Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Z Zilla: What if the real horror was the friends we made along the way? What if it’s you? What if it’s me? … It’s probably me. 

These and similar questions were why I knew I needed to have Romie Stott on the blog, and I needed to get all the details about Nothing in the Basement. So … tell me about it!

Romie: It’s a haunted house story about middle-aged people who have a lot of trouble believing anything could be going wrong on the level it’s going wrong. I’m a longtime editor at Strange Horizons and you may have seen my writing in Analog, Atlas Obscura, The Deadlands, and Tractor Beam.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

Romie: Have you had long theoretical conversations about what makes horror horrifying, and what does and doesn’t count as horror? I spent a lot of time hanging around someone who insisted horror has to meet two criteria: (1) it has to include an element of the supernatural, and (2) it has to scare you. That’s tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the supernatural and therefore am not scared of it. My reaction to most horror fiction is grief.

Some years ago, I was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, which is built on a hill. When you’re in the back yard, it’s obvious the front of the house is on the ground, and the back of the house is up on poles. I grew up in houses with crawl spaces, but rarely thought about them while indoors. I started playing with the idea that you could live your life standing on something without realizing how little was supporting you, both literally and metaphorically.

I was visiting my friend partly to see him in the play Wait Until Dark; he was one of the villains. I enjoyed being frightened by his believable on-stage cruelty (and loved that production overall). But it didn’t change my core understanding that when he stepped off stage, he was my friend. I wondered how much it would take to convince me otherwise.

When it comes to what keeps me up at night, I worry I could notice clear warning signs and then use my excellent coping skills and reasonableness to stay in a situation that has become very dangerous. Similarly, I worry that I appear ridiculous to other people, with no evidence this is true. So in my book, what haunts the characters is nothing; it’s nothing. These things happen to everyone. 

My goal while writing was for readers to think “oh no, is that what I’m like?” (The real horror is yourself.) The trouble when I finished was – oh no, what if my friends think I think that’s what they’re like? I ran it by my friend whose house and performance inspired the whole thing, and he was flattered. He asked me to be vague about the address so he doesn’t have to deal with tourists if the book becomes famous, which is a generous thing to worry about.

Zilla : Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Romie: Facebook, BlueSky, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, mailing list. You can buy Nothing in the Basement at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and here’s the Goodreads page.