Cold Eye

I’m writing this from Prague, on a day that has always meant something different to me here than it ever has anywhere else. This is the city my family comes from, the streets my mother toddled on before the war took her childhood and the peace after it took her freedom. At only sixteen years-old, she was imprisoned here by the very people who called themselves her liberators. It was for the crime…

This Christian witch with her daughter in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We’ve all gone on ghost tours in cities like Charleston or New Orleans (or at least thought about going). We’ve read about cemetery ghosts and haunted mansions—maybe even experienced some of our own brushes with the woo-woo. It’s the bump in the night, the sudden onset of goose pimples, the whisper that comes from nowhere and…

My father is the guy on the left I couldn’t stop thinking about scent after I published my most recent essay. About my father, an earthy outdoorsy Czech who, after he retired, virtually stopped bathing—washing only in lakes and streams. It was funny, and it was also kind of awful, and unforgettable. About my babies, who arrived smelling of the remnants of heaven, like they still had one foot in…

Two years in the Arabian Gulf finally turned me on to perfume. It started with my friend Zahra, who always smells wonderful. Hugging her is like being enveloped in a cloud of fresh roses, smoky whiskey, and something else I can’t quite name. I always hang on too long, just to breathe her in. So, when I opened my Christmas gift from my husband this year and found a bottle of Zahra’s perfume…

In first grade, at recess, I watched a girl in my class peel a big scab off her knee—actually reopening the wound—put it in her mouth, and chew. She didn’t know I was watching. When she looked up and caught me, she just kept chewing. Held my gaze. Didn’t stop. It was a little awkward, but neither one of us could tear our eyes away. We became friends later and never spoke of it. I’m willing to…

The view from my friend’s house. Life in Doha right now looks almost exactly like it did before the bombings. I realize that might sound strange coming from someone living about a hundred miles from Iran during a war, and whose city is being intermittently targeted. But it’s the truth. For one thing, it’s Ramadan. Which means that during the day, Doha is quieter than usual anyway. Most…

I don’t watch hockey anymore. I’m not even sure why. But I watched it as a girl, mostly—no, exclusively—because my grandfather did. My grandfather (Deda, I called him) wasn’t just any fan. He was an Olympic hockey player who skated for the Czech national team in the 1936 Games when he was fifteen-years-old. He may have been the youngest hockey player to ever compete in the Olympics at the time. I…

What if you couldn’t tell which thoughts were yours? Night of the Mother is about a woman fighting for her soul while a voice inside her head—her own voice—whispers that she’s already lost it. That she’s transforming into something that murders. That feeds on cruelty. That would hurt everyone she loves and feel pleasure in it. Is it true? Is she actually becoming monstrous? Or is something…

In Appalachian Virginia, some debts get paid in blood, and some histories refuse to stay buried. Old magic runs deep in the red clay, curses pass down like heirlooms, and the moon witches who’ve protected these mountains for centuries know that some protections exact a terrible price. Poetry becomes prophecy here. Love stories turn lethal. And the dead don’t always stay buried where you left…

It’s that time of year when we’re all supposed to announce our intentions—lose weight, learn Italian, finally write that novel. But I’ve been thinking less about what I want to become this year and more about what’s already been quietly shaping me all along. Living an ocean away from home, in my case Doha, Qatar, has a way of making a person reckon with her own mythology. The stories you tell…

Here we are again—that liminal stretch between autumn’s death and winter’s full arrival, when the veil thins and the ghosts get chatty.  I’m writing this from Virginia, where snow dusts the Blue Ridge Mountains like bone ash on dark earth, but my mind keeps circling back to Doha. That’s where I’ve put an ocean between myself and my origin story and have finally heard my own ghosts clearly enough…

My husband giving thanks to the afternoon light a few years ago. This is my quirky, annual list of things for which I’m grateful. Maybe you’ll find some of the items a bit oddball—I can’t deny that unlikely things have made my list in years past. Like a swarm of flies that congregated at my office window, and the spooky sound of footsteps at night, when no one else is home. Those might not make…

On our shelves were a handful of worn, black and white picture books of the old country. Czechoslovakia. Prague. This was where my people were from, and not in some distant past—my mother had escaped communism when she was pregnant with me, taking my eight-year-old brother with her. I grew up outside of Chicago, in a house with a sunken living room, riding a banana seat bicycle down streets that…

Twila thought grief was the worst thing that could consume a family. She was wrong… Listen, I know you come here for thrillers—for the kind of stories where someone’s always running, where the threat is human and the stakes are survival. I respect that. That’s why I write the books I write for you. But sometimes a writer needs to let something darker out of the cage. From October 1st-3rd, my…

There’s something unsettling about discovering that the stories you’ve been avoiding are the ones you’re meant to tell. For decades, horror lived in me like a secret language I refused to speak fluently. I could appreciate its literature—Dracula, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works. I could lose myself in Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic voice, Christopher Lee’s Gothic grandeur. But writing it?…

On Sunday, I’ll board a plane for Doha. That’s two days left of this thick Appalachian summer–the floral air, the bats tracing dusk with their wings, the laughter of friends drifting through the heat. Two days left with my children, scattered on their early-adult adventures, and my Boston Terrier, Barney, who will stay behind with my middle daughter. Two days left with the skeleton of my house,…