A few years back I wrote a novel about a serial killer who had a new and interesting way of dispatching his victims. He sabotaged elevators and sent people plunging to their deaths.
Many readers told me that after they read that book, they started taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever they could. I’d freaked them out. They could never look at an elevator the same way again.
This is when you feel, as an author, that you’ve really done your job. Making people fear things in their everyday lives in ways they never did before, that’s the dream of every writer of suspenseful tales.
If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s Duel, you know the chill that comes from looking in your rear view and seeing it filled with the front grill of a tractor trailer. Look what Stephen King has done for clowns or wide-eyed mechanical monkeys with drums. Jaws made us afraid of the beach.
Is there anything scarier than a simple door at the end of a long hallway when you don’t know what’s on the other side of it? The writers of Severance know the answer to that one.
And what about dolls? Chucky, Annabelle, the ventriloquist’s dummy from William Goldman’s Magic, or more recently, M3gan? Dolls have a special place in the annals of horror and suspense. I call still remember the night, as a kid, watching Trilogy of Terror, an ABC movie of the week featuring Karen Black being terrorized by a Zuni fetish doll. That one still gives me chills.
Toys – like that mechanical monkey and those devilish dolls – work well when it comes to embodying evil. Turning their innocence on their head is what makes them so frightening, and it helps that they share some of our characteristics. They have faces. They have penetrating eyes, mouths that smile. They can be – deep breath here – anthropomorphized. So they have an edge.
But what about a toy that doesn’t have face-like features? What about, say, a toy train?
Okay, some trains have faces. That little engine that could. Thomas the Tank Engine and all his friends. But those are friendly faces. Benevolent. Thomas never scared anyone. But is it possible to make a toy train evil? Can a seemingly innocent train set – some old Lionel or American Flyer trains tucked away in a box that typically come out at Christmas to be set up around the tree – be imbued with the power to create mayhem? To scare some poor family to, well, death?
That’s what I’ve set out to do in my new novel, Whistle. If I’ve done my job right, you’ll never look at a toy train the same way again.
Woo woo.
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