All Hallow's Eve: Interview & Giveaway with Alexandra Sokoloff

BCC: Hi Alexandra, welcome to Book Chick City. Do you think your screenwriting skills helped with writing The Harrowing, as to me it read so much like a movie?

AS: You won’t be surprised to hear that I originally wrote The Harrowing as a film script. The great indie filmmaker Brad Anderson was attached to direct the movie, but we lost him to another film which got its financing together first, and it was just heartbreaking - I just didn’t have the will to start over with someone new at the time, so I wrote the story as my first novel instead. Everything happens for a reason, right? So I was certainly seeing the movie in my head when I sat down to write the novel. I thought of the whole writing process as directing onto the page, while adding that extra dimension of Robin’s very internal point of view. But there’s no question that my screenwriting background helps me with everything I write. In fact I have found that all authors can benefit hugely from using screen techniques and film story structure in their writing? I’ve written a book about it, which I use in the workshops I teach: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors (available in October at the Kindle Store).

BCC: The Harrowing is quite creepy in parts; did you scare yourself a little bit while writing it?

AS: Yes and no! It’s more like acting: I had to make myself feel the terror as a character (as each one of the characters, actually); I had to walk through the rooms and the halls of that dorm and imagine things around me, sounds, sights, things I couldn’t see, which were frightening to me, so that I could create that same sensation in readers. All of that can be very close to truly feeling terror, but at the same time I’m aware that it’s a manufactured sensation, because while I’m experiencing it I have to be simultaneously figuring out how to translate it onto the page.

BCC: The Harrowing deals with the Ouija board. Have you used a Ouija board?

AS: Hah. Yes, The Harrowing is based on a Ouija board experience I had when I was sixteen. I was the kind of Goth girl who was always doing things like playing around with séances in cemeteries (because it’s not enough just to have a séance or to spend the night in a cemetery, oh, no - you have to have the entire multidimensional experience all at once!) and one night I and a group of friends were doing something like that with a Ouija board that led to a possibly poltergeist occurrence which has always stayed with me. Zachary, the not-so-nice spirit that the students conjure in The Harrowing, was talking to us that night. It was scary, disturbing. At a particularly tense point of the séance a glass candlestick holder suddenly shattered in front of us. I never believed there was an actual entity present, but it did make me think that poltergeist researchers are right, that the hyped-up hormonal energy of teenagers can sometimes cause random movements or breakages of objects. And it started a real obsession for me with the psychological aspects of supernatural events.

BCC: What is your favourite horror book of all time?

AS: Oh, not fair, there are so many! The Haunting of Hill House, of course; and numerous Stephen Kings, especially The Shining and Pet Sematary; Rosemary’s Baby; and I think Dan Simmons? The Terror is simply transcendent, its own whole new subgenre of horror fiction.

BCC: Your next novel, The Price, is due out Jan 2010; can you give us the scoop?

AS: Like The Harrowing, The Price is a supernatural thriller that plays with the mystery of whether the strange goings-on are real or otherworldly or simply inside the protagonist’s head. It’s a completely different kind of haunting, though. Boston District Attorney Will Sullivan has it all - a beautiful and devoted wife, an adorable five-year old daughter, Sydney, and he's considered a shoo-in for the Massachusetts governor's race - until Sydney is diagnosed with a malignant, inoperable tumour. Will and Joanna move into labyrinthine Briarwood Medical Center and are basically waiting for their baby to die, and going out of their minds with grief. But in the twilight world of the hospital, terminal patients seem to be recovering against all odds, and the recoveries all revolve around a mysterious and charismatic hospital counsellor who takes a special interest in Will and his family. When Sydney miraculously goes into remission, Will suspects that his wife has made a terrible bargain to save their daughter's life.

The inspiration for The Price was partly a longtime obsession with the theme of a deal with the devil (probably from working in Hollywood for so long), and partly the tragic death of the baby daughter of a friend, which got me thinking about the lengths to which we would go to save a loved one. Of course we say we’d do anything, anything at all but what does that really mean, when it’s time to sign on the bottom line? And is being willing to do anything necessarily a good thing?

BCC: What are you working on now?

AS: I just finished Book of Shadows, my fourth supernatural thriller for St. Martin’s Press, again set in Boston, in which a very male, very rational homicide detective must team up with a very female, irrational, mysterious practicing witch from Salem in order to solve what looks like a Satanic killing. And I’m doing the second book in a paranormal trilogy for Harlequin Nocturne (that’s Mills and Boon, for you), called The Keepers, about a slightly different kind of witch in New Orleans who must thwart a malevolent shapeshifter who’s preying on tourists in the city. I have to go live in New Orleans to write that one, the sacrifices we writers make!

BCC: Do you enjoy watching horror movies? If so, what are your top 5 favourite horror movies of all time?

AS: I absolutely love horror movies, but I won’t watch (or write) rape movies or torture porn. My top five favourites are pretty classic: The Haunting, The Shining, Silence of the Lambs, Rosemary’s Baby, and more recently, Session 9.

BCC: Which authors have influenced or inspired your writing?

AS: Again, so many! I owe several lifetimes of debts. I always liked the scary and mysterious stuff, all of Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Ira Levin, Ray Bradbury, Sheridan Le Fanu. I was especially influenced by Shirley Jackson, the perfect psychological horror writer, and the Bronte sisters, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Daphne Du Maurier. A Wrinkle In Time and Madeleine L’Engle’s other works are touchstones. And Shakespeare, of course, and innumerable playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams.

BCC: Have you ever had a ghostly encounter or scary experience that you want to share with us?

AS: Several besides the poltergeist experience I just talked about but also I recently stayed in a haunted Southern mansion for a week to research my third book, The Unseen, and there was definitely an imprint on that house. Parts of the house were extremely creepy, but there was also a distinctly sexual aura, probably because the mansion had been used as a party house in the 1920’s by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. That sexy energy was completely unexpected and kind of wonderful, and definitely influenced the haunting in the book. The fact is, as a woman, just walking out to my car in a dark parking lot is a potentially life-threatening experience. Women live with violence and jeopardy and the sensation of fear on a much more intimate and constant level than most men do. I don’t have to look for ghosts to feel terror. There’s plenty of it out there, all the time, and it’s not supernatural.

BCC: How do you celebrate Halloween?

AS: It’s funny, they never tell you that when you become a horror writer that you’ll never have a Halloween to yourself ever again! These days I always have a book signing event. At least I can still dress up. And this year besides the book signings, I’m teaching a writing workshop, but it’s at a mansion right on the beach in Charleston, so I can’t complain much. I do plan to do the Charleston ghost tour, for sure. Now that’s a city with ghosts!

Thanks so much Alexandra!

If you would like to know more about Alexandra and her books then visit her website: www.alexandrasokoloff.com

You can read my review of The Harrowing HERE

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Okay, on to the CONTEST! [NOW CLOSED]

I have TWO copies of THE HARROWING to giveaway. All you have to do to win a copy is:

• Follow this blog

• Follow me on Twitter (use link on sidebar)

• Answer this question: What are your top 5 horror movies of all time?

• Leave your email address with your answer so I can contact you.

Open WORLDWIDE! Contest ends 31st Oct. Winners will be announced 1st Nov.

GOOD LUCK!