(typewriter clicks) (bell dings) (gentle music) - Hi, I'm Adam Godfrey, and this is "Body of Water".

It centers on Glenn, who is our main character, and his teenage daughter, Lauren, who have suffered a tremendous tragedy in the drowning of his wife and her mother about six years prior.

Glenn decides to plan a weekend getaway into the Appalachian Mountains, just the two of them.

En route to their destination, they make a pit stop in a local diner and that's when things go sideways pretty quickly, as they find themselves trapped inside the diner as a living predatory body of water encircles the diner in search of prey.

- If "Jaws" didn't scare us enough about going into the water, you decide that you're gonna scare us just about the water itself.

Where did the idea come from to have a living, moving threat in water?

- Our family was vacationing in Ocracoke Island and my wife got caught in a rip current, and it took her out, and she barely made it.

My father-in-law, and I swam out, you know, we managed to get her back into shore.

But following that event, I kind of just asked myself, you know, "What could have been more horrific than that?"

And kind of the unexpected answer that came to me was if the water was actually a living antagonist.

You know, and that, that idea kind of gripped me.

(tense music) There's only so many ways you can portray water, you know, especially in the context of this book and how it moves and how it terrorizes the characters.

And I think most, most importantly to me was to make it believable.

And that's key to it, you know?

Anybody can come up with any kind of outlandish concept, and on its surface, this is really outlandish, you know?

But actually reading the book, I think people would see, you know, I took, I tried to take great care, you know, in applying a degree of actual science to it.

Making it plausible, you know?

And truly horrific concepts stem from the believable.

- [Jeremy] Adam, thank you so much for being here.

- [Adam] Thank you.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading.

(bell dings) (tense music) - [Adam] I like to, you know, bake in a lot of that plausible science and technology into my books, and so you end up with this amalgamation of suspense, thriller, horror.

I love that genre crossing aspect of works like this.