Guest post written by Dead Fake and Night Terror author Vincent Ralph
Vincent Ralph is the bestselling author of YA thrillers 14 Ways to Die and Lock the Doors. Both novels are New York Times bestsellers and Lock the Doors is also a USA Today bestseller and the winner of the Southern Schools Book Award. Vincent owes his love of books to his mother, who encouraged his imagination from an early age and always made sure there were new stories to read. He lives in the UK with his wife, two sons, and two cats.
About Dead Fake: Welcome to Bleak Haven: The town you won’t (or can’t!) leave… Deep fake murders have taken over the high school, but what happens when they start to become real?
A Great Place to Live…The Worst Place to Die. That was how Bleak Haven was born. Five words on the sign that I imagined welcoming people to town, and five more scrawled in blood-red graffiti. A desperate lie…and a terrible truth.
Before writing a word of the Bleak Haven series, I knew the setting would be integral. Bad things can happen anywhere yet, in this town, tragedy plays on repeat. But how do you breathe life into a cursed town?
One of the most enjoyable parts of writing these novels was creating the lore. For every killer who is front and centre in each book, there are those whose crimes echo through the ages. The sadistic Holt family who hunted trespassers like prey in the 1950s; the nightmare-inducing Lullaby Man, who stole babies from their beds; the quietly-raging Mallory Crow, whose killing spree began hours after her valedictory speech.
These historic events allowed for a deeper understanding of Bleak Haven’s future generations. In this town, track-and-field is as much a preparation for escaping monsters as it is Phys Ed. Studying the town’s dark past could help you survive its future. And, while some teenagers embrace the perpetual mourning, others are desperate to move on.
But there are smaller details, too. And this is where I believe Bleak Haven really came to life.
There is the rumour that killers can never leave town, whispers of a secret cemetery reserved for monsters, and masked factions convening in the dark; some to summon terrible things and others waiting to repair the damage. Most importantly, there are the contrasting ways that people grieve.
Of all the details in the Bleak Haven books, grief and its aftershocks was the most vital. After all, you cannot create a cursed town, where blood is spilled every decade, without explaining how its residents deal with the fallout.
We’ve all seen the slasher movies where the final girl sits in the back of an ambulance or strides into the sunset, but the streets of Bleak Haven are not bookends for a single tragedy.
It was important to show the quiet between the storms, where shady therapists creep into town in the hope of making money off the latest killing spree, and Bleak Haven High’s memorial wall expands with the faces of all those murdered before their graduation.
It would be easy to ask why, after one too many bloodbaths, the whole town doesn’t up and leave. Plenty did, but a town as cursed as Bleak Haven will always have aspiring heroes. Some deluded, others integral.
There are sheriffs desperate to right past wrongs, a mayor eager to prove that he can do what his successors failed to and bring genuine safety to the locals. And there are plenty of people who believe that they have the knowledge not only to survive the next Bleak Haven killer, but to take them down.
As I wrote more about Bleak Haven, I realized that it was a microcosm for the world. Rather than look away from tragedy, we seek out the next one; sensationalizing violence while failing to see the dangers in front of our eyes.
When you consider society today, those who still refuse to leave Bleak Haven are no different from the rest of us.
The first two books in the series – Dead Fake and Night Terror – take place four decades apart, and playing with time allowed for some of the richest development of the location and how its ‘curse’ is perceived by those who live there.
I could show how the town evolves and how later generations both perceive the horrors of their forbears and react to new threats.
For someone who had only written standalone stories, creating this series was initially daunting. But I soon realized that it would only work if the town felt like a character in its own right.
I’m incredibly proud of the result and I hope that once you’ve taken your first trip to Bleak Haven you can’t help but come back.
