What I Found When I Stopped Using Curse Words

Posted on 07/01/2026 by mapoll

There is no profanity in my books. Readers notice, and now and then someone asks me about it, usually with a little surprise in their voice, because my stories are not gentle. They are supernatural thrillers. There is real fear in them. So how do you carry a character through terror and fury and grief without ever reaching for a curse word? That is the puzzle I want to share with you today, because the answer taught me more about writing than almost anything else.

The honest answer is that it is harder. And that turned out to be the best thing about it.

Where It Started

Part of it is just who I am. I am a Christian, and I tend to write the way I talk, which means the salty words never really make it onto the page. That is not me pretending the world is a clean place. It is more that those words have never been the tools I reach for, in life or in fiction.

And here is what surprised me. Clean does not mean tame. Some readers have told me they finished one of my books in the dark and then got up to check that the door was locked. The dread is real. It turns out you can scare a person silly without a single rough word, and figuring out how became one of the most interesting puzzles of my writing life.

Take the easy words away, and you discover how much is waiting underneath them.

What I Had to Learn Instead

Here is the part fellow writers will recognize. A curse word is a quick road. When a character is furious, terrified, or breaking, it is the simplest thing in the world to drop in an expletive and let the reader fill in the rest. It works, and plenty of wonderful writers use it well. I just do not have that road available to me, so I have to find another way across.

Take that road away and you are forced to do something better. You have to ask what this person would actually do. How their hands move. What they say instead. The way fear sits in the throat and changes a voice. You have to find the precise image that delivers the same gut punch without the offense. That search, sometimes maddening, is where real voice is born.

A man who goes very quiet and very still can be more frightening than a man who screams a curse. A whispered line can land harder than a shouted obscenity. When you cannot lean on the shock of a word, you have to earn the shock of the moment. And earned shock lasts.

A Gift I Stumbled Into

So the way I write and the way I work turned out to be the same thing wearing two faces. The words I happened to leave out pushed me to become a sharper storyteller than I might have been otherwise. I did not plan it that way. It was a gift I stumbled into, and the longer I write, the more grateful for it I am.

If you are a writer too, I would gently offer this as something to play with, not a rule to follow. Try writing your angriest, most frightening scene without the easy words and see what you find. You might be surprised, the way I was, at how much more there is underneath them. And if you are a reader, I simply hope the stories keep you up at night. That is all I am ever really after.

Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the Ravens Cove Iconoclast Series. She writes stories with real dread and no profanity, and loves discovering just how much a quiet word can carry. She hosts the Real Ghost Chatter podcast and never stops looking for the line where the seen world meets the unseen.

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Forty Years in Alaska: What the Last Frontier Taught Me About Darkness

Posted on 06/24/2026 by mapoll

People ask me why I write about darkness. They expect a complicated answer. The truth is simpler than they want it to be. I spent more than forty years in Alaska, and Alaska teaches you that the dark and the light are both dramatic, and that neither one is ever very far from the other.

I did not live in the bush. I lived in Anchorage, a real city with traffic and coffee shops and grocery stores. But here is the thing about Anchorage that people from the Lower Forty-Eight never quite believe until they stand in it: the wild is minutes away. Genuine, untamed, indifferent wilderness, right at the edge of town.

Beauty With Teeth

You can be downtown in the morning and on a trail by lunch, and on that trail you are not the top of the food chain. Bears use those paths. Moose come through yards and they are not the gentle creatures people imagine; a cow moose protecting a calf is one of the most dangerous animals you will ever meet. The forests are deep and they do not care about you.

And it is breathtaking. That is the part outsiders miss. The same country that can kill you is the most beautiful place I have ever seen. The mountains, the inlet, the light coming sideways across the water. I loved it. I loved it for decades, the danger and the beauty bound together so tightly you could not pull them apart.

In Alaska, beauty and danger are not opposites. They live minutes apart, and sometimes they are the same thing.

A Land That Does Not Sit Still

Alaska does not let you forget that the ground itself is alive. The volcanoes wake up and dust the city with ash. The earth moves; if you have lived there long enough, you have felt a real earthquake, the kind that reminds you the solid world is only solid by permission. You learn to live with the knowledge that the floor under your feet has its own plans.

For a storyteller, that is everything. Beauty and danger, minutes apart. A land that can turn on you. Forests full of things that watch. I did not have to invent dread. I lived in a place that handed it to me, gift-wrapped in glory.

Where the Light Found Me

I want to be honest about something. I did not come to Christ until 1998, well into my Alaska years. For a long time I loved that country without understanding what it was showing me. When faith finally came, it did not erase the drama of the place. It explained it. The beauty and the danger, the light and the long dark, all of it suddenly read like a story written by Someone, with stakes that were real.

That is the instinct I carry into every book. The dark is real, and it has teeth. But it is never the whole picture, and it is never the end of the story. I learned that on the last frontier, in a place I loved with my whole heart, until I grew old enough that my body started asking for more sunshine than the North could give.

Alaska gave me the light and the dark in equal, dramatic measure. Every story I write is still trying to hold them both.

Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the Ravens Cove Iconoclast Series. She spent more than forty years in Alaska before relocating to Texas, and both places live in her writing. She hosts the Real Ghost Chatter podcast and never stops looking for the line where the seen world meets the unseen.

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What Animals Know About the Supernatural

Posted on 06/17/2026 by mapoll

Have you ever watched a dog stop cold in a doorway — perfectly still, staring at something you cannot see — and felt the hair rise on the back of your own neck?

You weren't imagining it. And neither was the dog.

I've spent years writing about the supernatural, and one of the truths I keep returning to is this: animals know things. They pick up on what we've trained ourselves to ignore. They don't rationalize away the feeling in a room. They don't talk themselves out of what they sense. They just react. And their reaction tells you everything.

Three animals in my Ravens Cove series have taught me that more deeply than I ever expected when I wrote them.

BC: He Never Doubted

BC showed up in Kat Melbourne's life the way most important things do — without warning and with attitude. Bart Andersen found him as a hissing, scratching kitten and brought him to Kat in a shoe box. She nursed him back to health. BC rewarded her with a lifetime of claws and unsentimental loyalty.

He is not a sweet cat. He bites. He holds grudges. He has left his mark on nearly everyone Kat loves. But when the darkness pressed in close — when the nightmares came, and the evil in Ravens Cove grew teeth — BC placed a velvet black paw on Kat's cheek and purred her back to sleep.

That's the thing about BC. He was never afraid of what lurked in that town. He knew exactly what was there, and he stayed anyway. That's not bravery in the human sense. That's something deeper. That's a creature who has never lost his connection to the world the rest of us can barely see.

"They don't rationalize away the feeling in a room. They don't talk themselves out of what they sense. They just react — and their reaction tells you everything."

The White Wolf: A Sign, Not a Pet

In Ingress, a snow-white wolf appears. Gold eyes. Regal bearing. An animal unlike anything the people of Ravens Cove have encountered before.

He isn't domesticated. He isn't a companion in any ordinary sense. He is something older. He is a creature who might move between the visible world and the one just beyond it. Alaska has always understood this. The Dena'ina people understood it. The land itself teaches it, if you're willing to be quiet long enough to listen.

When that wolf fixes his gold eyes on you, you don't ask what breed he is. You ask what he's trying to tell you. Because in a story about spiritual warfare, the line between the natural world and the supernatural one has always been thinner than we'd like to believe.

Carnelian: She Warned Them First

By the time Gorgon begins, a small Shetland Sheepdog turns up wounded and will not leave. Kat names her Carnelian. Ken Melbourne, a skeptic and former FBI agent, does not want a dog. Carnelian does not care. She appoints herself his bodyguard anyway.

The moment that defines her comes in Grandma Bricken's kitchen. Carnelian leaps to her feet and growls at an empty corner. The fur on her neck rises. She circles an invisible threat. Then something yanks her upward by the collar. An invisible force and something none of the humans in the room can detect.

Kat says it plainly: She (Carnelian) knew that nasty spirit was in Gram's kitchen before we did.

Carnelian knew before any of them. She knew before the prayer, before the confrontation, and before the danger became visible to human eyes. Just a petite, lovable Sheltie sounding the alarm.

What They're Telling Us

I don't think it's an accident that Scripture is full of animals responding to the unseen. Balaam's donkey saw the angel of the Lord and stopped walking long before Balaam understood why. The swine at Gadarene ran. Creation was made attuned to the spiritual world in a way that we, with all our reason and skepticism, have largely lost.

BC, the white wolf, Carnelian — they aren't decoration in my stories. They are witnesses. They see what the humans are still arguing about. And every time I wrote them reacting to the supernatural before the people around them caught on, I was writing something I believe is true: the unseen world is real; it is close; and sometimes the most honest testimony comes from those who never doubted it.

The next time your dog (or cat) stops cold in a doorway and stares, I hope you pay attention. They might know something you don't.

Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the Ravens Cove/Iconoclast series: Ravens Cove, Ingress, Gorgon, Dullahan, Andalusia Forest, and The Tide Weaver. She also hosts Real Ghost Chatter, a podcast exploring documented historical paranormal cases. Find her books at maryannpoll.com and on Amazon.

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What Makes Evil Feel Real

Posted on 06/10/2026 by mapoll

I didn’t set out to write a villain people would lose sleep over.

I set out to write the truth.

And the truth is this: evil is not a costume, and it is not a special effect. Real evil — the kind Scripture describes and the kind I believe walks this world — is ancient, purposeful, and patient. It has a name. It has a strategy. And it has absolutely no good in it.

That’s the evil I write.

Meet Iconoclast

In my first novel, Ravens Cove, I introduced the villain at the heart of the entire series. His name is Iconoclast. He is a demon. He is not a metaphor, not a symbol, and not a supernatural device. Iconoclast is a real, named, ancient demon who has claimed a territory and is working a plan.

His first appearance in the book sets the tone for everything that follows. When a man named Sweeney Tillmooth steps into the darkness of the ravine, he smells sulfur and decay before he hears anything. Then the presence growls. Then it laughs. And when Sweeney asks who’s there, the answer comes back like a sentence of death:

“I always answer a dying request. My name is Iconoclast, and I am your destiny.”

What follows is not gratuitous. But it is devastating. And it tells the reader everything they need to know: this is not a creature that can be reasoned with, reformed, or redeemed. There is no good in Iconoclast, not even a thread of it.

“Real evil has a name. It has a strategy. And it has absolutely no good in it.”

The Line I Will Not Cross

Here’s where I part ways with a lot of fiction in my genre.

There is a temptation, when you write a villain this dark, to pile on. More gore. More shock. As if the reader needs to be battered into believing the evil is real.

I don’t believe that. I’ve never believed that.

What creates genuine dread isn’t excess. It’s restraint. It’s the sulfur smell before the voice. It’s the moist sound of lips being licked in the dark. It’s what the imagination fills in after the page goes quiet. I write to the edge of what the reader can handle, and then I trust them to feel the rest. That is almost always more powerful than anything I could spell out.

As I have said many times, my books are not horror. They are supernatural thrillers, which means the darkness serves a purpose, but it isn’t the destination. It is the road that leads somewhere.

Evil With a Strategy

One of the things that makes Iconoclast so unsettling is that he operates by rules.

He has a hierarchy. He has named lieutenants: Gambogian, Caitiff, Venenose, Atramentous, and others, who carry out his orders. He has a territory. A timeline. A specific number of souls he needs before he gains full destructive authority over Ravens Cove. He even operates within a structure set by Satan himself, though he is always looking for ways to outmaneuver it.

This is deliberate on my part. A villain who simply rages is frightening for a moment. A villain with a plan is frightening all the way through.

And Iconoclast is utterly ruthless toward those beneath him. When one of his own demons fails a mission, he stomps on the creature’s neck without hesitation. There is no loyalty in him and definitely no mercy. Nothing that resembles care for anyone but himself and his ultimate goal. That is what a being with no good in it looks like.

Evil Needs an Opponent

Iconoclast is terrifying not just because of who he is, but because of who stands across from him.

Kat Melbourne is not a superhero. She is a woman who finds her faith in the middle of this fight. She is someone who did not believe before Iconoclast showed up, and who discovers in the darkest moments what she is truly made of. The strength she finds doesn’t come from physical power or perfect strategy. It comes from something Iconoclast cannot comprehend due to his arrogance, and it cannot take from her.

Grandma Bricken knows his name. She speaks it aloud in prayer. And that act — naming the enemy, bringing it into the light, standing in faith against it — is the heartbeat of everything I write. Because that is spiritual warfare in its truest form.

Iconoclast’s power is real. But so is the power that opposes him. And that tension of ancient evil with a plan versus ordinary people armed with extraordinary faith is what keeps readers turning pages at midnight.

Why It Matters

I write this way because I take my readers seriously.

You have encountered real darkness in your life. Not necessarily a demon named Iconoclast, but darkness that felt just as calculated, just as cold, just as intent on destruction. You don’t need me to water that down. You need a story that looks it in the eye, names it honestly, and then shows you what it looks like when light shows up anyway.

A villain who earns your fear. A hero who earns your hope. And a story that leaves you more certain than when you started: darkness doesn’t get the last word.

Mary Ann Poll is America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the six-book Ravens Cove/Iconoclast series, including her latest novel The Tide Weaver. She also hosts Real Ghost Chatter, a podcast exploring documented historical paranormal cases. Find her books on Amazon and learn more at maryannpoll.com.

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Why I Set a Thriller in the Texas Bayou

Posted on 06/03/2026 by mapoll

The first time I drifted through Caddo Lake on a boat, I understood why people go missing there.

Not the kind of missing you read about in police reports — though that happens too. I mean the other kind. The kind where something old and watching pulls your attention off the path, off the road, off the world you came from. You blink, and the cypress trees have closed in behind you. You turn around, and the water looks the same in every direction.

Caddo Lake sits on the Texas-Louisiana border, and it is unlike any place I have ever been — and I spent over forty years in Alaska, a state that knows a thing or two about wild and untamed land. Alaska's wildness is vast and cold and open. Caddo's wildness is close. Intimate. Draped in Spanish moss and silence.

The town of Uncertain, Texas sits right on its shore. Population: a handful. Name: perfect.

Because that's exactly how you feel there. Uncertain.

The bayou doesn't announce itself as threatening. That's what makes it so effective. The surface of the water is often still, reflecting sky and cypress and the ghostly gray curtains of moss above. Beautiful. Almost peaceful. But beneath the surface, the roots go deep — twisted, tangled, older than memory. And the legends that grow out of that place are the same way. They look like folklore on the outside. Look closer, and they feel like something that actually happened.

"The cypress trees have closed in behind you. You turn around, and the water looks the same in every direction."

I write supernatural thrillers. That means I'm always looking for places where the veil between what we see and what is real feels thin. Alaska gave me that — the Dena'ina legends, the long dark winters, the sense that something ancient watches from the treeline. Caddo Lake gives me something different. Something older in a different way. Swamp-old. Bayou-old. The kind of old that seeps up through the mud and wraps itself around your ankles before you notice.

When I floated through those cypress channels that day, I didn't just see a setting. I felt a story beginning.

The Spanish moss moved when there was no wind. The water held its secrets. And somewhere out past the tupelo trees, something made a sound I couldn't identify — not a bird, not a frog, not anything I could name.

I wrote it down. I always write it down.

For those of you who've followed me through the Ravens Cove series, you know I don't write horror. I write stories where darkness is real, where the supernatural has weight and consequence — but where light pushes back. Where goodness doesn't just survive, it fights. Caddo Lake gave me a place where that battle feels absolutely credible. The darkness there is not invented. It doesn't need to be.

But neither does the beauty. And that tension — between breathtaking and unsettling, between ancient grace and ancient dread — is exactly where my kind of story lives.

If you've never been to Caddo Lake, I hope one day you go. Take the boat tour near dusk. Let the moss drift. Listen.

Just don't wander too far from the path.

Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the Ravens Cove series. Her six-book series is available on Amazon. She also hosts the podcast Real Ghost Chatter, featuring true accounts of the supernatural. Learn more at maryannpoll.com.

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