Sherrilyn Kenyon, a multiple New York Times bestselling author of all kinds of novels, helps us tackle the tricky work of making the reader fear for the characters in the book.

The first step? Make the reader sympathize with the characters. Then make the reader love them. And then? Then you put them through the wringer while your readers bite their nails bloody in horror.

Here in the blurb we make it sound easy and formulaic. Listen to the ‘cast for pointers on the difficult bits.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Night Pleasures: The Dark Hunters, Book 1, by Sherrilyn Kenyon, narrated by Carrington MacDuffie

Writing Prompt: Take a Lovecraftian beastie and shove him into The Shire.

Legal Note: The Lovecraftian beastie may lie in the public domain, but The Shire most certainly does not. Additional points for making your Shire and your Hobbits C&D-proof with clever name changes and a shave of their feet.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Make your readers care about the character, then put them through the wringer. Funny characters, characters with a bad life, or capable characters are interesting. When readers identify with a character, they don’t want them to fail. Power imbalance can make horror. Horror where you don’t expect it, in the midst of banality, can be terrifying.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Sherrilyn Kenyon. Say hello.
[Sherrilyn] Hi.
[Brandon] Tell us a little bit about yourself.
[Sherri] I’m not that interesting. [Inaudible]
[Brandon] Well, what do you write?
[Sherri] I write some of everything. I do urban fantasy, I do horror, I do science fiction, I do paranormal. You name it, I’m probably there.
[Brandon] Excellent. Dan was so excited to have someone else on the podcast…
[Dan] Another horror writer!

[Brandon] Who writes horror. One of your many hats is a horror writer. So Dan suggested we do a horror themed podcast. So we’re going to talk about how you genuinely, as a reader… how to make your readers genuinely scared for your characters and evoke that sense of fear. So how do you go about doing this? We’ll start with you, Dan.
[Dan] Well, the great Steven King quote that I love is that you… the way you make the reader scared is that you take the character that they love the most and then put them through the burner. So the trick is how do you get them to love that character first? Really make them care about that character, which will make them later on scared when something bad happens for them.
[Brandon] Sherri, do you have any advice for people making…
[Sherri] I think one of the hardest things is making them to where they seem like they’re their best friends. One of the things that I specialize on are characters that are not really sympathetic or nice in the beginning. What I like to do is, I show enough of the back story or I show them… one of the characters that I have who when he’s first introduced is like Satan Incarnate. He is probably… this is the guy who’s been around for 2000 years, he’s an angry immortal, he hates the whole world. After you have seen him at his absolute worst, there is a scene where he is in a mall and there’s a two-year-old boy who’s lost. One of the things that the character does is he has these silver claws over one hand. He loves… that is how brutal he is killing his enemies, is he loves to feel the blood go through his fingers. What he does is when this little boy who’s lost comes up to him, he tucks it into his pocket. He looks at the little kid and he goes, “I’ll help you find your mom.” In that one moment, you find that he’s not a total animal, there is a sense of humanity about him.

[Brandon] OK. That’s really actually gutsy of you to start that way. I mean, I know a lot of newer writers who try to start their books with unsympathetic characters, and it usually crashes and burns. How do you make it work? How do you start with unsympathetic… this is a little bit of a tangent, but I’m really curious.
[Sherri] I don’t know. I just do. It’s one of those things.
[Howard] Wait, Sherrilyn, you explained it to us just now. You establish the character’s background in such a way that we are scared of him instead of possibly ever being scared for him, and then we have a moment in which we revealed that he has a human attribute to which we can all identify. Because we’ve all been that guy walking through a shopping mall who sees a lost child and says, “Oh, I should… I need to help that child because nobody else is.” So we can all identify with that.

[Dan] One of the tricks that I use in the Serial Killer series, which has a on the surface, a very unsympathetic character, and yet people like him in part because he’s funny. He has a sense of humor. Even when he’s talking about horrible dark things, he’ll make you laugh about it. When someone can make you laugh, you like them instantly. It’s just a human instinct. So using humor for that. Another trick that I use is to give him a bad life, honestly. Because then you feel sorry for him. Even while he’s doing something awful, you feel bad for him because he doesn’t have a dad.

[Brandon] The other thing I’ve seen done very effectively with a character whose more unsympathetic at the beginning that would make you care about them, is to make them extremely capable. Capable characters are interesting to us. Even if they’re capable about something terrible. Like the best executioner in the world, that’s an interesting character, even if they are not sympathetic at all at the beginning.
[Dan] Yeah. Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. It takes forever for you to really see good human qualities in that main character, but you like him right off the bat because he’s just such a good liar.
[Sherri] Well, Jeff Lindsay with Dexter. I mean, oh my God, to have had that concept.

[Brandon] Yeah. So how do you make that transition to making people afraid for them? You have… you’re talking about this character who is just Evil Incarnate or maybe Death Incarnate, he’s awesome, he’s really capable… I mean, John is an extremely capable character in your books. How do you then make readers afraid for them if they’re that capable?
[Sherri] You give them a nasty… the nastier you can get. Like Steven King said, you run them through the wringer. You give them an opponent who’s equally as motivated, who has a slight edge in power.
[Brandon] OK. OK, Dan?
[Dan] Well, the… again, I talk about these as tricks. With John in my series, you’re never really afraid that he’s going to die or get hurt. You’re afraid that he’s going to become the bad guy. So then it actually creates a lot of fear because you don’t want him to. You like him enough that you want him to stay good. You don’t want him to fall off the edge and start becoming a killer.
[Sherri] Yeah. See, I do that with my character Nick. So, yeah, it’s the same kind of thing.
[Dan] Yeah. Which is a really good idea. It’s a good thing to do, because he’s the main character. We know he’s not going to die. So finding something else to make the reader afraid of can work really well.

[Brandon] Why is that making people afraid? I want to try and break down this concept of fear in books. Why do you think that is actually making people afraid?
[Dan] Well, in the case of a protagonist, and especially a first-person protagonist, it’s because of how much you’ve come to identify with the person. You’re living inside of their head. Even third person, limited perspective, you’re just right down there with them, you’re seeing things through their eyes, and you come to identify with them. So in some sense, it’s almost like if that person does something wrong, then I’m doing something wrong, and I don’t want that to happen.
[Howard] I think another way to look at this, or another way to consider the answer to the question, is to look at when it fails, when it doesn’t work. If you have a protagonist, a main character, or whatever who you are supposed to be caring about, you’re supposed to be scared for and worried for, and you are therefore supposed to be identifying with them, and they do something that according to their character as you understand it, is unjustified. It’s driven by the needs of the plot, instead of driven by that character. You will stop identifying with them. In fact, when I see this in movies or when I read it in books, and I stop identifying with a character, suddenly the first thing I think is, “Oh, I hope he dies. I hope this is the one they kill, because this guy doesn’t read right.”
[Brandon] I’ve got a slightly different example to share. But this… talking about being scared for characters, done very well and maybe not done as well… I think of actually the James Bond films. They did that transition to Daniel Craig from…
[Dan] Pierce Brosnan.
[Brandon] Pierce Brosnan. Always, before Pierce Brosnan was James Bond, I always kept thinking, “Oh, he’d make the perfect James Bond. He would be the ideal, perfect James Bond.” Then he came along, and sure, those movies were fun, but I never was afraid for James Bond. I never had even an ounce of fear. I just got… under the assumption of… something was just not feeling right to me with these films. Then they filmed the Daniel Craig ones. If you’ve seen those, he is James Bond. He’s still the confident James Bond, but man, he’s put through the meat grinder through the course of those films. By the end of the film, I’m just loving this character, and I really do believe that he’ll crack and break and that… my suspension of disbelief… they get me to do it. They get me to suspend disbelief on James Bond. Who of course, nothing can ever really go wrong for James Bond. You know that. It’s been 50 years and nothing has ever gone wrong for James Bond yet. They did it. The way they did is what you’ve been saying, Dan, is they just put him through the wringer. Emotionally and physically, and you thought by the end, he was going to crack. He kind of did.

[Brandon] Let’s stop for our book of the week. Sherri, why don’t you tell us about the Dark-Hunter series?
[Sherri] The Dark-Hunters are vampires. They were published before you could call a book vampires. I vampires are called Daimons because back in the day if you… unlike now, if you had that word in there, it would automatically be rejected. The thing that makes it a little different from the typical of the genre is that my vampires only live to be 27. The God Apollo ended up cursing an entire race of beings from Atlantis. What they did is, they killed his child and his mistress when she was 27 years old. So his curse is that they cannot come out in daylight because he’s the God of the Sun and they only live to be 27 years old so they have to take human souls to live longer. Since his sister is Artemis, goddess of the hunt, she created a race of immortal Daimon slayers who go out after them. That’s the Dark-Hunters.
[Brandon] OK. Interesting. Well…
[Howard] Not familiar with it, but that’s the most interesting vampire mythos I think I’ve ever heard.
[Brandon] What is the first book in the series?
[Sherri] The first one’s called Night Pleasures.
[Brandon] And the newest one?
[Sherri] No Mercy.
[Brandon] OK. You can go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. You can download a free copy of one of Sherri’s books in the Dark-Hunter series and start your 14 day free trial at audible.com. So, details are on the Writing Excuses website.

[Brandon] All right. Dan, I’m going to throw a kind of harder question at you.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] Because we did want this to be a horror podcast. So far, we’ve talked mostly about fear and suspense, but let’s… let me ask you what the difference is. What is the difference between me being afraid for Daniel Craig, or James Bond in the James Bond show, and true horror? What is that line? What is the difference? What advice can you give to writers who actually want to be doing the horror, rather than just being afraid for a character?
[Dan] OK. The difference is that James Bond has a gun and combat training. Whereas the protagonist of most horror stories is just the guy next door or the girl next door. Someone who doesn’t know how to fight these monsters, and is in way over their head. As soon as the bad guys get close enough, they’re dead. They’re gone. So I think that level of incompetence helps a lot. Your character still has to be competent in other areas, but if that level of competence comes in the area of combat, it’s not a horror story anymore, because they can fight back.
[Howard] Maybe call it power imbalance?
[Dan] Yeah!
[Brandon] OK. Power imbalance…
[Dan] That’s a good way of putting it. John, as a character, he is not a fighter. If it came down to a one-on-one fistfight between him and any of the monsters in the books, he would go down in seconds. So it becomes, instead, a cat-and-mouse game because that’s something he can control. He always has to keep it at arms’ length, he always has to stay hidden, if that slips at any point, it’s all over.
[Brandon] Sherri, do you have anything to add there?
[Sherri] See, I like it where they are. Like in the case of… I’ll pick on Hollywood for a minute because people are so much more familiar with that. Predators. Where you have that entire group. I love that when it’s not an imbalance of power. Those are always my favorite. End of the Lost Boys, where Grandpa comes in and kills him and goes, “Damn vampires.” I find that those, just to me, that’s really…
[Howard] Well, there was a power imbalance in Predators, though. Because the soldiers…
[Sherri] They’re a lot stronger…
[Howard] Had no idea what was going on.
[Sherri] Well, that’s true. But they were trained.
[Brandon] OK, there’s an information imbalance.
[Howard] That’s what was… knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.
[Sherri] That’s true.

[Brandon] I’m going to throw this back at Dan. By your description, The Hobbit should be a horror novel. And it’s not.
[Dan] I suppose that’s true.
[Brandon] So there’s got to be something else. Because Frodo and Bilbo, neither one of them has any battle training, are thrown up against monsters…
[Howard] They have Gandalf.
[Brandon] Gandalf went away, in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. They were left on their own, and it was not a horror. So what is it that’s making it the horror?
[Sherri] I like… the thing that I think, to me, that’s really cool is like in Steven King’s Cujo where you take the thing that should not be fearful, and you turn it into something…
[Dan] That’s a big one.
[Sherri] Yeah. My mother… I always default back to my parents. My father was a drill sergeant, who did five tours of duty in wartime. My dad used to joke about the most frightening thing in the world to face is your mother when she’s angry. My mother was a tiny little 5 feet 2 woman, looked like Jacky Onassis dressed in pink. She really was. I mean, I always tell people my dad was the most sympathetic parent. I love when you find horror where you don’t expect it.
[Dan] That’s a really good point. That is a big part of, I think, why zombies are coming back now. Because it’s something that should be innocuous. It’s your mom, or your daughter, or your next door neighbor who is now a monster for reasons you can’t understand. That kind of horror out of banality really makes you scared.
[Brandon] Seems like that’s a running theme for a lot of horror now.
[Dan] That’s why a lot of horror, honestly, we think of the genre as being kind of a modern-day genre. That’s the reason. You can do horror in any setting. But once you change the setting, we don’t think of it as horror, because it lacks that everyday person next door kind of quality.
[Sherri] Well, vampires, when they started, that was the whole thing. They’re family members coming back to prey on the family.
[Howard] Wasn’t that the, after a fashion, the original Dracula? He’s an ordinary sort of rich and powerful noble who happens to be undead and has mind control powers and [inaudible] in his house?

[Brandon] Now. Since we’re on the topic of horror, and we’re straying just a little bit, but I did want to bring this up. A lot of people have misconceptions about the term horror. In fact, Sherri brought it up here, there was a time when you couldn’t sell a vampire book. Because vampires were gone. The horror sections vanished. They all got… the horror stories were still written, they just got hidden in other genres. They went either to thrillers or they went to fantasy. What happened there, do you think? Why?
[Sherri] Well, in terms of things like that, it’s all marketing. The publishers are the ones who determine where a book’s placed. They tend to… for whatever reason, they decide something is no longer in favor. Like, the vampire novels were really popular in the early 90s. Then, right about the time Buffy took off, the genre [ckkk]. You couldn’t sell it in fiction for anything unless you were Anne Rice. There were a whole slew of us who lost our contracts and were set adrift. We had to wait another five years before the genre came back.
[Brandon] Do you think that… I still think that a lot of the public has a misperception of what horror is. When I talk about HP Lovecraft, which I think is genuine horror, and you say, “This is horror.” They think Friday the 13th. I wonder if that has something to do with it. What is the difference, Dan, between horror and something like Friday the 13th?
[Dan] Well, it’s… like you say, a lot of it comes down to audience perception. You can try this experiment. Go and ask somebody what horror is. Their first two reactions, unless they are already a reader of the genre, they’re going to say slasher movie or they’re going to say 1970s Steven King era kind of thing. A house full of demons or something along those lines. That’s not what horror is anymore. That’s not what people are writing, that’s not what people want to read, but that’s still what everyone thinks. That’s why Barnes and Noble doesn’t even have a horror section in their store. Because the word itself is turning people off. So now, what was your question that I didn’t answer?
[Brandon] I think you did answer it. I should say, from what I’ve seen, some of those original classics, even Friday the 13th, were very horrifying. I should have said the difference between a true horror novel and like Friday the 13th 14, Slashfest galore or whatever. Anyway, we’re out of time. I want to thank Sherri very much for appearing on the podcast with us. Howard, you haven’t done a writing prompt for us yet.

[Howard] I have not done a writing prompt for you yet. Ok. Horror. You mentioned Lovecraft, which is at this point public domain. To an extent, right?
[Brandon] Yes. Ah. Let’s just pretend it is. I know it is. My agent actually represents one of the Lovecraft estates, but even he says, “Yeah, we’re not sure if this is even valid.” So you can go ahead.
[Howard] Take a Lovecraftian beastie and shove him into the Shire.
[Brandon] Ok. Frodo vs. Cthulu.
[Sherri] There you go.
[Brandon] I like it. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.