Four Questions with Francesca Maria

Can you imagine living in an actual haunted house?

Author Francesca Maria has experienced it firsthand, and I’m so happy she stopped by Tamika Talks Terror to share this experience as well as to talk about her upcoming story collection, They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Tamika Thompson: What is horror? 

Francesca Maria: To me, horror is the exploration of fear. What makes us feel afraid, what frightens us and how we respond to it. There is a primordial nature to fear, it keeps us alive - that fight or flight response - is key to our survival.

Whenever I’m writing a horror tale I try to reach down and explore fear from its darkest depths.

Thompson: What is the spookiest experience you’ve ever had?

Maria: I grew up in a haunted house so I’ve had several spooky experiences. The one that stands out the most is something that reoccurred several times in my childhood. When I was old enough to shower on my own, say at the age of six or seven, I would find myself locked in the bathroom. Our bathroom had a simple push button lock; all you had to do to open it was turn the knob. But the knob never budged, it was frozen and wouldn’t turn. I tried and tried and couldn’t get it to open.

While waiting for my parents to rescue me, I felt a warm breeze accompanied by a pressure of something invisible watching me, breathing down the back of my bare shoulders. It felt like this thing, whatever it was, wanted to isolate me and make me afraid. The longer I stayed trapped in that bathroom, the more I could feel that entity get excited.

My dad had to dismantle the knob from the other side of the door before I could escape. It probably only took 15 – 20 minutes but it felt like hours to me. My dad ended up replacing the door knob multiple times with different types of locking mechanisms. It didn’t work. I would still get trapped in the bathroom, over and over again. He couldn’t explain it and it never happened to anyone else in the house, which was curious given that we only had one bathroom to share amongst five siblings.

Thompson: What is the scariest book you’ve read and what about it frightened you?

Maria: One book that I read recently, that scared the bejesus out of me, was Nick Roberts’ The Exorcist’s House. It’s not a spoiler to mention that the book deals with exorcisms. Growing up Catholic, the concept of a demon taking over your body and controlling you was a real, legitimate fear. This sense that someone you love could turn into something evil before your eyes or worse, that you could be taken over by something dark and sinister and turn around and hurt your loved ones, is terrifying. The thought of losing control and giving into an evil within is a common theme that we see throughout the horror genre. There’s a reason why it works so well.

But I also have to mention the scariest story that I read which came from Stephen King’s Night Shift: “The Boogeyman.” This story absolutely froze me in my childhood fears. The thought of something lurking behind the crack left open by a closet door was an actual real-life terror that I endured nightly. I still can’t bear to have closet doors left open, even a little.

Thompson: In They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark you’ve collected thirteen tales that explore the nature of fear, powerlessness, and control. What do you hope readers learn about these phenomena?

Maria: I hope, first and foremost, that readers of They Hide enjoy the twisty-turny tales that I tried to weave together. I hope they see the love that I put into each story, into each monster and each beloved trope.

I would also love it if my readers walked away from They Hide with a better understanding of their own fears. By shedding a light into the dark and rummaging around in the shadows, fear might loosen its grasp on us.

Francesca Maria writes dark fiction surrounded by cats near the Pacific Ocean. She is the creator of the Black Cat Chronicles, a true horror comic book series narrated by a mystical black cat. And her short story collection; They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark will be out in April 2023 from Brigid’s Gate Press. Her short stories and essays can be found in Crystal Lake Publishing's Shallow Waters series and anthologies and Death’s Garden Revisited. You can find her at francescamaria.com and on Twitter @Writer_of_Weird.