Posts Tagged ‘Come Little Children’

Come Little Children Banner copy

Some of you may recognize Come Little Children.

I’ve recently featured this book on my blog and I’m thrilled to do so again!

I am almost done reading it and will be back soon to tell ya all about it.

I have D. Melhoff here today to tell us about writing horror.

Then you get a juicy peek inside the book and a great giveaway!

Enjoy!

~~~~

Now I’m turning this over to the author. Take it away D.

Blood, Guts, and Child Killers: The Darker the Book, the Better the Sales

By D. Melhoff

When you tell people that you’re a writer, their first reaction is a mildly impressed look followed by the inevitable question: “What do you write?”

If your answer is “horror”, then the response is pretty predictable. Either the person will take a step back and reply with a few harmless questions related to the business of writing (“Who’s the publisher?”, “Do you have an agent?”, “How long have you been writing?”), or they’ll take a step forward and start quizzing you on the plot of your last book.

Either way, people are usually interested in writers. They think we’re glamorous, maybe, or different from all of the humdrum accountants or teachers or nurses they hang around with every day. But it’s the second group of people—the ones who ask questions about our books—who are truly interested. Because if the conversation with the first group ever returns to the topic of horror, they usually seem obligated to apologize and say something like, “Good luck, but horror isn’t really my thing, so I’ll have to pass.”

Which is totally fine. Some genres don’t turn people’s crank.

It’s also fine because, as an author, a narrower demographic means a smaller target market which is often easier (and cheaper) to reach. Think of it this way: would Kitchen Widgets Inc. rather pay $4 million for a Super Bowl ad that reaches 100 million viewers—40% of whom are female, and only .1% of which fall into their key demographic—or $100,000 to air an ad on the Food Network that reaches 5 million people, but interests 75% of the viewer base?

Answer: Unless they like burning cash, they’ll go for the Food Network every time. It’s a targeted channel with a much lower cost of reaching the right people.

The same applies to books. Supernatural thrillers don’t have as much mass appeal as genres like mystery, romance, or historical fiction, but there’s still a strong clique of readers hungry for new twists and scares.

So then the question becomes: “what’s too much?”

Can anything cross the line these days, or repel even the most dedicated horror enthusiasts?

I think it depends on the project.

I have to admit, when I went through my second pass of Come Little Children, there was a certain scene that stuck out as going too far. I remember my eyes getting wider as I read it over and thought, “Oh no, that’s too much. That crosses a line.” The whole scenario just seemed out of character. It was violence for violence-sake, and I had to remind myself that my character wouldn’t have behaved that way in that specific situation, so ultimately I went back and toned it down. Again, the only reason I did that, though, was because it wasn’t true to the character.

In general, I don’t think any topic is too taboo for fiction. We all have different tastes, yes, but at the end of the day the biggest thing that people want is a good story. It’s pretty much impossible to shock readers anymore, so even with Come Little Children, I never felt I had to censor the content because readers would think that fictional child murders went too far.

And listen. I don’t sit down with a daily goal of how many kids I want to kill off. I tell the story that I see in my head, and I try to write the darkest, most exciting situations I can conjure up for likeminded readers. Plus, you can’t please everyone—not even all of your closest friends and relatives. My grandmothers, for example, have made it very clear that they don’t like horror stories, but I just tell them I don’t particularly like their potato salads either, so we agree to disagree and move on.

Honesty’s always the best policy, both in writing and real life. It’ll toughen your skin, but it’ll make you stronger too, so stay honest. Even with grandma.

~~~~

18741537

1771e-addtogoodreadsblack

Come Little Children

By

D. Melhoff

BLURB:  

 

The Nolan morgue is more than just an ordinary funeral home. When their newest employee uncovers a supernatural conspiracy connected to a string of child murders, she must use every shred of her intelligence to stop a new breed of serial killer and escape the morgue alive.

~~~~ 

 Come Little Children Book Cover Banner copy 

Excerpt

The old hands worked carefully with the added confidence of having done this hundreds of times. Their maneuvers were quick and precise. Fluid. Surgical.

A scalpel touched a point between the nipples on the cadaver’s chest and drifted north, unzipping the skin exactly seven inches along the sternum. Shadows played out the rest on the concrete walls: the worker selected a heavier device and hovered over the outline of the body, flicking a switch and activating a high, screeching vibration that trailed through the air and disappeared into the silhouette’s chest.

Instantly the hum dropped an octave—ggvvrrrrr, ck-ck, ggvvrrrrr—choking and sputtering as it coughed up particles of bone dust.

Ggvvrrrrr! CK-CK! Ggvvrrrr!

 

The mist made a macabre Tyndall effect in the lamplight.

Beyond these specks, the worker turned off the electric saw and brought up a wooden box the size of a tea chest, then withdrew something from inside.

Something small.

Something odd.

It was too dark to see what the object was, but the worker handled it nimbly and lowered it into the body’s rib cage.

~~~~

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0QAA607yo]

~~~~

About D. Melhoff

 

D. Melhoff was born in a prairie ghost town located an inch above the Canadian-American border. He credits King, Poe, Hitchcock, Harris, Raimi, and his second grade school teacher, Mrs. Lake, for turning him to horror.

Official Website / Facebook / Twitter / Google+ / YouTube

~~~~

giveaway photo: Giveaway Banner for 42nd giveaway.png

$25 Amazon or B&N Gift Card to a randomly drawn commenter.

Your comment is your entry. Easy as that!

Make sure you comment. The more you comment the more chances to win!

Follow the tour by clicking the button below.

goddess fish button

~~~

Thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew and Good Luck!

To see all of my giveaways click on the image below.

spellbound photo: Spellbound spellbound.jpg

Come Little Children Banner 450 x 169

Horror, the supernatural, what more could I ask for?

I do love my horror and this story takes place in a funeral home. Ooh, sounds scary good!

I wasn’t able to get Come Little Children finished before the tour but I can say I was captivated from the first paragraph and the author doesn’t dawdle, taking you straight into the horror.

Let me show you more about the book.

Enjoy the Guest Post from the author, watch the trailer if you dare, and remember to enter the giveaway.

You might win your very own copy!

18741537

1771e-addtogoodreadsblack

Come Little Children by D. Melhoff

Genre: Horror, thriller, supernatural thriller

Publisher: Bellwoods Publishing

Cover Artist: Carl Graves

Book Description:

The Nolan morgue is more than just an ordinary funeral home.

When their newest employee uncovers a supernatural conspiracy connected to a string of child murders, she must use every shred of her intelligence to stop a new breed of serial killer and escape the morgue alive.

**

Building Fictional Towns: A Look At Nolan From “Come Little Children”

By D. Melhoff | November 20, 2013

I’m always interested in taking readers to places they’ve never been before, particularly terrifying ones. The backdrop for Come Little Children is the majestic Yukon landscape, and for those of you familiar with Robert Frost’s poetry, you’ll know that it’s an incredibly beautiful territory, as well as a home for the weird and supernatural.

But why did I choose the Yukon for this particular story? And how could I teleport readers to such a remote place without having been there myself?

For me, those questions encompass the most exciting part about being a writer: exploring different worlds, deciding on settings, and, ultimately, getting to build them.

When it comes to deciding on a story’s location, inspiration can pop up from anywhere. For this particular book, I remember going through a Robert Frost phase and returning to one of his most famous lines (“There are strange things done in the midnight sun”) again and again. It didn’t spur the story of Come Little Children directly, but it helped spark an interesting motif and tie some of the paranormal elements together. I also like making connections with familiar lore, and the idea that “strange things” (plural) have happened under the Yukon moon hints that ol’ Sam from Tennessee hasn’t been the only subject of something bizarre up north. Combined with the fact that I come from somewhere extremely cold—and that I’m no stranger to having my face frozen off in the winter—I felt prepared to tackle the landscape, even though I’ve never been there in person.

So that’s why I went with the Yukon. Next was to decide whether or not to use a real town.

Ultimately, I created Nolan for three reasons:

  1. Logistics. I needed a place where I had control over the town’s history and its physical layout
  2. Tone. The deeper and darker into the woods, the better, so that’s where Nolan was born.
  3. Suspension of Disbelief. By setting the book somewhere unfamiliar, readers don’t arrive with a lot of preconceived notions. And similar to point #2, the more uncharted the location, the better, especially since there was always going to be a supernatural element involved. In other words, it’s easier to believe that dark voodoo exists in the secluded northern wilderness than it does in downtown San Francisco.

After I chose to go with a fictional town, that’s when the world-building really began.

For the sake of this blog post, I’ll boil my process down to another three points.

  1. Researching. Since I’m not a mortician, most of the designs (especially for the funeral home) were inspired by online articles and videos.
  1. Sketching. Not all of my settings are fully fleshed out, but I’ll usually draw up blueprints of the more critical ones. For this story, that meant creating a detailed map of the entire village, as well as a set of blueprints for the Vincents’ morgue—all the way down to the bathrooms and broom closets. Are the closets ever mentioned? No. But does it help me picture every inch of the building? Absolutely, and that’s something a lot of authors are careful about [I can’t say for sure, but I’d be willing to bet my left bludger that J. K. Rowling still has full sketches of Hogwarts filed away somewhere.]
  1. Editing. “Come Little Children” took two years to complete, and I feel many of the smaller details only surfaced after going over it again and again. A word of caution for fellow writers: your readers are continuity Nazis. If you tell people how a town is laid out—or how characters behave—and then suddenly you change something for convenience-sake, those readers will blitzkrieg der sheisse out of your Goodreads reviews. Having an editor will help catch glaring inaccuracies, but you still need to put in the time and effort to know your world better than anyone else.

That’s all for now, folks. Best of luck in your own world-building endeavors.

P.S. If you’re still wondering what kind of strange things happen in the midnight sun, I invite you to spend some time with me in Nolan and find out.

To read more about Come Little Children, visit: www.dmelhoff.com/come-little-children

**

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0QAA607yo]

**

About the Author:

D. Melhoff

D. Melhoff was born in a prairie ghost town located an inch above the Canadian-American border. He credits King, Poe, Hitchcock, Harris, Raimi, and his second grade school teacher, Mrs. Lake, for turning him to horror.

Website / Facebook / Twitter

~~~

giveaway photo: Giveaway Banner for 42nd giveaway.png

5 print copies of Come Little Children ~ Open to US shipping.

5 ecopies of Come Little Children ~ Open Internationally.

Click on the rafflecopter below to enter.

Raffle button

~~~

Thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew and Good Luck!

To see all of my giveaways click on the present below.

christmas present photo: Present Christmas.jpg