Yup, I’m blogging on The Nightstand again and thought I’d share part of it here.

Photo by Brenda Mihalko

In his vlog post ‘Who’s This Guy? Why Does He Write Weird Junk?‘ Daniel Marks mentioned how the king of horror, Stephen King, uses kids to put the ‘creep’ in creepy in his classic Salem’s Lot. King knows that when readers pick up a book with children in it, they often expect the children to be innocent and good and in need of protection from the evil that is afoot – readers don’t expect the children to be the evil that is afoot! That twist on the ordinary is what makes Salem’s Lot so creepy.

Writers like to do that. We either look for things that scare people and we amplify it, or we look for things that seem innocent and safe, and we flip them upside down and inside-out to make them CREEPY. With that in mind, I thought it’d be fun to share a few things that creep us authors out:

Maybe its because I was raised Catholic, but for me, anything about demons and devils and religious lore holds the creep factor. Like John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987). Alice Cooper’s character alone was enough to creep me out, but after watching it, I couldn’t sleep or look in a mirror for weeks!

Oh and sewer grates – those creep me out too. Forget walking over one; I have to walk around it, and I can’t even do that until I’ve peered down inside to make sure nothing’s lurking below . . . (thanks to It by, yup, Stephen King)

Want to hear what creeps the rest of The Nightstand authors out? Read the rest of the blog here.