ever more origins (Patreon)

For those who like a little background to their Knifepoint Horror, here’s another session…

bots (no spoilers!) – The robot voice was a real thing, an affliction that once befell myself and a roommate back in the day, who knows why; utter boredom most likely. There did come a point where we began to openly wonder about our sanity, and eventually the robots died, thank god. The story itself came to me during an odd random flashback to those times, when I began to equate those dorky voices with the woman from “staircase” holding her playful claw up in the air, a seemingly childlike gesture that, under the right circumstances, becomes something sinister.

Naturally, my ambivalence about technology took care of the rest of the tale. (For all anyone knows, Chatbot GPT wrote this paragraph, doing a slightly better job than I would have.) I mostly wonder these days about how much our bodies are either resisting or adapting to a constant flow of WiFi through us. Oh well, I’m sure many have studied this, and I’m sure that those safety studies TOTALLY got all the facts JUST RIGHT!

hole – This is another case of a Patreon subscriber making a seemingly offhand comment which then lingers in the mind, following me around and poking me in the side until I realize it’s something I’d actually like to act on. The mention of Texas as a possible setting for a future story was all it really took to start things going. Some of the landscapes I once saw on a Greyhound bus rolling through El Paso came back into my head, providing the feel of a solitary open plain.

The first draft of the final act of “hole” had too many obvious echoes of “vacancy,” and the whole thing very much needed a second narrative element to build it all out. So along came Adolfo Pedregal, whose dynamic with the narrator is pretty much patterned after the Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski rivalry, just toned down to make it somewhat plausible. The Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin is a real guy I had never heard of before poking around the internet to find a suitable villain. How did that hole appear in my true crime knowledge?

The story coming in May is a more striking case of Patreonner participation in the creation process—subscriber Alexa B. happened to ask me what sport I found to be the scariest, which immediately caused me to remember a very old idea which I had never fleshed out or even visualized as a horror story, and presto, we’ll see if you all like how it came out!

gifters – This was inspired by a viewing of a documentary about the small town of Leith, North Dakota, which was sneakily overrun in 2012 by a handful of people with very ugly intentions. What made the situation so maddening was the residents’ inability to find a legal way to deal with the supremacists. At some point the concept of a dark revenge story borne from just such a situation became very clear. This one was intentionally set in the past to avoid it becoming too zeitgeisty, and that required my usual fumbling around through books and the internet to make the historical details work (mostly). I enjoyed building the long, slow inevitability of impending disaster in this one—the sense that something scary is definitely coming, it absolutely cannot be stopped, and it’s time to just close the doors and windows and let it happen.

legalese – I saw an atrociously misspelled billboard ad for a seasonal haunted house last fall, and I thought, Boy, I hope that proof of the afterlife is never discovered, because the tidal wave of profiteering off it would be freakin’ unendurable. That led naturally to the image of some haggard office worker trying patiently to explain to a boardroom full of big bosses that no, it might not be wise to shove tourists into the same room as a ghost without doing a little testing first.

I spend so much time in coffeehouses, I finally just had to record a story inside one, live. (Well, three different takes stitched together.) Special thanks goes to all the boring conference calls I’ve ever overheard and all the disclaimers I’ve ever signed without reading them. (Oh, you have new Terms of Service? Sweeeeet, I’ll review that whole document right away!!)

colony – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a really convincing wildlife-strikes-back movie (my personal favorite is Phase IV), but the idea has always been interesting to me. What a fraught relationship it is between us and the furry/scaly/wingy folk, with us doing so much all the time to ruin it. If all the animals got together and decided that enough was enough… it’s always been interesting to think about. (Did you ever see the old TV movie where the scientists lure the killer bees into the Astrodome at the end and freeze them to death there? Good times.)

Colony was, at one point, even longer than the end result you hear, if you can believe it. There was a subplot it made me sad to cut out involving a struggling outcast living near the colonists, but it simply pushed the story too far away from its horror elements.

It made me very happy to write the climax of the story—where the characters cower inside the car—knowing this will never, ever be a movie, where CGI visuals of the stampede would undoubtedly replace pure imagination-feeding sound design. I remain the guy who yells “Why did they feel the need to show that?!” at the screen, convinced there are often better ways to embed imagery permanently in the mind than pointing a camera directly at it.

contestants – Admit it, you’ve watched the occasional YouTube videos of dead malls too. I think I’ve managed to tour all the ones that are within driving distance. I’ve always assumed there must be a basement to these things, right?

Once when I was a little kid, my father took me to a baseball game and I whined and cried for several innings about not getting some freebie that was being given out. I seem to remember that after the game, Dad found some weird sublevel in the stadium where shelves and shelves of souvenirs were being stored, and I think he gave someone there some money so I could have one of those freebies (a tiny wooden bat, as I recall, completely useless). I’ve always retained a mental image of the descent we took down a skinny ramp to get to that mysterious basement, and I think it probably inspired “contestants” at least a little. Ahhh, childhood!

blueberries – What else am I going to do with my pages and pages of old notes for comedy skits but try to sneak them past you in another format? Eh? Eh? There will be more, I fear.

I wish someone, someday would do a vivid full-color poster for this story as if it were a full, serious novel or movie, hint hint…

Now available from Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1J523T1

This latest, thicker-than-usual transcript collection brings us nicely up to date. And here’s a new link to the master PDF:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SWh9wjD4LuPm30My943cWlT14fqu9Hti/view?usp=sharing

I tend to cringe a little in preparing these volumes when I think of how much soul, emotion, and tension vanish from the words when there’s no one there to perform them, draw them out with strategic silences, or hit the key points with music or sound effects… reading one of these tales straight through on the page always makes me think, “That’s it? Really? That’s what took you so long to write and record?” At the same time, it could very well be that some of the stories are just plain leaner and work better when the artifice of the performance aspect is removed entirely. Which leads to the question: Which is the true version of the story, its first and ultimately permanent appearance on the printed page, or its artificially sweetened version released on audio?

Until next month, thanks for listening!

-S

coming in May

photo by Huhulenik, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license