Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

“One: Emanation from a Single Location,”

“Two: a Sense of Forbidden History.

“Three: an Atmosphere of Decay and Ruin.

“Four: Corruption of the Innocent.

“This is perhaps the most important element of any good Gothic horror story. Without it, what do you have? A shitty old dump with a dark history no one remembers or cares about. You need that one person who ensures that the evil lives on.”

And what’s truly frightening is when we realize that our pursuit of that sensation—of that reassurance of our own validity—has led us to a dark, terrible place from which there is no escape. That’s true horror. When the seducer turns on us, and we are no longer in charge. We’ve lost control. And now we have to pay an awful, unspeakable price.”

Pleasure and pain, Moore knew, came from the same area of the brain. The extreme of one became indistinguishable from the other. The pleasure of pain. The pain of pleasure.

“Sometimes stories have too much power. They change who people think you are.”

“The goal of the written word has always been to explain to man those things which seem unexplainable. We write to understand the world but, more importantly, we write to understand our place in it. I never set out to be a writer of fantastic fiction; I simply understood the dichotomy of the world. Good cannot exist without evil. Light without darkness.

Love is warmth. It’s like Greek fire; no matter how much others try to dampen it, it only grows more intense. I want to remember love, Sam. I want to remember it forever. Because the thought of losing that, well, there’s nothing more terrifying.

“There are two kinds of ghost stories, as those in your line of work must know: tales of revenge and tales of love cut short.