HP Lovecraft had a notorious, borderline pathological hatred of the cold. When the thermometer dipped in New England, the gentleman from Providence didn’t just bundle up—he practically withered away. He became physically sluggish, deeply miserable, and convinced that warmth was synonymous with comfort and life, while the frigid cold was the domain of absolute evil and decay.

In 1926, while enduring a freezing, impoverished stint in New York City, Lovecraft weaponized his personal physical misery to write “Cool Air.” In it, an eccentric physician, Dr. Muñoz, keeps his decaying body artificially “alive” through the sheer willpower of an ancient ritual coupled with a noisy, high-tech ammonia refrigeration unit. 

The terror in the story doesn’t come from a tentacled cosmic leviathan; it comes from the simple, shivering dread of a room dropping below fifty degrees.

Lovecraft took a mundane, everyday physical aversion and inflated it into gothic nightmare fuel.

Sitting here today, watching the mercury climb into triple digits on the front porch, I realize I am the exact reverse of Lovecraft. The sweltering summer heat melts my ambition, drains my energy, and makes me want to do nothing more than retreat to a darkened room with a cool breeze.

But thinking about Lovecraft’s aversion to the cold got me asking a question every horror writer has to face eventually: What physical, real-world discomforts actually make my own skin crawl, and have I ever had the nerve to write them?

The Monsters in the Queue

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a quiet shift in my personal relationship with fear. When you’re younger, horror is often an abstract game of monsters, slasher villains, and grand supernatural spectacles. But as the miles pile up on the clock, fear becomes much more physical, sensory, and claustrophobic.

Lately, I’ve discovered a growing discomfort with three very specific things: heights, tight enclosed spaces, and the primal dread of suffocation.

Now, if you look back through my published catalog of stories, you might expect to see these phobias lurking in the dark corners of my books. But the funny thing is, until very recently, I hadn’t used them. I’ve sent my paranormal investigator Pierce Mostyn into all sorts of bizarre, harrowing, and supernatural situations, but those specific, personal anxieties remained locked away in a drawer.

Perhaps we hold our most genuine fears in reserve, waiting for the right moment—or the right setting—to unleash them.

And then came the Bent Pyramid of Dahshur.

The Real-World Nightmare of Dahshur

I’m currently at work on a new Pierce Mostyn tale. In the story, Mostyn has to go to Egypt to get information vital to the mission he’s been assigned. The information is connected to the Shining Trapezohedron, a crystal of immense evil power. And of course, the investigation leads Mostyn and his team straight into the interior of the Bent Pyramid. If I can’t go underground, then it’s someplace dark and dank.

Today, the Bent Pyramid is open to the public. The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has installed wooden walkways, basic lighting, and generally removed the debris of millennia to make it accessible for brave tourists. But “cleaned up” in an ancient monument is a relative term. Once you step off the modern tourist track, the pyramid becomes a masterclass in primal, multi-sensory dread.

First, there is the verticality. To get from the lower chamber to the upper chamber, you don’t climb a grand set of stone steps. You have to ascend a free-standing, 50-foot wooden ladder.

This isn’t a ladder mounted flush against a sturdy wall. It is a skeletal timber structure standing completely out in the open air, suspended in the middle of a massive, echoing, hollow void. As you climb, you aren’t looking at a wall in front of you—you are dangling over fifty feet of empty air with nothing below you but a hard stone floor.

For someone with a growing fear of heights, looking down from the middle of that vibrating wooden structure in the dim light is enough to make the knees turn to jelly.

A Chilly, Suffocating Darkness

And what waits for you at the very top of that terrifying 50-foot climb? Relief? A wide platform where you can catch your breath?

Not a chance.

At the top of the ladder, you are forced to step directly into a narrow, low-ceilinged connecting passage. It isn’t a smooth, wide corridor; it’s a rough, rectangular tunnel chopped crudely into millions of tons of solid limestone. To get through it, you have to drop to your hands and knees and crawl.

While the ambient temperature deep inside the limestone stays a cool 68°F year-round—a relief from the desert heat outside—the air itself is a physical obstacle. There is virtually no natural ventilation. The atmosphere in those tight passages is thick, dead, and stagnant. It smells heavily of ancient ammonia from the resident colonies of Egyptian tomb bats that roost high in the darkness.

When you stir up the dust in those narrow stone arteries, you aren’t just choking on grit; you are breathing in ancient guano spores. The air feels heavy in your lungs. Your chest tightens. The realization creeps in that you are squeezed into an airless stone tube, suspended fifty feet off the floor, with a mountain of ancient rock pressing down on you from every side.

It is a cold, dusty, suffocating trap.

Writing What Scares You

When I began researching the actual interior geography of the Bent Pyramid, I realized I had accidentally stumbled into the ultimate testing ground for my own physical anxieties.

As writers, we don’t always need to invent hyper-complex, cosmic horrors from scratch. Sometimes, the most effective way to make a reader’s heart race is to take a real, physical space—a place you could theoretically visit today—and strip away the comfortable illusion of safety. You put your characters on that 50-foot ladder, you fill the stagnant air with choking dust, and you write the exact, visceral panic you would feel if you were standing on that rung yourself.

Lovecraft used his misery in the cold to freeze his readers to the bone. For my part, sending Mostyn into the stagnant, bat-scented blackness of Dahshur is my way of letting those long-reserved monsters out of the basement.

Speaking of Pierce Mostyn’s investigations into cosmic dread…

TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY!

If you enjoy classic, high-tension horror, atmospheric mystery, and Lovecraftian dread, today is your absolute last chance to back the Kickstarter campaign for the 9th book in the series: Pierce Mostyn #9: The Color That Fell From Space.

In this installment, Mostyn heads to the rural expanse of Nebraska to confront a terrifyingly alien force straight out of Lovecraft’s nightmare playbook. The clock is ticking down, and the campaign ends tonight, 10pm PDT!

[Click here to back the Kickstarter and grab your copy before time runs out!]