For Readers

  Oct 11: WITCH   The rains had been falling hard for a month when that old coot Reba, who herself was known as a drifter, came forward with the story that the farmer Andrace Chenowith had not been murdered by a homeless man living under the Bird Road Bridge.  It was a good bridge […]

  Oct 10: FRANKENSTEIN Frankenstein’s Monster calls Dr. Frankenstein his father, which makes him Dr. Frankenstein’s son.  So I don’t wanna hear it. … He stands over the city, watching, waiting.  Dressed in black and wearing a mask.  It’s a city that never sleeps…and ever since he came back from the dead, neither does he.

Oct 9: SÉANCE   There’s only one way to elicit a good jump scare.  You have to interrupt the mental flow somehow with fear.  You can do it in movies pretty easily, of course.  Build up sympathy for the character, increase the suspense…then release it by having someone pop out of nowhere and strike or

  Oct 8: DAY OF THE DEAD   The end of the world came and went with such a voluminous roar that it seemed as though everything that had happened in the before should no longer occur in the after.  However, this was not the case.  Where anyone survived to continue the old enmities, old

  Oct 7: MOVIE MONSTER   It’s a dirty job, managing movie monsters, but someone’s got to do it.  Not the actual, you know, cleanup on set.  They hire someone else to do that.  And if anything gets broken in the course of the filming, well, that’s their problem.  They want stuff to get broken,

  Oct 6: SCREAMING   I hate going to the grocery store.  It’s the little kids, you see.  Their parents wheel them around in the front basket of the cart, their fat little legs sticking out of the holes cut in the plastic.  Or they trail along behind them like ghosts.  And the crying?  Always

  Oct 5: MUMMY The plague came from the melting snows.  They warned us about anthrax, the Black Death, smallpox varieties.  They didn’t warn us about the dead coming back to life.  The death metal bands had a heyday.  Churches burned.  “The end times! The end times!” You couldn’t call them zombies.  They didn’t lurch

Still no further word…I’ll update if I find out, but otherwise skip it.   Oct 4: SPIDER So I need to write a short horror story on the subject of spiders this morning.  The first temptation is always to go for the cheap scare.  Boo!  To play on people’s typical childhood fears.  And then you

I was kindly referred to the Dractober Facebook Group.  I’ll see if I can find something more specific than that if they let me join 🙂 You’ll note the difference between the title and the assignment…I didn’t want to deal with copyright issues over the character.  The parody song lyrics should be okay, though.  

Caught up to the proper day.  Will update with source when I find out.   Oct 2: SKELETON Hugh’s limp had recently become worse, and he hated to say something to wreck his nieces’ and nephews’ fun, but he had to sit down.  Every bone in his body ached.  Everything felt slightly off-true.  He needed