Little girls finding other-mothers with button eyes, alcoholic writers turned murderous in haunted hotels, a lottery where the winner gets stoned — how did people come up with these stories?
As Halloween creeps up and as festivities increase this year, you may find yourself wondering who came up with some of the outlandish things we watch and read. Well, look no further. Here are four of the creepiest books (or short stories) and how they came to be.
‘Frankenstein’
Author: Mary Shelley
Publication date: 1818
What is now a Halloween staple started out simply as a story that 18-year-old Mary Shelley came up with during a ghost story competition.
This competition took place when she and several other literary giants, including her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori, took a vacation together in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1816.
That summer, known as “The Year Without Summer,” was the perfect setting to write a dark and fantastical story. A volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora erupted the year before, and by the time Shelley was vacationing with her friends, volcanic ash had made its way around the world, causing colder weather and impenetrable clouds.
In a letter Shelley sent while staying in the Alps, she wrote, “An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house.”
Later in that letter, she included a description of a lightning storm they had watched, writing, “The lake was lit up — the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.”
In this setting, Lord Byron proposed a competition, as Shelley later recalled, per The Open University.
Shelley explained later she was looking to write a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror — one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart,” per the University of Pennsylvania.
‘The Shining’
Author: Stephen King
Publication date: 1977
King’s novel came to him while staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, with his young son and wife.
“We were the only guests as it turned out; the following day they were going to close the place down for the winter. Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect — maybe the archetypical — setting for a ghost story,” he explained on his website.
The night King spent at the Stanley Hotel, he had a dream where his 3-year-old son was running through the halls, “looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming,” per King’s website. After waking up in a sweat, he got out of bed, lit a cigarette and mapped out the bones of the book.
Some critics claim this book is largely autobiographical, finding connections with aspects of the book and his own fears.
Writer Sreesha Divakaran calls King’s book a “confession — of his rage (especially directed at his children), his alcohol and drug abuse, his fears of failing as a writer,” per Rain and a Book.
In his memoir, “On Writing,” King echoes Divakaran’s sentiment, writing, “I was the guy who had written ‘The Shining’ without even realizing that I was writing about myself.”
Reactor Magazine comments on the realness in King’s ghost story, saying, “Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining: an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support writes his way to financial security, then turns around and writes a book about an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support who fails to make good on his talent and tries to murder his family.”
‘Coraline’
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publication date: 2002
The inspiration for this early 2000s novel came from a legend from Gaiman’s hometown in the U.K. and Lucy Clifford’s short story, “The New Mother.”
In 1994 in Hampshire, England, the legend goes that two young parents were killed in a house fire, but somehow their small daughter survived. The girl was left in the care of her grandmother, who was living in Hampshire.
Eventually suspicion arose among people in the neighborhood that something was wrong, since nobody ever saw the little girl. Several children snuck into the house, but “the only thing they found in the house was an old crib with the corpse of a baby lying inside, the body almost completely burned, buttons in place of the eyes and seams across its mouth,” per CBR.
The other half of the book’s inspiration came from Lucy Clifford’s short story, “The New Mother,” published in 1882.
In this story, two children named Blue Eyes and Turkey meet a girl sitting on the side of the road who promises to give them gifts if they disobey their mother. They tell their mother about this encounter, and she warns them that if they do this, “she’ll have to go away and leave them in the care of a ‘new mother’ with glass eyes and a wooden tail,” per Locus Magazine.
The children misbehave, and their mother is replaced by “The New Mother.”
After reading the previous Locus Magazine article relating “Coraline” to “The New Mother,” Gaiman acknowledged its influence, writing how he’d learned about Clifford’s story “first from Grant Morrison in a Thai restaurant in Soho many years ago.”
‘The Lottery’
Author: Shirley Jackson
Publication date: 1948
“The Lottery” is a short story that has shocked readers with its twist ending since its publication on June 26, 1948.
Stanford describes the plot, “In a small-time American town, citizens gather every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest. The citizens draw slips of paper from a wooden box to select a victim for human sacrifice.”
The story came to Jackson as she pushed her daughter in a stroller, coming home from a walk. She later explained in a lecture, “I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause,” per Stanford Book Haven.
She continued, “As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.”