We recently caught up with author, Jeff Deck and learned more about his background, experience and his goals for his upcoming workshop, Horror, Humor, and Humanity: Three Keys to Scary Storytelling on Saturday, October 20, 2018. Read more about it and register here.
“My goal is to encourage workshop attendees to inject more humor and heart into their scary storytelling,” Deck said. “Just as with real-life relationships, the characters we feel closest to are the ones who can hurt us the most. Imagine someone you love in mortal peril. Are you sweating yet?” According to Deck, “the way to build a similar connection to a fictional person is to step into their mind: to know their hopes and their fears, to share in-jokes with them, and to want desperately for them to succeed (or root desperately for them to fail). You need to be there holding their hand as they come face to face with evil and the unknown.”
Deck is the author of a supernatural thriller novel The Pseudo-Chronicles of 
Mark Huntley. In his book, character Mark Huntley examined the depths of horror and paranoia through an intimate, first-person epistolary perspective, while also including plenty of moments of humor to ensure the reader could relate to the protagonist, Mark Huntley himself. “By the end, many readers told me they felt as though they’d gotten to know Mark as a real person, which (I hope) made his final battles feel all the more meaningful,” said Deck.
He has had a couple of scary stories come out in anthologies this year: “Death Pledge,” in the Lovecraft homage anthology Corporate Cthulhu, and “Persona Ex Machina,” a tale about a murderous marketing A.I., in the anthology Robots & Artificial Intelligence by Flame Tree Publishing.
He is currently writing an urban fantasy series called The Shadow Over Portsmouth; the first book, City of Ports, came out in August, and the second book ( City of Games) is slated to release this December. While the series is not strictly horror, it wears its H.P. Lovecraft influence on its sleeve and features plenty of terrifying journeys into unknown dimensions. The main character, Divya Allard, tells her own story with sarcasm and vulnerable touches that increase the reader’s engagement with her — thus raising the stakes for the reader as Allard encounters dark threats and makes life-or-death choices.
And how did Jeff Deck come to author tales of terror? “Stephen King was a huge inspiration for me to become a writer of dark tales,” said Deck. Through reading King, he learned the importance of having a strong character voice to build rapport with the reader. “I consider King to be one of the best practitioners of using humor to enrich horror: here’s just one example of many, this one from his ghost story Bag of Bones.”
“On page 107, the main character, Mike, notices a bunch of joke bumper stickers on the wall of a diner,” Deck continued. “One of them reads: THERE’S NO TOWN DRUNK HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS. Mike doesn’t think it’s particularly funny — his next thought is “Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on…” — but it clearly sticks in his mind. 15 pages later, in a moment of embarrassment, he thinks to himself: THERE’S NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS. Which is not only a great callback to the diner — King is trusting the reader to remember the earlier reference — but also a slight variation on the original, giving us a far more entertaining insight into Mike’s mind than if Mike had simply thought, I felt like the village idiot. We’re sharing an in-joke with the character and gaining an understanding of him at the same time. Two simple lines can do a lot of work to build a character.”
