Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

The Gothic tradition is about secrets, dark secrets, awful secrets, hidden just behind the façade of normality. Modern horror is still heavily influenced by this tradition. But it’s not creepy old castles that hold these secrets anymore. The Gothic has invaded our everyday lives. The old farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The suburban Japanese home in The Grudge. Even a videotape in The Ring. The infectious evil that used to be confined to crumbling ruins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, like Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer has spread to our cities, our small towns, our homes. And that makes it even scarier, doesn’t it?”

the ruin and decay of the physical structure leads to the ruin and decay of the mind of the protagonist.

He was ten years old, clothes spattered with blood that wasn’t his own, the angry light of an unstoppable fire illuminating his face. He was just a boy, a tiny silhouette against the inferno.

His nerves were like millions of tuning forks humming in different keys.

Only the claustrophobic isolation of the world behind her locked door.

He wanted to hold the tears in—to hold her in—close to his heart. Instead, they slipped free, his daughter with them, the vacuum of space within him growing larger, consuming him, his heart, his soul. What had once been a paradise was now a black abyss, the vastness of space without a single star to light the way.