I Wasn't a Very Creepy Kid (Despite What You Might Have Heard)

Welcome to Day Five of The Twelve Days of Creepfest! A quick contest reminder: Comments on a post earn you one entry in the drawing for one of five free downloads of my horror novella, Monsters Unmasked. If you take a second and check my author page to find the answer to my Question of the Day, you earn two entries for a correct answer. (They're not hard, I promise!) Please remember to email the answer to me at ripleygold@gmail.com with Question of the Day in the subject line. (Don't leave them in the comments! Everybody will see!) One day, the question will pertain to my romantic suspense novel, Make or Break, and one correct-answerer will receive a free e-format of that book. All prizes will be awarded on December 23 and announced on December 24.

My links and the QOTD are at the bottom of this post. Also, be sure to click on the Creepfest logo on the right to see a list of all the participating authors and find some great new fiction for your library!

And now for today's post!

I've been trying to recall the first horror story I ever read, and came up blank. I was born in the 1960s, and I don't know if there was much pre-teen horror on the market in that era. If there was, I missed it. And considering how much time I spent in the library, that's unlikely. When my son was young, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series was popular, but I don't remember anything like that when I was growing up.

I remember reading about dinosaurs, the ice age, everything I could find featuring horses or dogs, The Little House books, Trixie Belden, The Hardy Boys (no girly Nancy Drew for me!), Rudyard Kipling, and biographies of Louis Braille, Harriet Tubman, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Nothing very horrifying there, though young Mr. Braille accidentally stabbing himself in the eye with a leather-working awl was kind of gross.

But upon further reflection, I suppose my introduction to horror came via fairy tales, many of which are incredibly terrifying. I went through a phase when I read as much Grimm as I could find, and went through the library's entire Fairy Book collection. The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book... you get the idea.

As a kid, I got my horror fix primarily through television. Twilight Zone was out of production by the time I was old enough to watch, but one of the local stations showed it late on Saturday nights, along with Night Gallery.

(What could be more horrifying than thousands of books, all the time in the world to read, no pesky people to distract you... and then breaking your eyeglasses? I shudder at the mere thought!)

I had a cousin who was five years older than I was, and she lived in Cincinnati. One summer, a male cousin and I went to visit. The two of them wrote scripts for horror skits and staged a neighborhood performance. Most of them were thinly-veiled ripoffs of Twilight Zone or Night Gallery episodes, including a homicidal ventriloquist's dummy (my cousin had a Charlie McCarthy doll who was cast in the role), and a creeping, killing severed hand. Being the annoying younger cousin, I was cast as "audience."

What surprises me is that given my lack of immersion in horror fiction, the first story I ever wrote - at age 10 - was a creepy one. And in keeping with the influence of my cousins, it wasn't very original. A little girl lived in a huge, Gothic home situated on a cliff high above the ocean. One day she found some old trunks in the attic, and was delighted to find them full of antique dolls. But one thing lead to another, the dolls came to life, and they all had tiny (but very sharp) knives. They attacked her, she tried to escape, and plunged to her death on the sea-swept rocks far below.

Ta-Da!

I wish I knew where that story was. It was written in pencil on notebook paper, and I am fairly certain I never threw it away, but I haven't seen it in years. My brother was eighteen years older than I, and he read the story and wrote me a note on the back, telling me how good it was, and that he was sure I'd be a writer someday. He passed away several years ago, before I published my first work of fiction, and I really would love to see that story and his note again.

The first horror book I remember reading is King's "'Salem's Lot," which scared me spitless and required my mother to sleep on the loveseat located outside my bedroom door for at least a week.

Do you remember the first scary story you ever read... or wrote?

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