What are you afraid of?

Sandra Parshall

If you want to start a lively conversation, ask a group of people what they’re most afraid of.

Answers might be hesitant at first, because grown men are a little embarrassed to admit, for example, that they’re afraid of the dark and women might think they’re playing to gender stereotypes by confessing a fear of creepy insects. After one brave soul comes clean, though, the dam will collapse and you’ll hear an astonishing outpouring of secret terrors. This is a gold mine for mystery writers, who can use phobias to add depth to characters and a little something extra to scary scenes.

Most of us start by giving our own fears to our characters. Easy to understand, easy to write. If you’re anything like me, you can harvest from your own phobia collection for a long time before you have to look elsewhere. I’m scared of almost everything. The only times I laugh at Adrian Monk are when he calls for a wipe after shaking hands or compulsively straightens and rearranges objects. I’m not afraid of germs, and if you could see my desk you’d know I’m not a neat freak. In every other way, I’m right there with Monk. Heights, depths, open places, closed places, spiders, deep water, fire, darkness -- they all terrify me. And my fear of failure (clinical name: atychphobia) goes way beyond terror.

My phobias are ordinary, though, common and rarely entertaining. For something exotic that I might afflict on a poor character, I can go to a site like The Phobia List, which offers page after page of clinical and popular names for all the things that freak out humans. Maybe I could work alliumphobia – fear of garlic – into a mystery. But no; that one’s better suited to vampire stories. How about allodoxaphobia, fear of opinions? Don’t we all know somebody who suffers from that and makes everybody around them suffer too? The world is also overpopulated with hedonophobes, those unfortunate souls who are afraid of feeling pleasure.

Some phobias raise baffling questions. How does an otherwise sane person develop aulophobia, fear of flutes? And bolshephobia, fear of Bolsheviks, seems like a big waste of time and psychic energy these days. I can’t even begin to understand bibliophobia, fear of books. How does anyone function with optophobia (fear of opening one’s eyes), or phagophobia (fear of swallowing), or nomatophobia (fear of names), or levophobia (fear of things to the left of the body), or phronemophobia (fear of thinking)?

But back to the question of phobias that can be used in mysteries. Iatrophobia, fear of doctors, is fairly common, but in extreme cases it would make murder by slow poisoning easy, because you could count on the victim not to summon his courage and seek medical care for his weird symptoms. Phasmophobia, fear of ghosts, offers the possibility of scaring somebody to death. Rhytiphobia, fear of developing wrinkles – poisoning again, with the toxin concealed in a face cream that must be applied lavishly. Pteronophobia, fear of being tickled by feathers, is too funny not to use, but offhand I can’t come up with a suitable scenario. (I’ll bet Donna Andrews could.) Any phobia that isolates the victim – and they are too numerous to list – would make the killer’s job easier and lessen the chance of detection.

Give a phobia to your sleuth and you can make it an obstacle that he or she has to overcome in solving the crime. Overdo it and your character may be dismissed as a Monk wannabe – and we know there can only be one Monk.

Two stories that use phobias to great effect are the Hitchcock film Vertigo (heights) and Nevada Barr’s novel Blind Descent (caves, water, darkness, tight spaces – all of which scare me). Lisa Gardner’s new thriller, Say Goodbye, is so loaded with spider stuff that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish it. And one of the creepiest scenes I’ve ever read is in Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner, when she sends Medical Examiner Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli into a dark attic to investigate strange thumping noises. It’s not that any great violence takes place. It’s the situation that makes me shudder. Will you ever catch me crawling around in a dark attic? I don’t think so.

Okay, I’ve come clean about my innermost fears. Now it’s your turn. What are you afraid of? What books or movies have given you nightmares because they touched on your phobias? In case you’re thinking of moving on without answering, I’d like to point out that I also suffer from severe athazagoraphobia – fear of being ignored.

What freaks out a CSI?

Elizabeth Becka (Guest blogger)


Our guest is the author of Trace Evidence and the just-released sequel, Unknown Means, both featuring crime scene investigator Evelyn James. When she isn’t writing thrillers, Elizabeth Becka is a real-life forensic specialist with the Cape Coral, Florida, Police Department. She previously worked as a crime scene investigator in Cleveland, the setting of her novels. Visit her web site at www.elizabethbecka.com.


Everybody’s afraid of something.

My heroine is a forensic scientist with the coroner’s office who investigates, of course, homicides. (Coroner = victims are dead.) But as part of her ‘other duties as assigned,’ she also investigates suicides, traffic deaths and industrial accidents. One such industrial accident has occurred in the salt mine which exists (I swear I am not making this up) 1800 feet below the surface of Cleveland, Ohio. Under Lake Erie, to be precise.

There’s just one problem. My heroine is claustrophobic.

So am I.

The only thing that ever scared me about working at the coroner’s office was the cooler—the large refrigerated room where the deceased, on gurneys, were stored. I hated the cooler. I couldn’t care less that it was full of dead bodies, that didn’t bother me a bit. What bothered me was that there were no windows. (I hated the cooler at my first job at an ice cream store too, and the most dangerous item there was a bag of Spanish peanuts…of course, the only dangerous thing in the coroner’s office cooler is possible exposure to TB.)

I rarely needed to go into the cooler, but occasionally it became necessary and I did it. I even shut the door behind me, because otherwise the refrigeration would flow into the hallway, wasting energy and taxpayer dollars.

There were only two things I ever refused to do at the coroner’s office: clean out the crypts, and ride the freight elevator without a light in it.

I didn’t like the freight elevator to begin with. It was one of those barbaric contraptions with the inner wall composed of grating that you had to pull shut after closing the outer door so that you could see the wall move when the elevator went up or down. At least you could have seen the wall move if you kept your eyes open, which I didn’t. It had one light bulb in the ceiling, which would occasionally burn out.

The deep freeze, a 20 x 10 room kept at minus 70 and used for storing old biological samples and bodies who weren’t going anywhere soon, had two light bulbs. The rear one had burnt out years before and had not been replaced, since the maintenance staff did not want to spend any more time in there than the rest of us, and the front one would burn out regularly too. I would go into the deep freeze armed with just a flashlight. But the perfectly empty freight elevator, no.

Please don’t point out that not having a light bulb scarcely made a difference if I kept my eyes closed anyway. It did, and you know it.

This isn’t quite as wimpy as it sounds, since most staff would consider saying no to my boss far more perilous than a silly dark freight elevator, but even she knew that you could only yank a dog’s chain so many times before it turns and bites, and did not push me.

The other thing I refused to do had nothing to do with claustrophobia. It was to clean out the old crypts (the small door and sliding tray system seen on TV, long since discontinued and used only for storage by the time I arrived there). That was out of the question because I had been traumatized about such crypts when I was a child, from the mere preview of a horror movie that made much use of surprises behind those doors. It appeared to be an utterly terrifying movie, at least to a small child, but in reality it must have been truly lousy since it doesn’t even show up in the Internet Movie Database. Doesn’t matter. The damage had been done. I would help clean out the crypts. Just not by myself.

The point is, a vital part of any suspense tale is facing something frightening, and much more so when it’s something the character finds personally frightening.

So readers are enjoying the subplot about the salt mine. It’s an interesting piece of industrial engineering, and it’s an odd role reversal: We’re used to seeing Evelyn walk up to a decomposed body without batting an eye while everyone around her is freaking out. Now Evelyn is, inwardly, freaking out, but to everyone else it’s just another day at work. 1800 feet down with a single elevator for egress? Sure, what’s odd about that? We’re actually under the lake? Yes, but there’s 1700 feet of stone between us and the water. There, that should make you feel better.

Sure.

Everyone’s afraid of something.