If you haven’t already, make sure you put In The Valley of Headless Men by L.P. Hernandez on your “to-read” list. It’s a tight, well-paced novella that hits right in the gut. Here’s the blurb:
Nahanni National Park is one of the last truly wild places on earth. Accessible only by plane, and only when the weather cooperates, it’s the perfect place for estranged brothers Joseph and Oscar to have an adventure following the death of their mother. Gillian, Joseph’s first love, invites herself along in the spirit of friendship. The park is much more than beautiful. It’s mysterious, with legends of giants and hidden, prehistoric animals. And among its few visitors, an outsized number of violent deaths inspire its second, more seductive name.
I want to share with you what I mean about a story that hits right in the gut. In the following passage, the narrator of the story is talking about childhood with his half-brother, Oscar. Oscar was physically abused by his father at a young age. Here’s what we get from the narrator:
Oscar would go quiet as a weekend with his dad approached, staring at the front door from the living room for twenty, thirty straight minutes. I asked him about it later, after his dad stopped coming around. He said if he stared at the door long and hard enough, his mind would play tricks on him. The black line between the door and the frame would fade. The door would become a wall, one his dad could not pass through. It didn’t work while we were little, but he kept trying.
God, I love this passage. It tells us so much about Oscar, and at the same time tells us so much about the brothers’ relationship. But the relationship is more complicated than we initially think, as the narrator lets us in on his thoughts just a few moments later:
He stood, unsheathed the knife, and began to walk toward the trees. A curious thought bloomed. Oscar was going to kill Gillian. Why would I think that about my own brother? He was not a violent man. Not to my knowledge. Still, I found myself reaching for a fist-sized rock on the sand.
After this, things start to get weird in the Valley. You believe all of it because the characters are so well-developed, and I think deep down you’re going to want the Valley to be weird and magical (that’s why we read horror!). But the way the characters react to the changing situation is what I want to focus on, because Hernandez never loses sight of the brothers’ relationship.
Dark Pathway: The Siblings
Family dynamics are a well of inspiration for writers. It doesn’t have to be your own, either! You know enough families — friends, extended, neighbors — to get a sense of how weird and unique each one is. Great writers utilize family dynamics to tell the kind of story that just doesn’t work with a group of friends, or a pair of lovers, or two colleagues. It’s why so many horror movies fall flat: they put some friends together and pray for some kind of character development to take place before they start dying.
We can do better.
Step one: Create two characters. They need to be siblings. Close relations will work better for this so you can mine the lifespan of the siblings.
Step two: Give them tension. Though they may love each other, there’s a history of sour memories. Identify those for each of the siblings.
Step three: Throw them in a forest. The siblings went camping at their father’s favorite spot. They’re going to scatter his ashes, but something weird is happening in the forest.
Step four: Write the siblings’ reaction. Let the simmering tensions between them bubble to the surface as they confront the weirdness. Maybe it’s just a scene, or maybe it’s a whole story. You decide! But don’t let them get out of that forest until they’ve confronted those deeper issues.
Ken Brosky is the author of The Beyond, a horror novel available through Timber Ghost Press. His work has been published in Grotesque and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, among others. He’s currently working on a screenplay and a new novel.
