Daniel Willcocks - Scarecrows, Rituals, and Rural Terror

Daniel Willcocks is an international bestselling author and award-winning podcaster known for his dark fiction. He is the founder of Devil’s Rock Publishing, co-founder of the chart-topping fiction podcast The Other Stories, and host of The Writer’s Chair podcast. Since 2015, Daniel has written or ghostwritten over 70 books, spanning horror, speculative fiction, and beyond. He is endlessly fascinated by the power of storytelling—and committed to building bold, immersive worlds that linger long after the final page.Please give us a short introduction to what Jack is about.“Jack” is the first book in the Twisted Tales series and tells the story of a group of three visitors to a rural, forgotten town as it prepares for the annual pumpkin harvest season. As Charli Clarke, her fiancé, and her twin brother discover more of the town’s strange obsession, they begin to uncover a long-lost ritual that seems to be possessing the villagers, and all roads lead back to the pumpkin fields.If you’re a reader who misses the fun, chaos, horror, and page-turners of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, these books are specifically written for you.You’ve written over 70 books, what was the spark for Jack?I’ve wanted to write a Halloween-specific story for a long time now. I’m a big fan of the pumpkin season, of decorating the house in horror, and of the folklore tales that surround the farmlands of the UK. So, when it came to choosing the first story that Rob (R.P. Howley) and I would write for this new series, it seemed a no-brainer to make a pumpkin the centre of the action.The story changed a lot along the way, but the core of the tale has stayed the same. Something is wrong in the pumpkin fields, and it’s possessing the townsfolk.You’re no stranger to horror, but Jack feels steeped in folk terror and creeping dread. What drew you to this particular subgenre at this point in your career?I’ve actually never thought about this question, but I have found that the last couple of years has seen my personal interest fall more into folklore and cosmic horror respectively. I suppose I like the history and the magic of folklore. There was a time when these folk tales were truly believed, and writing in this genre harkens back to the days when horror and magic were real, and humans lived in a more primal state of panic and protection. Somehow, although we argue with science now that the events of old folklore could never happen, there always seems to be a shred of doubt. All stories are rooted in a seed of truth, and that opens a whole realm of possibilities.Jack plays on the idea of a quiet village hiding something horrific. Why do you think isolated communities and tradition-bound rituals make such potent horror fuel?Because (most) of us live in a world of comfort and convenience. It’s easier than ever to distract yourself with Netflix, order food to your house, and get anything delivered from Amazon through the letterbox.But quiet villages and isolated communities don’t have these conveniences. They’re some of the last bastions of the old world, and because of this, anything can happen. In our built-up cities, we have cameras, we have police, we have witness. In these small communities, a whole village can conspire to hide its secrets, and the outside world will never know.It's a ripe playground for creating nightmare-fuel.The harvest festival in Jack is more sacrifice than celebration. Was this a metaphor for something larger—like blind tradition, generational trauma, or rural decay?Blind tradition is definitely something that’s been playing on my mind for a while. Why do we just go ahead with strange customs—just… because? What is the reasoning behind some of the things we’re “expected” to do. What is the point of gliding a knife through icing and sponge on a wedding day in front of all your friends and family?I like to question things. But I also really enjoy that these kinds of traditions exist. In this book, the pumpkin harvest is a chance for all the village to pitch in. It’s a proud tradition of the town, and one that unites the townsfolk together. It’s a beautiful thing turned sour, when a select few begin to manipulate the core purpose of the celebration and turn it to more nefarious purposes…Body horror and psychological distress play a strong role in this novel. How do you approach writing such visceral content without crossing into gratuitous shock?It’s a tough line to tread and one that you can never be sure you’ve gotten right. As a writer, what I find tame may be incredibly gruesome for the reader as it’s so subjective on personal experience. As a horror writer, it’s also difficult finding new ways to gross yourself out as the bar is always raised with each new book.With the Twisted Tales books, our aim is to bring just enough horror and gruesome content that the adults who enjoyed Goosebumps as children can get their fix. In this book, there’s one particular scene with an eye that my co-writer, Rob, added which I personally found awful to edit (I’ve got a thing about eyes), but I also feel like it added that edge that this book needed.Mostly I believe that the horror, the gore, the viscera has to serve a purpose. It’s not often that we write in scenes for shock value, but more because we are trying to tell the story as realistically as possible. In dire situations there will be blood. In precarious moments, bad people will do bad things. It’s about honesty in the text, and I hope that we’ve delivered that with “Jack.”Charli Clarke is dropped into Brackenholt against her will. What made her the right protagonist to unravel this myth, and what did you want readers to see through her eyes?While this isn’t necessarily a “slasher,” Charli has a lot of the hallmarks of the ‘final girl’ trope.We wanted to choose someone relatable, and someone who had the character flaws that made her the unlikely hero. Charli is arguably as vanilla as they come, and as much as she wants to be in Brackenholt with her fiancé, she also doesn’t want to have to share it with her brother.From the off, this creates a great deal of conflict with which to tell the story. I’m personally a big fan of the underdog, and Charli is the least equipped in the town to have to deal with this impossible situation, yet from reader feedback and online reviews, I’m certain that people resonated with her and championed Charli towards the conclusion of the book (even if they may not have necessarily agreed with some of her decisions along the way).There’s a tension between city logic and rural superstition in the book. How much of Charli’s arc is about confronting beliefs she thought she’d outgrown?Charli is the perfect avatar for inner city life. She’s mortified when her phone breaks and communication with the outside world cuts off. She can’t believe that people like in the way that the townsfolk do, and not only that but she has to confront the impossibilities of the horrors that present themselves around her.This is one of my favourite things to write, as we often grow up and outgrow our own beliefs in the boogie monster and the shadows that live in our closet. Yet, there’s still that tiny part of us that never quite accepts that these things aren’t real. As more evidence piles up to the contrary of Charli’s beliefs, she has to battle her own reality in order to understand—and attempt to conquer—the horrors that she faces.We never want to believe the darknesses in our lives until they’re standing right in front of us, staring us in the eye.Jack the scarecrow feels like a new horror icon. How did you construct his mythology—and were you inspired by any real folklore or existing entities?Jack combines elements of folklore with the magic of cosmic horror. When making an iconic character like Jack, it’s hard not to be influenced by other stories. There’s the almost Nursery Rhyme origin story told within the book on how Jack came to be, and yet there is a much larger story to the magic that is yet to be explored. As a writer, one thing that I’ve learned when creating mythology and back story is that you don’t need to fill in all the gaps, and you don’t always need to be rational. Thor can fly through Asgard with his hammer that summons lightning. You can tell the gender of an unborn baby by dangling a silver chain in front of a pregnant stomach. These are stories that we, as readers, buy into, but which don’t always ground themselves in logic. We aimed to bring some of that mystery and intrigue to Jack in a way that felt authentic to the journey of the characters within this book.While Rob and I have much more knowledge on who Jack is and where he comes from, we’ve kept his origins specifically vague in this book. Without giving too much away, we have potential plans in the future to explore Jack further with new stories, depending on his popularity, so if people want to see more of Jack, they’ll need to read this story and recommend to their friends…Brackenholt feels alive in its silence. How did you design a village that feels both believable and hauntingly wrong?I’m a huge fan of making the setting a character in itself. Brackenholt has all the hallmarks of a quaint and idyllic British village (although we have deliberately kept vague the details of where this town is set), but within the cracks of the buildings the secrets are told. If you’ve ever walked down a cute cobbled street alone at night, you’ll know that there’s something old-worldly to the feeling you get, as though you’ve walked back in time, so by specifically placing the townsfolk away from Charli, and creating a town that appears to be deliberately trying to get her lost, we create a recipe for Jack’s antics to thrive.It also enhances the juxtaposition between village and city life, when Charli thinks back to the images she had seen of the village and the hotel where they stay online, but then sees the actual thing in-person. We learn very quickly that she’s definitely not where she wants to be.How do you pace a story like this—where the horror creeps in rather than explodes up front?Pacing is always difficult with writing a story; trying to work out when to put the super exciting moments versus where to let the action calm a little (you’ve got to have the lows to feel the highs). I tend to write long in my drafts, and over-describe, so one trick that was very effective in tightening the pace was working with R.P. Howley, who has a great knack of getting to the point in a chapter (you should have seen the amount of my words that he cut out of the original draft—which made the story stronger), and creating stunning character dialogue.There are, however, a couple of things I do to try and make sure that the book is taking the reader on the right journey at the right speed, outside of the words themselves:a) I’m a big fan of using Freytag’s Pyramid as a way to plot the structure of the action. By using the pyramid as the main skeletal backbone for the story, I at least know that the core of the action is attended to, and that the reader gets a solid journey from the book. It’s a little overly simplistic to look at, but understanding that nearly all great stories follow this structure has helped me massively over the years, and means that I have a starting point to understand the foundations of what the story will become.b) I use a lot of reader feedback in my stories, and Twisted Tales is no exception. Rob and I have a rapidly growing team of beta readers who we send early drafts of the book to for feedback. At this point, we’re not focused on typos or grammar, but how the story feels. Where was it slow? Where was it too fast? What didn’t make sense? Given that the end result is going to be getting the books into the hands of readers and having readers enjoy the experience, we make sure to put dedicated readers into the process as early as possible so that we can craft effective stories.As for creeping the horror in, one of the greatest lessons I learned early on in my writing, was to “Hide the monster.” If you can show the effects of a monster (human or otherwise) without revealing the monster itself for as long as possible, you grip the reader who, ultimately, begs for the reveal by the end. In some cases, never showing the monster can be one of the most effective ways to create long-lasting horror (for example, Josh Malerman’s Bird Box). Nothing beats the monsters we create in our own imagination.With Jack, while we are clearly suggestive of who (or what) the monster is in this book, we also only truly see the effects that he’s having as we travel along the story. We are right there in Charli’s head, wondering if Jack is truly real, or if Jack is the puppet of another. I won’t tell you the answer here though…You’ve podcasted about writing for years. What lessons or rules from The Writer’s Chair did you break for Jack?For the most part, the way Rob and I approached Jack was the same way that I approach most of the books I’m involved in:* Write the first draft fast (tell yourself the full story before you begin editing)* Give breathing room between drafts* Edit firmly and cut out anything unnecessary (arguably most of this was Rob’s doing)* Don’t be scared to share early with readersIf there’s one rule that I did break, however, is that before I fully committed to this version of Jack, I did spend a few months spinning on four different versions (I still have the original chapters) that never quite felt right. I was juggling multiple projects at the time and the versions I had written never quite felt right for what we wanted this series to be.In short, I overthought it and let imposter syndrome get in my head. Now that we’re rolling on the next few books, that’s not going to happen anymore. All Rob and I can do is tell the best version of these stories, in our own way, in the hopes that others will like.Judging by early reviews, this is going well for us.The book warns readers about disturbing content. How do you balance creative freedom with responsible storytelling in horror?It’s a difficult thing to consider in our modern world, but I think it comes down to one thing: authenticity.I’m a firm believer that nothing is off-limits in creativity. The purpose of creativity is to explore, to understand, to experiment, and to educate. Some of the characters I’ve introduced in books I’ve had to live with in my head, and understand, and that’s a beautiful thing to do. Never in my life will I be a mid-40s cowboy possessed by a smoke demon (“Sins of Smoke”). Never in my life will I be a young female social media influencer born in the remote reaches of Alaska (“When Winter Comes”). Never in my life will I be a young girl falling down the rabbit hole into a realm of Lovecraftian monstrosities (“Dream”), but for a short while at least I can try to understand who these characters are, and what they feel. I’m never going to fully understand the individual characters and journeys of every representation of person or creature on this planet, but writing is one of the last havens for self-expression and experimentation that exist on this planet, and it’s one of the honours and joys of doing this kind of work for a living.That said, I absolutely understand the responsibility of my growing platform, and how my stories could affect readers. I have had friends and relatives who have been wildly triggered by content that they didn’t expect to read or see. When creating the marketing for any story or book, I work my hardest to ensure that people know what to expect before they’ve picked the book up. There shouldn’t be any surprises in my book that would upset people, and part of my journey as a growing independent author is beginning to incorporate trigger warnings so that those who are vulnerable, and still want to enjoy my work, can without the worry of finding themselves unnecessarily triggered by the darker content of horror.Jack invites reflection on the stories we pass down. What do you hope readers carry with them once they close the book?Mine and Rob’s hope with “Jack” is to have created a story that is not only fun and page-turning, but which tickles the nostalgic bones that Goosebumps gave, not only us, but so many others. We’ve written this story in a way that there are possibilities to expand into a growing universe, and we want readers to feel a part of the Twisted Tales experience. We are nothing but if not eternally grateful to any and all readers who spend time with our words, and we will gladly answer any messages, emails, or DMs people send our way.With two more books (at least) planned to launch this year, we’re working hard to create something long lasting, and that will stand out in the realm of horror for years to come.We’d love for you to join us on this journey.