legend

A tale made specifically for the campfire--a simple tale of the woods, long-buried secrets, and letting chances to escape terror slip agonizingly away. images copyright David Montano, www.davidmontano.com When I was younger, I loved adapting stories I’d read into radio plays or short films or long monologues, but the results just grew old in a drawer, because there was always the spectre that these projects were based on someone else’s original work and there would certainly be much ceasing and desisting and legal threats. These days especially, everyone seems to be circling the wagons with the things they create, demanding payment and putting up No Trespassing signs around every word, every idea. The stories of the Knifepoint Horror podcast, though, are presented through a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, making them essentially anyone's to experiment with however they want without having to ask permission or pay anything for their use. As long as the source is credited, you can freely copy, adapt or remix them and share what you come up with anywhere you like. Just have fun pushing your imagination to its limits; you may find, as I have, that it always beats thinking about intellectual property rights, trademarks, and royalties. - S.N. Jason Hill has also done a reading of this story, here. 1/1/15 - A listener or two has asked about the approach to story resolution often found here, which tends to end the narratives (and even individual scenes) on less than a high point with questions unanswered. The tension can suddenly evaporate, leaving things hanging. I think it's because I find myself genuinely frightened only by horror that manages to simulate the true feel of real life--its dead ends, unexplained mysteries, cliffhangers with no payoff. This is the world at its most stark, inexplicable, impenetrable. When horror gets too neat and follows a bulletproof story arc, I find myself spotting the ways the author artificially tied things up so as to satisfy everyone in the audience, and the story tends not to linger for me beyond that initial telling. But if I'm actively denied knowledge, or a traditional ending, or a release of tension, I find the horror sticks with me. To wander a world where anything can happen to you randomly, without warning, without explanation--that's what creeps me out. Lack of closure is my boogeyman. Well, lack of closure and cleaning my shower.