Welcome to the first of a series of mini-interviews with the creators of the Death of the Horror Anthology, live now on Kickstarter.
First up: Ryan Cady…
Hello fellow Death of the Horror Anthology creator. Please, introduce yourself and your story in the collection…
Ryan Cady here. I mostly write comics, and most of them horror – Image, Archie, Marvel, and DC, to name a few. My short for DOTHA is called The Pool, about a young woman who stumbles upon something very wrong in an isolated woodland trail.
What do you find scarier in horror stories: inhuman monsters or monstrous humans?
Inhuman monsters always scare me more. I guess monstrous humans just cause me anxiety – I feel a bit inundated with all the bad news in real life, and there’s not much gripping, lie-awake-terror at play (for me) in those kinds of stories. But man, oh man – give me a really well-designed monster, some subtle silhouettes with ominous intent?
I’m in heaven.
What scary movie, book or comic do you think every horror fan should experience?
If you haven’t read House of Leaves, I always recommend it. It’s hard to make literary analysis terrifying, but goddamn if Mark Z. Danielewski doesn’t manage it. Levels and layers of metastory, paranoia, and one very, very spooky house make it the kind of novel you can just fall into.
Tell me something cool about your DOTHA story?
The Pool is set in the universe of Preservation, a series of graphic novels that David Stoll and I are co-creating. While the first volume is well under way, our DOTHA short will come out waaaaaay before, so think of it as a fun preview to the kind of horror we’re trying to explore. It’s about old magic, deep horror embedded in places, not things, and how easy it is as a human to stumble into something we should leave undisturbed.
What’s your top tip for creating a scary story?
Everybody says “write about what scares YOU,” and I agree, but I try to think of it in these terms: write in the middle of the night, about the thing that’s keeping you up. What’s so scary you don’t want to turn off your desk lamp? That’s what you need to put down on paper.
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