A Horror Writer’s Christmas Memories
“To grandmother’s house we go” may bring a sentimental tear to most eyes, but for Ray Garton it brings a flood of disturbing memories that he has memorialized in a blog. If you seek a bracing antidote to the cloying cliches of holiday recollections and are curious to know what makes horror writers different (read strange), here’s an excerpt from Garton’s blog.
“Granny and Papa lived in a trailer park. Over the years, there have been a lot of trailers in my family on both sides. A lot. You can follow that to whatever conclusion you like … and you’ll probably be right. As a boy, I looked forward to visiting to Granny and Papa’s trailer. They had a dog named Nipper who was always on a leash tied to a tree in the front yard. Nipper was a big dog with long legs and a coat of tightly curled white hair. I’m not sure what kind of dog he was – he was rather odd looking and reminded me of a horse. Whenever we visited Granny and Papa, Nipper got very excited, and when he got excited, it seemed he looked directly at me. He didn’t exactly bark, but he made happy whining and yelping sounds as he rose up on his hind legs, waving his forelegs at me as if beckoning me to come play. I always fell for it. I was like Charlie Brown every time Lucy held the football for him to kick. No matter how many times I’d gone through the routine before, no matter how many times it always ended the same way, when I saw Nipper waving at me with his front paws and making those excited sounds, I couldn’t resist. I rushed toward him, a chubby little boy eager to play with a happy dog. And each and every time, Nipper would wait until I was just close enough, and then he would drop down on all fours, lower his head and the fires of hell would flare up in that dog’s eyes as his black lips peeled back over yellowed fangs and a sinister growl rumbled up from subterranean depths to let me know that if I took one step closer – C’mon, kid, one more step, just one more, c’mon – he would take great delight in gnawing on my windpipe while I thrashed around in the final convulsions of my life. Then I would spin around and run away in terror.
“I never learned.”
You can read it in its entirety here, and while you’re at it you can read his Christmas Greeting from an Atheist.
If you’d like learn how a nasty childhood becomes the stuff of fiction, visit Ray Garton’s E-Reads author page and sample some of his books. Not sure which one to start with? Can’t go wrong with Live Girls.
