Mystery and Horror are Sisters: Guest Post by Christopher Huang

Perhaps it is summer as you are reading this, but it is the dead of winter as I write. The world outside is cold and grey, and darkness rules the greater part of the day. It is, in short, the perfect time for ghost stories: tales of creeping fear and dread, of “ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night.”

I consider myself a mystery writer, but the mystery genre -- at least, as it is understood today -- was born in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, celebrated for his tales of macabre horror. Mystery and horror are sisters, and it should not be a great leap to get from one to the other. So when it was suggested that I try my hand at a horror story, I said yes.

But horror is frequently focused on the supernatural, and while the subgenre of supernatural mystery enjoys great popularity, my preferred subgenre is the fairplay whodunnit. That’s the one where the fun is in following the clues alongside the detective and trying to solve the mystery with them: the genre ideal of the Golden Age, for which Ronald Knox wrote the rule, “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.”

It’s not that Knox had a personal beef with the supernatural, exactly, though he was a priest and probably knew the ins and outs of exorcism. It was that a big part of playing fair in the murder mystery game -- or any game at all, really -- is the level playing field: the reader must understand the rules of the story’s world, and that’s usually accomplished by setting the story in the reader’s own world. I mean, it would be a bit of a cheat to reveal in the denouement that the muddy footprints around the murder scene actually meant that the house was infested with gremlins, and not that the gardener did it.

Authors of supernatural mysteries know how to introduce the rules of their supernatural elements to the reader, but I’m loath to lay down the law about the unknown. I mean, it’s called “the unknown” for a reason. And this, of course, put a bit of a damper on any plans I might have had for a story in which a ghost commits murder by summoning an eldritch abomination from the far reaches of the cosmos into a locked room.

But look here: horror isn’t necessarily supernatural, is it? Stephen King’s Misery contained no real supernatural elements, and even Poe, that grand-daddy of fear and guilt, wrote several stories hinging on the psychological rather than the supernatural. Could I do the same? What in the real world would I consider a source of that creeping dread that so deliciously chills the spine on a dark winter’s night?

Well, that would be a spoiler, but I wrote it and rewrote it and edited it and submitted it to my publisher. And I must confess ... Unnatural Ends is solidly mystery, not horror. A couple of advance reviews have remarked on its gothic flavour, but that is perhaps the extent to which the horror elements have survived the process. The story is its own unnatural end, a thing that has deviated from the course to which it was directed ... which is not a bad thing, honestly. Many writers talk about their work taking on a life of its own, and if art is a reflection of the artist’s psyche, perhaps it’s better, to some extent, to let the story carry itself where it wants to go than to force it down (ahem) unnatural channels to unnatural ends.
 
Mystery and horror are sisters, and it can be easy to slip from one into the other. But where horror revels in the unknown, mystery dispels it. They are two very different beasts, and for this author at least and for now, the slip seems to tend in just one direction.

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Christopher Huang is a Singaporean-born Canadian with a background in architecture. His first novel, A Gentleman’s Murder, was released to critical acclaim in 2018. His second novel, Unnatural Ends, publishes in June 2023.

 

How I Met My Publisher: Guest Post by Christopher Huang

Christopher Huang:
How I Met My Publisher 

I think I first became aware of Inkshares in late 2014 or early 2015, when a writer of my acquaintance, one J.F. Dubeau, began researching possibilities and alternatives in publishing. Inkshares had an exciting new concept, he said, involving the sale of pre-orders to justify the publication of a book. No more slush piles, no more agents; these were people who really loved books, and he had high hopes for their platform. I hadn’t a very clear idea of how I hoped to deal with my writing yet, at the time, so I simply nodded and smiled.

To be honest, I didn’t really know anything about publishing, period. In my mind’s eye, one simply submitted a manuscript to a publisher and waited for them to accept or reject. I knew nothing about querying agents or even about who the publishers were. I knew only that I had no stomach for marketing a book myself, as would be the case if I self-published, and that therefore I needed a traditional publisher to handle that aspect for me.

I’d been dreaming of writing and publishing for a while. Working in an architecture office, I often felt as though every ounce of my creative energy was being spent on my day job, leaving me with nothing left over to fuel the novel I wanted to write. I counted my money and calculated my yearly expenditure and said to myself, “Self, you live cheaply enough that you could probably retire at fifty; then you could get into this writing lark full-time and it wouldn’t matter too much whether you succeeded or failed. Barring some major emergency, you’d be safe.”

I was laid off in late 2015. I wasn’t quite forty yet.

Well, then. It appeared that my retirement plans were going to get an early start, and that brings me back to J.F. Dubeau and Inkshares.

J.F. was, by now, nearing the end of his pre-order campaign for The Life Engineered. The system seemed simple enough: you set up a project page for your book on Inkshares’s website, including any excerpts or details as might make the book more attractive to buyers, and then you began selling pre-orders for the book. This was the campaign, and you were free to set its time limit; but you needed to accrue 750 pre-orders within that time before Inkshares would publish your work. These 750 pre-orders represented 750 votes to see your book in print, with money to back them up — after all, anyone could hit a “like” button, but when money’s on the line, people get unaccountably skittish. Further safeguards to the process involved limiting each person to pre-ordering a maximum of ten copies of any one book, and barring authors from pre-ordering their own book. It wasn’t that they wanted the money, in the end: rather, it was that they wanted proof of viability. Everyone got their money back if you failed, but if you succeeded ... what followed was everything you could expect from a traditional publisher. Including sales and marketing.

I pre-ordered a copy of The Life Engineered, of course, but I admit to being initially suspicious. 750 pre-orders ... that could be gamed, I thought. All it wanted was some dishonest person with seventy-five friends willing to put down a hundred dollars each for ten e-books, and you could publish any sort of rubbish. (I’d learn later that getting even ten friends on board for a single book each was enough of a challenge, never mind seventy-five friends for ten books each.) It was the fine print that reassured me: Inkshares reserved the right to reject a book if they deemed it to have made the campaign on bad faith. They were a business, after all, and they couldn’t afford to publish rubbish if they hoped to publish anything else.

The Life Engineered debuted in March 2016. That same month, I started the pre-order campaign for A Gentleman’s Murder, giving it nine months to make the required 750 pre-orders rather than the customary three months because I am a rank pessimist who doesn’t give a fig for his abilities as a salesman. Remember, for me, a big point of getting a traditional (or traditional-ish, as the case may be) publisher was to have someone else handle the marketing aspect.

2016 was definitely the year of “what on earth did I just sign up for” as I e-mailed and pitched and advertised and then did it all again.

As it so happened, winning a contest (Inkshares holds contests from time to time, to encourage new projects) meant I “only” needed more pre-orders than most of the other participating projects, rather than the full 750. But the simple outcome was that I made it. There is a certain thrill in having your first manuscript accepted for publication, however it happens, and if I had any champagne on hand, I’d pop the cork right then and there. (Then again, if I were the sort to keep champagne on hand, I probably wouldn’t also think I could retire at fifty.)

A Gentleman’s Murder was finally published back in July 2018 to the sort of media attention I could never have managed on my own. Score one for letting the professionals do the marketing. And now, here I am, a little over two months later ... running a pre-order campaign for my second book, a somewhat darker suspense novel I’m calling (for now) Cat’s Paw. Because Inkshares is running a contest for new mystery novels, and I swear I have no stomach for marketing. 

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Christopher Huang is a Singaporean-born Canadian with a background in architecture and interactive fiction. His first novel, A Gentleman’s Murder, was released to critical acclaim in July and his second novel, Cat’s Paw, is now open for pre-orders at https://www.inkshares.com/books/cat-s-paw