The Story Behind “INSECTS” by Caroline Slocock

The idea for “Insects” came from a dream.  Or should I say, a nightmare.

In the dream, I’m standing in the doorway of my kitchen, horrified.  There are heaving, crawling piles of insects everywhere. I rush in and turn on all the flames on the stove to try and incinerate them.  I turn the taps on full blast in the sink to try and drown them.  But nothing works.  They just keep coming back like the relentless sea of beetles in “The Mummy”.

When I was thinking of a story for Twisted50, I imagined two women in a room.  That became an interview between a psychiatrist and a young girl.  I added the insects and the nastiness grew from there.

One of the most unsettling short stories I’ve ever read is Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”.  The way Kafka drip-feeds the macabre details of the story is masterful, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

That inspired me in my approach to “Insects”.  I wanted to give just enough information to plant disturbing seeds in the reader’s mind, but no more than that.

The scariest thing of all, though, is that I didn’t have to dig too deep to find my dark side….

Caroline Slocock