A New Scary Story

My football team having a horrible season

Everything I know being"wrong."

Here's the thing about stuff like ghost stories; although I am not in any way discounting what you said here. Over the decades, hundreds of millions of similar ghost stories have been told. I mean, really, there's only so many, right? It's like music. You have 12 notes to work with. But yet, every song is still unique in its own way depending on how one decides to interpret and arrange those notes. What makes a ghost story that's been told a million times different is dependent on how you tell it. Maybe the location is different, or the circumstances are different. Sometimes it's the back story that's what make it "unique" even if the "punchline" is the same. Really, that's what any story is really about anyway. The people who populate it, and their experiences and resolutions. As for monsters, when I write horror fiction, I think of monsters as not just creatures we imagine. But situations and things we encounter that make us anxious, worried, or fearful. In Edgard Alan Poe's The Tell Tale Heart, the monster was his guilt and his fear of being caught. In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the monster was his fear of becoming something other than himself. As for writing "scary stuff," there's a general rule to follow. Don't worry about what scares someone else. Determine what scares YOU and try to find a way to be general in the scare so that the reader has enough room to scare himself. When I wrote the foreword to Grue Tales as Ivan S. Graves, one of my pseudonyms, I put it this way: Nearly everyone at least once in their life feared the monster under their bed. But only you know what that monster looks like. And only you know what things that monster might do if, in the final act, you are swept away into its lair. The point is, tell me there's a monster under the bed. But leave it open as to what I imagine it looks like, or even what it does. What makes any story yours and yours alone, even if it is a rehash, is your style, your voice, your take, and your twist. Either way, it's a perfect month for some spooky stuff, and I would love to see anything you might come up with.