Doreen Petersen asked Jonathan Janz:

How did you come up with the idea for The Darkest Lullaby? I'm reading it now and it's soo good.

Jonathan Janz Hey, Doreen! Thank you so much for saying that and for reading that book!

As with most of my books, the ideas came from several places. On one hand, I had read several "quiet" horror novels that appealed to me, stories that put more emphasis on atmosphere than on plot. A couple examples would be T.M. Wright's STRANGE SEED and Charles L. Grant's THE SOUND OF MIDNIGHT (and, to a lesser degree, Grant's THE HOUR OF THE OXRUN DEAD). I wanted to capture the feeling and mood of those stories. Now that I think about it, another that spoke to me was T.E.D. Klein's THE CEREMONIES. But you get the point.

In addition to the above, I wanted to take the young-couple-purchases-a-potentially-haunted-house story and do something different with it. Hopefully, I accomplished that.

Lastly, I've always loved the notion of the revenant, that vengeful presence whose cruelty defies even death. To have not one revenant, but two, was an appealing and frightening notion to me. In a way, the novel connects to both HOUSE OF SKIN and THE SORROWS, which preceded it.

Thanks again for your question, and I hope you enjoy the rest! :-)

JJ

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