Richard Schiver

Tag: horror fiction

  • Friday’ 5 with Graham Masterton

    Friday’ 5 with Graham Masterton

    1 When did you first consider yourself a writer?

    A When I came back from watching Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea when I was about nine and wrote my own book about a harpoonist like Kirk Douglas fighting a giant squid. I bound my story in cardboard, illustrated the cover, and sold it to my best friend for a penny. That was my first royalty!

    2 What is the hardest part of writing?

    A Continuously thinking about plot developments night and day. The world inside a writer’s head is just as real as the world outside it.

    3 How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?

    A I was a newspaper reporter before my first book was published and so loads of articles and features had been published with my byline every week for years, so not particularly thrilled.

    4 In addition to writing, what else are you passionate about?

    A Poland. I didn’t find out until I was married to a Polish woman that my great-great-grandfather was Polish, and when we first travelled there (before the end of Communism) I felt an affinity with the country that I feel even more strongly now. I have travelled all over Poland and five years ago I started to organise an annual short story writing contest for Polish prisoners, in order to help their rehabilitation.

    5 If you could ask any author, living or dead, one question, what would it be?

    A James Herbert: Why did you hate my dining-room wallpaper so much?

    GRAHAM MASTERTON was born in Edinburgh in 1946, and at the age of 17 he joined his local newspaper as a junior reporter. He was appointed deputy editor of Mayfair at the age of 21, and at 24 he became executive editor of Penthouse. After leaving Penthouse, he wrote The Manitou, a horror novel that became his first bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Tony Curtis.

    Graham spent twenty-five years as one of the world’s bestselling horror authors before he turned his talent to crimewriting. Inspired by the five years in which he and his late wife lived in Cork, he created a series of novels featuring Katie Maguire, the first female superintendent in the Irish police force. The first book in the Katie Maguire series, White Bones, was published by Head of Zeus in 2012 and became a top-ten bestseller. Graham continues to write thrillers and horror novels alongside the Katie Maguire crime series, which has now sold over a million copies worldwide.

  • Weekly Writing Challenge 09/24/2025

    Weekly Writing Challenge 09/24/2025

    As I stated in my last post the opening for this story has changed. The original opening will remain, it will be moved into the body of the story following the new opening I will reveal when the story reaches it conclusion.

    God’s Chosen contd.

    A shadowy figure emerged from the dry goods store, it could have been Randall who owned the place with his wife, but it was too hard to tell even with the light cast by the burning saloon. Several of those staggering down the street turned towards the new arrival who tried to push through them and failed. The man fired several times into the crowd surrounding him, his bullets whistling harmlessly through the air as the group closed around him and his screams competed with the crackling roar of the fire. Whoever it had been was driven to the ground where the group knelt down around him and tore at his body while his screams dwindled to incoherent whimpers that finally fell silent.

    Reverend Wickes fell back from the window crawling across the floor to vanish into the deeper shadows where the voices once confronted him. They were silent now, leaving him alone with his terror, the image of the man’s death replaying itself in his mind while the roar of the raging fire crackled into the night.

    The call of a lonely bird pulled him from the restless sleep he’d fallen into and he rolled over onto his back, the stained and cracked ceiling of his bedroom shrouded by shadows as the false light of a new dawn painted the floor an effervescent gray.

    Cautiously he crawled to the window, the flames from the saloon having died down and he looked down upon the deserted main street. Smoke drifted across the small town, casting its shadows on the street that appeared devoid of life. Here and there he spotted dark splotches in the dirt that marked the location of someone’s death.

    Where did they go?

    He pulled himself to his feet and left the bedroom, carefully moving down the stairs as other birds responded to that initial cry and the day was filled with the promise of new life as the bloodied street beyond came into view as he came down the last few stairs onto the first floor. At the door he hesitated, not entirely sure if it was safe for him to leave but leave he must. He couldn’t stay here. This was a dead town, and as he moved across the front porch of the hotel he spied his church sitting at the opposite end of main street. White and pristine amid all the chaos the spire rose towards a bright blue sky that carried the promise of a new day. It was a refuge among the insanity of everything that had transpired.

    He raced down the steps, the church the only thing he was focused on, unaware of the multiple piles of what looked like discarded clothing littering the side street between the dry goods store and the hotel. As he moved down the street he became aware of movement to his right and swiveled his head to see these piles of clothing moving as the bodies they draped slowly climbed to their feet and turn to him.

    They all appeared to have died and he hurried down the street, towards the imagined safety of the church while more piles of discarded clothing slowly stirred to life.

    To be continued!

    Read the entire story to this point here. https://richardschiver.com/weekly-writing-challenge/

  • Weekly Writing Challenge 09/17/2025

    Weekly Writing Challenge 09/17/2025

    My apologies for missing last week. Was working on my house when I threw out my back, and have spent the past week on a heating pad. I know it’s no excuse, but it’s all I’ve got. Anyway without further adieu let’s get into it. One last thing before we start, many times while writing a story the ending tends to develop beyond what the writer first saw. In the case of this story, not only has the ending changed, but the beginning as well. When the story is done, I’ll share more details, and let everyone get a good look at the updated story.

    Continued!

    Is it the end? Reverend Wickes wondered as he stumbled back from the window. He was filled with a need to hide in the shadows he knew offered little comfort. Bad things hid in the shadows, this he had learned as a child. Wicked things lived in the shadowed places of our world. As the night closed around him, the faint light coming through the window offered little comfort. It revealed a world that had suddenly been turned upon its head. More shouts and gunshots came from outside as he pushed himself back into the corner of the room, his knees growing weak, forcing him to settle to the floor. He pressed his hands over his ears, trying to block out the sounds of a world teetering on the brink of insanity. But all he accomplished was to awaken the inner voice that had been a constant companion his entire life.

    A voice filled with all of the doubts he’d grown familiar with as he moved from childhood through puberty into adolescence before finally emerging into adulthood. Doubts that plagued his nights, keeping sleep at bay as he battled through every imagined slight and insult he believed had been directed at him. He had not felt like this in years, not since graduating from the seminary filled with the righteousness of a man of God.

    It was this virtue that enabled him to carry out his sermons, that enabled him to lock away the voices that questioned every aspect of his life. Every decision, every word he had ever spoken in response to a question, or while just passing the time of the day. Every waking moment was scrutinized and replayed in his mind while he struggled to slip into a dreamless sleep.

    Are they the chosen? Have the dead been called home?

    Am I now immortal? If this was the first resurrection as spoken of in the bible, priests and the righteous followers of God would be granted immortality. The thought came without warning, and he cringed from its presumptive nature. It was not his place to say. He had led a virtuous life save for his constant worry, his never ending doubts about his own worth. Would these doubts be the one thing to keep him from the kingdom of heaven?

    You are not worthy. The thought came in the form of a sweetly sinister voice whispering in his ear. It took him a moment to realize the shadows were indeed speaking to him in a voice he imagined as belonging to the defeated one, the archangel who had been cast down from heaven.

    “I will not be deceived,” he whispered as that voice continued to speak to him with the soft hissing sound of a snake gliding through grass.

    “I will not be deceived,” he said, louder this time, and the voice that had been teasing him softened even more.

    “I will not be deceived!” He shouted as loud as he could and silenced the voice once and for all.

    With this silence came the roar of a raging fire, and he looked at the window where reflected firelight danced across the glass. He crawled across the floor to see what was happening outside. Barrows Saloon was engulfed in towering flames that bathed main street in the light of day. Several people ran down the street, fleeing from a larger group of people who moved in a random, staggering, gait. They moved like a bunch of drunkards celebrating in slow motion.

    To be continued!

    Follow the link to read the whole story up to this point. Weekly Writing Challenge

  • Upon the Shoulders of Giants.

    From Poe to Carpenter.

    In the early part of the nineteenth century Edgar Allen Poe visited the South Polar Region in his only novel length work titled: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship aptly named the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures further south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile natives before escaping back to the ocean aboard the Jane Guy bound for regions even further south. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue towards that mysterious region around the South Pole.

    It is believed by many that H.P. Lovecraft consciously continued Poe’s tale with his novella, At The Mountains of Madness. That was serialized in Astounding Stories from February to April of 1936. Lovecraft twice cited Poe’s disturbing and enigmatic story in his text, and explicitly borrows the mysterious Tekeli-li cry from Poe’s work. In a letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.

    In August 1938 the novella, Who Goes There, by John W Campbell writing under the pen name Don A. Stuart was published in Astounding Stories. John never publicly claimed that his novella, Who Goes There? was intended to show H.P. Lovecraft how to write a story. However, literary critics have frequently drawn comparisons between Campbell’s work and Lovecraft’s earlier novella, At the Mountains of Madness, and have noted fundamental differences in their writing styles.

    The idea of a direct response to Lovecraft is further supported by the rediscovery of Campbell’s longer, unpublished version of the novella, titled Frozen Hell. A reddit user notes that the longer version “reads almost like a direct sequel to HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness,” before Campbell shortened it for publication. This suggests that Campbell’s original text had even stronger allusions to Lovecraft’s work

    John Campbell’s story has been adapted for the screen three times. In 1951 as The Thing From Another World, in 1982 as The Thing directed by John Carpenter, and most recently as a prequel to the Carpenter version, also titled The Thing, released in 2011.

    The history of this story inspired me to go one step further. In each of the stories above the alien presence never reaches civilization. Until now. I am nearing completion of my trilogy Shadows of the Past, that I’m working to have ready for release as early as next month, if all things go as planned.

    In Adversary, an ancient alien artifact discovered in Antarctica has a strange effect on anyone who touches it. Stolen to repay a gambling debt the artifact is lost and infects Jack Griffith, a sewer worker dying of cancer. The essence of the creature inhabiting the artifact offers Jack hope for a longer life. But is the price worth paying? Below is the proposed cover for the fist installment.

    A mockup of the proposed cover.

  • Fridays 5 with Kat Yares

    Fridays 5 with Kat Yares

    Continuing Fridays 5 with another author we lost too soon.

    1.) When did you first consider yourself a writer?

    A.)  I think I’ve always considered myself a writer – or at least since I could write a legible sentence. Have always written stuff, even poetry, and have earned a living from my words at times. But I didn’t consider myself an author until I had a short story accepted into a magazine and actually got paid for it.

    2.) What is the hardest part of writing?

    A.)  Putting butt in chair and just doing it. Next to that, is the absolute necessary rewriting/revision process.

    3.) How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?

    A.)  You could have heard me whooping and hollering all the way to the next town, I think. I still have that first dollar made taped to my desktop.

    4.) In addition to writing, what else are you passionate about?

    A.)  Movie making. Can’t call it film making because no film is involved. But I love the creativeness that you can achieve looking through the lens of a camera and then putting the scenes and segments together to tell a story.

    5.) If you could ask any author, living or dead, one question, what would it be?

    A.)  I would love to converse with John Steinbeck. And if I could only ask him one question it would be, Can I borrow the characters from Grapes of Wrath to interact briefly with my characters in the story I’m working on now?

    Kat Yares has been writing fiction her entire adult life. She is an author, screenwriter and indie movie maker. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous print publications and online. She passed due to heart failure in 2015.

    Her fiction is primarily in the horror/thriller genres. Unlike many, she writes horror not to gross out or startle her readers, but to make them think. Most of her stories are mind games and deal with mans (or woman’s) inhumanity to man (or woman). She is currently working on a two book series – set 2000 years apart. Part fantasy, part thriller – the two stories that comprise The Descendants are reminiscent of both Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon series and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

    Her work is available on Amazon

    http://www.amazon.com/Kat-Yares/e/B002O6QCGE

    If you’re a writer working in the horror, sci-fi, or fantasy genres and would like to participate. Answer the questions above and send them to rschiver@gmail.com along with a brief bio and an author photo 200px by 200px in size Thanks.