A TREE, AN ENTITY, AND STEPHEN KING.

I've always been drawn to stories where something ordinary hides something much darker underneath. That's part of why I'm writing a story about an evil entity connected to a tree. It's certainly darker than some of the other things I've written, but paranormal and supernatural fiction has always interested me, and this story gives me an opportunity to explore that side of my imagination a little further.

Some of that inspiration undoubtedly comes from reading Stephen King over the years. What I've always found interesting about King's work isn't simply that frightening things happen. It's how often the frightening thing begins somewhere completely ordinary. A small town. A house. A hotel. A stretch of road. A childhood memory. Something that shouldn't be frightening at all slowly becomes uncomfortable because you begin to realize there is something else beneath the surface.

I love that idea.

There is something particularly unsettling about taking an object we've seen thousands of times and changing the way we look at it. A tree is about as ordinary as it gets. Most of us walk past them without thinking much about them. They've always been there. They stand quietly beside houses, roads, cemeteries, farms, and trails. Some of them were already old before we were born, and they'll probably still be standing long after we're gone.

But what if one of them wasn't simply a tree?

What if something was attached to it?

What if something lived within it, around it, or because of it?

And what if that thing had been there for a very long time?

That's where my mind starts wandering.

One of the things I appreciate about supernatural horror is that you don't necessarily have to explain everything. Sometimes knowing exactly what the monster is makes it less frightening. The unknown leaves room for the reader's imagination to participate. You can give them enough pieces to understand that something is terribly wrong while still allowing that little voice in the back of their mind to ask, But what exactly is it?

That's something I think Stephen King has done particularly well in many of the stories I've read. The supernatural element matters, but so do the people encountering it. Their relationships, fears, mistakes, histories, and ordinary lives are what give the strange events weight. The horror works because it intrudes into a world that otherwise feels recognizable.

That's the direction that interests me with this story.

I don't want to write about a giant fantasy monster crashing through a forest. I'm much more interested in a tree that has stood quietly in the same place for generations. Maybe people have stories about it. Maybe children were warned not to go near it. Maybe terrible things happened around it decades apart and nobody ever realized there was a connection. Maybe someone eventually notices that the stories surrounding the tree go back much further than anyone expected.

Or maybe the tree isn't evil at all.

Maybe the tree is just where the evil lives.

That distinction fascinates me.

It also fits surprisingly well with the other things I enjoy writing about. History, witchcraft, folklore, unexplained events, forgotten places, nature, exploration—they all have something in common. They make me wonder what exists beneath the obvious version of the world we see every day.

When I visit an old place, I wonder who stood there before me. When I walk through an old cemetery, I read the names. When I see an abandoned building, I wonder what happened inside it. When I'm standing somewhere surrounded by trees that may have been growing for a century or more, it's difficult not to imagine everything those woods have witnessed.

Most of the time, those thoughts lead me toward history.

Occasionally, apparently, they lead me toward an ancient evil living inside a tree.

And I'm perfectly fine with that.

I don't know that I want everything I write to fit neatly into one genre. I'm far more interested in following whatever idea makes me curious enough to keep asking questions. Sometimes that's a real place with a forgotten history. Sometimes it's magic and folklore. Sometimes it's exploration.

And sometimes the question is simply:

What if you walked into the woods one day and discovered that something in there knew you had arrived?

That's the sort of question that makes me want to start writing.

So while there may be a little Stephen King inspiration somewhere in the roots of this one, I'm looking forward to discovering where my own version of the story grows.

Hopefully somewhere dark.

Keep wandering. Keep wondering.

— Linden Harroway