Five Horror Stories About Unstoppable, Inescapable Forces - Reactor

The main character (a horror author) and setting (Maine) of “The Road Virus Heads North” is quintessentially Stephen King. Richard Kinnell has been in Boston for a literary conference and is driving home to Derry when he spots a yard sale. He’s instantly drawn to an odd piece of art which depicts a man with a fang-filled mouth driving a muscle car across Boston’s Tobin Bridge. He buys the painting and hits the road again, but it’s not long before he realizes that the artwork has changed slightly. Feeling sufficiently creeped out, he decides to ditch the painting. If only it were that easy…

The idea of a living painting might not sound all that scary, but King has a knack for making inanimate objects come to life in the most terrifying ways. I also never thought a topiary animal could inspire fear, but The Shining (1977) proved me wrong.

Maggie’s Grave blends a folk horror plotline with campy B-movie vibes, resulting in a story that’s as hilariously silly as it is genuinely scary. And the blood-red cherry on top is the hefty dose of gore throughout.

The small Scottish town of Auchenmullan has been slowly dying for decades, and by 2019 only 47 people call it home. When an American tourist unexpectedly shows up, the town’s few remaining young adults take her to the one place they think is worth seeing: a witch’s grave. Maggie Wall was killed for being a witch back in 1657 and her grave sits on the mountain that overlooks the town. The group don’t take the eerie and tragic history all that seriously—until a very angry Maggie rises from the grave.

Maggie may not look undefeatable—she is a desiccated corpse after all—but that just means that she isn’t hampered by corporeal constraints (something which she puts to very good use). The residents of Auchenmullan soon learn that there’s no stopping a vengeful witch on a deadly mission.

From what I’ve seen, Incidents Around the House is a fairly divisive book. The story is told from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl called Bela (who I’d say actually feels even younger than that), resulting in a writing style that is purposefully simplistic and choppy.

Bela has befriended a supernatural entity called Other Mommy, who constantly asks if she can go into the girl’s heart. Bela doesn’t really know what that means and she keeps saying no, but Other Mommy is starting to run out of patience.

I personally didn’t love the writing style—and I especially tired of Bela’s overuse of the word “Daddo”—but the horror elements are so strong that it overrides those complaints. The descriptions of Other Mommy’s physical form are creepy, there are a few excellently executed jump scares, and it’s both chilling and heartbreaking to witness the family’s various attempts to escape the evil entity.

Misha Byrne is a screenwriter who has found success in Hollywood, but that doesn’t make him immune to the meddling of studio executives. The script for the upcoming season of his hit sci-fi show, Travelers, has the two female leads finally sharing a kiss, but the studio isn’t happy about that—not unless the characters die in a blaze of glory afterwards.

Misha isn’t willing to bury his gays—invoking the term for the depressingly common trope of queer characters being killed off—but before he’s able to figure out how to write his characters out of this corner, his own life comes under threat. Somehow, the fictional villains he’s created throughout his career have come to life… and they’re after him. Worst of all is The Smoker, a hauntingly pale man with no eyelids who asks for a light; if denied, he kills the person five days later. Now he has his sights set on Misha—and foolishly, Misha didn’t write any way to defeat him.

Although Bury Your Gays engages with some heavy real-world issues—including AI, corporate greed, and queer erasure—there’s still a sense of fun thanks to the horror elements being delightfully creative and Misha (mostly) managing to retain his dry sense of humor through it all.

The premise of “Come”—a cursed sex tape is unleashed upon a high school—feels like a mixture of Ringu and It Follows, but it sets itself apart with its protagonist. Our unnamed main character is one of the first from their school to (unintentionally and only partly) watch an infamous lost video from years past of a student and a teacher having sex in one of the classrooms. But it then becomes clear that anyone who watches the video will soon die—all except our protagonist.

Short and not-so-sweet, “Come” captures the frivolous and vulgar attitude that some teenagers would have towards such a tape, but while the tone is largely light and comical, the story also brings the scares and manages to not make a joke out of the grim subject matter.