Horror Favourites – Cassondra Windwalker

Obsession Never Dies in Cassondra Windwalker’s new book, HOLD MY PLACE, coming out January 25, 2022 from Black Spot Books. To celebrate this we asked Cassondra to tell us all about the movie that she fears the most.

When librarian Sigrun falls head-over-heels for the sophisticated and very married Edgar Leyward, she never expects to find herself in his bed—or his heart. Nevertheless, when his enigmatic wife Octavia dies from a sudden illness, Sigrun finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance worthy of the most lurid novels on her bookshelves. Sigrun soon discovers Octavia wasn’t Edgar’s first lost love, or even his second. Three women Edgar has loved met early deaths. As she delves into her beloved’s past through a trove of discovered letters, the edges of Sigrun identity begin to disappear, fading into the women of the past.

Sigrun tells herself it’s impossible for any dark magic to be at play—that the dead can’t possibly inhabit the bodies of the living—but something shadowy stalks the halls of the Leyward house and the lines between the love of the present and the obsessions of the past become increasingly blurred—and bloody.

Cassondra Windwalker is the author of the novels Idle Hands, Preacher Sam, and Bury the Lead, in addition the full-length poetry collections The Almost-Children and tide tables with god. Her short-form work regularly appears in literary jouornals and wins the odd award, including the Helen Kay Chapbook Award for her poetry chapbook, The Bench. She has lived in the South, the Midwest, and the West, and presently writes full-time from the Frozen North. She keeps company mostly with ghosts, literary characters, unwary wild animals, and her tolerant husband.

Below Cassondra tells us all about her favourite horror film:

“My mother, a sweet little freckle-faced woman with a soft spot for stray cats and peanut butter cups, was the arbiter of horror in my life. She hid under my bed to grab my ankles and on one storied occasion, donned pantyhose over her head and waited outside my bedroom window for me to discover her in the night. So of course she loved horror movies. Grandmotherhood has not softened this inclination of hers. She once recommended my kids watch the movie Signs when they were little because she considered the movie a comedy.

So I’m a little gun-shy in the horror department. My imagination is far too fertile to allow me to simply watch a movie and move on with my life. My rule when living at home was always that I would only watch a horror movie with my mom if I got to sleep in her bed. Six or sixteen, it didn’t matter. My poor dad would sleepily rustle off to find refuge in my twin bed when I stole his place. And that rule hasn’t changed. Even now, my husband and I schedule any horror screenings around nights he doesn’t work.

I have no tolerance for cruelty as entertainment, and gore bores me silly. But give me a psychological nightmare, particularly one with supernatural elements like ghosts and demons, and I’m enthralled in all the worst possible ways. I’ll take a ghost I can’t quite see over a zombie any day.

My favorite horror movie, then (assuming we’re going to disqualify Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, which is obviously the premier example of all time,) is The Shining. I can’t deny I suffer from that narcissistic trait common to writers in that we do love to see other crafts feature us in their stories. But it’s the sense of inevitability, of reality, that is so wonderfully drawn in this film.

Jack’s descent into madness is so visceral that everything he experiences swallows the viewer whole with sensory and psychological truth. What makes the movie compelling is walking away with the certain knowledge that I, that you, that every one of us is only a few breaths away from being forever lost in a nightmare plane that whispers, even now, just beyond the faint veneer of our perceptions.

Is that true? Maybe. Maybe not. The genius of the movie, the power it holds over us, lies in that seduction, true or not. And for me as a writer, such possibility is the root of all true horror, the kind that has the power to keep me up at night or send me haring through the woods in the middle of a bright afternoon, terrified out of my mind by the ghost of an idea peering at me with hollow sockets from behind a tree. I’m fascinated by the darkness within us and the myriad eventualities flickering in and out of existence around us with every turn we make. Nothing frightens me more than what I might do to myself, what I might do to someone else. That the reality of which I may be completely assured is only a mirage, a lie I told to myself so long ago I have forgotten the truth. The ghosts who dog my ankles, whose voices I echo though I pretend I do not hear them.”

Hold My Place on Indiebound
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781645481003

Pre-order today on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Hold-My-Place-Cassondra-Windwalker/dp/164548100X