This is a late post and I apologize for that. At 9 pm, I suddenly realized, shit, it's Tuesday. I'm not sure why I didn't write it yesterday. Netflix was probably involved. At this point I have no idea what this post is about. I'll be just as surprised as you.
All right, let's talk about murder. There's bound to be plenty of death in this upcoming vampire story, so let's revisit Mad's Greatest Hits of Murder.
I have killed a lot of people. A lot of characters, I should say. In a previous post I shared an excerpt where I gored a big-game hunter with a mammoth tusk. And that was, what, fifteen years ago? I have a long history of this.
Other notable deaths (some with examples!):
- Slaughtered by the cannibalistic morlock commonly known as Jack the Ripper
“What are you—?” Kowalczyk asked as he finally turned to look behind him in time for the pale figure to leap, grabbing him by shoulders and ripping out his throat. Kowalczyk dropped, with the creature on top of him, to the paving stones. His head tipped back, his neck severed nearly to the spine. The creature, the Ripper, began tearing flesh from his bones.
- Bitten by an arachnanthrope (a… spider-person)
William dismounted and tied the horse to a tree. He grimaced as he approached the body. “Good god, that’s disgusting.” He covered his nose with his hand. “And I can smell it!”
“Ah, yes, there has been some putrefaction due to the dissolution of the organs,” Murphy said, kneeling beside the body. He took a probe out of his medical bag and prodded the side of the torso, eliciting a sloshing sound. “As you can see, he’s basically a bag of soup.”
- Sacrificed to the Old Gods
- Crushed by a statue of a vulture
- Impaled by a flying pickaxe
- Assassinated at a political rally
- Killed by a vampire (or possibly bloodthirsty cannibals from Mars. On bicycles)
- Crushed by retracting bleachers
Why so much violent death? I don't know, fun? Mortal peril certainly raises the stakes, doesn't it? Everything is much more intense where there's the possibility that your characters could die at any moment. And before you say that I would never kill off main, important characters, I would say that you don't know me very well. Of the above, two were main characters. I may or may not have left them dead, but I did kill them.
A lot of those deaths were great fun to write. Is that weird? Maybe. But sometimes, someone needs to investigate something, and grisly murders tend to be the way to go.
What sort of terrible fate should befall some poor sap in my next story? Help me creatively kill someone!
I like the word arachnanthrope if I even spelled it right it is fun to say. You do seem to have a lot of death and murder in your stories. Just walking along and then bam your murdered just like that. What does it take to survive as a character in a MAD story?
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