It 's the house that piercedrians cross the street to avoid. It' s the house that high school students dare to Even though nothing tangible has actually occurred, your characters are afraid. This fear comes from the atmosphere: The setting that surrounds your house and your characters. Atmosphere is the mood, and that mood should haunt your readers long after the story is over.
If you write a prologue, begin the story with your date and time time or, at the very least, give hints to the decision. Perhaps your character is listening to Disco Inferno Perhaps your character is trembling in the shadows, her bonnet is drenched with perspiration and she & # 39; s praying for her lantern to stay lit long enough to be rescued. , but also gives you a chance to add a bit of dimension and foreshadowing to your story.
Haunt Your Readers Using the Correct Word
Consider this sentence: Using the right word can also establish the setting in your haunted house story. Consider this sentence:
Beverly Harris walked into the house.
There 's not much creative at all. There' s something else too descriptive at all. Lets try another set of words:
Beverly, overwhelmed with incipient danger, crept through the doorway.
Better. Crept is a stronger description than the word walked I can not we write this sentence in fewer and more ominous words? I think we can:
The house consumed her.
Therefore, you are emoting which should be your goal as a writer. To make your readers feel what your characters are feeling.
Location, Location, Location
It should have a personality. It should have a personality. Your protagonist wants It can be a bayou mansion decorated in a French-Creole, or maybe it & # 39; sa simple two-story cabin in Washington State like in Stephen King & # 39; s Alan Wake. Provenably such as a fortified castle located on top of a sheer cliff above a sleepy village. Each of these houses should reflect its geographical location, and its personality should be reflected through the protagonist Let it lure your protagonist back into its swampy tendrils. How to you show speak, would it show you that?
People in the Deep South speak differently to each other in Miami and people in Miami speak differently than people in Montana No matter the other person is a different person. No matter the geographic location, your house has a back-story and people will gossip about it. What they say and how they say It can reveal more of your house. For example, The Infinite written by Douglas Clegg, some of the characters that stay in the Nightmare House see it as just an ordinary house at first. Once they begin to hear the strange stories, the paranoia begins to take over and pretty soon the house is on a more sinister Your house is another character. Everyone has secrets; your haunted house does too.
Originality is Vital
There are already a number of haunted house movies and books that take place in all kinds of environments all over the world. There are literally hundreds if not thousands It must bring bring something new to a concept that is done over and over again. Being unique Creative writers must be flexible. Instead of a haunted cabin in the woodsy Canadian mountains, your own story is about a haunted floating home in the Puget Sound. Or maybe considering moving your cliché southern plantation to the sunny Perhaps your setting is in the Colonial American suburbs of the Massachusetts but the architecture is ultra-modern.
Remember that the farther your house is in the lighting and ambience. The haunted house located in lower parts of South America, for example, will spend at least a full month in total darkness in the winter and a full month of total daylight in the summer.
Enter If You Dare
Take this example from from the landscapes and neighborhoods to give the reader an ominous feeling long before my character. The Picture in the House :
... They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles and falter down black-cobwebbed steps beneeth the scattered stones of forgotten cities ... The haunted wood and the desolate mountains [are] shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths of uninhabited islands ... But the true epicure in the terrible and unterterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England ... Their strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combined to form the perfect portion of the hideous.
But HP Lovecraft has surpassed the expectation of horror in its finest excellence, award winning author Joe Schreiber writes a more literal description of the Round House in one of his most bone- chilling haunted house stories: No Doors, No Windows :
... It was sparse and plain and narrow, almost circular black walls that did not look as though they & # 39; d been painted black but were somehow sculpted out of naturally black material - some substance that literally absorbed light. There were no doors and no windows. Although the passageway appeared to be straight, there was definitely some bend to it, some winding quality just outside the lighter & # 39; s glow .
Joe Schreiber did not just describe the great word. They worked well with the other words. blatantly say: "The room was round." Instead, he painted a picture so vivid that the reader simply got a sense that this room was unnatural and no sane person would have it -pecially if only possessed a lighter.
When is a haunted house not a haunted house?
Sometimes it 's a cemetery where spirits of the dead live, work and haunt like in Neil Gaiman & # 39; s novel, a haunted house is not always necessarily a house. The Graveyard Book Haunted factories, sanitariums, junkyards, prisons, schools, caves and even sewers could all potentially be "haunted house" stories. All the same rules apply.
Read every haunted house story you can find. Dozens. Hundreds. Look how they establish the house & # 39; s Pay special attention to the word choices and sentence fluidity. Read, read, read .
Some excellent recommendations are:
No Doors, No Windows by Joe Schreiber
Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by HP Lovecraft
Hell House by Richard Matheson
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
The Nightmare House Series by Douglas Clegg
