The Nightmare Engine Podcast
Welcome to The Nightmare Engine — a weekly show that churns with dread and drips with dark insight. Hosted by David Viergutz, the Master of Malice, this show tears back the curtain on all things horror. From the art of scaring readers to chilling interviews with guests of the macabre—authors, occultists, scholars of the strange—you'll explore the gears that keep the genre grinding.
And nestled in the static… notes from The Curator of The Dead Letters, whispering deeper truths from the shadows.
This isn’t just a podcast.
It’s a transmission from the other side.
The Nightmare Engine Podcast
From Cosmic Mysteries to Haunted Realms with JD Barker
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Bestselling author JD Barker joins me on The Nightmare Engine Podcast, sharing his incredible journey from a ghostwriter and book doctor to a New York Times bestseller. I get an insider’s look at his creative collaborations, including a Dracula prequel and thrilling projects with James Patterson. JD’s insights into the business of writing, along with his strategic genre-blending techniques, give us a deep dive into the complexities of attracting diverse audiences while staying true to his horror roots. This episode is a goldmine for anyone curious about what it takes to build a successful writing career.
I take you on a journey through the realms of fan fiction and cosmic mysteries as we dive into the excitement of sequels and reboots, including the 1990 thriller Flatliners. We explore the scientific and existential themes surrounding med students flirting with death and draw fascinating parallels with films like The Lazarus Project. Our conversation spirals into a cosmic tangent, where black holes and our place in the universe set the stage for some existential musings. If you love the intersection of science, fiction, and the unknown, this discussion is for you.
Get ready to experience the spine-tingling allure of real-life horror and folklore monsters as I recount chilling moments from Costa Rica to the Stanley Hotel, the eerie inspiration behind Stephen King’s The Shining. The fusion of real and fictional terror sparks an exploration into haunted house experiences, folklore, and the psychology of fear. With personal anecdotes and compelling narratives, this episode reveals how true stories breathe life into imaginative storytelling, blurring the line between reality and the supernatural. Join me for a hauntingly engaging exploration of horror at its finest.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Nightmare Engine podcast. It is Monday, february 10th. It is not my usual recording day, but I've got a very special guest I'm really happy to announce today. We'll get to that in just a second. So we're just doing a little bit of a different recording session specifically for today, because there are so many cool things happening in the background that we want to talk to this guest about.
Speaker 1:So, as far as my updates go, so I just announced to my private group that there will be a ScareMail ARG launching. That's an alternate reality game that's going to take over your text message, your email, your podcasting, your YouTube. Everything is going to be involved. There's nothing that's going to be safe and we're going to turn your home into a haunted house. So that is the next step of ScareMail. Besides that, scaremail 2, the Drift, is launching, I think in just a few weeks. So we're going to announce it and open it up for pre-orders for everybody else. Besides that, my newest book, roanoke, is coming out probably in the next few months, and I'll be hard at work with that.
Speaker 1:So that is the short version of this intro. I don't really have much to update this week as just a few days has passed since our last recording, so I won't take any more of your time. I'm really really happy to introduce one of the top sellers in the country and someone that I know personally and can vouch for the quality of his work, mr JD Barker. How are you, sir? Hey man, how you doing Pretty good. I appreciate you taking the time out of your your Monday to to meet with me and to and to chat and to chat with with the folks that listen, oh, in any time.
Speaker 2:I'm always up for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, um, now I know it'd be kind of a shame you if nobody knew who you were. Let's get the skinny, let's get the intro. How would you describe yourself If you're first walking up to shake somebody's hand and you said, hey, I'm JD, this is what you need to know. What would you know?
Speaker 2:Oh man. So usually when I ramble on about myself, it's about a 20-minute long thing. So I'm a New York Times bestseller, started off years back as a book doctor and a ghost writer, so basically working behind the scenes. I did that for two decades and kind of honed the craft doing that. Indie published my first title but ended up selling about a quarter million copies, which put me on the radar of the traditional guys. I've captured lightning in a bottle a bunch of times. I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker's family. James Patterson reached out to me and we've done, I think, five books together. At this point I'm currently writing I don't know if you remember a movie called Flatliners from the 90s, but I'm writing a book to reboot that franchise. So I'm working on all kinds of cool things right now.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man, and so the vein you tend to write in. So we kind of stick on the on the darker side of things. But we also know that line between what makes things like horror or thriller or supernatural thriller can kind of blend a little bit. Most people know me from my horror and most listeners are probably here for that. But that's okay, because I think there are a lot of themes and I think, like I said, I think that line blurs a lot. So where where does the you know where your majority of your attention, because your attention isn't quite a few, quite a few areas. Where? Where does the you know where your majority of your attention, because your attention isn't quite a few, quite a few areas? Where? Where does that stick? As far as the lightness, the darkness, that sort of thing, are you closer towards the thriller side, the horror side? How would you? How would you describe that?
Speaker 2:So, if you believe Wikipedia, I build myself as a suspense author, which is no mistake, because it might. I think the first sentence is he's a suspense author who may incorporate elements of horror, elements of sci-fi, elements of this or of that. Um, I purposely did that at the beginning, because I like to keep my feet in multiple genres. Um, I almost feel like a literary pied piper. You know like, if I feel like I need to, you know, grab onto readers from a particular group. I'll kind of you know I'll write a young adult novel.
Speaker 2:I'll write a sci-fi novel, um, but I keep suspense out there as that common thread and that kind of keeps everybody coming back. Personally, I love horror. I grew up like horror was my. The first book I read, as what I consider to be an adult book, was Dracula. So I've been part of the horror camp from the get-go. But now that I'm in the business side of this, I sell way more thrillers than I do horror. It's just. The market is just that much bigger. But I love to do both. So I tend to go back and forth I write a horror, I write a thriller, I write a horror, I write a thriller. And you know again, keep that common suspense theme in between all of them. So the readers you know from from the various camps are all on board.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, yeah, so being able to incorporate those elements for folks they get a little bit. Maybe they dip their toes into it, right. So like they, they can kind of jump in and out of genres and feel pretty comfortable with it, like, ah, you know, there's a little bit darker than I like, but hey, we're back into a thriller where I like to kind of plant my feet, so that's that's really nice that you do that. Not a lot of people are able to do the cross genre stuff. I listening, if you, if you jump into one of jd's books, um, be sure to check out the back of it so you kind of know what you're getting into. But you know, I'm I'm pretty sure and you know you probably probably let folks know like, hey, you're going to get a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Speaker 2:they, if they look at the description or read the inside cover and that sort of thing, right yeah, I mean, I've never had somebody shy away from you know, like if they pick up a thriller and it's got some horror elements in there or vice like they never really shy away from it. They I don't go too far in any in one direction. Um, and I think that's kind of key when you, when you do this sort of thing, because I I noticed when I, when I write a straight up thriller, um, you know people like it, but like, if I add just a little bit of horror to it, all of a sudden that's something new that they don't normally see in a thriller, which causes that word of mouth, the buzz and the ratings just to be a little bit higher. So you know, I try to incorporate just just enough.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Now we slip back and we slip by two really really cool fact what you just threw out there so casually and I want to bring it back because it's definitely in the camp that people are interested in what you said. You wrote a prequelquel to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Speaker 2:I did, yeah, so I mentioned it's the first adult book I ever read. I picked up a copy when I was eight years old at a yard sale for 25 cents and that book just really stuck with me. My very first book, forsaken, was a horror novel and it was up for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Debut. And while I was there, dacre Stoker, who is Bram's great-grandnephew, basically cornered me and we talked for a little bit. He had read my book and he said the family had been trying to find somebody to write a prequel to Dracula for a while, using Bram's original notes, and asked if it was something I'd be interested in doing Obviously, something you do not say no to. I had that history as a book doctor and a ghost writer, so I've kind of dabbled in that camp before. I've worked with other people. You know a lot. I collaborate quite a bit. I've taken over projects from from other people, so you know jumping into something. You know that Bram partially wrote and turned it into a full-fledged novel.
Speaker 1:That was right in my wheelhouse. And what was the name of that prequel?
Speaker 2:We called it Dracul, basically Dracula, without the A on the end. If you go through Bram's notes, that's actually what he. Well, originally the vampire was called Count Wampir, which is not very scary. And then there's a page in his notes where he actually crossed that out. He wrote Dracul all over it and then he went back and wrote the A at the end, so it was kind of like an afterthought. It kind of like an afterthought, uh, it kind of reminded me of a girl in high school writing your boyfriend's name all over a note, you know notepad, or something like. He just covered a page with the word dracul and then, you know, there we could tell he used he wrote the a later because he used a different pen, like the penmanship was a little bit different, um, but in his notes dracul, you know, basically means devil, um, which is where where all of that stuff came from that's awesome.
Speaker 1:so so is that available today? Like we could go find it if we wanted to.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that came out in, I think, 2018. It's been out for a little while now. They, they wheel it out every, every Halloween. You'll see it in the windows of the bookstores.
Speaker 1:I definitely need to pick it up because I had no idea it existed. Like Dracula is one of my favorite books ever and I was like, oh my gosh. So like when?
Speaker 2:you told me that it was a fascinating story because you know, I've loved dracula my entire life and for me dracula has always started with jonathan harker on the train, um, but in reality that was actually page 102 of the original manuscript. Um, bram wrote another 100 pages before that and a lot of it was very autobiographical. He basically explained why he believed vampires were real. Um, he truly believed they were, to the point where he had himself cremated when he died. But the book that we, the story that we told, was basically that portion of it. You know why Bram felt vampires were real. And the coolest part about that book if you do pick it up is the author's note at the end, because you finish reading this book, you know it feels like it's a work of fiction. It's got some crazy stuff in there, and then you read the author's note and realize, realized the craziest parts were actually true in real life. Um, and then we point that out. We've got pictures and things like that to back it up. So it was a wild story.
Speaker 1:That is wild. And, oh my gosh, I, I'm already, I'm already like I got chills because I, I, once you live one of your best stories right. Once you, once you read one of your favorite ones, you're like, oh man, I wish I could go back and read that again, right? And so, like, on occasion, there's that, that option where there's like a prequel comes out or maybe a sequel, and you just hope to god, like the sequel, please, like, do the, do the do the original some justice, right, you know, hope, please, please, don't be bad, um, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I would. Um, I, I'm excited, I'm gonna go back and look at it. And then, um, I am familiar with flatliners, so once again, we'll go back a little bit in the beginning, because you're just dropping bombs on me right here. So, flatliners, I'm familiar with it Again, just like the prequel for Dracula. A lot of folks may not be familiar with it. So let's talk about Flatliners and then let's talk about what that revitalization might look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Flatliners, it's this movie. I think it was 1990 when it came out. It's got a crazy cast in it. It had a Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Billy Baldwin, Oliver Platt like all these people that we know today as household names, basically at the start of their career. And it's about a bunch of med students who decide to basically kill each other to see if there's life after death. So they kill each other, then they bring themselves back one after the other and end up bringing something else back with them at one point. It's a great story. It's a really cool premise and, honestly, it still holds up today.
Speaker 2:I've seen it more times in the last couple of months than I can count, but the guy who wrote it his name is Peter Filardi. He's actually on one of my other projects. He was working on Dracul for a while and I you know we had talked about this a while back. I told him I had an idea to reboot the franchise, to get it going again, and unfortunately the studio still had the rights. So I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. And then I got a phone call from him about a year ago and he's like hey, I just got the rights back from Columbia if you still want to do this.
Speaker 2:So what we're doing is basically writing a novel to take the entire franchise, the story idea, in a totally different direction than where people have gone with it in the past. Book is coming out first, with the hopes of a movie to follow. We've had a ton of interest from the film side, so I'm pretty sure that that's going to happen. But we're kind of going about this backwards. I mean, typically with something like this, you know the movie would come out and they just write a tie-in novel for that that movie. So we're going the other way around, with the book first yeah, I mean even the premise.
Speaker 1:Like that premise, if there, if it hasn't had its justice, you know, there's always an opportunity to do something, something new with a premise, you know, like that's um, there's a movie that came out recently I I can't remember the actress's name, but, um, she was on house. She was pretty famous for that series, but um, the it was called the lazarus project. Um, I don't know if you've seen a great movie. I love that movie. It's an amazing movie. I mean goes from, like science, pseudoscience, to this weird, like just I mean satanist type, demon, demonology type. I mean it just goes off the rails. But it's kind of the same idea, right, cheating death, I mean that's's it. They're just trying to cheat death, um, and then somebody makes a horrible, horrible decision, and that's always how these things seem to go down. But are there any?
Speaker 2:what scares me about. I mean it's a great movie, um, a lot of people haven't seen it. I don't. I didn't. All the time in labs and universities, you know, literally just you know scientists, med students just trying things and you don't hear about it. And I think that's the part that's scary, like the fact that it is believable it could actually happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean it's, and I guess it's all it's kind of relative to like what does it mean to actually die? Like I'm? I'm a, I'm a cop and I've done cpr on quite a few people and people then have, you know, been gone for minutes and we're able to continue cpr until we can get them to the ambulance. The ambulance hits them with medication and and, um and uh, the, the defibrillator, and then continue, and then eventually they come back and you're like where have have they? Have they been gone? Like you know, the it's, it's really kind of relative. You're like where did they go if they went somewhere? You know, so it's such a such a cool, cool premise, um and uh, anyways, I, I'm a big fan.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna kind of pivot a little bit because I'm a big fan of space stuff.
Speaker 1:And this kind of pivot a little bit because I'm a big fan of space stuff and this is just kind of random because I'm talking about interesting things that I like seeing in the news and seeing the stories, and I was watching a guy and I don't know if it's true or not, and this is along the same veins of like kind of what you know versus what you think you know, and this is about black holes, and I talk about these all the time because it's crazy to think about it, just conceptually, about how small we really are. But with a black hole, we used to think that it would, just things would go in and it was impossible for anything to come out, right, because of the amount of sure force that's there. That's there. Um, I was watching a video and this guy was describing that scientists had discovered that there was a black hole sucking in a planet or a star and sometime later it starts spitting the star back out and you're like what? How is that even possible?
Speaker 2:right, and so go ahead it just makes me think that there's so much like that we just don't know. You know like I'm smart enough to know there's a lot that I don't know. Yes, um, and you know like I, when you see something like that, I mean it's, it's, it's fascinating. But you know like there's new things like that popping up all the time. I just saw, um some video the other day from mars on that elon musk had put out and they actually found square structures on the planet surface. You know, like literal squares.
Speaker 2:It looks like the foundation for a building, you know, from a very, very long time ago. You know it couldn't be an accident. You know like when you see it and you know there's theories. You know like the sun is slowly shrinking, like there could have been life on Mars at one point and then it became inhabitable and that life may have ended up over here. You know, in a few billion years it might move from here to the next planet and the next planet. But like that kind of stuff really backs it up. And I saw a story this morning. It looks like he's going to actually fund the mission to Mars all on his own. He's going to get a profit from Starlink, you know. So this, this guy is, you know he's, he's, he's like a real life tony stark. But like he finds us out there and like he just decides, okay, we're going, and he's paying for it.
Speaker 1:I've always heard that mother nature doesn't create in straight lines, right, I mean, that's no, and this is when you see the pictures of it.
Speaker 2:I mean they are perfectly clear in like 4k or 8k or something crazy, and it looks like the foundation for a building. Um, yeah, it's about the same size I think they said is the great pyramid. So it's not, you know, not small oh my gosh, all right.
Speaker 1:So once again, something else I gotta look up. This is nuts, but and the reason I bring up something so, so colossal, like this right, is because we as writers take these, just these ideas and we try to condense them down right and force characters to either deal with realizations or deal with the thing. Dracula is the same way, right, I mean dealing with the monster. That's kind of where, you know, that's kind of where we as humans connect best, I think, with the characters and stories, because the only way we can really do it is as humans. You know, we there's always that power, that that you know.
Speaker 1:When you, especially when you go like fantasy and sci-fi, like, okay, well, now the human has this capability or this technology and they can solve the problems that way, um, but most of the time they're just dealing with the issues and and you know, you and I we write darker themed stuff and where our characters are normally at the pits, right, I mean, that's pretty consistent across the board you throw a character into a really really deep, dark pit and then they've got to kind of claw their way out and they discover things along the way, um, and I think that makes it makes it fun. I mean, I mean it makes it humanizing. I I mean, do you agree, or is it, or am I? Am I just kind of breaking this down a little too much?
Speaker 2:no, I mean, that's that. I mean for me, like you know, there's two camps when it comes to writing. I don't want to get into the weeds too much. You've got your your panthers and you've got your outliners For me, when I write a horror novel, I need to be a panther, which basically means I create my plot, my scenario, I create my characters and then I drop these people into the mix of some you know crazy thing. That's just sort of happening and for horror, to me it works that way. I can't outline a horror novel because as the author, I don't want to know where it's going. I want my characters to kind of tell me, and I think that's where that kind of thing comes from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fun, right, I mean. To discover it along with them is kind of how it is right we're on this adventure. All we're doing is playing it in our heads and putting it down on paper for other people, right? I mean that's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's. That's all it is. I mean, it's almost like I'm watching a movie in my head and I'm writing it down as fast as I can.
Speaker 2:One of the things that really jumped out at me with with Dracula when I was working on that. Bram, you know like, he started Dracula when he was 43. We found notes dating all the way back to when he this literally his entire life and a big section of his notes. He had documented vampires, all you know, through different cultures all around the world, and he found that they existed virtually in every culture around the world. And you know they existed long before we all started hopping into boats and sailing and talking to each other, which makes you wonder, you know, like what is that based on?
Speaker 2:You know there's got to be some type of element of truth, you know, as a kernel behind all of that, and that's, you know. To me that's the scary part and because now, all of a sudden, you're taking something. You know it's not a, you know an anirisist, you know vampires, it's not a sparkly vampire from Twilight. This is something that you know most likely existed in some form or another all around the world and people just, you know they talk about it, but it's just, it may not be here anymore, or maybe it is. You know, who knows?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean I I had um jonathan mayberry on the on the show and jonathan was really big into other cultures and exploring those to find their monsters right, and I can't remember what country he said it was from.
Speaker 1:He was like, hey, look he. He wrote about vampires and when he created this basically a monster book talk about the different cultures and vampires and I I think it had other monsters, but I think it might've just been vampires across different cultures. But in in this culture and this is a particularly cool one if you get a chance to look it up I'll see if I can find the title somewhere but basically the vampire, it would infect somebody and then its head and spine would detach from the body and float around at night and then would reattach itself to the body. That was the vampire in that culture and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm like what a, what a horrifying monster and like we, we, we've downplayed it to sparkly vampires and ultra super wealthy vampires and when other cultures, like you describe their grain of truth could be so much more terrifying than we could even imagine could be so much more terrifying than we could even imagine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think horror authors spend a lot of time going through other cultures looking for that one unique thing that we haven't heard of yet in the US in order to be able to write that book and bring it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean I wrote about this thing the other day and a lot of times. For me, inspiration is very simple. It's just like I need something cool, I need something terrifying, what's something I haven't seen before that I think other people would just eat up. And one of the things I looked up was the leshy. Have you heard of a leshy? No, I don't think I have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's um, I'm not sure where the folklore comes from, but it it essentially is a like a godlike trickster of the woods, and as somebody who's an absolute diehard fan of Adam Neville and anything that has to do with the woods, with weird rituals, with cultists, blair Witch, that sort of thing this was right up my alley. And so the Leshy is this trickster god that, depending on what's happening with you, it's either going to lead you astray in circles forever I mean, just let you just keep roaming and just messing with you constantly until you basically lost your mind Um or if you're, like, really grateful and you show that, uh, an appreciation for the forest, or you show an appreciation for the God, that an appreciation for the forest, or you show an appreciation for the god it will actually help you. It'll deliver things to you that you need, or help you and guide you and get out, and I'm like what's worse than a monster with a conscience like you know what, though?
Speaker 2:I mean I bet you'd probably, you know, if you pulled a bram and you start researching that you'd probably find that same monster in multiple cultures described just a little bit different. I mean, that's almost a gin, right, or almost a genie. Um, you know, it's it. And again, from my standpoint, I started looking at that like what is the actual basis, like what is the origin of these different things, because somebody didn't just, you know, sit down one day and make that up yeah, do you have any?
Speaker 1:do you have any kernels like yourself I'm use your term Do you have any kernels that you made up yourself, that you're like oh man, this is unique and nobody else has thought about this, or if they had, it's really buried deep. You know something that was just.
Speaker 2:I don't know just thought about this and I spent a lot of time researching other authors. You know, like stephen king in particular, trying to figure out how he got from. You know he literally wrote carrie sitting between a washer and dryer. You know, in a mobile home and you know to where he is today. Um, and if you go back and you break down his books, you know, like his very first one, carrie it was about telekinesis. The second one was salem's lot. It's about vampires. The third one was the shining. It's a haunted house story. You know, like he didn't reinvent the wheel, he went back and looked at the tropes that have been used over and over and over again and just told that same story, but did it differently or did it better. Um, so I think you know I don't know that there are any new monsters at this point. I think there's just unique ways to talk about the monsters that we all know about man, what a just wisdom.
Speaker 1:And bombs. For me, man, just new ways to talk about the monsters we all know. Wow, um, so what? What would be one of the more recent monsters that you were like hey, this needs a revitalization, right? Um, flatliners, great example, but like what's one of the newest monsters you're like we need?
Speaker 2:more. I've got a book coming out in may. It's called something I keep upstairs, um, and it's one I've been working on, for it took me about four years to write. Now I can write a book in about three months, you know if I sit down and start to finish, um, but this one, honestly, just kept scaring the bejesus out of me and I had to put it aside and kind of come back to it later. Um, and I think a lot of that is because it's actually based on reality.
Speaker 2:I live on a little island off the coast of Portsmouth in New England. I go for a run every day. It's about four, I think, it's 4.2 miles to do a lap around the island and at one point I crossed the beach. And if you're standing out on our beach and you look out over the water, about a quarter mile out there's another little island. It's only about an acre, it's real tiny. There's only one house on it. It's a white house with a red roof, so you can see it from the shore. You can't really tell what's going on out there because it's just far enough away. But like that fascinated me from the very first moment I saw it. You know, like the what if? Gene within me kind of went off, like what is this is going on? What if that's going on?
Speaker 2:I got to know the people, who, who owned it. It used to be a lifeguard, uh, or a coast guard life-saving station. Um, that fell into complete disrepair and a company took it over and they're turning it into a museum. So the guy who was in charge of that, he's like hey, if you want to go out there, I'll take you out there. So I hopped in his boat one day. We motored out to this, this island, and I'm standing in the middle of this house and like I I don't necessarily believe in ghosts or the paranormal, but but I felt something very weird like in that house, like to the point where I just did not want to be in that house anymore. Um, and then even going out on the beach, like the whole Island kind of gave off that, that vibe that I just wanted to get out of there.
Speaker 2:Um, and I started researching the Island itself and then I realized that long before the coast guard put that house up there, it had been used as a quarantine zone for the yellow fever. Um, it was a prison during the Spanish American war. Um, they used to take, like when they captured a boat during the Spanish American war, they would make them dock out there. Uh, they wouldn't let anybody leave the boat. Um, you know, and what typically would end up happening is they would run out of food or illness would spread or whatever, but they would wait for literally everybody on that boat to die and then they would just take the boat because they wanted the boat. Water is surrounded by sharks. That's how they got rid of the bodies.
Speaker 2:All kinds of dark, scary stuff basically happened on this picturesque little house if you're looking at it from the beach. And I ended up incorporating all of these things into the book. The tagline for the book is for a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die. So you know, kind of you know, you know your premise going in cause. I knew I wanted to write a haunted house story, but I didn't want to do the typical haunted house. I wanted to do something that had never been done before.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, and what's worse is, exactly as you said earlier, is that this, this, there? There is so much truth in this that's horrifying when you really think about it and you're like, oh my gosh, we did that. I mean, it makes sense that you would not feel good going to that place, right, like to just, I mean, I don't want to say I believe in ghosts, I don't know, but I haven't, like completely dissuaded myself from their existence. You know, like there's a lot of things that I believe that some people would be like, oh come on, you know, but in truth that happened there. I mean.
Speaker 2:I love mixing truth with with fiction. Um, so in in the story a 17 year old kid he, his, his grandmother actually owns the house in my book. She passes away and she leaves it to him. So the 17 year old kid basically inherits a house on its own private Island. Um, and you know, he does exactly what you would expect him to do. He turns it into a party house with him and his friends. So they go out there, you know, and they have, you know, they have fun for a little while.
Speaker 2:But then eventually somebody lands on the idea well, you know, what would it take to make this a haunted house? And they don't know the house's history. You know, to them it's just a normal house sitting on an island. So then you come back to the tagline for a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die. But you know the fact that it's a real house, you know, like a real place, like if you're here in Portsmouth, everybody knows like everybody's got a story about this particular house, you know, and all of that kind of fuels the fire. We're actually doing a fun contest with it too. We're actually going to draw a name on publication date for one person and allow them and three of their friends to spend the night in the house, which should be interesting.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, you know, and and that that type of stuff, that that interaction it reminds me of. Do you remember the old days when the first Blair Witch came out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, just yeah, I mean that, that, and that's why it got you right, Because you know it was the shaky cam footage like, up until that point, all we had ever seen was, you know, highly processed, highly edited. You know lighting is perfect, audio is perfect, this and that. All of a sudden you've got this. You know crappy camera footage, um, and you know that made it seem extremely real. Um, the funny thing is, in today's world I think we see more of that type of footage, um, than we do the process stuff. You know, if you watch the news like, you don't get shocked by it anymore. We're used to seeing people's camera footage from their phones, uh, pop it up on the screen. So I like it wouldn't work in today's world, but it, you know it was the timing of that was perfect.
Speaker 1:Well, it looks like you're about to bring it. Make it real for somebody you know, I mean we're.
Speaker 2:We're trying something different, like I love doing, you know, something promotional for for every book. Um, for me, like, the one thing that sells more books than anything is word of mouth.
Speaker 1:Um, and with something like this, I mean, a lot of people are talking about the contest yeah, I mean, and and what I like about all this too, especially as a writer, you have. We have to imagine that somebody who's picking up what we're reading or what we're writing is going to have to dissuade themselves of reality to enter into the story that we've created. And that's what makes horror horror and that's what makes thrillers thrillers is because you try to adapt those feelings that the characters are going through, because it's so relational. You know, like, um, I went to a, I went to a haunted house and one of the most, one of the most, um, I guess, realistic parts of it was the fact that I had everybody standing in a room together and then say this warning on the wall that everybody had to read. That's basically like they claimed it was their liability waiver.
Speaker 1:If you say it aloud, it's on recording. Here's the video. And what I think it did is it put everybody in the mood. It puts you into the mood and you're like, hey, I'm going to break this barrier between me and the supernatural down just a little bit enough to say you know what? I'm all, I'm okay, I'll say the words that I'm okay with what comes next, you know, and, um, and I think that's what makes I think that's what makes horror stories so interesting for us is because we we all feel fear I. It makes us, it's part of what makes us human. But we don't want to feel fear all the time. But we'll jump into it for a horror story and be okay with it in the short term.
Speaker 2:Well, the real difference there is you were standing in a haunted house. You were standing in a business, right, you were, you know. So you know, like, on some level it's like going on a roller coaster. A roller coaster may be scary, but you know you're going to walk away from that roller coaster, you know you step into that haunted house, you know, in the end I just paid admission to come in here. I'm going to come out of it at some point. I'm going to laugh about it with my friends, even if there's a couple standing here.
Speaker 2:You basically go out. You can only get there by boat, you know. So you have to hop in a boat. You have to go out to this island and literally stand in a house that's haunted. Like who? I don't know that I would do it. I don't know that I would spend the night out there, you know, for 24 hours and someplace like that.
Speaker 2:We've got a bunch of paranormal investigators that are coming out that that want just, you know, check out the island. They want to do their thing. Um, so we're gonna let that happen too. But like it's the idea, I think, of you know, staying there overnight, like that that's frightening because, like you don't know what you're going to encounter, but what you, what you do know is like, whatever you do run into it's, it's not manufactured. You know, like this, whatever happens out there is real um right, I think that's you know with the book. I think that it works in a lot of ways because you finish reading this book and very much like what you're cool, you know the parts that you think are fiction. You get to the author's note and you realize wait a minute, that happened, that happened, that really happened. You know you can jump on Google, you can go down that rabbit hole and research some of these things, but you know it's all based on fact and even in those moments it's real enough to the person there, right?
Speaker 1:I mean, if they believe it. That level of reality is enough sometimes to spook people. You know, yeah, the. Okay, I want to bring this incident up. I want to know your thoughts on it. I don't know if you're familiar with it and mainly and mainly because it's well, we'll talk about a different one, because it was because it was mentioned earlier and we kind of talked about it. Um, if you're going to a haunted house, you have a. You're going in with a level of expectation you're like, okay, I might encounter something like. That's the point.
Speaker 1:A lot of, a lot of the times, these investigators, they'll go in and they're like I'm gonna find nothing because their entire job is to debunk whatever. If that's the angle they're choosing. You know, kind of for television. You know, if you, if you're the, if you ever seen that movie um? God, I don't think it was, I don't think it was. Like the zach baggins make fun of movie um, but basically, they, they, they go in to prove that a haunted house is not real. At the same time, prove it's real, I mean. So it's a different angle. They go in to find a haunted house and they don't. They don't think it's haunted, but it really is, etc.
Speaker 1:So, um, the idea that you're like you're going into a situation knowing that something could go wrong or nothing will go wrong at the same time, it reminds me of like spelunking, right, spelunking, or cave diving. There is only two outcomes with that you make it or you don't. And it's kind of the same way with a haunted house right, it's either going to be haunted or it's not. And I don't understand spelunking, because the risk in spelunking is you get down there and you can't get out, or you you're starting to head in and you still get trapped. And now you're, you're trapped, getting in versus trapped getting out. I mean, either way you're trapped, and the other option is just life itself. And so I wonder I'm like what person, what sane person, would put themselves in that scenario willingly, just like we do with a haunted house? It's kind of the same thing there's going to be something or there's not right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, splunking is one of those things I would never do. And there was a movie God, I forget who was in it, but it was a guy. He gets trapped when he kind of gets stuck. I think he's got to cut his own arm off in order to get out.
Speaker 2:It was like 16 hours or something like that yeah, yeah, something, something like you know true story, um, and like that kind of stuff. Like when I see that that's enough for me, like I, I will back off and say no, thank you to that. Um, you know it's the same thing with, like with you know this, this little island that I've been talking about, like you know, if you stand on our beach and you look at it, it's very picturesque. I mean, you could take a photo of it and it's and it's gorgeous. You know you're looking out over the water. You see this little island off in the distance. What you can't see, though, is, like there are actually great whites like in that water. Um, you know it's, it's, there's an inland right there, so, like it's, it's warmer, and because of that, you know like all the fish come in there, particularly this type of time of year, um, and the sharks follow um, but you don't see any of that.
Speaker 2:You know, like I love the fact that you know you can look at something. It's beautiful, but like all this scary, nasty stuff is happening. You know, just right outside of your vision. You know, haunted houses are like that too, like I think. You know we don't understand what any of this stuff is right. Like we don't know what. You know where we go. You know we talked about what happens when you die. Like you know, these are conversations, people, but it happens since the beginning of time. Nobody has a clue. We don't have that answer. What I could tell or can tell you is that people are, you know, we're made of energy. You know, to a large extent, you know, and, like, that goes somewhere. You know, like I don't think anything ever actually goes away and I, you know, you can talk to anybody, even if they don't believe in this sort of thing.
Speaker 2:I can guarantee at some point they have stood someplace where they have kind of felt that weird moment. You know where, like, either they feel like somebody is watching them, somebody is in the room with them, something has happened here. I don't want to be in this room, I want to get out. You know these are all things that happen on an instinctual level. You know, in what they call our lizard brain, that we as humans have told ourselves we've evolved to not accept anymore. You know, if you stand in a room with a cat, you know, like that cat, if something, anything weird happens, it will dart out of the room and be gone in a split second. It's not going to stand there and figure out what it was that just scared it, you know.
Speaker 2:A person, on the other hand, is stupid enough to stand there and try to figure it all out before running out of that room. And it's mainly because we have let go of those, those instinctual reactions, and I think we would be better served to bring some of them back. But the fact that you do feel that kind of thing, I think when you're standing in some place like that, you know that's telling you something there. There's something going on there that we're not quite aware of. What do you think it is? I don't know.
Speaker 1:At that particular house. What do you think?
Speaker 2:it is? I mean, is it reflected in the book? I think a lot of bad things have happened there. If you go to a house where a murder took place, they can pull up the carpet, they can repaint the walls, they can make it look pretty again, but that blood is still in there. It's in the drywall. You know like there's always something still there. You know, to me this house is the same thing. You know, like this house. You know like a lot of stuff has happened on this particular island. A lot of stuff has happened in the house itself. No matter what you do, you can't make that go away. That's you.
Speaker 1:You know it lives a lot longer than the rest of us do so some sort of just bad juju, right, bad energy, just yeah, yeah it's just yeah, yeah, there's.
Speaker 2:There's something to that, um, and I don't know if you know it's it's almost like the the more bad energy you have, it almost like it feeds you know, like it the energy craves more bad energy, or like it causes more bad things to happen in that same spot and and do you think that's something that's, do you think it can be countered?
Speaker 1:You know, like enough good people or enough good things happen like that it can. I don't know break the curse.
Speaker 2:You know, in theory, like if you look at it from a scientific standpoint, my answer would be yes, because everything is you know. It's almost like a magnetic field. You know like you can counter it with the you know equal amount of measure coming back at it in the opposite direction. Um, that being said, I don't know, you know. Until we actually figure out what it is, I don't know what we can do other than run like the cat, right?
Speaker 1:because that's what we should be doing, or we should go check it out, or maybe we should go split up and cover more ground that way oh man, like a bad episode of scooby-doo yeah, well, and there's a movie a while back.
Speaker 1:It was called nope and I I don't. I don't, I don't remember seeing it, but I think I talked about it recently because I just like, I was like please tell me that this is one entire horror movie where the the guys, instead of doing the things, the atypical things that people do, or the typical things they would do, they they'd be like, hey, we should go take a look at this thing, this noise in the basement. The guy's just like nope, just leaves. Or like, hey, we should split up and we should go cover more ground. Nope, and it's just the people doing the complete opposite of what should be done in a horror movie. If you ever stand back and you ever had these moments in your life you're like, if I go down this path right now and this is just me talking to JD you ever had those moments in your life. You're like, if I do this, I am probably in the premise of a horror movie.
Speaker 2:I think we get detached.
Speaker 2:I remember when 9-11 happened, there were people in New York there was video of people standing in the street filming the buildings as they were following literally around them. I think we're so used to watching that kind of thing. When it actually happens to you, it almost feels as if it's happening on a television screen. You're safe because you're just watching it and people don't realize that it can actually kill you. But we put ourselves in those kinds of situations too.
Speaker 2:I mean, my wife and I, we went to Costa Rica a few years back. Um, we wanted to go on a zip lining thing, um, so you know, we signed up for it through the hotel. Um, you know, we didn't speak Spanish and hardly anybody there spoke English. Uh, but we set it up and, like, the next morning somebody shows up in a white van with like six guys. They load us into this white van, they take us down this road in Costa Rica for like a half hour, then we turn off the paved road to a dirt road and drive for another two hours into the jungle and then we eventually get to a zip line.
Speaker 2:But you know, my wife and I are looking at each other going. This might've been a bad decision because, like, nobody knows where we are. You know, we're literally in a foreign country. Nobody knows what we're doing this morning. If something happens, you know we don't know what the outcome is going to be, and then we get to the zip lining thing and it's exactly what it's supposed to be was. You know zip lines, but you know you start thinking like if somebody actually died out here. You know somebody, you know that zip line broke like they're probably not going to tell anybody. You know like the whole thing seemed like a horror movie and and you know like there's there's a lot of instances, I think, in our life. You know, especially when you look back on certain decisions that you make, you know it's right out of the first 15 minutes of a good scary movie.
Speaker 1:And besides the haunted house that you wrote this, what sounds like it's going to be an amazing book about, especially with like all the publicity and stuff, and people be able to go see this crazy place and be like, hey, this, this existed, you had no idea. You know. That for me is I'm gonna grab it from you because I think that's gonna that's, that's that for me, that girl, that that kernel of truth is what really sells a book for me. If you're like, hey, look, you know, just like at the beginning of a movie like based on real life events, I'm like, okay, like let me, let me have a little bit more vested interest in that versus something that just kind of came out of nowhere. But have you had any moments besides standing in this haunted house and be like I need to leave this place? Have you had any of those? It's like giving you that feeling.
Speaker 2:I've had some weird ones, you know. So, stephen King, when he wrote the Shining, it's based on a hotel called the Stanley, which is out in Estes Park, colorado, and this is, you know, the funny thing is, from a business standpoint, this hotel had never made any money until the shiny came out. And now all of a sudden it's a very profitable hotel out there in the middle of nowhere, but, you know, it's kept a lot of its original charm and, like when King stayed there it was, it was literally falling apart, like they were getting ready to shutter the place and you know, certain parts of the hotel are still like that, like they purposely left it that way. But my, my wife and I went out there. It was actually for a writer's retreat with a couple of other horror authors. Josh Mallerman was out there, dallas Mayer, which is Jack Ketchum he was out there At one point.
Speaker 2:We were down in the basement at midnight reading horror stories to each other, which was a lot of fun. But the following morning my wife and I were in bed. We're just talking, it's morning, we're waiting and trying to figure out what we're going to do with the day and the bed just started to shake and like we didn't know why. It was like just vibrating. It almost felt like those magic finger things they used to put on hotel beds, but like there wasn't any of that.
Speaker 2:The bed was just literally vibrating, um, and neither of us got scared, we just started. Like you know, we we talked to the hotel manager when we went downstairs. He's like oh yeah, the bed in that room does that? Sometimes no explanation for it Um, other other than it just sort of happens.
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's your key. We'll tell you about the rest later. Yeah, yeah, exactly Awesome. Well, I mean that's. I mean I'm glad you took that as you did, because I would not. I I'm the type of I'm like you know I might write some spooky stuff, but if my bed starts shaking in the Stanley hotel, knowing the history I'm running, I mean period, like it could be, you know, it could be part of the and, hey, you know, might be something there, you know, just a mess of guests, whatever, I don't care, I'm running like that's not I, I would love nothing more than to like look into a corner and actually see a ghost.
Speaker 1:You know, like just get confirmation that it, you know, that's just, you know that it's there right or it well, and you could either have confirmations there or just have an existential crisis and you're like, okay well maybe it's only there for me, and that's even worse, I think, than it just then, you know. Hey, do you see that? No, I don't you know like.
Speaker 2:That's the flip side of it, because unless you document that in about four different ways, nobody's ever going to believe you right?
Speaker 1:well, awesome, man. Well jd like we are right there. Like it 45 minutes already passed, man, like I didn't realize how fast it was going. But, man, the story about this, this tell me again the name of the novel and tell me again the name of the island, because I gotta look them both up, um sure the book the book is called something I keep upstairs comes out in may 13th of this year, so a couple months from now the island is called wood island.
Speaker 2:So if you just go on wood wood island, new hampshire, wood island, kittery, um, I think probably just if you type go on Wood Island, new Hampshire, wood Island, kittery, I think probably just if you type in Wood Island, it'll come up and you'll get some of that history. If you're here in Portsmouth, I think they've got tours that actually go out there.
Speaker 1:Very cool, Awesome man. So part of this I know we already talked about it, but part of the end of the show is to thank the authors that. Come on, Give me the shameless plug when do you want people to go and what do you think they should start with? Should they start with your newest release? Should they start with something you've co-written with somebody? If you, if you want somebody to know JD, where do they go and what do they grab?
Speaker 2:You know, for me as a, as a writer, my favorite book is always the latest book. Um, cause, just so yeah, I, right now I would say pre-order something I keep upstairs. Um, if you want to grab something that's already on the shelves, I'd probably start with the fourth monkey. Um, that's the one that James Patterson read and it. You know, he, he, he liked it enough to call me and asked me to write a book together, so I would probably start there.
Speaker 1:Very cool, and where do you want people to go to get it To?
Speaker 2:get your to find me is JD Barkercom. The books can be found pretty much any bookstore. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, jd, it's been an awesome pleasure. Man, thank you. Thank you for taking your time, thank you for sharing all this stuff. I know some of this, like we as writers, we we put it on the page so we don't have to talk about this kind of stuff, but I think it really makes us things fun and makes us relatable. So, thank you for sharing. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Relatable. So thank you for sharing. Oh, thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Yeah, so, ladies and gentlemen, mr jd barker, um, this is not a man you guys want to miss, please. If you have not picked up any of his books, um, I'm personally recommending them and I don't do that very often, so please go check out one of jd's books. Um, this has been another episode of the the nightmare engine podcast. Um, thank, thank you all for joining me. I don't know what episode this is, because I might move things around. It might be eight, might be nine for this season, but until next week, guys, thank you.
