Winter Solstice

I’ve never understood the obsession with daylight. Every summer, people start celebrating the extra hours of sunshine as though the sun has personally decided to give them a gift. Longer days! Later sunsets! More time outside! The more sun, the better, apparently.

Well.

I like the dark. Always have. There’s something about darkness that feels more honest to me. It hides things, certainly, but it also gives the imagination somewhere to go. Darkness makes room for possibility. So when I started thinking about the summer solstice, I couldn't resist putting a little pall over everybody else's delight in all that glorious daylight. Because I could. Bwahahaaaa…

But the more I played with the idea, the more interesting it became. What if all that light wasn't necessarily a protection? What if, in a place where summer nights barely become night at all, darkness became something you had to wait for? And what if somebody was waiting right along with you?

That's where Nora and Copper Harbor came in. I wanted to take something people celebrate—the longest day of the year—and turn it slightly sideways. Not make the daylight itself frightening, exactly, but make it part of the machinery of the danger. Because that's what I love about small-town horror. You don't necessarily have to invent a frightening place. You can take a beautiful place everyone already loves and ask one uncomfortable question.

What if?

What if the thing everyone’s celebrating is also something someone else has learned to use? What if the crowd is looking at the sky while someone’s watching you? What if there isn't enough darkness for a secret to stay hidden—but there’s just enough to make you vulnerable? And suddenly all that glorious summer light doesn't feel quite so innocent anymore. That's the fun of writing horror for me. I don't always want to take away the things people love. Sometimes I just want to put a shadow across them. A little one. Just enough to make you look twice.

And if everybody else wants to celebrate sixteen hours of daylight, that's perfectly fine.

I'll be over here waiting for midnight.