Introduction and Guide: Terrifying Transformations at Home, at Work, and at Play

by L. Andrew Cooper, editor

with Monte Remer, editorial assistant

and Silas the Scribble Man, demon wrangler

Welcome to Terrifying Transformations at Home, at Work, and at Play, the third Exhibit from the Horrific Scribes archive of transgressive dark fiction and (some) poetry.

I begin with a brief history with few scholarly notes, so you’ll have to trust me. The Industrial Revolution helped to solidify the separation of social life into “domestic” and “public” spheres, especially in the middle classes. The former was (and is) the realm of family and housework, the denigrated domain of the woman, dubbed “The Angel in the House” around the middle of the nineteenth century, who wasn’t supposed to mind her relative confinement or lack of choices. The latter was (and is) the realm of politics and professional work, the elevated domain of the man, who took his superiority and rulership as ordained by nature, God, or what have you. The domestic sphere represented a respite from the struggles of the public sphere. A man’s home was/is his castle, his safe escape from the troubles of public life.

The ideals of domestic bliss that confine and disenfranchise women are, of course, oppressive ideology in thin disguise, but the domestic sphere’s dreadfulness doesn’t mean the public sphere lacks nastiness to make men’s yearning for a safe retreat understandable. Horrific circumstances define both major social spheres, so, quite naturally, horror fiction and horror-adjacent fiction have taken up such circumstances as substance for scares.

Domestic horror is a thriving subgenre that explores primarily women’s but also others’ experiences within the boundaries and expectations of the home. As a foil, office horror, or workplace horror, is also a burgeoning subgenre, tackling public life’s troubles with a range of the parent genre’s resources. In keeping with the centuries-old division of spheres, this subgenre seems mostly male dominated, but since legendary feminist photographer Cindy Sherman’s film Office Killer (1997) is one of the subgenre’s greatest works so far, generalizations should be careful and assumptions avoided.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were early critics of the division of life into oppressive spheres, and later thinkers influenced by Marx and Engels took on the idea of leisure time, what we might call the sphere of play, as an area of social life also subject to ideological manipulation and control.

The stories in this Exhibit are about terrors in the spheres. You don’t have to think about Marxism to “get” any of them. All you really have to know is that in whatever sphere of life you find yourself—home, work, or play—something lurks there that wants to fuck you up. The spheres transform you, probably not for the better, and they’re so much bigger than you that you probably can’t stop them. These spheres aren’t planets, but they still have something cosmic about them. We have no choice but to live in them, but living in them takes away our choices. Are we helpless? Hopeless? Slaves to the spheres that imprison us? Different stories in this Exhibit have different answers, so read on.

GALLERY ONE: DOMESTIC SUBVERSION

“From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House” by Thomas C. Mavroudis. A father trying to connect with his son ends up watching online videos that reveal a wild, violent side to his quiet neighborhood nestled within a city. As technology brings his home’s suddenly untrustworthy surroundings inside, the man’s idea of his home transforms, and so might his connections to family. The story is subtle and unnerving, allowing pieces to fall into place for the reader without editorializing about their meaning.

“Mr. Ears Comes to Dinner” by Tracy Fritz. A successful businesswoman who has settled on life as a homemaker feeds the raccoons in her yard, and one day a very special animal, with which she forms a special bond, joins the group. As in “From a Trail Cam,” wildness from the home’s surroundings transforms domestic life, but here domesticity’s fragility, as well as its sacrifices, come more plainly into view. The psychological insight is piercing.

“The Herman Condition” by Tom Johnstone. I wouldn’t have guessed that a story about a talking sourdough starter mix could be so disturbing, but that’s what this story is about, and it’s really quite upsetting. A woman who has escaped domestic violence follows a new recipe for a “Herman” friendship cake, and over days of preparation, the mixture erodes her self-confidence and resolve. The separation and gendering of social spheres promulgates violence against women. This story shows, among other things, the horror of internalizing such logic.

“QVC” by SJ Townend. A woman wants to buy an air fryer for her kitchen because she thinks it might help her with problems at work, and then she buys that air fryer, letting it become the focus of her home life so that she can talk about it at the office. She obsesses over it, a new obsession to cover up the old, the trauma that makes her home anything but safe. While previous stories also deal with domestic damage, here the damage is extraordinarily deep, and the story engages with home consumerism as bad medicine as well as “neighborliness” as bad faith.

GALLERY TWO: DOMESTIC BETRAYAL

“Guilt” by Harley Carnell. A boy and his mates decide to play a trick on his mom when she returns home to their flat, but something unthinkable—impossible—happens, the aftermath of which involves the kind of guilt that destroys lives. This story is about an emotion the power of which defies rationality. Betrayals ranging from the son’s betrayal of his mother, which should have been harmless, to the domestic space’s betrayal of reason itself link family and home to madness.

“A Witch’s Envy” by Matt Hollingsworth. Domestic betrayal goes to extreme lengths in this bizarre fairy tale that approaches psychedelic surreality. A witch who wants to restore her youth, when she was a major online influencer, uses men’s severed heads (mounted on her wall) to search the dark web for a solution, which turns out to be the murder of her daughter. Things at home become more tense, and further twists make the domestic situation even more difficult. This story offers much more than I’m highlighting with my domestic theme—so really, read it—but its emphasis on enmity and competition between mother and daughter has a root in realism that dispels a key myth about the house’s angels.

“Postmarked for My Bones” by Fendy S. Tulodo. The stories in this gallery aren’t domestic horror per se, but they do involve betrayal of the sense of order domesticity is supposed to provide, the reliability and relative stability of the home in contrast to the chaos of public life. In “Guilt” and “A Witch’s Envy,” moral orders break down, as do the rules you would expect to govern space. In “Postmarked for My Bones,” time is the betrayer as it functions unusually in and near the main character’s home. It redefines where, how, and possibly who he is.

“Post Op” by Luke Ramer. This gallery begins and ends with kids doing what could have been fairly innocent boundary-testing in the home. “Post Op” also provides a nice bridge to the next two galleries about the public/work sphere, as it begins in a hospital, a realm of professionals, and segues to the home. But the home is where the main character believes he is exploring his sexual limits in private. Home is supposed to be private. Unfortunately, as with all domestic myths, home’s promise of privacy can be betrayed in the ghastliest of ways.

GALLERY THREE: TROUBLE AT THE OFFICE

“Scheduling Issues” by Richard Dansky. I never asked Dansky whether such was his intent, but this story offers one of the best representations of an anxiety disorder I’ve ever seen. The main character experiences intense anxiety at work that peaks, unfortunately, around the time of day when his workgroup has meetings that are very important whether they need to or not. His trouble at the office escalates as he tries to resist the smothering pressures of corporate culture. The climax and denouement are gloriously cinematic.

“Ash-Ray Wednesday” by Mark Towse. Another look at smothering corporate culture, this time with a more distorted—and comic—perspective. A man’s frustration overboils when he must face the condescending censure of his boss, whose infernal mismanagement is mostly to blame for the problems he faces at the office. A confrontation, however, reveals that something much more… infernal… may be going on. Fun. Dark. And fun.

“Notes from the Dark Web” by Christopher Degni. The dark web, which is real, seems to the uninitiated majority like a criminal fantasyland that exists all around us but beyond our senses. It has a supernatural, occult quality, and Degni’s story captures that quality well while showing you what the dark web looks like (at least as much as I could duplicate his formatting) in the neo-epistolary form the story takes. Degni’s story shows that the dark web is indeed all around us, in the same offices that enable the regular web… and again, something infernal might be going on.

GALLERY FOUR: WORKPLACES REDEFINED

“The Slide” by E.W.H. Thornton. The professional space of “The Slide” is the professor’s space, the lecture hall, and one of the title’s references is to an old-fashioned slide projector, used to support a lecture, the substance of the story. The lecture, and thus the story, is at first about photography and death, but as it goes on, it turns toward the viewer of the imagery, and thus the people in the lecture hall, and thus the lecture hall itself, the significance of which changes for those inside. Didn’t you know? Education is dangerous.

“Calypso” by Lira Palmer. While the main character’s professional status remains ambiguous, she is clearly working as she searches for the rare “Calypso” orchid, and her workplace is a vast desert. The unusual sphere of work creates occasions for threats and becomes a threat itself in a tale that masterfully blurs the scientific with the psychedelic, psychological, and supernatural.

“Clarence Darrow and the Murder Victim” by Douglas Kolacki. Set in 1924 and glowing with a Capraesque atmosphere of American innocence, this story takes place in the public sphere of the courtroom, workplace of famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose latest case has become a popular sensation, as well as a coming-of-age opportunity for one particularly enthusiastic boy, because a murder victim will testify at her killer’s trial. The appearance of a zombie on the stand might not just change the courtroom: it could have permanent effects on the law.

“Red in Tooth” by Joseph Hirsch. Hirsch warns readers with “odontophobia” to avoid this story altogether. That the term “odontophobia” exists reflects on how many people see the dentist’s chair—centerpiece of a certain common workplace—as a place of torture. This story gives us a dentist who exploits his vulnerable patients in the most unimaginable ways, a dentist who ends up in a parallel chair controlled by someone who wants revenge in a style particularly suited to a dentist. If you don’t have odontophobia yet, you might soon.

GALLERY FIVE: CHANGING STATES OF PLAY

“King of Hearts” by Devin James Leonard. What we know is that a man in charge of three kids playing a simple game deals out a deck of cards. The kid with the ace of spades wins, and the one with the king of hearts, the suicide king, loses. This story’s excellence comes mostly from its manipulation of what we don’t know: the adult’s and children’s relationships with each other, their circumstances (details suggest they’re dire), and the stakes of the game, which doesn’t fit neatly in the leisure category. Leonard’s short and brutal tale shows how even “play” can turn to horror.

“Best Seats in the House” by Sam Arlington. Throughout this Exhibit, stories have highlighted what happens when the rules that are supposed to govern the social spheres break. The wildness supposed to remain outside invades domestic security, the orders of space and time fall apart and undermine domestic reliability, antagonistic forces shatter the anxious niceties of office culture, and workplaces themselves exceed their traditional boundaries. “Best Seats in the House” concludes the Exhibit in the sphere of play with a tale about rules changing, and breaking, in America’s most sacred game: baseball. A little girl in the stands knows what the rules are supposed to be, and the surreal changes she observes, which include players with guns, distress her mightily. Her father is very concerned about her distress, and he has good reasons. Many thanks to Sam Arlington for providing this Exhibit with a big finish.

EXHIBIT THREE: Return to the Order of Attractions

ENTER Gallery One: Domestic Subversion and read the first attraction, “From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House“