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 thatโs 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 thatโs 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 sheโs sleepy. But then thereโs a flash of light and the car is airborne. Next thing she knows, sheโs 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 Aliceโs missing family.
Jess is still haunted by the things that happened in These Still Black Waters, but in What Lies in Darkness, sheโs confronted with Alice, a girl whoโs lost as much as she has. Set a year after the crash that saw Aliceโs family disappear, Jess investigates when Alice finds her sisterโs bloodied backpack in an abandoned house. She sees that Alice is barely surviving, haunted by her own ghosts. What Jess doesnโt know is, those ghosts might just be connected to her.
Alice, it turns out, is whatโs called a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Sheโs 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 peopleโs energy like a washcloth, good and bad. And perhaps itโs this sensitivity, or perhaps itโs the trauma sheโs been through, but sheโs 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 didnโt, 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 wasnโt 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 havenโt 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 ofย These Still Black Waters,ย Do No Harm,ย Behind Every Lieย andย The Night Olivia Fellย (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books), which has been optioned for television by a major Hollywood studio.ย She lives in London, England with her husband, two sons, and their dog, Tango.
