Recipe for a Reader

Feed me fear. Feed me horrifying, delectable fear. Scare me, shock me, send me off to bed with a stomach full of nightmares.

Does this sound awful? I believe it does...yet this is my reading history. From the time I was a child, I thrived on fear in the stories read to me. If you recall Are You My Mother?, you may remember with a nostalgic smile a small bird on an adventure. I, however, saw an abandoned creature searching in vain for its lost parent while avoiding certain death from a snorting, evil excavator. In the end, when the bird does indeed find its mother, I may have been more disappointed than relieved.

In middle school the discovery of Stephen King's books began to satiate my appetite for terror. My first King experience was his novel It, and this story forced me to sleep with my bedroom light on for two weeks. (I also stood as far from the shower drain as possible for several months after finishing the novel.) The Shining as another tasty treat: the idea of malevolent ghosts tormenting the caretakers of a snowbound hotel was deliciously frightening! In my mind, I was at the Overlook Hotel right along with Danny -- oh, and Tony, too. I ate up every Stephen King novel I could during my teenage years, which eventually led to experimenting with other bizarre works and authors: the Dexter series, Dean Koontz's novels, and many other macabre and morbid delicacies.

Thus I have come to realize that fear is my motivation -- delicious, edible fear. Are You My Mother? was simply the appetizer. Now I have a full feast of twisted fiction laid out before me. I am a reader who devours books drizzled in fear.