Terror Tuesday: Writing Spooky

Another Terror Tuesday creeps across your computer screen. Hope you all have visited your local boostores and asked for more horror and supernatural books.

DVD screens this week: “The Uninvited” and “Mirrors.” “The Uninvited” is a decent little psychological horror tale, though not of Hitchcockian merits. The ending was a bit odd and it wasn’t a big surprise what was going on, but entertaining and better than expected. Worth the rental.

“Mirrors” on the other hand is a good one to skip. While I liked the overall premise of ghostly things in mirrors—and have used it in short stories myself—the story, starring Keifer Sutherland, just did not hold together and the ending was a big disappointment, the alternate one as well. Save your money on this one.

Well, onto this week’s subject: writing spooky stuff in period.

I was thinking while designing the new banner for The Chloe Files, The Trouble with Flappers short story about what attracted me to telling the type of stories I do in that series, or in fact any of my supernatural tales. The story caps off the second Chloe Files supernatural/mystery, Sliver of Darkness, which also involves ghosts and unfinished business from the past.

With the flapper story, though I have always been kind of fascinated by the whole Roaring Twenties milieu, I wanted something as ghostly as possible with a small mystery thrown in. Time period things always lend themselves well to telling a chilling or bitter-sweet tale and it seemed the very height of social gaiety, before the Crash of 1929, lent itself particularly well to a spooky opposite. Much in the same way the Titanic makes for a good ghost story, I reckon.

The 1920s represented a peculiar niche time period in our history. We were recovering from the “war to end all wars” not yet named World War I. Radio was just coming into the forefront and like a tight rubber band letting go, certain segments of young society threw off the puritanical conventions and restraints of their antecedents. “And how!” as the saying went. There were the bearcats (fiery girls) and darbs (great person or thing), and you could “cast a kitten” (have a fit) or “doll up.” There were “Bug-eyed Bettys” (ugly gals) and “cake-eaters” (ladies’ men) and that’s no bushwa.

Young women shucked their bras and strapped in their bosoms to give themselves a boyish appearance, jammed feathers in their hair and danced the Charleston. Heavy makeup, a loosening of morals and plenty of heat-seeking males to eat it all up. Sort of a predecessor to the flower children and free love of the 1960s, with more style, perhaps. Gangsters ran amok. The country went dry, but good times reigned in secret rooms in the back of funeral parlors or other businesses and illegal speakeasies. Flappers were unflappable.

Much of it all came to a crashing halt with the plunging to the stock market in 1929 and the setting in of reality and financial hardship, though perhaps it had been running its course for a time before that. You can only play at having fun for so long before the glitter wears off. Beneath it all, a certain loneliness and purposelessness pervaded. Human nature at its base level craves something deeper, gravitates towards something more than frivolity (with possibly the exception of Paris Hilton).

Within all that experimentation, laughter and self-fulfillment, there also existed those who were swept along out of fear of loss or coercion. One partner wanted to “hit on all six” while the other wanted something more meaningful. And there began the genesis of Chloe’s tale, The Trouble with Flappers. It’s a ghost story, to be sure, a mystery as well, but also a look at what lay beneath the sprightly music and Devil-may-care mores of the time. I wanted a traditional feel to the story, so it starts when Chloe’s car breaks down on her way back to New Salem and she encounters an abandoned mansion in her search for a phone. Then a strange little girl dressed in a flapper costume and the discovery of two bullet-riddled bodies that seemed to have died in the 1920s. It all gets weirder from there.

I am pretty sure Chloe will be visiting some other time periods (well, she does end up in the 1960s for brief periods in Sliver of Darkness) but this little adventure in the 1920s might just be one of her most harrowing.

The Trouble with Flapper is available in The Chloe Files #2: Sliver of Darkness from Barnes & Noble. The Chloe Files: Kicking Evil’s ass one demon at a time…