Day 5- Tell a scary story by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud sets up the scene for a horror story (perhaps?)

The Prompt

Molly heard her mother’s car pull into the driveway. She closed her math book and ran to the front door. The two hours she spent between the end of school and the time her mom came back home from work were always lonely.

She met her mother at the front door.

“Hi Mom!” She gave her a hug.

“Hey sweetie.” She set down her purse and her keys. “What are you doing?”

“Homework!”

“Well go finish it up and we’ll watch a movie when you’re done, okay?”

Molly was about to head back to her room when the door opened again. Her mother came in, again. “Hi, Molly!” She joined the first in the kitchen — two carbon copies of each other. They didn’t see each other or seem to know the other was there, but they kept talking cheerfully to her. And then a third came in. And a fourth.

Molly crept slowly back to her room. The kitchen was full of their happy talk, all their words running over each other. She hated nights when this happened. She slid under her bed and put her hands over her ears. She hated what came next.

Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of The Strange, Wounds, and North American Lake Monsters
Find him on Twitter at @NBallingrud

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Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version

[Reading Room] Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

If you like horror and dark fantasy, you should definitely be reading Alyssa Wong’s work!

My first clue should have been that this story was published in Nightmare Magazine.

This is a fabulous story: original, chilling, populated with compelling characters, with a strong narrative arc and an intriguing premise. But it’s not my kind of story and I kind of hated reading it!

But the writing, right from the start is fabulous:

As my date—Harvey? Harvard?—brags about his alma mater and Manhattan penthouse, I take a bite of overpriced kale and watch his ugly thoughts swirl overhead.

Isn’t that a great opening sentence? It tells you so much.

And it is even more compelling when you begin to realize that she’s not being metaphorical about being able to see his thoughts.

This is a woman who seems like she might be a victim, then quickly isn’t, then vacillates between the two states, depending on who she’s with at the time.

It makes her “real”, and it makes for an interesting metaphor about life.

But it’s horror. And that’s not my thing.

I was impressed with Alyssa Wong’s writing and am a bit sad that she doesn’t seem to write the kinds of stories I like. But that’s hardly a criticism.

If you like horror and dark fantasy, you should definitely be reading Alyssa Wong’s work!

Read Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers at Nightmare Magazine or buy a periodical that features her work, and support publications that pay their authors, at the same time!

[Reading Room] Dress of White Silk by Richard Matheson

I can see why so many episodes of the Twilight Zone start with the words “From a story by Richard Matheson”…

GREAT story!

This creepy little story starts with a kid who has been locked in a room by ‘Granma’, and we don’t know why, yet.

It’s told in the voice of the little kid, and I mean, really in the voice of a little kid:the grammar’s all wrong and there are no apostrophes in the contractions. The story can be a little hard to read at times, because of it, but the errors keep us firmly in this kid’s head the entire time — no narrator’s voice, here. This is a great technique for a writer to steal borrow, if you’re bold enough.

Continue reading “[Reading Room] Dress of White Silk by Richard Matheson”

[Reading Room] Nightmare At 20,000 Feet by Richard Matheson

I thought I knew what I was getting into, with this story.

After all, I’ve seen the Twilight Zone episode (William Shatner!!) a hundred times and they re-used the story for the Twilight Zone movie (John Lithgow!!).

Surely there was nothing Matheson could do to scare me (or even retain my interest) in a story I knew so well.

Ha!

The writing is FABULOUS and I thoroughly recommend you read something by Richard Matheson today.

Within the first two paragraphs he conjures up the sense of being on a plane in the 1960s, when this story was written. He describes an everyday action (like smoking a cigarette), but it tells you so much: Who, what, where, the place, the time, the state of mind of the character and the tone of the story to come:

“…the sign above the archway which led to the forward compartment lit up — FASTEN SEAT BELT—with, below as its attendant caution — NO SMOKING. Drawing in a deep lungful, Wilson exhaled it in bursts, then pressed the cigarette into the armrest tray with irritable stabbing motions.”

(Of course, everyone in my critique group would have crossed out that word ‘irritable’ as unnecessary, but that just goes to show that sometimes you can ignore people’s pet peeves without killing a story!)

Moving on,

“Outside, one of the engines coughed monstrously, spewing out a cloud of fume which fragmented into the night air. The fuselage began to shudder…”

Isn’t that a great opening for a story that you know is going to be a creepy story? He’s not being melodramatic at all (planes DO shudder as they start up), but the vocabulary is just perfect.

This is a much longer story than I expected, after having watched the two filmed versions. It’s a psychological nightmare, as promised in the title, by a master short story writer.

Highly recommended.