ThinkingSkull.com

You hear it all the time in interviews; “What inspired you to become a writer?”

For most horror writers and those telling tales of terror, you’ll hear Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits,” or maybe even classic films like Hammer horror or The Evil Dead.

Well, for me it was in kindergarten. Each student was allowed fifteen minutes a day or so to listen to whatever they chose on the record player, and I always knew what I wanted to hear from the first time it was played for me: “Mother Ghost Nursery Rhymes (and other tricks and treats).” This was a Scholastic collection of 33 1/2 RPM records each with a story or song or whatever, each stranger than the next. “Rock-a-bye Monster” and “Georgie (the Ghost)” were two of my favorites.

These days with all of the insulation and over-protecting of kids, I don’t know that I would have had the same access to such things as I did in 1972, but I was also reading my mom’s Stephen King books at the age of ten, so there you go.