Category Archives: horror writing

February 26, 2025 · 1:16 am

Talking to Nobody

I entered the classroom silently. Death doesn’t have to make any sound when it enters a room, but I remember many times when I entered a classroom in a fully enraged-lion roar. Probably too many times.

This time it was a small lesson to a small class. Little Mickey, ten years old, was sitting there in a front-row desk. He was wearing that stupid purple derby hat that he always wore in his imagination. And he was wearing nothing else besides.

I gave him that old death-eye stare of disapproval. He grinned and shrugged. “Hey, I like to write about nudists, okay? They tell the truth more than most people.”

I simply nodded.

Sitting the next row over, in the front seat also, middle-aged Mickey was slumped in his seat like the cynical, world-weary teacher-thing he actually was. I nodded disapprovingly at him too. “I know, I know,” he said. “My time is running out. I have to get started on my writing plan for real this time. My stories will never get written if I don’t.”

The third seat in the third row contained Old Coot Mickey with his wrinkled clothes, his long Gandalf-hair, and his frizzy author’s beard. He grinned his goofy grin at me and nodded at me cheekily. “I’ve got fourteen novels written and published now. Taint my fault that nobody ever reads ’em. They are mostly good stories, too.”

I rolled my eyes at the dark ceiling.

On the chalkboard I wrote out. Today’s Lesson Is…

“I know! I know!” shouted little Mickey, naked except for his purple hat. “The next novel is A Field Guide to Fauns. It is all about nudists in a nudist camp. I am definitely down with that!”

“Is that really a good idea, though?” asked middle-aged Mickey. “I think I was meant to be a writer of Young Adult novels, like the ones I taught so often in class. I know how those books are structured. I know their themes and development inside and out. I know how to write that stuff.”

“But the little naked guy has it right. You have ta be truthful in novels, even as you tell your danged lies.” Old Coot Mickey made his point by punctuating it with a wrinkled hand thumping on the top of his desk. “You have written novels with characters forcing other characters to make porn films in The Baby Werewolf, and sexual assault of a child in Fools and Their Toys, and lots of naked folks, and betrayal and death… All of that is the kinda stuff kids really want ta read. And them stories don’t glorify that stuff neither. Stories can help fight agin that stuff.”

“Remember, that stuff is hard to write about because I actually went through some of that stuff in my own life. It’s possible for even a fiction book to be just too real for a YA novel.” Middle-aged Mickey had entered fighting mode with his fists on his hips.

“But the underlying truth is why you had to write those stories to begin with. You have truth to tell… But in fiction form,” argued little Mickey.

“And horrible experiences turn into beautiful survival stories and heroes’ journeys with time and thoughtfulness and art,” said Old Coot Mickey.

I agreed with all three of me. I nodded and smiled.

“But you are Death, aren’t you?” asked middle-aged Mickey.

“And you’ve come to take away at least Old Coot Mickey!” declared little Mickey.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” I answered all three of me. “I am not Death. I am Nobody.“

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August 9, 2024 · 1:12 am

Books That Make You Hurt

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Yes, I read this book.  Yes, it scared the poop out of me.  Yes, it made me cry.  This is a uniquely horrific horror story that is so realistic that you know that it has actually happened in real life somewhere, sometime.  Only the names of the characters would be different.

I have a deep abiding respect for Richard Peck as a writer.  He earned that with his books A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago.  Those books made me laugh so hard it blew chocolate milk out of my nose.  And, yes, I was drinking chocolate milk at the time.  They are so realistic because the people in those stories are real people.  I know those people personally.  Of course, they have different names in real life.

But Are You In the House Alone? is a very different book from those other two masterpieces.  It tears your heart out and eats your liver because it is a first person narrative in the voice of a high school girl being stalked by a sexual predator.  Everything that happens to Gail in the high school, at home, and at the house where she babysits is hyper-real with horror movie levels of attention to detail.  I don’t wish to be a spoiler for this well-written book, but the narrator does not die in the book and it definitely does not have a happy ending.  For anyone who has the amount of empathy I do, and in many ways becomes the narrator-character by reading, reading a book like this can physically hurt.  A teacher like me has lived through horrible things like this happening to students before, it even happened to me as a boy, and it adds the slings and arrows of those things being re-lived as you read.

This is not the only book that has ever done this sort of damage to my heart strings.  I remember the pain from the conclusion of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.  You root for Little Nell and boo Daniel Quilp.  But the bad guy wins.  No happy ending can linger in the harp-strings of your memory-feeling song as long as a tragic outcome does.  I was there with Scout in that ridiculous costume in the dark when Bob Ewell was attacking her brother Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  That story was filled with wise and laughable things, but the stark horror of that climactic moment nearly wiped all the good feelings away, if not for the heroics of ghostly Boo Radley whose timely intervention brings it all back before the novel ends.  It horrifies me to admit it, but I was there, too, in the moment when the boys all turn on Simon on the beach with their sharpened sticks in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  They mistook him for the monster.  I still haven’t fully recovered from that reading trauma.

The thing about books that hurt to read which makes it essential that I never try to avoid them, is that they can add more depth and resonance to your soul than any light and fluffy piece ever could.  Life is much more like Lord of the Flies than it is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I am sadder but wiser for having read Are You In the House Alone?  I am recommending it to other readers like me who don’t so much live to read as they read in order to live.  Not because it is easy and good to read, but because it is hard and essential to read.  It will hurt you.  But it will leave you like it leaves its narrator, damaged, but both alive and purely resolved to carry on.

I have written one too.

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April 16, 2024 · 12:37 am

Is Mickey Icky?


This post is about writer doubt. And Stephen King. Do those two things go together? If they don’t then Mickey is an awful writer and does not know how to do what he does. It would mean Mickey is icky.
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I used to think Stephen King was a totally over-rated writer. Back in the early eighties I read Carrie, King’s first novel, and got halfway through Firestarter, and had to give up. Partly because the book was overdue at the library, and also because I found the books mechanical and somewhat joyless in the writing. I thought he suffered greatly in comparison to writers I was in love with at the time like Ray Bradbury and Thomas Mann. I began to tell others that King was somewhat icky.
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But King was obviously also somewhat successful. He began to get his books made into movies and people who don’t read discovered the evil genius of a man who tells stories to scare them and laces them with a bit of real humanity, real human feeling, and love.
I saw it first in Stand by Me. That movie, starring young Wil Wheaton as the Steven King autobiographical character, really touched my heart and really made for me a deep psyche-to-psyche connection to somebody who wasn’t just a filmmaker, but somebody who was, at heart, a real human being, a real story-teller.

Now, the psyche I was connecting to may very well have been Rob Reiner, a gifted story-teller and film-maker. But it wasn’t the only King movie that reached me. The television mini-series made from It touched a lot more than just the fear centers of my brain as well. And people whose opinions I respect began telling me that the books The Dark Tower Trilogy and Misery were also amazing pieces of literature.
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So I picked up a copy of Hearts in Atlantis at Half-Price Books and began reading a Stephen King novel for the first time since the 80’s. MY HOLY GOD! King is not a little bit icky. He is so NOT ICKY that it makes Mickey sicky to have ever thought King was even a little bit icky! Here is a writer who loves to write. He whirls through pages with the writer’s equivalent of ballet moves, pirouettes of prose, grand jetés of character building, and thematic arabesque penchées on every side of the stage. I love what I have discovered in a writer I thought was somewhat icky. Growth and power, passion and precision, a real love of both the words and the story. He may not know what he is doing. But I know. And I love it.
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And so, while I have been editing the first novel I ever wrote, Superchicken, to make it ready for self-publishing, I have begun to ask myself the self-critical question, “Is Mickey really icky when he writes?” My first novel is full of winces and blunders and head-banging wonders that make me want to throw the whole thing out. But I can’t throw it out. It is the baby in the first bathwater that I ever drew from the tap. The answer to the questions of Micky ickiness have yet to be determined, and not by me. I guess I have to leave it up to you.

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March 13, 2024 · 1:06 am

Writing Myself To Life

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I have been working on my novel The Baby Werewolf, and I am now in the final phase, working on the climax and crisis point.  And I surprised myself.  The killer monologues to the main characters who have now become his intended next victims.  I have played this out over and over in the twenty-two years I have been writing this book.  Last night, for the first time ever, the hero character laughs in this scene instead of the cringing fear that had always been there before.

How is such a thing possible?  What changed?  I have been writing and rewriting this story since 1996.  But it goes much deeper and darker than that.  This story went on my have-to-write list in 1966 when an older, stronger boy who lived near my home trapped me in a place out-of-sight of others and stripped me, gaining some horrible kind of pleasure by inflicting pain on my private parts.  Recovery from that has taken half a century.  The recovery itself probably explains why I struggled so long to pull this story together in a finished form.

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There are things about my writing life that are undeniable.  First of all, I have to write.  There is really no other choice for me.  My mind will never know rest or peace without being able to spin out the paragraphs and essays and stories that make it possible to know those things.  Nothing is real if I can’t write it out.  Secondly, I am a humorist.  If I can never be funny at all, can never write a joke, then I will descend into madness.  My sense of humor not only shields me and serves as my suit of armor, it heals me when I suffer psychic wounds.  This book is a horror story, but like many of the best horror stories, it relies on humor to drive every scene and knit the plot together.  And it was a breakthrough for me to have the hero character laugh instead of cringe in the critical scene.  It allows me to live again.  And love again.  And the real monster that caused this book to be, is now forgiven.  The world continues to turn.  The picture is now complete.  And soon, the novel will be too.

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January 24, 2024 · 11:41 pm

Reading Bag of Bones

This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.

This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.

………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.

Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together. 

King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.

At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.

There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.

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September 16, 2023 · 1:05 am

Slade House (a book by David Mitchell)

As a writer of novels, like all passable to good writers of novels, I read novels. Not just any novels. Novels that are the kind of novels I aspire to write myself.

David Mitchell is one of those novelists who can write the way I want to write. His stories are detailed and yet, compelling enough to follow wherever the story leads you. Characters are vivid and seem to have an actual life beyond the pages of the novel. And there is a chance that you will meet them again in another David Mitchell novel, even if they died in the previous David Mitchell novel you read. He writes across swaths of time and gives the story a sense of history.

Slade House is basically a haunted house story, a horror story about a house that is itself a sort of ghost. It can only be entered by a single small iron door that only appears in an alleyway every nine years. And every time it does appear, in October of 1979, 1988, 1997, 2006… , at least one somebody will go in and never come out again.

The story is side-linked to the masterpiece Mitchell novel, The Bone Clocks. It is also a plot less convoluted and multifaceted than Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas, so much easier to follow

David Mitchell is an author I study to learn about writing and storytelling. I don’t copy him. I do take note of his bag of tricks, his writer’s toolbox, so to speak, and I pick up and play with those same tools and magician’s secrets. I would like to suggest that if you truly wish to be a writer of fiction, you must put David Mitchell’s books on your must-read-before-I-die list. If you can’t put Mitchell on that list, then here are a few others on my list; Michael Crichton, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Louis L’Amour, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Mark Twain, and J. K. Rowling. It should be obvious that these names are all on my list for different reasons. And if you don’t read David Mitchell, there are artisan’s techniques there you can get nowhere else. But you are the reader. And if you have chosen to read this far through this essay, then you are at least fool enough to want to know the things I am telling you in this book review.

As a storyteller, David Mitchell is Rumpelstiltskin. He weaves straw into gold. And if you are canny and careful enough of a reader, you can gain some of that value from his work without giving up your firstborn.

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August 10, 2023 · 1:22 am

Books That Make You Hurt

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Yes, I read this book.  Yes, it scared the poop out of me.  Yes, it made me cry.  This is a uniquely horrific horror story that is so realistic that you know that it has actually happened in real life somewhere, sometime.  Only the names of the characters would be different.

I have a deep abiding respect for Richard Peck as a writer.  He earned that with his books A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago.  Those books made me laugh so hard it blew chocolate milk out of my nose.  And, yes, I was drinking chocolate milk at the time.  They are so realistic because the people in those stories are real people.  I know those people personally.  Of course, they have different names in real life.

But Are You In the House Alone? is a very different book from those other two masterpieces.  It tears your heart out and eats your liver because it is a first person narrative in the voice of a high school girl being stalked by a sexual predator.  Everything that happens to Gail in the high school, at home, and at the house where she babysits is hyper-real with horror movie levels of attention to detail.  I don’t wish to be a spoiler for this well-written book, but the narrator does not die in the book and it definitely does not have a happy ending.  For anyone who has the amount of empathy I do, and in many ways becomes the narrator-character by reading, reading a book like this can physically hurt.  A teacher like me has lived through horrible things like this happening to students before, it even happened to me as a boy, and it adds the slings and arrows of those things being re-lived as you read.

This is not the only book that has ever done this sort of damage to my heart strings.  I remember the pain from the conclusion of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.  You root for Little Nell and boo Daniel Quilp.  But the bad guy wins.  No happy ending can linger in the harp-strings of your memory-feeling song as long as a tragic outcome does.  I was there with Scout in that ridiculous costume in the dark when Bob Ewell was attacking her brother Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  That story was filled with wise and laughable things, but the stark horror of that climactic moment nearly wiped all the good feelings away, if not for the heroics of ghostly Boo Radley whose timely intervention brings it all back before the novel ends.  It horrifies me to admit it, but I was there, too, in the moment when the boys all turn on Simon on the beach with their sharpened sticks in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  They mistook him for the monster.  I still haven’t fully recovered from that reading trauma.

The thing about books that hurt to read which makes it essential that I never try to avoid them, is that they can add more depth and resonance to your soul than any light and fluffy piece ever could.  Life is much more like Lord of the Flies than it is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I am sadder but wiser for having read Are You In the House Alone?  I am recommending it to other readers like me who don’t so much live to read as they read in order to live.  Not because it is easy and good to read, but because it is hard and essential to read.  It will hurt you.  But it will leave you like it leaves its narrator, damaged, but both alive and purely resolved to carry on.

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June 6, 2023 · 1:37 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 25

Canto 25 – Dealing with the Devil

Stanley was determined to get both hands around Eule Gheist’s stupid neck, and squeeze until he gave up a solution to saving Maria’s life.  He bulled his way into Aunt Philia’s Toy Store.

Before he could shout out the first threat and demand, he was stopped dead in his tracks by the other man standing beside the Owl Man’s check-out counter.

“Hello, Stanley. We’ve been waiting for your return,” said the mysterious stranger with the ice-blue eyes.

“You know I want my daughter back?  You are going to give me a way to go where she is and bring her back home?”

“Oh, no.  Our offer is far more complicated than that.”

“What kind of a place is this?  You trap and kill your customers.”

“You have it all wrong, Mr. Mensch.  We always give our customers exactly what they pay us for.”

“Maria never paid you to kidnap her and put her life at risk.”

“Oh, you are confused about who our customers are.”

“What do you mean?  You never actually sell any of these toys.”

“We have never harmed a customer.  We couldn’t possibly kill them since they are already dead.”

“And you sell them these toys?”  Stan’s arm swept around in a circle indicating the whole collection of dust-covered antique toys.

“We sold Maria to Esperanza for five years’ worth of spirit life.  We don’t sell these toys from the store.”

“Maria is a toy?”

“Basically.  We provide the other side with humans to play with.”

“So, how do I get to where Maria is?”

“You don’t.  No member of the story she is playing in will want you to be a part of it.  You don’t fit the story.”

“So, what’s to prevent me from throwing a fit and wrecking this store?”

“Pick up a toy and destroy it.”

Stanley picked up a wooden rocking horse and slammed it into the floor with the full force of his anger and frustration.  Almost immediately the fractured pieces disappeared and the rocking horse rematerialized on the shelf, even wearing it’s dust covering.

Stan stopped and stared, feeling totally stunned.

“Everything is set in spirit life.  It will still be here even after a nuclear missile from Russia blows Dallas into vapor.”

“I don’t… I mean… ah…”

“I know you are stressed about your family’s situation.  We have a possible solution to offer for a price.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can guarantee Maria’s survival.  And I can cure Bonita’s cancer.”

“How… how do you know about that?”

The Owl Man grinned.  “This is the store’s owner.  Mr. Mephisto.”

“The dark man from the Shandra and Mark story?”

“Exactly,” said the gimlet-eyed man.

“So, I’m making a deal with the Devil.  What will it cost me?  My soul?”

“We want you to become the new manager of the Toy Store.  You are a very resourceful man.  And you have a good heart.”

“And I am due to return to my owl form,” said Eule.

“If I refuse?”

“You have to make the choice, of course.  But the job has perks.  The spirit life will make you immortal.  And Maria and Bonita are both saved.”

“And if I refuse to accept the job, what happens?”

“You trust to luck for the outcome you seek.”

Stanley could do nothing but stand there and try desperately to think.

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May 30, 2023 · 12:35 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 24

Canto 24 – Girl Talk

Maria found herself limited to riding along in her own naked body as she and Esperanza labored to run back to the hacienda where Imelda lived.

“Do we have to run all the way?” Maria asked in her head.

“We do.  Time is short.  Imelda and your Yesenia are in grave trouble.  But your body is so much better than mine…”

“What do you mean?”

“In life I was a little bit of a gordita.”

“Gordita?”

“Little fat girl.  Not athletic like you.”

“Oh.”

“You know some Spanish.  I can see it in your mind.”

“My mom and my real dad are both Spanish speakers.  But they got divorced when I was four.  And we found my stepdad, Stanley.  He only speaks English, so…”

“So, you got out of practice.”

Maria’s body was panting, wheezing, and gasping for air as it ran.  But that didn’t affect either voice in her head.

“And you were out of practice at running.  Let me control the breathing.”

“Okay.  But that might be against the rules.  Promise you won’t use it against me later?”

“We want the same thing,” she reminded Esperanza.

“We surely do.”

The body fell into the trained running style that Maria used in high school track and cross country.  The breathing became regular and easier by far.

“You are definitely good at running,” Esperanza noted.

They pulled up at the gate to the hacienda.

“¿Por qué corres, Esperanza?” asked the guard at the gate.  Maria knew instantly from Esperanza’s memory that the young man’s name was Juanito, even though he was a rust-colored skeleton dressed in gray ghost clothing that you could see through.

“¿Dónde está Imelda? Necesito hablarle.”

“Ella está en el segundo piso. En su dormitorio, creo.”

“Gracias, Juanito.”

They were instantly running again.  The hacienda would’ve been gorgeous in an expensive and colorful way, Maria thought, if only she weren’t seeing it in black, white, and gray.

Esperanza found Imelda’s bedroom door and banged on it with both fists.

Then the door was opened from the inside.

“Yesenia!”

“Maria, you must not say things out loud using your actual voice!  You must tell it to me and let me speak it!”

“You are breaking the rules!” said Imelda in Yesenia’s voice coming out of Yesenia’s tear-stained face.

Maria was hardly listening to the scolding.  She was at once filled with joy at having found the girl she betrayed.   But at the same time she was jealous of how beautiful Yesenia’s naked form would obviously look to Rogelio.

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May 23, 2023 · 2:22 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 23

Canto 23 – Confessional

Stan stumbled into the bedroom.  He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain it all to Bonita.  Especially since the Vodka was making it difficult to walk, let alone talk.

She was sprawled out on the top of the bedspread, it was still tucked in and made up with her usual attention to tight corners.  She was still dressed.  Her head, propped up against the pillows, was wide awake, and she had definitely been crying.

“Bone, honey, um…”  He stood at the foot of the bed, swaying and shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Stan, you’ve been drinking.”

“It’s Maria… um, ah… it ain’t actually… um, going well…”

“But you’ve been trying harder than before… I’ve seen it.  You two are working together instead of fighting.”

“Yeah, but, I have something to tell you…”

“Yeah… but, first… I have something I gotta tell you.”

“Oh, um… the doctor’s visit?”

“Yeah.  The report came back.”

“Oh, no!  You mean…?”

“Remission is over.  The cancer is back.”

Stan pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead.  How could he…  now?  Maria was…

“You gotta promise me about Maria.  She’s gonna need you more than ever now.”

“You know I will…”  The room was swirling a bit.  He sank to catch himself on the corner of the foot of her bed.  There was suddenly no way he could tell her now.  “How long do you have?”

“Days, weeks, months… not years.”

“You know they told us that before.  Then the chemo started doing its damn job.”

“Yeah, but not this time.  It’s spreading faster than ever this time.  Promise me you will love her like she’s your own daughter.”

“Don’t be so quick to give up.  We both still need you.”

“We don’t have any more options.  It’s still there in my lungs.  We can’t afford more treatment, and Doc Jimenez says it wouldn’t help if we could.”

Stan started to cry.  The alcohol… and the bad news… both sets of bad news.   But mostly the alcohol…

“Promise me you’ll love her, and you’ll take care of her.”

 There was nothing more to say.  “You know I will.”

He gathered her limp and exhausted form up in his arms.  Drunkenly.  And they both wept together.

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