My first horror novelette is now on Amazon!

The first time I read Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” I can't say I was horrified, rather I was confused. Of course I was young then and it just made no sense to me – who would believe that nice, normal, small town folks would do such a horrid thing? But, of course, as I matured I started to realize that was exactly the point. That they chose to do such a thing was the very thing that made it horrible.

There are lots of kinds of horror – there is the gory, blood-and-guts kind of horror and then there is the subtle, psychological kind. The latter is what fascinates me because it creates in you the sense that this could happen to anyone. Turn to the person next to you on the train or in the market or in your own house and wonder “what might this person be capable of?” I remember a story a friend told about a boy in the neighborhood she grew up in. Her grandmother once told her, “it's okay to play with him but don't bring him in the house, there's something disturbing about that boy.” He grew up to be Jim Jones. We never know.

I grew up among pragmatic, practical people. It was all well and good to read books about scary things but they never took them seriously. “Things like that just don't happen in real life,” my mother would say but yet, as an adult, I have ample proof that they do. Just read the news. Anyone who followed the Casey Anthony trial had ample opportunity to exercise their imagination on the limits of horror. What is more horrible to a normal person than a young mother dancing, drinking and partying while a tiny, beautiful child is missing and possible dead? Horror, indeed.

When I wrote Home-made Pie and Sausage I really did not intend it as a horror story. I needed a crime story to submit to an anthology and that is what I wrote but when I showed it to my first readers they all said, “that's horrible – you have a creepy mind.” Thank you – I think....

So what makes something psychological horror? I think it is proximity to a situation or circumstances that hides something terrible and we go through our days, weeks, months thinking all is well, all is well, all is well – except it isn't.

A few years back I read an article in the Marblehead Reporter about a couple who were fixing up an old house and made a startling discovery. I can't tell you what it was because that would give away my story but that article stayed in the back of my mind all this time and grew. It grew into a short novel, a novelette of 15K words, that I called The Crazy Old Lady in the Attic. Yesterday Amazon released my novelette in their Kindle store and it is also live on Smashwords. Eventually it may also make it into a printed collection of short stories.

Is The Crazy Old Lady in the Attic proper horror? Well, I think so and, so far, the beta-readers at least back me up on that. Mattie, the heroine of the story is in her early 30s and has escaped her proper Bostonian upbringing by marrying Stan, a Cape Cod fisherman. Mattie was raised in an elegant brownstone on Boston's beacon Hill by her elegant, refined grandmother whom she called GrammyLou. On the top floor of GrammyLou's brownstone there is a ballroom that was shut up many years ago after the party which ended in Mattie's parents being killed in a car wreck. Now the ballroom is slipping into decay – the linen tablecloths are yellowed and tattered, the flower arrangements are dead and desiccated. The champagne bottles and glasses are smashed.

When GrammyLou dies, Mattie inherits the house and she and Stan decide to spend the summer cleaning it out preparatory to selling it. Mattie is completely unprepared for the things she begins finding.... things that lead her to seek out the few people from her past who might have clues. But nothing prepares her for the reality that awaits her: that her life was built on lies and that she was raised by a monster.

Give The Crazy Old Lady in the Attic a try and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.