American Hoarder

By Jason Arnopp

"So you’ll stay a while longer? Maybe drink some wine?

Cool. In that case, I’ll tell you.

Yeah, I’ll tell you all about this one episode of American Hoarder. The one nobody ain’t never gonna see. Not even if everything else in all the TV archives gets wiped clean and the networks got nothing left to show. You just need to swear to me, on everybody’s lives including your own, that you won’t tell a soul.

Okay?"

"This story is brilliantly chilling and has made me clean my room" – comedian Tiernan Douieb

Jason Arnopp is the author of The Last Days Of Jack Sparks (Orbit, 2016). He has written for the worlds of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Friday The 13th, as well as scripting the 2011 Lionsgate feature film Stormhouse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Arnopp
• Release date: Feb 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311708670

Jason Arnopp

Jason Arnopp is a novelist, scriptwriter and sometime journalist. He has contributed fiction to the worlds of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Friday The 13th. His most recent release is the Orbit Books novel Ghoster. Before that came The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, which is now in movie development at Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment.Arnopp wrote the 2011 Lionsgate US horror feature Stormhouse and script-edited the 2012 Peter Mullan film The Man Inside. He is also the author of books including Beast In The Basement, A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home, Auto Rewind and How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else. He lives in Brighton, UK, with a stupidly large collection of old-school VHS.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Copyright Notice

Title Page

American Hoarder

A Letter From The Author

About The Author

Also By Jason Arnopp: Beast In The Basement

Also By Jason Arnopp: A Sincere Warning…

Also By Jason Arnopp: How To Interview…

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

First published in the UK by Retribution Books, 2016

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright © Jason Arnopp, 2016. All Rights Reserved

Cover design © Caroline Fish at Mad Old Cat Lady, 2016. All Rights Reserved

JasonArnopp.com | Patreon.com/JasonArnopp

The right of Jason Arnopp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This free edition of this book may be shared, but never sold.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

AMERICAN HOARDER

by

Jason Arnopp

RECORDING BEGINS

So you’ll stay a while longer? Maybe drink some wine?

Cool. In that case, I’ll tell you.

Yeah, I’ll tell you all about this one episode of American Hoarder. The one nobody ain’t never gonna see. Not even if everything else in all the TV archives gets wiped clean and the networks got nothing left to show. You just need to swear to me, on everybody’s lives including your own, that you won’t tell a soul.

Okay?

So listen. This story will only take till… let’s see here… round about midnight, and it’ll put a chill in your bones. So let me insulate you with a glass of this good stuff. It’s French. Cabernet, or some shit.

Me? No, I’m still fine with the beer.

So I probably said this back in the bar at some point, but I’ve personally worked on over two hundred episodes of this show. By now, the damn thing’s a well-oiled machine, a winning formula.

You’ve seen it, right? Oh, okay, then let me help you out. Every week, it goes like this:

Stage One: The fruitloop, as we privately call him or her, they get in touch and ask for help with their home chock full of crap.

Stage Two: We arrive and pretend to be shocked by the vast array of shit clogging the arteries of Chez Fruitloop. We start to help.

Stage Three: Fruitloop gets cold feet, changes their mind about Operation Clear-out, gets even loopier.

Stage Four: We persevere. Can we get the fruitloop over this final impossible hurdle and help them live the normal life they can’t have because they’re so fuckin’ loopy?

Stage Five: Well, can we? Yes. We sure can. Success! Fireworks, cake, everyone’s happy.

Now, strictly between you and me: if things get desperate, we’ll do anything to motivate the fruitloop to jump from