What happens when a teenage girl regains consciousness after a horrible car accident, only to discover her entire family has disappeared?
This question, this fear, is loosely one that’s haunted my nightmares most of my life: waking up or coming home and realizing that my entire family is gone.
A few years ago, I woke after having this nightmare again, filled with the shivery, foggy feeling you get after a dream that’s too real. But instead of turning away from it, like I usually did, I leaned in and started writing about it.
What I ended up writing is the opening scene of What Lies in Darkness. Alice is heading home with her family after a Christmas Eve party. The snow is falling and she’s sleepy. But then there’s a flash of light and the car is airborne. Next thing she knows, she’s waking up. The car is on its side. Her arm is broken. And her entire family has disappeared.
But What Lies in Darkness was the second in the series, so I also needed to write about Detective Jess Lambert, who first appeared in These Still Black Waters. What Lies in Darkness can be read as a standalone, but we also have Jess, a detective with her own traumatic background, investigating the case of Alice’s missing family.
Jess is still haunted by the things that happened in These Still Black Waters, but in What Lies in Darkness, she’s confronted with Alice, a girl who’s lost as much as she has. Set a year after the crash that saw Alice’s family disappear, Jess investigates when Alice finds her sister’s bloodied backpack in an abandoned house. She sees that Alice is barely surviving, haunted by her own ghosts. What Jess doesn’t know is, those ghosts might just be connected to her.
Alice, it turns out, is what’s called a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). She’s sensitive to physical, emotional and social situations, as well as textures and sounds and bright lights. The sensation of a patterned shirt or socks that are too loose drive her crazy, as do highly pitched sounds or strong smells. She absorbs people’s energy like a washcloth, good and bad. And perhaps it’s this sensitivity, or perhaps it’s the trauma she’s been through, but she’s started seeing the ghost of her dead father.
While researching HSPs, I learned that in medieval times, people who could see, feel, hear and know things that others didn’t, were often considered witches. They were sensitive to the unseen world around them, the world of spirits and energy. Which was perfect for writing a character where my reader wasn’t sure if she was actually seeing dead people or simply sensitive to the energy around her.
Like all of my books What Lies in Darkness came about because of things that are very personal to me. My fear of my family disappearing set me on the path to write this book. But interestingly, I haven’t had that nightmare since writing What Lies in Darkness. I like to think writing it exorcised that fear. I guess only time will tell.
Christina McDonald is the USA Today and Amazon charts bestselling author of These Still Black Waters, Do No Harm, Behind Every Lie and The Night Olivia Fell (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books), which has been optioned for television by a major Hollywood studio. She lives in London, England with her husband, two sons, and their dog, Tango.
