In preparation for writing Dead Works, I watched a couple of those ghost-hunter themed shows on TV. I convinced myself that this counted as in-the-field research. Well, in the final analysis, this was a waste of time. Quite frankly, I found these shows ridiculous.  Granted, I was not anticipating solid science. I fully expected the shows to be rather lame (full disclosure: I’m skeptical of all reality TV and suspect these shows are script-driven).  Still, I was rather taken aback at how awful these shows were. I couldn’t understand how these “experts” (who, after all are in this line of work and who have supposedly confronted all kinds of strange occurrences) yelp, squeal, and scream at the slightest noise or the tiniest flickering shadow (“Did you see/hear that!!!” – well, no, to be perfectly honest). In addition, hours of footage must be filmed to find something remotely eerie (like a piece of dust floating before the camera lens). The edited version which purportedly shows this unconvincing “evidence” (and which viewers cannot see or hear) is packed into 60 minutes of silly nonsense. These shows only convinced me that the entire ghost-hunting industry is a giant hoax. Sadly, none of these shows were at all helpful in my efforts to gather data to inform Dead Works. So, multiple hours of time wasted….

One of these shows did strike a chord with me, however. Since I work a lot with kids, and since my fiction efforts typically involve adolescent characters, I was drawn to a show called Psychic Kids. I never saw it when it was on the air, but did watch a couple of episodes via Netflix. My initial reaction was that these episodes were heavily scripted and used child actors. The “host” was a guy who had a reputation for producing schlocky paranormal TV shows. If I’m not mistaken, I think he also identified himself as a medium, or something paranormal-ish.  He’d escort two or three older children or adolescents around a supposedly haunted house and ask them if they felt anything. When the kids invariably said no, he would ask leading questions about energy or a presence of spirits, and the kids would get the hint to reply “Oh, yeah, I do feel that…” Then this host would fill in the blanks and ask more incredibly leading questions such that the kids would “report” seeing a ghost who, when alive, lived/visited/rented/owned/died in the house. Of course, the kids and the hosts would gasp or shriek at the right times when the lights are off. And the viewers would end up shaking their heads and thinking wtf?

This show was all in good fun, I suppose, if it was scripted TV. However, the producers swore up and down that the kids were legitimate. If that is the case, then, this takes on an entirely new meaning.

If Psychic Kids was not a fictitious production, then the portrayal of actual kids was extremely bad taste – if not abusive. These kids, again if they were real (or portraying themselves), were troubled youngsters. They were struggling with something (and it wasn’t ghosts), and the network was exploiting them for entertainment purposes.  Did they have emotional or behavioral problems? There were hints that the kids had been struggling with personal problems (to make the urgency of the “haunting” more evident or to somehow add credence to the ghostly visions). For instance, the kids were breathlessly described as having issues with isolation, anger, anxiety, parent-child conflicts, and so on – often in response to being psychic. The episodes of the first season even employed a psychologist who served as co-star/co-host (or whatever you call it) and who took part in the “process”. I was especially irritated with her presence and her on-screen comments when talking with the kids and their parents. Psychologists should “first do no harm” – a basic ethical principle. Yet, she was earnestly trying to convince these kids that their emotional difficulties were the results of being haunted. How could this possibly be construed as doing no harm? Then, of course, there could have been other troubled kids who viewed the show on a frequent basis who may have been struggling with their own problems. What was the impact on them? Could this have diverted them or their parents away from the help they needed and pushed them towards an interpretation that was unhelpful? I hope not.

So, I certainly hoped the show was scripted with actors playing the roles of the kids. Otherwise, we had a disturbing portrayal of TV at its exploitive worst.

When it comes to ghosts and the paranormal, I have occasionally been asked, “Do you believe this stuff?”

People are often surprised to hear that the answer is “no”. I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve not had any experiences with hauntings – although I have scared myself silly at times over the course of my life. The reason for this, of course, is that I love horror.

Ghost stories and supernatural tales are probably my favorite. Giant monsters are cool. Zombies and vampires…meh. Slasher tales? No, those are tiring and boring. For me, gore and vivid portrayals of flying body parts are not frightening. The imagination is more intense.

What? Love horror but not believe it ghosts (or monsters or demons or…whatever)? Why not?

Basically, I’ve been trained as a scientist – a psychologist, but a scientist nonetheless. Empirical support is important to the field of psychology.  You will see this perspective in Eric, the graduate student character in my second novel Dead Works (releasing soon). Like him, I believe much of the supernatural experiences reported by people can be described by natural causes. My goal is not to alienate or anger people with this comment (heaven knows I love horror tales), but this reflects my world-view based on the reliance of scientific evidence. Things like hallucinations, dreams, sleep paralysis, confirmation biases, errors in logic, memory and perceptual errors – these account for just about everything that is considered “supernatural”. I haven’t seen compelling evidence to suggest otherwise.

A fair number of supernatural claims are also hoaxes. I love looking at photos of ghosts and reading reports of possession. One of my favorite photos is a picture of a head of a youth looking around a doorway in the Amityville Horror house. This was supposed to be a picture of one of the kids murdered in the residence. Many of you have seen it, and it is downright creepy. I love it. However, it is actually a photo of a college student who was serving as a research assistant for Ed and Lorraine Warren who were conducting a psychic “investigation” of the house.  Too bad. (I still loved the movie The Conjuring based on one of the Warren’s cases.)

By the way, the stories behind such “true” accounts as the Amityville Horror and The Exorcist have been disclosed as hoaxes – sad but true. However, they remain dynamite stories just the same. I can – and do - enjoy them on that basis.

The plot is pretty straightforward – a Boy Scout troop, stranded on a small island off the coast of Prince Edward Island, is exposed to a biologically engineered parasite that eats its victims alive from the inside out. The scout leader (the town doctor) and the five boys are at the mercy of a gruesome invader that not only gradually destroys the human host (in grisly detail), but uses the host’s body to spawn new organisms  - all while making the host very hungry and delusional (which is not a good combination). The victim will eat anything and will try to infect anybody… you get the gory picture. The comparisons to Lord of the Flies, Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and 28 Days Later are pretty apt. Combined elements of all of these tales are evident in The Troop by Nick Cutter.

I have some mixed reactions regarding The Troop, but not because of the nature of the story. While my idea of horror involves less - as opposed to more - gore and guts, I am able to go along for the ride when there are some unique twists. With The Troop, the graphic storytelling involves children – and believe me there is no holding back on the part of the author. Some people were disgusted by this. I wasn’t. The read was disturbing – that is true – but it was disturbing in the way that The Walking Dead episode involving Carol and Lizzie was disturbing (I will say no more). That was a powerful episode for a TV show, and Mr. Cutter writes equally disquieting passages in The Troop.

The overall narrative was fairly uncomplicated, but the author had some rip-roaring scenes involving infestation. In fact there were two (yes, two, which rarely happens to me anymore) incidents that made the hairs at the back of my neck tingle for just a second. In both cases, they involved one of the boys (Kent), and they were only a handful of words in both cases – but they hit their mark. Mr. Cutter also intersperses transcripts from a government inquiry among the chapters to help fill in backstory and propel the plot. I found these devices rather effective.

I think the main problem for me was related to point-of-view. Unfortunately, the author uses a third person-omniscient point of view. There is a lot of head-jumping among the characters – sometimes within the same sections and even the same paragraph. The result is a little jarring, because you end up trying to reorient whose state of mind is being addressed. Given the nature of the story, the author needed to tell the story from multiple different perspectives, but I think he could have taken a more third-person limited perspective within sections or chapters. That way, the reader is assured whose perspective is “seeing” the action and whose emotions are on “display”. Speaking of emotions, another limitation of this omniscient point of view was the author was never truly inside the heads of his characters, so they remained rather distant as if they were being kept at arms-length from the reader. Finally, the kids were all fourteen, but the omniscient point of view resulted in descriptions of their actions and affective reactions that were way beyond the capacity of adolescent males of this age.

In summary, The Troop is a gruesome and eerie horror tale that maintains a suspenseful pace, even though avid horror-readers will probably predict where things will end up (and if they can ignore some distracting point of view issues). I give The Troop a 4ish rating.

Snowblind by Christopher Golden is a winter-wrapped supernatural tale that I read during the first few days of my summer vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (while we waited out three consecutive days of rain).

A small town in eastern Massachusetts has some bad luck during blizzards. Twelve years ago, multiple people died mysteriously during a monster storm, and if twelve year old Jake’s account is accurate – the cause of the deaths was ice demons living within the storm that abduct people and steal the warmth of their souls. Pretty cool (no pun intended). Jake should know, he saw his ten year old brother taken by these phantoms right before his eyes and mercilessly killed. Now, present day, with another record breaking blizzard fast approaching, the ice demons appear to be back – along with some other surprises (ghosts of the long dead) – and Jake, along with a huge cast of characters, must come face to face with these creatures again.

The story starts out with great promise. The description of the blizzard and the accompanying eerie incidents were nicely described and the chills – both from the weather-related narrative devices and the attacks of the ice demons on Jake’s brother (and other townsfolk) – set up the novel well. The author certainly had some unique supernatural elements to work with. Unfortunately, Golden cannot sustain this narrative suspense and the midsection of the story loses a lot of momentum. There are quite a few characters, and each one is visited on a cyclical basis to propel the plot. Then they are revisited and revisited, with much of the same emotional reactions or backstory covered repeatedly. Despite this over emphasis on redundant character details, the characters are surprisingly indistinguishable, and I frequently confused their backstories. I found this especially true of the female characters for some reason. The action does pick up quite a bit for the final section of the book, and the pace is reasonably exciting, despite an improbable presence and actions of a ghost, some unrealistic dialogue, and some silly thought processes as the characters are trying to escape the creatures.

So, all in all, an okay read. Snowblind has some creepy happenings, nifty blizzard descriptions, and decent supernatural beings which unfortunately are hampered by some redundant backstory and underdeveloped characters.