Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

“Four: Corruption of the Innocent. That’s you guys.” This drew a laugh. He replaced the cap on the marker, set it on the ledge that ran along the bottom of the board, and returned to the lectern. “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.”

“Last One Out Kills the Lights by Sebastian Cole. You all should have a copy of this now.”

He was not above calling a book unreadable. But their literary merit wasn’t important at this moment. They were words strung together to represent the firing of neurons and the transferring of information through synapses. They were human minds set into paper, and Sebastian loved every single one of them, even the ones he found disposable.

The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson,

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’ Lovecraft said that, and for good reason. When our fate is uncertain, our minds naturally lead us to the worst possible scenario.