Why not? We all need a good scare sometimes not just from watching movies that make the hair on the back of our neck stand on end but with a blood-curdling horror novel.
A book paints the complete picture. One may not get this through a movie all the time.
I love writing horror because just thinking up a scary scene for a book that I am working on gives me goosebumps. That’s a good sign because if I get goosebumps, then my readers will too.
In my book The Villa, I talk about the woman in white who appears in the night. She walks on her property and God help anyone who comes across her. Her angry piercing eyes, her jet black hair, her snow-white skin, her long white hundred-year-old lace gown, and her wailing. Oh! It’s absolutely sinister! This is what makes a horror novel stand out It’s that spine-chilling aspect.
This apparition Eleanor Mortimer is based upon a very old legend. Growing up in Sri Lanka for the first fifteen years of my life, I had heard this legend of a beautiful white-clad woman who walks in the middle of the night carrying a child. My friends used to scare me with it. She is called ‘Mohini.’ I guess you can say that she is the Sri Lankan counterpart of the American Bloody Mary. She appears to hapless young men who walk on lonely roads or by cemeteries in the dead of the night. Sounds interesting? Actually even thinking about it gave me the goosebumps. What happens to these hapless men is quite sad.
As the legend goes, when the young man encounters Mohini, of course, stricken by her beauty he would stop perhaps to talk to her or just to get a peek. She would come close to him and beg him to carry her child for a moment. If the victim complies, too bad for him. He would either be frightened to death at that exact instant or go mad for the rest of his life. Wow! All of that just to get a glimpse of the woman.
The Villa has a little bit of Mohini in it. I guess I could say that Eleanor Mortimer is a version of her. But in the story, she’s not after any man. Instead she’ trying to get Susan Smith to leave her century-old domain. The Villa in the mountains belongs to Eleanor and God help anyone who gets in her way.
Image: “Dance with Ghosts” by Daniel Kulinski is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0