Can Veeky Forums write better shortform horror than reddit?

Can Veeky Forums write better shortform horror than reddit?

Is there more to that one or is that it?

nm found it
>Mere days after my 18th birthday, Dad finally decides to bring me into the loop.
>Eloquently as ever, he explains to me the nature of his murderous calling; how, ever since mom left him years ago, he has ravaged and murdered beautiful women for sport.
>“Spencer, I want you to carry on my legacy” he announces, and to this, I merely nod in awe.
>Proceeding to the basement, I discover that it’s every bit as nightmarish as I’d hoped. Chains, meat cleavers, piles of disembodied limbs- it’s all down there. For hours, I giddily pore over the various instruments of torture. Just holding them in my hands, I can feel their true weight; all the lives they’ve taken, all the misery they’ll inflict.
>“This is awesome, Dad!” I cackle.” You know- you really didn’t need to wait this long to tell me all this.”
>“Well, son” Dad smirks, a hint of malice appearing in his voice. “As I mentioned before, I did need you to be old enough…”
>He pauses- and smiles.
>“Old enough for the death penalty.”
>In the distance, I hear police sirens blaring.

Which is just retarded.

Oh there's more.

I hear something go bump in the night
was it the chilly breeze of April
or was it the skeleton under my skin?

Two sentence horror story :

She looked into his eyes, mellow and unflinching. "Of course there's never been anybody else."

:(

oh my fucking god nuke Reddit right now

The harsh florescent lighting make the perfect white walls blinding. You finish your meal to a hum of intelligible voices. Eyes fix on you from across the table then dart away when noticed. Conversation gradually ceases with no discernable cause. You turn to your left and question the newly descended silence. You search for a sympathetic face to join in your confusion but all avoid your gaze. You see them look at one another for a moment.
Over behind the counter a girl garbed in drab blue whispers something to an older woman dressed in a more authoritative colour, glancing at you.
Your best friend picks up his phone, stands and says he has to take a call outside, followed closely by his friend, you're alone. After a few moments you walk out towards the outside toilet, the parking lot is empty, friends nowhere in sight. You pat your pockets, no phone, you just had it, didn't you? Where are they? You walk back to the entrance, through the window the blinding lights are out, the perfect walls coated in shadow. One shadow moves, perhaps an employee leaving, it disappears somewhere behind the counter, the restaurant is empty.
Your exhalations summon cold vapour in the night air, the street is lined with crooked, unfamiliar houses, he drove you here. Spread in front of the houses is a wide empty street, punctuated by a single police car, idling. You approached the car to ask for directions or to use a phone but the figure behind the wheel fiddles with the radio, and begins to slowly pull away, leaving only exhaust smoke. Empty silence in all directions.

Post the rest of this shit

Eh, that was kinda campy.

I liked it.

holy...

a SERIAL KILLER?

that's truly frightening

post the rest!

The OP reddit story is awful and a weak copy of the overused trope of serial killer family. Even Ligotti's attempt was mediocre

The alarm rings at 5:00, you hit it and start the process of going to work; breakfast, coffee, defecation, shower, clothes. Work passes in an unpleasant haze of anxiety and forgetfulness smeared with a hint of dread. Lunch occurs, more work, and then, you go home.
The evening is spent eating sandwiches or oatmeal for dinner, sitting in front of the computer, browsing Veeky Forums for hours until you decide to go to bed. Disgust at the wastefulness of your life joins you under the sheets, and you vow to yourself, 'I'm going to change my life' as you fall asleep.
The alarm rings at 5:00,

That's not what Purity was about you stupid fuck

and then a skeleton pops out

garbage

They are there, dancing in the dark. We see them through the single porthole of thick plexiglass that allows us to look out into the lightless depths. Allejandro's stale breath fills my lungs, and mine his. I want to hold his hand, if only to feel human warmth as I slip into unconsciousness.

"How much?" he wheezes from his station. How much time do we have left. How much air. How much consciousness. How much left to live. The regret of years condensed into two words.

"Three." I tell him. Outside, they probe and search, and drag their fleshy, benthic bodies around our capsule. The rhythmic pounding of hearts beating in unison in the musty false atmosphere, mine, and Allejandro's, and a hundred more sputtering with fleshy contractions. My bones hurt and there is a roaring in my ears.

Allejandro's hand clasps my own, sweaty and shaking. "Thank." I hiss as a rattling burp of air forces itself, involuntary, from his failing lungs. We are shaking. The world is shaking. The metal is groaning and bending. Here, in the womb of god, we have entombed ourselves. Allejandro's hand scrabbles up my arm, damp with musky perspiration. By the time it reaches my shoulders, then my chin, and begins to part my lips with its spiny appendages I do not have the strength to keep from swallowing.

Help.

You seem to be mistaken. Reddit has a fetish for "shocking" imagery and abrupt twist endings that leave the reader going "holy...I want more...." That's all there is. But don't worry because every single story follows this exact template.

Yeah that's the idea, guy.

Too mired in physical movement and positioning.

fuck you

I got one too :

The straps have me bound so tightly that my hands lost all feeling hours ago. From the hallway, I hear his penis beating out a meaty rhythm against his bare thighs with each footstep.

>trope
stopped reading

"Stacey would be glad too see me so early," Michael thought as he entered his neighborhood. When he stopped the car, Michael looked up, and saw a black shape darting away from the windows of his bedroom.

something something ghost on the staairway, i know it's not there, something something but I hope it stays, because I'm schizophrenic

The alarm sounds. Lunch break is over. I set my coffee, still warm, upon the table. I can't be bothered to dispose of it, knowing some custodian will sweep over the second I leave. I rise, slowly, regretting ever sitting.

yes... yes... just a HINT

>horror
>reads like a wacky sitcom
probably, but i won't

oh u

i liked it, would make for a comfy detective novel or similar

...

I don't get this.

Anyone else plays this game where you try and find out exactly what amateur writers are actually plagiarizing?

This one is from the first Hannibal episodes (you even have the name Spencer which was the surname of Abigail) and that American Dad's episode about Jeff and his Dad

>Sims 3 in a nutshell

i can picture it now

???
that's trash and not in any way similar to the previous one

It was a skeleton...

Mind. Fucking. BLOWN.

You don't get it, it gets you.

RATTLED

what's the moral of the story?

>the real horror isn't your serial killer dad but being taken away by the police who will then not search the house to easily identify your father as the real perpetrator, freeing you and rendering the whole story pointless

and you discover a skeleton next to you in bed

you guys need to consume more calcium, skeletons are our friends

A bit ot, but since this is Veeky Forums, and this is lit or near lit, imho, i'll post it.

But his dad was killing people for the past decade so the son would've had to be eight and killing people, the cops would know it was the dad....

Why does a story need a moral? I'll agree it needs some synthesis at the end to create a singular idea or image that a reader can hold onto, but that isn't necessarily a moral point.

Where reddit, and a lot of short horror, goes wrong is that it takes the "image" literally and tries to leave you with a twist rather than a feeling of discomfort, or an idea of human emotion

spooky, his father was not only a serial killer but also retarded (like most actual serial killers)

Sure.

>The day leddit finally beats Veeky Forums down, Hillary Cunton is elected President.

>being a wageslave
who does this?

i do it with cartoons. it used to all be shit from shakespeare or else b-movies. now a lot of it is from anime.

...

Kek

I swear I've read this somewhere on totse or ASSTR

The walls white, plain, inoffensive. Safe. That’s the word that best describes this place. Safe. When I was first brought here I thought it odd, the way the school was run. “An educational revolution”, “Praxis Sui Generis”; shallow slogans, but not inaccurate. You could call it “radical group learning”—no teachers, no curriculum; marking was democratized, you could propose the class talk about anything. Within reasonable limits, of course. All this was facilitated by the new Psycho-Social Education Uplink Device, but we just called it the white cap. Oval, white, with an antenna sticking from the top: to receive the thoughts of the class and prevent electrical interfetterence, or so I was told. Even the way the room was organized was decided by the class. This was through the appreciation system. Those who submitted thoughts the class appreciated would gain “appreciation”, which would move them forward in the classroom. It was simple, really—those with the best opinions would move to the front of the class, while those with less appreciated opinions would be moved back. The white caps weren’t perfect; the further away from the projector you were, the quieter your thoughts were, the closer, the louder. The projector was placed at the front of the room. Which was good, of course, as it allowed the most appreciated to be better heard. At first, I had my reservations, as I imagine anyone reading this might. When I first put on my white cap I asked the very thing you’re probably thinking: Isn’t everyone’s opinion of equal worth? Surely, we should all be an equal distance from the projector so we can all be heard. That comment was highly appreciated by the class. One front rower quipped “1984 wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual!”. The classroom roared with laughter at that one, figuratively of course. Looking back on it, I didn’t realize just how funny that was; 1984 WASN’T supposed to be an instruction manual. I’ll have to thank him later. I moved 3 spaces forward that day. It’s been three 3 years since then and we all agree that we’ve learned a lot, we’re a very enlightened class. The way the class is structured sorts the gold opinions from the static, so to speak. I think I’ll stay here.

Actually very good. Cut down on the memes and you could actually write a very good short story about this

Sure
>you and your thoughts will forever be sealed in their depth, never fully accessed in peace and love by another being.
>you are only, to others, memories of actions and not a conscious person, merely an imitation of you.

Is our focus on prose the only thing that seperates us from reddit?

Holy.....

this is kinda spooky, although "kids saying creepy stuff" is getting kind of boring really. kids always say the weirdest shit, irl too

It's not the prose that sets reddit apart, though they lack it. It's their dogged determination to reach a singular outcome. When reddit wants you to read "disgust" they load a story with as many buzzwords and stock situations about disgust as possible : coprophagy, disembowelment, bodily effluvia. Similarly, when they want you to feel fear they put you into the body and mind of a child, and then abuse you : beatings, an inability to reach out to authority figures for supplication, and heaping derogatory comments. "Oh no! How could someone do this to a child!" They want you to scream, so that they know they've made you feel something.

This is a flawed process for a number of reasons, the most important being that it is EXPECTED and that it is borderline PARODY. Reddit deviates little from these stock situations and tropes because they "work" (or do in the minds of their creators, who saw them used more effectively elsewhere) and they become familiar quickly. You can tell very soon after beginning a piece whether it's a murder, a monster, a cult/system, a mysterious "event" that overtakes a community, or a deliberate attempt at subverting these things, not in some clever or self-aware way, but by keeping the identities of characters involved secret until the last minute and then pulling back the curtain to go FOOLED YOU!

Since these stories are only constructed around a few stock templates and a few stock fear/disgust objects there is no innovation. Instead, there is escalation. If one of these writers creates a story about a murderer, then suddenly that, on its own, "isn't scary" for writers that follow. The next has to be a murderer with a twist, maybe he disembowels his victims for some reason, and thus now the twist isn't frightening enough and the following writer must make a murderer who mutilates and then EATS his victims. Scary! It gets to the point where authors become desperate to find some kind of new hook to make themselves and their piece stand out, and so the original murderer now bathes, literally bathes in a bathtub, in the blood of his victims to transform himself into some kind of blood demon. They only care about setpieces to be moved and thrown about and misused like a petulant little girl who's gotten hold of her grandmother's priceless porcelain dolls. What they do not care about are things like setting, character (outside of stock characters that can be appropriated like the frightened father, the courageous lady soldier in over her head, the inner voice of the killer, etc), and implication- things that last far longer than putting a twist at the end of a piece.

It's a really myopic way to write stories and I hope that by bringing it to light and mocking it here I can help highlight why it's an issue, how it becomes one, and how one can avoid it.

This doesn't feel frightening as much as it feels lonely. I can't tell exactly why the guy is leavingt he place he's in (a psych ward?) but the contrast of night with the artificial harshness of fluorescents connotes freedom more than anything else.

This isn't fear exactly. There's the two-sentence story that goes like this and ends with "I'll do it tomorrow" but what's frightening about that is the contented way in which it's voiced. We know the speaker won't do it tomorrow, but he thinks he is, and will think this until he dies or it becomes too late to fix his life. The horror's motivated by the irony of the situation. Here, there's a clear bent and the creation of a noticeably mediocre (and kind of specific) life that really take away from what makes something like this frightening : the lack of awareness.

I'm interested, but it seems more an idea of a story than it does something finished and self contained. I can't tell if the 1984 bit is meant to be in-character foolishness, or a dig at Veeky Forums or something. Could exist as more than the extremely shortform.


I'm and would appreciate a critique.

Good post

HOLY

Boo!

This is better than most shit I've read on nosleep whenever I tried going there. Is there moar

But who was phone?

What's more frightening than loneliness

this is the most reddit thing i've ever read

I can't speak for reddit, but I do know Veeky Forums knows little to nothing about writing. They're too wrapped up in aesthetics to bother with how things function in writing as a craft.

Necromancing the thread but I'll give it a hwhack.

1/4

2/4

3/4

5 word horror story from /x/
bad smell friend voice run

Pregnancy

Horror is the most pleb-tier of genre fiction. Honestly, the lowest of the low.

Fantasy would like a word

...

CRASH! The police kicked down my front door. Only one enemy remained. Two if you counted my dad.

hot

The real horror story is that the genes on your fathers side of the family lower the US IQ average while making you feel a sense of superiority

This gave me a boner wtf

reminds me of that dude in askreddit who would post these shitty, long-winded stories as replies to threads. each of his stories would get thousands of upvotes and the dude published a short story collection because he was so popular lol.

That story is a reddit joke.

gurochan Veeky Forums does, but they aren't interested in being scary

Someone fucking expand on this.

Horror is aesthetic. I'd consider something like Story of an Eye to be horror to some extent, to say nothing of things like Turn of the Screw. To think of it as Stephen King and creature-features in book form is to think of horror the wrong way.

lol

"You have an assignment due tomorrow get off Veeky Forums"

Why would the police murder him? I get that the kid is pretty crazy and the dad is trying to blame him, but they don't just rush in and shoot someone that's unarmed and not actively resisting. Maybe he would resist or rush them, but there's really nothing to suggest that he would. It honestly just seems like the kid would just be too shocked to do anything.

It doesn't flow very well, either.

I enjoyed your story. "The regret of years condensed into 2 words" is a nice line but feels a little out of place as we never get a glimpse of what those regrets might be. Also I dont think benthic is a very descriptive word, its a bit like youre beating us over the head with the fact that they are underwater. I would read an entire book this was excerpted from, tho.

So far as I know, this is it, alas.

How's this lit? I think it emulates Lovecraft's style very well

"Crash!"
I awoke to the sound of my golden retriever eating my pancakes
"ph'nglui mglw'nafh I was drizzle and she was hurricane R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" I chanted as my dog sprouted a thousand tentacles of spooky doom and it was really scary primirdial spooky horror that's frightening.
"Only one enemy remains, two if you count God"

very kafkaesque

Too late to ruin the thread my man, we already had a pretty good one