Scary Stuff with Bibiana Krall and Veronica Cline Barton

In this episode, venture into the worlds of Bibiana Krall and Veronica Cline Barton, prolific writers on their own and collaborators on the award-winning Haunted Series consisting, so far, of four books each with six spine-tingling tales set around the globe.

Stretch your imagination with these riveting short stories filled with psychological suspense in the styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne du Maurier. No gore, though a lot of paranormal scariness and some madcap elements as well.

Here, you'll learn about the latest book in the series, "Shadow Reflection" (published in September 2023), along with "Wicked Mist," "Tangled Webs" and "Hearth Fires." These tales will take you far and wide, from Big Sur to Mount Kilimanjaro.

To learn more about Bibiana and Veronica and where to purchase these works, please visit their sites.  I bought my books on Amazon.

This is Kate Jones. Thank you for listening to The Gale Hill Radio Hour!

The show is available in Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast directories. Also on Substack and YouTube; Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Kate: 0:18

Hello and welcome to The Gale Hill Radio Hour. I’m your host Kate Jones, here with two prolific writers, both on their own and as collaborators on The Haunted Series. One is a world traveler, mother, wife and wildheart, who writes edgy and suspenseful fiction that’s influenced by nature magic. The other holds graduate degrees in engineering and business, yet her lifelong love affair with British murder mysteries inspired her toward a literary career. 

Of course, there’s much more to Bibiana Krall and Veronica Cline Barton than those short descriptions, but that will do for now because we have some haunting to get into. 

Welcome to the show, Bibiana and Veronica! 

We’re doing this interview in late October, so we must talk about The Haunted Series, otherwise known as “haunting stories that take you places.” What do you mean by that?

Bibiana: 1:26

Haunting stories that take you places: Basically, the concept is that when you read one of these collections or hopefully all of these collections, you will immerse yourself in story so deeply that you will feel taste, sense, smell and everything where we’re taking you in these stories. And these stories are written around the world in all sorts of cool, sometimes exotic, sometimes not so exotic locations. But you are going to be haunted, you’re going to experience mysterious things and you are going to travel the world with us in these stories.

Veronica: 2:12

Well, I think from our travels, I mean Bibiana has traveled quite a bit and I have too and when we put the series together, it was right as the lockdown started with the pandemic and really there was no traveling or very limited traveling at the time. And so we just felt it was important, we wanted to at least share some of our travel experiences and kind of twist them in the Haunted stories, of course, but we just felt that was an important element to bring out during the times.

Kate: 2:48

I think so! That is amazing to me that you started this right before the pandemic and now you have four in this series. How'd you do that?

Veronica: 3:02

Well, it’s four years of lockdown. But we began this — I actually got to meet Bibiana in person in Savannah in January of 2020. So right before the lockdowns occurred and before the world shut down, and Bibiana and I had been friends on Twitter at the time. And we had started to call each other and we talked. My husband and I planned a Southern road trip and happened to meet up with Bibiana and her husband in person. It was just fabulous. And one early morning, sitting at the Kessler Mansion, which used to be a mortuary, we sat down and we were just talking about maybe we should write a book together. You know, I mean, we have very, very different backgrounds and styles, but it was just something that kind of … you know, the seed was planted in Savannah. But then, when the world — you know it just started closing and stuff — we had some more conversations and decided let’s do this, and do something hopefully productive in very uncertain times, I guess.

Kate: 4:23

Anything you want to say about that, Bibiana?

Bibiana: 4:26

Yeah, I think as far as like doing it, when we made the decision to write this book together, we were rebelling against sort of hopelessness, rebelling against feeling, you know, the lockdown, because literally, we did not begin writing these stories until the world was on lockdown, official lockdown and she and I both were bouncing off the walls. I had two teenagers at my house, a rescue cat, my husband, who usually travels, and I was losing my mind. All my quiet time was gone, and Veronica would call me on the phone in the morning and I was just like, I’ve got to do something or I’m going to lose my mind, and not because of all of the things that were going on in the world. Yes, very scary, all of that was really scary, but my creative time had shrunk to almost zero and I needed something to focus on. So when we made this decision to write the first book, we both were like well, this will last three months, six months, we’ll write this book, it’ll give us something to do, it’ll be fun, it’ll be cool and it did really well. It came out in September of 2020. So we basically started writing it in May and we had that book out in September which is, you know, hyper speed for any kind of book. But we thought the pandemic would be over by then. So this series was not a planned series and, as we’re sort of following the breadcrumbs, we realized it’s not gonna be over in 2020. So we decided to write another one and we’re like, oh well, it’ll be over. And we still hadn’t really turned it into a series at that point, but we started getting an inkling, I think in 2020, about mid-2021, that we had been extremely hopeful about the length of time that we might have to basically create and to do these things, and maybe our inability to go and travel and do the things we were used to doing before the pandemic. So we just kind of bolted down. And we had a very strong idea in our minds about how long the stories should be, what kind of structure we were going to put in it, and we followed that recipe that we created in the first book and that’s really how it rolled into a series very effortlessly, because we had a format, a beautiful format that worked, and that’s what we used the second year, the third year and this is our fourth year right now.

Kate: 7:11

So, so terrific. So I just want to ask you: What is the appeal of scary stuff? I mean, you were doing this in a scary time, so what is the appeal of the paranormal, anything that kind of scares you, for you and for people in general? In other words, what do we get out of these kinds of stories?

Veronica: 7:34

Well, I think it’s an escape. I mean, I know I’ve always loved them. I grew up back in the dark ages with “Twilight Zone,” still in black and white, and then merged into “Night Gallery” and just some of those old TV series and the movies, and it was just something that I always gravitated to and just really enjoyed. And I think, because, we kind of schedule our release usually on Labor Day, so it gives us like the month of September and October, everybody's getting in the fall mood and lots of discussions on Halloween topics and that. And I think it’s an escape in a way, and it’s time to just kind of focus on the season and just things that really kind of scare you but entertain you, I guess. So, Bibiana, do you wanna answer?

Bibiana: 8:39

Well, I’m just going to go all in. I grew up in a haunted house, and the haunted house I grew up in was not haunted to my parents because of our religious beliefs. So apparently, if you’re Catholic, you don't believe in haunted houses, or at least you’re not supposed to talk about haunted houses. But our house was so incredibly haunted that now, as an adult person, when I get together with my siblings and we’re just talking or we’re somewhere on vacation together or something like that, that house always comes up and the things that we experienced in that house always come up. And there’s always things that are very similar to my experiences that I’ve never told anybody about. And there are other things that never happened to me, that happened to someone else, that they never told anybody about. So you can say this is group psychosis, but if we’re all having different things happen to us, I’m not sure how that works. But this place was abandoned in the late 1800s and it had been part of an enormous farm system. I grew up in Michigan and in this farm system you had, like the mom’s house, the grandparents’ house, the hired hands’ house, so on like hundreds and hundreds of acres. And this house had been abandoned for a long time when the grandmother passed away and my parents bought it for almost nothing in the 1950s, early 1960s, and they refurbished it and cleaned it out because it had been empty for, gosh I don't know, 45, 50 years, so who knows what was going on there during that time. It was so abandoned that walls had caved in and nature was taking it over. So they got it for like 10 cents plus the land or something, I don’t know. But anyway, to me, the scary stories I write have a combination of things. Yes, they’re entertaining, but they also, at least the way I try to write them, is I try to teach people to listen to their intuition, I try to teach people to be brave when they’re afraid. And honestly, during that pandemic I think we all needed a lot of help with that. And still today we need a lot of help with that. But I think the paranormal, just in general, for me, is that there’s a lot of things in the world, a lot of things that all of us have experienced, that we can’t explain with science or religion or logic, and that’s where, to me, the paranormal comes in. It’s like sort of chasing, that chasing the shooting star or chasing the mist through the cornfield and trying to figure out where it came from, or if it wants to leave us a message. And maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just nature, but maybe it is something else and that’s always been my quest to find out. I’m a curious person.

Kate: 11:47

Ooh, I like that. There are six short stories in each book, connected by a common theme. Please describe the books and talk about what readers encounter in each one of them.

Bibiana: 12:03

Veronica, you want to do the first two and I’ll do the last two?

Veronica: 12:07

Sure. In “Hearth Fires,” the theme was you’ll see the Ouija board on the cover. Although the stories didn’t directly involve people sitting around the board and the happenings there, somehow they’re referenced in each of the stories. Out of the six stories we have five kind of really serious haunting paranormal stories and one kind of oddball story, and I usually write — I do write — the oddball story. So we went from a really ghostly tale in Louisiana, and then I had a shopkeeper near Salem, Massachusetts, which is where my ancestors landed, so maybe I have a little bit of witch in me somehow. And then we went to Scotland and had the mystic and magic of the Highlands, if you will. With Bibiana’s  stories, she started out with a really serious ghost story in Southern Savannah and then went to Big Sur, which was one of the last places we went before lockdown. So she got to see that. And then we went to Paris and had all kinds of fun activity there. Well, maybe not so fun for the main character there, but the main thing too was just, you have all these, this eclectic group of stories and locations, and the characters are very different and what have you. But we had the theme of this Ouija kind of experience, and you do make contact with others or you have strange occurrences that happen during the stories and so you kind of wrestle with that. And then with “Tangled Webs,” which is our second book of stories, Bibiana takes us to Canada, in Jasper, so up near Lake Louise, I guess, and Jasper Lake. And we go to Italy with a story, “Ragno Dazante,” which is just an incredible tale that has a twist ending that you will not forget, and we also do “Widow’s Walk,” so getting into the Northeast and Falmouth and having a haunted house kind of experience there. And the same with mine. I have “Sculpture of the Dead,” and this is again in “Tangled Webs.” We were like, you know, there are different things that kind of pull at our psyche, if you will, and so is it real or is it just imagined? That kind of thing. And in my stories, I have a sculptor that is commissioned to sculpt this woman, this famous movie star’s legs in marble, and some really strange things happen there. And we go to Norway and I have “Hviske,” the Whisperer, you know a woman who can kind of sense people’s inner traumas, inner feelings, inner emotions, and can either make good things happen or maybe not so good things happen. And then in Quebec City, we go to “Mode de Veuve Noire.” I can’t say the name with my French, but there we have a social media influencer that goes on hard times and so she gets invited to this gig at the Ice Hotel in Quebec and has some bad things kind of come to fruition there. But again with the stories for the second year, and with “Shadow,” we kind of went a little bit darker, I guess, than the first stories in “Hearth Fires.” And I think it was because, you know, being second year in the lockdown, people’s emotions were, you know, getting a little more fragile I guess at the time. And you know, some scary stuff was happening and we started to build some of those social issues into the stories. And in my “Mode de Veuve Noire,” it was the cancel culture. So, if you remember, back in the second year of lockdown 2021, cancel culture was huge news. And so, you know, just with each year as it progressed, that was kind of our first instance where we started to take in the emotions that were really coming out of the public and society during the lockdown. So we incorporated the feelings, or at least our perception of the feelings and what that was going on, and we tried to incorporate elements of that in each of the stories. So I’ll let you take books three and four, Bibiana.

Bibiana: 17:36

Okay, well, “Wicked Mist.” “Wicked Mist” is all about the mist, and the mist might be fog or mist in a field or over a cliff, or it might be the mist in your mind, of not remembering some pertinent details, etc., etc. And I mean my personal favorite story in “Wicked Mist” that I wrote, is “Ningyo.” It is the craziest story you’ve ever read because it’s about painted dolls, kind of. I actually was looking at this really famous Polish photographer’s black and white studies of the haunted forest in Japan that’s on Mount Fuji, and they were so freaky and weird. He was taking pictures when it was first snowing. They were all black and white and just exceptional photographs, and they were so amazing that I actually reached out to him. I found this guy’s email and he actually wrote back to me. And this guy’s like super famous and he actually wrote back to me. I told him what I was trying to do and he was trying to get me to get on a plane and go to the haunted forest. I’m like, we can’t here in America right now. We couldn’t do that, but his photographs really inspired me to write “Ningyo.” And “Ningyo” is really kind of a murder mystery about a person who was done completely wrong and they are coming back from the dead and using their loved ones as mouthpieces, or a way to basically solve not only solve their murder but avenge a lot more that’s gone on that they had no control over. So it’s a pretty strong story and it’s because of this guy’s photographs. So “Devil’s Breath,” that also is completely bonkers. It’s basically about a female demon who’s tired of men mistreating her, and she comes through the centuries and kicks people’s butts and that kind of stuff. It’s pretty fun. “Witch,” also, but this is about witches on Mackinac Island. So a lot of people don't know the history of Mackinac Island, but one of the last group of witches in the United States that were murdered for being witches, that happened on Mackinac Island in the 1800s. So, Mackinac Island is in Michigan. It’s a place I used to go to a lot when I was a kid. In Veronica’s story, “Diamonds and Ashes,” set in California, I would say there are a lot of things going on in here. But one of the biggest ones is don’t make promises to people that you’re not going to keep, because they might come back and bite you. Yeah, ooh, I’m telling you. The one thing about these stories is they’re not just paranormal. There’s a lot of psychological suspense, there’s a lot of mystery. You know always tons of suspense and no gore. That is also our brand.

Kate: 20:59

Yes, that is wonderful. I wanted to make sure we talked about that, because why did you decide on that?

Bibiana: 21:07

Well, the world is pretty ugly, I mean, let's face it. You look out, you look on the news every day and and it’s just awful things, awful, awful, awful things. So we know that grown-ups have seen things they want to forget. We know that grown-ups know what it looks like if something bad happens to a person. You know from the aspect of the criminal or whatever. So what we do is we take you to the point where something may happen and we use Veronica’s cozy mystery style of closing the door so you can decide as the reader if you want to take it further, to envision what that is, or you can just let it go and move along and catch up with the rest of the story. So we don’t feel any inherent need to write gore because we are so focused on writing the psychological suspense, like Alfred Hitchcock or Daphne du Maurier, that we don’t feel like we even have to. We feel like it would cheapen what we’re doing because our readers are elevated and our readers don’t need it, don’t want it and, really, would actually be very excited to find stories like this because this is not the modern framework for stories as a rule. So we’re breaking tons and tons of rules here, but we’re breaking them all on purpose. 

So “Area 58” the craziest alien story you will ever read and it is an alien love story that’s Veronica's dark satire to the max and “Unrequited” is about a group of gentle ladies in an English manner who have themselves a garden club and a tea club, and all I can say is, boys, be careful when your car breaks down and be nice to those little ladies.

Kate: 23:07

So that’s in “Wicked Mist,” correct? I read on your site that you want people to know about that book, and so why is that? Is that a favorite of yours because of any aspect of it?

Bibiana: 23:28

Well, I think one of the reasons that I just really love “Wicked Mist” is “Wicked Mist. Like “Hearth Fires,” we wrote just as almost an experiment to see if we could collaborate and to do something creative. “Tangled Webs” was more of a focus, like we need to go a little harder, we need to stay in these lines, that sort of thing. Then when we got to “Wicked Mist,” it was a little bit more supercharged on all fronts and I think it’s because we had all been locked up with our, you know, rescue cats and our teenagers, for two and a half years by then and it’s like you have to let all that energy go somewhere and it certainly went into “Wicked Mist.” So “Wicked Mist” was a grand prize winner in a book competition and I’m super proud that it happened. I still can't believe it happened, but you know, it’s just a couple of frequencies higher. That’s all I can say really. I really I love “Wicked Mist.” And the last book, “Shadow Reflection,” this year’s, is about looking back. It’s also about looking in the mirror and being honest or being dishonest, and and it’s about the things that you see in the distance and the things you don’t see in the distance. So it’s got a lot of symbolism to it. The first story, “White Raven,” is about the first woman who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and something supernatural happens to her on the mountain. And I went this June and climbed Kilimanjaro with my husband and, I didn’t have any supernatural stuff happen. But I’ll tell you what, that is a really big mountain, that’s a really big mountain. But I wanted to be very authentic in how I described the mountain, how I described how she was feeling and some of the same feelings that the main character, Truda, is feeling, I was feeling because once you get about above, about 10,000 feet, your lungs start compressing, it gets hard to breathe, it gets hard to walk. Literally, leaning down to tie your shoe can knock the breath out of you and it’s hard to imagine that. But you know, every 10,000 feet is more and more and more epic and the mountain is 19,000, 324 feet high and you actually cover every sort of geographical, you know, sort of like weather system. So the bottom is jungle, then you have like a moor land, then you have a kind of high desert, then you have a moon area and then you have tundra and I mean there’s ice and snow, you know, at the top of the mountain. So it’s bonkers, but anyway. So that’s “White Raven.” You get to climb on Kilimanjaro with Truda and I. And then we have “Obelisk,” which is about a young woman who dreams of the stars and she is an astro … Well, she isn’t quite yet, but anyway she wants to map the stars as a living and she wonders about you know, aliens and wonders about alternate places. Well, she actually finds out. And the question is, when she finds out, how does she feel about it? That’s what I'd like to ask all the readers. And then we have “Billy,” the craziest, my craziest story in there, about a young man who is bullied in school and mistreated by his classmates, and he kind of has a bit of … Veronica, would you say he has kind of a bit of a mental breakdown? Because I kind of feel like that’s what happens to Billy. He’s just had enough, you know, he can’t take it anymore and he goes and he commits some very violent things and when that happens, it alters his, his energy and he becomes something different. So that’s a pretty scary one. Then we have “Mask” by Veronica, where we are in Alaska, and we are in Alaska in the late 1800s. Is it late 1800s? Yeah, late 1800s, and we are walking with a sea captain’s wife who’s feeling bereft and spurned and, and she doesn’t like it up there, she doesn’t really belong up there and some some things go on that make her see things in a different kind of way. And, oh boy, she’s messing with some forces that she didn't quite come prepared for. And that’s all I'll say about “Mask,” but it’s quite something. And then, “Flipside,” we’re in the woods. We’re in Moon Lake, I believe. We’re in Moon Lake and we have a woman who is saying goodbye to a beautiful relative who happens to have this amazing haven in the woods, and the haven is magical and it’s enchanted, and what it’s enchanted by I won't say, but it is really an unusual story and it has a lot to do with parallel universes, sort of what you can see and maybe what you can feel versus what you can feel. But anyway, that’s a really neat story. And the final, the final story (“Hijinks”), is the fun one by Veronica. That is a really, I would say, a dark comedy, dark satire about a witch and the Queen of Christmas, or aka Santa’s wife, who are basically duking it out with each other, kind of like the housewives of Orange County. And it’s pretty fun because you have Christmas versus Halloween. So it’s this great story that sort of fills the spaces in between Halloween and Christmas, when we’re all supposed to put turkeys up on the wall but some of us don’t and we either stay in that Halloween mode or we start decorating for Christmas. So it’s, it’s just got these great vibes. It’s really fun. And that’s one thing about these stories is there are some pretty scary ones in all of these collections. But there’s also this sort of wild madcap, sort of off-the-chain kind of story that Veronica writes well, that I don't know how to write at all, and there’s one of those in every single collection, which really kind of lets off the brakes. You know, lets some of that steam out so that you can, you know, sort of get that balance again and then you can, you can go forward.

Kate: 30:53

So is there anything else you'd like to say about the Haunted series?

Veronica: 30:59

Well, I think, one thing in the back of each book, Bibiana and I put in a couple of recipes, either for cocktails or appetizers or some more substantial kind of casserole things. But for each year, we decided we wanted it to be a Halloween party in a book, and so you get to read fabulous stories and if you go to the back, you can find a particular recipe that we each felt kind of symbolized something we had tried that year ourselves or had experienced, you know, in the travels that were described in each story. And so we tried to pull in a little bit of comfort and celebration at the end anyway. So you can, if you’re a cook, and they’re not really hard recipes, especially mine, you know, it’s like recipe 101, I guess.

Kate: 32:03

So that's that's good for me. 

Well, it has been so enjoyable having you on the show. Thank you so much, and I will have links to how to get these books in the show description. 

This is Kate Jones with The Gale Hill Radio Hour. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Please share this episode with anyone who appreciates a nerve-tingling page-turner.