I have extremely vivid dreams. There’re many nights that I’ll wake up unable to tell if something I remember actually happened or if it was only in my dreams. One of the biggest things about my dreams is that they’re so close to reality but there’s always something off. Sometimes it’s such a small detail that my unconscious mind just accepts it. Other times, it’s a big thing and it’ll confuse me to the point that I’ll wake up.

Many people know the phrase uncanny valley. It was originally coined in reference to robots that look sort of like humans, but they don’t behave like us. It’s that feeling of recoil when you see something that’s familiar but then small details are off. I’ve heard that it’s our survival instinct coming into play. I use the phrase in an attempt to convey the wrongness of the place they’re in. Doors leading to walls, rooms twisting, proportions off. Bringing my characters into places that at first look right. But once they take a moment, it becomes clear that things are missing, or there’s too much of something, or they’re not in the right order.

This feeling is essential in horror to build that unease and tension throughout the story. A big, evil monster is scary, but something that takes the familiarity and twists it on its head is truly terrifying. A scary monster is easy to separate. Easy for your brain to mark it as an obstacle to overcome. Even when the antagonist is another human, it’s easy to understand. But what happens when the monster keeps changing the rules? Right when you’re able to accept one oddity, another one creeps up behind you and smacks you upside your head. Keeping that tension without losing it or overdoing it was one of my main goals.

In Going Down, the labyrinth is built to resemble our world. Hotel corridors. School hallways. Commercial kitchens. Places that are easily seen anywhere as you go through life. But in this place, the rooms don’t hold any memories or experiences. The things that give them warmth and vibrancy. Pipes lead to valves that circle back to the same pipe. The lighting is dim but there’s no lights in the room. The doors leading anywhere but out. The most terrifying part is that wherever these characters are, this place has not only been watching them but learning from them too.

The entity that chases the main characters throughout the book uses this same principle. It mocks Izzy while wearing faces of people she’s lost. Uses their voices to crawl under her skin. Even knowing the voices are a sham can’t stop Izzy from falling into the trap.

I want to achieve the same thing. I want my audience to feel what my characters are feeling. And I think the best way to do that is to show why the character is feeling that way. Foreshadowing is something that I think is really important but it’s also really hard to accomplish. I don’t want to give away the twist immediately, but I also want to give my audience the ability to figure it out as they’re reading. Things that they can look back on with a different perspective now that they have more information. That way, once the resulting twist is revealed it’s satisfying and also makes sense. And it’s something I hope to cultivate as I continue to write.

Ultimately, this feeling of wrongness that comes along with uncanny valley can be used in so many ways. The initial resistance when a restaurant changes their layout or when the straws at your favorite coffee shop change. It’s a similar premise but at a much milder level. The straws changing may not activate a full-blown fear response, but it may cause discomfort. Meeting someone that you swear you’ve seen before. So sure that you spend the rest of the meeting trying to place where you know them from. It’s uncomfortable and frustrating, but it is also interesting. Your brain is telling you to pay attention. To look at all of the available information and figure out what’s wrong.

This is what keeps me writing. I want to take that discomfort and dissect it. To figure out how it all works and how I can mold it into whatever I want. I want to create stories that would keep me up at night.

— Blue Thalman Best