The Apartment Awaits...

When I first heard of The Apartment, something about it chilled my blood and I knew I had to get it involved in my Murder Month!

The Apartment is an Audible original thriller, written by KL Slater (author of The Silent Ones, Closer, The Mistake and other creepy thriller), which is inspired by the terrifying "Little Albert" Experiment. I won't go to much into what the plot of this is, but let me be as vague as I can.

Freya is struck by tragedy. Losing her husband and her house, she needs to find somewhere to live quickly. So when she meets by chance Dr Marsden, she can't believe her luck. He offers her and her five year old daughter, Skye, a place to live. A small apartment in an exclusive part of London for a fraction of the market rent. When she moves into Adder House, she feels comfortable with the other residents.

But strange things start happening and no matter what Freya does, she can't help feeling that she and Skye are never truly alone... Freya might have escaped the problems of her past, but it looks like danger is in Adder House, and they are terrifying...

Now, I am thrilled to have a small guest post from KL Slater, talking a little about The Apartment and I hope to will creep you out to check it out!

I want to thank KL for writing this post - I know how busy she is! And I want to thank Anna at Midas PR for asking this would be up my street! Now, if you want to check KL out, visit her via her website - klslaterauthor.com - or via her Twitter at @KimLSlater. And if you want to check out The Apartment, you can visit Audible now!

When Audible approached me to write an Audible Original I was really excited by the idea as an avid audiobook fan myself. I was aware of the increasingly popularity of audio books and was attracted by the prospect of having creative freedom in terms of the idea.

I usually write psychological thrillers for, a crime genre that is my favourite genre to both read and write.

When I began thinking about a story I might like to craft, I remembered something striking that I discovered online a few years ago that I discovered just generally surfing online. 

I’d stumbled across a video of The Little Albert experiment which had taken place in the 1920’s, by a psychiatrist called professor John B Watson. 

At that time the experiment was received very positively and hailed as a great stride forward in psychology circles and propelled Watson to fame. 

Today, the Little Albert experiment is no longer acceptable, not least because it is unethical. Watson, now an infamous figure, actually conditioned fear into a perfectly normal baby boy and although this was considered ground-breaking at the time, he did have his critics. Not least because the child was never de-conditioned from the fear Watson imposed on him. 

I found an enormous range of resources online for this experiment and actual video footage can be readily accessed by a simple Google search. It truly is horrific and unacceptable in light of our thinking today.

Still, the seed of it wedged firmly in the back of my mind and when Audible gave me the chance to come up with ideas, the Little Albert experiment seemed like a very good start. I knew the story would still fall into the psychological thriller genre I love writing but would also be slightly different to the domestic noir type thrillers I usually produce.

Setting was something that interested me early on in the process. To date, all of my books have been set in Nottingham, where I was born and still live.

I visit London quite a bit for both business and leisure and usually stay in Kensington. My husband and I love walking around the streets there, looking at the enormous, grand old houses. Lots of them have been converted into fancy apartments.

Developing the idea, I thought about bringing the past into the modern day. I got thinking about a young woman with a small daughter who’d been struck by tragedy and had to sell her house. 

What if she got an amazing offer, the answer to all her accommodation problems and the chance to start anew? An opportunity, perhaps, that anyone would find very difficult to turn down.

So my protagonist, Freya, and her five-year-old daughter, Skye, move into a fabulous apartment in Adder House, Kensington. 

My husband took a picture of the house that I imagined as Adder House.

And that was the beginning of my idea that became The Apartment.

I found writing the Audible Original a very interesting process. I wouldn’t say I intentionally wrote it differently to my usual books but I did often think, during the writing process, about the fact it was being written exclusively for an audio format.

The flashbacks, an integral part of the novel’s structure, were an ideal opportunity to capitalise on this and I wrote the flashbacks in the form of a journal and also an old voice recording. 

I knew this was an ideal plot device and would translate really well into audio.

I was lucky enough to be invited by Audible to their recording studios in London to see the main narrator, Tuppence Middleton, recording one afternoon. 

She’s done such an amazing job and I saw first-hand how the narrative I’d written translated into the spoken word.