A Lesson on Gravity: A Collection of First-Person Horror Short Stories

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of short stories told from the first person point of view. All the stories are horror themed, some comedic, some not. Each story presents a character wrestling with an internal conflict while facing an external horror. In the first story, a man is visited by a ghost from his childhood, bringing the guilt he’s buried for years to the surface. The second story deals with collective trauma in the form of an unstoppable killing machine and how cycles of preventable tragedy continue until a change occurs. The third story examines relationship roles and what happens when that status is upset on an isolated country road. The fourth and final story sees a creative individual balancing life expectation with reality in a haunted house. Like most horror, by taking these characters into dark places and darker situations, they come out the other side transformed from who they thought they were into who they are.