Goodreads asked Maynard Sims:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Maynard Sims Stillwater is a ghost story due out from Samhain in March 2015. We started our career forty years ago with ghost stories and we have been writing them ever since, in between thrillers and other stuff. We love ghost stories and there is nothing that thrills us as much as the quiet unease and gradual unraveling of the mystery.

Mick – a good ghost story must have a reason why the ghost is doing their haunting. The human characters must be believable, have a flaw in their character, so that the haunting may derive from that flaw. Often the human character will be an innocent, and as such they create tensions in people and situations around them that leave a chink for the evil to slip through.
A good ghost story must be believable, so the characters have to be empathetic and realistic. The setting has to be familiar so that even if the reader has never been to such a place they can recognize it in their minds eye. The ghost or haunting has to have a purpose that derives from either the character or the setting so that what happens appears inevitable and natural. Atmosphere is vital. The tale needs to be told quietly, without fuss, so that the merest shift away from normality is a cry or shout that something is wrong.
Len – One of my all time favourites is Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman. To me it’s just about as perfect as you can get in the genre. Another is Hawley Bank Foundry by LTC Rolt. I can’t even bring the plot to mind now, but I remember the chill it gave me when I read it. There really are far too many to mention, there were a lot of good ghost stories written in the period between the two world wars, and many of them were republished in the Fontana books.

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