My short story THE SOUND OF DARKNESS is being published in the @redcapepublishing anthology F is for Fear, part of the A-Z of Horror series. Release date is 28th October 2020-!
◇
The theme of the anthology invited writers to submit a story around a common phobia or fear. I chose fear of the dark because there is so much you can do with that: is it a fear of darkness itself or of what might be inside the darkness?
The Sound of Darkness
This is a more personal kind of story for me too. It features a half-Turkish protagonist who has his Turkishness erased growing up (in a council estate in the late 1990s).
The darkness of the estate has a lot of urban myths attached to it and is itself an antagonist – but I wanted to play around with darkness as a metaphor for absence and obscurance, and how terrifying that can be from an existential perspective.
Darkness is a site of mystery and potential understanding if you face it and see what is in there. And maybe darkness is only scary depending on where you are and who you have grown to be.
I don’t know if that worked or not or if it is just a story about a man trying to overcome his childhood fear and recalling the incident that set it off. I hope that it is at least a fun story with some tension that creeps at least a couple of people out in places.
C. M. Rosens 