Reviewers and book bloggers: Medium Well is now available for review on Net Galley!

As someone who just wrote three ghost stories (the first, Medium Well, will be released by Berkley InterMix on February 19), I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about being scared—how to do it and why. I’ve always had a weakness for ghost stories, both fiction and nonfiction, but I’d never really stopped to think what it was about those stories that really got to me. Why some of them gave me nightmares and some of them didn’t do much of anything.

I should start out by saying that explicit horror doesn’t do much except make me cringe. Texas Chainsaw Massacre never really appealed to me, nor did Scream or Halloween. It wasn’t that they weren’t scary (they definitely were). But it wasn’t the kind of scary I found enjoyable. Stabbing teenagers who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time makes me sad rather than uneasy.

Contrast this with Silence Of the Lambs. Now you may remember SOL as being extremely violent, but in fact it isn’t. There’s one sequence that’s designed to demonstrate that Dr. Lecter really is just as dangerous as everyone said he was, but that’s it. With the exception of the ending, everything else works by innuendo. You feel that Clarice is constantly under threat, but that threat is never realized until she finally finds Buffalo Bill at the end of the movie. And it’s that constant unrealized threat that makes the movie feel so terrifying.

I think good ghost stories work with a similar dynamic. You’re always waiting for something scary to happen, but it never seems to come when you expect it. Moreover, written ghost stories can be considerably scarier than filmed ones because the action takes place in your head. There’s a moment in Shirley Jackson’s supremely terrifying Haunting of Hill House when two of the psychically sensitive guests are talking in their darkened bedroom. One of them remarks that the other’s hand, which she’s holding, is very cold tonight. Guest two replies that she isn’t holding her hand. And that’s the last sentence in the chapter, as I recall. Gotcha!

Lots of great ghost stories work just like that—did you really see something or didn’t you? What was that noise anyway? Did something just flit by that mirror? Even ghost stories that don’t take themselves entirely seriously can still give you the chills. I remember reading Jennifer Crusie’s ghost story Maybe This Time while I was using the treadmill in my basement. Yes, it was funny (hey, it’s Jennifer Crusie), but by the time I was halfway through the book, I was feeling very uneasy about being downstairs all by myself. You laugh, but it’s sort of nervous laughter.

So to some extent that’s what I tried to do in Medium Well, Medium Rare, and Happy Medium. They’re not particularly violent (although there are a few deaths here and there—they’re ghost stories, after all), but, well, things happen. The heroes and heroines see and hear things that others don’t. They’re frightened frequently and threatened occasionally. But everything works out in the end.

Hey, they may be ghost stories, but they’re still romances!

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