Taking the Scenic Route

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Clayton Tunnel

Would it be more difficult to imagine horror when you are seated amid luxurious surroundings on a clear and sunny day than it might be if you were you crawling, knee deep, through a slime pit, in the fading dusk, with unknown animal noises all around you?

Mysterious settings are keys to creating narrative or dramatic suspense. When the actual surroundings in which one is writing are not only mysterious, but also eerie, they’re a pretty good inspiration for scary fiction.

Why not find someplace off the beaten track, go there, alone, and drink in (or absorb, as by osmosis) the bad vibes; let them chill you, thrill you, and become a part of you, as you let your imagination run wild.

If you don’t have a heart attack, you’ll probably come away with an idea (and maybe a dozen of them) for a spooky chiller or an uncanny thriller.

With the economy the way it is, getting away to, say, the catacombs or your favorite bat-filled cavern may be too dear a journey to make. That’s where your Internet service provider’s images browser can be of assistance. (I prefer Yahoo!, but several others are probably as good.)

Type in the would-be destination of your choice, and, with the click of your mouse button, you’re there. Describe what you see, as well as you can, but don’t merely describe it. See it. Hear it. Feel it. Smell it. If possible, taste it.

Let the scenes depicted in the photographs become one with you, as you become one with each of then in turn. Imagine that you are a character in a story. Why are you there, in the catacombs or the bat-filled cavern, by yourself? How did you get there? What happens to you? (Whatever it is, it has to be horrible or horrific, if you’re writing a horror story.) What happens next?

Stanley Hotel

Similarly, actual horrors sometimes become connected to a place, and the place to which these horrors are connected can itself inspire tales of terror. For example, Charles Dickens is believed to have based his eerie, supernatural short story “The Signalman” on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel crash, and a night as a guest in the Stanley Hotel near Estes Park, Colorado, gave Stephen King much of the material that he needed to write his novel The Shining. “It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind,” he said.

By taking the scenic route, as it were, and merging your consciousness with your surroundings (as they are depicted in the photographs and in your descriptions of them), and imagining that you are your protagonist, your antagonist, or another of your characters, you will create, for your reader, the same suspense and fear, the same horror and terror, the same panic and certainty of doom as you yourself feel.