short stories

A New Scary Story to Tell in the Dark

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Growing up, I got to know my brother’s bedroom floor pretty well. I knew all the scratches on his black-painted wooden bedposts, the rectangular shapes made by the interconnected wires holding up his mattress, the worn-out softness of his bedraggled carpet. And no, this isn’t because he pinned me to the floor and made me beg for mercy (that was reserved for when he tied me to the swingset).

I knew my brother’s bedroom floor because I slept there every time he told me a scary story. That was the rule: you scare your sister, you get to deal with her nightmares. Truth be told, I didn’t usually have nightmares after one of his stories (probably because I was too terrified to close my eyes in the first place).

Don’t get me wrong – I was a very willing audience. I BEGGED him to scare me. I especially loved it when he read to me from a particular series of books, the first of which was entitled Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark by Alvin Schwartz.

These books were FANTASTIC. (They actually just came out with a documentary about this series, as well as a feature film based on the first book!)

Back in the day, though, the books were just, well, books. But they were also SO much more. My elementary school friends and I passed around the Scary Stories trilogy like candy. The books terrified us, delighted us, and – most importantly – made us want to read. We had no idea at the time that parents all over the country were complaining about the series, or that the Scary Stories books were actually banned in some places!

Each book featured a collection of short stories that consisted primarily of urban legends from around the world. Some of them you would recognize as classic campfire tales: “The hook,” “High beams,” “The wendigo,” etc. (Basically the first season of Supernatural in the form of a children’s book, LOL.) Some were more obscure. Some weren’t even stories, just creepy vignettes with no real plot (“The thing” comes to mind here). Some were just about leaving a disturbing image imprinted on the reader’s brain…and boy, did they ever!

The entire series had these wonderfully gruesome, dripping-with-gore illustrations by Stephen Gammell that were as much a part of the appeal as the stories themselves. In one recent reprint, Gammell’s illustrations were actually removed and replaced, presumably for being “too intense” for young audiences. The trilogy has since been re-released with the original illustrations (thankfully) restored.

I can’t imagine a Scary Stories book without them!

Nor can I imagine my childhood without those terrifying tales. But as much as I loved reading them (or, even better, having someone else read them to me in full dramatic fashion), I often regretted the decision later, when the house was dark and quiet and all the little floorboard creaks and weirdly-shaped shadows that weren’t noticeable in the daytime suddenly came to life.

Thus, my childhood was a marvelous, ever-repeating cycle of hunger for scary stories followed by intense buyer’s remorse at having read them.

You wish you hadn’t read about me now, don’t you, dear little Gretchen? Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

For better or worse though, those dark, eerie, disturbing tales I shared with my friends as a kid shaped the person I grew up to be. To this day, I still have a special place in my heart for all things spooky and creepy…and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Supernatural, The X-Files, and Grimm are long-time favorite shows of mine. On my calendar, Halloween is circled because it’s one of the most exciting days of the year. And my first-ever published story, a flash fic entitled “Grisly,” is – you guessed it – a horror story.

And now, as the leaves begin to change, and the nights grow longer, I have a new horror story coming out – one that takes me right back to my childhood, and my love-hate-love relationship with those deliciously evil scary stories.

“The Haunted Fleshies” is available now in the September 2019 Issue of The Society of Misfit Stories Presents… and I could not be more thrilled:

https://books.google.com/books?id=c46sDwAAQBAJ&dq=society+of+misfit+stories+presents+issue+3&source=gbs_navlinks_s

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/956628

The story follows Grace, a little girl much like the one I used to be (and sometimes still am), who can’t get enough of her older brother’s favorite books (even though they scare the pants off her). After a terrifying nighttime encounter in her own backyard, Grace is convinced that the monsters in the books are real, and they’re coming for her. Whether or not she’s right, one thing is for certain: someone – or something – in the neighborhood has a taste for blood.

My hope is that this story will take you back to when you were a kid, sitting around a crackling campfire, swapping tales of hook men and golden arms, and laughing at how silly they are. But then, every so often, you’ll hear a branch snap or some leaves rustle and you’ll glance into the dark woods beyond your fire’s little circle of light, and wonder if maybe, just maybe, something could really be lurking out there.

Happy reading! 😉

~Gretchen

Coming up on ATHF: Book reviews for Knight’s Honor and Plain Dane: Dawn of Power, plus a review of Lucifer Season 4 on Netflix!

The Whole Story

astheheroflies1 Comment

There are many reasons short stories get rejected. Many, MANY reasons. So many, in fact, that it would be impossible to safeguard your story against all of them. If the slush reader’s having a bad day, if the editor just doesn’t dig your writing style, or if the magazine JUST accepted a story about a cross-dressing werewolf (which is exactly what YOUR story happens to be about), there’s not much you can do about those things.

There are, however, a few things you CAN do to vastly improve your story’s chances, and one of these is to make sure that you have a complete story. Conflict, change and growth are the lifeblood of all stories, both long and short, and a lack of these elements is one major reason that many short stories get rejected.

Now, the advice “write a complete story” might sound like an obvious no-brainer, and if we were talking about novels, it would be. If your novel’s main character doesn’t have a problem, then you, as the author, have a big one.

But short stories, especially flash fiction (1,000 words or less), can be a little trickier. With so few words, it can be easy to fall into the trap of writing a beautiful scene without any actual substance, or a trick-the-audience, twist-ending story in which nothing actually happens (I’ve been guilty of both of these charges myself, and I’ve got the rejection letters to prove it!).

Consider these two examples:

I could write a moody, atmospheric piece about Katie, the sailor’s daughter, staring out at the ocean on a misty morning, thinking about her father, who’s been lost as sea for eight months. If done well, this has the potential to be a really gorgeous, heartbreaking scene. However, unless Katie actually DOES something—maybe she decides to go hit the high seas and look for Dad, or realizes she has to let him go and get on with her life—then it’s not a complete story.

I could also write a tale about Nora, the meek, mousy, small-town librarian, who, as it turns out, spends her nights as a wildly-popular exotic dancer. Now, this is certainly a fun idea, but simply setting up the character as a soft-spoken, overlooked librarian and then revealing at the end that she’s a smokin’-hot stripper isn’t enough for a full story. Nothing changed for Nora—she knew she was a stripper all along. The only thing that’s changed is the audience’s perception of her—and that’s just if they didn’t see the ending coming (which many readers—and editors—will).

So, what does it take to make a complete story, and how can you make sure your piece fits the bill? Here are three simple tests to put your stories through before you send them out into the big, bad, rejection-filled world:

1.) Ask yourself: What is the CONFLICT in my story? Is it:

-Man vs. Man
-Man vs. Nature
-Man vs. Himself
-Man vs. Society
-Man vs. God

If you can identify a clear conflict, chances are you’ve got a full story.

2.) Ask yourself: What CHANGES in my story? How are things different at the ending than they were at the beginning? If you can see a clear difference in your story’s character or situation as the result of the events that took place, you’re probably in good shape.

And the final test:

3.) Boil your story down to a single-sentence summary, e.g.: “Katie thinks about her father, who is lost at sea” or “Nora the dumpy librarian is actually a highly-paid stripper.” When you’ve got your story in this bare-bones state, look for key words that indicate change or conflict, such as:

-realizes
-discovers
-learns
-decides
-struggles

Notice that neither of the two examples above have words like that. However, if I make a few tweaks to the storylines: “Katie, the sailor’s daughter, DECIDES to go look for her father, who is lost at sea” or “Nora, the dumpy and over-looked librarian, DISCOVERS true joy when she takes on a secret life as a stripper”—now I’ve got something that maybe, just maybe (if all the stars are aligned and neither the slush reader nor the editor are going through a messy break-up) has a chance of getting published.

Best of luck on your submissions, and keep writing!

-Gretchen