TIH 629: C. J. Dotson on The Cut, Lake Erie Folklore, and Hotel Horror

Michael David Wilson 0:20
Welcome to This is horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Today we are talking to CJ Dotson. CJ Dotson is a North East Ohio native who now lives with her family in upstate New York. She studied English with a creative writing focus at Cleveland State University, and now daydreams about having the time and resources to go back to school to study history and mythology. Instead, she is the author of the wonderful supernatural hotel horror novel the cut, which was released earlier this year, and is primarily the reason why we are talking to CJ today, and she is also the author of the forthcoming novel these familiar walls, which is scheduled for release next year. So that is CJ Dotson, but before we get to the conversation, a quick advert break, the

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Michael David Wilson 3:06
Okay with that said, Here it is. It is. CJ Dotson on this is horror. CJ, welcome to this is horror.

C. J. Dotson 3:24
Thank you so much for having me

Michael David Wilson 3:26
so to begin with, I want to know a little bit about what some early life lessons were that you learned growing up in Ohio.

C. J. Dotson 3:39
Yeah, I don't think it's Ohio specific. When I was little, my dad and I used to watch nature documentaries together all the time. I would get to stay up later than my sisters. I had younger sisters. I would get to stay up later than my sisters and watch nature documentaries with my dad. And one of the things that stands out to me now as an adult, that was really fun about that was that we would watch the documentaries, and there would be, like, a scene where, where it would be following, like termites going through their their tunnels. And my dad would always ask, How do you think they got that shot? Or how do you think they found this out? Or how do you think they, like, got here at the right time for this? And he would so as we would watch these documentaries, we'd already be learning about whatever the animal was. But he also was in asking me these questions, going out of his way to instill in me a curiosity about more than just what you're looking at, about how it works, or how it was done, or how they figure things out. And I didn't realize at the time that he was doing that, but when I think back on it, that that curiosity that he gave me, I feel has carried me really far.

Michael David Wilson 4:52
Yeah, do you think it was that that kind of led you to want to write and to be creative? Even to ask these questions about the universe, I

C. J. Dotson 5:04
think that had something to do with it. My I just have always been telling stories in one way or another. When I was little, I was, like, little little, I was a terrible liar. I, like, not terrible as in, bad at it, but terrible as in, like, I just lied all the time about stuff that did not matter. I remember my mom got me like books about not being a liar. And then when I was about nine years old, my I was in the gifted program at my my elementary school. So I'm a nervous wreck of a burned out adult, as we all are from the gifted programs and our teacher enroll, had us enroll in or enter into the young authors competition that was held by a local community college and writing fiction just any of the like impulse to tell lies, to like, make up stories to because what it was was I was trying to make people like feel things or have reactions or responses, and fiction just that. Was it? It was off to the races. How

Michael David Wilson 6:11
did you react when your mother presented you with a here's a book on not lying.

C. J. Dotson 6:18
I don't really remember. I remember the book itself was one of those little like cheaply produced picture books for small children, with the hard, shiny cover, but the kind of flimsy pages I remember more about the book than how I felt about it, mostly just annoyed that people thought I was lying. How could they think that about me? I was totally lying a lot.

Michael David Wilson 6:45
You're just being creative with the truth. You gotta pick a different spin on it, right? And I have to say, you know, when you mentioned the nature documentaries and you mentioned termites, and I think specifically because you decided to open with termites. Well, this very naturally leads to horror, to create your features to a little bit of body horror too. So I'm wondering when did horror kind of come to the forefront of your mind or your development? Were you watching explicitly kind of horror movies or reading horror books when you were growing up?

C. J. Dotson 7:28
Mostly when I was young, I was really into fantasy and science fiction, but I also loved goosebumps, the Goosebumps books, and I was so, I was so, I can remember my specific favorite one was called Chicken Chicken, and it was about some kids who were rude to a lady who turned out to be the village witch, and she turned them into chickens. And I was like, Yes, this is fantastic. But I didn't start,

C. J. Dotson 7:57
like, really considering horror seriously for myself as as like something I wanted to work on with my writing until 2020, actually. So the world fell apart, and I was like, I think what I need is more discomfort.

Michael David Wilson 8:12
I mean, my as well doubled down, right? But yeah, in terms of goosebumps, I think we're a similar age, so I grew up with these as well. And just that, they were always at the school book fair and they were in the library, and they were just so delightful for anyone who even had a kind of inkling towards horror. And, you know, they had, like, a lot of things like gloop and body horror and werewolves and the covers as well. Oh,

C. J. Dotson 8:49
I loved the covers. I missed that style of, like, pulpy covers for things. And then they had the TV show with the incredibly 90s intro. And I don't remember why I was looking up old goosebumps episodes a couple of years ago, but I discovered that Ryan Gosling, I think his first ever role, if I'm remembering correctly, was in the Say cheese and die episode of Goosebumps. So that was a fun thing to see, to stumble upon randomly, somebody big got their start there.

I loved I loved goosebumps,

C. J. Dotson 9:24
not as much as I loved Animorphs. But Animorphs as like that was sci fi, but it that had some, like, horrifying, body horror stuff in it, like the Did either of you guys read the Animorphs books?

Michael David Wilson 9:38
I don't know.

C. J. Dotson 9:40
So do you do you know the like, the basic, like, what it's about?

Michael David Wilson 9:46
Can I? Can I please? Please enlighten us. Yeah,

C. J. Dotson 9:49
Animorphs was about this group of, like, misfit pre teens, or teens, I can't remember how old they were at the start is by Ka Applegate. The. They're taking a shortcut home from the mall one night through an abandoned construction site, and an alien spaceship crash lands right in front of them, and an alien who's gravely wounded stumbles out and has just enough time to tell them that like the bad guys are coming and take this it will help you. And he gives them a piece of alien technology that allows them to acquire the DNA of any animal they can touch, and then they can turn into that animal. And then the bad guy aliens land, and one of them is and what the bad guy aliens are? They're called jerks. They're brain slugs that take over your brain and control you and turn you into a controller and out of the and they're at war with this alien species that has crash landed here Earth has been kind of left to its own defenses by the good guy aliens, and they kill this crash landed alien right In front of these hiding children, and then the children are alone trying to figure out how to save Planet Earth from an alien invasion, when anybody could be controlled by one of these aliens. And they use this morphing technology to turn into different animals, like a fly, to get into a room and spy on somebody or a rhinoceros to wreck up the place. And it's, it was just so fun to read as a kid, but it also, I've got, I've I've repurchased the full set of them fairly recently, and it doesn't, it doesn't get gruesome, because it's for children, but it's like an unflinching look at the horrors of war, and it describes also there when they morph, like, it's not like smooth and pretty, there's like, grinding bones and liquefying organs, and it's but it's an incredible series. But the Animorphs books were great, like, top tier, and they definitely weren't horror, but they definitely had like horror shades to them, and it was a really fun series. This

Michael David Wilson 12:07
sounds absolutely perfect for me to read to my daughter. She's seven years old. I don't know if that's the right age, but she's at this age where she's kind of curious about horror adjacent things, but it can't be too full on horror, or she'll get scared and then won't sleep. But this, this feels like it's touching into it's tapping into that area.

C. J. Dotson 12:31
I read them, some of them, my son and I started them. He's 10 now, but we started them a couple years ago, and then I don't remember why we like paused and never picked it back up again. My daughter is six, and she just she loves horror stuff, and it's such a struggle to find good horror content for a six year old, like there's great middle grade horror. We're reading scare waves by Trevor Henderson right now, and that one's been really fun so far, but there's not much horror out there for six year olds. Not, not quite

Michael David Wilson 13:06
Yeah. And I tend to find when we talk to people on the podcast, those who read horror at that kind of age, they were just basically reading things that were wildly inappropriate. So yeah, there is a gap in the market, but maybe Trevor Henderson is doing his best to single handedly fill it, but we need people to join the cause.

C. J. Dotson 13:31
My daughter, she when she was like four, speaking of like things that are wildly inappropriate for your age group. When she was about four, I had a terrible backlog of laundry to fold, and so hello scratch. And so I told the kids, stay upstairs. I'm going to fold laundry while I watch a movie, and I want to put on something that I've seen and I know I like, so I can like, not have to look at it the whole time while I'm folding laundry. And I put on evil, dead too. And around the time that the eyeball flies through the room into that guy's mouth, I heard, and I look, and my four year old daughter was hiding behind the couch like this, watching, and so I tried to turn it off, and she insisted that I was not allowed to turn it off. So we had a long conversation about, like, special effects and props and fake blood and acting. And then I let my four year old watch all of Evil Dead two, figuring she would tap out at some point, but she loved it. She wanted me to invite Bruce Campbell to come and watch it with her. I said, Baby, I don't think that's gonna happen. She had never encountered a cliffhanger before. So the ending made her furious. So then we had to watch Army of Darkness, of course. And then it turned into that toddler thing where, like your kid wants to watch the same one or two things on repeat forever. And we watched evil, dead two and Army of Darkness, probably three times a day for three months straight, and last year for how. Halloween. She went as ash to kindergarten. She went as ash to kindergarten. They wouldn't let her wear the chainsaw hand, but she had the fake blood and everything. That's cool. Yeah, she's a cool kid.

Michael David Wilson 15:12
Oh my goodness, for for a horror fan, absolute dream daughter, you know, keep watching Evil Dead too. It certainly beats the likes of Paw Patrol and bluey and all the other things that people who are for watch.

C. J. Dotson 15:31
I like bluey. I like bluey.

Bob Pastorella 15:35
When did Animorphs come out around the same time that goosebumps did?

C. J. Dotson 15:40
Yeah, I feel like it was, it was coming out around that same time. I

Bob Pastorella 15:44
remember waiting for 90. Yeah, 90. So if you read

C. J. Dotson 15:47
it to your kid, you're gonna have to explain stuff. Like, no, they didn't have cell phones. Like, yeah, that's what a pay phone was. But well,

Bob Pastorella 15:54
you know, I'm, I'm Gen X, so I'm the older generation. So we didn't have goosebumps. We had like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries and the three the three detectives or three inspectors, there were different ones, and so we didn't we had more mystery and everything like that. And I don't know, it always cracks me up to realize that goosebumps and things like anamorphs and things like that came out on the tail end of Satanic Panic. And it's like, how in the hell did this stuff even get published? Because it was at the tail end of all this stuff is bad, you know? And it's just, I don't know, just like, so me, growing up, I was reading like wildly inappropriate things from my age. You know, I should have been. I should not have read Stephen King when I was, like 13 or 14 years old, but I did, because there was nothing else to read.

C. J. Dotson 16:53
My can't remember it was my middle school or my high school, but they had the girl who loved Tom Gordon in the school library so that. So I was reading Stephen King around, like 14 ish also, but it was that one which was, like, kind of mild for a Stephen King novel, kind of an Off, off center one, so, but that was my first King novel.

Bob Pastorella 17:17
No, we're, we were. I was reading Satan's lot and the shining and, yeah, and in the stand, I think the first one I ever read was the stand, and I was in it is, it was the this, this the lean and mean version, not the one he put out. You know,

C. J. Dotson 17:36
I was gonna say crazy one to start

Bob Pastorella 17:39
with, yeah, but I started with the lean and mean, which was still a door stopper at 800 pages, yeah, but I read it, I was, I was probably getting out of teens when I finally read it.

C. J. Dotson 17:57
But I don't remember the first time that I read it, but I remember the time that, because I reread sometimes, I remember the time that it scared me the worst I was I was reading it in the bath like an absolute fool. And I also I was reading it having a bubble bath, and I kept hearing this fog horn noise that sounded like it was coming from the pipes, from from the like the area of the drain. And I kept thinking like, man, you're imagining it. You're you're you're convincing yourself something weird is happening. Nothing is bad. There's not something making a fog horn noise in your drains. And then, even though I wasn't at that part of the book, I remembered the line from that book that scared me the most, and it's when Pennywise says I can get them if they only half believe, because I definitely at least half believe. I've got a terrible overactive imagination. And I remembered I could get them if they only half believe. And I was like, I gotta get out of this fucking bath. And I got up and I put on a bathrobe, and I went downstairs, and I was like, Matt, I was talking to my husband. I said, Is there a fog horn like, am I? Am I losing it? And he is sitting at his computer desk, which, at the time, was directly under our bathroom, and he it's like, nine o'clock in the evening or something. He turns to me, and he's got a glass bottle in his hand, and he just goes and blows across the top and makes that Foghorn. It was him the whole time he didn't know that he was accidentally terrorizing me right upstairs, reading it in the bathtub.

Michael David Wilson 19:29
That is wonderfully serendipitous. You probably don't think it is, but,

Bob Pastorella 19:38
yeah, but I can also see you telling that. And then after reading the cut, I'm like, Okay, there's I see, I see where that comes in. Now

Michael David Wilson 19:51
are you only need to look at the cover of the cut the way that comes in. You don't even have to open the book to get. That foreboding.

C. J. Dotson 20:02
I'm so, so grateful to my jacket designer, Olga gerlick, who designed that cover, because it is just perfect. I love it so much.

Michael David Wilson 20:14
Yeah, it's so creepy, and I'm gonna pull it up as I'm talking about it, yeah, just like you can. Nobody wants to see that coming into or out of the plug. Nobody. And I, oh yeah for the for the video viewers, there it

C. J. Dotson 20:35
is. I'm using a couple of stacks of books to prop my laptop up higher, and that was one

Michael David Wilson 20:42
of them. Now, them, very inventive, but I mean in terms of the cover design, how involved were you with it, and what was the process in terms of getting that together?

C. J. Dotson 20:57
I had a completely different idea for what I thought I wanted the cover to look like. I also, it should be noted, I have a Fantasia, so I can't see pictures in my imagination. So when I was like, trying to picture what the cover would look like, I wasn't really very good at picturing something well. So my idea had been like, when you open the book, on like, one side would be LARP in hotel, and on the other side would be the power plant with, like the lake stretching between them. And I told that idea to my my team at my at St Martin's Press, and they got back to me, they were like, we tried that, and it did not work. It did not give the right vibes. It was not great. Here's this instead. And they sent me two cover options, which were both permutations of the final cover. And one was pretty much what you can see now, and one was it had, like a few more tentacles that were kind of squiggly, er, but I thought less menacing, and the font looked like Lake, like water. And I thought it kind of took away from the tentacles. And they, they loved, they, they also, it turns out, loved the one that I liked better. So I did have an idea, and they did ask my input, and they tried it, but very fortuitously, my idea did not pan out, and their idea was way better. And so I figured they know what they're doing. I'll go with their idea.

Michael David Wilson 22:21
Yeah, I think there's something about the simplicity and the almost empty space that really gives it a kind of boldness. And you, of course, unquestionably know in looking at it that you are, you are dealing with a book that's going to involve some sort of horror, something squirmy. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I can kind of see, you know, the vision for the idea that you pitched initially, but that feels like the special edition hardback version. So let's hope that there's some kind of limited edition in the future? I ever get to be fancy?

Michael David Wilson 23:04
But you said before, and I think, yeah, it's really interesting to to explore this further that you only started writing fiction in 2020 so at the same time as the pandemic, I know too, from looking into things that this is the third horror manuscript that you've written. So first of all, you've been pretty busy. But secondly, I want to know what was the impetus for you deciding to write in the pandemic, because one would assume, that probably you'd had a kind of inkling towards creativity before, and then something pushed you to just go all in.

C. J. Dotson 23:50
I had been writing for a really long time. I just switched to horror in 2020 so before that, I had been mostly writing fantasy and science fiction. And then in 2020, my family and I moved into a new house. My son was almost five, and we were just settling into the new house, and my darling boy looks at me and says, mommy, who lives in this house? And I said, Well, we do we live here now? And very casually, like, he's like, he's commenting on the weather. He goes, No, someone else lives here too, hiding. And I was like, oh goodness. And I thought that was really funny. I put it on Twitter, and a bunch of people were like, You should write a horror story. And I was like, I don't think I'd be very good at that. And they were like, you should try writing a horror story. And I was like, I don't think I could be very scary. And then I wrote, I wound up writing a flash fiction story called Eyes like empty windows that got accepted into an anthology called 99 Tiny Terror. Years from Pulse publishing, if I'm remembering correctly, that was the like, very first, like baby version of what eventually turned into my first horror manuscript, a haunted house novel and and it was actually, like, surprisingly, really fun, really fun to write a haunted house novel. It was so fun to write a horror manuscript. And like I said, I had been doing sci fi and fantasy before that, and pivoting to horror, to contemporary horror, meant no world building. So I didn't have to create whole like world histories and religions or systems of magic or new technologies or aliens, and it felt like cheating to just skip straight to writing the story, but it was wildly fun. And then I finished that manuscript and and heard about this program called Pitch wars, which existed at the time, but doesn't anymore, unfortunately, but it was a mentorship program, and it was very competitive. And I'd been wanting to take my writing more seriously for a while, so I entered this haunted house manuscript into pitch wars, and I made it in, and that sort of kicked off the rest of it. I've just been working in the horror Lane since then and and it's been the most fun. It's been great.

Michael David Wilson 26:27
So then, was it via pitch wars that you got your publisher, or did you get an agent? So what? What were the steps to then have the cut in print and with a publisher, and then would I be correct in thinking the haunted house novel that you've mentioned is these familiar walls, which I believe will be coming out next year?

C. J. Dotson 26:53
Yes, yes on all counts, pitch wars. There were pitch wars didn't land me my agent right away. So the way the pitch wars worked for anybody who's listening, who's not familiar, the way the pitch was worked was after your mentor selected you, you worked intensively with them for about three months to revise the manuscript and get it ready for querying. And then at the end of that period, there was something called the agent showcase, where everybody who did pitch wars, who had their manuscript ready by the end, was invited to provide a very brief description of their book and a very brief sample from the first chapter, and then for a period of, I can't remember if it was a week or 10 days, agents who had registered with pitch wars could browse the showcase and directly invite anybody whose pitch they liked to query them. So it was a way to jump ahead of the slush pile. For me, it was also really important in terms of demystifying querying in general, the publishing industry is so convoluted sometimes, and so like shrouded in shadow, it feels weirdly secretive sometimes, and having a mentor just explain everything very clearly helped so much. I did not get my agent from the showcase, but I made an incredible community of friends, and a lot of us still keep in touch. And we were we haven't done it in a while, but we were periodically doing something that we called the trash swap, where we would take our first draft manuscripts and through a very convoluted process that one of our Discord mods very kindly went through. We would get matched with first readers from amongst our own pool, my friend Brianna, she wrote on good authority, which is a like, really beautifully written upstairs, downstairs, Victorian, I think era, Gothic romance that explores the difference between like consensual kink and non consensual power dynamics. Gorgeous. She got the cut to read to beta read. She had the very first early draft of it, and she finished it, and she had some really great feedback and advice to make it stronger. And then she was like, you know, I think my agent would really like this, but he wasn't open to queries at the time, so I waited months until he was and in the meantime, I queried widely. And then he opened and I sent it to him, and and then, yeah, he did love it, and he signed me. Chris Bucci is my agent. He's the best. And then he got me my deal with my publishers, who are also great. I love them a lot too.

Michael David Wilson 29:49
So then when you got the deal, did they accept both the cut and these familiar walls at the same time? Was it a two book deal? You, and then if, if, yes, why did they or did you or together? Did you decide to lead with the cat?

C. J. Dotson 30:11
Um, so they decided to lead with the cut because that was the one that my editor had already read, I think was the most of the reason like that was never like, like discussed, really. So the decision making process there is just, it's up to guesswork for me, but I'm seems reasonable to me to guess that's the one they read at the time. So when my editor wanted to have a call with me, one of the things he asked on the phone was if I have any other projects waiting or ready or started, and I talked to him a little bit about these familiar walls. I mentioned briefly that I was I was very inspired by Mike Flanagan's horror movies and shows the sort of especially Oculus, the with the dual timelines and with the sort of like dreamy, almost hypnotized sequences. And it turns out that my editor also really loves Mike Flanagan, and so when, and he didn't, he didn't say anything about a two book deal on the call, but when the offer came in, the offer was specifically for the cut and these familiar walls. So thank you to Mike Flanagan, also for for helping out with that one unknowingly. But at the time that he made that offer, he also had not read these familiar walls, so he'd only heard my pitch and my enthusiasm about it, so the cut being the one that he had already read was the one that we started working on
first. So

Michael David Wilson 31:49
what I'm also hearing is if Mike Flanagan would like to adapt either of these books, then please do. I could see the cut being a kind of Netflix Mike Flanagan series. It it fits, it has that format.

C. J. Dotson 32:08
I love you.

C. J. Dotson 32:11
Thank you. I i hardly dare to to hope, you know, for for something like that, you know, like secret daydreams while I'm falling asleep in bed. I'm like, wouldn't that be nice? And sometimes I have to kind of give my like, pinch myself little moments because I tell myself, like, well, that's impossible. That's never going to happen. But that's what i That was the like, negative self talk I had for myself before I got my book deal and before I got my agent and before I got in the pitch wars. So So I catch myself being like impossible, but it would be nice to hope,

Michael David Wilson 32:48
well, I mean, to be honest, when I catch myself feeling like that, I often defer to something that Josh Malerman said. And he said, instead of saying, oh, you know, the odds are really high. Why would it be me? Ask yourself, why not me? It has to be someone. Why not me?

C. J. Dotson 33:10
Yeah. I mean, it does. It has to be someone. And I feel like one of, one of the, especially when I was querying literary agents, one of the things that I think really like carried me through that process was the idea that, like, yes, so much of this industry is luck, but luck can only strike you if you give it the opportunity to so the more that you try and put yourself out there and keep going, the more chances you're giving the the good luck to happen. And I just have to figure out how to apply that to to to getting a film deal somehow. Because, gosh, wouldn't that be fun?

Bob Pastorella 33:54
One of my favorite quotes is, those who attempt the ridiculous can achieve the impossible. I like that, and it kind of goes into this theme that I've had for the last couple of years, is that you have to approach your writing fearlessly, and because the people who especially like, if you look at horror, the people that we aspire to that paved the road before to before us, like, for example, like Clive Barker, Clive wrote fearlessly. He gave no fucks. This is this is this is the story. This is what I'm going to do. He directed a groundbreaking movie while reading books in a library on how to direct a film, because he did not know how to direct the film. He only knew how to direct plays and so and he, he changed the face of horror for the better. And if you have to be on that level, but you have to attempt to do. Do something that that only you can do. So, yeah, exactly what Josh says, why not me? If you have a crazy ass idea, then do it? Figure it out. It create the world. You know, there you go.

Create the horror you want to see in the world.

Michael David Wilson 35:19
Yes, and I have to say, I mean, I know that a number of disquieting things have happened to you in your own personal life. Your son, when you moved in to the new place, said that he felt somebody else was living there. Did anything come of that? Have you had any kind of strange experiences or looked into the history of the building?

C. J. Dotson 35:49
We only wound up living in that house for about a year, but the previous owner, and was it both of them? I cannot remember right now if it was the owner and his wife, but at different times, or just the previous owner, but at least one of them died in the house. So yeah, so we knew that the guy was he did a lot of like his own, like building around the house. So one of my favorite things about it was that if you went down into the basement, and you went into the unfinished part of the basement, there's one wall that doesn't lead to another room, right, like it's dirt beyond that wall, just dirt, nothing else. And you can see a bricked over doorway in the wall that goes to nothing. And I always wanted to smash through it with a sledgehammer. I desperately wanted to, and my husband talked me out of it because of, like, you know, boring growing up stuff like resale value of the house and repairs to the foundation, etc, etc, but, but there was also it wasn't. It wasn't just the doorway that led to, like this, nothing in the dirt because it was just, it was just dirt. It wasn't. There was nothing beyond there. But there was also wires going through the wall at that point, and the wires, the wiring situation in that house was so bizarre. The guy must have been paranoid, because he had a little security system, and it had about 10 dummy wires that so there was like the whatever one wire actually like, powered the system, and then 10 dummy wires that came off of it and ran around and ended in nowhere, so that if anyone tried to, like, cut power to the system, they wouldn't know which wire to cut. But also, the guy didn't think that, like, wouldn't somebody just cut all the wires if they didn't know which wire to cut? It was a strange house. I miss it, though, but, but no nothing, nothing super haunted ever happened there, unfortunately.

Michael David Wilson 37:46
And you said you were only in the house for a brief amount of time, but presumably, yeah, because you said nothing haunted really happened, that you weren't like, driven out.

Michael David Wilson 38:02
And, I mean, let's jump into a few specifics pertaining to the cut. So for those unfamiliar with it, what is the kind of elevator pitch

C. J. Dotson 38:18
the cut is? The cut follows a young mother named Sadie Miles, who has a three year old daughter by her late husband, and has just found out that she is pregnant by her fiance. And the discovery that she's pregnant forces her to confront the realization that she cannot stay with her abusive fiance any longer, and so when he goes to work, she packs up everything she needs for herself and her daughter, and she leaves without a plan. She just she goes, when she gets the impetus, and winds up several hours north at larpin hotel, a crumbling past its prime historic hotel on the shores of Lake Erie, where she gets a job as a hotel housekeeper until the seasons change, and there are more teaching positions open for her to apply to. And she also negotiates a temporary place for her and her daughter to stay in the hotel a room for a couple of weeks. And so she thinks her luck is finally turned around, but on the first night that she's there, she sees a guest struggling in the hotel pool, and she runs down to help. And when she gets there, the water is calm and empty, and her hotel manager insists no one has even come through the lobby all night, and after her ex, Sadie's not going to let anybody gaslight her anymore, so she starts to investigate, and as disturbances, discrepancies and disappearances mount in the hotel. Sadie, who has nowhere else to go and no other options, has to figure out if this is even a safe place for her and her daughter to be, and what she could even do if it's not where, where could she go, or how could she stop whatever's happening.

Michael David Wilson 39:58
And I think. You know, a lot of people, particularly when they hear hotel horror, the shining will be the easy comparison. But actually, for me, I felt it had a much more Rosemary's Baby feel to it, particularly with the gaslighting and being trapped in a nightmare and seemingly everyone being against her, but knowing that, like, No, I'm I'm not mad this. This isn't me, but everybody is just trying, you know, to distort truth, to gaslight her.

C. J. Dotson 40:35
I only watched Rosemary's Baby one time. I've never read the book that it's based off of. I only watched the movie The one time years ago, because the there was something about the actress who played rosemary, something about her reminded me so strongly of one of my younger sisters that it was kind of more upsetting to watch it than I feel like it should have been, and I've not really been able to bring myself to watch it again since then, because i She reminded me too much of my sister.

Michael David Wilson 41:10
Well, I'll say this, if you read the book, then the film is almost one of the most faithful adaptations of a book, like when it was written, he kind of mirrored it so closely on what Ira Levin book. So I think you'll be able to get that without imagining your sister having those bad experiences. Yeah, yeah.

Bob Pastorella 41:40
There's a little bit more humor in the book, yeah. But a lot of it too, is our Levine, our 11 basically showing off his, his ability to to know the history behind, you know, Broadway plays and stuff like that. So it's a lot of Broadway insider stuff that you really you know, if they had an annotated text that would probably make a lot of the jokes come out a lot better. The thing you know, it never the cut didn't remind me of The Shining or Rosemary's Baby. It reminded me of The Sundown motel by Simone St James.

C. J. Dotson 42:23
I liked that one. That was a fun one. Yeah, that, that

Bob Pastorella 42:27
book was really, really good. And and then, and then it goes all David Cronenberg. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. So this, that's, that's, see, that's that's writing fearlessly. Yes,

C. J. Dotson 42:44
it was fun. It was fun to write, especially some of those ending sequences were really, really fun to to get a little out there with the the teacher who, who I mentioned earlier, who had us enter the writing competition when we were kids, I dedicated the cut to her because I had been telling myself since I was nine, if I ever get a book published, I'm dedicating it to Mrs. Frank. And she I sent her a copy of the book when I got my author copies, so she got to read it before it came out. And she came to my book launch event and and during the Q and A, she she mentioned one of those wild elements from the end, one of those, like, fun sequences. And I was like, no Mrs. Frank, no one else has read it yet. So she just, like, spoiled one of the more fun parts of the ending of the book, like at my launch, during the Q A, oh,

Michael David Wilson 43:36
my goodness. At least. At least there was enthusiasm. But, yeah, that's, that's a major spoil out. But, I mean, so we've spoke in terms of what we compared the cut to when we were reading, but what, what was the genesis, in terms of, where did this idea come from for you, be it something that happened, be it different films, different books, what were the ingredients that formed the genesis of the cat?

C. J. Dotson 44:12
So there actually was a beach just like the beach from the cut in the area that I grew up in. It was this very deeply unpopular little beach on Lake Erie. And it was deeply unpopular because it was overlooked by the power plant, same as the one in the cut, and the flood lights shining down on the beach, and the barbed wire fence cutting the beach in half, and the water there really was always warm, because they would siphon it in and then back out again. And I don't know how power plants work, but I'm assuming they used it to cool machinery and piped it back out, and it didn't have anything like I'm hoping it didn't have anything yucky in it, because I swam in that water a lot. But one time, I was there with a bunch of my friends, and I saw a. Or something bioluminescent under the water. And, you know, now, I'm sure there are bioluminescent fresh water, normal things that live in Lake Erie. Why not, you know, but at the time, and I'm not going to check if there are, I want to believe that I saw something weird. You know, it was under the water, and it was like a little point of light that then sort of scattered into multiple little points of light. And none of my friends saw it. But that image stuck with me, and when I was casting around for what I wanted to write about next in terms of a horror book, that image kept coming back to me, and I was like, I'm gonna write a lake, Lake horror. I'm gonna write Lake Erie horror with glowing things and weirdness. And then I wanted, I wanted to set it in like my familiar area I was living in Maine when I wrote the cut, and I was kind of homesick for northeastern Ohio, but my familiar area, that part of Ohio, at least everybody who lives close to the lake lives in, like, very expensive homes, and that, like, upper class people having a bad time isn't really what I wanted to be writing about. It's not, it's not a story type that really moves me to want to make make things up or delve into that world. So I needed a character who didn't really belong there and who was an outsider, but who couldn't leave for one reason or another. And so from there, Sadie and the the hotel that she was going to be staying at kind of grew together. And so then you've got Sadie, you've got blarpin, you've got the power plant and the beach and and the rest, I kind of made up to go with that stuff,

Michael David Wilson 46:53
yeah. And I wonder, I mean, growing up near this Lake Erie area. What kind of folklore and superstition was there?

C. J. Dotson 47:06
I was from like an excessively boring little town in that area, but I know that people, I don't know if people actually believe in the Lake Erie monster, or if that's just like a jokey joke. I know there had used to be shipwrecks in Lake Erie, not as many is in some of the other great lakes. But so I know there's, like, Ghost Ship stories and stuff like that, but the folklore of that area was never really my like particular interest,

Michael David Wilson 47:37
yeah, and I think with the book as well. I mean, just the the dynamic between Sadie and her child is the affectionately stinker is, you know, one of the most kind of realistic portrayals between a mother and a child. And thank you. So there's so much kind of juxtaposition in terms of what the real horror is, because there's just so many layers to it. There's the hotel, there's the people inside the hotel that's protecting her daughter, there's the fear that her abusive ex could loom and could come back at any one time. This is before even we haven't even got into the horror with her own family and her mother and some things that happened there. So I mean when, when you're stitching it together, how were you keeping track of all that? And did you meticulously plan this to make sure that every kind of beat hit when it needed to?

C. J. Dotson 48:52
Yes, I am. I am a very excessive plotter. When I'm sitting down. It's because if I don't plan and plot really thoroughly, I totally lose the thread. I didn't used to be an excessive plotter, and then I would wind up with like 300,000 word first drafts, because I would just go everywhere. It was a problem. So I became an excessive plotter, and I start by sort of opening a document and kind of talking to myself in it, just, what sort of story do I want to tell? I think I want it to be a lake monster story. Well, why are they there? And kind of literally just stream of consciousness. I ask myself a question, and I type it out, and then I type out the answer to and sometimes it contradicts itself. Sometimes I'll be like, yes, yes, yes, and I'll write that in the document. And then once I've been doing that for long enough that it starts to feel like a story, I open a whole separate document and do like a paragraph of like, first it's gonna be this, and the end is gonna be this. So in the middle. I need this. And then once that feels fleshed out enough, I actually go and do, like a scene by scene outline. So before I start drafting, I already know pretty much every thing that's going to happen in the book, every conversation that's going to happen, which is really useful for me, in terms of not getting lost, like I said, like not just totally going off script, but it also lets me go back and make sure, like, okay, so if, if I've got in, like, in like, you know, scene 14, I've got this moment, then I could hint at it this way, like, back in like, scene 10 or like, and then that should have this effect later. And so it allows me to keep track of of all the moving parts and tweak it all. Before I even start drafting the first draft, I'm really excited because I'm about to start that process for a new idea. And I it's, it's one of my favorite parts of the whole thing is the is the outlining and figuring out exactly how it's going to go and how upsetting I can make it, and how weird it can get. And so it's this idea I've been percolating for like, a couple of years, and I'm really looking forward to getting, like, digging into it.

Bob Pastorella 51:14
Do you think that your world been building experience with science fiction and fantasy allows you to be able to plot like that. You think that has any type of influence with that? Because I know it's like world building is like, you don't do much of it in horror. I mean, you can, but I know in science fiction, you've got to, you've got to have some groundwork laid out.

So I guess

Bob Pastorella 51:45
is that, is that a foundation that you use to be

able to plot with when I

C. J. Dotson 51:50
back when I was still writing science fiction and fantasy, I was also writing by hand, and so yes, I did, like, excessively plot everything back then. And I would have, like, right now I've got like, three or four documents and like, character sheets, documents before I start. But back then I would have like, notebooks, like full notebooks before I would start drafting. And there would be maps, and there would be, I would get, like, really excessive with my world building. I would like, understand, like, the, like, basic World History of each country in a fantasy novel. I would, I would, I would have, like, the I would plan out all the different religions and Fantasy was where I was most recently, before I switched to horror. So I keep like, I would plan out, like, the different religions and the magic systems. And I couldn't just be it couldn't just be like, the magic does this. I had to be like, Why does the magic do this? And like, what are the consequences, and what can the magic not do? And like, so I would get very, very obsessive about planning, especially when I was writing fantasy. And it did, yeah, totally carried over into the way I plan and plot when I'm writing my horror, just as like a brief backwards, when when you say there's not much world building in horror, but sometimes it's there. Have you guys read sister maiden monster by, I think loose Lucy Snyder.

I'm gonna look that up real quick, but I'm pretty sure it's Lucy Snyder. Sister maiden

C. J. Dotson 53:19
monster. But yep, Lucy a Snyder,

Bob 53:22
I've heard of it. I haven't read it. The the world building is

C. J. Dotson 53:26
interesting in that one, because it comes a little bit later, because it's it's changes, rather than a whole new world. But I recommend it. I read that one all in a day back in April and and, did you did you guys watch when evil lurks? Oh, yeah, I liked the world building in that one. It was subtle, but it was really interesting.

Bob Pastorella 53:55
It was because it was like, yes, he's making a sequel. He's also making a vampire movie.

C. J. Dotson 54:02
I saw that, I think I saw that it's supposed to be kind of funny,

Bob Pastorella 54:06
yeah, and I could see how you could do that. But the things, the subtle little things that he put into that world, like there was a lullaby. Do you know how old things have to be going on before you have a lullaby about it. And it's like you can't have, like, an event happen. It's like, we're gonna write a lullaby, like you're not doing it the next day. You know,

C. J. Dotson 54:35
that's my goal now, is to write lullabies the day after terrible world events.

Better get moving. Yeah, rock a pie universe,

Bob Pastorella 54:45
whatever, you know. But, I mean, there was a lullaby about it, and then, and then you already have complacent police. Is, you know, they're like, Oh no, no, no, no. There's no rotten, you know, it's only in the cities. So, yeah, no, there are. Experienced enough to realize they're gonna be sitting at the station. Yeah, they're jaded.

Yeah, it was a good one. So, yeah, there's

Bob Pastorella 55:09
world building. I don't think it's to the extent that fantasy and science fiction has

C. J. Dotson 55:15
no Not usually. I would love, I don't know if my agent would love it, but I would love to, now that I've, like, been in horror and have had so much fun with it, I would love to go back to a dark fantasy trilogy that I had been writing before, but make it like, really, not just dark fantasy, like horror fantasy. I would love to go back and do that and like, mix world building with flat out horror. And

I just have to, I just have to try to get my agent on board

Bob Pastorella 55:51
read Imagica by Clive Barker.

C. J. Dotson
Ooh, I will. I mean, I might not remember, but I will try to remember

Bob Pastorella 56:00
it is massive. It's, it's a gigantic book. If you get it in paperback, you can actually get it in two volumes Now, Dan, but it is, it deal is, it's, it's what it's hard to explain. It's all about magic. But it's Clive, it's, it's, it's a personal story. There's some horrifying moments in there, but the world building is just ungodly how you pulled it off. Oh,

C. J. Dotson 56:30
I love that. I will definitely try to remember that,

Michael David Wilson 56:33
yeah, and I think that's a real appetite right now for kind of crossovers with horror. So I would strongly imagine that if you wanted to kind of tackle horror meets fantasy, or horror meets sci fi, like the demand is there, like, Maybe there's even more demand for horror sci fi than just straight horror at the moment. So

C. J. Dotson 56:58
yeah, I

C. J. Dotson 56:59
loved cold eternity by essay Barnes recently that one was so good in terms of, like, sci fi, horror, I'm always like crying out for more stuff that makes me think of event horizon and essay Barnes has just filled that hole for me in a way that makes me so happy. You guys heard about the the event horizon graphic novel prequels coming out soon, right? Or, I don't know how soon, but, oh my god, I'm so excited for those. I can barely contain myself.

Bob Pastorella 57:30
I have not heard about that, and now I'm excited too.

C. J. Dotson 57:35
I'm so excited.

Bob Pastorella 57:37
Oh man, that sounds crazy.

C. J. Dotson 57:40
Yeah, it's gonna be, from what, from what I understand, it's gonna be a US, a couple of, like, not, like, like a limited run, like, a few issues, graphic novels, that's gonna tell the story of what happened to the original crew of the event horizon. Ah, I'm, like, rabid for it. I'm so excited just even talking about it or, sorry, yes,

Michael David Wilson 58:06
now you're just making me want to re watch event horizon.

58:13
Yes,

58:15
you know, the best

Michael David Wilson 58:16
event horizon and alien are probably the definitive sci fi horror crossover movies.

C. J. Dotson 58:26
One of my many cats is named Newt after the little girl from aliens. She's the one that uses her claws the most. Oh,

Michael David Wilson 58:36
my goodness. Thank you so much for listening to this is horror with CJ Dotson, join us again next time for the second and final part of the conversation. But if you would like to get that and every other episode ahead of the crowd, please become our patron@patreon.com forward slash This is horror. Patreon is the best way to support the show and to keep the podcast going. And with that in mind, a special thank you to our latest patrons at the premium paid tier bone songs, Scott G and Carrie J Wolfe, I have been open about wanting to do this as horror podcast as my full time job by the end of the year, and the main way that I am going to be able to do that is if we get more patrons. So when I say I would like your support, you are literally helping facilitate my dream to potentially do this full time. Am I offering to you in addition. Into more podcasts and submitting questions to each and every guest is story unboxed, the horror podcast on the craft of writing. It is an exclusive podcast to Patreon, and in a matter of mere days, Bob and I will be recording the latest installment in the series in which we discuss and analyze hereditary story. Unboxed is not just a podcast in which we discuss the film, but one in which we discover writing lessons that you can apply to make your own writing better. So if that sounds good and you are financially able to do so, please join us@patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. Okay, before I wrap up a quick advert break,

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Michael David Wilson 1:02:09
Well, that is almost all we've got time for on this is horror. But before I go, I'd like to remind you that, as well as hosting this is horror. I am an author. I have a number of books out, and if you read my books, then I would love it if you could leave a review on Goodreads, on Amazon, wherever you want. And I would like to thank Curtis McIntyre, because in the space of about a month, he has read and reviewed every single Michael David Wilson book, and he's done that over on Goodreads, and he has given my first free books the girl in the video they're watching and House of bad memories, four stars. And he's given my latest book, daddy's boy, five stars. So thank you so much, Curtis, not only for reading all those books, but for taking the time to leave some stars and to leave some thoughts on each of the books, I really appreciate that, and now that you've read all of them, don't you worry, because I have a number of other books coming. I've already got a novella that is with a publisher and an agent. I've got a collaborative novel with Jon crinn that is going to be complete in terms of the first draft in a matter of days. And then I've got another novel that I have planned out and I'm going to be working on very soon. And if I really bring my A game, I might even be able to do the first draft of that one by the end of the year. So plenty for you to check out a load of short stories available, particularly on the other stories podcast. You can head to Michael David wilson.co.uk and you can check out links to each and every one of those. So thank you to Curtis, thank you to you, dear listener, for listening to this episode and joining me each and every week. I'll see you again next time for part two with CJ Dotson, but until then, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing and have a great, great day.