The Thrill of Horror: A Guest Post by Stuart Neville
The author of The Ghosts of Belfast and Those We Left Behind is no stranger to writing a gripping crime thriller — but what made him want to try his hand at horror? Stuart Neville has penned an exclusive essay on what led him to writing Blood Like Mine, down below.
Hardcover $29.95
Blood Like Mine
Blood Like Mine
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.95
A desperate mother and daughter on the run. An FBI agent closing in on his target. A ruthless monster on the loose. You’ll be reading this one from behind your fingers.
A desperate mother and daughter on the run. An FBI agent closing in on his target. A ruthless monster on the loose. You’ll be reading this one from behind your fingers.
Ideas are slippery things. Sometimes they’re elusive, forcing the writer to go on the chase, clutching at loose threads in hopes they’ll make sense. Other times they sneak up on a writer, quietly, little by little, over days and weeks until they solidify. Most rarely, some ideas arrive fully formed, the story mapped out beginning to end, the characters already defined. That was how my latest novel came to me.
The idea for Blood Like Mine arrived at an inconvenient time: I was 40,000 words into an entirely different book, an altogether more literary affair. I had been struggling, having been stalled for a few weeks, when this Shiny New Idea presented itself. Any experienced author is wary of the Shiny New Idea. So often, they can seem better than they really are, their true appeal being a welcome, if guilty, distraction from the work that really needs doing. Initially, I treated this Shiny New Idea as such: a distraction. I mentally set it aside, tried to focus on the book I’d been struggling with. But the idea kept nagging at me, constantly elbowing its way to the forefront of my mind.
To try and tamp the idea back down into my subconscious, I decided to write a detailed synopsis, hoping that would scratch the itch. That only made it worse. This idea was burning a hole in my brain, demanding to be written. In the end, I realised I had no choice.
The result is my latest novel, a horror-thriller called Blood Like Mine:
Rebecca Carter and her daughter, Moonflower, are on the run from a grisly secret across the Southwest. FBI agent Marc Donner hunts a vicious serial killer targeting online predators and draining victims of blood before severing their spinal cords. When Donner’s investigation leads him to Rebecca and Moonflower, he discovers a mother who’ll do anything to protect her daughter—even if she’s a monster.
Throughout my career, my writing has straddled the border between thriller and horror. At times, I’ve tried to lean closer to the crime genre, but the supernatural is never far away. I was an 80s kid, so of course I grew up reading Stephen King. That, and a steady childhood diet of Universal monster pictures and Hammer horror movies, left me predisposed to the uncanny side of storytelling. While Blood Like Mine certainly dives deeper into the horror genre than I have in the past, for me, it doesn’t feel like such a huge leap. The story is structured as a thriller, with procedural elements that will appeal to the mystery reader, but with a generous side helping of the macabre. Are you a thriller reader seeking a gateway into horror, or a horror reader dipping a toe into crime? Or are you simply looking for a bloody good page turner? If any of those sound like you, then I hope you’ll make Blood Like Mine your next read.
Photo credit: Johanne Atkinson