Tag Archives: horror

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KillerCon Travel Journal: Strange Rites

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I’ve read books with gaudy covers because I’ve loved their authors and I’ve watched as the cover art shifted in my mind as I went. Geometrically the illustrations were in the exact same positions, but I’d attached new meanings. After putting the book down I was hard pressed to imagine any other cover. The design had improved upon association.

The same phenomenon applies to people. Charm can make an average looking Joe handsome and a sense of humor looks great on a woman. A positive association of someone attaches to their form, like an aura of positivity, and makes you eager to see them.

I felt these positive associations form in my brief time here at the KillerCon, getting to know established writers, up and comers, and the fans roving the hotel floors.

In my home city of Minneapolis I function on a safe predictable loop (yes, like the second season of Mr. Robot). I go to work, for coffee, and my weekly club night. I’m less likely to feel socially anxious when I know what to expect.

My first day at KillerCon I was out of element, a stranger in a strange land of splatter punks and hardcore horror aficionados who’ve traveled on the same circuit. At first I felt less like a participant and more like a pop cultural anthropologist.

Then I realized everyone was wearing conversations starters on their sleeves, literally tattooed right on: portraits of the Bride of Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft, Pinhead, and Cthulhu.

Eventually those of us with thousand yard stares at the bar started looking closer at one another, laughing over shared obsessions, pitching stories, telling morbid tales of our own hometowns.

Since opening ceremonies we’ve tortured ourselves with hot sauces, death peppers, strange foods, and gross out stories. Last night I took the Malort challenge, shots of a drink whose creator says is for drinkers who disdain the light flavors of neutral spirits. If you enter #MalortFace into Instagram you’ll see a series of portrait of people who’ve taken the same challenge.

That was last night, a whirlwind of hotel room parties, singing, and storytelling. This morning on the final day of KillerCon the event feels like summer camp. I wasn’t sure if anyone would like me on the day I arrived now I wish I had more time with everyone.

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Messing With Texas: I’m Coming to KillerCon!

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I’ll be attending the KillerCon in Austin Texas from August 23-27. You’ll find me hovering around the Clash Books table talking about my latest horrifying creation He Has Many Names. I’ll be reading an excerpt on Sunday the 26th(at 1pm, location TBA).

This will be my first public reading of the book tour, and my career. No pressure, right? I mean what’s the worst that could happen? Scaffolding near the stage could come undone the moment I step behind the podium. A steel beam could impale me through the lungs. I could cough out a geyser of blood as my stomach lining seeps down my lap. I could stagger forward a bloody bile encrusted mess and realize my fly has been down the entire time. Now that would be embarrassing. If this plays out as I’ve foretold then I promise to haunt the Conference Center of the Wingate hotel as the Fly-down Phantasm(I expect a listing on hauntedrooms.com by the end of the month).

I’ll be really honest. This is my first one of these events and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I assume I’m supposed spend the first evening waving a microcassette recorder around my hotel room, checking for electronic voice phenomenon.

“Is there anyone here who wishes to speak, someone with perhaps with some insights into men’s casualwear?”

“How many of the spirits with us identify as fashionestas?” “Is an all black ensemble slimming or does it make me seem less approachable?

“Is this Edgar Allan Crow t-shirt ironic enough for this venue or does it look like I’m trying too hard? Be honest. I’ll appreciate it.”

I’ve scanned through the event programming. There are screenwriting workshops, panels on mythology, horror movie screenings. All stuff I’m keen on. I’m probably going to do the same thing I do every time I’m faced with the paradox of choice: wave an enchanted pendulum over a map of the grounds and scry out the best option. If the ritual keeps pointing me to the hotel bar well then that’s where the universe has decided I need to be.

In any event I’d like to meet like-minded lunatics with an affection for the abnormal, a penchant for the paranormal, and a weakness for weirdness.

If you’re attending the KillerCon in Austin between the 23-27, find me at the Clash Books table or drop me a line at drewchialauthor@gmail.com.

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How Silent Hill Inspired My Writing

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Stories with exceptional world building stick with you long after you put them down. They invite you on detours to take in the surroundings: the blimp filled skyline, the gear filled horizon, the towers of steam. These things leave an impression. Stories that veer away from their champions to explore strange civilizations, with nonsensical norms, invite us to image how we’d fit in. Universes with different natural laws, where magic is real and sorcerers can recreate their results lead us to conduct our own thought experiments.

Stories with exceptional world building take up prime real estate in our imaginations. Their authors build the steel frames of civilizations, but leave us with enough ambiguity to fill in with our own details. That’s why people keep returning to the shires of Middle Earth, the dunes of Arrakis, and the rose fields of the Dark Tower.

This phenomenon transcends mediums, down yellow brick roads, through galaxies far far away, and even virtual Matrixes. In fact one of my favorite imagined universes comes from a videogame series called Silent Hill.

I want to explore what makes these games so haunting and what they can teach writers about the importance of world building.

What is Silent Hill?

For those of you who’ve never been to Silent Hill it’s a ghost town in rural Maine. A place where the mist hangs low and ash falls like snow. A mining community that went up in smoke when a coal deposit ignited, perhaps from a accident, perhaps from a ritual sacrifice gone wrong. The fires rage to this day, pumping plumes of smoke through cracks in the street, concealing the town’s tragic history beneath a fog of toxic fumes.

While other ghost towns are a draw for urban explorers Silent Hill attracts a different type of visitor.

Silent Hill through James Sunderland’s Eyes

James Sunderland receives a cryptic letter from his wife Mary, inviting him to join her in their “special place.” The problem is their special place is in Silent Hill at the heart of a burning hellscape. The bridges there have collapsed. Highway patrol officers guard the roads into town. Oh and Mary has been dead for three years. James goes anyway, parking at a rest stop, and trekking through the wilderness until he finds himself in Silent Hill.

On his way James encounters Angela and Eddie, others like him, summoned by the ghosts of their pasts. They mutter to themselves, thinking aloud on past sins. They all seems too far-gone to make for helpful companions.

Shortly after finding a radio James encounters a figure in a tunnel. It staggers into the light revealing its arms are bound in a straight jacket of flesh, its feet are fused with stiletto heels, and its face is featureless apart from a long zipper leading to a gash from which it spews acid vomit. The creature’s very presence makes the radio burst with static.

From here on James embarks on violent journey into the fog, through boarded up buildings, rust strewn corridors, and unspeakable horrors.

Battered and shook James makes it to Mary’s special place in the park, where he encounters Maria, Mary’s physical double and emotional opposite.

This is when story takes a turn for the abstract and James starts to question the authenticity of what he sees. Just as the town reveals its darkness James reveals the darkness within himself.

We learn Mary had a terminal illness and spent her final days in hospice, where she grew hostile to her husband. James responded by drinking himself into a deep depression. He should’ve known his wife was dead when he came into town, because he’s the one who killed her. James smothered Mary with a pillow. He’s been in denial ever since he entered Silent Hill. His journey through the city mirrored the stages of grief.

It turns out the monsters are manifestations of things James has tried to keep buried. The knife wielding nurses in their low cut shirts and short skirts represent his pent up sexual animosity, as do the leggy mannequins chasing him through dark hotel rooms, but the ultimate manifestation of James’s repressed feeling comes in the form Pyramid Head.

Pyramid Head is a giant with a Judas Cradle on its shoulders, a long apron stitched together from human skin, dragging a sword the size of a surfboard across the floor. This unrelenting boogieman represents James’s desire to punish himself. Continue reading How Silent Hill Inspired My Writing →

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HE HAS MANY NAMES: Full Book Art Reveal

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Behold the fold book design for He Has Many Names by Matthew Revert.

Submitted for Your Approval 

MeetNoelle, a Hollywood transplant that’s been subsisting on instant ramen and false hope. She’s on the verge of moving back into her mother’s trailer when her agent convinces her to take a meeting at the Oralia Hotel. Enchanted by the art deco atmosphere Noelle signs a contract without reading the fine print.

Now she has one month to pen a novel sequestered in a fantasy suite where a hack writer claims he had an unholy encounter. With whom you ask? Well, he has many names: Louis Cypher, Bill Z. Bub, Kel Diablo. The Devil.

Noelle is skeptical, until she’s awoken by a shadow figure with a taste for souls.

Desperate to make it Noelle stays on, shifting the focus of her story to these encounters. Her investigations take her through the forth wall and back again until she’s blurred the line between reality and what’s written. Is there a Satanic conspiracy, is it a desperate author’s insanity, or something else entirely?

Clash BOOKS invites you enter a zone in-between afternoon and midnight, a place if unnamed does not violate of copyright. You’ll find it in a tome of forbidden knowledge, a book called He Has Many Names.

PREORDER NOW!

Design by Matthew Revert
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Dragon’s Breath: A Horror Story About Telling Stories

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The Van

I’d been dabbing my neck all afternoon, feeling the hive begin to blister, then pop, and seep down my back. I was allergic to sweat, but I couldn’t help but run my fingers through my hair and smear it everywhere.

Agent Sunderland suffered no such compulsions. He’d spent the morning cooped up in the van with his suit coat buttoned the entire time. He didn’t mind sitting in a leather swivel chair, wearing giant head cans, or guzzling coffee like it was Gatorade. The man was a cold-blooded reptile with his hatchet face and beady eyes.

Agent Reese on the other hand had a head like a cinderblock, and no neck to speak of. He wore a pair of shoulder holsters over his pit stains. There was a Glock in one and silver flask in the other. The flask was covered in Celtic crosses.

“What is that?”

Agent Reese lifted his arm as if he needed to check. “A flask.”

“What’s in it?”

“Holy water.”

“Should I have some of that?”

Agent Sunderland shook his head. “She’d smell it on you.”

I itched the path they’d shaved down my chest, feeling the rash of ingrown hairs, the gaffer tape pinching the skin. “But she won’t notice this?”

Agent Reese snapped. “She will if you keep picking at it.”

Agent Sunderland guided my hand from chest to my knee. “Breathe. She can’t see through clothing, she can’t smell fear, and she can’t hear what you’re thinking.”

“How do you know that?”

Agent Reese peeled the cover off the van’s ancient surveillance equipment. “This is not our first rodeo.”

“Is that a reel to reel? What government agency did you say you worked for again?”

Agent Reese put a reel on the machine. “We didn’t.”

“What are you agents of exactly?”

“The lord.” Agent Reese threaded tape from one reel to the other.

I reached for the latch for the door. Agent Sunderland caught my hand. He had the same Celtic cross tattooed on the back of his hand.

“You saw what she did to your friend.”

The door to Jamie’s studio apartment was wide open. Signs of a struggle would’ve been an understatement. The mirrors were shattered. The drawers were smashed to splinters, and there were paperbacks everywhere.

As for Jamie his body was contorted on the kitchen table, arms locked in place, back arched in an upward facing dog position, head craned all the way back until his neck snapped. The screenplay he’d been toiling on for as long as I’d know him was rolled up and crammed down his throat.

Agent Sunderland put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it like he was giving a strong handshake, a show of sympathy from someone who’d read about it in books. “This town is filled with artists just like Jamie, bright kids with dreams of making it. The only thing between her and them is sitting in this van.”

I shook my head. “Pitching a screenplay is scary enough on its own, add this on top of that and…” I trailed off.

Agent Sunderland elbowed me, another show affection that didn’t suit him. “Good, use that fear.”

I hung my head between my knees. “If she’s licking her lips at the sight of my neck I’m going to lose the plot.”

Agent Reese scoffed. “You don’t think she’s a vampire, do you?”

Jamie had dragged me to a networking function for writers. There were whispers that a produced would be hiding among us. Matilda stuck out like a sore thumb with her leather lined suit, jet-black pixie hair, and fierce model features. Her skin was porcelain white and her eyes were so brown they might as well have been black. She wore an armored ring that ran up to her knuckle. When she reached out to shake my hand her palm was ice cold.

I scanned the van, shifting my gaze from one agent of God to the other. “What is she?”

Agent Reese lowered an eyebrow. “Not a vampire.”

Agent Sunderland adjusted the collar of the all black ensemble they’d fitted me with. “Listen. Don’t worry about your pitch. Let her do most of the talking.” He slid a pair of fine Italian loafers onto my feet.

“Just what the hell do you think she is?”

“Exactly.” Agent Sunderland smiled as he pressed the toes of the to check the fit. “Just remember, if you feel you are in any real danger, say the phrase, ‘Eye of the needle’ and we’ll come rushing in.”

“Eye of the needle, as in ‘It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?’”

“Yes.”

“That’ll be hard to work into casual conversation.”

“Which is why we won’t miss it.”

“And why can’t I wear my sneakers?”

Agent Reese motioned out the window to the line leading around the block to the bouncers at the door. One was shining a light on IDs the other was scanning the patrons from top to bottom.

“The dress code always starts with footwear.”

Continue reading Dragon’s Breath: A Horror Story About Telling Stories →

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The Films That Inspired My Novel: He Has Many Names

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My forthcoming novel He Has Many Namesshould be arriving just in time for Halloween. It’s the story of a ghostwriter sequestered in a haunted hotel with one month to pen a novel. The hero, Noelle Blackwood, is a horror writer who knows her way around a scary story. Her imagination has explored every haunted hotel in pop culture. She has run a black light over the tropes and clichés residing in every room.

I’ve armed Noelle with all of my influences and she is proud to wear them on her sleeve, name-dropping the films, books, and paintings that inspired He Has Many Names. This way I could pay homage to my influences while promising to take the story someplace different.

Over the next few months I’m going to take those influences to show and tell. Let’s start by talking about the films that inspired He Has Many Names.

1408

Mike Enslin has spent his career trying to prove there’s an afterlife, searching for ghoulies and ghosties in the hope of proving his daughter is in a better place. His quest has turned him into cynical critic of haunted hotspots. At book readings he tells his audience he’s never seen a ghost and it wasn’t for lack of trying. One day he receives a postcard that says, “DON’T STAY IN ROOM 1408 OF THE DOLPHIN HOTEL.” Mike adds the numbers together and gets 13. It’s a cute dare.

Mike reserves the room, much to the dismay of the hotel owner who warms him of all the natural and unnatural deaths that have occurred in there.

What happens in room 1408 of The Dolphin Hotel and room 1901 of The Oralia in He Has Many Namesare very different. Still the heroes of both tales have quite a few things in common. Both characters are fascinated with the paranormal and yet they’re both intrinsically skeptical.

Mike Enslin, John Cusack’s character in 1408, has spent years seeking proof of life after death. It’s left him jaded. He sees how people deceive themselves.

Noelle Blackwood, the hero of He Has Many Names, was diagnosed with a fantasy prone personality at a young age. She had to learn to differentiate between a set of complex maladaptive daydreams and reality. She developed her skepticism as a coping mechanism.

As for the rooms themselves 1408 and 1901 have little else in common. Once the digital clock starts counting down from 59:99 1408 has a clear mission: kill its guest in under an hour. Room 1901 of The Oralia, a forest themed fantasy suite, has a far more mysterious purpose. Continue reading The Films That Inspired My Novel: He Has Many Names →

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How to Exorcise a Demon So You can Get Your Damage Deposit Back

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Hey. I get it. Shit happens. You’re hosting a board game night, trying to let some air into a socially suffocating relationship, but you can’t get anyone into the idea of a game of Clue. So you venture into the closet.

“What about Ticket to Ride?”

“What’s that?”

Your partner rolls their eyes. “It’s like Monopolybut with trains.”

Your partner’s friend with the man bun chimes in. “I’d prefer not to spend my evening celebrating crony capitalist.” And that’s that.

Your fingers scan past Merchants of Venice, The Settlers of Catan, or Vegas Showdown.

“What about The Game of Life?”

Everyone groans. “Life sucks.”

Someone points over your shoulder. “What’s that up there?”

You scan the fire hazards on the top shelf. “Twister?”

“No next to that. Is that a Ouija board?”

Six Months Later

Sixth months later and you’re still scrubbing blood red droplets from the bathroom ceiling, draining the fly carcasses from the light fixtures, and scraping frost from the mirrors.

One night of candlelit laughs has led to six months of strange electrical issues. Six months of handprints on the other side of the TV screen. Six months of bookmarks straight up disappearing. Not to mention the cat toys you keep finding up in the cobwebs, the long strands of hair dangling from the ceiling fans, and the footprints in the dust of your coffee table.

You can’t remember how many times you’ve discovered family photos in the microwave, turned around to find the dining room chairs stacked floor to ceiling, or all the cabinets bursting open at once. Your upstairs neighbor keeps stomping on the floor. He claims someone has been stomping on the ceiling.

You refuse to call the situation what it is and your partner refuses to sleep over anymore. Continue reading How to Exorcise a Demon So You can Get Your Damage Deposit Back →

Excerpts, Featured, Writing

An Excerpt from Retail Hell

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The following is an excerpt from Retail Hell, my new short story (at 8,600 words it’s more of a novelette) now available on Amazon.

The Customers Cometh (an early chapter from Retail Hell)

Jezebeth led Barbara to a cliff side overlooking an endless subterranean shopping center. To Barbara it felt less like a cavern and more like another world with a rocky skyline. Great walls of shelving stretched in all directions, cut from lopsided stones, like catacombs with sale signs. Barbara could just make out the checkout counters on the horizon.

Jezebeth pinched Barbara’s shoulder.

“Do you mind if I give you a bit of fearless feedback? I couldn’t help but notice that you were lagging behind on the way out. I know it’s your first day and you’re trying to contain your enthusiasm, but don’t worry about it. Just let loose. Run headlong into each new challenge. Alright?”

Barbara half nodded.

Jezebeth slapped her on the back. “Don’t worry. You’ll get another opportunity after the meeting.”

Barbara turned away, preferring the endless hellscape to her micromanager’s wild unblinking eyes.

Greeters, in red and black uniforms, ran out and scattered along the plane below.

Jezebeth clapped her hands. “There they go.”

The greeters scurried behind volcanic craters, like townsfolk fleeing bandits in the old west. Some fought over hiding spots, while others helped each other bury themselves in the dirt. Continue reading An Excerpt from Retail Hell →

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How to Alienate People By Telling Them You Write Horror

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I get around, wheeling and dealing in my hip bohemian community. I’m a man about town, getting recognized in my seasonally inappropriate dark t-shirt and jeans.

“The tall guy with the bulbous nose? Yeah, I know him. Why, what did he do?”

When I go to the grocery store the clerks double bag my eggs because they know I’m walking, at the coffee shop the baristas know that I’m mostly harmless, and at Chipotle they always have a bowl ready because a burrito is just not enough meal for me.

Yeah, I’m kind of a big deal. I shake hands. I make connections. I interject into the conversations when I’m eavesdropping.

I have a talent for reading people. My subconscious Sherlock catches every tell, every raised eyebrow, and bitten lip. No signal is misread. No micro-expression is lost in translation. I see you there giving me the eye by way of the floor. Now you’re rolling those eyes right up into that thought cloud about me. I know what you’re thinking.

You might go so far as to say that I’ve got game… until I make the mistake of telling you I’m a horror writer. Then it’s all down hill from there.

I might as well introduce myself as, “A stranger,” or wear a sash that reads, “Creeper,” or show people a photo of all the mounds in my basement and ask, “Can you guess which ones are mine?”

At least that’s how it feels based on the reactions I get.

In his book On WritingStephen King recalls getting caught selling his first horror story at school. He was a bestseller even then. The principle confiscated as many editions as she could get her talons on. She called young Stephen into her office to review the evidence.

“What I don’t understand, Stevie,” she said, “is why you’d write junk like this in the first place. You’re talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?”

Young Stephen was speechless. He had no answer apart from his hangdog expression. For decades after this encounter he felt ashamed of his work, as if the subjects he wrote about were manifestations of something wicked within him, something best reserved for abandoned Victorian asylums and horror conventions.

Horror Has a Stigma

I feel like young Stevie King whenever I make the mistake of pitching my fiction to a person of the puritan persuasion. Turns out there are a surprising number of devout individuals on the dance floor.

When you tell someone you’re a writer, they may ask, “What are you working on?” If your answer is, “A story about a woman trapped in a hotel with a demon.” they may follow up their question with, “Why would you write about such things?”

That one always stumps me, because I think the answer is self-evident: I do it because it’s entertaining. Any dangerous situation that activates our fear centers is instantly engaging. If that danger comes from someplace supernatural, in the great unknown where our nightmares thrive, then all the better.

I don’t think that automatically makes my stories bleak or nihilistic. Like any author I still have to strike a balance between hope and dread, I just skew a little further toward dread.

Still, I get it. Horror isn’t known for being the most emotionally engaging genre. It rarely enjoys prominent placement in Oprah’s Book Club. It rarely inspires readers’ life decisions. It doesn’t have the allure of a romance novel to inspire travel. It’s not going to give readers material for dinner party conversations.

Horror is the box wine of literature. Not that classy, but it will get you drunk.

I’ve spent many an evening defending my vocation when I should have been, well, dancing.

Should You Hide Your Affinity for Horror?

Is it possible to be a suave socialite when you spend your nights scripting secret ceremonies set in subterranean cellars? I have no clue, but I’ve learned something from all my time requesting songs from before half of the dance floor was born. Being myself is still the best practice. Not because people are more likely to be drawn to me, they won’t be, but because I’ll be rejected for the right reasons. I’d rather be brushed off for the asshole I am than for being a disingenuous creep.

If You Can’t Do Horror How Fun Are You?

I’m done catering to people with delicate sensibilities. From here on out I’m going to let my freak flag fly. I write horror, not socially acceptable thrillers with artisanal serial killers, but horrorhorror with ghosts, devils, and creatures made of tentacles, where villains win and bad things happen to good people.

If you won’t go anywhere near things that could give you nightmares then steer clear of here. If you don’t get the appeal of a ghost story around the campfire then I don’t want to share my S’mores with you. If you can’t stomach a schlocky piece of splatter house cinema, but you have time to keep up with the Kardashians, I doubt you’re that much fun.

In other words: if you ain’t into cool shit, you basic.

Closing Thoughts

Much of the above was “inspired” by actual events, not necessarily based on them. Don’t get me wrong. I get rejected a lot. Not for being a horror writer, just, you know, because.

The pulp bins of the 70s and 80s were clogged with forgotten horror novels. Writers dare not admit to working in the genre today. We’d rather say we write dark fantasy, or psychological thrillers, or bizarro fiction, but in our hearts horror is the genre we pledge allegiance.

It’s up to us to destigmatize it. Class it up. Horror is a great vehicle for gross out gags, but it’s also a great vehicle for morality plays, thought experiments, and reflections on current events.

The torture-porn films of the early aughts (Saw,Hostel, etc) have lowered the intellectual capital of the genre. We brave few who identify as horror authors have to raise it up again, even if that does mean pitching stories on the dance floor.

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Retail Hell is Out Now! Watch the Book Trailer

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Retail Hell is now available on Amazon!

When Betsy, the customer from hell, drops dead in the middle of a rant she finds herself in the actual Retail Hell. A place where every day is black Friday, the only song that ever plays is All I want for Christmas is You, and the customer is always right… about to torture her.

Part sales satire, part straight-faced horror, Retail Hellis about rude people, ironic justice, and the insanity of commerce. As fiendish as an episode of The Twilight Zone, as brutal as Hellraiser, and as scary as a trip to Walmart, Retail Hellis sure to make your shopping experiences more of a nightmare than they already are.