Launching with 3 very different stories

Horror covers a lot of ground. It’s easy to think of two horror movies that have almost nothing in common, except that they’re horror. Alien and Midsommar, say. Or two books — The Haunting of Hill House and Cujo. When I think how little these have in common, I feel inspired. Because if the only limit you set for yourself is “horror,” you gain the run of a very large forest. Steve and I want our site to be open to all of it. And we wanted to signal that intent from the start.

So we started with three stories very different from each other.

“Spring Break Outbreak” is the very first one that I wrote for this site, so I’m glad to see it become the first in our gallery. It’s the most cinematic in its inspiration, and the most on the nose in its inspiration (I mean, look around — it exists because of current events; it could not have been written in December). A few days after I wrote it, too, I realized it was an almost beat-for-beat echo of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” which I hadn’t read since I was 12. (Steve said I should tell people I meant to do that. Well — I’m sure my subconscious took stock of current events and said, “You know what. . .”) Anyway, when I realized the Poe connection, I celebrated by re-reading that story, and then watching the Vincent Price movie version. I hope everyone likes Steve’s big blue illustration of the ‘80s room as much as I do.

Red isn’t the only death out there… (from Masque of the Red Death, 1964)

“So You’re a Ghost” is the only story here that existed in any form before current events. Years ago, a friend said she hoped to be a ghost when she died, and I said, “Yeah but” and then as a joke sketched out how that might go. It made me laugh, so I saved the idea as a Word doc, ten sentences long. As we were building this site, I remembered that joke and fished it out of the old files, and it turned into what you see here. It’s horror, but the main reason it exists is still to get a laugh.

Lastly, “Kevin Becomes a Man” came about after I emailed Steve to say it doesn’t always need to be me writing and you reacting with illustrations. Send me a picture, and I’ll see if it prompts a story. He sent one of a lone man standing ahead on a road. I imagined a little kid who’d have to walk past the man, and went from there. This story doesn’t have much in common with the other two, in tone. This kid doesn’t deserve what lies in store for him. And he doesn’t deserve what’s already happened to him in the past, either. I worry about Kevin. He’s not going to be okay, is he?

That might be, though, what all horror has in common — from “Masque of the Red Death” to Alien to Midsommar to these three. It’s always about people who enter the forest and are not going to be okay. And it’s always something you can take, I think, as a little bit of a joke. At least, in the end, after a good scare, I usually find I’m laughing at myself.

Masque of the Red Death put me on a Vincent Price kick, so next I watched The House on Haunted Hill (1959). Look at him. He gets the joke.