I am the first to admit I don’t like the horror genre. I don’t get how people find entertainment value in watching other people being mutilated, tortured, and killed off in any number of different means. The human imagination seems to have never ending variations on how to inflict pain and misery on other humans. It always makes me think of the line in Clash Of The Titans where Perseus meets Ammon the playwright (played wonderfully by Burgess Meredith) who delivers the line “I was partial to tragedy in my youth. That was before experience taught me that life was tragical enough without my having to write about it.”
The wife writes horror. She has an affinity for it. She attributes it to having grown up in a haunted house. She is good at it, which is bad for me because she usually has me beta read for her. Some of her stories are truly disgusting and I have to spend a lot of time using brain bleach to blot the stories from my mind. Usually she does have a theme of good winning over evil in the end, which makes reading her stories a little more tolerable.
So, why did my Muse hand me an idea for a horror story the other day?
It just came out of nowhere, the way most ideas from my use come to me. It’s a weird, quirky idea and I don’t know if it has already been done or not, since I am not widely read or well-versed in the field. It may very well end up being a variation on a theme, but hey, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun.
I don’t know how to develop the idea, but I’m sure I can consult with the wife about it. I imagine this as being a slow build kind of story, one where odd things keep happeming, and it keeps building until the characters realize too late that they are doomed. None of this blood and gore, with graphic depictions designed to be nothing but grotesque. No madman slicing people apart with an oversized bladed weapon in any number of creative ways. No monster lurking in the dark, jumping out of the shadows, ginormous teeth ripping people apart.
It would revolve around something that seems totally innocuous at first, something you would think couldn’t possibly hurt you. It seems to me that would be the most horrific type of story. The thing that you just dismiss as not being able to harm you that ends up destroying you. Something that gives you a sense of betrayal. I’ll have to dig deeper into this to see what develops. I’ll see what details the Muse wants to pass along.
What really surprises me is that I’m going along with this idea. As I said, I’m not a horror writer. I once wrote a horror story about a guy torturing a young thug who had been playing ‘Knockout’, a game where the youth walks up to a random person and hits them in the face, trying to knock them out with one blow. I read a news story about it and my Muse had a bad reaction, and handed me the story. I guess that’s her way of dealing with things that bother her. I took the story to my Writers’ Guild and read it, looking for feedback. Only one person in the room thought the story was disturbing. Everyone else thought it was funny. All I could say when they were done critiquing the story was ‘You people are sick.’
Anyway, if I do write this story, I might publish it under a pen name. I wouldn’t want it to turn into a bestseller and then have people want more horror stories from me. I don’t think I’d enjoy writing them very much. Unless it is a ‘Children of the Corn‘ situation. It started as a short story by Stephen King. I think it was nine pages long. It got turned into a series of ten movies, with two reboots of the original movie. Hey, if it makes money like that I’ll be happy to have written a horror story.
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