For Readers

  Oct 15: BLACK CAT   I first encountered the woman in black on a moonless October night in dreams. I, Ferntail the Cat, was gathering information on a certain nightmare that had recently begun encroaching upon my ward Jaela’s dreams.  Once she was solidly asleep, I had entered the realm of dreams and traveled […]

  Oct 14: VAMPY LINGERIE   It had all been a series of mistakes.  Moving to the new town, making friends, taking up Judy’s dare to bike past the old Alterwerth farm, and then, even worse, taking up her dare to go inside the creepy old place, especially considering the number of women that have

Oct 13: BAT   You’re watching a surreal Italian horror movie and a bat is ravaging a woman’s hair, trying to bite at her face. It’s a stuffed monster.  Real bats don’t do that. … You wake.  It’s a hot night, the window is open.  Something dark flutters in the room. “It’s nothing.” You go

This list comes from Kirsten Easthope!   Oct 12: DEMON/DEVIL   Every woman I’ve ever met is possessed by demons.  Devils.  Vicious, brutal spirits.  Sometimes I have to remind myself of this—when I see a babe in the arms of its mother or a young girl smiling at a summer day, hair tugged by the

  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