Spooky Stories: Tales of Fear, Terror, Apprehension, and Murder

This book came about after facing my own personal nightmare. My life changed from a happy joyous thing full of possibilities to that which was threatened, my end no longer just problematic, no longer possible, but probable; now flashing before my eyes, just the way the movies say. Such great consequences from such a trifling act... falling down. This fall and blow to the head had everything necessary for my personal demise, rendering me unconscious. When I awoke I could not move. I was trapped in the darkness. Now I began to know terror. I looked upon my own body, unable to move and I knew the deep despair of separation, life from death, hour after hour. Welcome to Spooky Stories. There are two kinds of terror... slapstick and intellectual. Slapstick terror is the kind where predictable ghosts, ghouls, witches, sorcerers, appear to do some hideous deed, which is manifest by mass chaos, confusion, mayhem, and panic. I am not frightened by this kind of terror, though I may be startled by it, which is not at all the same thing. Instead of this slapstick approach, and purists may cavil at my use of the term, I confess to being terrified by the only true terror that is terrible, and resides forever in your own mind. All the great writers of intellectual terror, starting with my esteemed colleague Edgar Allen Poe know that by seizing a man's mind, and glimpsing what horrifies him, he will thereafter control that being, in all his times and situations. Think for example of Winston Smith from the novel "1984" (1949) by George Orwell. His captors had discovered his deep and abiding fear of rats. And so, when they wanted to control him, which they did sometimes for the sheer joy of it, they had but to show him pictures of writhing ratdom, and he was rendered paralyzed by his own personal fears. That is what a true terror writer aims for. For each of us may be controlled by a thing, a thing which the next person in life's queue may find harmless, innocuous, even pleasant. This is the great secret of terror. Terror must take the thing you most love and turn it into a missile of destruction and hate... a deep, abiding fear and devilry. To each man, his own terror and God help us. I have long had an interest in stories of apprehension, terror, confusion, puzzlement, and I have watched as the great writers use their talents to transform a little thing into the greatest of menaces... as I do in these spooky tales. There are five stories in this book, each of which explores an element of the fragile human condition in which anything may be turned into a missile of destruction, lamentation, and grief.