“My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?” This was the Amazing Criswell’s question to the camera at the opening of the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space. And it turned out that your heart could stand those facts, indeed your heart got along just fine, because the strings pulling the scares were clearly visible.

But how does your cardio fare when it runs into a creator of horror and suspense with strong psychological skills? Someone who can set the uncanny and ghoulish loose in the ordinary world, make them seem as plainly real as traffic or breakfast? You may find out on Wednesday (March 19), when four writers of eerie thrills get together for The Dark Side, the next event in the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Incite series at the Central Library.

Toronto’s renowned Andrew Pyper will bring The Demonologist, his latest work of nuanced dread, in which a skeptical academic is suddenly locked in battle with a hellish spirit over the fate of his daughter. Also aboard will be Craig Davidson, author of such two-fisted novels as The Fighter and last year’s Giller-nominated Cataract City. His new novel, The Troop, sends a group of Boy Scouts into a forest roamed by a ragged and terrifying stranger—a tale so tenacious that Davidson had to write it under the pseudonym Nick Cutter to throw it off his trail.

Pyper and Davidson will be joined by two more denizens of the dark: Vancouver’s Sean Slater (yet another pen name) with his hard-edged procedural The Guilty, about the hunt for a bomber terrorizing our city; and Deryn Collier, the Nelson-based author of Open Secret, the newest in a series featuring coroner Bern Fortin, who is this time pursued by menacing secrets in his own past.

The evening gets under way at 7:30 p.m in the Central Library's Alice Mackay Room. Admission is free. See the Vancouver Writers Fest site for details.