Ty Tracey’s latest horror novel, The Corroding, starts off in a place that’s pretty terrifying: the depths of a salt mine, thousands of feet underneath Lake Erie. A mine supervisor, Tim Magidson, receives an unsettling call from one of his supervisors. After blasting deeper into the mine, the workers found something disturbing underneath the rubble. The supervisor has a hard time explaining to Tim exactly what they found, so Tim calls in the company geologist and makes his way underground. When he gets down to the blast site, he finds something he can’t even begin to comprehend:

The crystal was round in shape and approximately the size of a basketball. It was embedded into the mine face about four feet above the floor. It pulsed between a shimmering black and a deep blood red. As it turned to red, more of the haunting illumination wafted from it. There was a strong feeling of unease the closer they got to it. It enveloped the two men in something of a haze that segregated them from their surroundings. If they turned around, they could only see blackness even though they were mere feet from dozens of workers and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment and exterior illumination. There was an unmistakable sense that whatever this thing was, it was in complete control of its environment.

Little do Tim and the miners know that by finding the strange crystal, they have unleashed an unspeakable horror. As the freed evil being wreaks havoc, The Corroding follows FBI crime scene investigator Lori Cruz and a large cast of characters working to save humanity. Kirkus Reviews describes the resulting novel as “an expansive, devilishly creative, genre-bending work incorporating horror, fantasy, and science fiction elements....This 600-page doorstopper requires a healthy attention span and a true appreciation for all things sinister.”

Tracey, who is a software engineer living in Massachusetts, is no stranger to literary success. His first novel, Three Days in Ashford, was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award and won the 2019 IndieReader Discovery Award. But though he has always had wide-ranging thematic interests—he describes himself as “an author with a passion for horror, paranormal, alternative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy”—the idea that eventually became The Corroding presented a unique challenge.

“The [novel], at its most fundamental level, is a pleading attempt to cast a light on our rarity as a species,” he says, “and how patently absurd it is that we treat and believe in one another in whatever fashion the latest somewhat popular man in a suit who has the loudest microphone says we should. But all the while, [the story remains] a really scary horror novel.”

What scares us as individuals is often a deeply personal question. Some people can read a tense haunted house story and sleep soundly all night but won’t touch contemporary horror movies because the bloody effects are too realistic. For Tracey, the frightening things he wanted to explore in The Corroding are more mundane. And, perhaps, even scarier because they are realistic.

“When I set out to write The Corroding, I [planned] to allegorically summarize a lot of my thoughts and personal beliefs around the way I saw our civilization collectively heading at the time,” he says. “A lot of folks get such feelings off of their chests through social media posts or confiding in friends and family members who share their views. I, for whatever reason, never do any of those things. Instead, I guess I was just starting to bottle a lot of it up, and then I decided to release that pent-up emotion through my writing. I saw a world outside my window doing everything in its power to marginalize as many people as it could, those marginalized people dying as a result, and everyone forgetting the value and intrinsic power of the ‘great collective’ in favor of a sinister agenda pushed by the few and capable.”

Tracey’s fear came not from a computer-animated monster in a movie or the climactic scene in the latest Stephen King novel, but from watching American society splinter into pieces instead of uniting to use “the full faculties of our collective strength” to overcome adversity. He imagined how a powerful, terrifying collective enemy might be enough of a threat to bring people back together. “Only by overcoming everything we’ve been taught to hate about one another may we ever know peace,” he says.

Tracey admits that had he pared down The Corroding to purely the elements of a horror novel, it would have made for an easier writing and editing process. But he knew the extra work would help him tell the story he wanted to tell, and that adding the bigger context to the scarier moments would make them more memorable. “I love Michael Crichton so much for this very reason,” he says. “Would Jurassic Park have been as transcendent a story if nobody had any idea...where the dinosaurs had come from? I don’t think so, personally. The research Crichton put into formulating the premise, and the plausible mistakes his characters made to unleash the horror elements, render the eventual scares so much more relevant and enjoyable.”

But other than keeping a big story with a large cast of characters on track, Tracey still had to make sure he was going to deliver on the thrills and chills horror fans are looking for. Tracey, who loves a good scare as a reader, believes that the best way to scare other people is to start on a good premise rather than something that’s extreme and has a shock factor. “I write what I think would scare me and hope for the best,” he says. “I think if it’s gonna scare me—and I’ve been through the mill a million times because I write horror, read so many horror novels, and watch so many horror movies—I feel like it’ll also scare a lot of people.”

Occasionally, Tracey surprises even himself with how scary his own writing can be. “Sometimes I do creep myself out,” he says. He spends much of his time with his wife, playing with their young daughter and their rescue pit bull—not exactly the sort of activities you’d associate with what comes out in his horror writing. “I’m not a weird person at all; I’m a pretty normal guy day-to-day, but then I’ll write [about something] horrible happening, and I think, Gosh, who am I!”

Kirkus writes that while The Corroding might be long and detailed, it is always “an exciting story,” with pages that “fly byas the menacing apparition goes about systematically extinguishing all of the world’s minds and bodies. The story is marvelously character-driven with pitch-perfect dialogue; the insidious supernatural elements are finely developed and sharpened with brutal precision.” Kirkus gave The Corroding its prestigious starred review, as well as naming it one of the best Indie books of 2023.

Fans of Tracey’s writing have plenty to look forward to after finishing The Corroding and reading their way through his backlist. The author keeps a blog on his website, where he updates readers on exciting developments, like the upcoming audiobook of The Corroding that will be ready for listeners in December. Tracey’s blog also mentions that he is hard at work on his next novel, Blackened Time, which will be set in the same universe as The Corroding and Three Days in Ashford.

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.