I have two short stories for free this weekend.
The Mirror, a tales from the crypt style story.
The Costume Shop, an R.L. Stein inspired novella.
Pick them up today and give yourself a short read to take up a night. Enjoy.
This week my boyfriend has been making fresh bread. It’s the type of bread that you bake inside a pan with a lid, and it gets a thick crust. Today was the first time he added a few herbs to the dough and it was tasty. He’s really enjoying baking, and I am enjoying eating it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been learning to cook new things, and use food that I’ve never used before. You have to make do when all the potatoes are gone at the local grocery store.
This morning I complained about dishes, and couldn’t figure out where they were all coming from. “We’ve been eating at home more,” my boyfriend reminded me, and a light bulb went off. Less fast food means more dishes. It also means healthier eating.
I hope all of you are doing well. This week I have two more short stories up for free. Hopefully it will entertain you for a little while.
Footprints – The things in your mind are often worse than the things in the darkness.
The Scarab Necklace – A tales from the crypt style short story.
It’s always interesting when you have a movie or book that is just esoteric enough that you can read different things into it depending on where you are in life, but the person who wrote it refuses to tell you what they actually meant. The Platform (on Netflix) is a movie just like that.
This Netflix original horror movie is about a man who volunteers to be locked up in a prison so he can quit smoking. In this prison you are on a floor that has a giant hole in the center. Every day a platform lowers through the hole and you have two minutes to eat whatever the people above left for you. But there are more than 200 floors, and the people above are hungry.
I almost think this is a psychological horror movie because most of the horror is dealing with the starvation, and knowing that you never have control over this fundamental need to eat every day. However, there are a lot of gory things that happen as well.
The basic premise of the story was interesting. How do you convince the people above you to eat less so that more people can eat? How do you get everyone to ration, especially since you can’t speak to everyone? Especially if many of the people locked up with you are criminals who already committed terrible crimes, and have no compunction about committing more?
If I had any complaints it might be the dialog for the film. I couldn’t tell if it was written poorly, or a translation problem. The film was done in Spanish, and we watched the English dub of it. Because it was dubbed there was, obviously, lip syncing issues. Some of the dialog sounded forced, and unnatural. It tries not to give too much commentary while giving you information on the situation. It could also be that they are trying to increase the unsettlingness of the whole situation with the way they are talking.
The whole movie seems to be a commentary on society. Those above take as much as they want and leave the crumbs for those bellow, and those at the very bottom are left with nothing. But how do you stop that chain? You can try getting everyone to ration, take only what they need, but often they just think “this is the way things are” and go along with it.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, and the movie has a brutal way of presenting it. Considering that each set of prisoners stays on a level for thirty days and there are many, MANY levels, there are probably just as many people dying from starvation as there are from suicide and murder.
Since our family is stuck inside right now we got a subscription to Netflix. That means Bjorn and I have been going through all the old movies that we’ve heard about, but didn’t have access to. Today we watched Bird Box.
The basic premise of Bird Box is a woman trying to survive a calamity that has effected the worlds population. Some sort of creature has arrived on earth and if you see it you will commit suicide in the most expedient way possible. Five years after the initial outbreak happened Malorie has lost everyone, is running out of food, and options. She has to get her two children to a safe haven miles away down a river without seeing anything.
But the movie isn’t about the creatures, or the world falling apart. It’s about Malorie and her personal journey to connect with other people amidst all this craziness. She had a terrible father, their mother left them, her boyfriend disappeared after she got pregnant, and her sister committed suicide the first day of the outbreak. She has kept everyone as far away as possible since then to protect herself. Even her children.
This is much like “A Quite Place” in that the story centers around the people, not the outside influences. I guess that is why I love movies like this. I tend to write stories with things in the background that may be dangerous or scary, but the true story focuses on the person. Footprints is about a man dealing with his fathers death, but there’s a monster in the woods. The Scarab Necklace is about a woman trying to find some confidence, and there’s a cursed necklace. Even my series, The Witch’s Trilogy, is about a girl trying to discover what and who she is, and there are acolytes trying to sacrifice her to a big sea monster.
In this sort of story telling there is definitely a monster, but it could often be exchanged for something else. In The Quiet Place and Bird Box it could have been a pandemic, or an alien, or a monster from the deep. The only thing that really mattered was the story of the family trying to find their way in a messed up world. The mechanism of the monster did make things a bit unique, one depending on sound the other on sight, but ultimately they were not the main feature.
The movie, itself, was well done. There wasn’t a lot of dialog, most of the story heavily relying on motion and action to tell the tale. What dialog there was made a point. Malorie’s inability to connect was shown right down to how she talked to her children, giving them short, easy to follow instructions, never showing them much love, and just making sure they survived. But as Tom says surviving isn’t living. You have to have something to hope for or what’s the point.
I think right now this story hit home with me. Like the people here we are cooped up in our homes, fearing an invisible creature outside. We are unable to be close to others, and things have gone a little crazy. But like Malorie we need a little hope, something to live for. There’s a point to all this madness, we just have to look for it.
My mother-in-law sent us a care package from back home today. In the box of assorted snacks, and home made cookies, she included a roll of toilet paper, and a thing of hand soap. Odd that sending people toilet paper now seems almost normal now.
The best part was she printed out memes, and faces, for everything and stuck them to the individual items. Our Cheez-its now have a big goofy smile on them, it’s great.
It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve been to the store so I don’t even know if they have any at ours. I hope you are able to find the things you need right now.
Continuing on my entertainment for those stuck inside (which is most of us right now) I have two more short stories for free, and an anthology.
The Ring and The Camera: Two short stories revolving around cursed items like a Tales from the Crypt style.
Stars End: a glimpse into a possible future, and the way technology might change relationships.
Stay safe out there my friends.
Crissy
Author Crissy Moss 