Oct 30 -- JOHN EVERSON: Why Won't You Just Leave Me Alone?

Why won’t you
just leave me alone?

John Everson

Copyright © 2016 by John Everson

Most of the time, all I really want is to be left alone.

Honestly.

Put me in a room with electricity, a stereo and a beer fridge and I would be happy to stay there for hours. Days. I could lose myself in the music, or open a file and lose myself in telling a story. But the key part is being left alone.

When I go to a bar, I don’t want to talk to the jibber-jabbering lonelyhearts sitting next to me. I want them to shut up and watch the game on the overhead TV. Just leave me alone with my thoughts and my beer and my laptop, please. You can imagine, with that attitude, I don’t have a large posse of close friends!

That’s not to say that I’m a complete misanthropic recluse. I host a big summer yard party at my house every year, and a winter chili, ale and bourbon fest. I love cooking for people and playing the host. But the events are held on my own terms, and when they’re done, the people all go home and I’ve got my personal Fortress of Solitude back again.

I suspect that this may be a slightly more male attitude than female. We don’t have woman caves, we have man caves… the place where men retreat from the rest of the house thronging with voices and feet. I know of far more anti-social men than women.

In any event, coming from that head space, you can imagine that the thought of someone forcing themselves into my personal space is a terrifying theme. Especially when that other person doesn’t just want to be heard… they want a piece of you.

Stalking villains are a major trope in horror. More than slimy, grotesque monsters, really our biggest communal fear is of someone or something intruding upon our lives in a way we do not want. Something coming out of the dark that just won’t go away.

One of the most effective horror films of the past 25 years, for me, was High Tension. One of the first films I ever saw from the French “extremity” movement, it follows two college girls who are seemingly stalked by a brutal killer. But the film’s truth is much worse. It’s a nailbiter start to finish because throughout the film, the “personal space” (and lives) of person after person are not only intruded upon, but shattered.

There are stalking villains who cause mayhem for the pure love of violence, a la A Clockwork Orange (anarchistic and frightening) and stalking stories due to twisted love. I think the latter, which High Tension falls into, is often the most disturbing, because the stalker’s eyes look on the victim with love while dismantling any chance of love’s happiness. What is worse than being murdered by love? It’s the ultimate betrayal of humanity.

In my novel Siren, I touched on the stalking theme due to a lover spurned. When the title character is rejected, she refuses to take no for an answer, and stages a siege on her former lover’s home. His “man cave” is not only pummeled by a rain of bloody, broken birds, but everything he loves is soon under attack.  Why? Because of spurned emotion. At the end of the day, the heart is more deadly than any weapon.

In my novel The Pumpkin Man, the killer’s motives are less obvious at first… but the victims all share a dark secret that they were involved in a quarter century before. When the killer carves the likenesses of their faces in a jack-o-lantern, he is memorializing them… and exposing their own evil as he disappears with their heads in the dark of the night.

Past actions driven by the passions of the heart can haunt us for the rest of our lives, no matter how we may try to bury them. When seen through that eye, you can understand how attractive being alone can be. It’s safer there away from the unpredictable actions of others. There are no minds and hearts twisted by emotion to ruin the day or burn down the night.

There is only you.

Of course, when you’re completely alone, you’re also at your most vulnerable.

In some ways you’re safest when you’re alone… and yet that creak in the floorboard just above… what if it isn’t the wind, but the walk? The footsteps of your past coming back to bring some misguided vengeance? He/she may have climbed in through the bedroom window. Lowered a vengeful obsession back into your life from the roof.

No matter how closeted you keep yourself, you must at some point interact. And you can never escape from the things and people you’ve touched in the past. You will always, in some way, be stalked by your past. In the end, we create our future peril with every word and action of the now. Those actions may be kind or cruel… but how they’re transmuted by the twisted minds of others can never be predicted or controlled.

And that may be the scariest thought of all.

GIVEAWAY
Today’s giveaway is FIVE ECOPIES of SACRIFICING VIRGINS by John Everson!!!

To win: go to the Official FB Event Page; find the post announcing  today’s giveaway; and comment, “I WANT TO WIN” in that post and you just might!!! 

There’s also an offer to play with a OUIJA BOARD!!!! YES!!! FUN!!!! Stop by http://thepumpkinman-horror.com/ on Halloween and talk to the online Ouija Board there for a moment… but beware the spirits you might raise! http://thepumpkinman-horror.com/ask-the-ouija.html

 

OFFICIAL FB EVENT PAGE

Tales beyond the darkness!

If you could bring your daughter back from the dead...should you? If you could forget the worst event in your life...would you?

In this collection of twenty-five dark tales from Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Everson, you’ll meet a host of provocative characters. Learn the secrets of the man whose pumpkin carvings look strangely, disturbingly real. Visit a small town where the tavern game isn’t about shots, but sharks. Meet the woman who finds an ancient sex toy—and a salacious spirit—entombed beneath her garden. From quiet tales of ghosts and cemeteries to extreme tales of erotic horror, Sacrificing Virgins will take you to the bleeding edge...and beyond.

AUTHOR BIO

John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of eight novels of erotic horror and the macabre, including his latest, the Fountain of Youth thriller THE FAMILY TREE, as well as the Bram Stoker Award-nominated tour de force NIGHTWHERE, the Bram Stoker Award-winner COVENANT, its sequel SACRIFICE and the standalone novels THE 13TH, SIREN, THE PUMPKIN MAN, VIOLET EYES. He also is the author of four collections of short horror fiction, including his latest, SACRIFICING VIRGINS.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he occasionally records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

Learn more about John on his site, www.johneverson.com, where you can sign up for a direct-from-the-author monthly e-newsletter with information on new books, contests and occasionally, free fiction.

Want to connect? Follow John on Twitter @johneverson, or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/johneverson.

Link to Amazon Author Page