Happy Goat Horror

Dark bleatings, dear friends! This week’s Friday post is brought to you by author James Everington, who wrote a (scary but hilarious) story about our beloved Sinister Horror Company. As we’re celebrating the wonderful run of a favourite indie press (I think we can all agree!), we thought it might be nice to see this weekend out with James’s fictional musings. Enjoy!

The Sinister Horror Company

by James Everington

‘The Sinister Horror Company’ (TSHC) was so named because that’s what it sold: horrors. Of course, it’s long been known you can make money by scaring people witless: ask any horror movie director, roller-coaster designer, or life insurance salesman. But the originator of TSHC (we’ll get to him in a minute) looked down on such mass-market, off the shelf, uniform terrors. His vision was of something grander, tailored, bespoke: horror personalised.

And thus, TSHC was born.

As for he who birthed it, what can be said? Facts are scarce; sightings of him at literary conventions have long been rumoured to be doubles of varying approximation to the real thing. He gives no interviews, he gives nothing away. No one knows what drove him to such lengths in the pursuit of horror—he may know what scares us, but no one knows what scares him.

He chose prose as his medium of choice for TSHC, and unlikely as it seems now the books he initially produced emerged unnoticed outside of a small circle of horror aficionados. Only he knew that each individual volume printed was unique; only he knew the minute and intricate variations of plot, pace and detail singular to each. Even the typos were deliberate: calculatd. No one ever noticed, although the odd reader (and they were odd) suspected the names of the authors of the books couldn’t be real: ‘Ben Jones’ so ordinary it seemed designed by committee, counter-balanced by the utterly implausible ‘Kit Power’. I mean, c’mon.

Each sui generis book and the effect on its single reader was logged: market research. Thus, TSHC gathered demographic data about the things that scare us the most. What imagery triggered people to throw the book at the wall in disgust… and what lingering phrase meant they picked it up thirty-seconds later and continued reading. Where in a story they gasped, laughed, cried, or flushed scandalised and ashamed. Where they paused with hitched breath, where they remembered the day their dog died, or the lost elan of their youth, or the half-eaten maggot in an apple that meant they never ate red foodstuffs again. Each reaction, correlated against the most uncanny and degraded stories man and algorithm could contrive. Soon, there was so much data it had to be stored in custom-built servers, powered and cooled by TSHC branded wind-turbines, the black blades of which scythed through the Bristolian sky. The books continued to be printed, selling in numbers more implausible by the day. The amassed knowledge became too large and inhuman for even the proprietor of TSHC to understand fully.

As impressive as all that was, that was only Stage 1.

He made the go-live decision for Stage 2 yesterday. God help us all.

The city-sized servers of TSHC harbour an almost unimaginably vast set of data on human horror, but each data-point has been analysed individually, as an atomic entity. Phase 2 introduced a complex, evolving AI into the dataset. Allowing the horrors stored there to interact, cross-reference, breed. Complexity theory tells us that interaction of multiple simple entities can create something an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the sum of its constituent parts. And TSHC, now an organism in its own right, is the ultimate and likely final proof of this.

I doubt those transhuman evangelists in California ever expected the Singularity to be created by a small-press horror publisher from Bristol, but here we are.

And it’s hungry: the sum total of all our horrors is very, very hungry.

We are all scared and it has somehow locked all the doors. Impossible a computer could do that, but its very impossibility makes it the more terrifying, and I think that is exactly why it has done so.

It needs our fear to live; how could it be otherwise, considering?

No one has seen the proprietor since Phase 2 went live. He’s part of it now; his fears that none of us ever knew are part of it. So they’ll be no more stories, all that is left are those he published.

I think what you have to do is read those stories; if you can hear me, read the stories please. They’ve been calculated, crafted to scare you, after all. Read them, savour them, let your feelings of horror and unease percolate. Think of the images they conjure up—writing on the inside of a coffin lid; a mime’s tongueless and grinning mouth; a night sky as bright and pitted and vacuous as the moon from horizon to horizon—think about what makes you scared. Please.

It might be enough. For awhile, it might be enough to satiate TSHC even as it grows. Otherwise, it will need to feed on our horrors more directly.

I sense it is coming, although how that can be so for something made of numbers and data I don’t know. My own personal, bespoke, and inscrutable nightmare, tailored just for me.

So read the stories. For the love of all humanity, read the…….

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