Originses (Patreon)

If you’re the type of person who likes to know where a story comes from, have I got a deal for you! I thought I’d transcribe a few memories of how some of these tales came to be. If you find this interesting, I’m happy to do another set sometime while I wait for another idea to get off its butt and assert itself.

TRANSIT – I’m one of those weirdos who’s morbidly fascinated by air disasters, God help me. I’ve watched more than one of those crude animated re-creations on YouTube—the kind with no narration, just text printed on a screen, slowly spooling out the facts of a crash. I can’t look away from something that goes so right 99.9999 percent of the time yet goes horribly wrong in incredibly rare moments. The reasons are always so sad to me—tiny, tiny imperfections in a process or microscopic faults in cognitive processing leading to utter horror. And yes, the staticky radio communications, with their eerie dead spots, are inevitably riveting. Frankly, I dislike everything about plane travel: the bustle of airports, the necessary prep, the cramped seats and aisles…. Amtrak will always do just fine for me, thanks. I stretch out on the train, read, gaze out the window, chat with the snack bar attendant, eat the awful microwaved pizza… everything about planes and airports seems to be saying Go faster, faster, faster! Amtrak, meanwhile, seems to be saying, “Dude, like, chill. Life is meaningless; enjoy the scenery.”

I remembered that my brother, Les, a longtime airplane buff, is one of those people who instinctively understands naturalistic voice acting, so in he went, playing the part he was born to play: a pilot. I shall continue to abuse his skills right up until the moment he asks for any kind of payment.

LABORER – About a mile and a half from my apartment, there’s a road similar to the loop depicted in this story. I like going for walks there after all the nice office buildings close for the day, when they just sit there, silent and hulking, with no one around to care about what goes on inside. One time I stayed out a bit later than normal and suddenly it was dark and I realized just how lonely a stretch of road that could be. The crime rate in that area is probably less than zero, but I found myself walking briskly back all the same, a little creeped out.

THE COPPER CUP – My idea of fun is driving late at night and listening to calm voices on the radio talking about something I don’t much care about. You can still hear some very unusual shows past midnight on America’s airwaves, everything from fiction readings to audio documentaries to first-person ramblings unblemished by music and even advertising. This is the kind of stuff I won’t seek out in podcast form, but when it just pops up randomly as I’m barreling down some country road and I have miles to go before I sleep…. ahhh, gold! I’ve always wanted to fictionally re-create that sense of tuning into something odd, obscure, and underfunded.

CIRCLES – Something’s been happening to me these last few years. The desire to create a deep scare and just leave it at that has been abandoning me little by little; what makes me happier now is finding some sort of second layer to a horror story, usually sacrificing some of the creepiness for the sake of giving the characters or the situation more of an inner life. To me, this makes a horror story more of a thing to be experienced a second and third time, though I’m sure many would disagree. There are so many damn first-person horror stories for audio out there for us to wallow in that I feel the desire to pivot a little and produce the kind of story that’s still in short supply: something supernatural and horrible, yet starring real, complex people who sometimes find themselves becoming better somehow in the face of terror.

When I think of a story like “circles”—whose narrator I find quite tragic—or “The Lockbox,” “elements,” or “Twelve Tiny Cabins,” what I’m hoping for is this kind of exchange between two people:

ROSENCRANTZ: You listen to that new Knifepoint story?

GUILDENSTERN: Yeah. It was OK. I like the part where the guy freaks out when he sees the ________.

ROSENCRANTZ: That’s what it was about to you? The ____________? You didn’t get what else was going on in it?

GUILDENSTERN: Um…. guess not.

ROSENCRANTZ: You primitive. You half-wit. This is why I’ve always hated you. 

IMPOUND – I have a little audio file I created that depicts the actual sound of the thing the narrator hears within the wall at the end. I decided to cut it from the story, reasoning that it’s just better not to know, you know? 

I was worried about “impound” for a while because there’s a certain scene where credibility is stretched to the breaking point. I have to remind myself sometimes that horror gives us the leeway to go right up to that line, and even beyond it, as long as the writer keeps an absolute poker face.  I’ve never forgotten what some actor said about his technique: “As long as I truly believe I am who I’m depicting,” he said, “you have no choice but to believe it too.” I think the same concept applies to the writing of bizarre, unrealistic, and even ridiculous stories. 

MOONKEEPER - There may be a little personal bitterness that fueled this one, and maybe “The Crack” too. When I tramp around on foot under the stars for a few hours, life is pretty blissful, and there is only one thing that can ruin the experience of backpacking the night away: the ugly influence of human beings who occasionally feel the need to notice and even single out a lone walker for a bit of casual harassment—a beeping horn, an unwelcome drunken approach, or just an inexplicable stare in the dark that makes me think, “OK, who are you and why are you just creepily standing there in that spot at 4:07 in the morning? Is this the night I get jumped and beaten?” Even in the boring suburbs or some industrial park, the natural world at night is a beautiful and remarkable thing—but a little too dangerous solely because of my fellow man. Oh, how I resent him.

If I told you how often I daydream about living the transient life that the narrator leads, just for a couple of weeks or so, you’d back away slowly. While half of my daydreams in this life feature the usual scenarios of undeserved wealth and privilege, the other half are of living hand-to-mouth, crashing on sofas and in cousins’ garages, always on the verge of true poverty but inexplicably surrounded by supportive artistic friends who are in the exact same boat. Is anyone else like this? Anyone? Anyone…?

TARP – For me, the real villain in “tarp” is the weather that comes for the narrator at the end, and the thought process of creating the story started there, with that scene. More than once I’ve gotten a seriously bad vibe from the swirling of clouds in the sky; it’s such a primal fear, bringing a sense of utter helplessness, the feeling of being completely overmatched by an impending threat. We never used to have to think about things like tornadoes here in Falls Church, Virginia, but that seems to have changed a bit, and every couple of years I’ll be out somewhere and the rain starts to pelt me and the wind picks up and then a ghastly cloud appears in the distance, one so dark and oddly shaped that I’m frozen for just a second thinking of what it might imply. I’ve been lucky so far.

MOTHER – There’s a two-legged thing that the narrator of this story sees in the hallways of the convalescence home that makes no earthly sense, but it scares me all the same. I’m not sure what made me think to put it in, except that I’m always trying to imagine ridiculous things that, if seen in the dark under the wrong circumstances, can be transformed into something freaky and tough to forget (see “tarp”). 

Once in a while, I’ll finish a recording and upload it, and only then will I realize that I missed a clear chance to make some small detail scarier and more vivid. And for me, it’s too late at that point; I consider the opportunity gone. That happened with this story, which could have been ten percent creepier if I had just stopped to visualize one of the climactic scenes a tad differently. If you write or paint or create music or pottery or even gourmet meals, I’m sure you know that nagging feeling of failure.

ATTIC – The house where this begins is essentially my Aunt Grace’s house in North Collins, New York; the house across the street is the one where the Willetts lived. The Willetts were an elderly couple that I remember as the embodiment of the husband and wife from the painting “American Gothic.” Aunt Grace would sometimes go over to visit them and take me, at age 7 or 8, along. We all sat in rocking chairs in an empty room as night fell, one person to a corner. The Willetts didn’t say much. I don’t think they cared for children. 

Did I remember to put the spinning chair in this story? Aunt Grace had one in her living room and I spent a couple of summers spinning in that sucker like there was no tomorrow. Strange, how I forget the details of these stories so quickly, and listeners have to remind me of them. The same is true even for some of the titles….

LET NO ONE WALK BESIDE HER – After Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” PBS kept giving David McCullough narration work, thank goodness. Have you ever seen “The Donner Party,” the one-hour documentary consisting of McCullough’s readings from the diaries of those poor pilgrims, accompanied by image after lonely image of snowfall and dark woods? It’s a great inadvertent horror movie. I loved the feel of it, as well as the short doc about the hideous Johnstown Flood that McCullough narrated. Economical, straightforward, and understated. I always wanted to make one of those, and so this story came about. 

I almost never listen to anything I’ve personally narrated, especially stuff I’ve written myself, but for some reason, breaking into a faux-doc format or outright radio play has the magical effect of producing something I can actually listen to again and again for entertainment, even if I have to endure my own voice in parts…  :)