The Forest Dweller

The Forest Dweller (10,250 words)

This week's story is essentially a continuation of what I was talking about in my previous post about a 'shared universe' of short stories involving my interpretations of classic Universal monsters.
The idea was a little bit stolen, I'm afraid to say... I was thinking about different Universal movies and had several ideas cooking (including Uprising and The Wolf of Whitechapel) when I read a short story by August Derleth called The Dweller in Darkness. August Derleth was an American pulp writer from the early 20th century who is most famous for introducing the world to H P Lovecraft. Lovecraft only ever published his stories in pulp magazines in his lifetime and only got paid for one of them. If anyone ever wanted to read his stories they had to go out and find back issues of all these different magazines. Derleth created his own publishing company called Arkham House specifically to publish collected volumes of his dead best friend's works. Once the collected versions hit bookshops word spread and Lovecraft became an American horror icon. Derleth wrote his own stories set in the Cthulhu mythos and published them as well and The Dweller in Darkness was one of these. Unfortunately, for all the great things Derleth did for Lovecraft he wasn't a great writer. The story really isn't that good- it's set in woodland in America where a pan-dimensional being haunts local residents, makes a flute sound and has two smaller familiars with it (which reminded me of My Neighbour Totoro!).
I thought, maybe a bit arrogantly, that I could do better.
It also hit me that I could make this my version of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Creature was one of the classic Universal movies I'd pretty much written off for me since I don't really like writing straight-up fantasy, I prefer making things realistic and believable. But then this story gave me an idea that I really thought could work.
For me this one was easily the hardest of this series and unlike any story I've written before- it's Victorian and a bit actiony and yes, I've done that plenty of times but it was the format that was the challenge- a diary. The difficulty with a diary is that you have to constantly take into account when the diary is being written, the change between past and present tense is really hard to maintain (I still think I messed it up a few times but I can't figure out how to fix it so I've left it as is...) and I don't think I'd want to do it again. The other huge challenge for me was writing horror and the supernatural- I couldn't help either not finding it scary or thinking the supernatural elements were a joke. A rough challenge, lots of potential, did I meet them? I don't think so but I got something down- it begins, has a middle and then ends so ultimately it's not all that bad.

One last note- I don't like the title. I've gone with it because I literally can't think of anything better but it's too close to Derleth's title. If anyone has a suggestion that would be great!

See what you think and message me if you want, I'm always after feedback...

B A Jones 02/08/2014