Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Room 205- Part 1 of 2


Room 205
            Harper Grant lived two doors down and across the hall. Every condo in my building was the same… except for his. His condo was much larger than normal condos, and it wasn’t in fact, the regulation size; but he paid extra for it, didn’t he? Yes, I could tell he had bribed the landowner, Gregory, for that room and he had especially bribed him not to add a wall and make it two separate condos.
Yes, that’s how big it was, it was twice the size of one average condo; to be more specific, it was twice the size of my condo. He even had a big view of the part next door, and the building was shaped like a large, backwards C, so his was one of the two rooms with a window, and Gregory had already closed down that condo on accord of an infestation of some rodent I had never heard of. Once I had gotten a raise and saved up for the condominium downstairs with the window, Gregory shut it down. I knew that moment that Harper Grant had planted said vile rodents in the walls somehow and he was meaning to destroy my dreams.
I always hated Harper, and he disliked me two times more, but it was less shocking for me to snap first.
Just like his spine.
He never would’ve allowed me to have the superior apartment unless I stood over his dead body with my stolen keys. Of course, this was not an easy task, for I had to get into his room somehow, but one weary night, I figured it all out. I would creep into Gregory’s office where he kept all of the spare keys, I’d pull the shades, grab the keys, sneak back out, unlock Harper’s condo, run into his room, suffocate him with his own pillow, buy a safe storage, hide the body, keep his room. Voila.
But Gregory made it harder. On the night when I planned to borrow the owner’s keys, he wasn’t asleep like I had anticipated. Greg had instead decided to go out with his “girlfriend,” more commonly known as a call girl, get wasted, come back into his office, and fuck her on the desk. So I killed the whore, and then the bastard Gregory. Their bodies were a little harder to dispose of, so instead of concealing them in a safe, I acted on impulse, and cut them each into twenty different pieces, drained their blood in the toilet, and packaged them in deli bags. I had a friend who could take it from there. I had to go back to his apartment, and pack him a suitcase and leave a flyer on his bed for Hawaii. Later I would hire a housesitter under the pretense I owned the shithole. I feared that it’d be hard to believe, considering he didn’t care about his apartment. I didn’t cover up for the prostitute: no one would notice her disappear.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Why is horror, horror?

You may ask why so many authors write of the genre, and why it ends so often in the protagonist's loss. The answers lie here; Horror is dominated by a strong group of writers who won't just let their hero win, because they have an equal love for their antagonist. They want the final battle to be strewn with loses; broken ribs, severed extremities, lost children, brothers, sisters, and friends. As so often seen in thrillers, the hero would win after a battle where their life is threatened, but never put in real danger. Horror and Sci-fi creators need to see their heroes fall victim to physical and emotional pain, and it is for that reason that those creators make superior novels and films; it produces a more realistic outcome in a genre where realism is not accepted as a plot, and when a character dies, you end up caring because the producers used hardships to make the characters human. It is the emotional toll that the protagonists endure that give the movie an impact, and provides an ending that will tear at your heartstrings and likely leave you satisfied.