INTERVIEW: Christopher Ransom

Here at Falcata Times, we love the chance to chat to authors and with his third book, The People Next Door (published today by Sphere) released we thought it was high time that we say hello to Christopher Ransom and see how he'd developed not only as a writer but as an established author.

Chris chats to us about the long road to becoming who he is, his surrogate family and Donuts...

FT: Writing is said to be something that people are afflicted with rather than gifted and that it's something you have to do rather than want. What is your opinion of this statement and how true is it to you?

CR: I don’t buy the afflicted or tortured artist routine. If you don’t want to write, if writing is hell, don’t do it. Tortured writers are probably just tortured people. They are usually the same ones who would be miserable doing anything else. I don’t have to write. I do it because it’s something I enjoy and respect.


FT: When did you realise that you wanted to be a writer?

CR: When I was 19, I discovered that I enjoyed writing and was not terrible at it. Well, actually, I was terrible at it, but not for someone who had just started. And there were no other occupations that interested me, so I decided then to become a writer, knowing full well it might take 10 or 20 years to do so.


FT: It is often said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is and what have you written that either proves or disproves this POV?

CR: Writing a “good” short story is very difficult indeed, but the ability to write a good short story doesn’t mean you can write a novel, a poem, a screenplay. Each form has its own demands. Writing a novel utilizes many of the same skills, but it’s a marathon that requires additional knowledge and a different set of emotional tools. Patience, endurance, a larger vision, the ability to juggle more elements across a broader scope, and so on.


FT: If someone were to enter a bookshop, how would you persuade them to try your novel over someone else's and how would you define it?

CR: I would take the shopper by the arm, gently, and whisper, “Buy this book. I wrote it and I need to eat.” If the shopper asked me what my book was about, I would say, “Human appetite, death, love, sex.” How could they refuse?


FT: How would you "sell" your book in 20 words or less?

CR: A thriller concerning one struggling American family’s frightening, hilarious, creepy, sensual, disturbing, and poignant misadventures in suburban America.


FT: Who is a must have on your bookshelf and whose latest release will find you on the bookshops doorstep waiting for it to open?

CR: Peter Blauner, Colin Harrison, Tom Perrotta, Rafael Yglesias, Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, Bret Easton Ellis, Scott Spencer.


FT: When you sit down and write do you know how the story will end or do you just let the pen take you? ie Do you develop character profiles and outlines for your novels before writing them or do you let your ideas develop as you write?

CR: Yes to both methods. I create character sketches and profiles, construct outlines, keep notes on vivid scenes that come to me early on, and so forth. And then I abandon 90% of this stuff once I am writing the draft. Plotting is next to useless. I never know how my novels will end until I reach the end.


FT: What do you do to relax and what have you read recently?

CR: Reading, cooking, watching movies, and walking my dogs all help me relax. The best book I read recently was Scott Spencer’s Man in the Woods. I found it a gripping, exquisitely crafted literary thriller.


FT: What is your guiltiest pleasure that few know about?

CR: I try not to allow guilt into the things that give me pleasure. I like some pop music and unhealthy foods, but I don’t feel guilty about either. OK, donuts.


FT: Lots of writers tend to have pets. What do you have and what are their key traits (and do they appear in your novel in certain character attributes?)

CR: I have two rescue dogs, both mutts. While my wife and I did not have children, I realized we were using our dogs as surrogates in some respects, to fulfill some missing role. I thought this would be a useful facet of a marriage to explore in my first novel, The Birthing House, which focuses on a couple who are undecided about having kids. So, our dogs were a kind of inspiration for the dogs in that book, but I did that once and don’t intend to shoehorn my pets into any future works.


FT: Which character within your latest book was the most fun to write and why?

CR: In The People Next Door, my main characters are a struggling American family, so it was great fun to change points of view, from Dad to Mom to Daughter to Son. Kyle Nash, the 15-year-old boy, was a blast to write, because I reconnected to many of the emotions and experiences I had at that age.


FT: How similar to your principal protagonist are you?

CR: Mick Nash, in The People Next Door, is a husband, father, restaurant owner, former jock, fading hotshot with a temper, paranoid, and tired but wired. I don’t have kids, don’t own a restaurant, was never a jock or a hotshot, and have a very mellow, almost non-existent temper. I am only a little paranoid and almost never wired, so I guess the answer here is, not very similar at all.


FT: What hobbies do you have and how do they influence your work?

CR: I don’t have many hobbies now beyond reading, writing, cooking, and travel. But most of my hobbies, sports, and passions as a kid were solo activities: riding my bike, waterskiing, golf, keeping and breeding snakes -- creative activities where you compete primarily with yourself. I see some parallels there to writing. I want to travel more and use those experiences for future books.


FT: Where do you get your ideas from?

CR: Life. The world. People I know and the everyday problems they face. My imagination. Wal-Mart. Denny’s. In the shower.


FT: Do you ever encounter writers block and if so how do you overcome it?

CR: I’ve never felt blocked, though I don’t write every single day no matter what. I take breaks between books or to travel. I don’t really believe writers get blocked. I just think we need to feed ourselves in different ways, with new ideas and experiences. Whenever I am stuck, I think about my paycheck and how not working is not really an option.


FT: Certain authors are renowned for writing at what many would call uncivilised times. When do you write and how do the others in your household feel about it?

CR: When I had a day job, I wrote at night and that was harder to balance with family and social time. Now I write full-time, so making time is not a problem. My wife and family and friends always took my writing seriously, as a career goal, as legitimate work, so I had a lot of support.


FT: Sometimes pieces of music seem to influence certain scenes within novels, do you have a soundtrack for your tale or is it a case of writing in silence with perhaps the odd musical break in-between scenes?

CR: I don’t have soundtracks for books, but sometimes certain songs or albums give me an energy boost or inspire me to hit it hard. Last fall I wrote a chapter set in the early 80s and for some reason Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” popped into my mind as the perfect encapsulation of the cheesy, self-centered mood I was trying to get down. I listened to the song over and over as I wrote this 14-page piece in about 3 hours, but that was a freak occurrence. Most of the time I write in silence.


FT: What misconceptions, if any, did you have about the writing and publishing field when you were first getting started?

CR: I think I was fairly realistic about the long road to publication. I knew that for most writers it takes a decade or more to get any good, and I was fine with this. One of the reasons I was drawn to writing fiction was that it was something I could pursue on my own, at my own pace, reading what I wanted when I wanted, developing my work in isolation. In other words, the exact opposite of a four-year university program, which I tried but did not enjoy at all. Even so, you can’t know when you begin how hard it will be, how much dedication will be required. After I had been writing for about 9 years, I realized I was almost ready to begin.


FT: If music be the food of love, what do you think writing is and please explain your answer?

CR: Writing and reading -- consuming and creating fiction -- is how I digest and contribute to the world. It is how I frame real life, looking for storylines, using story to see and appreciate the ups and downs of life. Writing is life and living and loving and being. It’s everything to me.


FT: What can you tell us about the next novel?

CR: It will be done on a larger geographical canvas, not confined to a neighborhood or single town like my first three novels. This one, my fourth, will be something of a nightmarish odyssey across America, with more movement and larger set-pieces, skipping from mountains to deserts, from highway to airports to midtown Manhattan. It will feature a small cast of main characters, but most of them will be in constant motion. It will be a ride, with intimate moments, of course. I haven’t settled on a title yet.


FT: What are the last five internet sites that you've visited?

CR: Amazon, my bank, The New York Times, Gmail, and various updates to my own author site. Oh, and that one with all the shoe porn...


FT: Did you ever take any writing classes or specific instructions to learn the craft? If so please let us know which ones.

CR: The best things that the few writing classes I took in college taught me were that I enjoyed writing and analyzing other people’s stories. Most of what I really learned came from reading good books and the years I spent writing on my own. Nothing teaches one how to write a novel like writing a novel.


FT: How did you get past the initial barriers of criticism and rejection?

CR: I understood from reading books on writing, and from comments made by other writers, that criticism and rejection are part of the job. Once you accept that, really accept it on an emotional level, you can assume that if you are getting criticized and rejected, you are doing the job. I took pride in my rejections because they were evidence I was at least playing the game.


FT: In your opinion, what are the best and worst aspects of writing for a living?

CR: The best aspects are that I am earning a living at something I love and respect. I am my own boss and business owner. I set my own hours. Hearing from readers, that I touched them in some way. Knowing that I now do, in some small way, what my heroes did for me -- that is a fine feeling. Becoming a published novelist was my lifelong dream, so if I die tomorrow, I can smile and say, “Well, pal, we did that much at least.”

The worst is . . . well, compared to the above, my complaints aren’t worth your readers’ time. I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to tell stories for a living, but it would be nice if we could get some decent fucking coffee around here.

URBAN FANTASY REVIEW: The People Next Door - Christopher Ransom

Release Date:

SYNOPSIS:

There's something wrong with the neighbours...On a quiet street in a pleasant American suburb, the Nash family - father, mother, son, daughter - lead unremarkable lives and wrestle with unremarkable problems: a marriage without spark, money issues, kids having a tough time in school. And then the new neighbours arrive. The Renders are beautiful, confident, and charming, and the Nashes are promptly seduced by their charisma, their money, their sex appeal. But the Renders are hiding a horrifying secret. They're not as perfect as they seem. In fact, they're not even human...When Mike Nash learns what the people next door truly are, he's plunged into a heart-stopping fight for his life - and the life of his family. Pulsing with imagination, thrills, and pure terror, The People Next Door is the scariest novel of the year.


REVIEW:

Christopher Ransom has been a little hit or miss for me as an author, his first title, The Birthing House, had some great idea’s, in fact, too many to really squeeze into one title although he did his best to be able to do so. Whereas his second book, The Haunting of James Hastings, felt more than a little flat as it confused the hell out of me as to who was who and what was happening, so much so that by the stories end no one really knew. So for this, his third book I was expecting him to have learned lessons from both in order to give the reader something special.

Unfortunately what occurred really was a novella with a hell of a lot of unnecessary padding. Add to this no hard and fast rules to the world as he contradicted himself for the “creatures” within constantly, he then created a scenario and rather than explain things fully he left it as a mish-mash without any real direction or cause/effect. Also include too much detail on certain things like Sailing which the reader really didn’t need to know and it was a title that unfortunately sank better than Mick Nash, the titles lead character who really didn’t come out fully formed in order for the reader to associate with him.

All in the title had way too many flaws, not enough positive traits to save it and I think that perhaps this would have made a better movie script (or perhaps even a Twilight Zone Episode) than it did a novel. A great shame as I really hoped that he’d have created something memorable after the fondness I had for The Birthing House.

THRILLER REVIEW: The Haunting of James Hastings - Christopher Ransom

Release Date: 08/07/10

BOOK BLURB:

James Hastings' wife is dead - her life snuffed out in a horrific accident that leaves her husband shattered. Dizzy with grief and guilt, James withdraws into his sprawling mansion, losing himself in liquor ...and memories of Stacey. Until the day two women enter his life. One is Annette, a gorgeous stranger with a dark past. The other is not a stranger, and her past is all too familiar. First her voice echoes through the phone lines, and from behind the ballroom doors ...Then her shoes reappear, streaked with mud and grime, as though unearthed from the grave ...And soon Annette begins saying things only Stacey could know, enveloping James in a spiral of terror and violence that threatens to destroy his home, his sanity, and his soul. For death is only the beginning of his nightmare. And the haunting of James Hastings might just be the end of him.


REVIEW:

Having read the first title by this author I marked him as a name to watch, and whilst I did have problems with it, there was enough potential to make me stand up and pay attention. That said, this second offering had to be something special and hopefully the author wouldn’t have fallen foul of the second novel curse.

What occurred was a tale that was way to long, was pretty patchy as well as disjointed as if the author had so many idea’s that he just had to cram them all in, even when they were at odds with each other. Whilst it may have made sense to him, as a title it didn’t work and really does confuse the reader but not in a good way. Obviously the principle character was Eminem (although the author does admit this in the acknowledgments in the books back.) Unfortuantely due to the many problems I had with this novel, it is not a title I will be recommending and to be honest I don’t think I’ll be bothering with the next.

WRITING TIPS: Something Birthed this way comes - Christopher Ransom

Hail Mighty Readers,
As many visitors to the blog tend to be authors-in-waiting, we like every so often to bring you things such reviews on help books to aid you get that better deal, along with interviewing authors about thier work to see if that one little glimmer that they found matches the one that you've got safely stashed in that secret nook or cranny that your just waiting for that special time to unveil.

Here our friends at St Martins Press and Zeitghost wanted us to let you see how Christopher Ransom went about it and kindly passed on, in his own words, how he was influenced and set about his first novel. He'd also like to hear about your own Supernatural Happenings and Ghost Stories at his blog here. So for you delectation we proudly present Chris's Something Birthed This Way Comes, in his own unedited words...

Sometime around 1979, my father announced to my older brother Mike and me that he had installed a PIRATE ANTENNAE, so we could now watch HBO for free! ‘But don't tell anybody,’ he warned us. ‘It's sort of illegal. And your mom will probably give me hell about it.’ In an effort to get the most out of his purloined ‘cable’ service, Dad's policy on what the kids were allowed to watch was, shall we say, lax.

Following this domestic technology revolution, we Ransom boys were exposed to Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Alien, Urban Cowboy, My Bodyguard, Jaws, The Blue Lagoon, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Convoy, Hooper, Alice, Sweet Alice, The Elephant Man, and Dressed To Kill among many others.

Fighting. Drinking. Cussing. Cars and stunts. Guns and knives and blood. Monsters and human monsters, aka crazy people, and, when you were really lucky, naked breasts. I remember looking at my brother in the dark, our eyes this wide, sending each other the same message – Can you believe Dad's letting us watch this? and, Don't you dare tell Mom, you little shit!

There were a lot of pirated movies. But the one that really stands out for me is, of course, The Shining. I don't remember much about that Saturday night. Just that there was very little talking going on while we watched.

The little boy running in the snow in that maze. And the cackling woman in the bathtub. And the twin girls in the hallway. And the axe landing in that man's chest, and the geysers of maroon-black blood that flowed from the elevator.

This was 1981 or so.

I was nine.

Then came Cujo, on the eve of my 6th grade year. I saw that little summer surprise in the movie theater. Twice. A few months later I was strolling through the book fair being held in our elementary school cafeteria when I stumbled across a little paperback. Had the same cover art as the movie poster. Ominous farmhouse in the background, the white picket fence with Cujo spelled out in dripping bloody letters.

‘Now There’s a New Name for Terror’ it said, and there was, but it wasn't Cujo.

The name was . . . well, you all know the name, don't you? A light went off in my eleven-year-old brain. I'd seen the movie. Now I could read the book and do it all over again, everyday for optional reading time!

Okay. My parents were divorced. They were not wealthy. Their friends were contractors, teachers, barbers, realtors, lawyers, and gas station men. Some of these people had problems that even an eleven-year-old could see. In short, I knew people like the Trentons and the Cambers, the white and blue-collar families in Cujo. I recognized them. I knew my parents loved me very much, like the Trentons loved their boy Tad. But sometimes life throws you a rabid dog. We had been through rough times, but we'd been lucky so far. I hadn't been trapped in a car for three days, dying of thirst while under attack by man's best friend.

Not long after cracking the opening chapters of Cujo, my 6th grade teacher Mrs. Schrag, a good teacher who could go from motherly sweet to drill sergeant stern in about half a second, interrupted optional reading time and called me to her desk. I went to her, holding Cujo in my hand.

‘Christopher,’ she said, her brow hunching steeply. ‘That book you're reading.’

‘Yeah?’

‘That's a Stephen King book.’ A new name for terror, indeed. ‘Are you really reading that?’

‘Whattya mean?’

‘Do you . . . ah . . . understand it?’

‘Cujo? Oh, yeah, sure,’ I lied. ‘Uhm. Most of it. I think.’ Better.

‘I see.’ Mrs. Schrag had a hard eye for liars, and she was pressing me with it full force. ‘Do your parents know you're reading that?’

‘Oh, yeah! My mom bought it for me.’ This was true. ‘And it's okay, I saw the
movie. Twice! It was awesome!’

Mrs. Schrag’s eyes darted around the classroom to be sure no one was listening. She leaned over her desk, grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘I know. I saw it too! Wasn't it great? I just love all of his books!’

Mrs. Schrag and I understood each other after that. Later in the year she recommended Pet Sematary to me. I read all of the King books, then Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dan Simmons, and so many others.

There are many reasons that I was never really a good student after the age of thirteen, but dark literature and scary movies sure ain't one of them. I found trouble enough as a teen, but I shudder to think what kinds of trouble I would have found for myself without the books.

I dropped out high school at age seventeen. I took some college courses, earned a few As in my writing classes. But in addition to majoring in Beer Guzzling, I kept finding myself staying up late with my nose in some horror novel or another, unable to focus on the ‘serious literature’ I was being prescribed by my professors. Oh, if only they had been offering course titled ‘Ghosts, Pimps, Cops and Ho's: Genre Fiction in America’!

I read a lot – just not textbooks. I had no interest in college, and so I made myself a deal. I agreed to let myself fail, again. On one condition. I vowed to become a professional author. I would become real writer – even if it took a decade, twenty years, a lifetime. Because in writing, the only failure is to quit.
I filled journals, I penned sappy poems, I labored over a couple dozen short stories. I moved to New York. I worked lots of jobs. I wrote millions of words. I moved to Los Angeles. I got married. I wrote eight screenplays, including romantic comedies, neo-noir thrillers, and two sort-of-horror scripts.
I amassed some four hundred rejection letters and sold not a single story.
I was failing, again.
But why? What had I been doing wrong?
The answer is, I no longer loved writing. Working on screenplays, I had fallen into a creative coma. I wasn’t following my heart. I had always loved novels more than movies. I had always loved dark fantasy and thrillers and horror fiction more than romantic comedy and pretty much everything else I’d detoured to write.
So I wrote my first novel, a psychological horror-thriller called The Birthing House. It took three years, working seven days per week, nights and weekends when I was not working at (and commuting an hour each way to) my full-time job as a copywriter for Famous Footwear.
Two bestselling authors read early drafts and provided unsolicited quotes in support. I landed a passionate, gun-slinging agent named Scott Miller. He sold the novel almost exactly fifteen years after I made that promise to myself.
But why? Why now, and more to the point – if I had found that which moved me above all others when I was a teenager, why did I not begin my first horror novel until age thirty-two?

The quick answer is, I wasn't ready. I hadn't experienced anything worthy of a novel, and I didn't have the emotional stamina and discipline to spend three years writing one. But the other answer is probably the most-fitting answer: fear. I was afraid to attempt what my heroes did year-in and year-out, which is delve deep into themselves and write about what scared them most.
But here I must give credit to the house itself, because she played a role . . . and then some.
In 2003, my wife and I decided to leave the Big City life behind. While knocking around Wisconsin we discovered Mineral Point, a charming town of approximately three thousand souls, located some fifty miles southwest of Madison. Art galleries, historic buildings, and an honest-to-God Ben Franklin five-and-dime. Old trees and old houses, many of them Victorians at prices that, compared to Los Angeles, seemed astonishingly low. We toured a few of these charming homes, found one on a half-acre lot, with a small library on the second floor, and bought it (relative to Los Angeles) for a song.
Only after we had moved in did I realize that our lives had taken on the trajectory of the first hundred pages of a horror novel. You know how it goes – young couple moves from the city to a small town in rural America to start a new life, only to discover that their new neighbors are the offspring of a centuries-old satanic cult that’s just decided to bring back the annual tradition of roasting the new City Boy and His Purty Wife over the communal Halloween bonfire.
Alas, our new neighbors turned out to be some of the kindest and most genuine people we have ever known. But we did discover something odd about our new residence. Shortly after we finished unpacking, the former owners showed us a hundred-year-old, sepia-toned photo of a group of women standing on our porch. Dark dresses and pale countenances. Some were wearing aprons, others were wearing nurse caps. None were smiling. This did not appear to be a family gathering.
Our hundred-and-forty-year-old home was once a birthing house, we were told. A what? Yeah, a birthing house. You know. Doctor’s quarters. Midwives. Wet nurses. A birthing house. Neat, I guess. I forgot about the photo a week later.
So my wife and I began the first year in Wisconsin doing what you do to ‘start a new life’. Look for jobs, find the good restaurants, make new friends. We also began to talk about having children in ways we never had before. Neither of us were in a hurry, but I kept asking myself, what are we doing out here in the sticks, in a four-bedroom house? Besides enjoying a slower pace and the clean air? Did we come here to have children?
Time to quit dallying and write that novel. They say one should write the book one would love to read but can’t find in a bookstore. Well, I hadn’t read a good haunted house story in a long time. I mean the kind that grips your throat while you’re in it.
I also knew that I wanted to do something scary and full of sexual tension. I’d been reading a lot of Colin Harrison – Afterburn and The Havana Room are two of my very favorite novels, not least because of how deftly Harrison weaves sex and food and money and race and class and more sex into his characters’ lives, their motivations, and the larger dynamics of the urban noir. Because come on, isn’t that what drives us, so much of the time? Our appetites?

I certainly thought so. Because during those years of living in New York and Los Angeles, I experienced – and witnessed my friends engaged in – an almost constant tug-of-war with temptation. Jobs for more money. Drugs for more fun. New partners for more sex. New choices for a whole new lifestyle. It seemed as if everywhere I turned someone I knew was up to something your parents warned you to avoid. And for a short period it almost seemed . . . normal. At least until the hangover set in and your dreams, or your family, had gone up in smoke.

It was perhaps too easy to imagine taking the big job, experimenting with the next drug, and falling into some stranger’s bed. But if those alternative paths were easy to imagine, then so were the consequences. And no vision frightened me more than the prospect of losing my wife, my best friend, the woman I had been writing for all along. The pain I would inflict and the hell my life would become if I gave into that temptation, were so ugly and disturbing to contemplate that I never crossed the line.

Instead, I told myself to get back to work. I wrote about crossing the line.

Isn’t that what readers want from authors of the dark? Our gravest fears playing out on the page? The Shining is, after all, not only about a haunted hotel and a psychic little boy. It’s about alcoholism and the legacy of family violence. It’s about a boy who foresees his parents’ divorce, and worse, their approaching REDRUM. Cujo is not only about a rabid Saint Bernard. It’s about how the career demands that separate man and wife can lead to infidelity and become a rabid dog that kills your kids.

The human sex drive. It’s partly responsible for the continuation of the species, but it can, when left unchecked, also give birth to a monster. So here were my ingredients: a childless couple with a history of deceit, a house built for birth, and several ghosts of women past. Things going bump in the night, things going bump in the writer’s mind.

I felt the first contractions. Ready or not, something was about to be born. Then one night I had a real humdinger of a nightmare. One that did not end when I woke up. And I’m not making this part up, folks. Trust me.

In the nightmare I was with one of my ex-girlfriends and we were close to . . . becoming intimate, is the polite way of saying it. I was reaching out to her, this shadowy beauty from my past, but something was holding me back, forbidding me. In the dream I was aware that I was in a bed, and there was a great weight pressing down on my body, ethereal but strong, like a force field of smoke crushing me into the mattress.

Then my ex-girlfriend was gone and I began to wake up, sort of stranded between the dream and the part where you wake up screaming, and I could not see it – this force – but I sure as hell felt it, and then knew somehow that it wasn’t an ‘it’ at all, but a her.

The woman hovering over me was not my ex-girlfriend, and she was certainly not my wife, who lay sleeping soundly next to me. I was on my side facing my wife, almost flat on my stomach, so I could not look up or behind me to the side of the bed. But I felt a curtain of black hair tickling my shoulders as she leaned over the bed and whispered in my ear.

‘Stay . . . stay down.’

It was at that time I experienced a sublime terror. I woke all the way up and the pressure lifted. I rolled onto my back and pulled covers up and blinked into the pitch-blackness of our bedroom, trying to see her. To see if she was still in there with me. And then I remembered the sepia-toned photo of the women standing on the porch of our house a century ago.

Midwives, wet nurses, maids. Mothers gone astray.

And I thought, What if one of them is still here? What if she suffered a loss . . . and wants compensation?
So, after spending the rest of the night in a delirium of cold sweat, I had my novel. Well, not my novel. But I had what better writers than I have called the hard, unshakable center, that seed from which all else would spiral out.


One can never know, but I suspect that this may be the last time in my life I am handed the gift of a premise for a novel by way of a real estate transaction and a nightmare. Was it really the house that gave me the novel? Or one of the women? Go ahead and laugh, but I have wondered.
All I know for certain is that the birthing house and The Birthing House taught me to love writing again. Wherever I go from here, I hope I don’t have to move halfway across the country to find my next book. I’ve come to love this old girl, her warm hearth, her cozy little library. And since writing a novel inspired by her and the women who once ushered in new life under her roof, she lets me sleep soundly.

Most nights.

CTR

Author Website
The Birthing House Book Trailer
FT Review of The Birthing House

HORROR REVIEW: The Birthing House - Christopher Ransom

BOOK BLURB:

When Conrad Harrison impulse-buys a big old house in Wisconsin, his wife Jo doesn't share his enthusiasm, reluctant at the idea of leaving their LA life - so Conrad is left to set up their new home as she ties up loose ends at work. But Conrad's new purchase is not all that it seems. Soon Conrad is hearing the ghostly wailing of a baby in the night, seeing blood on the floor and being haunted by a woman who looks exactly like Jo. With his wife away, Conrad becomes obsessed by the pregnant girl next door, Nadia, who claims to be a victim of the evil in the house. The crying leads him to a bricked-up body, and the mystery of the Birthing House unravels, pulling in Jo, Nadia and leading Conrad to a nightmarish conclusion...


REVIEW:

For a first time author Christopher Ransom grabbed my attention from the beginning. The book was not only well written but the sheer scale of twists and turns really didn’t allow the reader chance to formulate idea’s and just as you think that you’ve got the hang of what’s going on, Christopher rips the carpet literally out from under you. I loved this book however the only downfall was that it felt that the author had so many idea’s for the ending that it they didn’t seem to interconnect and rather than a cohesive gel left you feeling more confused over what was happening. A shame to be honest as its pretty top notch. The only other thing to add is don’t let the book blurb put you off, for some reason its not as punchy as it could have been and that may well turn a few readers off.

LE