Halloween
Back Stories
2022 – “Bob and Tina's Rocky Mountain Bed And Breakfast”
I started writing this story
just as COVID rearranged life as we know it. It took a little time before I could get back to my writing desk to finish it. This is another one where the original title gave away too much. I wonder when you figured out where the narrative was going?
2019 – “Samhain 2019”
I started writing this story
with two possible directions I could take it. As I got about 2/3 of the way
into it, I chose to take the “traditional ghost story” path. Perhaps another
time, I’ll see where the other road takes me…
2018 – “Homeward
Bound”
I wanted to tell the story
of the start of the zombie apocalypse, but from a different point of view…
2017 – Angie passed away -
No story this year…
2016 – “Shelly's Perfect Halloween”
I saw the illustration at
the end of the story, and decided to flesh out the details behind it. The trick
was to distract the reader long enough to hide the final twist until the last
possible moment. I hope you were surprised…
2015 – “Sarah’s Killer App”
I enjoy Stephen King’s short
stories, and a favorite is “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” from the compilation
“Skeleton Crew”. I decided to put my own
spin on it, and update it for more modern technology. Also, I think my twist
ending is a bit darker than the original, which is more appropriate for
Halloween…
2014 – “Dream Lover”
I was stumped for a good
story idea, and then I had a few nights filled with strange dreams. I enjoy a
good plot twist, and this was my favorite.
It’s definitely rated “PG-13”, but it’s no more explicit than your average
romance novel.
2013 – “Dreamcatcher”
I’ve always been fascinated
by the American Indian lore regarding dreamcatchers. What a wonderful creation
to stop bad dreams and promote good ones! And it looks like the boys of cabin
twelve could use one…
2012 – “Ghost Tour”
Many of the stories told by Nigel are from the haunted tours of New Orleans. The story of the Good Friday fire is historical fact. If you ever have a chance, get a good bartender to make a proper absinthe drink for you, even if you may not like the taste enough to have a second one. And finally, enjoy the people watching opportunities in the Big Easy should you ever find yourself there. You never know who you’ll meet!
2011 – No story. Just didn’t
have any good ideas…
2010 – “The Ritual”
This story actually came
from a friend’s suggestion. Eros wanted
to know what would happen if Linus finally met the Great Pumpkin. I set the
story in his high school years, and made the Great Pumpkin something much more
sinister than the naïve young Linus expected…
2009 – “Summer Of The Loup Garou”
I’ve always wanted to do a
story about a werewolf that you rooted for. I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got
it just the way I’d like, but I think this one comes close. There were a lot of influences here – from
the little house my cousin and her husband had on Irish Bayou to the group of
kids that hung out together in the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s
“It”. The CYO dance incident actually
happen between two buddies of mine in high school, and the descriptions of
Jeanette are based on a real life crush I had back in middle school…
2008 – “The Purse Snatcher”
I
too had this fear of women’s purses instilled by my mother, and I’m still
uncomfortable looking in a woman’s purse even with express permission. I think people have gotten a little too blasé
with their privacy. We then feel violated
when that privacy is invaded and our secrets are abused. Don’t post pictures of yourself dancing on
tables and flashing the cute bartender on the Internet and then act indignant
when somebody at work makes lewd comments about them. Perhaps your secrets
should’ve remained secrets… We’ve all
got them. We may trust our closest
friends and family with our intimate lives, but everyone has a few things that
are not for public consumption and should not be published for the world to see
– intentionally or otherwise…
I
wanted our bad guy to be a relatively decent bad guy, but I wanted him to find
something in a stolen purse that would cost him dearly for the privacy he
invaded. It took a while to come up with
just the right thing and make it work… I
think it does. And the scariest part of
this story? I did the research, and
that’s roughly how lethal injections are really carried out…
2008 (Bonus) – “Poor, Poor, Paulie”
I
wanted to write my own version of “The Blob”, but I wanted it to be a new
terrestrial life instead of something from outer space. As I described the conditions necessary to
create the monster, the character of Paulie wrote
himself. The only question was, should
he sick his creature on some of the people who had wronged him, or should he
come to his demise in the solitude of his lonely apartment. In the end, I chose
the more likely answer…
2007 – “Prey For Me”
I
was playing around and came up with the title, and I liked it for a story about
a child vampire that turns the tables on a would-be predator. I just needed a way to tell the story without
giving it away too soon. I’m still not
sure the title doesn’t give it away before I even say a word… I wrote the first paragraph, and it creeped
me out so much I had to put it aside for a while before I could come back to
it. If anything is going to distract a
reader from where the story is going, that will. I had a little trouble deciding whether I
wanted the priest to be a bad guy, or just a potentially bad guy. In the end, I decided to make him a tortured
soul, but not an evil one. In a way, he’s saved from himself…
2006
– “Flowers For Algernon”
I
like this title, and I thought I would borrow it from the award-winning short
story. The resemblance ends there.
Working at Rouse’s, I drove the section of Hwy 90 I describe in this
story every day. There are places along
there where the swamp is so close to the road you can spit on an alligator’s head. Indeed, sometimes you could see where a road
kill was dragged back into the swamp. Another time, a four-foot alligator was
road kill – probably just a little slower than that 18-wheeler bearing down on
him as he went after some tempting morsel.
That highway is unforgiving of driver error as well, with deep ditches
and large trees just off the pavement trying to hold root between the asphalt
and the swamp. There are a number of
roadside crosses as testament to the dangers of this road. One morning I began to wonder, what if some
of those crosses were not just memorials, but gravesites? There is a cross we place in Dave’s Halloween
graveyard that I’ve painted “Algernon” on in reference to this story. I never found out who originated the quote
“When a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head and cries…” But I did find a great female blues
guitarist, (Rory Block) who references
it on one of her albums while researching it.
2005
– Hurricane KATRINA floods parts of
There
was a story called Midnight Mechanic that I
passed around just after Halloween that I’ll post here. I wanted to do a story about “The Crossroads”
– and who you might meet there. I used a
trick I heard about on MythBusters to get the traveler on his way before he
witnessed too much…
2004
– “The Wedding”
Again,
I had I title I really liked, but it would give away too much of the
story. So I saved it for the last line
instead. It’s the title of a “Buffy The
Vampire Slayer” episode, “Never Kill A Boy On The First Date”. A lot of the names in the story are people I
know, and my friends Rick and Cathi really did get
married in a Celtic ceremony (complete with kilted groomsmen) just before
Halloween that year. This is the second
time I’ve used the mechanism of the italicized text indicating that I’m
switching between two time lines, past and present, converging on the final
moment. (I used it first in “Slay Ride” in 2001).
2003
– Hurt my back, out of work, and Bill Higgins passed away. I didn’t celebrate
Halloween that year. L
2002
– “The Curse Of The
Broken-Hearted Witches”
I
really like the movie “Practical Magic” starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman,
and Stockard Channing. It is the story of the Owens family of
witches and their curse. Any man that
falls for an Owens woman dies. In it,
they touch on the cause of the curse – their ancestor Maria fell in love with a
man that would never come for her so she cast a spell on herself to never fall
in love again. I thought that story needed
a little more detail, so after a pitcher of “Midnight Margaritas”, I decided to tell
Maria’s tale…
Eye of newt, toe of frog,
Wing of bat, tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind worms sting,
Fragias salt, like a sailor’s
stubble,
Flip the switch, and watch the cauldron bubble!
2001
– “Slay Ride”
We’d
just seen a terrorist attack on the
2000
– “Sole Survivor”
I
was watching one of the Dracula movies, and I realized they either take place in
Transylvania, or after he arrives in Europe after getting kicked out of
1999
– “Death Of A Fortune Teller”
This
one was inspired by the
Dark
Lady laughed and danced and lit the candles one by one
Danced to her gypsy music till her brew was done
Dark Lady played black magic till the clock struck on the twelve
She told me more about me than I knew myself
1998
– “Black Agnes”
OK – This one was cheating. I wanted a “classic” ghost story – one that’s
been around the campfire a few times. I
found this on the Internet somewhere, and embellished it slightly.
1997 – “Through Cat’s Eyes”
This is far and away my favorite short story. I like that you can read this story as a
supernatural tale – or not. It is
purposely ambiguous. It’s also
interesting in that I wrote it from the point of view of a teenage girl. Not something I’m at all familiar with – and
yet I think I make it work. While
between jobs, I shopped it around some magazines for extra cash. Did you know
that publishing on my own web page invalidated “publication first rights”? Still – if “Cemetery Dance” went so far as to
check if the story had been previously published, it had at least made the
first cut. It was later published in an
E-zine for writers edited by successful, published writers. (Now defunct.) L
1996 – “What A Tangled Web We Weave”
The movie “Arachnophobia” got me thinking about what
might happen if there was a poison-resistant super spider species. Cross that with a little bit of “The
Andromeda Strain” and you get a story about the end of the world as we know it,
and we didn’t see it coming…
1995 – “Jumbee’s
Revenge”
How could I live in
1994 – “Alien Lover”
This one was inspired by a short story by Robert
Silverberg called “The
Shadow Of Wings”.
Except – I wanted to switch the point of view. In the end, I knew there was only one way to
end it. Because we’ve all been at the
wrong end of the flyswatter at some point…
I still chuckle at the graphics at the end of this story.
1993 – “All That Glitters”
And what kind of scuba diver would I be if I didn’t
write a story set on a treasure ship beneath a tranquil