Childhood Fear by Rob Bliss

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 My Childhood Fear

Year: 1979
Location: Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada.

A beach town, crowded with sunbathers, a summer paradise where I as a child played in the sand and shot an arrow from a bow straight into the blue sky, then ran for my life. All arrows come down – straight into the shooter’s head! I read Richie Rich comic books and ate French fires from a paper boat with lots of ketchup. To this day, I still love beaches and sand and there is currently buried a Richie Rich comic book in a dune, since I tried to bury the following memory, but have failed. It still haunts me.

My family were close friends with another family, who had a cottage at Wasaga Beach. It was an old cottage from the 1950s, forest green flaking paint, a large porch enclosed by mosquito netting, on which was unfolded a cot for my mother and I to sleep. The interior was full of people. The chances of monsters was slim since I was well-protected, squeezed on half the bed between my mother’s body and the bare wooden wall. But no mother can protect her child from his imagination.

In those dark days of Fonzie, Sweathogs, bowl haircuts, plaid pants, and brown Adidas running shoes with jagged yellow Charlie Brown stripes up the sides, there were still drive-in movie theatres. Three families in total were heading to the drive-in, one of them related to the other, and already residing in the beach town paradise of Wasaga.

I was ten years old. My life was about to change forever.

Playing on the big screen was the recently release, The Amityville Horror, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. Why in the hell my family thought showing me horror movie at ten years old was a good idea, I dunno. Were they evil? Was this an orchestrated move to destroy my mind by forcing me into a world of fear forever! (From which I have yet to escape….)

I was there! I saw it all! The son waking at night to systematically kill his entire family while they slept. (I would never sleep again – that’s how they getcha!) The blood seeping from the walls, the glowing red entrance to Hell in the basement (Don’t go down there, George Lutz!), the flies amassing on the windowsill (my bedroom had a wooden window exactly like that one, and it too amassed flies), those windows which were the devil’s eyes, and of course, Jody the Pig! (I was raised on a farm that had pigs.)

I’m sure all of the adults had a good scare and laughed about it as they chewed their red licorice and sucked popcorn and hung elbows on 1970s car doors, scenting the warm beach breeze. I remember nothing until we returned to the cottage and were told it was “beddie-bye time”.

Night trees swayed their limbs and threw shadows diffused by the mosquito screen against the wall I faced. My back to my sleeping mother, I stared at the wooden wall and saw Jody the Pig and blood sweating through the wood and flies walking up walls, gathering on my face, with the devil himself waiting to devour us all … once we returned home. If we ever did. Wasaga Beach was a paradise, and people from the city still go there to escape to this very day. But every paradise contains a serpent …

For years afterwards I lived in fear due to that movie. Jaws made me afraid of swimming, The Omen made me check my head under my hair for 666 because I was sure I was the devil’s son (I still believe this … I’m losing my mind slowly every year), and Phantasm terrified me to think that steel balls with spikes would fly out of nothing to stab into my forehead and shoot out a geyser of my brain blood. But none of them came close to the unending horror of Amityville. (Also where Jaws took place – what’s with this town – burn it with napalm!)

Why in the held did my parents let me watch so many horror movies so young?

And now, years later, I fear nothing. But I write horror to constantly try and bring back that feeling of horror, and I know I fail every time. This is intentional. Still as a child, I gravitated towards comedy to dispel horror, and comedy may find its way inadvertently into my work, to shine a light into the darkness to make it a little less horrifying. The melodrama is also intentional since it comes with the genre; if you make something overblown, you decrease its fear. I can’t write subtle because if I do Jody the Pig will eat me!

Nurse Stitch has her mouth sewn shut and her memory erased.

John Doe has undergone 'nightmare surgery', his memory also erased, replaced by crippling trauma and delusions.

Mahmoud Farouz is a captured insurgent from Iraq who is going to be used by a special Black Op organization to make America feel fear again.

When these three prisoners of a secret underground torture facility band together to escape, they cannot realize that not only has their torture been orchestrated, but so too will be their path to freedom..

Or Purchase a copy direct from Necro Publications by clicking here 

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 Rob Bliss writes horror.

​He was born in Canada in 1969.

He has had 100 stories published in 30 online magazines.

He has also published 17 more novels, novellas, and short story collections on Amazon.

Necro Publications has published three of his novels, with a fourth released in January, 2021.

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Website: https://robbliss.weebly.com/
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Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Rob-Bliss/e/B07VL1TQ1R?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1610743021&sr=8-1

Goodreads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19496667.Rob_Bliss

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rob.bliss.779/

Twitter: @BlissRob