#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.

Getting Saved

My apologies for the long absence, dear readers, but, to make amends, here's a very brief excerpt from my latest, a non-fiction book entitled "The Savior Inside You: 18 Daily Essays on Hollywood, Self-Help, and Other Illusions."

There’s a minister in Nigeria whose personal net worth is presumed to approach $150MM.  

Money from nothing.  

I guess I was wrong about there never being a class of people who could reasonably expect to acquire wealth without having done any real material work to attain it.  After all, mass media wasn’t invented with radio and TV. 

 It was Gutenberg with the printing press, and the first product was The Bible.  

The irony is that, like so many other money making products, as soon as something is successful, people immediately set out to copy it.  After Hunger Games, the market was flooded with young adult actioneer novels.  After Karloff’s Frankenstein, the theaters were filled to the brim with monster movies.  

And, for better or for worse, after the success of the Christian church, everyone and their mother wanted to sell you on salvation.

 If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll probably recognize some familiar themes, but I think it's safe to say that I've gone a bit deeper and, frankly, even more personal than usual.  As always, if you're a fan of my writing, I definitely encourage you to pick it up.  And, if you like it, please share it and add your voice via comments and reviews on Amazon.com.

Thanks, as always.

A thought on Game of Thrones

You all know that I've been a fan of professional wrestling ever since I was a little kid. And what most don't realize is that, beyond the violence and the spectacle, pro-wrestling is serialized storytelling broken down to its most basic elements. For a time, in the 80's, in the midst of Bruno Sammartino and Hulkamania, you had these long stretches of good guys, or, as they call them "babyfaces" or just "faces", holding the world championship and vanquishing bad guys (aka "heels").

But the usual trajectory of wrestling story lines have always been much more subversive. Historically, the heels have held the championships and constantly thwart the efforts of the faces to unseat them - partially through skill in the ring, but more often through cheating and the manipulation of the rules and incompetent refs.

See, the problem with most faces is that they think the most talented grapplers should be champion. But championships are won in multiple dimensions, where pure wrestling skill is only one, and possibly the least important.

Which is why Ric Flair is able to call himself a 16 time world champion. He mastered all aspects of the game. Not just in ring skill, but a mastery of ref manipulation, psychological warfare, timely alliances, and just straight up cheating.

Ric Flair & The Four Horsemen bragging, before getting called out

The storytelling genius of Ric Flair is that he was so arrogant and smug, audiences hated him so much because if it. They would pay over and over again on the hope that this time he might lose.

The very definition of the man you live to hate.

Which brings me to Game of Thrones, and, more specifically, the ruling family.

The Lannisters are The Four Horseman of Westeros.

They play the game better than anyone else. We admire and loathe them. And, as noble as the Starks are, they are overmatched. In this world, their very nobility is a liability. And the Lannisters are the real stars.

Tywin Lannister educates his son Jamie while slaughtering a deer.

The Starks played a great game of checkers. But Tywin Lannister is playing 3D chess.

That said, having not read the books, I think this next generation of Starks have learned the hard lessons that can make them competitive. But I think it shows the genius of George R. R. Martin that he's made the world so karmically unfair so far because our hearts keep hoping against hope for at least a just ending, if not a happy one.

But I would say don't count on it.

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.

NSFW Video of the Moment 02-26-13

Pulp Fiction - I'm Superfly T.N.T. !! - beware, if you have gentle ears.

In Defense of Uncle Tom

Hollywood Shuffle - NAACP & Uncle Tom

Honestly, it was something I'd never questioned.

For those of you who don't know, within the African-American community, an Uncle Tom is a race traitor: someone who would harm other Blacks to promote him or herself among Whites.  The term comes from an 1800's book by Harriet Beecher Stowe called "Uncle Tom's Cabin", set during the period of American slavery.

But, to be perfectly honest, I never actually knew what it was that Uncle Tom had done to sell out the other slaves around him.

This, of course, is why I love wikipedia.  After all, how could I have figured out everything I needed to know about Ayn Rand last summer without having to subsidize her books?

But that, my friends, is for another blog post.

Point being, I looked up "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and, frankly, I was shocked by what I read.

Here's the link to the plot synopsis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Plot

Uncle Tom was a deeply Christian slave who bonded with certain whites in such a way as to convince them of his humanity.  His Christian faith sustained him as he withstood punishment from a hateful slavemaster because he would NOT whip the other slaves.  And when asked to rat out certain slaves who'd escaped, Tom held his tongue, protecting them, even as he's being beaten to death.  He even forgives the overseers for killing him.

Moreover, at the time that it was published, 1852, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was seen as a key abolitionist text, one of the first to highlight the daily horrors of slavery.  It was loathed among the slaveholding class and the author was allegedly referred to by Abraham Lincoln himself as "the little lady who started this great war."

Unfortunately, history was unkind to this book's legacy.  As Reconstruction dragged on, Southern whites took to making blackface stage plays based on the book outside of Stowe's creative control, most of which depicted the near-saintly Uncle Tom as the exact opposite of the character's intention.

Honestly, I don't know what else to say, other than it pays to really know your history.

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!

Chillin' like a villain

Chill.com is a website where videophiles like me can curate and share all of the gloriously messy videos on the web that they love and share them with the world at large.

Someone at Chill thought it was a good idea to name ME as the curator for the videos that appear on their front page all week.

I think I'll make it my mission to make them regret this decision.  :-)

Check out my own Chill collections at http://chill.com/Dayfornight.

And for a taste of what I'm liking on Chill, check out this link.

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.  :-)

for Christopher Hitchens, or Requiem for a Contrarian

I did my research, and the first time I referenced Christopher Hitchens here on Macroscope was way back in 2002, in a post called "The Shadow King" on the absurdity of naming Henry Kissinger, of all people, to investigate how badly the government botched the prevention of 9/11.  Around that time, Hitch had written a book about how a very convincing case could be made that Kissinger should be prosecuted in The Hague for war crimes, given the campaign he and Nixon conducted in Cambodia and the way they sabotaged LBJ's negotiations with the North Vietnamese by secretly telling them to wait until Nixon won the '68 election to get a better deal.

I feel like I'd been aware of Hitchens for a long time, and while I bounced back and forth between agreeing with him wholeheartedly and thinking he was completely off-base, what I loved about him was that he was one of the few people in public life who took the time to argue eloquently.  Yes, he was a chain smoking jerk, but he never backed away from a fight and he always did it with the very best lyrical flourishes.

He reminds me of a political pundit version of George Sanders, and felt like he faced his own impending demise the same way he confronted all of his adversaries: with the ongoing power of his words.

Cannot think of anyone who more definitively owns the classification "rapier wit".  A quintessential man of letters in the vein of a William F. Buckley.  Hitch was often more conservative and reactionary for my tastes, but at least I always knew what he was thinking.  At least I always knew THAT he was thinking.

The political discourse could use far more voices with the style, guile, passion, and care that Christopher Hitchens possessed.  The world is poorer for his passing, but much richer from his presence.

Rest in peace, Christopher.

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?