Have Yourself a Toxic Family Christmas: NEW RELEASE of Home for the Holidays!

 

No, I am not ACTUALLY wishing this upon you. I am merely suggesting you read about a toxic family Christmas – in my new book!

 

I hope you have an awesome Christmas, if you celebrate it. And if you don’t? Please check out my new book anyway!

 

Some stories have a very interesting way of appearing to writers. They come as ideas, a feeling, a gentle nudge at our brain, a memory, an experience, an impression from something – or even as a scene!

 

That is what happened for me, with my new extreme horror novelette, Home for the Holidays. (Which is my FIRST extreme horror book! I am not new to writing extreme horror; I have done it with short stories. And I challenged myself to write extreme horror in a book-length story. I hope I succeeded!)

 

But, yes, this story came to me as one scene. The scene in question? A mother sitting at the table with her adult children and the three of them talking about what they wanted to do while they all had a break from school and work. That’s it! That was the scene!

 

So I wrote it. And at the end of the scene, the daughter says she wants to see Grandma, to which her mother looks at her with horror, then stands from the table and says “Absolutely not.”

 

Yep. That’s how the scene ended. And I was curious, too. Why was the mother saying they could not see her mother? Why did she want to keep her children away from their grandmother during Christmas?

 

These and other questions are what I pondered, explored and toyed around with as I tried to figure out the rest of this story.

 

One thing I observed during that particular holiday season that I wrote this story was that there were a lot of people posting online about how the holidays were not so cheerful for them, because they could not celebrate Christmas with their toxic families. I know people who have had to sever ties with their parents and siblings because of toxicity, homophobia/transphobia, or because of past abuse that seeps into the present. I myself have had to unfortunately sever ties with a couple of siblings who are toxic. (And, believe me, I have given them many chances, only because they are siblings. Family is hard, dammit.) This made me realize, you know, that not everyone gets to go home for the holidays.

 

And that’s where I got the title for my story. That’s also where the rest of my story started to unfold!

 

Toxic family + Christmas + the expectation (illusion?) of being with family during Christmas = the perfect Christmas horror story! I decided to make it extreme horror based on some of the things happening in the story.

 

I used some of my own experiences of past abuse from my dad in the story, and I combined it with other things I have read in books of abusive and toxic families, in creating the past of the mother of the adult children in the story. There’s also a dream I had of one scene in particular that I used in the story (writing that scene made me nauseous). And the amazing cover by the very talented Christy Aldridge of Grim Poppy Design gave me the nudge to write yet another scene. And, finally, an idea I had for another scene I added during the revision stage of this story came from my original idea of what the cover looked like.

 

But other than that, the story took on a life of its own. It’s definitely not the same story that was originally accepted by a publisher that now no longer exists but it ended up being the story I was satisfied with when it was published by Twisted Dreams Press on Friday the 13^th.

 

As a writer of horror, I challenge myself to try my hand at writing the different subgenres of horror. I will probably do the same when the time comes that I start writing fantasy, romance, suspense, etc. But for now, I am writing in the horror genre, and I’m happy that I made the leap to try writing an extreme horror book. It’s a novelette, sure, and maybe I’ll take it as far as writing an extreme horror novel at some point. For now, this is my contribution to the horror community, and I can only hope that it is a good one.

 

Blurb:

 

Mona Townsend was five years old when her mother tried to kill her father.

 

This crime cost her and her brother, Colton, 23, twenty years with their mother.

Finally reunited on one December morning, the siblings are willing to forgive all and create a fresh start with their mother.

With Christmas coming up, Mona wants to make the occasion extra special.

Knowing that her mother has had a long-term rift with her own mother, she and her brother hatch a plan: Why not surprise their mother with a family reunion so that the two women can bury the hatchet and have a relationship again? After all, if she was capable of forgiving her mother for the past, why wouldn’t her own mother want to set things right with her mother too?

It was Christmas, after all. A time for miracles and family.

But what Mona and Colton don’t know is that their mother had a very good reason for severing ties with her own mother, and that some families are too toxic to appreciate the holiday spirit.

 

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