A Horrific Inspiration
A Horrific Inspiration
Origin Stories for The Devil's Road a TRUE CRIME Serial Novel about Serial Killers
I’ve been reading horror since I was eleven when I found a copy of Stephen King’s Misery at my mother’s bedside. She tried reading It the year before, but was unable to finish it because it was, “… too damn scary!” Since it was the same author and smaller and size. It must have just been meant for me.
After everyone went to sleep I would dive under the covers with a flashlight and learn how Misery was going to torture the captured author Paul. I hid my horror novels under the sack of water that acted as the mattress of my waterbed. I devoured Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Dean Koontz. Friends introduced me to Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon, and Hannibal by Thomas Harris, and eventually, I found Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft with the help of some fantastic teachers. I also quit hiding the books under the waterbed when my sister started poking holes in it to get even for some slight I likely performed against her. I’m sure I deserved it.
If you haven’t started reading The Devil’s Road, check out Chapter 1. You can read or listen to it for free here:
Or, if you are a subscriber and would like to read along by issue, you can bookmark this page for quick access to individual issues. If you are enjoying this series, please consider sharing it with others, and don’t hoard all the good tales for yourself.
I’ve been a male version of Lydia Deetz (a consumer of the strange and unusual) my entire life. My teen years were spent curating the horror section of the video store I clerked in and taking Dario Argento films to high school parties where people looked at me like I was some sort of serial killer for being into such weird films. Susperia was not the crowd-pleaser I imagined it to be.
Now … fast forward to graduate school. It’s 2006 and I was living in Fayetteville, Arkansas attending the University of Arkansas. I was married and a new father. My wife and I had recently moved back to the state after a six-year stint in Southern California and were happy to get back to a more “normal” pace for our lives. It felt familiar and comfortable in a way that is difficult to describe until you have left a place for a long time and then returned.
My wife and son were prepping for a five-hour drive to visit the grandparents and that morning’s paper had a headline article describing a number of unidentified bodies that had been discovered along Interstate 40 through Oklahoma and Arkansas. I-40 is one of the most heavily traveled transcontinental roads in America, going from Barstow, CA to Wilmington, NC. However, these bodies weren’t discovered in those other places. They were discovered here. The road my wife and son were about to traverse.
The voice in my head began to whisper horrible things to me. A lifetime of reading and watching horror movies was feeding my spoonfuls of fear. They made it just fine. No need to bury the lead there, as I would more than likely be banging around in a padded room than writing this story if any of my nightmares had crawled out of my brain and formed in front of me. But the fear stuck with me, and I’d been waiting for it to find a voice … a purpose ... an intent. Then I happened upon this map.
That’s a lot of red dots … rural red dots. I grew up with people on the marginalized edges of society while also tip-toeing through the halls of the wealthy. I grew up in the south in a small town that embodied the cliche of having an “other side of the tracks.” I rode my bike on both sides and often got in trouble for it. It’s easy to dismiss tragedy when it doesn’t check all the right boxes. It’s easy to blame victims who place themselves in violent and dangerous situations, but no one starts this life out with one of these red dots as a destination. That choice is usually made for them.
If you enjoyed this week’s issue then refer a friend and win cool prizes!
The Rewards
REFER 2 FRIENDS: 1 month paid subscription for FREE
REFER 5 FRIENDS: 3 months paid subscription for FREE + PDF copy of the pilot screenplay The Devil’s Road
REFER 10 FRIENDS: 6 months paid subscription for FREE + 1 SIGNED mailed copy of the pilot screenplay The Devil’s Road
