Campaign for Real Fear short story comp

[manyeyedhydra]

This is a nice follow up to the women in horror thread Stella started a while back.

Campaign for Real Fear aims to shock horror fiction world
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/30/campaign-for-real-fear-horror-fiction

other link
http://campaignforrealfear.wordpress.com/

500 words. Deadline is April 16th. And they're after new monsters rather than worn out vamps, woofs and brain-munchers.

Might be of interest to the horror afficionados we have lurking around.

I'm always a bit leery of these calls for new monsters though. Whenever it's been done in the past all that seems to get produced are variations on the "nothing is more monstrous than us human beings" theme, which are well-written, realistic, but ultimately as exciting as an episode of Eastenders (a dreadfully dreary, miserable British soap in case anyone is wandering).

Hopefully, I'll be proved wrong and they'll turf up some exotic new terrors like Mieville's slake moths and crazy multi-dimensional spiders.

I might have a crack it at myself. 500 words doesn't leave a lot to play with though and rather predicatably, the first idea that came to me was of the "nothing is more monstrous than us humans" variety

 

[manyeyedhydra]

A solitary bump in the night in case anyone missed it and would be interested before this thread sails off into the empty darkness.

 

[Handley_Page]

Are we talking a new version of Dr Who's enemies, or something from the fertile minds of Lovecraft or Collins, et al ?

Difficult to top those old Gothic Horrors, I reckon.

 

[Verdad]

A solitary bump in the night in case anyone missed it and would be interested before this thread sails off into the empty darkness.

You mean, you crept up here in crepuscular hours and bumped this thread before it could slither away into putrid depths of nameless dread?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

The scariest thing there is is a crazy parent or a crazy child.