Tales of death-cult dismemberment, dystopian nomads and menacing marionettes are accompanied by recurring encounters with, Mr Death and late-night visits from an ominous talking crow in local author, Suzanne Craig-Whytock’s second collection of short stories.
“They classify the short stories and my last two books as horror fiction and supernatural thrillers,” said the Cambridge native. “I just like weird. I look at a normal scenario and think, ‘But what if this happened?’ A lot of my books start that way.”
Craig-Whytock has published three novels, Smile, The Dome, and The Seventh Devil as well as two short story collections, Feasting Upon the Bones and, her latest, At the End of It All.
“The new collection just came out on February 7,” she said. “I don’t want to brag but it debuted at number one on Amazon’s Hot New Releases Chart and number one on their bestseller chart for a little bit, as well.”
Her weird and other-worldly works are gaining fans around the world.
“Smile, my first book was published in 2017 and now it is being translated and published in Georgia, in Georgian,” she said. “My second book, The Dome, was published last year in Arabic. A publishing company in Lebanon picked it up.”
Getting five books and two international translations published in less than six years is an impressive feat for any author, but of course, At the End of It All, is not the end of it all for the prolific writer.
“The sequel to The Seventh Devil, The Devil You Know, is coming out this summer with BookLand Press and I just finished the manuscript for my new book Charybdis,” she said. “Charybdis is a Greek mythological whirlpool. It’s from the Odyssey.”
It’s only natural that echoes from classic western literature would creep into the retired high school English teachers work, but her biggest influences are a bit more contemporary.
“I was reading Stephen King when I was nine years old,” she said. “I kind of classify my own writing as a cross between Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. I don’t write graphic horror. It’s more psychological.”
Her century home in Drumbo, stands in the shadow of two historic churches and only a few haunting steps from the local cemetery. Consecrated, fertile ground for many of her ghostly inspirations.
“All my books take place pretty much around here, except The Dome, which takes place in Toronto in the future, 2135” said Craig-Whytock. “The Seventh Devil takes place here. Even the Drumbo Pub is mentioned. Same with the sequel. Some of it takes place in this area.”
The house she shares with her husband Ken and daughter Katelyn is steeped in local history and the original carpenter carved the date Dec 26, 1906, into the wooden staircase that lands next to Craig-Whytock’s office.
“This house was owned by the mill owner and the railroad came through here so, it was quite a wealthy town,” she said. “My husband has an office upstairs and I said I would really like an office. So, he partitioned the long dining room off and made my own little writing space.”
Good authors are typically their own worst critics and Craig-Whytock is no exception. She still has the first rejection letter she received for a poem she submitted to a publisher and nearly didn’t get her first novel published.
“Smile, is young adult fiction about a 16-year-old girl,” she said. “It started as a character sketch and it took me almost 10 years to create the entire book then I put it away in a drawer because I thought, nobody is going to want to publish this.”
A colleague convinced her the novel was good and to submit it to BookLand Press in Markham. They picked it up and have published all her subsequent novels. Her short story collections have been published by Potter’s Grove Press an independent publishing house in the US.
“I have been very lucky to have found a couple of publishers,” she said. “Once you get in with a publisher, they publish your work, and it does well then they are usually interested in any of your subsequent work.”
Craig-Whytock loves to help other writers get their work published.
She edits her own online literary magazine called Dark Winter Lit.
“We publish short fiction and poetry and I get high-quality submissions from all around the world. It’s nice when you get a reply back from someone after you accepted their submission, and they are so happy. You’ve made their day. They’re over the moon. It’s a nice feeling.”
Craig-Whytock knows how far a little bit of genuine encouragement can go. She grew up in Cambridge and recalls her teen years at Preston High School as a difficult time in her life.
She loved to read and write but might not have pursued a writing career were it not for the support of her English teacher, Mrs. Sandy Crawford.
“She was still there when I got out of teachers’ college and I did a long-term position at Preston High School,” Craig-Whytock said.
“It was such a gift to be able to teach with her as a colleague, with this woman who had encouraged me and supported me. Whenever I wrote something she was always so delighted and supportive of my writing. I probably wouldn’t have been the writer I am and probably wouldn’t have got into writing at all if not for her. I just wanted to mention that.”
