A Trip Long Overdue: A Guest Post by Lamar Giles
Lamar Giles always knew he wanted to write a supernatural horror novel, but hoping to do justice to the genre held him back for years. With idols like Stephen King and Tananarive Due, he wondered how he could write in this genre and make it his own. Discover how Giles overcame his own fears and wrote Ruin Road, down below.
Hardcover $19.99
Ruin Road
Ruin Road
By Lamar Giles
In Stock Online
Hardcover $19.99
Cade is fed up with how people act around him — too shy, too rude, too afraid. When a pawn shop purchase leads to an alternate reality, he’ll have one chance to set things right and save everyone he loves from the road to their own ruin.
Cade is fed up with how people act around him — too shy, too rude, too afraid. When a pawn shop purchase leads to an alternate reality, he’ll have one chance to set things right and save everyone he loves from the road to their own ruin.
Ruin Road, my latest novel, is about a good kid named Cade Webster who wishes people would stop being afraid of him (see, he’s a Big Black Boy in a place where people have been taught there’s nothing scarier). That wish comes true, but the problem is everyone Cade meets from that point forward loses their fear of everything, and chaos ensues. It was a frightening premise to explore, and only in hindsight did I recognize the characters weren’t the only ones motoring past trepidation to do the unthinkable because, for a long, long time, I was afraid to write this story. Fourteen books into my career, and this is my first supernatural horror novel.
I was a kid in the 1980s hiding Stephen King paperbacks in my schoolbag (I still have my original copy of Skeleton Crew held together by masking tape) and a teen in the 1990s discovering Tananarive Due’s African Immortals in My Soul to Keep. Those writers, and many others, were my heroes. I loved them and the genre so much that I could not fathom *DISRESPECTING THEM* (fear can make you believe ludicrous things) by attempting anything longer than a scary short story here or there. After all, who the heck was I to step onto a court my idols played on?
So, instead I wrote everything else: thrillers, middle-grade fantasies, contemporary coming-of-age stories, and even graphic novels. For nearly ten years, I avoided directly tackling the genre I loved most while subconsciously injecting little bits of horror into everything because all of my stories have monsters, mostly the human kind. It was a slow journey, with many detours, to reach Ruin Road, and if I had to say what drove me here, it’s another wish. One that frightens me way more than what happens to Cade in the book. I couldn’t imagine, years from now, looking back on my life and thinking, I wish I’d tried.
Try might be understating what happened when I decided to take this trip. I went from zero to a hundred, from the terror of tackling the kind of horror I’ve always loved to putting all the horrors into a single story. There’s monkey’s paw–style wish-gone-wrong, a Faustian deal, cosmic horror, plenty more of those (human) monsters I’ve littered throughout all my fiction, and so on. Did I do my idols proud? Well, Tananarive Due said Ruin Road is “riveting, grounded horror tinged with characters who leap to life.” (Me = mind blown.) And while I haven’t heard from Stephen King yet . . . fingers crossed!
Here’s the thing about any place you want to be: You can wish to get there someday, or you can plot a route, buckle up, and step on the gas. Don’t believe me? Hop in. I’ll show you. If you get a little scared along the way, I promise that sometimes a little fear is a good thing.
