It Was All A Dream: An Anthology Of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right

By Laird Barron

Tried and true, or done to death?

There are plenty of tropes we'd like to see rot in their graves, but they keep coming back from the dead. In this book, horror's most devious minds subvert, reclaim, and double down on what you know too wel

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hungry Shadow Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986920214

Laird Barron

Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Swift to Chase, and The Wind Began to Howl. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.  

Book preview

It Was All A Dream

It Was All A Dream

An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right

Edited by

Brandon Applegate

Foreword by

Laird Barron

Hungry Shadow Press

Copyright © 2022 Hungry Shadow Press.

All stories copyright © 2022 their respective authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover art copyright © 2022 by Evangeline Gallagher, evangelinegallagher.com

Interior illustrations © 2022 by Christopher Castillo Díaz (artem_astaroth)

Edited by Brandon Applegate, bapplegate.com

Content warnings at the end of the book. Check the table of contents for page number.

eBook ISBN: 979-8-9868771-1-2

Contents

Editor’s Note

Foreword

Laird Barron

Everyone’s Got a Little Devil in Them

Erin Keating

Parting Gift

Cormack Baldwin

Bloody Nights at Hippie Cliffs

Eric Raglin

Pickle

Die Booth

Fuck This Shit Manor

Laurel Hightower

A Maiden Will I Die

LC von Hessen

Don’t Say Its Name

Taylor Rae

Jumbies!

Lyndon Nicholas

Searching for Überwald

Alex Woodroe

Advent of the Clown King

Tom Coombe

Don’t Go in the Woods…or Do, See If I Care!

Patrick Barb

The Thickest Soup You’ve Got

Nikki R. Leigh

Hail, Mary, Full of Rage

J. V. Gachs

Castoffs

K.A. Wiggins

Ghostwritten

Madison McSweeney

The Pizza Curse

Helena O’Connor

Tattered Fairy, Hungry Fairy

Belicia Rhea

Playing Tricks

Angela Sylvaine

Gone in a Flash

Gabino Iglesias

Nyctimene

Gemma Files

I Unlock the Cage

Erin Brown

Miss Rennie

Edward Lodi

It Wasn’t a Wedding Cake

Drew E. Huff

Flight 457 to Portland

Danielle Davis

The Devil’s Morning

Wendy N. Wagner

Hollywood Werewolf Conspiracy

Hailey Piper

Editor’s Afterword

Story Notes From The Authors

Content Warnings

Acknowledgments

About the Editor

Editor’s Note

Horror is for everyone, regardless of experience, trauma, or situation. With that in mind, we’ve included content warnings at the back of this book so you can enjoy these stories safely. If you don’t need them, that’s awesome. If you do, please use them.

Foreword

You Don’t Know How This Will End

Laird Barron

You know how this will end.

The first two clichés they hit you with in Genre Lit 101 are write what you know and never end a story on, it was all a dream. That latter prescription against employing a certain kind of trope serves as the inciting element of this anthology. It’s a rule and you know what artists love to do with rules. We’ll return to this in a bit. Meanwhile, I’m sympathetic to bad tropes insomuch it's not always the case of a flawed design, but rather a conceit done to death. In the end, it was all a dream is an example of that phenomenon. A great idea chewed to a pulp down through the ages.

Ambrose Bierce got in on the ground floor with An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge while Lewis Carroll was more explicit with Alice in Wonderland. Bob Newhart pulled it off on network television. Similarly, the revelation that Ricky Schroeder’s snow globe was the universe of St Elsewhere worked pretty well…Judging by the furor, the booya! conclusion divided audiences, as did Bobby waking up in the shower, revealing an entire season of Dallas was but a dream.

The above examples concern dreams; specifically dreams as a method of delivering a twist. However, that’s the tip of the narrative iceberg. Ask Poe; ask O Henry; ask Hitchcock. Horror has existed as a category definition long enough to earn its share of affection and ire. Horror (and its subsets) represents a splinter in the lens of human perception. Horror invites the audience to suspend disbelief, to accept the taboo, the improbable, the weird, the objectively impossible. In a good naturalistic horror story, transgression is the name of the game. Incest, occultism, perversion, and murder are crimes enacted by demented, aberrant figures such as the cannibal, the maniac cop, and the slasher. Veering into less-travelled territory, the deep waters of supernatural horror for example, logic and physics are warped by the appearance of a ghoul, a phantom, or a damned mansion full of them. Reality itself is utterly transfigured when an ancient curse takes hold of a victim, when the stars align and the dreaming dead drag hapless bystanders into an umbral domain. These creatures and conditions represent intrusions from beyond mortal reckoning; external forces upending the conventions of our natural, humdrum routine. But that’s not enough; nothing is ever enough. Attempting to fake out or shock audiences is a venerable genre tradition. Such is the ineluctable consequence of serving two competing masters—genre expectations in the form of recognizable tropes and beats, and the necessity to be endlessly inventive while remaining yoked to the harness, or walking a tightrope, if you prefer. There are ways upon ways to pursue the latter goal of literary regeneration. Unfortunately, trapdoor endings and cheap inversions are historically the lowest hanging fruit and are the cause of much lamenting among critics and fans alike.

So what is a beleaguered anthologist to do? I’ll tell you: task a contingent of writers to imagine how these tropes might be reconfigured and deployed. Don’t ask for the reinvention of the wheel. Merely ask writers to alter the trajectory of hoary narratives, to apply a tweak here and there. Remember, jaded audiences prefer familiarity while also craving the unknown. I’ve said before in regard to dealing with shopworn themes: sometimes it’s best to adopt the mindset of a skilled judo player dealing with an unavoidable attack. Instead of resisting, one might choose to go with the weight of a century of genre tradition, genre conditioning, formula, and convention.

Ride it on down.

What an author can’t break, they subvert.

In this spirit, It Was All a Dream aims to short circuit the cliché about clichés; the authorial remit is broadcast in the subtitle: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right. Indeed, striving to pen a tale-well-told is an admirable goal—arguably the core mission of every genre story.

This is a golden age of horror and a golden age of communication locked in a bone crusher handclasp. It’s also the age of metatext, hyperlinks, audio adaptations, Creepy Pasta, NoSleep, Channel Zero, et al. These stories fairly crackle with energy siphoned from the zeitgeist. Herein, you’ll encounter lovers hellbent on defeating a legendary serial killer, a final-final girl, urban legends revivified for the texting generation, bad Christmas witches, clown apocalypses, realtors to the damned, new kinds of zombie uprisings, bugbears of the mind, alien abductions, a couple of the best takes on the werewolf genre I’ve read in recent years, and a cruelty of horrors great and small.

The tropes prove varied and the strategies to update them equally so, born as they are of plague lockdowns, social upheaval, and raw uncertainty as the planet burns down around us. We’ve got inversions, total conversions, double entendre, concepts taken to their logical conclusion—and beyond their logical conclusion. You get satire, parody, a hint of absurdism, and look-you-dead-in-the-eye, this-is-a-true-story permutations on the original conceits. It’s a hoot. When it’s not melancholic. When it’s not scary.

In my youth, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions felt truly dangerous; Skipp and Spector rocked their splatterpunk schtick to the delight and outrage of horror fandom; Rex Miller and Clive Barker jolted the status quo to similar effect; Hartwell’s Dark Descent was a scintillating retrospective of the field; and Ellen Datlow shot high grade genre lit into our veins from the pages of a New York slick called OMNI. It Was All a Dream represents a similar bleeding edge; the newest new wave horror and weird fiction at the one-fifth mark of the 21 st Century. Diverse and forward-thinking even as it renovates the old haunted asylum one more time.

You know how this will end. Or maybe not.

Laird Barron

Stone Ridge, New York

July 29, 2022

Illustration - Everyone’s Got a Little Devil In Them

Everyone’s Got a Little Devil in Them

Erin Keating

I’ll tell you what happened that night, if you really want to know. But you can’t tell a soul.

It starts way back—on a dark and stormy night, like all good scary stories do. Mother Leeds, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was laboring with her thirteenth child. She pushed and cried, cried and pushed, with almost all the midwives in the county tending to her. Still the baby wouldn’t come. She prayed to God. Still the baby wouldn’t come.

So, she prayed to the devil.

The baby came in a sudden rush, a boy bawling into the world.

He was beautiful until he wasn’t. As soon as Mother Leeds looked on him, he began to change. Soft baby flesh hardened into leather hide. Limbs stretched and contorted. Goat horns curled from its head, bat wings unfurled from its shoulders, claws protruded from bony fingers, cloven hooves stamped at the floor. But most terrifying, they say, was its eyes—red as the fires of Hell.

That’s how the Jersey Devil was born.

Now, that’s just a story, of course, and it’s not even the story you want to hear. But before I tell you what happened that night, you’ve got to understand that the legend of the Jersey Devil followed me like a shadow. No one would ever say anything to my face, of course, but the whispers would start as soon as I turned my back—a steady rustling in my wake. That’s what it meant to be a Leeds in May’s Landing.

In the winter, the Devil’s cloven hooves bore deep tracks in the crusted-over snow. In the spring, the Devil’s claws slashed gouges into saplings. In the summer, the Devil’s winged silhouette rose from the mist in the cranberry bog. And I’d keep my head down and my mouth shut, so much like a mouse that I could never be mistaken for a devil. Almost never.

Except for those gray nights in late October, when the moon hung low and ripe, and the whole world seemed to crackle—those were the most dangerous times. Because those nights, people did more than tell stories about the Devil.

They tried to catch it.

The story you’re asking about takes place on Mischief Night, 1960. Mischief Night—a holiday so rowdy it only happens in Jersey—the night before Halloween when kids tee-pee their neighbors’ trees and set fires in their trash cans.

The night when grown men, drunk on Rheingold and the power of their loaded shotguns, show up at our door.

That Mischief Night had been quiet for hours—so long I prayed they’d forgotten—when we saw the headlights turn off the road. The crunch of the long, gravel drive echoed through the night. I counted twelve pairs of headlights before Dad grabbed my shoulder.

Stay out of sight, he murmured. His eyes flicked toward the hall closet where he kept a rifle for nights like this.

But, you— I started to protest.

Betty, go.

I’d only heard him use that voice once before—equal parts sad and scared and angry. It was on the night that Mom—

I ran, bumping down the hallway, past my room where two Mischief Nights ago, a brick had sailed through my window.

I stumbled out onto the screened back porch, gulping down the cool night air. The porch furniture had been covered up for the season with plastic tarps. I tucked myself underneath one, my shoulders digging into the slats of the metal chair.

It was too late in the season for the nightly chorus of frogs and warblers. There was no other sound to soften the truck doors slamming one by one, the thud of boots up the front steps. Dad’s voice, slow and clear, called to the men through the locked door.

You all go home—we don’t want any trouble.

No trouble, no trouble. The men repeated in a squawking chorus, like circling carrion.

Then, a snap. My heart leapt into my throat like a startled bullfrog. Someone was outside the screened porch. One of the rowdy men had broken from the group and snuck around back. I peeked for a moment, but retreated as a flashlight beam bounced toward me.

And soon, another sound I’d never heard before—a slow, metallic twang, almost like a zipper being undone.

He was cutting the porch screen.

I held my breath, listening as two boots stepped onto the porch with a thud.

The voice that spoke sounded like it was about to smile. Come on out, Miss Leeds. I know you’re there.

I poked the top of my head out from under the tarp, barely enough to see.

A face was bent in front of me, nose almost to my nose. I flailed backward, and would have sent the chair crashing through the screen if the man hadn’t grabbed the back of it and set it upright.

There, now. I didn’t mean to scare you.

I finally got a good look at him, and my jaw clenched—it was Mr. Harper from the bank, his crisp suit traded for a brown hunting jacket. Dad always said that Mr. Harper was a piece of work. Only last week, I’d seen him berate a pump boy up one side and down the other for not being careful of the candy apple red paint on his shiny new Studebaker CHAMP. He had the same gleam in his eye now—a joyful twinkle at making others feel small.

A puff of his stale, bitter breath hit my face. I tried not to gag. I’d like your help, Miss Leeds.

Then I noticed the knife Mr. Harper turned over and over in his palm. My stomach flipped each time the blade flashed in the darkness.

Don’t you want to help us catch that Devil? Mr. Harper smiled. He had a smile like oil, so slick and greasy you wanted to scrub yourself clean after he looked at you.

There is no Devil, I squirmed. It’s just a story.

Sure has a lot of people scared for just a story. He held up his hands, as though in surrender. I didn’t take my eyes from the knife. So, what do you think, Miss Leeds?

Dad! I cried.

A flash of movement—Mr. Harper grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. My dad appeared in the back doorway, rifle raised, face like a ghost. With his knife against my neck, Mr. Harper pinned me in front of him, his fingers pressing so hard into my shoulder, I knew I’d bruise.

Put that down, Leeds. We don’t want anyone getting hurt.

Dad didn’t move.

We only want the girl to help us find the Devil, Mr. Harper went on. It won’t harm one of its own, will it?

I told you—it’s just a stupid story, I insisted. Mr. Harper pressed the knife closer, and I fell quiet with the bite of cold steel on skin.

I watched my dad’s eyes, shifting as he weighed the odds. To fire the rifle at Mr. Harper? Would I get hurt? Would it scare off the other men, or would it start a riot?

I thought of blood soaking into the living room carpet.

I’ll go, I said. I’ll go and there will still be no Devil, and they’ll see there’s nothing to be frightened of.

Dad looked back and forth between me and Mr. Harper. His mouth pressed into a thin line.

Please—she’s fourteen— His voice was like a prayer.

Sounds old enough to think for herself. You heard the girl. Mr. Harper jostled me through the back door, shoving me through my own house.

Dad followed behind, arms limp and rifle dragging. Betty—Betty, listen. Do whatever you have to do to get home, you hear? Whatever you have to do.

Mr. Harper tore the front door open. Beyond it, a mass of men pulsed—a shifting form of lights and glinting metal. A low rumble rippled through them like a hungry beast.

And if my mouth hadn’t gone dry with fear, I would have told Mr. Harper to look no further for the Devil.

It was right here.

Mr. Harper offered me a hand into the bed of the Studebaker CHAMP with a self-satisfied smile, like that single gesture still made him the hero—a righteous man, a slayer of devils.

Mr. Harper’s son, Charlie, sat in the truck bed, a shovel in his lap. Mr. Harper slammed the tailgate closed, then jabbed a thumb in his son’s direction. You watch her good, boy.

Only after Mr. Harper disappeared into the cab of the idling truck did Charlie let out a breath.

Charlie was in my grade in school. He was quiet, but nobody messed with him because he was such a great baseball player—people said he’d be the only freshman to make the varsity team come spring. But tonight, Charlie curled his lanky frame around that shovel as though it would save him.

Love Hurts by the Everly Brothers started playing on the radio in the truck cab, the song interrupted by bursts of static.

One by one, the caravan of trucks turned around, heading up our long driveway. I braced myself against the side of the truck bed to keep from being thrown out as Mr. Harper swerved around potholes.

My dad, framed in the doorway of our house, grew smaller and smaller until we turned onto the main road, and he vanished from sight.

His voice echoed through my head. Do whatever you have to do to get home, you hear?

Headlights bounced down the road, and the air filled with whoops and drunken laughter. It was a perfect Mischief Night—cool and balmy, with a sky so overcast no one could recognize your face in the dark.

Cold sweat beaded on my forehead and upper lip but I didn’t dare wipe it away. I wouldn’t give Charlie Harper the satisfaction of seeing me shake. If he so much as looked at me, I planned to glare at him like I was a feral thing, a devil-spawn, but I didn’t get the chance. He hung his head between his knees like he was going to be sick.

Are you okay? I nudged him with my knee, too terrified to release my hold on the side of the truck.

He blinked at me. "Am I okay? Are you okay? He wrung his hands on the handle of the shovel. Christ, I’m so sorry Betty."

This wasn’t your idea—you’ve got nothing to be sorry for.

But I did nothing to stop it.

My ribs cracked open and my heart fell out into the truck bed. Then, I’m sorry too, I whispered.

We all knew what Mr. Harper did to Charlie—it was May’s Landing’s worst kept secret. Charlie’s long sleeves on the final days of school when it was so hot the rest of us were melting in our plastic chairs; the swollen rings around his eye that faded from purple to green, that he blamed on a missed catch though he’d never missed a catch in his life; the stiff way he eased himself in and out of his seat, like he ached deep down into his bones.

We all knew—and we did nothing to stop it.

I cast my eyes up at the moonless sky. You know this is all for nothing, right? There’s no such thing as monsters.

Charlie shook his head. You of all people should know better than that.

Eventually, we turned off the highway.

The Pine Barrens loomed—a solid, dark wall in the night.

For most of the kids in town, the Barrens were like a wild playground—some used it for hiking and hunting, others for secret parties—but I had always been told to stay away. Seeing a Leeds in the Barrens is about as good as spotting the Devil itself, Dad had warned.

Turns out, the Barrens had a way of gobbling you up, blotting out all light and sound until it was just you and the trees.

One by one, the trucks pulled through a narrow entrance—an unmarked break in the tree line—and vanished. When it was Mr. Harper’s turn, the branches needled my arms and face, so I pressed myself low in the truck bed. I hoped the CHAMP’s candy apple red paint was all scratched up after tonight.

Even though we drove in with a dozen cars, our group started to thin. By the time Mr. Harper finally parked the truck beneath a pine—same as all of the other pines—I couldn’t spy another headlight in any direction.

Charlie hesitated, still curled up in the corner of the truck bed.

Where is everyone? I asked.

They set up a search perimeter, Charlie said.

My stomach bottomed out, and my ears started ringing. A search perimeter. This wasn’t the drunk, riotous Mischief Night I had imagined. This was planned when these men and boys were clear-eyed and sober, in the rational light of day. I clenched and unclenched my fists.

Whatever you have to do. Whatever you have to do, you hear?

What are you waiting for, boy? Mr. Harper hollered.

Charlie tensed beside me, sucking down a sharp, almost inaudible gasp. Come on, he whispered.

After you, Miss Leeds, Mr. Harper pointed his flashlight deeper into the woods.

In his other hand, he held a shotgun. My knees wobbled beneath me.

Go on—get.

But, where— I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. I started walking.

The Barrens were a place without direction, without time—an endless stretch of trees around and above you. Some steps felt like miles, others only inches. Each tree looked the same—felt the same. I walked with my hands outstretched, feeling my way as the flashlight beam lit hardly a few feet in front of me.

The wet, sandy soil seeped into my shoes. I was grateful, at least, that we were past mosquito season. More than once, I misstepped and sank into knee-deep water before Charlie pulled me back. The flashlight beam swept over the cranberry bogs, recently harvested, with only a few ruby red berries left to catch the light.

I searched the overcast sky for any sign of the moon—any sense of time passing. But the clouds gave me no hint. I was trapped here in these woods, thrown from the flow of time, with Mr. Harper walking behind me with a shotgun.

Miss Leeds, I’m getting impatient. Mr. Harper’s voice was hot against the back of my neck.

My shoulders tensed. I didn’t dare to turn around.

I’m sorry—I don’t—I don’t know what you want me to do.

His whole fist clamped around my upper arm. My pulse hammered against his fingers.

I don’t know what you’re stalling for, Miss Leeds, but I don’t much care for it. Call it already.

Please—I can’t call something that doesn’t exist.

Mr. Harper’s face shifted, like he was taking off one mask and putting on another. His forehead creased into three sharp lines. His bloodshot eyes grew wide until I could see too much of the whites. His lips pulled back in a snarl—the face of a devil.

A few paces behind me, Charlie held his breath. I never knew someone to be so still and silent—except Mom that night. This was the real Mr. Harper, the one only Charlie knew.

Maybe it needs something to lure out—how about the scent of blood? Mr. Harper’s teeth shined yellow in the flashlight beam.

Sour bile rose up in my throat, but I swallowed it down. Sorry, sir. I’ll try harder. My eyes stung.

Oh, are you going to cry? He let go of my arm with a toss that sent me stumbling.

I said I’d do it, I snapped.

I didn’t need to actually summon the Devil—there was no Devil. I only needed to play along until they lost interest—when the sun rose, and the hangovers set in, and everyone went home. We couldn’t stay in the Barrens forever, right? Not forever.

In my lowest, most menacing voice, I started chanting what I could remember from my Latin class.

Videam, videās, videat, videāmus! Audiam, audiās, audiat, audiāmus!

If Charlie, who sat two seats behind me in Latin, realized I was conjugating the present subjunctive, he didn’t rat me out. Instead, he watched wordlessly as I started dancing in place—spasmic motions of my arms and legs, my head thrown back, an over-dramatic play at the devil-conjuring Mr. Harper so badly wanted. With one final, throaty shout—Loquiam, loquiās, loquiat, loquiāmus!—I collapsed to the ground.

In the distance, gunfire cracked through the Barrens.

A ringing silence followed. My heart throbbed against the carpet of dried pine needles. A shadow fell over Mr. Harper’s face. He didn’t have the crazed devil-look anymore—this was much worse.

His mouth pressed into a tight line, brow as smooth as stone. He took slow, deliberate steps toward me—shotgun raised. I willed my legs to move, but I was pinned like an insect as he considered me down the barrel of the gun.

What did you do? he hissed.

Nothing—I did nothing— I stammered.

Well, you must have done something.

I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry—I don’t know. I didn’t mean to whimper but the words wouldn’t stop. The dampness of the soil seeped into the knees of my jeans, like blood soaking into carpet and staining floorboards. Please—please—I’m sorry.

Mr. Harper stared at me as though I was no longer bait but the Devil itself, all horned and hooved and winged.

Another shot.

Mr. Harper lifted his eyes to look.

I ran. I didn’t look back, though Mr. Harper swore and Charlie screamed. The shotgun blasted. The bullet barreled into a tree to my right—a sharp crack like the Barrens themselves had been split in two.

I’d heard that sound before—of a bullet making impact.

It sounded like shattered glass and broken ribs and my mom’s wet breath as she bled out on the living room floor. I hadn’t heard her voice since someone shot through our window six Mischief Nights ago—in another gray autumn when word of the Devil spread like a fever. But I heard her voice now.

In that wet, rasping