Trust the Process: A Guest Post by T. Kingfisher
Gothic horror at its finest, this time Kingfisher invites us on a haunted rescue mission cloaked in the eerie decay of American coal mines. Read on for an exclusive essay from T. Kingfisher on writing What Stalks the Deep.
Hardcover
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What Stalks the Deep
What Stalks the Deep
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$16.99
$19.99
An instant New York Times, USA Today, and Indie bestseller!
The next installment in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton investigating the dark, mysterious depths of a coal mine in America
An instant New York Times, USA Today, and Indie bestseller!
The next installment in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton investigating the dark, mysterious depths of a coal mine in America
I can’t remember when I decided that the plot of What Stalks The Deep would revolve around an abandoned coal mine. Before I’d started writing, certainly, but there was never an Aha! moment, just a growing certainty that for the next adventure, I needed a coal mine. Sometimes my brain does that without actually seeking conscious input. I’ve learned to trust the process. When I need to know the setting, I’ll know it, and that’s all I can ask for.
Possibly it was because of all those drives through West Virginia, a trip I used to make once or twice a year. The town of Flatwoods has a Fiestaware outlet store, and was one of our favorite stops on the way, so it seemed like a fine place to set my story. (Yes, in my head, the Hollow Elk mine is somewhere in the vicinity of the Fiestaware outlet.)
Flatwoods is home to the Flatwoods Monster, which—sorry, Flatwoods—is a pretty D-level cryptid. Mothman gets all the West Virginia glory, I’m afraid. But it also had a railroad branch in the correct time frame for my story, and was known in the 1880s as “Burned Churches,” which is the sort of name that makes a horror author sit up and take notice.
Once I had my setting, I started researching and wow, that took me down some rabbit holes. If you can avoid being a coal miner in the early 1800s, I highly suggest it. The number of gases in a mine that could kill you were extraordinary. I actually had a chart with whether they were poisonous, explosive, or both, and whether they were lighter or heavier than air. I had initially planned to put an extensive cave system in the book, but after reading up on the claustrophobic conditions, I realized that I had most of the scary underground passages I needed right there. Possibly too much scare factor, to be honest. The way that the ceilings would sag under the weight of millions of tons of stone, or how the floor would slowly buckle upward toward the ceiling, creating squeezes where the miners had to crawl on their bellies—the carbon dioxide that would pool in low places, odorless and fatal—the stagnant black water, full of a hundred different toxic chemicals—and somehow I had to make the readers afraid of a monster?
So I threw Alex Easton, sworn soldier, into this mess, with full confidence that they would rise to the occasion, or at least fail to rise to the occasion in a manner that was fun to read about. The abandoned mine itself became one of the antagonists, a dark place riddled with strange lights in the deep. Good thing Easton isn’t claustrophobic…much.
Poor bastard doesn’t even get to buy Fiestaware.