Since this week is Friday the 13th, we're very lucky to have a guestpost from William Hill, author of the terrifying Department 19 and its sequel, The Rising. Department 19 is a secret branch of the British government that protects its citizens from vampires--and if you've been looking for real, gruesome monsters then these books are for you!

He's here to tell us why he writes those "horrible" things he does. (And also to give me traumatic flashbacks to reading Stephen King's It.) Welcome, Mr. Hill!

WHY I LIKE READING (AND WRITING) SCARY BOOKS

It was the prologue that did it.

George Denbrough chases a paper boat down the flooded streets of his home town, until he loses it down an overflowing drain. A drain in which he finds a friendly, charming clown. A clown that suddenly changes shape and pulls George’s arm off at the shoulder, leaving him to bleed to death in the rain and the rushing water.

That was it for me.

Not only was it the moment when I closed the book and asked my mum to take it back to the library for me, as I was too scared to even touch the thing, but it was also the moment when I first understood the power that books can have. The power to make you scared.

I wrote Department 19 because I wanted to tell Jamie’s story, the story of an ordinary boy thrown into an extraordinary world, where he has to sink or swim, where he finds out who he really is. But I’ll be totally honest – I wanted to scare readers as well. Not because I’m mean, or vicious, or some kind of sadist, but because I think that books have a unique quality; how scary they are is limited only to the power of the reader’s imagination.

I can describe the vampires in Department 19 in as much detail as I choose, but the picture of them that appears in one reader’s head is still going to be very different to that of another. In films and TV, the monsters, the villains, the frightening and scary things, are fully formed and shown, the decisions that the director and the makeup department have made, presented to you. That doesn’t mean they can’t be scary, not at all – The Exorcist, The Omen, the original A Nightmare On Elm Street, all scared me silly when I was younger than I am now. But they’re a communal experience, where everyone who sees them sees the same thing.

Books are different. With books, it’s just the words on the page and the power of your own imagination. It’s personal.

When I was a teenager, I went straight from reading children’s books to reading Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert etc. and my mother, who always encouraged me to read, and would bring me horror paperbacks home from the second-hand shops near where we lived, even though she didn’t really approve of them, would often ask me “Why do you read all that horrible stuff?” She still asks me that question, but now she also asks me “How can you think of the horrible stuff you write?” I didn’t have an answer for her when I was younger, but I think I understand it a bit better now.

I loved (and still love) horror because nothing makes you feel more alive than having looked into the darkness.

It’s placing yourself in harm’s way, without actually taking any physical risk. It’s like being on a rollercoaster – you know full well that it’s safe, you know that nothing genuinely bad is going to happen to you, but your heart is pounding, your palms are clammy, you’re doing that slightly hysterical grin that is meant to show you’re not scared, but in fact gives you away completely. And while the ride may be horrible, it may be an ordeal, it may not be something you ever want to do again, when you get off at the other end, your legs wobbling, your face pale, the sensation of being alive, of having survived, is wonderful. It’s adrenaline and it’s endorphins but it’s ultimately the primal, joyous sense of being alive.

That’s what scary books did for me.

Still do.

You can confront terrible things, evils both great and small, violence and pain and anguish, and you can do it all from the comfort of your favourite chair, or lying in bed with a small lamp on, the one that’s light doesn’t quite reach the corners of the room, the dark corners where things can hide, and wait. And if it gets too much, you can simply close the book, and come back to the real world for a while.

For whatever reason, the human brain seems to have a bit that has a tendency towards the masochistic; it’s the bit that looks at the rollercoaster tracks and thinks it can see cracks in the metal, that looks at the dog being walked innocently in the park and imagines it suddenly accelerating towards you, it’s jaws wide, foam frothing from its mouth. This is the bit of our brains that give horror its power. And that’s why I write scary books, and why I still read them. Because I love tapping into something primal, experiencing something visceral. Because being scared is good.

It’s one of the ways that you know you’re alive.

********************************************************************************************************************************

Thanks to HarperCollins Canada for arranging this guestpost! Department 19 is now available in paperback and The Rising will be available later this month.