I Can't Explain

I wrote a recent guest post entitled An Obsession I Can't Fully Explain for Dundurn's Defining Canada blog.

It was a nice break from all the recent work I have been doing on my forthcoming Dundurn book (Spooky Sudbury - which I'm writing with Jenny Jelen) and the editing that I'm doing for the forthcoming Atomic Fez novel I, Death to compose this post.

For the post, I tried to explain why I enjoy writing books about the paranormal and the unexplained.  My first non-fiction book, Haunted Hamilton, was released in the fall of 2012, and Spooky Sudbury comes out this fall.

Because I have recently been teaching horror writing workshops and have thus had to examine how effective horror works and techniques that can really draw out suspense, suspension of disbelief and pull the right strings when it comes to fear, I had already been doing a lot of thinking about that when Dundurn invited me to do the guest post.

Here's how the post begins:

I have always been afraid of the monster under my bed.

And I still am, despite the fact I learned there really was no monster there – or so the rational mind in the bright light of day would suggest.

Part of the reason I write what I do is because that monster under my bed never really left. As the morning sunlight slowly inched its way into my room, dispelling the shadows and revealing the space under my bed as monster-free, physical evidence of that monster was abolished. But no amount of sunshine or logical reasoning could ever completely remove that monster from my mind.

Go check out the full post.