Scared Stiff - The Program

They used to say horror was the bastard child of literature — too lurid for the salons, too bloody for the book clubs, too honest for polite society. But I always figured that’s what made it worth writing. You don’t go down into the basement because you want to find something nice; you go because something’s scratching under the floorboards and you can’t sleep until you know what it is.

Back in the early ’80s, we horror scribblers were a small, strange family. You could find us in the back of dim bars and damp basements, swapping ghost stories and rejection slips. We were the night shift of fiction — the ones who stayed up late, typing by the sickly light of a desk lamp, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and wondering what might be hiding just behind it. We weren’t writing for glory or bestseller lists; we were writing because we knew there were things in the dark that needed names. 

Horror fiction has always been the most honest kind of storytelling. It strips everything down to the raw nerves — fear, guilt, desire, and mortality.

It doesn’t lie about how fragile we are. Every story, no matter how gruesome or supernatural, is really about being human. It’s about that cold, electric moment when you realize the monster outside might be less frightening than the one breathing inside your own ribs.

The short plays collected here are a testament to that truth. They’re small, sharp incisions — each one a bloodletting of imagination, a whisper from the void. These aren’t stories meant to comfort. They’re meant to wake you up, to make you flinch, to remind you of a truth I came to acknowledge decades ago: horror isn’t a genre — it’s a mirror.

And it's time to reflect.

- RPD