

I completely understand that genres go in cycles. As far as I can tell, Chick Lit became huge after the monster success of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Everyone wanted more, and publishers bought more, and published more, and it lasted for a good six years or so. Now Chick Lit is deader than a doornail. No agent or editor wants it, although paranormal chick lit - warm and fuzzy werewolves and vampires and such - seems to be going strong.

Other examples: the one-two punch of the film series The Lord of the Rings, which brought a whole new generation to the Tolkien books, and the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series, turbo-propelled fantasy to new heights. Both are still going strong.

So basically, a while ago, this happened with horror, right? Only for a lot longer run, it seems to me. Stephen King, Ira Levin, William Peter Blatty (though he doesn’t consider himself a horror writer) and Thomas Tryon headed up a horror renaissance in the late seventies. And while King kept it going strong through the 80’s, Thomas Harris and Dean Koontz added a new dimension by crossing horror and thriller. Anne Rice came along and brought in a yet another whole new dimension - the huge female readership - including a significant segment of the massive romance readership. Horror kept on trucking, undoubtedly bolstered by the success of film franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th.

And then…what?

Was it just a matter of saturation? Publishers over published and created a glut, and readers just didn’t want to see it anymore? Maybe horror moved more into the movies, where a younger audience craved the scares, but an aging reading population just didn’t want to see the gore any more? It does seem to me that movies aimed squarely at teenagers, like the I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends, and Final Destination franchises - and more recently, the Saw series - kept horror going in cinema longer, but that’s petering out now as well; post-strike, the studios are just not interested in horror scripts.

Now, I have heard rumblings from the general direction of New York that horror fiction might not be completely dead, thanks to Scott Smith’s The Ruins, Dan Simmons’s The Terror, and Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, and the hope those bestsellers hold out for the genre in general. And yet, when I go to conferences, I’m consistently hearing agents and editors saying they’re not looking for horror. And Scott Smith is not necessarily primarily a horror writer, and Dan Simmons has said himself that he doesn’t consider The Terror a horror novel, and it’s true that his brilliant book transcends the whole notion of horror.

So, okay. Those of us who are writing horror can call our books dark suspense or paranormal or supernatural thrillers – like I said, I don’t care what you call it. Maybe we’ve just gone back to the pre-King days when horror was shelved in fiction and literature, and maybe that’s a good thing.

But I wonder. Do we authors in this dark genre bear some responsibility for the apparent demise of the genre? And do we bear some responsibility for reviving the genre if we would like it to revive?

Did horror perhaps tank because authors started writing some truly terrible books that repulsed more readers than they were attracting? Did it marginalize itself with more and more outré offerings and lose the mainstream readership that Stephen King and Anne Rice and Thomas Harris had held on to for so long?

And is horror as a genre continuing to shoot itself in the foot (chest, head, groin, kneecap…) by not embracing and aligning itself with a related genre that is alive and thriving – meaning paranormal romance?

I don’t know if anyone could have ever truly called Anne Rice a horror author. She was shelved in horror because she wrote about the supernatural, but really what she was writing was paranormal literature with a large helping of erotica. But she sure did bolster the horror genre while she was at it.

So why exactly are we as horror authors and reviewers and readers not rushing to claim as our own books like Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and horror/thriller crossovers like Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club – all of which deal with the dark side and the supernatural while differing from other offerings in the horror genre because a) they’re cross-genre and b) they are wildly popular – not to put too fine a point on it.

As an author, I have no problem with my publisher calling my books “supernatural thrillers”. But as a reader, I feel a pang at what seems like the disappearance of a genre I have read and loved since I first began to read. And I can’t help wondering if there is something we can do.

I have no answers, just questions, mainly these two:  What did we do to get here… and is there anything we can and/or should do for the genre now?

I’d love to hear it from anyone and everyone who cares. Please share your comments below.

Alexandra Sokoloff is the author of the dark genre novels The Harrowing - for which she was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and AnthonyAward - and The Price. She is contracted with St. Martin's Press for her next two supernatural thrillers, both slated for release in 2009. Visit her official author website and MySpace page.

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.

_{Author's Note: The below is the direct result of watching way too much Star Trek at a formative age. The Borg! They're here already! You're next! Also, there is a fair amount of talking out my butt. Please swallow your grain of salt now. - SL}

I keep hearing that people don’t read anymore. That kids don’t value words because they’ve got access to more immediate pleasures. As media becomes ubiquitous and its content uniform, we’re directing our own evolution toward a species that operates by hive mind. Room for difference narrows. Art dies, and the anonymous machine supplants our conscience, subverts our humanity. Instead of gym classes, we’ve got the Nintendo Wii. Instead of quiet contemplation, which affords us the time to construct intelligent ideas, we can Google, see what other people think, and mimic what has already been discovered, often without comprehension. We don’t think anymore. We only communicate, and adopt ideas fashioned by the Greeks two thousand years ago, only less effectively.

“Idiocracy.” “Brazil.” “Radio Nowhere.” But this is the worst-case scenario. I worry about it a lot, but that’s probably because I’m a worrier. The opposite is just as easily true. Democratization of information brings difference, and a free exchange of unique ideas that advance society, like the French salons of the Enlightenment (though hopefully to less catastrophic ends). Machines become the repository for our memories, so that we can focus solely on cognition. It’s hard to say what changes technology will bring, and the unknown is always scary.

Out of last year’s ten bestsellers in Japan, five were originally cell phone novels written mostly by first-time authors. They were love stories that tended to lack characterization, setting, and description, so that readers unfamiliar with those specificities never felt excluded. Celebrity Rehab is to Arrested Development as cell phone novels are to One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I first read the article about these phone books in The New York Times. I wondered if it was time to turn off my laptop, and find a field to plow. Why bother learning a craft, when a twenty-year old who’s never seen a semi-colon can do your job in a tenth the time? Remember vaudeville? I don’t. Freakin’ Japan!

But such reasoning is specious. I’m reminded of that nut carrying the “end of the world” sandwich board who hung out near ground zero in the weeks following 9-11. Yeah, that stinker really did do that. I still wish I’d kicked him. What did he know? His socks didn’t even match.

Doomsayers have heralded the end of humanity since humanity began, but for all that, we seem okay. People probably read more in this century than ever before, and reading has become democratized; it’s not just for white men anymore. The written word has indeed changed our lives. So has television, radio, mass production, the middle class (now shrinking), electricity, toilet paper, the list goes on. And they didn’t just change our lives, they changed us. We’re creatures of our own creation.

Loneliness is the disease, and our species has long striven for the cure. Media like the written word approximate our ideal form of communication, but until we all become psychics or reach singularity, they’ll never hit the target; they’ll just keep getting closer (or, paradoxically, further away). So yes, phone novels and other innovations might marginalize paper novels, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Such is the way of change. Let’s be honest, some of the American bestsellers (Bridges of Madison County, anyone?) might as well be cell phone novels. And besides, maybe these young Japanese women, now that they have book deals, will pen the next classic.

I think we can rest easy so long as we’re willing to adapt. Writers have inherent value. Aside from research scientists, they’re the only people I know who can sit still for hours, and think. Thinking is the job the rest of the world is trying to avoid by talking on the phone, and surfing the internet, and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s hard, and really frustrating. It always has been. The human brain accounts for about 2% of human body weight, but consumes about 20% of the total energy in the body at rest. When actually in use, it burns even more energy. Thinking is like running a marathon all the time.

If, one hundred years from now, the novel becomes obsolete, we’ll still find work and even fulfillment. The skills used for writing are rare, and translate into every medium, from stockbroker to sitcom writer. Nonetheless, I expect that the novel will remain because it’s unique. So far, electronic mediums haven’t duplicated its ability to thoroughly examine a specific subject, and evoke the same depth of emotion. What we’ve seen instead is novelty and marketing ploys. People will always visit the Colosseum, but that doesn’t mean they can’t tell the difference between entertainment and art.

Then again, changes are coming. Cell phone novels. The Amazon Kindle. Readers who will eventually revise their favorite authors’ text, and write their own “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” We can all see it on the horizon. When Edward R. Murrow made the leap from radio to television he called it, potentially, “the world’s greatest classroom.” As writers, perhaps we ought to get ready to make that same kind of leap, so that as change happens, we can affect the outcome.

Sarah Langan is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated novels The Keeper and The Missing. Her next book, Audrey's Door, is due in bookstores in 2009. Learn more about Sarah at her official author website and visit her on MySpace. 

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.

As a writer, especially a writer of dark fiction, you’re given a certain amount of creative license when penning a story, and although I appreciate that freedom, I find myself getting pretty anal when it comes to certain details.

For example, when writing about mental institutions, I could have fostered an innocuous enough building and location from my imagination to pass mustard. But what about the feel inside the building? The energy that’s exerted by the patients who live there, the families that visit them? Yes, I could have easily made something up, but I figured there were a few readers out there who’d experienced the inside of an institution in one way or another. They would know phony when they read it. So, to remedy the situation, I visited mental institutions, many of them. Some new, some ancient, some abandoned. But I left each location with a sense that I held something tangible, something real I could share with my readers.

In truth, though, I think I take research a bit too far some times. Take the coffin incident for example…

I was writing a scene for one of my books, where a secondary character accidentally locks himself in a casket. Not having experienced such a tragedy, I began winging that thread on imagination alone. But the scene simply wouldn’t jell. When I finally finished the first draft and read it, it felt two-dimensional. So I wrote it again. It still stank. By the third draft my frustration level had peaked, and I shoved my chair away from the computer, knowing there was only one solution to this two-dimensional problem. I would have to experience it. Now you would think a logical person would take into consideration that the number of readers who’d actually been trapped in a casket was minimal enough to make the whole issue moot. Then again, we’re talking about a rational person…I’ll tell you, I’ve pulled some crazy stunts before, all in the name of research, but this one ranks in the top three.

Here’s what happened . . .

Having access to a casket was the easy part because many of my friends are funeral directors. Choosing one of them to lock me inside a casket, however, was the challenge. Although I trusted my friends, did I trust all of them with my life? Uh, nope. And just how many of them would think I had completely flipped off my rocker? Damn near every one of them….except ‘Jay’, a twenty year veteran in the business and an avid adventurer. So I asked him, and, as I suspected, he gave me a crooked grin, eyed me for a long moment, then said, “Aw, what the hell. Okay, I’ll do it.”

Early the next evening, after Jay’s staff had left for the day, we went into the casket selection room, and I chose a bronze sealer with off-white satin interior. The high-end, air-tight model made Jay nervous.

“Ten minutes and you’re out of air,” he said, his expression now pensive. “You sure you want this one?”

“Well . . . yeah. You are going to unlock it, right?”

“Yeah I’m going to unlock it, but what if it gets stuck? Suppose something goes wrong with the lock. I mean, it’s not like we go around testing these caskets. Once they’re locked, they usually go in the ground.”

“Then let’s test it before you lock me inside,” I said, getting a bit nervous myself.

So we did test it—three times, and the casket reopened each time without fail.

With Jay hovering like a mother hen, I finally slipped off my shoes and climbed into the casket. My body sank into the plush mattress, and I let out a little sigh. This was more comfortable than the mattress on my own bed.

“When you’re ready to come out, just knock on the inside of the lid or the sides, and I’ll unlock it right away,” Jay said.

“Okay, but let’s practice to make sure you can hear me.” I signaled for him to close the lids.

The moment that tiny space grew dark I beat on the side of the casket with an elbow, then quickly pushed open the lid above my head. This was going to be tougher than I thought. “Did you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

I nodded, took a deep breath. We eyed each other for a moment. “Okay then,” I said, drumming up as much courage as I could. “Let’s get this shit over with.”

As soon as the lid closed, I heard the click of the lock slipping into place….

I have never known darkness so complete. Not one molecule of light existed in this confined space. That alone caused my breathing to grow rapid. Tight spaces don’t usually bother me, but tight, dark spaces are another story. I was able to move my arms, but the range was extremely limited. I brought my right hand to my face, touched my nose, still not believing the depth of the darkness. Only three fingers fit between my head and the lid above me. Leg movement was nearly impossible. A few inches straight up was about all the room I had before hitting the bottom lid. The sides of the casket pressed against my shoulders. A sardine in a can had more room than I did.

With each passing moment, every scent seemed to grow more concentrated—the new mattress—layers of satin—metal. The smells quickly became overwhelming, and my nose burned each time I inhaled.

Sounds, even those created by me, were muffled. The rustle of my clothes against the lining of the casket, my breathing. I coughed to test the effect, and the sound fell flat, like a rock dropped into a shallow pond. A thumping sound came from outside the casket, and I held my breath, listening. More thumping. Was Jay walking around the casket? Walking away from the casket? I had to mentally push, shove, squash, stomp that thought out of my head before I completely came unglued.

I closed my eyes, which made no difference in my surroundings, and focused on my character and the scene I’d written for him. What would he be doing right about now? In my mind’s eye, I saw him thrashing, frantic to be free. I knew his confinement, knew the darkness, understood his helplessness. The vision grew so vivid, I found myself beginning to hyperventilate. Wait . . . I tried drawing in a deep breath, but only managed to fill a third of my lungs. I wasn’t hyperventilating . . . I was running out of oxygen!

In the throes of that revelation, my eyes flew open, and I slammed an elbow against the side of the casket.

Rapid thumping outside now. Quick, muted footsteps. The clank of metal against metal—Jay sliding the L-key into the lock? I heard a click—then nothing. I felt my eyes grow as wide as doubloons. Ramming my elbow harder against the casket, I yelled, “Let me out!” My voice sounded muffled by a thousand pillows. “Let—me—out!”

More clicking sounds that seemed to go on forever before—light! The top lid suddenly flew open, and I bolted upright, gulping air.

When I finally collected myself, I looked over at Jay. “What took you so long?”

He held up the L-key. “I got nervous, and it kept slipping out of the hole.”

Now that would have made an interesting broadcast, don’t you think? Author Suffocates in Casket Due to Nervous Funeral Director—more news at 10!

Deborah LeBlanc is the author of Family Inheritance, Grave Intent, A House Divided, and Morbid Curiosity. Her next book, Water Witch, is due in bookstores in August 2008. She is the current president of the Horror Writers Association. Learn more about Deborah at her official author website and visit her on MySpace. 

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.

Long Island, NY, December 11, 2007 – Dark Scribe Magazine, the recently launched virtual magazine focusing on dark genre authors and their works, is pleased to announce that MUSE – the new writing collaborative comprised of acclaimed novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff, and the UK’s Sarah Pinborough – will take up residence on its virtual pages with a monthly column.

MUSE-ings: Smart, Dark Thoughts from Smart, Dark Dames will premiere in the magazine this coming January. Each column will feature the revolving roster of muses and will explore dark genre literature from a decidedly feminine point-of-view. Readers can expect insights and ruminations on the horror, suspense, and thriller genres from four women who know the business. Expect everything from the sassy to the understated, from the thought-provoking to the lighthearted. Most of all, expect the unexpected.

MUSE was born when LeBlanc, Langan, Sokoloff, and Pinborough met at the World Horror Convention in 2007 and realized their shared ambition, humor, and love of dark genre literature. In addition to their new guest column at Dark Scribe Magazine, the women are working on a very unique collaborative book project and will all be tutors at the 2008 Pen to Press writers retreat in New Orleans.

On this unique new partnership, Dark Scribe Editor-in-Chief Vince Liaguno says, “We’re delighted to be bringing this caliber of talent to our virtual pages. Our readers are in for a genuine literary treat.” MUSE member and HWA President Deborah LeBlanc echoes his sentiments, "We're thrilled by the opportunity to bring our combined general and female perspectives to Dark Scribe Magazine, a top quality, new publication dedicated to dark literature. The professionalism DSM brings to the genre will undoubtedly make it a leader in the industry. We're honored to be on board as they embark on their maiden voyage."

Dark Scribe Magazine is the first undertaking of Dark Scribe Press, LLC, a new small-press publishing company based in New York. For more information on the magazine and its parent company, please visit Dark Scribe Press.  For more information on MUSE, visit their official website.