For a long time I’ve wanted to use Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as the setting for a horror game. It really chapped my ass when a horror movie called Lovely, Dark, and Deep came out last year, because that was MY idea (it helped a little that it was totally different from what I had in mind). I had started a few things that didn’t pan out and had tabled it. But I inherited my mother’s tattered old copy of The Complete Poems of Robert Frost and reacquainted myself with some of his longer poems, including “The Witch of Coös," which was a great base for a horror story. The story of the poem is that a traveler spends an evening with an old woman and her son, and they tell him about the long-ago murder of a man, how he was buried in the cellar, and how his bones came up the stairs one night and were trapped in the attic. Is the woman a witch? Are the bones real? You never know. But it’s clear they really believe this, and the traveler leaves without visiting the attic. A most unsatisfying end to the story. Since Frost has lots of poems about death and burial and graves, I decided to use them all and to mimic his voice, to make a life full of graves for this woman culminating in the crazy tale of the risen bones. What would happen if an angry skeleton was trapped in the attic and she died? What if she was alone? What would happen to the skeleton then? Would unsuspecting relatives or townspeople come upon it after her death? Surely she’d make plans to avoid that.
Life for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was hard: Puritanical beliefs about their roles, the neverending pregnancies, births, and deaths of their children, and of course the fascination with witches (female power and agency)—all this is fertile ground for a horror story. The memories from Mrs. Lajway’s past are terrible, but they are squarely in line with the lives of women in rural New England at the time, and they all come from Frost’s poems. The death of little June Lajway—and the resulting marital breakdown—comes straight from the horribly depressing poem “Home Burial,” and the terrifying and bloody death of Willy Lajway was lifted directly from “Out, Out.”
I’ve also long been interested in religious faith and how difficult it seems for people to hold on to it, yet how persistent it is. I seem to be immune to religious belief, so it has always been a bit of a mystery to me and something I’m intensely curious about. In the jam-packed horror subgenre that I call “atheist learns a lesson,” events always point to the existence of a cosmic good and evil. I don’t think there’s a comparable subgenre of “theist learns a lesson.” For instance in The Exorcist, Father Karras allows his psychiatrist persona to take precedence over his priest persona, and it’s the modern doctor who learns the lesson. So I was interested in exploring what it would mean for Reverend Odlin to learn a lesson. Not an atheistic lesson, but one suggesting that there might indeed be something there, but it’s awful. What would that mean to someone who used to believe unquestioningly in something supremely good, but had come to doubt that? And such a lesson could not be concrete; It would need to be couched in confusion and untrustworthy perception, something that resolved no doubts but only raised more of them.
This was a great Ectocomp with a lot of very good games, and it was particularly meaningful to me because it’s been hard for me to get in gear this year and put something out. So I’m very pleased that I was able to do anything at all. There are numerous fiddly problems with the game, and I’m indebted to everyone who sent me a transcript. I’ll try to get a revised version out soon.
And a note on An Admirer, my Petite Mort game-- the game came directly from this article by Kevin Roose about a deeply disturbing encounter with a ChatBot. I kind of wish I hadn’t spent the idea on a PM because there’s a better, bigger game in there, I think. Anyone who wants to expand on it is welcome to do so.
Thanks as always to this helpful community. I am always aware that I don’t write IF alone, but rather with a small army of smart people contributing.