Today on the dark fiction website, Wag the Fox, you can read my post about children in horror fiction.
I wrote Carus & Mitch while my wife was pregnant, so it makes sense that children were on my mind back then. Children and parenthood have featured in most of the stories I’ve written since, too.
But there’s another reason why my favourite scary stories happen to feature children. I like the kind of horror that arises from everyday situations. There’s something about the unpredictability of children that seems ripe for exploitation in horror fiction, allowing scenes to lurch from tenderness to terror.