Perfect for Halloween

Downloaded 'Descent into Darkness: A Horror Anthology' (2017) collected by Tony Urban. 20 creepy tales written by first-time writers and new-to-me authors. Quite a fitting read for Halloween.

Tony Urban’s own contribution of ‘Baba’ kicked off the stories to a promising start. Three 13-year-old boys went up the mountain, into the woods, stumbled across Baba’s cottage and two got eaten. One ran and Baba screeched after him to say "But Baba be here for you when you ready. I always be here..." Kenny Weeks, the one who survived was haunted by guilt and dreams, attempted suicide twice, eventually returned to the hometown as a young college kid, and went out to the woods, ready to meet his fate.

Mostly kept short, the stories are fairly effective in stirring up delicious little twinges of ‘eiowww’ as I went through them. I kept criticisms to the minimum and read it mainly for their plot and how scary they are. The scariest stories needn’t even possess a supernatural element. Humans and their psychosis are the most frightening. The longest story in there is published author of horror fiction David J. Schmidt's 'Send in the Clowns'. Oh man, I love-hate it. It's clown-o-pocalypse, and probably my worst nightmare. Nothing supernatural, just a world gone crazy. Very real, very terrifying. Last I heard on the gossip mill, the actual Clown Motel with all its 600 creepy figurines in Nevada is up for sale.

"It's not nostalgia," I said. "I just can't believe they're burning the Clown Hotel." The flames climbed to the sky, brilliant and angry and terrible. "It's like, I had half expected them to turn it into their... I don't know, their headquarters, or something. I almost hoped there would be enough rational thinking, enough humanity left in them to recognize the hotel as a symbol of themselves. But this is even worse."

Delia Rai's 'The Door' is quietly scary in not telling you much and leaving it to your imagination. Unspeakable horrors possibly lie behind a locked door in the rented house. The husband and wife had been warned not to open it. Wife mysteriously disappeared one night. She was never found. Husband sold his first successful novel shortly after, but never moved out of the house. Did he make a pact with the Devil? Is the house a demonic portal? Six years later, a reporter turned up to interview the husband, and the story suggested that she found details that stirred up more questions, and disappeared too when she couldn't contain her curiosity about the locked door. Up to this point, the story was told from the point of the reporter as a first-person narrative. I was a little thrown off when it abruptly stopped and swopped out to a third-person narrative in the final few paragraphs that concluded the story. But it didn’t take away the lingering tingle felt when I realized what could have happened. Oooh.

I decide to ask him about his work. Maybe an idea will come to me. I touch the tiny key in my back pocket again as if to reassure myself that it's real. It is. Tiny but real. What if I try to open the door? I have the key after all. Bad idea, I say to myself, especially if you get caught. You won't. Just a quick peek inside, just to see if the key fits. Then maybe I can come back another day. Plead a stomachache. Reschedule the interview.