The Story Behind the Story: Monstrous

I think that clowns are a great vehicle for horror fiction. For one thing, many people fear clowns for reasons unknown to me. Another thing I like is that you can put them in macabre and twisted situations that can make them scarier than most other villainous types of characters. When I set out to write Monstrous, I had an idea for a clown story using a little person as a clown. Having been mistreated and abused his whole life, my clown wanted revenge on society. He had been teased for being a midget clown his whole life, even though he feels that he has much more to offer.

The setting I wanted to use was a babysitting scenario, so I had the idea of having this macabre statue in the house that disturbed the baby sitter, but convincingly looked like a statue. When she learns that it is a real clown on a murderous rampage, she must do everything she can to not only save herself but the two children she is babysitting.

What didn’t work about the first version of the story that I wrote was that the clown was a regular person who used a knife to attack the babysitter. That story just didn’t resonate. When a magazine editor pointed this out to me, I knew I had to do something more memorable and, in a strange way, more believable. So I decided to make the clown a supernatural character that while in statue form was actually made of porcelain. He then transforms into flesh and blood before attacking his victims. It didn’t seem realistic to me that the clown would have been able to go unnoticed unless he was an actual physical statue. Then to make it more interesting, I gave the clown retractable, sharp claws that he uses to attack his victims. I liked this version of the story much more than the first version. Pick up a copy of Blood Reign Lit if you would like to find out more.