I have been asked many times in my life where my predominant dark side comes from. Here are some possible reasons from my formative years:

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of my dad telling stories to Tracey and me when we were little. We would vault on to his lap, and after the ensuing “oof “ when his bony daughters elbowed him in the gut, the tales would be spun.

One of the stories was about a black cat, who got vengeance after being walled up alive. Years later I read a similar story in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and my knee jerk reaction was that Poe had plagiarized my father.

We also were treated to the first two stanzas of The Raven, which Dad knew off by heart, scraps of which would worm their way into his everyday conversation.

Our favorite story was Hansel and Gretel, (a story that would inform my gingerbread lust all my life). Sometimes H & G would shove the witch in the oven and run home, sometimes they gorged on the candy house first, (Dad describing all the goodies in detail) and roll home like fat barrels, and sometimes the witch baked them up with an apple in their mouths and had herself a German brat feast. After all, they had been trespassing and damaging her house with their greedy little mouths.

One time around Christmas when I was about six, , I was working on a craft project and was struggling to draw an angel. I asked Dad to draw one. I wanted a blonde, blue eyed benevolent herald of Christ’s birth. What I ended up with was a drawing of a Larkin-esque cherubim with four heads, a man, a goat, an eagle and a lion. I protested, and insisted on a one headed angel with wings. So dad sketched one out. Then drew fangs on it. I eliminated the angel from the nativity scene and stuck with the stable animals, which I could draw myself.

Mom influenced my dark tastes from her love of reading Stephon King and other horror novels and letting them lay around where I could get at them. I read The Amityville Horror when I was seven years old. I didn’t look out of my window in the dark for years in case Jodie the Pig and her glowing eyes would be lookin back at me.

Mom would also tell us stories from The Twilight Zone TV series. This was before cable and Netflix, so we didn’t have much of a chance to see them.

Then there were the stock true family ghost stories, or tales of what it was like when the Cincinnati Strangler was terrorizing the city.

Dinner time was family discussion time, and if the conversation lagged, we could always talk about what we wanted for our funerals, and often did.

And for these reasons, I love to scare and be scared, read and watch horror, and my angels always have four heads and fangs.

#memoir

Uncategorized