By Derek Darklord
Greetings, fellow-travellers down the night-highway of the macabre. I, of course, am Derek Darklord, and You, of course, will recognize my name from the covers of your favourite spine-tinglers, bone-chillers and blood-curdlers. Some of my more famous works include, “DeadWoman”, “Spider’s Ball” and “Literal Blood Hound”. No doubt these books have been the stuff of your nightmares, but have you ever wondered what, fair reader, is the stuff of which my nightmares are made?
Dare you ask, beloved word-looker, what horrifies me, the very master of horror?
Our dumb society.
Ooh. It gives me chills just to think about it. My hair, dear reader, is standing on its verymost end.
Sure, I’ve written about people wearing so many layers of human skin that their own skin has rotted and sloughed off as they crept through college dormitories. But I have also rubbed against the hairy shoulders of disgusting ape-like men while riding home on the subway at rush hour. Which is the greater horror? I cannot say, for I am but a humble word-spinner.
And have I written stories about changeling babies that sucked the eyeballs from their mother’s heads and sewed little bags of live cockroaches into the sockets? Of course I have. But when you really think about it, what’s a little cockroach-sewing compared to waiting in line for six hours to speak to those real life changelings at the DMV?
And would I deny writing a story about a flock of skeleton birds with bloody hands and the voices of little girls that sang ‘ring around the rosie’ as they held down students at the local high school and vomited gallon after gallon of writhing maggots into their open, screaming mouths? Of course I wouldn’t. But undeniably creepy though that story may be, is it as creepy as Generation Y? The Me Generation? I think not.
Always looking at their phones. Who are the real zombies, Generation Why?
If there is one lesson that I hope my books do teach, it is this: horror is all around us. Whether we’re being impregnated by wolves with the faces of blowflies, or enduring a mad society’s censure just because we like to wear cargo pants with sandals, horror is central to the human experience.
My job is merely to hold up a mirror to that experience.
But, like, a blood mirror. A bloody, haunted mirror. A bloody, haunted mirror haunted by the ghost of an earthworm.
