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Deep, Dark Concept
Smiling Faceless Woman follows a linguistics student whose carefully planned life unravels when terrifying paranormal experiences lead him into a group investigating the mysterious forces behind hauntings. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In a way, I have been thinking about this story all my life. I was always interested in the supernatural and the paranormal, and devoured whatever content was playing on TV, and borrowed whatever books from the library on the subject. I used to go ghost hunting with my little brother. I have had many experiences I can’t explain. So, I guess this book was my way of making sense of spirits and hauntings and the afterlife. But the genesis of this specific idea was a very difficult semester I had in college. Like in the novel, I was overworked and stressed and burnt out, and found myself balancing everything on the line from grades to relationships to a few mysterious encounters. I would say the other inspiration was just being a healthcare worker, surrounded by the sick and the hurt and the dying. I have worked in many various historic facilities, and with each strange thing seen or heard or heard about, a kind of deep, dark concept brewed that much more.
How did you decide how much of the story should focus on everyday life versus supernatural events?
There were a few sentiments I had going in. I always appreciated college and that time in my life, being a mall rat. I started to feel like modern rock is kind of dead, so I wanted to relive that a little. And I missed the early internet days when memes were still new and fresh and just starting to blossom. My first drafts were actually a little too heavy on the day-to-day stuff so I had to pull back. Although it was fun to dip into nostalgia and coming-of-age territory, of course, this is first and foremost a horror suspense thriller. I consider the structure of the book in three acts. First is mostly romance and some paranormal. Second and third is some romance and mostly paranormal. The relationship starts as a foundation but becomes a kind of frame narrative because the action and mystery builds up then takes over. I think this approach worked because you really care for the main character first before every terrifying otherworldly threat.
What inspired the creation of SPIRAL?
During the preparation of this novel, I felt compelled to do research on a level I hadn’t done before. I always do some, but not to this extent. I talked to a paranormal investigator, a preacher and also a local expert. I actually went to reportedly haunted locations by myself at night with nothing but a flashlight. So, a lot is inspired from these conversations and these experiences. I got a lot of different perspectives and ideas. As for the group itself, the name was something I thought of a long time ago. I knew the story would begin with a protagonist and a love interest but expand to this whole other route where I needed a cast of characters. The initial concept was kind of like your typical crew from those paranormal investigation reality series before. But I decided to use each character to represent a new layer of depth. In doing so, I made each character very unique from one another, and there was a nice ongoing contrast which was so pleasant to capture.
What do you hope readers take away from Alex and April’s reflections on their past?
First and foremost, my goal was to make the reader fall in love with these characters, and to fall in love with these characters being together. My intention was for audiences to get a slice of their lives and personality, a taste of the chemistry and attraction between them, and feel how they go so perfectly together in a lot of different ways. But I wanted there to be flaws and imperfection and incompatibility to some extent that could be examined with a magnifying glass. I thought it would be interesting to see a whole relationship timeline, from the crush stage to the courting stage, getting comfortable and then getting complicated. My aim is to have introspective lingering questions about what defines love and romance, and what makes a relationship work or not work, plus timing, plus fate.
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SMILING FACELESS WOMAN is a multiple award winning textured, nostalgic, cerebral thriller that dissects college life versus the so-called real world, crosses blurry lines between just friends or more than friends, transports readers back to the age of Sony Ericsson and the Motorola Razr and early internet culture, and explores the possibility of an afterlife through a scientific, supernatural and spiritual lens.
Smiling Faceless Woman
Smiling Faceless Woman, by Thomas J. Gebhardt III, is an expansive supernatural horror novel that mixes paranormal investigation, romance, coming-of-age anxiety, and a heavy dose of late-2000s pop culture. The story centers on Alexander Jacobsen, an ambitious linguistics student whose carefully mapped-out future starts coming apart when disturbing events invade his sleep and then his waking life. What begins with sounds, misplaced objects, sleep paralysis, and an oppressive presence eventually leads Alex into SPIRAL, a paranormal investigation group that treats hauntings as equal parts fieldwork, folklore, psychology, and spirituality. That blend gives the novel its identity. It’s paranormal horror with a personal center, where ghosts matter because of what they reveal about the people living around them.
Alex is a fitting lead because he’s skeptical enough to question nearly everything he experiences, but curious enough to keep following the evidence. His gradual acceptance of his family’s paranormal sensitivity works particularly well because it develops alongside a much more ordinary identity crisis involving school, work, ambition, family, and adulthood. The book repeatedly returns to his idea of “LIFE101L,” the informal education he gets when his meticulously planned life refuses to follow the syllabus. His relationship with April Wen becomes a major part of that education. Their connection moves through friendship, unrequited affection, sex, domestic life, grief, and eventual separation, giving the supernatural horror romance side of the book considerable space. When the novel jumps ahead and shows them officially together, that relationship feels authentic because readers have already spent so much time watching it form.
One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is how thoroughly it inhabits its era. MySpace, Nintendo DS systems, Motorola Razrs, mall jobs, MP3 players, memes, movies, bands, clothes, food, and internet culture aren’t occasional decorations. They’re part of the characters’ everyday vocabulary. The result is a remarkably specific time-capsule texture, especially in Alex and April’s scenes together. The prose likes to linger on conversations, meals, music choices, shopping trips, jokes, and small physical gestures, so the pacing has a roomy, episodic feel. That approach also changes the rhythm of the ghost story material. A frightening encounter can sit beside goofy banter or an ordinary afternoon, which makes the paranormal feel as though it’s intruding on an actual routine.
The occult horror and paranormal-investigation sections broaden the novel considerably. SPIRAL’s cases range from a dead child haunting a cottage to a violently malevolent presence on a ranch, and the team approaches each location with cameras, EVP recorders, EMF meters, historical research, prayer, intuition, and competing theories. The novel is especially interested in the argument between scientific explanations and supernatural ones. It discusses sleep paralysis, environmental causes, psychokinesis, folklore, Christian theology, indigenous spiritual practices, and the idea of Sheol as an overlapping realm of the dead. That investigative framework eventually grows into much darker territory involving curses, witchcraft, sacrifice, possession, and the literal smiling faceless woman. By the climax, the restrained unease of Alex’s early haunting has expanded into full-scale demonic horror, with the members of SPIRAL forced into a confrontation that makes their earlier investigations look almost gentle by comparison.
I liked that Smiling Faceless Woman is interested in connection. Alex begins as someone obsessed with controlling the trajectory of his future, and the novel keeps putting him in situations where knowledge, plans, and certainty only take him so far. Friendship, family, romance, faith, grief, and intuition gradually become just as important to him. Even after the violent paranormal climax, the story ends on quieter emotional ground, with Alex and April looking back on what they shared and acknowledging that life has carried them somewhere neither expected. That gives this ghost-hunting horror novel a surprisingly reflective finish. Its ghosts are memorable, its occult mythology is ambitious, and its real subject is the messy process of learning how to live when the world, both the visible part and the part hiding behind it, turns out to be much bigger than you planned for.
Pages: 440 | ASIN : B0FHF3MH7H
