Developing a short story by Katriona MacMillan.
Hello again and welcome to another exciting episode of “what the hell was going through my head when I wrote that?!”
This week we will be focusing on The Shadow People, a short story I released for Halloween in 2023. FYI in the horror sector, there’s a bunch of writers like me who release a horror short in time for Halloween each year. Or a horror long, depending on how prepared they are. With the ongoing ton of work I attempt, I have thus far only made it to the short story level before the deadline. Watch this space though, I will get the hang of it one of these years.
Back to the Shadow People.
Tooth and Claw
Originally the title was tooth and claw. Sometimes I have a working title just so that I have something to call a story even if it’s not finished yet. I like Tooth and Claw as well, I’m going through this phase of trying to make the titles match the content. Up until now I have been a random namer. You can tell this if you read the Dark Science series. Each book has the name of an alchemical ingredient.
Themes
Tooth and Claw came from one single inspiration and that inspiration is a repeated theme with me. Humans are monsters. The creatures which we invent through folklore have to be even scarier than ourselves… and people can do some pretty scary stuff to one another.
A second theme I played with in Tooth and Claw was the idea of darkness as an enemy to humanity. In a literal sense it scares me. It encourages that feeling you get when you run back from the bathroom to your bed in the middle of the night. It’s that creepy, tingle-up-your-spine, what if the darkness was hiding something feeling. Where we always think things will come out of the shadows to attack us, I like to visit the idea that the shadows themselves might attack us.
The darkness as an enemy trope reminds me of Final Destination. I always thought that if the Japanese had made that film instead of the Americans, it would have been gut-wrenchingly terrifying.
So I set out to write about a different type of monster. One that appeared ferocious and vicious, but which would later be outpaced by humanity and whatever horrors humans could think up.
The Shadow People
When I first wrote this story I did send it away to an anthology for publication. Although it didn’t fit with the anthology, the editor messaged me to tell me she had asked her boss if they could publish it as a standalone. It never happened, but that she liked the story enough to have published it on its own gave me a confidence boost. I decided not to send it out to anthologies anymore, and just to publish it myself.
The Shadow People follows the original hunters – the shadows themselves. Creatures made of solid darkness who have hunted human beings since the beginning of time. Over the generations their task becomes harder. New inventions thwart them, brighter cities deter them, and eventually the race faces starvation. How will the shadow people survive in an ever brighter world?
Pick up your kindle copy of The Shadow People on Amazon to find out!
Katriona MacMillan 