First of all, no axes. No severed heads or zombies or vampires or werewolves. What scares me is subtlety and a gradual uptick in the strangeness element. Take a film like Incident at Owl Creek Bridge or Nicole Kidman’s The Others. The world is normal but gradually becomes less so. Slowly, over time, we begin to understand we are in a terrible place because the terror is already here, and always has been. The movie Silent Hill starts out with perfect pitch, and descends into a shattering nightmare that is still with me. But it did so slowly and with art, with a delicate touch.

As well, the story has to make some kind of sense, it has to operate on its own internal rules, it has to be true to these rules and not break them for a cheap thrill. The film The Haunting was a superb example of the gradual increase of terror until it became unbearable.

At least for adults. Children and teens, who have no experience – yet – of how frightening the world can be – they laugh at scenes that would make a grown-up run shrieking from the room.

I wrote the Niceville Trilogy to be terrifying in an inexorable but logical way. If anyone compares what I’m doing in the NICEVILLE Trilogy with Stephen King or Henry James or Sheridan Lefanu, then I have done my job.

Give the books a try. If you can put the first one down after thirty pages … well, trust me. You won’t.

Rainey Teague Snaps Out Of Existence –

They stood and watched as Rainey Teague stick-walked jerkily into the frame, leaned in to the glass, stayed there, his expression growing more fixed as the seconds passed, Rainey drawing closer and closer to the glass until his nose was pressed up against it and his breath was fogging the plate.

Then the recoil.

He steps back.

And … vanishes.

The camera keeps rolling. They both stood there and watched it, riveted, locked on, with the utter wrongness of the thing rippling up and down their spines. In the frames they saw the feet of passing strollers, always that patch of bare sidewalk, now and then piece of paper flickers through or the shadow of a bird ripples across the screen, and in the background people passing by, perfectly oblivious. They ran the frames on until a uniform cop appeared in the image, crossing from the direction of Pennington's Book Nook, reaching for the door of Uncle Moochie's.

Nick recognized the big bulky shape and the pale freckled features of Boots Jackson, the Niceville cop assigned to canvass this block. They rolled it back and forth a few more times, but it was always the same.

At 1513.55, Rainey Teague is right there.

At 1513.56, the kid is gone.

He doesn't leap out of the picture, or duck to one side, or jump way up high, or fade away, or turn into a puff of smoke, or get jerked away by the arms of a stranger.

He just flicks off, as if he were only a digital image and somebody had hit ERASE.

Rainey Teague is just gone.