Todd Keisling: Five Things I Learned Writing The Sundowner’s Dance

Jerry Campbell just wants to be left alone. Grief-stricken over the death of his wife Abigail, the elderly widower and recent retiree is desperate for a change of scenery. When his realtor suggests a new home in Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, Jerry figures it will be a nice place to spend the rest of his days in solitude.

Until he moves in.

Weird neighbors. Nightly block parties. Strange noises across his rooftop at all hours. Worst of all is Arthur Peterson, chairman of the Fairview Acres Community Association, who seems obsessed with coaxing Jerry into participating in neighborhood activities.

At first, Jerry shrugs off the incidents and eccentricities, telling himself he doesn’t want to be the guy who complains about everything—but that all changes one evening when Katherine Dunnally appears on his doorstep with an ominous warning: “You need to leave. The worms…they dance at nightfall…”

His neighbors all say Katherine suffers from a form of dementia called Sundowner’s Syndrome, but as the weeks progress and the strangeness mounts, Jerry begins to suspect there is something else going on in his neighborhood. Something that has to do with the huge stone in the community park…

Heartfelt and unsettling, Todd Keisling’s latest novel, The Sundowner’s Dance, propels readers through a terrifying exploration of grief, dementia, and perhaps the greatest horror of all: growing old.

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The story always knows, and sometimes you really have to get out of your own way to let it call the shots.

I’m one of those “plantser” sort of writers—I plot a beginning and ending, but pants everything in between. And let me tell you, when I started the story that would eventually become The Sundowner’s Dance, I did not want to write another novel. I’d just finished rewriting a doorstopper called Devil’s Creek and wanted to focus on nothing but short fiction for a while. This story, originally titled “Beneath the Eye of the Moon,” began its life as a novelette. All the dots were there, I just had to connect them—but around the 11k word mark, I realized this story wanted to be longer. Needed to be longer. So, I shelved it for about four years and wrote Scanlines instead. I won’t recap the whole process here. In a nutshell, I resisted this story every step of the way, until it became clear to me that I couldn’t anymore. Lisa Dunnally was the catalyst—the daughter of one of the protagonists. She showed up on Jerry Campbell’s doorstep one day, forever altering the course of what I thought would be the final act of the story, and added some much-needed dimension to her mother, Katherine. I realized I’d been holding the story back in my refusal to let it become what it wanted to be: a full-length novel. The experience taught me tough lessons in storytelling. Sometimes, the story knows better than we do, and it’s not the writer’s job to create so much as it is to record.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s are horrible, but “Sundowning” is worse.

I’m no stranger to dementia. My granny experienced it in her final years. Hallucinations, mostly. Irritability. Mood swings. I’d heard of “sundown syndrome” before writing this book, but I didn’t know what it entailed. Once the term found its way into the story, I had to do my diligence and research the topic so I could speak on it with some authority. For the story’s purposes, there’s an “illness” (for lack of a better term) that presents effects of dementia, and often in reverse of sundowning—the victim becomes a different, better version of themself at night. However, the real thing is worse. It occurs in the mid- to late stages of dementia, often triggered by insomnia and over-stimulation during the day, and wreaks havoc on a person’s psyche. Sundowning patients have good days and bad days, but every night is a bad night. They begin seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, suffer from body aches, everything irritates the shit out of them, and more. Imagine that you can’t tell the difference between reality and your dreams. Familiar faces look foreign to you; some even look scary to you. And you are certain that someone, somewhere, is out to do you harm. When you do finally sleep, your circadian rhythm is broken to the point of only allowing an hour or two here and there. You’re basically trapped in your malfunctioning brain. I can think of nothing more terrifying than that.

And then there’s cancer.

I was in the early stages of the second draft when my wife discovered a lump in her breast. She had it checked out and was scheduled for a biopsy. Then we waited. And waited. We tried to get things in order just in case. Both of us have lost family to the Big C. We’ve seen what it can do to a person. She’d lost a lot of weight in the months leading up to the discovery, and I think we both assumed the worst. Life was in limbo, and though rewrites were the last thing on my mind, I stuck with it because what else am I going to do, you know? I lost a lot of sleep. Spent a lot of nights at my laptop, spiraling to dark thoughts and possibilities. What would I do without her? How would I go on? We’re both neurodivergent in complimentary ways, handling things the other usually avoids, and the prospect of spending the second half of my life without her was the scariest thing I’ve faced. Like I said, I’ve lost family to cancer, but this hit differently somehow. It felt more personal, and I found myself grieving for her even when she was in the room. That was the longest two weeks of our lives, and I’m happy to say the lump was benign. As of her last checkup, she’s free and clear. But my god, the anxiety in the interim saturated my soul and wouldn’t let go. So, I channeled it into Jerry, the protagonist, who is a widower still grieving for his wife two years after her passing. He’s facing my personal fear: how to continue after such a loss.

Sometimes your characters have to blow something up, and I’m probably definitely on a watch list.

I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have a suspect search history. For my novel Devil’s Creek, I had to research homemade meth production and cult mentality. The Sundowner’s Dance took me down a different online rabbit hole: homemade explosives. Ammonium nitrate, sometimes referred to as ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), the stuff farmers use to fertilize crops, is highly explosive. It’s what Timothy McVeigh used to perpetrate the bombing in Oklahoma City back in ’95. Like my research into meth production, I discovered the instructions on how to create a bomb (by accident, I swear) using ANFO. So, yeah, I’m on a watch list somewhere. Then again, who isn’t?

We need more elderly protagonists.

I grew up among the elderly, and was partially raised by my grandmother and great-grandmother. I was around for conversations involving prescriptions, elder care, and insurance headaches. I’ve witnessed strokes and their after-effects, and the depression that settles in as one realizes their body is failing them. Life doesn’t end at 65 and people don’t disappear when they retire. They go on living in partial invisibility, only visible when they become an “inconvenience,” seemingly separate from the rest of the society as they exist in their so-called “golden” or “twilight” years. I feel this whole facet of life is underrepresented in horror these days. Maybe it’s the social discourse pitting generations against one another—Boomers and Millenials, etc.—that’s made us hesitant to tackle the subject; or maybe it’s that we’re afraid to face the prospect of aging ourselves. But that’s the beauty of it, I think. Aging awaits us all. We can’t escape it. It’s ripe for horror based on these facts alone.

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TODD KEISLING is the two-time Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of Devil’s Creek, Scanlines, Cold, Black & Infinite, and most recently, The Sundowner’s Dance, among several others. A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was an Indie Book Award finalist in Horror & Suspense (2013). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.

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