This is an installment of Pandemic Purchases, a special series of personal essays about the items bought in the last year that brought the most value and joy to our lives and work while living in lockdown.
On April 13, 2020—about a month after terms like social distancing, KN95, and Dr. Fauci had fully embedded themselves into everyday conversation—I turned 36. I asked for a subscription to Shudder, the scary movie video on-demand service.
No one bought it for me, so I gifted myself this mainline injection of bloody whodunits (Deep Red), arthouse creepers (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), Polish possessions (Demon), Indonesian hexes (Impetigore), Farsi-speaking vigilante vampiresses (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), and transmogrified alpaca monsters (Color out of Space). It turned out to be the best thing I bought during the pandemic. Not only did these fictional terrors provide a useful cathartic foil for what was happening in the real world, but each lurching scream and bone-crunching exorcism pushed me toward a lifelong goal: writing my own horror fiction.
Long before I wanted to be a food and travel writer (my current profession), I wanted to be a horror writer. As a kid, my storytelling idol was R.L. Stine, whose Fear Street paperbacks I devoured like packs of Dunkaroos. On AOL message boards, I remixed spooky myths and legends into bite-sized tales, styling myself a freelance member of Are You Afraid of the Dark’sMidnight Society, then graduated to paper-thin short stories with titles like Deadly Relations (“Cousins can be murder!”) and One New Page (“Beepers can be murder!”). At the time, I’m sure I felt an offer for the film rights for a movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar was imminent.
Later in my teens, the horror content I consumed matured—Needful Things, my gateway into Stephen King’s novels, leveled me—and King became the writer I admired most. So I set out to write a proper horror novel. Multiple times. I worked up detailed character maps, contrived elaborate backstories, diagrammed plots like they were housing blueprints, and diagrammed actual blueprints for half a dozen haunted houses. I’d write several chapters, lose the thread, and abandon the story. When I was younger, I chalked this up DNA. (I don’t put much stock in the zodiac, but an Aries personality quirk that really resonates for me is the compulsion to run headlong into shiny new projects, often at the cost of neglecting, or outright deserting, existing ones.) When I got older and found a niche writing about food, a passion that had eclipsed horror, I chalked it up to time. The busier I became as a journalist, the less time I had to write for pleasure. Before the pandemic, I hadn’t tried to write fiction in close to a decade.
Last spring, the only activity that felt acceptably low risk was walking outside, so my wife, brother, and I would meet up at FDR Park. Open greenspace is rare where we live, in the concrete-and-red brick grid of South Philly, which makes the Lakes, as FDR is colloquially known, so vital. Fed by the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, the network of marshy lagoons gives the park its nickname. This was all swampland once, the soil so sludgy and unstable the Swedes who tried to settle here in the 1600s gave up and moved north. For the American sesquicentennial exposition of 1926, the City of Philadelphia reclaimed the land and hired the Olmstead Brothers to create an exquisite, world-class park, and as South Philly’s patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods developed during the following century, the Lakes hosted generations of little league practices, wedding portraits (present company included), golf outings, underage carousing, and if you believed the rumors during the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s, devil worshipping.
With its grand, neglected buildings, ancient trees, black water, and brush-choked corners, the Lakes is a very good setting for a horror tale. And as I studied these features during daily walks, one started to come together in my head. On March 26, I posted an Instagram story under the arched, altar-like Boathouse: “Absorbing as much Lakes scenery as possible because I’m writing a short story set here. It’s a horror story, my first love and entry point into writing.”
I started writing. With my workload decimated 80% in April, I suddenly had more free time than I’d had in a decade and I immersed myself in horror fiction. I would listen to horror movie podcasts in the car on the way to the Lakes. I’d think about my story—and other stories within the pandemic anthology I planned to create—while walking the Lakes. And after I subscribed to Shudder for my birthday gift to myself, I watched horror movies at night, catching up on classics old (Halloween, The Changeling, Hellraiser) and new (Train to Busan, Terrified, Revenge), deep diving into sub-genres (Italian gialli of the 1970s, J-horror of the 2000s), and setting notification reminders for the site’s monthly upload of new content like Mandy and Host (if you thought your work Zooms were scary…) This steady spigot of gruesome creativity kept me engaged and on task. I wanted my characters to be as realistic as in It Follows, my atmosphere as nerve-saturating as in The Wailing, my plot twists as dastardly as in Scare Me. The monsters, and their makers, were motivators.
I intended The Lakes to be about 15 pages. I wrote 46. I finished it, the first piece of adult fiction I’ve written that contains a The End. And the story is good! (I think so anyway. You can read the first chapter here and email me how wrong I am.) I sent it to an agent, who ghosted me, but I don’t care. As a professional journalist, I’ve written pieces I’m proud of, but this work of an amateur fiction means way more.
As spring inched into summer like a caterpillar, I wrote two other actually-short short stories, Maruna Lantra and Beekeepers, with plans to package them and others into a pandemic horror collection starring The Lakes. But as freelancing clawed its way back to some semblance of normal, I had to sideline that project for paid writing assignments. Temporarily, maybe. Who knows. But if The Lakes is the closest I get to a horror novel, I’m good with that.