Incy Black | Fight or Flight?

I once shut down a Haunted House experience at a seaside resort—aged thirty-eight. Too terrified to move forward or retrace my steps, the lights had to be turned on, men had to come rescue me, and they were mightily grumpy, especially as it must have taken them a good fifteen minutes to coax me passed the PSYCHO-esque “woman in a rocking chair.” Tears were shed, there was a lot of nonsensical yelling (from me) about how scaring people should be made illegal, cups of tea were offered because that’s how we Brits deal with shock. An acute over-reaction on my part? Quite possibly, but my terror was real, and my response instant, primal and uncontrollable.

Which is probably why the heroines and heroes and their reactions to threat or pressure in my romantic suspense books flirt the edge of extreme. Whether when facing down a killer or falling in love, their responses can be out of character and unpredictable as they resist, deny, and struggle against the obstacles suddenly making their usually smooth life-path decidedly rocky. Something explored in greater depth in Hard to Protect where with emotions already running high, artificial adrenaline in the form of a drug is added to the mix.

And it is my fascination with very nature of a character’s reaction to super stressful events that brings me back, time and again, to the romantic suspense genre where danger and intense emotion combine to thrill and challenge the boundaries of what is credible. Fast paced and the ‘unexpected’ are my reading jam. Blame the Australian writer Matthew Reilly for this. He does for the written word what the movie DIE HARD did for Hollywood—slam the audience with relentless, high-octane action. It matters not a jot to me that Mr. Reilly has been criticized for ‘straining credulity’, his wild stories and style of delivery got a whole lot of reluctant adolescent boys reading—enough said. And happy-ever-afters should be hard fought for, after all, "the course of true love never did run smooth."