Boys, Bears & Scares

I'm very excited about this new gay horror facebook page, Boys, Bears & Scares.

I love how one of the pairs of buns is hairy! 

This page features all kinds of gay horror books, films, and erotica. This will definitely be a great resource as I work on becoming more well-read in the gay horror genre. Also a great place to learn about other gay horror writers and form community.

Check out this excellent and comprehensive page about the world of gay horror. I am very honored to have my books included here. 

Boys, Bears & Scares

7 Favorite Posts from 7 years of Unspeakable Horror!

To celebrate the 7th birthday of Unspeakable Horror, I thought I would share 7 favorite posts, one from each year.

There have been lots of ups and downs over the last 7 years, including shifts in focus, experiments with format, and a brief hiatus, but overall I am very proud of Unspeakable Horror. I credit this website (and the networking facilitated by the website and blog) with launching my writing career (which is still in the launch phase, I hope). Unspeakable Horror represents some of my best work as a writer and my continuing efforts to be an excellent writer of blog entries, essays, poems, stories, and comic books--all in my beloved horror genre, which provides me with an endless landscape for imaginative storytelling, critical inquiries, and intellectual explorations. 

Without further ado, here are my 7 favorite posts of the last 7 years:

#1 The Shining's Dogman from 2006

I wrote this analysis and explanation of the cryptic appearance of the dogman from Kubrick's version of The Shining. This weird cinematic moment refers to a subplot from King's novel. This post is by far the most read of all of my posts and it accounts for most of my blog traffic. Even after seven years, this one post will sometimes get 500 hits in a week. 

On the one hand, the dogman is a pathetic stereotype, a sex-crazed homosexual screaming for Derwent's attention and ready to "devour" little boys who cross his path. On the other hand, he is portrayed as a victim of Derwent's closet; the dogman is denied access to Derwent's elite privileged world because of his status as a gay outsider. And to make matters worse, Derwent goes out of his way to publicly humiliate the dogman 

#2 Michael Jackson's Ghosts from 2007

After writing an essay about Michael Jackson's Thriller in 2005, I wrote this follow-up about Michael Jackson's Ghosts.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the double relationship between the eccentric Vincent Price-like Maestro and the conservative, bigoted Mayor.  This doubling is reinforced by the fact that Michael Jackson plays both characters.  The Mayor and Maestro are truly shadow figures of each other.  At one point, the Maestro takes over the Mayor's body and the Mayor, complete with pudgy prosthetics, dances for everyone, followed by a pivotal scene where a hand with a mirror comes out of the Mayor's stomach and shows the Mayor his own monstrousness.  This doubling of the characters, emphasized by Jackson playing both parts, enhances the complexity of the film.  Neither side can be as black/white as the mentality of a traditional horror film.  In fact, the film begins with a transition from an outer black and white world that becomes a color world when they enter the inner sanctum of the castle.   

 

#3 On Evil Children from 2008

In 2008, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, my blogging league, did a blog round-up on the subject of evil children in the horror genre. My entry was a piece about "It's a Good Life," which covers the original short story, the Twilight Zone episode, and Dante's remake in the feature film. 

In 1983, Twilight Zone: The Movie hit the theaters. I was ten-years-old at the time, and I was completely traumatized by the segment featuring little Anthony and the nightmarish world that he unleashed upon his prisoners. At the time, I didn't know anything about the original Twilight Zone episode with Billy Mumy or the short story by Jerome Bixby. Recently, I re-visited all three versions of It's a Good Life about evil little Anthony, the mind-reading boy who can make anything happen by wishing it into existence, and I've come to the conclusion that Anthony is like an embodiment of the id run amok. He is a figure that represents the buried child that exists inside the human psyche. But why is he so sinister?

#4 Boys Beware from 2009

In 2009 I discovered a fan-made music video for Sufjan Stevens' song about John Wayne Gacey. The footage in the video was very creepy, and I learned that the clips were taken from a piece of anti-gay propaganda called "Boys Beware." I found the original film, which turned out to be fascinating and disturbing.

The intention of filmmaker Sid Davis seems obvious: to portray homosexual men as a dangerous threat to young boys.  There is no subtlety on the part of the narrator, a police detective; he explicitly explains in the voiceover that homosexuality is a mental illness and many homosexuals are violent in their demands for sex.  On the surface, this appears to be a despicable piece of homophobic propaganda.  However, a number of elements in the film seem to undermine the filmmaker's explicit message and make the short film a piece of campy absurdity (and as a result, disturbingly entertaining to watch). 

#5 I'm Leaving My Bedroom Open For You, Modoc! from 2010

I wrote this analyis (and fantasy digression) about the '80s cult classic, My Best Friend is a Vampire.

The primary gay subplot of the movie stems from this mentor relationship between Modoc and Jeremy.  First, his mother hears Modoc's voice in Jeremy's bedroom, so she knows Jeremy is secretly keeping a man in his bedroom, and then Modoc picks up Jeremy for school.  When Jeremy's parents see stylish, handsome Modoc drive away with Jeremy in his fancy car, and they see how Jeremy begins to behave strangely as he transitions into the "alternative lifestyle" of being a creature of the night, they assume that Modoc is Jeremy's new boyfriend and that their son is gay.  This part of the film is quite clever and funny--especially the scene when the parents are both reading pop-psychology books about what to do if your son is gay. 

#6 Let the Right One In from 2011

I wrote a five-part blog series about Let the Right One In, my all-time favorite vampire novel and film, including the original Swedish novel, the film, and the American remake. Then, I put all the entries together into one post. 

To counterbalance Hakan's monstrousness, the relationship between Eli and Oskar remains primarily pure, although characterized by increasing acts of violence.  Like the film, the book is pretty enigmatic about the relationship between Oskar and Eli in the end.  Although, the book makes it clear that Eli is a boy (and even switches the gender pronoun) while the film keeps Eli's true gender implicit and subtextual--the audience is shown that Eli has a scar in her groin, but the meaning of this remains unclear until you read the book. 

#7 Dracula Doll from 2012

I had an early memory of a book for kids that featured a boy with a Dracula Doll. I especially remembered an image of the doll with the arm torn off. Over the last few years, I have been searching online for the title of the book, but I never hit the right key words. I finally figured out where the image cam from last fall and wrote this post about it. 

Frankenstein Moved in on the Fourth Floor was released in 1979 when I was about six-years-old. I probably read it a couple of years after than when I was about eight. It makes me wonder if this image of a creepy Dracula doll was planted deep in my subconscious, and that is why I wrote "The Vampire Bridegroom," which also features a creepy Dracula-esque vampire doll. 

That concludes my 7 favorite posts from 7 years of Unspeakable Horror, although it was very difficult to pick just 7.

As always, thanks for reading!

500-Word Horror Story: The Pickle-Maker and The Devil's Ax

Petal walked the path to school, past the Pickle-Maker's, turning down a shadowy alleyway.

A squeaking voice emanated from a barred basement window. The voice pleaded for help

Petal returned with a bucket of water. She brushed away the black widow spider webs and reached through the bars until her hand entered the fish tank.

Petal felt a squishy creature, about the size of a bullfrog, swim into her hand. Bringing her hand back through, she held a small human head with octopus tentacles. Startled, she threw the little head up into the air. Fortunately it landed right in the bucket like a circus diver.

The little head, whose name was Crispin, thanked Petal for rescuing him. He shared his harrowing tale:

Luger the Pickle-Maker and his son Box were the ax-murdering head collectors who had terrorized the city for years. Their murders were as famous as their spicy pickles

Satan gave Luger the enchanted ax in exchange for their souls. No matter how poor the aim, if Luger swung the ax, the target's head was off; it was a head-collecting ax, and the ax never spilled a drop of blood, cauterizing as it chopped, capturing the soul inside like a pimento in an olive.

While Luger loved the chopping, Box developed a talent for pickling the heads with black magic. The heads sprouted gills and a nice set of tentacles from the neck. Box kept them in a massive fish tank, which he purchased cheap from a defunct lobster restaurant.

One of the heads laid eggs under the model pirate ship. Soon little Crispin hatched, but only grew to the size of a baseball.

Luger and Box kept their fish tank and pickled heads in a secret chamber in the basement. The tank sat right beneath the barred alley window.

Petal carried the bucket across the park to the town square where the police station was located, stopping at the great fountain in the center.

As Petal looked around for a policeman, a burly hand grabbed her arm. It was Luger. Petal dumped the bucket into the deep fountain. Petal stood face to face with the pickle-reeking servant of the Devil.

Luger and Box used duct tape on Petal and dumped her on the floor of the secret chamber. They would return.

Petal peered up and saw the heads in the fish tank beckoning with their eyes. She hopped up a stepladder and jumped into the tank. The heads bit and pulled at the duct tape. Her hands were free.

Luger marched into the chamber with the ax, ready for business. He saw Petal in the tank, dropped the ax and climbed the stepladder. He tried to pull Petal from the water. As he leaned too far forward, Petal pulled him in.

The heads converged. The thrashing water was filled with blood.

Petal climbed out of the tank and picked up the Devil's ax from the floor. Box walked into the secret chamber.

Petal didn't even need to aim.

The Beating of My Tell-Tale Heart

I had a terrible secret, and the secret pounded away beneath the floorboards of my brain. I felt just like Edgar Allan Poe’s mad narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In my ninth-grade English class with Ms. Shoemaker, I learned to perfect the “five paragraph essay” format, discovered Huckleberry Finn and Romeo and Juliet for the first time, diagrammed subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, and encountered Poe’s short story that would change my life.

I was the son of a preacher, and every Sunday my mother, older brother, and I went to church out of duty to see my dad preach. My brother was the high school football star, and every Sunday the men of the church congratulated him on his latest headline in the sports section of our hometown newspaper. I remember the church sanctuary had fuzzy orange pews and a kaleidoscope of stained glass all around the sanctuary windows. My father preached passionate sermons, his hands wrestling with the powerful words that came from his mouth and spread across the audience, but I sat there daydreaming and playing with the rubber rings that lined the communion cup holders on the back of the pew.

Despite being the preacher’s son, I didn’t study the Bible very much at all. I stayed away from it, in fact, except when I had to study it in Sunday school. One day during Sunday school, I asked the teacher if my dad was being literal in his sermon when he had said, “Satan was trying to throw chains over our hearts,” a line that woke me up from my daydreaming. The Sunday school teacher, a man with tall curly hair, paused for a moment, and I could see that I put him a tough spot. Here I was, the preacher’s son, asking him to question what my dad said in the sermon. He mumbled something about Jesus freeing us from the chains, and then he moved on to the next subject, but he didn’t answer the question about whether or not Satan was literally trying get us. Obviously, the part about “throwing chains over our hearts” was a metaphor, but was Satan a metaphor too?

In the Junior High cafeteria, the subject of demonic possession and Ouija boards was a popular topic of conversation. My friend Ethan told me the entire story of  The Exorcist from beginning to end, a movie that my dad would never let me watch. And despite all of the Catholic parts of the story--we were Dutch Christian Reformed--I really questioned whether all of that could happen, and I really wanted to know if Satan could come and possess me. In addition to The Exorcist, I heard a variety of stories from my friends about strange experiences with the Ouija Board: disturbing messages, demonic encounters, and attempts to destroy the Ouija Board; it was indestructible--not even fire could destroy it.

Around the same time I asked my Sunday School teacher about Satan, in my English class we finished the unit on Huckleberry Finn, and we read a disturbing story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery.” I had never read anything like it before; the ending was so unexpected, so shocking, and our minds reeled at what it all meant. That story paved the way for what we would read next, Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Just like “The Lottery,” this story had a surprising ending: after the narrator chops up and buries his murder victim beneath the floorboards, and he has seemingly gotten away with the crime, he suddenly confesses because he hears the pounding of his victim’s heart, which drives him to confess. The police detectives, who are also in the room and suspect nothing, can’t hear the heart at all, so is the pounding heart just in the narrator’s imagination? Is he insane, or is some supernatural force driving him insane? It was the first time I encountered an “unreliable narrator.” Poe’s narrator reveals himself to be insane by all of the outlandish, paranoid things that he says, all the while trying to convince the reader that he is not insane, which undermines his credibility even more.

Poe’s story impacted me on a much deeper and personal level too; the more I worried about Satan, the more I became convinced that horror stories were how Satan found people to possess. I was pretty sure that thinking about horror stories would be like a flashing beacon for Satan to notice me and come collect me. I didn’t dare share this with anyone, but one day after class I gathered up enough courage to ask Ms. Shoemaker a question.

When everyone else had left the classroom, and Ms. Shoemaker erased the board, I timidly approached. I mustered the courage to ask her: “Ms. Shoemaker, don’t you think that writing horror stories is really unhealthy for a person?” I didn’t have the courage to say the part about Satan, but “unhealthy” seemed to be close enough.

She stopped erasing the board and turned to me, thinking over my question. Her response was a huge surprise; she said she thought, for someone like Poe, writing horror stories helped him release his inner demons, and that was ultimately a good thing.

The thought that writing horror stories could be a good thing sent my mind reeling again. And she said “demons,” which made me wonder if she really knew what I was talking about, but I didn’t have the courage to ask if she literally meant demons. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the moment when I became a horror writer; in a sense, Ms. Shoemaker gave me the permission to be a horror writer, a permission that I couldn’t give myself.

Just like Poe’s narrator who had a terrible secret torturing him, I also had a terrible secret that was pounding to be let out (like a murdered heart), and it wasn’t my secret fear of Satan coming to possess me; my big secret was that I was gay. Ever since the fifth-grade, I was becoming more and more aware of a strong attraction to the other boys at school, and I was deeply ashamed by this attraction. I had heard my classmates talk about “faggots” and "buttfuckers" for years, and I was horrified to think that I was one of those. Just like Poe’s narrator, the secret would not let me free--one day I would have to confess.

I told my dad that I needed to tell him something, and I explained all about my fears about Satan, Ouija Boards, and horror stories (I held back the part about being gay, however). I remember sitting on my bed as my dad explained how the Bible guaranteed that Jesus would protect me from Satan, and I didn’t need to worry about it all. He showed me a passage from Romans: “For I am convinced that neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:38). That Bible passage, and most importantly what my dad had said, finally put my mind at ease, and I didn’t worry about Satan anymore. I still wasn’t clear about the mystery of whether or not Satan was literally real, but I wasn’t worried about him trying to possess me anymore.

Looking back almost twenty-five years later, I wonder if my fear of becoming possessed by Satan was really about my fear of becoming gay, a fear of losing control of my own identity like a Satanic possession. Although I would later leave the church, I cherish the moment when my dad comforted me and helped alleviate my fears about Satan. It was the first time in my life that a Bible verse had truly given me comfort.

500-Word Horror Story: The Tree House Ripper

The Ripper terrorized the tree houses of America.

For years, no one dared to sleep all night in a tree house.

Buzz taunted his sister Agnes. He downloaded crime scene photos and pasted them on her bedroom wall while she slept.

Agnes’ father, an expert craftsman of tree houses, had built three on their large wooded property, but he forbade his children to sleep in them.

The father’s untreated shell shock erupted like a landmine, and the doctors committed him.

With father gone, and stepmother drunk at the country club, Buzz soon discovered the secret underground room where father kept his collection of war souvenirs and contraband weapons.

Agnes, Buzz, and Buzz’s best friend Alfonso played Vietnam all summer with jagged Bowie knives, empty AK-47s, camouflage helmets, and dead walkie-talkies, Buzz and Alfonso always the Green Berets and Agnes always the Vietcong agent to be captured and tortured for intelligence.

Buzz hatched his plan: they would all three spend the night in the three tree houses, each of them alone all night.

“Death before dishonor,” they cried. “The Ripper will die by our knives.”

For advance warning, Buzz had father’s Aleutian seal dog on guard, a breed known for its fierceness and ability to pull seals from holes in the ice.

Once they tucked Agnes inside her sleeping bag with her camouflage pajamas, Buzz cut the ropes of her ladder so she had no way down.

Agnes heard the chirping of crickets and the foraging of raccoons in the shadows below.

The dog fell into a trance; she lay on her back as a claw popped through her belly like a crocodile baby's snout through egg skin. According to black magic, the Ripper must enter this world through the vacant womb of a sleeping dog.

The Ripper himself was a horrid imp, thick scabs for armor like exoskeleton, layer upon layer composed of blood from his victims. His front teeth were tiny and sharp for tearing skin.

He squatted down. The thick silken rope emerged moist and glistening.

Moving through the branches like a gibbon, first he murdered Buzz; next he murdered Alfonso, both of them asleep at their posts. He strung up the boys’ bodies in their sleeping bags, chanted the incantation to make the sleeping bags digest the boys like stomachs; they would be reborn in the underworld as insectoid angels.  

The black imp perched himself on the tree house windowsill above Agnes’ sleeping bag, but she was vigilant and ready. A sliver of drool fell from his mouth. Agnes had no choice.

She had infiltrated the trunk where father kept his collection of hand grenades; she pulled the pin and released the handle.

The Ripper leapt upon her as the grenade blasted the tree house into flying stakes and splintered branches.

Agnes rid the world of the Tree House Ripper, but uprooted her mortal soul, which wandered nightly from tree house to tree house; she became known as Hand Grenade Agnes, a ghastly phantom in camouflage pajamas.

500-Word Horror Story: The White Mouse and the Secret Basement Room

A golden retriever named Bumpy captured a white mouse under the basement stairs by the Ping-Pong table.

Bumpy carried the mouse in her teeth as careful as a snake carries its egg. The mouse was covered in saliva, but safe.

Ridley, a pale twelve-year-old with freckles, put the mouse in a shoebox and showed it to his best friend Grape, a pudgy boy who always wore a windbreaker, and they showed the mouse to Grape’s baby sister in the crib.

The night Grape slept over, the boys played Ping-Pong when Bumpy captured another white mouse.

The stacks of boxes formed a maze that went beyond the reach of the light bulb. With flashlights, they searched for clues.

Grape found a clue: mice turds next to a stack of boxes. Grape pushed the stack aside and discovered the secret door. It was locked.

Ridley showed Grape where his father kept the ring of keys beneath the workbench.

When Ridley opened the basement door, the boys smelled mouse urine in the darkness. Their flashlights revealed the wire cage teeming with white mice and the massive terrarium overflowing with shadow.

The instant Ridley cracked open the terrarium lid, the boa constrictor whipped out like a jack-in-the-box and wrapped around Ridley’s throat. Ridley kicked over the wire cage; the horde of white mice fled across the floor in all directions.

As Ridley turned blue, Grape dropped his flashlight and pulled at the thick coils, but to no avail. The snake crushed Ridley’s throat and slithered away into the maze of boxes and escaped through a small window.

The ambulance took the body away. The police asked their questions.

Between swigs of whiskey and sobs of despair, Ridley’s father told Grape the whole story:

When Ridley came out of the womb, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat as tight as a yo-yo. However, Ridley’s mother made a deal with Satan, who loitered in the corner of the delivery room. The umbilical cord uncoiled itself from the baby’s throat and transformed into a little boa constrictor like a shoelace. The baby screamed for the first time as Satan dropped the serpent into the father’s coat pocket; Satan told the father he must keep it the rest of his days.

Ridley’s father gave Bumpy to Grape to care for, and Grape returned home, the front of his windbreaker wet with tears.

All night long, Bumpy guarded Grape’s baby sister.

Grape and Bumpy hunted the serpent through the neighborhood. In his backpack, Grape carried his boy scout hatchet.

When they returned, they found the crib empty, the snake asleep in the nursery, a large protrusion in its center.

Grape screamed in horror.

Bumpy attacked the throat. Full and sluggish, the snake tried to shake off the dog. With its head occupied, Grape hacked away with the hatchet. In a torrent of blood, the baby slid from the esophagus into Grape’s arms. She was whole and unharmed.

The baby cried like a newborn. The snake was dead.

Mr. Thing and The Twilight Zone Pinball Machine

In 1996, I got a bartending job at the only gay bar in Fort Collins. It was a cursed bar, haunted by ghosts, a tragic past, and The Twilight Zone pinball machine. I was twenty-three that summer, in the closet, a recent college graduate with an English degree, working full-time at the local bookstore and living upstairs at my mom’s house.

I had a tragically brief romance with the manager of the local dinner theater, an older man named Tony who played the lead in the production of Anything Goes; when he sang “You’re the Top,” I imagined that he sang it directly to me in the audience. He had a beautiful tenor voice with just a hint of raspiness. He had dark hair and freckles on his shoulders, which I loved. Introduced by a mutual friend, I met Tony at a popular pizza joint after my shift at the bookstore. We were holding hands under the table by the end of the night. It was sheer luck--destiny, I thought; I didn’t have many gay friends and I felt buried alive in the closet.

As I fell in love with Tony, I started to feel like I had really conquered the closet at last. But I was desperate and needy for reassurance, which was typical for a young man emerging from the closet, and I smothered him.

With some of Tony’s friends, we took a trip to a nightclub in Denver where they pumped waves of slippery foam into the dance floor. The patrons shed their clothes and danced in the foam pit, but I couldn’t join them because I was so reserved and shy, and I was the designated driver, having borrowed my mom’s car for the night. Tony got drunk and left me at the edge of the foam pit until closing time.

I drove everyone home, but Tony was drunk and distant. He wouldn’t return my calls for days after that.

My need for constant reassurance was a pit.

It was over. I was devastated; I had to do something or else get sucked back into the closet, which felt like crawling back into a grave.

So I applied to work at the only gay bar in Fort Collins: Nightingale's.  I told Tony that I applied, and Tony put in a good word for me with the owner. But Tony warned me. He thought I was too green, too fresh out of the closet.

Next to Putt-Putt Golf on the highway, across from the only strip club in town, Nightingale's was a scary bar, especially when empty in the afternoon as I prepared for Happy Hour alone. The dance floor itself was cavernous, lined with tables on the perimeter. It didn't have any windows, and there were many empty back rooms, sections closed off and filled with spare equipment and furniture, and the back hallways had red-carpeted walls. It had a terrible mice infestation; sometimes I found their little bodies in the cupboard.

It was a cursed bar.

It was Matthew Shepard’s bar. On busy Saturday nights, Matthew came down from Wyoming to dance. I remember him. He wasn’t old enough to drink yet when I worked there, but minors could come in to dance as long as they wore wristbands. They even mention Nightingale’s in The Laramie Project, the play about Shepard’s murder.

And it had a cursed history.

The original Nightingale’s burned down one Christmas season in the '80s when the bar was full on a busy Saturday night. At least two people died from asphyxiation in the bathroom. The flames made it impossible to escape. Closeted married men, the rumor went. The fire started when an angry lesbian threw matches at the dried-out Christmas tree in the bar. She had to serve a brief prison sentence. The regulars during Happy Hour told me all about it.

In 1996, the gay community was just emerging from the worst of the AIDS epidemic. I know I felt the fear of it every day, and it cast a dark shadow on my coming out.

I didn't know how to enter gay culture without a mentor. With Tony out of the picture, the only thing I could think to do was dive in. Working at a busy gay nightclub was definitely diving in.  However, the bar--the literal bar where I set down the drinks--became like a barrier for me, my own personal ramparts to separate myself from the customers and from my purpose. I didn't know how to be on the other side of the bar where the people danced and socialized and hooked up.  

One of the regulars for Happy Hour, a man who ordered many pitchers of Bud Light and played the trivia video game all afternoon, told me that the bar was haunted, and suddenly everything made sense. I had felt such an overwhelming sensation of dread on so many afternoons. I always assumed that this anxiety stemmed from my own struggle with the closet, but could it be a ghost? 

Once, when the bar was crowded and busy, I heard a strange cascade of voices call my name like an echo throughout the bar.

The DJ for the bar seemed to be the most sensitive to the presence of the ghost.  She called it "Mr. Thing," and she said when she saw it on the dance floor, the ghost looked like a moving shadow. And I did see a running shadow one afternoon next to The Twilight Zone pinball machine.

The Twilight Zone pinball machine, released in 1993 by Midway, was highly regarded among pinball aficionados. An incredible game to play, it was extremely complex and difficult, layered with references to a wide variety of Twilight Zone episodes, prominently featuring the central and iconic image of Rod Serling himself. Serling's voice, portrayed by an actor, could be heard at times along with creepy motifs based on the unforgettable theme music.

One afternoon, as I was plugging in The Twilight Zone pinball machine, I was surrounded by flashing spectral light like a strobe light. I stepped out of the corner, and it vanished.  I stepped back into the corner, and I was surrounded by the light again.

When I finished my Happy Hour shift around 9:00 or 9:30, I loved to stick around, have a few beers, and use my tips to play the pinball machine. I always got lots of quarters in my tip jar. After playing a game, I could turn around and watch the young men on the dance floor.

I was setting out ashtrays in the empty bar before opening, and about halfway through the dance floor, I had to stop and turn back--I sensed something in the corner where there stood several large stacks of extra chairs.  The rest of the afternoon I stayed put behind the bar, eyeing that corner of the bar. When the D.J. showed up for her shift a few hours later, she said to me: "Mr. Thing is back there in the corner," and I felt a chill because I knew it too.   

I felt a presence walk up behind me as I prepared the till. I turned around and there was no one there.

I saw a white figure wave at me in my peripheral vision as I handed a customer a "greyhound" across the bar. It vanished when I turned my head.    

On a dead weeknight in March, I lost the battle with my fear of the bar. A drunk, belligerent customer threatened to cut my throat. He had come from the strip club across the street, and I refused to serve him because he was already sloppy drunk. The second he walked out the door, I locked it behind him, afraid he might come back, even though it wasn't midnight yet.

Instead of calling the police, I just decided to close the bar. The only customer was my friend who had witnessed the whole thing. When the owner stopped in unexpectedly, I was still cleaning up. The owner immediately fired me for closing early. 

Last August, when I visited my hometown of Fort Collins after being away for many years, it was a strange shock to discover that the old Nightingale's building had been completely demolished. In its place stood a bank.

Does Mr. Thing haunt the bank after hours?

I discovered that Tony died from AIDS a few years ago. I searched online to see if he had a Facebook page, and found his obituary instead.

It felt like Nightingale’s had become a ghost bar, along with all of its stories: the horrible fire long ago, the tragedy of Matthew Shepard, my lost love Tony, and the mysterious ghosts that haunted the dance floor where I came out of the closet and played The Twilight Zone pinball machine.

Was the ghost in my imagination? Was everyone feeding me stories because they could see I was afraid? The bar itself was dark and gothic enough to push anyone's imagination. Over the years, I speculated the ghost in the bar was just a projection of my own anxieties about being gay, a shadow figure of myself, but then I remembered how the D.J. and I both sensed something in the corner by the chairs.  

With its flashing, disorienting lights--like the dance floor--and its pitfalls, twists, and turns, The Twilight Zone pinball machine embodied my experience at Nightingale’s. More than that, I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone, venturing into the strange and dangerous world of being gay.

Norman Just Got Scarier

This post about episodes 1-3 from the new Bates Motel series contains spoilers, and so does this behind-the-scenes video:

I really enjoyed the first episode of Bates Motel (see review below), and the second episode effectively established some important new characters and relationships. The second episode also developed the character of the town, which has a shadow economy with corrupt law enforcement. This sense of lawlessness, or corruption, definitely defines the town as a scary, unstable place. In a sense, the volatile nature of the town mirrors Norman's psychic instability. And just as the town has frightening secrets, so does Norma and her son. 

At first, I was uncertain about the introduction of Norman's older brother, Dylan. However, the conflicted dynamic between Norman and Dylan is really working for me as a viewer. The complexity of the triangle between Norma, Dylan, and Norman is what makes it so tense and captivating. Norman and Dylan have different fathers and very different childhood histories, but they share Norma in common. Dylan's relationship with Norma is just as complex as Norman's relationship; however, Norman (like his name implies) is much more enmeshed with his mother. It seems that Dylan understands that this is dangerous. 

I also love the introduction of Emma's character. Through her eyes, we see the sweet and likeable aspects of Norman, but she is beginning to get glimpses of Norman's darkness. 

That was my favorite part of the third episode. While the second episode went deeper into the characterization of the town, the third episode went deep into the characterization of Norman. This episode revealed the severity of his sadistic fantasies, which the journal is feeding. In addition, the viewer gets inside Norman's mind in this episode, both with his fantasies and his hallucinations. Like the title for this post says, Norman just got a lot scarier. 

Into the Fog

My students are writing a Literacy Narrative for their first essay assignment this quarter, and this got me thinking about my own history with literacy and writing. I went looking through some old folders and I came across this little horror story that I wrote in the 8th grade. 

A lot of people ask me why I write horror or why I am so interested in the genre. I really don't know why (I've explored that topic on this blog--ultimately it's a mystery), but I think it's interesting that I was drawn to writing horror stories right from the start. This is a great example.

I have wonderful memories of this 8th-grade creative writing class at Boltz Junior High with Mr. Larsen. He was a big man with a loud voice and a bushy beard. He had a wooden pointer that he would slam on the desk to emphasize his point. He was the wrestling coach, and he knew my older brother who was a successful wrestler. I was not a wrestler, and I remember being worried that Mr. Larsen wouldn't like me because I wasn't like my brother. 

I had misjudged Mr. Larsen because he liked me for being me, and he encouraged me to write horror stories and a little murder mystery for his class, which I also found in the folder. His grizzly bear exterior, although very intimidating to me initially, turned out to be just a front. He was a wonderful teacher and an inspiration to me as an adolescent.

Mr. Larsen told the whole class that I misspelled "beautiful" twice in the first few sentences. If you click on the image of the first page, you can see where I fixed the spelling with white out!

He also said that I broke the rules because first-person narrators can't die at the end of the story.

There must have been a lesson in the class about unreliable narrators, which (to this day) is one of my favorite techniques. Without further ado, featuring my first unreliable narrator, here is "Into the Fog":

 

Bates Motel Review

I was quite surprised when I discovered the full premiere episode of Bates Motel in my Comcast on-demand menu (it does not officially air until the 18th). Since it has not officially aired yet, I will not include spoilers in this review. I am a huge fan of Hitchcock's Psycho, and this new show is a textured and weird feast for Psycho fans. 

Freddie Highmore is amazing in the role of Norman Bates. Like his predecessor Anthony Perkins, he does a wonderful job masking the darkness of the character with a cheerful, sweet persona. The short teaser trailer above exemplifies the actor's ability to emote darkness. Similarly, Vera Farmiga is awesome in her dualistic role as Norman's mother (she has some dynamic scenes where the audience gets a peek at her character's profound darkness). I found both of these main characters to be engaging, and I identified with both of them as a viewer, which is no small feat considering what the audience knows about them.

I am very intrigued with how they re-imagined the story and the world of Norman and Norma Bates. One of the key differences is the fact that the mother/son team exist in the present day while the house and the motel are from previous eras. In the original Hitchcock, the gothic house is from a previous era and the motel is recent, built by Norma and her lover. In this new show, the gothic house is made more gothic by this layering of eras. On another level, the show is nostalgic for the Hitchcock film, which gives the show a weird texture. The house and the motel are "haunted" on many levels. What's different and compelling here is that Norman and Norma are like the viewers, just discovering this gothic world for the first time. 

There is a wonderful Twin Peaks-esque feel to this story world, and there are many strange signposts in the episode that point to the upcoming subplots. And I am very excited to travel deeper into this scary world. 

Also, I loved seeing Nestor Carbonell as the sheriff. That was a welcome surprise.

I should also report that the show gave me nightmares, which I attribute to this weird layering and the excellent performances.