Horror author Ben Monroe chats with me today about his second novel, The Seething.
Bio:
Ben Monroe has spent most of his life in Northern California, where he lives in the East Bay Area with his wife and two children. He is the author of In the Belly of the Beast and Other Tales of Cthulhu Wars, the Seething, the graphic novel Planet Apocalypse, and short stories in several anthologies.
You can find more information about him and his work at www.benmonroe.com
Welcome, Ben. Please tell us about your current release.The Seething is a horror novel about a family taking a trip to a small town by a lake in the mountains. What should be a time for them to rest and regroup becomes a living nightmare as they run afoul of a sinister presence lurking in the lake.
What inspired you to write this book?
A couple of years ago, I was hiking around a lake near my home. It was the middle of summer, and we were experiencing dire drought conditions. As I walked the trail around the lake I noticed that the water had gotten so low that the floating docks at the lake’s edge were now resting on dry lakebed. I don’t know why this thought popped into my head, but suddenly I thought “If there’s a monster in that lake, it sure would be a lot closer to the surface now.”
Then I started imagining what would happen if a creature had been trapped in the lake for many years, and what it might do to survive if the lake began to disappear.
These strange thoughts stuck with me for a while, and the more I thought about them, the more the story started to take shape. Until eventually I knew I just had to write the thing to stop imagining it.
Excerpt from The Seething:
Charlie woke in a dark chamber, lying on his back in a shallow pool of muddy, brackish water. A small circle of light shone down from the hole above him, casting a bright glow across his torso. He rose slowly from unconsciousness, only fully regaining his senses when he felt prickling spreading over his bruised hands. He itched the back of one with the other and was revolted to feel the squelching pop of chitinous bodies, and something slick and vile slimed his fingers. His eyes opened immediately and saw that his hands and arms were swarming with fat white spiders, wobbling along on tiny swollen legs. They crawled in crazy drunken patterns over his exposed skin, while their bodies extruded sticky strands of webbing.
With a sharp, almost barking yelp, he sprang to his feet, cracking his head on a beam in the ceiling of the low vault; the under-flooring of the shack above. Looking up, he saw blue sky overhead through the ruined floorboards through which he’d fallen. Charlie slapped his hands together, wiping the strange arachnids from his hands, swatting them off his legs. The creatures fell to the muddy pool and rotten splintered planks around him and tried to make their escape. He stamped and splashed madly, his foot landing on a dry patch of ground where they crunched underfoot, and he felt their bodies split and squirt viscous fluid as he crushed them.
The last of the strange, pale spiders crawled away into the muck, and he took a few breaths and felt himself relax. The wind groaned above, rattling against the thin walls. Thin eddies of air seeped down past the boards like searching fingers and caused a handful of dry oak leaves to flutter down into the pit with him. His eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness surrounding him.
The pit was at least ten feet deep, a hollowed-out basin below the cabin. He raised his hands toward the lip of the hole above him but couldn’t quite reach the splintered wood. The walls were wet and smooth, almost clay-like, and the pool of water filled one end of the small chamber where the walls went straight down into it. Across from that, closer “to below the hole, the ground sloped up gradually for a few feet, ending in a solid wall of dirt.
While he was taking in his grim, slimy surroundings, he heard a furtive splashing noise from across the small chamber. Instantly alert, his breath caught in his chest. He waited, and he listened. The sound came again, a bubbling splash from the far end of the pool. His heartbeat pounded in his chest, his breath still caught in his throat. His blood flushed with adrenaline, and every instinct urged him to flee. There was a brief moment of stillness, and he released his pent-up breath.
And a frothing, berserk seething as the water churned around and over him. His eyes burst wide with terror as he felt something like icy claws grasping at his legs, firm and sharp, and something unseen burbled in the murk and muck. A growling, chattering, furious cacophony of nonsense howling and gibbering from under the murky water.
Charlie pulled against the force gripping his legs, his fingers clawed desperately at the clay walls as he was dragged into the murk. Tears of fear rolled down his cheeks in thick, fat streams.
“Help!” he screamed to the hole above him, watching it pull away inch by excruciating inch. “God, somebody help me!”
Slimy and threadlike tendrils slid with excruciating deliberateness around his face and “throat, like roots or fingers, encircling him, pulling tight, forcing their freezing cold lengths between his teeth as his mouth filled with a foul, bitter taste. Fiery pain exploded in his mouth as the sharp, rigid things pierced his tongue, lanced through his cheeks. The barbed lengths ripped at his limbs and body, squeezing, tearing.
And with one final tug, whatever unseen force was below the water dragged him under. Murky green haze washed across his vision as his eyes filled with stinging water, and he was pulled into the darkness.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m always messing around with short fiction, whether submitting to various anthologies, or just writing strange thoughts that pop into my mind. I’ve been working on polishing up a collection of a bunch of my previous short fiction, and seeing if there are any publishers interested in such a thing. I’m also working on a new novel, but it’s early stages of that now, and I’m not sure I feel comfortable divulging what it’s about yet. Though suffice to say it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and has some themes and elements which I’ve been interested in for a very long time.
I’ve also been thinking about trying my hand at writing fantasy, of the swords & sorcery variety, and I’ve been doing a little world building to create a setting conducive to the types of stories I want to tell in that genre.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I’ve always been a storyteller, for sure. I think I first caught the writing bug when I was a kid, but didn’t really know what to do with it, or get much encouragement from my teachers. A lot of the feedback I got was “why do you want to write about monsters and scary stuff?” and I didn’t have the language to explain that it was just fun for me. So I put it away for a long time. I did start writing professionally in the tabletop games field in the late 80s, and got some decent responses to the weirder things I was writing. Then I went on to work as a copywriter and technical writer for a while.
But I didn’t try fiction again until much later, in my late 40s. Something just “clicked” in my brain and I stopped holding myself back and just did it. Started writing for the sheer joy of it, and wrote the kinds of stories I wanted to.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Boy, I sure wish I did. I have a regular day job, which eats up a good chunk of my day. It’s not writing-related at all, which is actually kind of nice, because I’m not burned out by staring a computer all day. Between that, and being a parent to a couple of awesome teenagers, time to write is still a luxury. So I have to make time to write where I can these days. I find what helps a lot is to set aside a few minutes each week (I tend to do this on Sunday evenings) and look over my schedule for the next couple of weeks. I look at my work schedule (which is rarely the same from week to week), my family obligations, and then just try and fit in chunks of time throughout the week to write. I make notes in my calendar for writing time just like it was any other professional meeting, or necessary family event.
And I also don’t stress about filling in every free moment with writing time. I’m fully aware that doing that will lead to burnout. I take time to engage in my hobbies, go hiking in nature, or just sitting and doing nothing for a bit.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I don’t know if I have a quirk, really. Though almost all my current horror stories are set in Northern California where I live, so I always try to have a character say “hella” once in a while.
I also really love movies, and studied film in college. I tend to think “cinematically” when writing, imagining where camera angles might be, the use of long shots, close ups, establishing shots, etc. I feel like a lot of that comes through in my writing.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Spider-man.
Eventually I realized that wasn’t really an option, and I became interested in making films. I did end up getting a degree in Cinema in college, and worked a little in the local film business for a few years. Eventually I realized that loving movies, and working on them are really two different things, and I just didn’t have the interest in the sort of day to day film work I was doing (while I focused on writing, editing, and directing in college, the work I was getting was as an Assistant Director). I didn’t enjoy being on a film set all that much, though I did like being around film creatives.
I’d still love to try my hand at screenwriting again one of these days. Maybe someday an opportunity will present itself.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I guess just that if they’ve read this far, I appreciate them taking the time to learn a little about me and my work. If they want to learn more about me, there’s lots on my website, including links to find me on various social media platforms.
And Lisa, thanks to you for giving me this opportunity!