Nightsiders

Afterword

Nightsiders started out life as a straight homage to films like The Straw Dogs and Last House on the Left—the kind of grungy, violent 1970s extreme cinema for which I have a real (and slightly guilty) fondness. I wanted to put my own stamp on the now slightly clichéd setup of a middle-class family being attacked and forced to turn to violence in order to protect themselves… or in this case, themselves and their home.

Then, as I sat down to write, something peculiar happened. The story refused to bend to my will. It began to twist and turn in my grasp, taking on a new shape, becoming something entirely different from what I’d originally envisaged.

So now, rather than a tough, noirish thriller with sociopolitical overtones, I was dealing with something much more ambitious and problematic.

That was when I decided to hand everything over to my muse and just go with it, and it led to the strangest writing experience of my life. The story basically told itself, with no apparent gap between thought and page, no room to react to what was forming in my brain before I saw it on the laptop screen. It was if I were simply transcribing the words being whispered in my ear by a particularly giddy psychopath—perhaps it was even Nathan Corbeau himself.

I like to think that the end product has more in common with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games than any of the other films I mention above—indeed, I have come to see it as a sort of literary cousin to that truly disturbing piece of cinema, and hope that my novella is even half as effective and interesting. I have a feeling that some people won’t like the direction this story takes, but I hope that an equal amount of readers will appreciate what I’ve tried to do, and acknowledge the freedom I allowed my creative instinct during this project.

Rather than pay sheepish tribute to what I feel is by-and-large an unfairly maligned subgenre of horror cinema, I have attempted to take a fictional template and push it beyond the perceived boundaries of its ilk, while at the same time trying not to sacrifice the basic scares and thrills inherent in the situation I have created.

The horror in which my characters find themselves is a very real one, and even though that sense of reality is stretched just about as far as it can go, I believe that I have paid honest respect to the roots of this kind of story.

I can only hope that I’ve succeeded in my lofty aims, but if I didn’t, then I’ll still be happy if I have at least told a tense, perhaps even thrilling story to keep you entertained as the sun goes down and the neighborhood dogs begin to howl…