Sure Is Quiet . . . Too Quiet
We meant to take a break of two months, maybe four. Now eight months have stacked up. But that’s a good thing. We’ve been busy putting what we learned here to use.
Looks like all this writing is going somewhere
Good news today for the Cannibal Cyclops family, or at least for me personally.
The Recurring Character
Who doesn’t love a horror franchise? (We haven’t exactly got one here — we just wanted to know more about one dude.)
I’ve Got a Few Pool Stories
What is it about swimming pools that makes them . . . kind of creepy?
Happy Halloween, Victims
The shortest stories don’t show up hoping to make friends. They are like a hand that flashes out of the dark, bearing a knife. You see it only for a moment — then it’s gone. Was it even real? You suspect it was. You’re bleeding.
Dungeons & Dragons & Mazes & Monsters & Chastity
I’ve wanted to write a 1980s-style Satanic Panic story for a while. Meaning a story where some D&D game goes off the rails into “real-life” horror. A big, fun, dumb, fantasy-goes-awry, heads-get-larped-off ride.
If there’s no way in, tilt it and look again
Steven sent me a drawing of a window. Just a window — but it was so odd that I knew there had to be a story in it. Unfortunately it took six trying months for me to figure out what the story was.
The fiction is all fiction
When you turn a real place into a fictional place for the sake of a story, should you worry that you'll offend people who live there? Maybe there is no such thing as a real place in fiction.
Building a story is like building a house
We read stories the same way we move through houses. Every room has a purpose, every word matters. But the architect probably didn’t get the blueprint right in one draft, and the story’s opening sentence probably wasn’t always its opening sentence.
Weird science
Some horror stories derive their power from the unknown, from elements that cannot be made to make any sense. But today’s story needed its science to hold up under scrutiny.
Same old story: a deal with the devil
The world has already seen at least 665 stories about a deal with the devil. Why am I adding one more?
Horror as escape?
When this site launched, I thought horror fiction would be a perfect escape from the real-life horror of our shared crisis…
Launching with 3 very different stories
Horror is a big tent (ask Pennywise). After all, what does Midsommar have in common with Alien? And we meant to reflect that wide potential by launching with three very different short stories.
The Recipe
There were two inspirations behind these stories. One, I knew the amazing Steve Morris was going to illustrate them, and that was great. Two, suddenly I had no idea what the future might hold, and that was the opposite of great.
Why the Eye?
Eyes are an ideal visual tool for thematic communication and unlike our other senses, they both consume and express information.