Two-sentence horror stories
It’s a little past Halloween, but I thought I could squeeze in last little bit of fright. After all, the seasonal horror movies are still in theaters. Basically the first week of November is the Halloween snooze button.
I don’t know where it originated or how long it has been a “thing” but people are writing two-sentence horror stories. If you have never read them you must be thinking “that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” And you are right and wrong at the same time.
Calling them stories is inaccurate. There is no plot or character development. For a horror story there must be some building tension or dread. These don’t do that. How could they in just two sentences?
But to think two sentences can’t elicit a chill down your spine isn’t accurate either. Two sentences can sometimes deliver an experience of tension that two hours in a theater cannot.
Don’t believe me?
-A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said, “I heard that, too.”
Some of them cheat by using a plethora of commas and modifiers, but with a lot of these the simplicity is a piece of the puzzle that makes them work.
-I never go to sleep. But I keep waking up.
Many of them are simple descriptions of what would be the eerie moments of a horror movie. And two sentences can’t provide jump-scares like movie can, but still they can give you that tingle on your neck.
-“I can’t sleep,” she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.
-I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, ‘Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”
-I can’t move, breathe, speak or hear and it’s so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.
-There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
-They delivered the mannequins in bubble wrap. From the main room I begin to hear popping.
-My daughter won’t stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn’t help.
Basically the star of these works are the gaps. The missing information really serves as the monster in these two sentence teasers. They are short, simple and they touch a nerve.
And while they seem easy to understand, they are not simple to construct. I decided to try my hand at a couple to close this column. I found myself writing and rewriting, obsessing over words and structure to get the tone correct.
-On the night my mother died, my family’s grandfather clock struck a single tone, the first noise I had ever heard it produce. Fifteen years later, down the hall from my bedroom, I heard it tone twice.
-Her mind was consumed by the image of the nameless man left motionless along the roadway. The morning light revealed a finger-drawn signature in the dust on her hood – “Thomas.”
-I couldn’t be certain the noise I had heard was a voice. Sliding my feet into my slippers to investigate, I wondered why they felt so warm.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune