Burnt Snow burst onto the shelves last year to great reviews. It’s an amazing debut from Aussie Author Van Badham.

Here at Fang we read a wide range of books, but I accept that I’m a complete wuss. I loved Burnt Snow but I found that the level of increasing suspense affected me quite strongly, especially if I was reading just before trying to sleep!

So I asked Van: “Do you ever creep yourself out when you’re writing? LMAO! Give yourself nightmares? “

OMG, all the time. I’m very inspired by Wes Craven in this regard, who’s the filmmaker who made the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street ‘movies and a zillion other horrible, spooky things. He’s actually a college English Literature professor, and someone once asked him why he’d ended up with a double career as a horror maestro – did he like scaring people? He said no, what he sought in making horror movies was the ‘release from fear’.

For me, reaching into the black mud swamp of my own fears and dragging these monsters onto the page helps me to deal with them. In many ways having a vivid imagination is a blessing, of course – but there is a very nasty trade off that comes with that, which is that your darkness is also vividly dark.

Over Christmas last year, I was living in London and it was a particularly bleak winter, with a lot of snow and very little daylight. Just getting to and from my job at the theatre was an ordeal, marching through snow and sleet, and a friend who was going away for Christmas gave me the key to her flat, which was just near the theatre, in case I couldn’t face the struggle to get home. One night I got stuck working late after feeling very unwell all day, and as it was snowing and pitch black dark, and my boyfriend was working a nightshift and wouldn’t be home, I decided to stay the night at my friend’s empty flat.

The flat is in an old spooky building, with long silent corridors and doors that open and close without making any noise. Because my friend is just in London temporarily, the flat is very sparsely furnished. She also has a child and as it had been a rush to catch a plane to get away, the flat had that aura of being abandoned – a stray child’s shoe here, a dropped toy there made it look like the scene of a kidnapping. I got inside and felt a bit creepy – it’s a flat with very high ceilings that made me feel small and under observation.

I took my coat off, and that’s when I realized I was very, very sick – my clothes were actually stuck to my body with sweat. I decided to have a shower, and while I was in the shower I started getting flashes of purple and green lights in my vision and my head got all light – out of the shower, I was on my hands and knees on the freezing cold tile floor, desperately trying to stay conscious. I managed to shuffle into the spare room, and despite the fact that I was sweating really heavily, I felt incredibly, incredibly cold. I dragged in two heaters and put them on full-bore, shut the door of the room to seal the heat in and buried myself under about three quilts before turning off the light and trying to sleep.

I couldn’t. The room was lightless dark, and I was still freezing, and the heaters were humming, and I was hearing every creak and tremble in this place. I convinced myself there were ‘presences’ in the flat. That they were wandering around in the dark void beyond the door to the room, rubbing against one another, whispering something. And this lasts for hours – me, stiff with fear, trapped in this room, listening to these evil things stirring beyond the door, sweating, freezing, and believing that I’m trapped in this room until morning. I reach for my phone to call my boyfriend and I’m terrified that just the lights of the mobile keys are going to draw the presences to me – like moths – that it will be some cue to come and… do ‘something’. Dissolve me, swallow me, mutilate and torture me, lead me into a darkness I can’t get back out of… I call and call but the phone rings out; my boyfriend’s on nightshift, he can’t answer.

Finally, my rational mind decides I am just being childish and it’s just because I’ve got some kind of flu, and I force myself to fumble for the bedside lamp and turn the light on. My fingers are actually wet on the light switch, I am sweating so much. Light goes on, it’s a very weak bulb and the room is still quite dark. The heaters are making this gurgling, whirring noise, everything’s in brown light, and there’s a black shadow in the middle of the opposite wall. And I can’t understand why it’s there. I can’t work out what is causing this black pool of shadow. My eyes dart around the room, and as they do, I think I see glimmers of movement in the shadow, as if it’s more of a blob, and it’s starting to stir.

I don’t want to look at it, but I don’t want to turn off the light, so I roll over, clutch my phone, send out a twitter message begging someone to get my mother in Australia to phone me because it’s the middle of the night and I can’t call her from my phone and everyone I would call in London is asleep. My mother does call, and I speak to her under the quilts and tell her in whispers: ‘There’s a moving shadow on the wall and I think it’s turning into a blob.’

‘Everything will be all right,’ says my mother, ‘stay under the covers.’

She will keep trying my boyfriend’s number, she says. Then she hangs up. The heaters whirr. I can hear the beat of my pulsing heart. Then the sound of the heaters turns into something like a chortle.

A long, sustained chortle.

I am hiding under the covers and sweating and freezing and hearing this wet, croaky chortle and my pillow is damp under my head and the voice of the chortle says: ‘look at me… look at me…’

I curl up in a foetal position in the bed and I can barely breathe under all the covers and while the voice is repeating ‘look at me… look at me… ‘I’m clutching my phone, praying for my mother or my boyfriend to call me and then the blankets of the bed start moving, like they’re being pulled away. Like something is pulling at the blankets and it’s the voice that wants me to look at it and I am so cold that when a blanket exposes my feet the skin I’m so icy cold that I bolt upright in bed and scream ‘Leave me alone!’ and yank back the blankets and the sheets that are sliding off the bed while I try not to look at the blob that’s oozing from the wall.

It oozes from the wall as if it’s vegemite being squashed through a biscuit, and all the black tubes of ooze pile on top of one another and they are forming the legless rump of a demon. I can’t tear my eyes away from the pile of ooze, and I realize that the thing has sprouted tiny arms, and that a wide crack between two layers of ooze is a mouth, and that above that mouth are nostrils and above that two blind eye-sockets. The demon is taller than me, as wide as an armchair, made out of layers of oozed black slime – and then a fat, pink tongue rolls out of its mouth, wet, the length of a pillow – and I scream.

It says: ‘I am every bad thing you’ve ever done.’

I scream and scream and I’m backed against the wall, crouching on the bed – and while I’m screaming at this thing, my mum rings. And I grab the phone and scream and beg into it that she rescues me from this demon. ‘It’s at the end of the bed and it’s rolling this massive spongey tongue at me, it wants to swallow me whole.’

Mum explains, very calmly, that the demon can’t see me. ‘It can’t walk because it has no legs, it can’t grab you because its arms are too short. So, as long as you stay in the bed, and bury yourself under the blankets, you’ll be safe from the reach of its tongue. The demon will dissolve when sunlight comes in through the window.’

Then, she promises – I make her promise – my boyfriend will arrive and we can escape.

And I cry, and I cry, and I can’t work out if the water on my face is from tears or from sweat, but I huddle against the wall wrapped in the blankets and quilts. I cry and I cry and I drop the phone on the ground and when it rings I don’t answer it because I won’t let a single inch of my body beyond the border of the bed.

The demon rolls its tongue, laughs at me – the laugh of slime and excrement and bowels. And I keep crying and it keeps laughing until my light head and my crying overwhelms me and I pass out in a cloud of greyness.

Okay.

So when I wake up in the morning I am too weak to stand, but the light on my phone is flashing from the floor. I manage to look at the opposite wall – but there is no demon. The only noise is the heaters, still whirring. I risk snatching the phone from the floor. It is my boyfriend – he tells me to leave the flat. ‘Get a cab straight to the doctor’s, because it will be faster than waiting for me.’

I realize I am in beige light. It is a murky dawn, but light is coming in through the window.

I got out of the flat, out of the building, onto the cold grey street, managed to hail a taxi, and fell into my boyfriend’s arms outside the doctors’ surgery. My boyfriend carried me into the doctor.

My temperature was reading 39. This is officially pyrexic – my body had been trying to fight the onset of ‘swine flu’ by making itself as hot as possible to boil and kill the virus. The temperature has overheated my brain, and this and extreme dehydration has been causing me to hallucinate.

So there were no actual demons oozing out of the walls?

No. Just ‘swine flu’ and that vivid imagination, oh golly.

I creep myself out writing these books all the damn time. But it is a very necessary release from fear when you’ve got a brain that sees ‘demons crawling out of the walls’ when you are sick.

PS How good is my mum? She has been dealing with situations like this for a very long time.

Huge thanks to Van for donating a copy of Burnt Snow to a lucky reader.  To go in the draw to win this, just leave a comment about what creeps you out!  The competition will close on Wednesday 20 April at 3pm Sydney time.