Slum
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Collection: Memoirs, Horror
Shortly after my mother died of a terrible illness, I began having…visions. They weren’t wispy, flighty dreams or random, short‑lived nightmares. These phantasms were fuller, more tactile and present, as though I was actually visiting a place—one I eventually started calling Slum.
I don’t forget these visits the way I forget dreams, nightmares, or even night terrors. In Slum, I am immersed in a vast urban hellscape of terrible, corrupting beauty and encroaching, overwhelming evil. I can smell in these visions—I can’t smell in my dreams. I can touch things. I can sense the continuous burden of time, which I never can in dreams. The world of Slum makes a kind of sick, profane sense. My dreams, by contrast, are disjointed, often random, sometimes utterly nonsensical. Not Slum.
These visits are not for the weak of heart or stomach. I offer them to you, the reader—but honestly, I have written them down more to say back to Slum: “I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I touch you. And yes, I taste you too.” Perhaps in that act I can come to a fuller understanding of Slum, and Slum of me. That is my hope.
Genre: Nonfiction; Horror – Psychological; Horror – Supernatural / Occult; Nightmares and Visions
Themes: Grief and its aftermath; psychological trauma and fragmented self; body trauma and the horror of embodiment; sexual trauma and abuse; murder and casual, normalized violence; fascism and dehumanizing authority; indifference and human herd behavior; urban blight and spiritual desolation
Setting: Nightmare metropolis named Slum
Length: 42K words
Who It’s For: Readers 18 years old and older; readers interested in night terrors; readers who want to read about sexual trauma, readers who want to read about urban blight; readers interested in stories about the terror of fascism; readers interested in stories featuring indifference and herd behavior in people
If writers like Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson or Bret Easton Ellis appeal to you, then Slum will too.
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