Today's Reading
Wolf Harbor Estate
An Excerpt from
The Ink in Your Veins: On Writing Fear
BY J. R. ALASTOR
INTRODUCTION
If you were to take Story, strap it down onto your dining room table, and slide a scalpel through its chest, you would find the lifeblood is theme. It causes Story's cold corpse to breathe, to reach through the sheets of dead trees and puncture your skin, fastening long, clawed fingers around your heart.
Let me ask you this: Why do we love the thrill? How on earth have my grisly books sold so many copies worldwide? (Abounding gratitude, by the way.) And why is The Haunting of Hill House still regarded as one of the greatest stories of all time?
My theory is that the monster in the house, the killer in the dark, reflects ourselves. That in reading about a house morphing into a twisted mirror of a young woman's soul, we feel as though we, too, have looked ourselves in the eye. Like the Greeks, who witnessed plays of great tragedy and comedy to experience the emotion, we, too, hunger for confrontation of our innermost secrets.
We've all done things in the dark, after all.
Only, also like the Greeks, we want this experience in a safe environment. We don't want to face ourselves, not really. We just want to feel like we have—to sample the sting of guilt, the relief of catharsis, and to move along as if nothing happened.
Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.
But where do those demons come from, I wonder? Could they flow from a great burden, an unpardonable guilt, as so many of our protagonists shoulder?
I think perhaps each of you knows what I'm referring to. And if you don't—well. Over the course of this book, we shall all get rather well acquainted, shall we?
I'm dying to begin.
DAY ONE
THE DINNER PARTY
The Dinner Party (n.): wherein the characters are summoned to a secluded yet always opulent estate, usually by an enigmatic host who may or may not appear. Murder and mayhem inevitably follow.
—The Ink in Your Veins: On Writing Fear, Index of Tropes
CHAPTER ONE
Rodrigo
I was prepared to sell my soul for a one-way ticket back to Spain, and I'd only been off the plane for three hours.
"Ro?" Olivia's cold fingers wound through mine, and I tore my gaze from the vein of dark cloud over the harbor. "What is it?"
I extracted my face from my scarf and grazed my mouth against hers. "Nada, mi vida."
I glanced down the dock, the graying planks warped with age. The stalks of a dozen derelict sailboats poked at the Maine sky like toothpicks, the small ferry bobbing next to us pristine by contrast. The sun was a shameless lie, having burned off most of the fog, but I still couldn't see Wolf Harbor Island over the horizon.
Olivia attempted to unsequester my hand from my jacket pocket, her cheeks wind whipped. "You're still on edge."
"My face is freezing."
"That's the only part of you I can see."
"Which is why my face is freezing."
A divot appeared between her eyebrows that I wanted to smooth away with my thumb. "Look, I know you're—"
"A suspicious bastard?"
"Beautifully put, love, but I was going to say 'nervous.' Trust me, Alastor does not have some devious scheme to land us in a courtroom and ruin our lives." She flared her eyes comically, and I felt the corner of my mouth lift against my will. "The NDA has to be just a formality. How else is an anonymous author supposed to make sure we won't let his identity slip?"
...
