Check my first Freebie horror short story, "Alure", on Patreon

As promised, my first Freebie, a short story available for free to the public, is available now on Patreon. It's called "Alure", it's most definitely a horror short, and, frankly, I'm pretty sure it's not what you'd expect. Read it now by clicking the image below.

Enjoy!

About Freebies on Patreon

Good evening, Friends and Family.  This morning, I published my first Freebie on Patron.  

What's a Freebie?  

Exactly what the name implies: a short story I'm publishing for free to the public on Patreon.  If you're a subscriber, the Freebies don't count toward your monthly benefits, so you'll still get your exclusive short stories of the month in addition to the Freebies.

Now, Freebies will not be a regular thing.  Basically, they'll come out whenever I feel like doing an extra one in a month, and since it's October, I'm already bursting at the seams with ideas, so this felt like a good time to start.

Now, Patrons and friends, what you can DEFINITELY do is share the Freebies as far and as wide and to as many of your friends as you can.  Who knows?  They may like it enough to want to be a Patron one day.

So, the first Freebie, "Alure", is already posted, just click this link.  

In the meantime, Rideshare Tales continue later this week.

All the best

#horror Short Story of the Month: Five Houses

As promised to my subscribers on Patreon, this is the first of a monthly series I'm going to publish there exclusively.  The story itself came pretty quickly, but the germ of the idea has been growing for some time.

The story is called "Five Houses", and I like to think of it as a horror confectionary, short and sweet, although there are layers.

Anyway, you can get it exclusively as a subscriber at this link to My Patreon page.  I'll have a lot more to say about this series in general, and this episode in particular, in future posts.

In the meantime, enjoy, share, and let me know how you like it.

Welcome to My Patreon!

I think this video pretty much speaks for itself.

New, exclusive content at http://www.patreon.com/damonyoungscribe.

Every month.

Wait 'til you see what's been crawling around inside my brain since "33 Ways"...

I'm just getting started

OMG! For the first time in seven years, I've finally completed a new #horror short story. I don't even know what do to with myself anymore. :-) Wanna read it? Stay tuned...

Afraid of the Dark, or some thoughts about my novella, Nite-Lite

As an engineer, I'm sort of turned on by complexity, which is both a blessing and a curse when you're a writer.

When I first started working on my MFA at the American Film Institute, the first screenplay I wrote was a big, sprawling modern fantasy piece with multiple layers of reality and a deep secret history.  It was pretty trippy.  When I presented it to my writing group, I remember my instructor pointing out that my classmates who loved weed were the ones who appreciated it the most.

The major piece of advice that my instructor gave me consisted of one word: "Simple."

It took another script before I really began to take that advice to heart.  And, as most of us in the film industry know, the simplest kind of movie to get made is a horror movie.

Now, you know I love horror.  So I set about to work on the most direct, straightforward horror story I could imagine.

Which, of course, led me to think about my childhood, where, let's face it, just about everything is scary.  Dogs are scary.  Strange people are scary.  Weird looking food is scary.  Clothes are scary.  Plants are scary.  TVs are REALLY scary.

But the single scariest thing of all was the absence of light.

I'm not sure how old I was before I stopped requiring the hall light to stay on to ward off the darkness before I went to sleep, but it was definitely a while.  So I started to mine that base fear to find a simple story to tell.

And, since I'm a research nut, I started looking up the history of things that scared children.  And I started talking to friends and family about their experiences.  As it turns out, for many of them, that fear of the encroaching darkness didn't end with childhood.  If anything, for some, adulthood only crystallized it into something hard and fast and unrelenting.

But it wasn't until I started writing an outline that I started having night terrors.

Imagine lying in bed, suspended in a sort of waking sleep, where my mind, and, in some case, even my eyes are aware of the room around me, but control of my body has left me.  I can't turn.  I can't move.  I can barely breathe.

Now, imagine being in that state, and sensing, no, KNOWING that there is something else in the room with me.  And, let me be clear: not someone else.  SomeTHING else.  Something so awful that its very presence made me tremble.  Something that, if I were to find the strength to roll over and meet it face-to-face, I knew, at the core of my soul, it would result in the end of me.

And now imagine being in that state, KNOWING that is there, and trying to scream.  Trying, and failing.  Trying, where the only thing to come out of your mouth is a faint, breathless whisper that doesn't even amount to the only word with any meaning at that moment.

"Help".

So, that happened to me at least three times, maybe more over the course of writing the first iteration of what is now my first horror novella, aptly entitled, "Nite-Lite".

I'm sure those with sharp eyes will catch some of my influences, which I'll talk about at a later date.  Let's just say, of everything I've ever written, this is the one piece, after all these years, that I've never tried to re-write.

I'm not sure that IT would let me.

I don't have night terrors anymore.  I actually sleep pretty well.

As long as all the doors are closed.  No need to look the darkness in the eye,

Click the link or the image yourself, then.  Read.  Enjoy.  And sleep tight.

Review: Fox's The Following & NBC's Hannibal, or NSFW Videos of the Moment - 04-16-13

There's a very interesting conversation going on just beneath the surface of network TV about the blurred lines between imagination and reality.

It began in a very heavy-handed yet still entertaining way with Fox's new hit show, The Following.  In it, Kevin Bacon plays the stereotypical FBI burnout Ryan Hardy, who's called out of the mothballs to recapture his old nemesis, literary professor/author turned Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed serial killer Joe Carroll, played by the very underrated James Purefoy, and his growing thrill-kill cult.  While the serialized Rube Goldberg-style plot really stretches your ability to suspend disbelief in a way that only the craziest shows like "Lost" and "24" could in the past, the really interesting aspect is how Carroll sees himself as the actual author of the story playing out before us on the show.  For Carroll, each crime he and his minions commit are all chapters in a book he is literally writing in the show about Ryan Hardy, who he's chosen as the protagonist.  I'm reminded of something I think I read from John Byrne that, in the best stories, you take characters that you love and you torture them.

So, we have these fascinating moments where Carroll, without actually breaking the fourth wall, is forced to negotiate between his hatred and profound desire to just kill Hardy and his narcissistic need to keep Hardy alive so he can give him a good and satisfying ending in the story.  Yes, it's crazy, but it's occasionally funny and always entertaining.

Check out The Following, Season 1, Episode 12 - The Curse - on Hulu.
 
Let's just say, I'm waiting to see how packing a mansion with a bunch of homicidal maniacs on holiday eventually works itself out.

But, the far more interesting side of this conversation about imagination and reality is happening in NBC's new series, "Hannibal".  In this prequel to "The Silence of the Lambs", Hannibal Lecter (played masterfully and completely separately from Tony Hopkins Oscar-winning performance in the film version) is merely an extremely cultured psychiatrist called in to counsel Hugh Darcy's Will Graham, an FBI profiler who is credited with the talent for "pure empathy".  Graham is able to walk into a crime scene and instantly and accurately imagine how the murderer felt as he committed the crimes based on the evidence in front of him.  In these moments, Graham tells the story of what happened to the victims from the killer's perspective, much like how slasher movies back in the '80's forced the audience to literally see the teenage camp counselors through the murderer's eyes.

Check Out Hannibal: Pilot on Hulu.

Graham has such an amazing imagination that these horrific things cling to him long after and, of all people, it's Dr. Lecter's job to keep him sane throughout.

While they deal in very similar subject matters, Hannibal is a noticeably more sophisticated show than The Following in virtually every detail - performances, production, and, most important of all, writing.  But, in this instance, instead of a character trying to get control of the reality around him to suit his own ends, like Joe Carroll, Will Graham is desperate to get control of the increasingly deadly alternative realities inside of him, and, frankly, Hannibal Lecter is just adding fuel to the fire.

I just thought these were interesting dichotomies - using fictitious serial killers to explore how we interface with the worlds both within and without (and the price that comes with both).  They're both quite good, and neither is for the faint of heart.

Frankly, I'm still stunned by what's getting past the network sensors these days.

Video of the Moment - 01-28-13

"They're Here Already!  You're Next!"

Fanning the Flames

Another plug: if you've been enjoying the odd dropoffs to Amazon's Kindle store from my crooked imagination, take a moment to like and share my new Fan Page at http://www.facebook.com/damonyoungwriting.  As always, your support is appreciated beyond words.

Thanks!

Why Reviews Matter On Amazon

Admittedly, between work & weddings, I haven't had nearly the time to devote to Macroscope that I used to, and many of my missives have been creeping into Facebook and Twitter more frequently.  But this blog has been my creative, opinionated home for over 10 years now, so it will always occupy a place of reverence for me.

It's also the best way for me to reach people who I know dig my work directly.  So, if you're reading this blog, I'm assuming you're a fan of my writing.  For that, I am eternally grateful.

You also probably know that I've been redirecting my writing energy towards pure fiction over the last year, in the form of my ebook shorts, all of which I'm selling exclusively on Amazon.com for the Kindle, iPhone, iPad, web browsers, etc, including:

• "I'll See You In Hell", about a pair of hitmen who take a blood feud where angels fear to tread.
• "The Worst Place On Earth", about the unspeakable secrets hidden away inside a foreboding old money mansion.
• "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", about a father staring down the face of evil during a rest stop on a family road trip.
• "The Trick-or-Treaters", about a self-centered girl who learns there's really no way to escape Halloween.
• And, most recently, "33 Ways To Kill My Husband", which, I think, is pretty self-explanatory.

I'm sure many of you aren't surprised to hear that, far and away, my best selling short story is "33 Ways To Kill My Husband" - even though it's still, clearly, in a similar vein to my other work, it has a much broader appeal, is not really scary, and, honestly, is probably quite funny (at least, I think it is).

But what I've noticed is that, when we do these free promotions on Amazon, "33 Ways" vastly outsells the other books, and my theory on it is that a big part of it is the reviews.  I have easily 10x the number of reviews for "33 Ways" as for the other books, and I suspect that Amazon's internal recommendations algorithm chooses to suggest it to more viewers because more people have taken the time to write a review (the vast majority of which are positive).

So, again, my theory is that the other books could reach a larger audience if they had more reviews.

With that in mind, I have a request:

I've you've had the chance to read my other books, and you enjoyed them, I would really appreciate it if you took a second to give them reviews.  It could be as simple as "I loved it!" or "It scared the crap out of me!"  One or two sentences is probably enough.  But it could be a huge way to help me reach an even larger audience.

You can find them all online at this link.

Thank you all for sticking with me for the last decade.  And who knows what the next ten years may have in store...

Trick or treat. Or else.

They're back.  And, this time, they're free.  Check out "The Trick-or-Treaters" for free all week long, exclusively at Amazon.com.

 

Maniacal Laughter, or why I wrote "33 Ways To Kill My Husband"

Years ago I saw an interview with one of my artistic heroes, the great filmmaker John Carpenter, where he was asked what did he think of the "Saw" series.  "I think they're tremendously funny," he replied with a completely straight face.

It's hard to explain what makes me laugh.

When I think of my favorite comedies, movies like "The Naked Gun" and "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" immediately leap to mind.  I love "Airplane" and "Top Secret" and "Real Genius" and "Revenge of the Nerds" and "There's Something About Mary" and "Dumb and Dumber" and "Zoolander".

On the stage, I love Christopher Durang and on the page I bow at the feet of Douglas Adams.

I could go on and on about the stories that everyone else thinks are funny that I also think are funny.

But then there are the other stories.

Like Mary Harron and Christian Bale's version of "American Psycho".

Like the Paul Verhoeven trifecta: "RoboCop", "Total Recall", and "Starship Troopers".

Or "Re-Animator" or "Creepshow II" or parts of "John Carpenter's The Thing" or even "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

And let's not even get into the local news.

There's absurdity and irony and excess all around us every day.   While most people would shake their heads and turn their eyes away, I honestly cannot help but laugh.  It's almost involuntary.  The bigger the crazy, the more over the top, the louder I laugh.  And the more serious the people in these situations take their absurdity, the funnier it is.

What's even funnier is that most people are so hyper-aware of the circumstances, but so incredibly unaware of the very irony they create.

I'm reminded of a joke from Bill Maher about the proctologist who complains that he has to look at asses all day.

But even as I write these things, I feel like they could be coming out of Heath Ledger's mouth in "The Dark Knight".

Maybe, in the end, the biggest joke is on me, after all.

Wouldn't that be funny?

I guess my own lack of self-awareness is part of the genesis of my protagonist in "33 Ways To Kill My Husband ".  But the honest truth is I owe a big debt on this story to my fiance.  I just hope she doesn't take it to heart.  :-)

Scary Christmas

Now, Macroscope fans, as a special holiday gift from Amazon.com, if you have an Amazon Prime membership, which already gives you unlimited free 2-day shipping and a huge cache of free streaming videos, you can now get all four of my horror short e-books for FREE.  That includes:

• "I'll See You in Hell", where not even death can put an end to the vicious feud between two rival hitmen.
• "The Worst Place On Earth", about the terror unleashed with a secretive, "old money" family are forced to open the doors of their mansion to the public.
• "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", something abominable that is slowly, deliberately stalking a family driving home through the post-Las Vegas desert.
• and, "The Trick-or-Treaters", who come knocking on the door of a working girl who hates Halloween.  As you can imagine, the Trick-or-Treaters are not amused.

 Not your every day stocking stuffers, but definitely good for huddling around the open fire.

Enjoy!

2 More Days 'Til Halloween. Read Four for $4.

Now that I've taken you through all four of my current short stories, my Halloween gift to your Macroscope readers is a Four for $4 deal.

Get all four short horror stories, including "I'll See You In Hell", "The Worst Place On Earth", "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", and the very latest, "The Trick-or-Treaters", for $0.99 each. Just check out my Author Page on Amazon and you can score them all.

Enjoy, and don't stay out TOO late this weekend.

3 More Days 'til Halloween, but "The Trick-or-Treaters" are already here.

I used to live in a working class neighborhood in a not-so-great area of Los Angeles.  If you looked at the crime maps on the internet, the area was a virtual collage of color-coded crimes and misdemeanors, but it was also an area with mostly houses for blocks & blocks.  The population was less transient than streets lined with apartment buildings, and, as a result, there were more children.

And more children mean trick-or-treaters on Halloween evening.

It all sounds great - little kids in cute costumes with their mock attempts at candy blackmail.  I was in to it, ready to play along with my buckets of Hershey's kisses.

But once the sun had completely set, I figured it would only be another hour or two before the parents packed the kiddies away and off the mean streets.

Imagine my surprise when I settled in to watch John Carpenter's Halloween for the billionth time when, at around 9:30, there was a knock on my door.

There was no peep hole and my lights were already on, so I couldn't peek through the window in secret.  There was, however, a pretty solid screen door, so I opened the main door to take a look.

It was a person, at least as tall as me, but clearly heavier, wearing saggy jeans, a dark hoodie, and wearing a plain white hockey mask and holding a sack full of.... who knows.

He didn't make a move.  He didn't make a sound.

He just stood there.

And I just shook my head and laughed, saying "No, dude.  Not tonight", before closing the door and waiting for him to leave.

He was probably just some teenager who wanted in on the fun.

Probably.

But what if...

My latest horror short is called "The Trick-or-Treaters."

It starts from that idea and runs with it into some pretty crazy and surprising places.  I can honestly say that how I imagined this story would end is no where close to how it actually concludes.  And there are definitely some moments where I had an idea to write something where I thought, "wow, that's really, really wrong."

I'm reminded of a term Marlon Brando uses in "Apocalypse Now":

Moral terror.

It's brand new and available in the Amazon Kindle store today.  And definitely pay attention to my Macroscope post on Halloween proper.  I've got a little special something cooked up.

8 More Days 'til Halloween. Read "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation"

A little over a week left before the day, and I'm sure most of you will do most of your celebrations over the weekend, so let's call it a week.

Which brings us to my next scary project.

This one had been percolating in my brain in a variety of forms for years. And it comes from a couple of different places.

So much of horror is about dark, closed-in spaces, which, as you can imagine, makes me think about flipping the proverbial script to see what we can do in big open spaces in broad daylight. Which, as a California resident, can't help but lead me to the desert.

My mind wanders to the long drives out to Las Vegas and all of the nothing in between.

Or is it nothing?

When I fly over that same land, I think of all of the mountains and rock that goes for miles on end. It's literally a no man's land.

But just because there are no men, that doesn't mean that there's nothing else out there.

And that leads me to one of my other thoughts, as a genre writer: I'm SO much more interested in new monsters. I've had my fill of vampires and werewolves and zombies. These things have been done to death.

But something new...

You could literally be sitting right next to something horrible, and not know it until it's too late.

The original title was "Sidewinder". But it was August, and the process of finishing this story was literally consuming me.

Hence, "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation."

I'm pretty sure you've never seen or read anything like it. Check it out.



Now that we've finished our trips down memory lane, I think the next time I'll have to share with you something fresh.

 And awful.

 

10 more days 'til Halloween. Read "The Worst Place On Earth".

Keeping in the spirit of the month, here's a little bit on my next horror short ebook.  It's actually a title I used once before for a Macroscope post about my love of horror movies that I wrote in the wake of the first time I'd ever seen Eli Roth's "Hostel". 

But the title is really inspired by a feeling, and it was a feeling I had after watching one of the earliest trailers for "28 Days Later".  I've literally searched dozens of times for that particular version of the trailer, but I've never been able to find it.

Maybe it was a nightmare I had after watching the trailer.

But, there's a moment where people are running away to hide from something terrible, but they're running into a deep, dark, wet place that, under ordinary circumstances, they would never EVER go.

I was just struck by the sensation of the awful choice: what's after you is bad, but where you're going to escape it is worse than you could possibly imagine.

It's the worst place On Earth.

And, like any good writer, there's lots of double meanings in that title.  But I'll leave it to you, oh, intrepid reader, to suss that out for yourself.

I mean, at this point, if you're following my writing, you've already gone to Hell.  How much worse can it be? :-)

Right?

12 more days 'til Halloween. Read "I'll See You In Hell"

Those of you who've never seen "Halloween III: Season of the Witch", may not get the joke, but I'm not going to spoil it for you.  :-)

We're counting down the days to All Hallow's Eve, which struck me as the perfect time to re-share my horror shorts.  So, taking it from the top:

The first story sort of started from that scene in "Unforgiven", where a certain character who's staring down the barrel of a shotgun says to his tormentor:

"I'll see you in Hell."

And, to a person like me, that's the kind of line that gets your mind racing.  Would they really see each other in Hell?  And how would that go down?

Bad people doing bad things in a really bad place.

It's like an episode of "Oz" on steroids.

Hence, my very first ebook.  It's really pretty crazy.  But, at the end of the day, if you're not going to create something crazy, what's the point of creating in the first place?

I prefer to think of it as "innovation", right, Steve?  :-)

Anyway, if you want to go on this sick, horrified ride, jump on board.  Download it.  Read it.  Be scared.

And, if you've already read it, share the love (or hate, as it were :-)) with your horror-loving friends.

It's that time of year.

The Most Wonderful Time of The Year, or why I love Halloween

There are certain times of the year that tickle my heart as a filmmaker and a deep lover of movies.  I love February, when all of the classic Oscar-winning films suddenly get new life on TV.  I love December, when your favorite holiday movies return while the studios generally offer the highest quality films they've made all year.  I love May, when the biggest, loudest popcorn movies of the summer come roaring into the multiplexes.

But my dirty little secret is that I love the month of October most of all.

I love scary movies.  And these 31 days are the days that they all rise like zombies, shambling across the quiet countryside to frighten a new generation.  These old horror films are like old friends:

The tightly coiled maniacal genius of a medical student who can Re-Animate the dead.

The terrible thing Creeping inside the crate beneath the university staircase.

The little boy in the clown costume with the butcher knife on Halloween night.

The puzzle box that Raises a little Hell every time someone is fiendish enough to try to solve it.

The Thing inside that snow dog running across the Anarctic.

I could talk about Val Lewton and William Castle.  I could talk about Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.  I could talk about Universal and Hammer and Dimension and Artisan and Lions Gate.

I could talk about the newbies, like the people who can't help but video tape the things that go bump in the night, or all the poor souls who've forced to live or die and make their choice.

In many ways, I think a good horror film is the highest order of filmmaking.  Think of the skill it takes to craft a movie that can terrify and amuse, that can horrify but still attract repeat viewings, that can attract the best talent, that can push the boundaries of special effects.

Psycho
Jaws
Alien
The Silence of the Lambs
Cape Fear

I could go on and on and on.

But I won't.

I'll just ask you to turn on the TV or go to the theater, hold on to your sweetheart, and enjoy the rush of getting the daylights scared out of you for the next two weeks.

Review: The Thing

Do you have those movies that you've seen so many times that you've actually forgotten the first time?

I'm like that with "John Carpenter's The Thing". I think it's pretty safe to say that it is, hands down, my favorite horror movie of all time. I practically know it by heart. I re-watch it and study the evolving (or should I say deteriorating) relationships among the group of fairly ordinary men in an Artic research station that is infiltrated by a shape shifting alien that can perfectly imitate any animal it can devour.

I think it's a perfect horror movie. It's tense and scary. It's got great laugh out loud moments. It's pretty original. And it's super bleak.


It's funny to me that Carpenter himself worships the original movie, "The Thing From Another World", where the alien is basically a Frankenstein monster made of vegetables who fertilizes new versions of himself using human blood. It's such a weird, quirky movie with the stereotypical stupid scientist. But it also has some great jump out moments and a great end line:
"Tell the world, tell everyone: Watch the skies everywhere, keep looking, keep watching the skies!"

But, frankly, I don't find "The Thing From Another World" scary at all. For my money, the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" trumps it in every way: scare factor, Cold War paranoia, direction, performance... it even has a better end line: "They're here already! YOU'RE NEXT!!!"

That said, I can appreciate that The Thing From Another World comes from a different era in horror moviemaking, so I can excuse Carpenter's affection.  Especially because I so appreciate what he did with his own take on the film.  By returning to the original source material, John Campbell's novella, "Who Goes There?", Carpenter rediscovered the true paranoia and horror of this unwelcome visitor from another planet.

What's interesting to me in reading the Campbell story is the intelligence that's implied about the monster by the investigating scientists.  While a reviewer of the current prequel to Carpenter's film (which we'll get to in a moment) asks how such a creature could evolve through natural selection, Campbell assumes that the creature has developed the science that allows it to adapt to any environment at a cellular level.  They even assume that they've never seen its natural form, that even its ship was something it had appropriated from another species it had imitated.

Which is what is so great about Carpenter's film - the thing isn't just a monster.  In many ways, it's smarter than the humans and is constantly a few steps ahead of them, deliberately sowing the seeds of mistrust as it swallows them up, one by one.

It's this intelligence, this cunning, that is the single biggest thing I miss the most in the new prequel, "The Thing", with Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  But, don't get me wrong.  I actually love this movie.  It really takes the horror aspects of the franchise to a new level.  For fans of the Carpenter film, the way the two-faced thing is born in this film has to be one of the most horrifying scenes in any movie I've seen in some time.  The effects are crazy and the cast is great.  Mary Elizabeth really reminds me of Naomi Harris in "28 Days Later".  As my better half said, by the end of the film, what she's experienced, you cannot take any chances.  You have to be as hard core as possible.

But her survival hinges on the way the thing chooses to attack her early in the film.  Frankly, it's sloppy and not nearly as clever as it is in the Carpenter movie.

Then again, it is a prequel.  Maybe the Norwegian camp taught the thing a thing or two.

Go see them all.  They're great films.