This week: Prison Edited by: Annette  
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"Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open." ~ Bernard Kerik
"I've spent most of my life in prison. I was a prisoner of my fear and my low self-esteem." ~ Gerry Cooney |
Prison
There are the endless tales of imaginary monsters from the classics such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Mr. Hide, Psycho killers, and the axe murderer prowling the deserted highway at night in urban legends.
One type of horror, so uniquely real and terrifying, rarely finds its way into scary stories. It's going to prison. Worse: going to prison without having committed a crime. The concept of putting people in prison has some utility to society at large, but it's arguably overused when people who failed to pay a fine or failed to fill out a piece of paperwork find themselves robbed of the ability to tuck their children in at night.
Few writers have described the feeling of being locked up in such eloquence as Franz Kafka. His body of work is filled with claustrophobic themes about oppressive systems that confine people. One of the themes that he uses are those of bureaucratic power over others.
If you plan to write about someone in jail or in prison for any reason, you should do a little research. No! Do not commit a crime! There are better ways to do research.
 Read Franz Kafka's stories
 Watch The Shawshank Redemption
 Find out if your local police department has an outreach program where residents can learn about policing. It often includes a tour in the jail.
As fiction writers, we don't have to experience everything first hand. But we should know what we're writing about with minimal competence. Describing the penal system is dark and filled with topics, imagery, and emotions that are well suited for the horror/scary genres.
What can be worse than being robbed of freedom? |
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Replies to my last Horror/Scary newsletter "Ubiquitous Telephone Poles" that asked: What currently new invention gives you the creeps?
S 🤦  wrote: A new invention that gives me the creeps? Everything to do with AI. It learns from the lowest common denominators of user-curated Internet, and then tells pregnant women to smoke or explains that 9.1 is a smaller number than 9.09. But people want to trust a machine that learns from reddit and other strange sources and not books.
However, talking about telephone poles. Where I come from we have STOBEY POLES (pronounced stow-bee). They are made from two old railway lines (millions of kilometres of railways were removed, and they had to do something with each), around 10 metres long, set so they come to a flat-topped taper and filled with reinforced concrete. You hit one, your car is totalled and the pole laughs. They were considered for other states, but were considered too dangerous. We don't care - just don't run into one! Chosen because they were resistant to termites and fire and would be hard to demolish, named after the engineer who designed them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stobie_pole)
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Horror/Scary: July 09, 2025 Issue [#13196]
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