Haunted: A Collection of Weird Fiction

By Robert Gannon

Haunted: A Collection of Weird Fiction is an interconnected compilation of stories about decorating for Halloween. You always build the most elaborate haunted houses around. This year, you're going to base your haunt on one of the beautiful varieties of pumpkins at the local farm stand. Do you go for a classic orange? An impossible smooth rouge? Or the swirling bumps of the faded jade? Each pumpkin leads to an entirely different haunt, and each haunt features a series of stories inspired by the theme. As you go further in the collection, you realize that the knowledge you gained from the first haunt carries over to the second and the third.

Haunted is an adaptation of Robert J. Gannon's interactive weird fiction collection game Haunted: A Slip Story. It features six brand new stories inspired by the events in the game. In the game, your choices branch out into 39 different pathways; here, the author presents one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Gannon
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005759667

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Haunted (A Slip Story) is an interactive weird fiction collection game. It’s an original short story collection reimagined to be a more interactive experience. After the introduction, you chose which of three paths you want to go on. Each path leads to a different mini collection of stories that build on each other until their inevitable resolution. Then you get to try another choice, and then another. Each new choice references the choices that came before in the text and artwork.

There are elements of Haunted that came naturally to me. I am a home haunter. I’ve been building elaborate yard haunts for myself and other people for 23 years now. I started in eighth grade and never gave it up. These are experimental, ground-up attractions that change every year.

I’ve actually built some version of each of the haunts featured in Haunted. There are real home haunting tips and tricks contained within the stories, though not quite enough to build your own haunt off of. Maybe it will spark your imagination to try some of these ideas yourself.

The horror that comes from them is purely imagined. Real world haunts have to have safety as their top priority. You don’t want someone to actually get hurt wandering through your property. At my last house, the ground was level enough that I could have a simple maze in the front; at this one, I have to block off direct access to the yard and build the experience for the sidewalk/driveway/front walkway. Both work in different ways.

There’s always a narrative element to my haunts, which is what made writing a short story collection about home haunting so appealing. It’s not just a bunch of monsters in the yard, it’s a night club. It’s not just a cemetery, it’s creatures emerging from the ancient crypt. It’s not just props hanging in the air, it’s an under the sea adventure. You get as much out of my haunts as you’re willing to put into them.

In this collection, you’ll find a mix of texts. The second person narration is straight from the game. I pulled the text word for word from the code in the order I prefer to play the stories: orange, rouge, jade. The six stories (Crawl, Carve, Shrapnel, Shine, Portal, Paint) are brand new to this collection. They are the stories of six different haunters with six different plans for how to tell similar stories on Halloween. The text of the game is meant to make a short story collection feel more interactive; the text of the new stories is meant to engage a reader who wants to read a short story collection. It’s a fine line of difference that took a lot of trial and error to make right.

If you like the experience of Haunted: A Collection of Weird Fiction, I encourage you to check out Haunted: A Slip Story. The game itself contains over 80 different ever-changing illustrations, an original instrumental soundtrack, and a whole lot more choice in how you experience the narrative. You choose the pumpkin. You choose which prop to build first. And you get to live with the choices you make as you progress through the three yard haunts.

HAUNTED

No one else was going to dig up the bodies. That's the number one lesson you learned when you started haunting your house. Everyone would oo and ah at the