Exactly how does one twisted psyche pile up such cold-blooded carnage? To find out, simply get into the head of Stacy Willingham, if you can. She’s the Charleston-based scribe of Southern Gothic murder mysteries who, since her 2022 bestselling debut A Flicker in the Dark, keeps on slaying in ink.
Aug. 26 marks the debut of her fourth nail-biter, Forget Me Not. Set in a muscadine vineyard on an island inspired by Wadmalaw and informed by the author’s fascination with the Charles Manson murders, it follows a journalist, Claire, who returns home to South Carolina to grapple with past personal demons and runs afoul of new ones, too.
A ticketed publication day event with Willingham in conversation with author Kristen Ness takes place 6 p.m. Tuesday at Charleston Library Society, co-presented by Buxton Books.
Fitting the profile
Not unlike the sociopaths the author dreams up, this 30-something mother of a one-year-old toddler would be the last person you might suspect to dabble in such darkness. Instead, she reads like the sort of sunny-smiled crisply-dressed Charleston woman you might spot in line at Whole Foods.
Pleasant demeanor notwithstanding, she spends her days, elbows deep in depravity. On a recent serene morning at Charleston Library Society, she mused the same holds true for her favorite female mystery writers such as Karen Slaughter and Jennifer Hillier.
“When you meet them in person, they’re all the nicest people you could possibly imagine,” she said. “There’s kind of this running joke in the thriller author community that we get the rage out on the page.”
To mine that dichotomy, simply look to her source material: the mind of a serial killer.
A taste for blood
The menace lurking in the author’s psyche has been there since childhood. Willingham’s close-knit brood, who moved to Wild Dunes from Chicago when she was 12, would gather around the television on Friday nights to view The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Her older sister turned her on to chillfests including the Scream movies and Stephen’s King’s The Shining, which scared her plenty.
“I had to hide it under the bed,” she said of the book, as its presence on her nightstand was unsettling.
The scene of the crime
Like her sinister antagonists, Willingham is equally selective when it comes to the scene of their crimes.
Her process often starts with the setting, and given her Charleston childhood, the South has served as the scene of many a misdeed. The next one, she divulges in a Charleston City Paper exclusive, is set in Alabama.
“I use the heat a lot in my books. It’s a claustrophobic feeling if you’re in a house in August and the air conditioning is broken,” she said, adding she also uses the region’s pop-up storms.
“There’s a violence to that I find interesting,” she said.
Picking a target
When it comes to her target reader, she said, “In a lot of ways, my target is just myself. I just try to write a book that I love and the way I want to write it.”
Many of her readers are drawn to her characters, which have mainly been women around her age, with one departure in her third novel, Only If You’re Lucky, a college campus thriller that involves a group of teenaged roommates.
Along with the frailty of flesh, the weird workings of the mind drive Willingham’s narratives.
“Where my stories come from is this deep obsession to get in someone’s mind, to get in someone’s skin to figure out why they do what they do,” she offered, keen to grasp why some humans make such chilling decisions.
That frequently involves mining a character’s past and revealing misperceptions surrounding it in Forget Me Not, the protagonist unpacks her sister’s long-ago disappearance.
Killing your darlings
Writers rue the painful process of “killing your darlings,” or cutting a great passage for the sake of suspense.
To that end, in Forget Me Not, Willingham excised a major plot twist and faced down a big multi-paragraph chunk of descriptive writing. She did so with the razor precision of a sociopath, dismembering to “scatter the pieces around in different places.”
Successful thriller writers must also hide their crimes, too, lest their sharp readership too readily realizes “whodunit.”
“Most all of my books have multiple twists. I may not get you on everyone, but hopefully I’ll surprise you at least once,” she said.
Readers take note: One Willingham trick is to hide the clue in dialogue. It can be laden with double entendres.
A ‘token’ of her crime novel
Of course, any killer worth his or her psychopathic salt should pluck from their slay a token.
In her latest slay, Willingham chose the diary that served as an evocative inroad for both the protagonist and the reader.
“The way I wrote the diary. I really wanted the reader to feel like every time Claire cracked open the pages like a movie projector,” she said.
Not unlike her stone-cold villains, Willingham leaves little to chance when it comes to gripping her reader’s rapt attention. Underneath that genial veneer, this master of the serial thriller is one crafty artist. One would do well to keep a mighty close eye on her as she primes to slay again.
If you want to go: Willingham’s pub-day launch starts at 6 at Charleston Library Society, 164 King St. More: charlestonlibrarysociety.org.
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