Aug. 2, 1997
You can write one. Steal this plot, change a few things, and publish it:
Researchers at an Antarctic outpost discover another station that has apparently been abandoned for years. No living or dead men are found, but some rooms are in disarray. The team discovers a journal, and a geologist fluent in Russian is able to translate for the rest. Narration now shifts to the contents of the journal.
The journal starts with the minutiae of daily life. Geologist skips ahead, find reference to a cave discovered across a mountain range. Strange artifacts and even stranger lifeforms found frozen in cave. Team takes back an artifact to study.
As days progress, eerie things happen and people grow fearful. Some people die in gruesome manner. Communication to the outside is cut off. The captain valiantly keeps writing, until death is immediately at hand. The final paragraph is unfinished, with perhaps a few "Dear God!"s or an "It's entering the room...." or even some "Iä! Yog-sothoth!" if you're doing a Mythos piece.
You can then optionally place the people in the present, who have just finished reading the journal, in the same peril.
Writers write about what they know, which is why so many characters are writers. Naturally the characters tend to have an extreme dedication to recording what happens, even as the seven-eyed, tentacled, pincered creature is about to fly in the bay window and devour them. Instead of running away screaming, they write about the horror they're experiencing. Instead of screaming worshipful things in Lovecraftese (you know, "Cthulhu f'taghner fhagn") they take the time to write these interjections down. The business of living a sort of recorded first person point of view breaks down when the writer dies.
One author (forget the name) had a fun term for this sort of story: "manuscript found in the rectal canal of Pembroke P. Poe". In real life, stupid author trick #2 is used in several Lovecraft stories and many "here's the abandoned ship, and here's how everyone aboard perished" tales.
There may be computer equivalents of this, where the author was resourceful enough to press "Save" before dying; here, however, is an old-fashioned ending:
"14th August. Wind has knocked down the power lines, and I write by the wan light of one
guttering candle. Had I known, I would have left the book alone, but no matter. It is released
in this world, and it is coming for me. There's nothing I can do.
"The house shifts; it's found its way inside. Maibelle, I will always love you. Do not think
of what will have happened to -- it's up the stairs. The smell! The buzzing sound, that
blasphemous imitation of a human voice! As if it had anything in common with life on this earth...
It's in the room now; five gray eyes in a cluster; cilia dragging on the wooden floor...
forward tentacles reaching toward me... Hey! it's [illegible] taKin-g my [scrawl] pen...
I got it back... One feeler probes its way into my mouth... mmmph... mph... mmmph...
I'm about to die so I gotta make this quickstay awayfromthe Miskatonic collectionof...
Oh! I am slain. [dies].
The Shakespearean touch will help you gain favor with those who consider horror to be gutter literature. Now the writers that consciously try to make horror a more serious art form (Charles L. Grant, etc.) usually put out stuff that's pretentious and boring. But that's another column.
