Laurel Hightower grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, lived for a time in California and Tennessee, before returning to the Bluegrass State. Her bio on her site states she loves “true-life ghost stories, horror movies, and good bourbon.”
“I’ve always been a Halloween kid, so when I couldn’t find the stories I wanted to read anymore, I decided to start writing them,” Hightower notes via our email exchange. “It was pure joy and still is!”
Hightower is the author of the Bram Stoker-nominated Below, as well as Whispers in the Dark, and the feminist-themed short story collection Every Woman Knows This. She has also co-edited three anthologies: We Are Wolves, The Dead Inside, and Shattered & Splintered.
Hightower is a paralegal by day, when she’s not writing or revising her books during the night or weekends. She took early inspiration from a few different sources.
“I loved Shirley Jackson from an early age, read the heck out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Goosebumps, plus I just grabbed any book with a ghost on its spine in my local library,” Hightower remembers.
“I didn’t so much have mentors as I did folks whose work and careers I admired, whether we ended up interacting or not—Stephen Graham Jones, Jonathan Janz, Tananarive Due, and Kelly Barnhill are a few that come to mind.”
The horror author has several literary irons in the fire as we discuss her past.
“I have a novella called The Fawn coming out as part of a Pandi Press four-author collection entitled Four Past Meatnight that comes out this month. I’m also working on a novelization in a collaboration with my friend Brian Keene, and the novella I was revising this weekend is going to market soon with my agent!”
Our discussion weaves through her novels so far, the connections between paralegal and writing work and the theme of loss and deep-seated familial trauma running through many of her scary stories.
Whispers in the Dark
Whispers in the Dark packs a punch for a debut novel. It’s a paranormal thriller that features terrifying supernatural entities called “Whispers” that prey on the grief and memories of protagonist Rose McFarland, a trained Memphis S.W.A.T. sniper with a secret.
Hightower had the Whispers idea early on while writing the novel and let the process of writing the book form emotional layers over the initial plan. “I think it was a matter of both things feeding one another,” Hightower says.
“I had an idea of the Whispers—what they looked like, how they behaved, but I wasn’t as sure on the drilled-down motivation, the reasons why they clung to Rose, and the effect they had on her life.”
Whispers in the Dark was an “epic undertaking” and “learning experience” for Hightower in hindsight. She was still working out how she wanted to write stories and did a lot of “call-and-answer-type planning.” What helped ground the story was her knack for research from her paralegal work.
“I did a lot of reading of first-person accounts and memoirs of folks who did that [S.W.A.T.] job for years, as well as speaking with a friend of mine who’d been on a SWAT-type team, though he was a K-9 officer and not a sniper,” Hightower says.
“He was generous with his time and kind in answering questions as they came up.” The nightmares that Rose faces in this story feel quite visceral as a result of all that careful planning.
Crossroads
The grief experienced in Crossroads is shared and generational. Hightower wanted the mother-son relationship to feel distinct and part of her process with any new work is to spend time getting into her characters’ heads and lives.
“I draft character sheets to keep details straight and assign a back story and life circumstances, then I spend time examining certain situations and determining how that character would respond given their unique background,” she says.
For the main character, Chris, her entire identity was centered on her son and his tragic car crash, by joyous choice.
“That informed all of her actions, her choices, even if they seem crazy or dangerous to an outside observer,” Hightower argues. “So her grief, too, was informed by those circumstances—the way it consumed her until she couldn’t face it head on.”
One day, a drop of blood falls from Chris’ hand onto her son Trey’s roadside memorial, and later that night, Chris thinks she sees his ghost outside her window. Only, that ghost may not be her son, but something far more sinister.
The audiobook for Crossroads is excellent and highly recommended. That book was the recipient of an Independent Audiobook Award in 2020 in the category of Best Horror, as well as This is Horror Best Novella Award the same year.
Below
Below is an absolute subterranean nightmare. Addy is driving to meet up with some friends at a horror convention when a snowstorm hits the night she's driving through West Virginia
She's recently divorced and trying to rebuild trust in humanity. She has to place that shaky trust in a charismatic truck driver, and when a red-eyed monster shows up on page 49, Addy has to either save herself or help a stranger deep in a cave.
Hightower was inspired by a few West Virginia experiences.
“It was a bit of an amalgamation, but primarily it was being in Mammoth Cave as a kid when the guide turned the light out so we could see how dark it was,” she remembers. “It was terrifying, and I realized immediately that if I were ever in a cave with no lights, I would die, simple as that.
For the book’s setting before the cave exploration, Hightower explains that it was plucked from her past.
“I made an ill-judged attempt to face my fears of driving long distances alone by driving from Kentucky to Virginia for a convention. I will never do that again, and I spent the whole time wondering what would happen if I went off the road. So I decided to write about it.”
Hightower shows a ton of restraint with her creature feature story, and she read John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies in preparation for writing Below.
“What struck me was that Mothman was so peripheral to what actually happened,” Hightower says. “I wanted to explore the meat of the matter, the creatures he was sort of hovering around, and let that plot develop sort of under his eye.”
Silent Key
Former Detective Cam Ambrose is a single mother as she navigates a murder mystery and keeps her child safe. The plot summary on Goodreads accurately describes Silent Key as a mix of Nick Cutter’s The Deep, Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and Stephen King’s Firestarter.
Cam slowly learns more and more about her late husband over the course of the book, and her best friend Dimi and an isolated neighbor, Eric Morgan, attempt to solve a decades-old whodunit that involves her husband’s mistress and a string of unsettling hauntings.
“This one was mostly about the characters, the notion of a found family between Cam and her brother Dimi, and the way they pull Eric Morgan into their fold,” Hightower says.
“I loved exploring the romance aspect between Cam and Morgan, as I’m a sucker for a love story, and had been wanting to incorporate the traumatic instances of downed submarines during the Cold War and what it meant for those sailors, as well as their families left behind. It was a fun one to write, and I didn’t want to let go of those characters. They remain my favorites.”
Every Woman Knows This: A Horror Collection
Every Woman Knows This is filled with twenty deadly stories about the everyday and supernatural evils women face.
The emotional and physical impacts of motherhood, unwelcomed advances from menacing men, a goddess pushed to the brink, and an unsettling exploration of modern motherhood are all covered in the collection.
The title Every Woman Knows This comes from the first line of the titular story, which hit Hightower in the grocery store one night.
“‘There’s a certain kind of smile it’s not safe to return—every woman knows this.’ It’s exhausting, the kind of knowledge women must hold at all times to keep ourselves safe, and a lot of my short fiction is written through that lens of feminism.”
Hightower selected her favorite new and old stories in a pretty visceral way. She wanted to make sure they resonated with her, even years later. “There were several I cut from consideration because, in my opinion, they did not. If my writing can’t impact me, how can I expect it to impact my readers?”
Hightower has previously spoken out during the Women in Horror panel at Authorcon this year. That group of panelists wanted to go further than previous discussions to a future-facing coalition that involves multiple allies and builds up ways to improve the situation for women horror writers.
“We discussed practical pitfalls we’d faced in publishing and reader spaces, the clear gaps in pay and outreach, and workshopped ideas on how to get past those, how we could support each other, and how and where to include non-women in the conversation,” Hightower remembers.
“It was invigorating and supportive, and there’s a whole two-day seminar being added to the programming for next year. I’m excited to see action and practical solutions moving forward.”
The Day of the Door
The Day of the Door is an apocalyptic story about four children living in constant fear that their mother is going to lose it on them, and she finally does (possibly) kill her oldest child. It’s a gripping paranormal thriller that wrestles with grief, traumatic deaths in a family, and just fun paranormal investigations.
The Lasco siblings and their interactions are believable, and Hightower doesn’t waste any time getting to the spooky house theatrics. Read this if you enjoy The Haunting of Hill House, A Headful of Ghosts, and The Amityville Horror.
Hightower had a specific approach she wanted to depict the trauma of childhood abuse. “So many of the scars of childhood carry into adulthood because people don’t know how to face and deal with them,” Hightower says.
“Childhood trauma taints every aspect of who we become, and the fact that Stella never took responsibility warped the children further.
The Virginia author sees The Day of the Door as another spot where she wanted to dive into her characters’ heads so I could show them reacting as authentically as possible, and a healthy way to direct the spotlight to the siblings, and away from a monstrous matriarch.
The Long Low Whistle (Killer VHS Series Book 7)
The Long Low Whistle is part of the Killer VHS Series. The story follows Patricia, still haunted by the titular whistle and her father’s unsolved death two decades later. Trish meets up with an amateur cryptid hunting group in her small Southern town to search a sealed, abandoned mine.
The horror genre often relies on claustrophobic vibes and shocking reveals, like watching an old VHS horror movie. In this specific book, which is a shorter, more concentrated novella, Hightower wanted to keep the pace moving along.
“I knew what the beats were, where I wanted everyone to end up, and the story fell in line from there,” she notes.
“I tried to picture how things would progress underground, and with disaster situations, you’re rarely granted any respite beyond that which is forced by even more traumatic circumstances. So I definitely put my characters through the ringer!”
The Long Low Whistle is a strong recommendation for cryptid fans who enjoyed The Descent, Whalefall, Discount Armageddon, and Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology.
