The other took me to dinner in the nearest big town and we tried Thai food for the first time together. One took me to a carnival and bought me ferris wheel rides and won me a stuffed frog. I went out with each of them over those first few weeks of school. Years later, in my freshman year of college, I met a two boys at the President’s picnic on the very first day that I arrived on campus. And it all started with that Weebles Haunted House. I was not a dark kid at all, but those scary stories scratched some deep itch I had. I devoured stories by Shirley Jackson and Daphne Du Maurier and gothic mysteries by Victoria Holt. Stranger with My Face and Down a Dark Hall were my favorites. Then I read everything I could get by Lois Duncan. I became obsessed with The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck and The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. But the fair was only once a year, so stories were the most readily accessible way to feed my desire for fear. When the county fair came around every fall, I’d wait in line for the spook house over and over while my friends were riding the Scrambler. I had a lovely childhood with great parents, a younger brother and sister, and lots of friends in small-town Oklahoma. Me at Six (when is when I got the Weebles Haunted House) From that moment on, I was a lover of the macabre. It made real haunted house sounds, whatever those are. It was so intricately detailed in all its haunted plastic glory.

There is no way to explain how cool this thing was.

And it’s especially weird to realize that, without any one of these events, I might have written a completely different story.įirst, when I was six years old, I got the best birthday present I’ve ever received: The Weebles Haunted House. It’s funny now, looking back on those three very random and totally unconnected things and realizing how they led me to a reality where I’m a real-live author typing this guest post two-weeks before my debut novel makes its way into the world. I can, however, identify three things in my life that seem completely unrelated but eventually led to a book. I know some authors can point to one single moment that shaped them into the writer they would become, but I can’t narrow it down quite that far. It’s a dark, twisty story, and people seem to want to know where it came from. I often get asked what led me to write DARK AND SHALLOW LIES, my debut novel that’s out this fall. And if those dark stories have just a little bit of truth to them, and if they’re mysterious or unsolved or unexplained-like Lizzie’s story-that’s even better. Give me all the creepy things that go bump in the night. The more haunted and atmospheric, the better.

The ghost next door wylly folk st john