Christa Carmen is joining us today to talk about her novel, How to Fake a Haunting. Here’s the publisher’s description:
A desperate woman’s plot to frighten her husband out of her life takes a nightmarish turn in a chilling novel of modern horror by a Bram Stoker Award-winning author.
Lainey Taylor is being pushed to the brink by her alcoholic husband, Callum. Prone to hallucinations and erratic behavior, it’s only a matter of time before he puts Lainey’s life–and that of their daughter, Beatrix–in jeopardy. A divorce and full custody is out of the question. In Callum’s words: Over my dead body.
Lainey’s sympathetic friend Adelaide has a wild solution. They’ll stage a haunting so convincing it will drive Callum out of Lainey’s life for good. Nothing too over the top: strange smells, noises in the walls, and flies unleashed along the windowsills. It could work. Considering Callum’s alcohol-induced night terrors, he’s already close to broken. With each new scare, Lainey is closer to seeing the haunting through to its bitter, freeing end.
But in a house filled with so much rage, resentment, and fear, is it any wonder that Lainey and Adelaide’s plan goes horribly wrong? As their fake haunting spirals into something no one can control, Lainey discovers that the only way out of this frightening trap is to join forces with Callum, or die trying.
What’s Christa’s favorite bit?
My new novel, How to Fake a Haunting, takes place in Newport, Rhode Island and deals with a woman who decides that the best way to be rid of her alcoholic but well-connected husband is to stage a haunting so realistic, it will drive him away. My favorite bit takes place around two-thirds of the way through the book, in chapter 32, and occurs when main character Lainey and her best friend Adelaide have returned to Lainey’s house under cover of darkness to orchestrate the mother of all fake hauntings, a terrifying spectacle that will finally send Callum packing for good. In order to pull of what is essentially an elaborate theatrical production, the women dig deep into their arsenal, acquired through extensive horror movie research and a meeting with a husband-wife team of paranormal investigators. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that, in order to write the scene, I had to rely on my own knowledge of horror films, titles like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, Carrie, The Changeling, and Malevolent.
Moving the characters around the scene as cinematically as possible, I turned Lainey’s home into the ultimate haunted house. Adelaide readied an Amazon Echo to play the loudest, creepiest song possible and placed candles with magnetized bottoms at the center of a marble kitchen island (later, Lainey would place magnets with opposing poles on the floor in the room above the kitchen, given the impression that the candles had flown into the air and stuck to the ceiling themselves). Lainey programed the television to turn on at a specific time and echo the song that would belt from the smart speaker. Adelaide lit the candles and hid in the pantry while Lainey returned upstairs and arranged cherubic-bordering-on-creepy recordable teddy bears outfitted with demonic chanting from an occult YouTube channel on Callum’s bed. The final touch was a membrane-thin bag of pig’s blood procured from the butcher and positioned over the bathroom sink, a strip of adhesive attached to the bag and strung with polyethylene line across the ceiling and into a tiny peephole in the laundry closet accessed through the attic. Then, Lainey got into position, Facetimed Adelaide to time things properly, and watched as Adelaide pressed play on the Alexa app, setting off the smart speaker and throwing everything into motion. The show had begun, and in order to succeed, they would need to commit 100% to the bonkers house of horrors they’d assembled.
Earlier in the novel, not long after Adelaide had first relayed the idea of faking a haunting to get rid of Lainey’s husband, the two women are discussing how they can get away with the whole crazy plan:
“We have to go all out in the moment. Why don’t serial killers get caught for years, even decades?”
I tilted my head, considering this. “Uh, well, up until fairly recently, hasn’t it been because of limited technology? DNA testing being in its early stages, less surveillance tactics, more—”
Adelaide groaned. “Good grief. No, Lainey. It’s because they had serial killer confidence! They were brazen as all hell, taking insane risks that paid off.”
In my favorite bit of this novel, Lainey and Adelaide aren’t the only ones utilizing serial killer confidence; I employed a similar brazenness, a similar commitment, researching everything from the weight of pig’s blood to the ways one might transform an innocent teddy bear into a demonic being straight from Hell. I studied the clown scene from Poltergeist, the pig’s blood scene from Carrie. I wrote and rewrote to maximize tension; I transitioned Lainey’s POV to that of a camera lens. For this chapter, I wasn’t just a writer. I was a director, a puppeteer, a magician. I hope readers pick up on that shift, and I also hope they have fun with the bonkers plotline at this stage of Lainey and Adelaide’s ambitious—and oh-so-fun—fake haunting.
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BIO:
Christa Carmen Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island , Beneath the Poet’s House , and the forthcoming How to Fake a Haunting , as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked , the Bram Stoker Award-nominated “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” ( Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror ), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills . She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.