A Halloween freebie: The Vincents

The attached short tale, entitled The Vincents, is currently appearing on Kevin Lane’s Spill Your Guts podcast as part of his Halloween story anthology, which also includes narrations of the Knifepoint Horror stories dusk, thrifting, and here performed by others. Give The Vincents a listen if you get in the mood for a campfire vibe this week… which I figure you might be in all week.  

Holiday break is now upon us! I’ve got to hit my pile of notes pretty hard to begin writing stories for 2025. I’ve got three I feel very good about so far… expect something new for your ears right after the turning of the new year.

 And for those who like the origin stories...

here – To the question of who these terrible people are, where they came from, and what they truly intend—well, that I really do not know beyond having a gut feel that they’re as bad as it gets (those cops ain’t coming back). For me, this one is not so much about the resolution of the threat itself but the real-time terror of those first minutes when the narrator walks into his home to find such a strange phenomenon, and has no idea what to do or who to turn to when the obvious solution fails. What happens next really seems impossible to predict; I found it more interesting to focus on pure knee-jerk visceral feelings. Sixteen minutes and out.

harbingers – For a few weeks, the nature of what the narrator is protecting the children from wasn’t at all clear to me. The moment when we finally see what it is that he’s so afraid of just wouldn’t come, so I wrote and revised up until that moment, and walked away for a while. I could almost see the Bad Thing in the distance, near the treeline, just over a hill… but it stayed maddeningly elusive. Then came the notion that maybe the Bad Thing could be more about the narrator himself, and things started to click into place.

It was interesting to read about how one-room schoolhouses used to work, and just how many there were until the middle part of the 20th century. The woman you hear in the beginning is a real person remembering the era as part of a historical archiving project, and there are dozens of other personal reminiscences like that available online through the Library of Congress.

I don’t think I would have ever gotten the idea for harbingers without a sleepy-eyed late-night viewing of an early eighties Bud Cort movie called Why Shoot the Teacher?

crannies – One day I was standing in line at Staples when a completely normal thought occurred to me: What if someone tore their entire house down with their bare hands because they thought ghosts were living inside the walls? You know, just the stuff I think about when I’m buying ballpoint pens. The concept of crannies grew from there, but then the outline ballooned into something that was likely to become the longest story I’d ever attempted, and was also utterly nutso in some parts—so it seemed like an exhausting project to tackle. The story you hear is simply the small extracted core of a much longer and more complex whole; it’s been outlined but may or may not ever see the light of day. (As always, it's having to do laundry that keeps me from doing much more writing and recording.)

majesty – Like crannies, this one began with me reading up on real history and then making guesses about how much I could realistically invent without crashing into hard facts and creating a blend that makes a weird, inaccurate hash of things. (For some reason I especially tend to make dumb assumptions and mistakes about climates and the timing of the seasons around the world.) Unlike crannies, there was also the matter of writing a long story through a narrator who’s willingly involved in an awful, horrific enterprise. It was kind of a relief to go full-on freaky during the climax with a little B-movie gore and monster imagery to redirect the mind from the darker themes at hand.

doggo – Some stories take two or three tries with the ending, and each ending is fully written out and recorded before it’s set aside for a few days to see how it feels. My priority when I seem to have viable options like that is to go for the scariest one—not necessarily what I think is the best one—giving straight creepiness every chance to succeed. But with doggo, the original scary ending was weighed down by a tired trope or two and just didn’t make full logical sense; plus it required a little more suspension of disbelief than I felt comfortable with. And in a weird way, it felt oddly disrespectful to the dogs! So I wiped that ending out and instead squeezed its essence into the meta bit at the end about the conversation the narrator has at a party, and also added a nebulous hint of it as a cold open. Waste not, want not…

summoners – I was having fun writing this story until I got to the moment when the people arrive at the camp and get out of their cars to talk to the gate guard--and then, as sometimes happens out of the blue, I simply scared myself. I very powerfully felt the dark night; I heard the chirping of the crickets; I saw the way the cars’ headlights brushed the edge of the trees nearby; I visualized how the characters were physically arranged in that exact spot--and man, I just got the willies. Then suddenly the writing felt like work… but the good kind of work. I do like it when I scare myself because it’s always a surprise and only happens every fifth or sixth story.

The details of the nature of the ghostly feelings that have been experienced at Mandey Brown’s real bar in Chapel Hill were changed for the story, so if you go by there for a drink and cheesy grits, maybe she’ll tell you about some vibes that various people, including herself, have had in the past. But she’s real busy running around feeding everyone and painting pictures, so maybe she’ll claim there’s nothing wrong in there at all… but she’s lying, she’s lying.

😊 - S