What is she talking about, especially in light of the fact that the last words ever spoken by Bischoff, as he lay dying, were “the Day of Judgment”? The Baron picks up the phone when it rings, and his puzzling talk with a woman on the line ends with her bringing up “the Day of Judgment”. There is also the question of a phone conversation the Baron has at Bischoff’s house after the suicide. Not pleased to be under a cloud of suspicion, the Baron decides to investigate why Bischoff took his own life, and soon enough he is wondering whether two cases of suicide that Bischoff talked about just before he shot himself are linked to his death. Some there even think the Baron murdered Bischoff. Bischoff’s wife was once the Baron’s lover, and before Bischoff died, the guests rushed to the garden and saw Bischoff give the Baron a hate-filled look. It appears that his death is a suicide, but some there suspect the Baron drove Bischoff to it somehow. The gathering starts well, with several guests in attendance, but it ends tragically when Bischoff, alone for a moment in his garden pavilion, shoots himself. It’s Vienna, 1909, and on a September night, a narrator named Baron von Yosch is invited to the house of famous actor Eugene Bischoff. Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1921)

Here are some books that influenced The Screaming Child, works that all to one degree or another straddle the area where mystery, horror, and psychological distress meet. That is, of course, if we can trust what she is telling us… Her explorations begin, leading her toward a certain discovery.

When she moves out of the city to a rural location to make an effort at recovery, she hears what she thinks are her child’s screams coming from the nearby forest. Perhaps he was abducted, perhaps murdered. Does an odd and creepy situation connected to a crime have a rational explanation, or will the final revelation involve the supernatural? If the narrative is told in the first person, how reliable is the narrator? How much of what we are told is supposed to be real and how much has been distorted, if not outright imagined, by this central character? My new novel, The Screaming Child, is a first-person tale told by a woman trying to go on with her life after her 12-year-old son has vanished. You can play with a lot of ambiguity in this zone. It’s the region where mystery story meets horror story meets psychological thriller. There’s a region touching on three areas of fiction that I like to explore when writing.

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