About the Book:
A family’s relocation looked like a chance to relax and regroup—but as they settle into their new home, teenage Kimmie Barnes’ special senses make her the target of something primordial, evil, and utterly malign.
Darkness…
Golden Oaks, California is a sleepy town on the shores of Oro Lake, and the residents have no idea what horrors lurk below the glittering waters.
Beneath the waves…
One by one, as people begin to disappear, the once quiet town is soon in the grips of a waking nightmare. An unimaginable horror consuming everything before it.
Hungry…
All while echoes of an ancient evil spread out like malignant spider webs, like dead hands reaching, grasping…
SEETHING…
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Author Interview:
1: Tell us a little about yourself and what got you in to writing?
As long as I can remember I’ve considered myself a storyteller. As a small child I read voraciously, and noodled about with stories of my own. As I got older, I became fascinated by tabletop roleplaying games and ran countless hours of them for my friends. More often than not I took on the role of gamemaster, the person who presents the adventure to the rest of the group, and describes what happens during play.
But by the time I was a teen, I’d become too scared to write my stories down for some reason. I still had dreams of writing fiction “someday” but it seemed like such a daunting task. In college I majored in Film, and took a number of screenwriting courses in addition to creative writing.
After that, I sort of fell into copywriting and technical writing for a long time. While in the back of my head I still wanted to write fiction, it still seemed like an unsurmountable task. I didn’t really know how or where to start. Then I took a copywriting gig for a boardgame publisher, that sort of spiraled out of control. Scope creep kept adding more and more to the project, until they’d asked me to write a series of short stories and a novel tied into the setting of the book.
Still not knowing where to begin, I really just jumped in and started writing. And something in doing that unlocked the part of my brain that had so long told me it was too hard, or I didn’t know what I was doing. I just followed the advice of Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Let go your conscious self, and act on instinct.”
2: Do you have a favourite time and place where you write?
Not really. I do have a desk in my house where most of my writing is done, but I also take my laptop with me to different places. Sometimes I try to write in a setting close to the place I’m writing about. For example, when writing my novel The Seething, I often took my laptop up to a picnic table overlooking the lake which had inspired the story in the first place.
I also have a day job and a family, so my time can be a little random. I try to make an effort to write a little bit every day, and a lot when I have the time. But I sneak my writing sessions in as time allows, and don’t beat myself up if I don’t get to the keyboard every day.
3: Where do your ideas come from?
Robert Bloch used to say he had an idea machine on his desk, and he’d just crank a lever and an idea would pop out. I think that was sort of his way of telling people “I have no idea.”
For me, ideas come from all around. I might hear a phrase taken out of context which inspires a title and an idea follows. I might think of an interesting character or situation, and then write the story to find out what happens next. I wrote a story recently that started with an image and a sentence which I realized was a perfect end to a story, but I had no idea what that story was. So I wrote the piece with that sentence as the target, and just kept aiming toward it.
For The Seething, I happened to be hiking around a lake during a drought year, and noticing how low the water had gotten. I could see the lakebed, and these weird, squiggly trails baked into the exposed mud by the summer sun. And that got me thinking that if there were a monster in the lake, it was a lot closer to the surface now. And if its ecosystem was being destroyed by drought, what might it do to get out and find someplace better to live?
So I wrote the book to find out.
4: Do you have a plan in your head of where the story is going before you start writing or do you let it carry you along as you go?
As I mentioned above, I usually don’t have much more than an idea or notion when I start writing. I learned a few years ago that one of the things that’d held me back from writing fiction for so long was that I was sort of an over-planner. Maybe because of my training in film and technical writing, I used to outline everything. And what I realized over time, was that once I’ve outlined an entire story, I’d sort of lost interest in it.
For me, the fun part of writing is finding out what happens next. I come up with some characters, a setting, and a situation, and throw them all together to see where they go. When I outline or pre-plan a story, I eventually get to the end with this feeling of “great, now I know what happened, and now I have to write it all over again, but make it longer? Forget it.”
So I gave up on outlining, and just write to see where the story goes.
5: What genre are your books and what drew you to that genre?
Primarily horror, though you could really describe a lot of what I write as fantastical stories told with a veneer of darkness. I’m a firm believer that horror is more of a style or aesthetic than really a genre.
I love stories about regular, relatable people having understandable problems, and then something terrible shows up to knock everything off-kilter. I’ve always enjoyed stories of that sort.
And I think that’s something horror does really well. For example, take Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. It’s a story about a relatable family dealing with understandable problems (moved to a new town for dad’s job, also, dad’s in-laws are terrible and hate him, and that’s causing tension in the family, etc.). And then probably the worst thing that could happen to a family happens (death of a child). And then the ghostly horrors really begin. By the time the monster shows up, we know these people, we empathize with them, and we want to see what happens.
6: What dream cast would you like to see playing the characters in your latest book?
Well, as I mentioned earlier I was a film major in college, and have always been a big movie buff. So as you imagine I thought about that a lot while writing The Seething.
Dream cast, in quick bullet points:
Gabe Barnes: Jeremy Renner
Laurie Barnes: Jessica Chastain
Kimmie Barnes: Okay, I admit I’m not up on my teenage actors these days, so I haven’t really got an idea here.
Shawna Lasher: Katee Sackhoff
Charlie Gaines: Tony Todd
7: Do you read much and if so who are your favourite authors?
Oh, yeah. I probably read a book a week when I can. I grew up reading Tolkien, Lovecraft, and King and still revisit their stuff from time to time. I’ve recently really been getting into John Steinbeck and Louis L’Amour. For more recently-written works, I’ve enjoyed the short story collections by Francesca Maria and Tamika Thompson.
8: What book/s are you reading at present?
I’ve been working my way through L’Amour’s “Sacketts” series, which is the 12-book saga of a family from coming to the New World in the late 1600s to them exploring the wild west of the 1800s. I just finished book 11, so I’m putting off the final one for a while since I now it’ll be the last.
I really enjoyed King’s new one Fairy Tale which I read a month or two ago. And him noting it was somewhat inspired by the works of Lovecraft, Robert H. Howard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs got me digging out ERB’s Pellucidar books for the first time since the 80s, and giving them a shot.
9: What is your favourite book and why?
That’s a really tough question. I doubt I have a single favorite, and whatever I said to that answer today could be totally different a few hours later. But, some books I’ve enjoyed and read many times:
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien: Okay, I know they’re two or four books depending on how you consider them; but whenever I get the urge to read them, I read the whole thing so it may as well be one book.
The Shining, by Stephen King: Strangely, I didn’t read this for the first time until about eight years ago. But I loved it, and recently have made a tradition of rereading it every January. Even better if I can read it in a snowed-in cabin in the mountains.
The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the original six books of this series (the later books never really clicked for me, sadly). Dark fantasy at its very best, and often a perfect example of merging fantasy and horror.
10: What advice would you give for someone thinking about becoming a writer?
Don’t think about it, just do it. Start writing with no expectations of being published, or worries that people won’t like what you write. Just start writing.
And if you need someone smarter and more successful than I am to tell you that, do yourself a favor and read the books Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, and On Writing by Stephen King.
11: What are the best Social Media Sites for people to find out about you and your work?
The best place is my website: www.benmonroe.com. With the current state of upheaval in the social media fields, if I gave you a link to my feeds now, that could change tomorrow. But I do keep a list of what sites I’m active on within my website.
About the Author:
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 (coming in 2023 from Brigids Gate Press), the graphic novel Planet Apocalypse, and short stories in several anthologies. His latest story “the Patchwork Man” appears in Blood In the Soil, Terror On the Wind from Brigids Gate Press. You can find more information about him and his work at www.benmonroe.com
Reading Nook 