On A Winter's Eve

Once upon a time… on a cold and dreary winter’s night…

For many the frightful remembrances of an awful event suffered during their youth fade with time. For others, however, the dreadful scene swells with the passing years, driving all else from its path. The mind focuses on it relentlessly until it magnifies to the exclusion of all else, eventually defining the individual in ways they could have never imagined.

Some eighty years after a night of terror an old man, his mind teetering on the ragged edge of madness by his childhood recollections, determines to face his fears by awakening the world to the stuff of nightmares – the monstrous memories that haunt his dreams.

Now he sits down to pen a strange and horrific narrative of how he and his family were attacked by spawn from beyond while living in an isolated cabin during a blizzard - on a night of soul-wrenching horror.

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Influenced by the likes of pulp icons H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, On A Winter's Eve attempts to capture the magic of the 30s and 40s - a time when all the great pulp writers were cranking out their classics and fussing about the half-penny per word offered by stingy editors for works that would go on to define the age.

This story is for anyone who appreciates the golden era of pulp authoring, when readers were still afraid of things that go bump in the night - in many ways, a simpler time when folks were apt to lose themselves in a dime novel as they devoured the material of men whose time on this earth was often tragically far too short, but whose bodies of work are yet appreciated today by avid fans starving for more.

I know - I'm one of them.