A thrilling rollercoaster which promises a screamy ride with mysterious prophecies, sinister sequences, and brutal revenges is what ‘Scare Me If You Can’ (published by TreeShade Books) can be best described as. We spoke with author Sid Kapdi to understand what it took to create this intriguing world for the readers.
Q. How you began the journey of professional fiction writing? What prompted it?
I have always loved story-telling and my day job involves just that, though of a corporate and technical kind. I wanted to extend it further and write fictional stories for a while, but due to other priorities, I had been suppressing the urge. Meanwhile, in one of my WhatsApp groups consisting of my schoolmates, some of us used to create episodes involving our friends as characters. Though we used to write in any random genre, my friends found my horror stories quite scary and prompted me to go professional.
I did not know where to start, so I researched a bit on FB groups and publishers’ websites. I also started attending lit fests which helped me to increase my network. On the side, I began writing short stories and later decided to go for a novel that had short stories. I was lucky to have met the right people to guide me at the right time and that is how the journey began.
Q. How did you choose to debut with a horror-thriller novel? When did you develop an inclination towards this genre?
In my teens and early twenties, I was fond of reading novels by Sidney Sheldon, Robin Cook, John Grisham, and Jeffrey Archer.
Fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat thrillers have always fascinated me. I knew that whatever genre I choose to write in, my stories would be pacy and action-oriented. By nature, I have been known to be witty and funny, and my amateur writing in college days always reflected these qualities. However, I chose horror as it was outside of my comfort zone. I found that making readers feel scared is far more challenging and I had never done it before.
Q. What led you to decide to write a piece of work where horror becomes a reality? What sort of research went into it?
As I mentioned earlier, I did not have much of a background in horror. But I knew that I was creative, could think of interesting ways of bringing out the scare and was good at making it sound real. I read the works of the horror greats such as Stephen King, Neil D’Silva, and Dean Koontz and found that horror writing involves the use of powerful verbs and much more show rather than tell, as compared to other genres.
Though many of my stories have a backdrop that is familiar to me and places I have visited before, I did need to do my research around say, a crime scene, a poultry farm, a butcher shop, and so on.
Q. How did you weave the intriguing elements in the plot: the horror-themed resort backdrop, an advanced horror-writing workshop, and 10 stories? You decided it beforehand ?
The ten stories came first. I was good at writing short stories and I wanted to take advantage of that. Hence, I made the outlines of the stories first, each on a different theme – romance, interview, chat, animal cruelty, sexual abuse, and more. What I needed was an interesting backdrop wherein I could blend the stories such that the backdrop becomes as important as the stories. Once I was able to zero in on the main plot of a horror-writing workshop, I found that either a haunted hotel or a themed resort would enhance the horror effect.
Q. Was it a conscious decision to base the stories in different Indian cities? As the horror quotient rises with each story, tell us about the challenges you faced?
The setting of each story in a different city and also different state, came up when I was deciding the names of the characters or participants in the workshop. I wanted to have as much diversity as possible. Working backwards, I updated my stories to align with my thought of different cities and I also set up the names of the characters within each story accordingly.
I knew that many of the readers would not be very keen to read horror, especially from a new author. Hence, I decided to vary the scare quotient such that the initial stories would have more of a thriller element rather than horror and the ‘scariness’ would increase with each story. The advantage of this was that the readers got hooked at the start and they did not feel the horror rising as they kept going along. The challenge was to arrange the stories in the right order, I had to even replace a couple of stories at a later stage since they did not fit into my idea of the scare factor.
Q. Can you give a glimpse of the twists and turns in ‘Scare Me If You Can’ the horror buffs can look forward to?
The horror buffs are in for a treat when they read ‘Scare Me If You Can’. Some of the twists that the readers can expect are – traumatic experiences faced by people which later get attributed to past-life events, pranks played on each other turning out to be real, the discovery of dead bodies at unexpected locations and furthermore shocking discoveries behind their deaths, cheating leading to unimaginable consequences, and so on. The biggest twist is that a character from one of the stories turns up in real and wreaks havoc on the workshop participants.
Q. What sort of feedback have you received from the readers so far?
The feedback has been very positive and encouraging. The best part is that many of the non-readers of horror are appreciating the book. Also, the unique backdrop and the theme of the novel have been the clear winners. Besides these, the readers have loved the visually appealing descriptions articulated in simple language.
Q. Any horror novel you would like to see it get adapted into a movie?
I would certainly like to see my novel being adapted on screen. On a serious note, I would like to see ‘Maya’s New Husband’, the debut book of my favourite horror author Neil D’Silva to come alive on screen.