Mia’s Shrine of Scary Stories, #3, 2025

Hey y’all.

This, for once, comes with some warning tags: mentions of violence and death.

I am coming to you right from finishing my own Hallowe’en do, I cleaned out the (plastic!) spiders a little kid who attended the party hid in my bed and I got rid of most of my make-up. And I was thinking about writing this for the last two hours of the party or so, when I noticed my party mood shifting into something more quiet, more work-focused (though this does not feel like work, shall we just say, more focused on how I want to put this to you?).

I have learned a lot over the last two years. This harvest season I notice to my deep satisfaction I can reap some of it, and it sits okay with me that other matters will have to grow for a while longer. One of the fruits I can gather is that I now know better what my restlessness can mean, when it is time for my body to enjoy some activity, and then when it is time for me to withdraw from even the pleasant company of my best mate and sit down and start writing. This is huge to me. So here I am and I am already feeling a different kind of happiness than the company of others. I am feeling happy that I can sit here in the quiet of the night and write to you. Thanks for coming back here, and sharing this with me in a way that I feel comfortable with.

***

There are so many strange and scary stories out there. And while I will often say that I don’t much care for the focus on the teenager section of all of the span of human lives one could write about, it is simultaneously stunning what is out there about that age group which manages to bridge the gap to very, very grown up problems.

The third book I want to tell you about this spooky season is and is not about the horrible, classic trope of the final (teenage) girl. It is and it is not a horror story with all the supernatural trimmings. It is a story about family. It is multiple love stories. And it is a tale about how hard it is to look after the ones we love and love itself. Its another one by Courtney Gould! And it is called The Dead And The Dark.

Logan Ortiz-Woodley’s dads are famous ghost hunters with their very own TV show. Moving all around the US throughout most of her life, always looking out for the next location, the next story they could take on, the next paranormal phenomenon to investigate, Logan has been living on the road a lot. And now she has passed her final school year in L.A., her dad Alejo reveals to his daughter that it is time to join her father, Brandon, at his and Alejo’s hometown of Snakebite. Brandon has been staying there for six months without them, location scouting for a new story. Or has he?

Meanwhile in Snakebite, a teenage boy, Tristan, has gone missing. His girlfriend, Ashley, and a handful of his best friends are still looking for him, together with the town’s sheriff. Ashley has not given up hope yet, six months after Tristan’s disappearance. She is sure she can still feel Tristan’s presence everywhere around her. Then the family of two dads and a lesbian teenage daughter convene in Snakebite’s local motel, and suddenly it seems obvious to the population of Snakebite that former local Brandon is somehow involved in Tristan’s disappearance. After all, didn’t Tristan disappear at the exact time Logan showed his face in Snakebite again? But Ashley’s understanding of her and her family’s prestigious role in town society will not allow her to stand simply by when Logan and her dads become targeted. Plus, would it not make sense to team up with Logan, after all the daughter of famous experts for the paranormal? If anyone would know how to find Tristan, it must be Logan, right?

Then another teenager is found dead. A presence is leading Ashley and Logan to where the body is hidden. A vision in a ruined abandoned cabin in the woods the teenagers used to use as party shack makes Ashley see a younger version of Brandon. How is Snakebite connected to Logan, who has never been there before?

As the bodies keep dropping and town temperament turns fully against the Ortiz-Woodleys, Ashley needs to decide whether she believes Logan that Brandon is innocent, when Logan is not even sure herself who her aloof father actually is, and why he pushed her away years ago. And Alejo and Brandon need to win a race against the darkest evil they know, before their family is torn apart forever.

***

You guys, this is such a scary queer version of the all-American serial supernatural murder trope that I squirmed in my seat. Sometimes with delight at how Gould, once again, is shaping her characters, but most of the time in abject fear and miserable anxiety. The plot is a classic through and through, but with so many novel twists and turns it never once was predictable nonetheless. My heart broke for Brandon, which came as a surprise first and then not at all once his character became more well-known to me, and of course for Logan, and then Ashley, about five times over, and I absolutely cried toward the end. I want to use this day which is moving into Samhain now, to explore the layers the three works I told you about have for me.

As we move through our lives, some of us will remain relatively lucky, if you can call it that, with regard to loss. By which I mean, experience its cruelty as little as possible, or in a manner that is less violent, sudden, or vicious, than others who are not that fortunate, do. The truth of it is that there is no averting it, there is only the question of how, not that it will be, horrible, and life-altering. There is no religion to ward us from it unless your faith is that all-encompassing. If you have that sort of faith, I consider you fortunate too. Because many of us do not possess it. And that is not in any way down to us being lacking as human, nor even (if the word feels applicable) spiritual beings. We just do not believe that there is anything out there to balance the violence of it. And then we need to keep on living despite experiencing this as the truth, and regardless of it. There is no choice for many of us when it comes to keeping on going. It can be a strangely passively active time: waiting, waiting to get better without ever being capable of trusting that one will, is so annihilating, it feels like one is at a level with the dust on the floor. Nothing. No-one in the face of it. Loss is universal as well as isolating. It is everywhere, and it is exacerbated by the mindless, incredible violence that we exercise on each other as human beings. No one who is already careless towards your needs will become suddenly full of care and understanding just because you are experiencing loss. This is not how people function. The world will keep on turning, day after day, while we grieve, and try to go on, because there is only one other option once you are at this point in your thoughts.

Horror stories can become both an outlet for as well as a a strange counterweight to realities too bleak to cope with. If you have read the books I mentioned here, you will perhaps realise, that we have progressed from poltergeists and mere demons to having to deal with the much worse fallout from unbelievable transgressions against our bodies, our minds, our senses of self, and on top of it, as if that is not all more than enough, there is no real remedy for loss. If you have met the young adults in What The Woods Took, you will know what I mean. What makes me return to stories like this is not that I have a morbid wish to investigate how abysmal people are toward one another, as if the headlines of the daily news were not enough. Sheridan calls this ‘evil’ in What The Woods Took. And maybe it really is. Not in a Satan kind of way. But in the way an instinct of wrongness will tell us what is evil, what is a violation against us, what dehumanises us and strips us of autonomy over the self. I enter these stories knowing I will feel true fear, and be reminded of real grief, and maybe if I am lucky experience cleansing rage sometimes. I enter fully aware that I have felt horrible in real life already and that I have been in actual and great peril to lose myself. I do not relive the exact corresponding events, but I am reminded of them. But I also enter these stories knowing that I am seen. When our human environment fails us, and it can and will in extremis, even if it means well, art can be the crucial chain link which returns to us the experience of belonging. That is perhaps its most profound and astonishing impact, that when all else fails us and nothing can make us care, let alone feel good again, we can discover people have managed to sculpt, paint, compose music, set words to this exact feeling for as long as humans (and quite a share of our taxonomic genus) have created anything. While the individuals around us may fail us, the collective knowledge of suffering still exists, and it offers resonance, which can feel almost as comforting as experiencing direct care. To experience this transcendence, sometimes having to chase it for a long while but being able to rely on the knowledge it is out there - this is why these books are so important, and why remembering and trying to commune with this feeling of the collective is so important. And it is important to be told, again and again, that there is an Alejo, and a Sheridan, that there is a Brandon and an Ashley, and a Logan, and that there is a Lottie and an Alice. Because the people who created these characters are there, too. They are real. By extension, that gives us the option to believe in a Lottie for us, or a Logan for us too. Or that we could be a Sheridan, an Alejo. It is okay to wish for someone to stand by your side, to drag you out of the woods, to help burn your monsters. To wish for friends, siblings or parents to have your back. I can confidently say that some demon slayers in my very close vicinity were revealed to me that I had no idea of. You may be slaying some monsters for someone else. These books make us remember our strength, and they offer narratives that can end well when our lives do not allow us to trust that we will very probably not forever feel like we have hit the rock bottom of a black, dark pit of personal hell, with only a fiend full of vicious accusations and words of hopelessness as company. Think of Dorothy Parker’s poem Resumé, think of Invictus by William Ernest Henley, and only listen to the words. The biographical aspects are not what is truly relevant. I only believe that things happen for a reason in the very literal sense, as in, they are caused by something. Ascribing meaning to randomness is something I cannot personally think of as a solution to the problem that we need to find purpose in life, lest the Why and Wherefore dominate our every waking moment. There are no answers, so we need to stop asking these questions in order to keep on focusing on living. And that is what many of the horror stories out there force the protagonists to do: act and take control, resist, get up again and fight.

(Some afterthoughts to this, to make you smile again: Maybe do not be literal for once and insist upon being saved from a hard time by a fierce sexy valkyrie or no one at all. Be patient and learn to take the help in the form in which it is offered, and get out of the woods first. For future reference, no-one has to pass the valkyrie muster to try and help me.)

Good night, and move into November smoothly and safely, and read the scary stories from the place of comfort and security that I wish for you to have, that you are allowed to have and to enjoy.

As always, Mia.