I’ve always liked things that are a little strange.
Not necessarily scary in the traditional sense. I’ve never been especially interested in gore or shock value just for the sake of it. What usually gets me is something that feels normal at first and then starts to feel a little off. A familiar place with one detail that doesn’t belong. A character who looks harmless but clearly knows something you don’t. An image that makes you stop for a second because something about it doesn’t quite add up.
That is probably why so much of what I make ends up the way it does.
I can start with something completely harmless—a cat, a little creature, an old house, a skeleton holding something ridiculous—and almost immediately I start wondering what’s wrong with it. What happened right before this? What happens next? Why is that expression too calm? Why is that thing in the background? My brain tends to start building the story before I’ve even decided there is one.
A lot of that probably comes from what I grew up reading. The names that come to mind first are Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Anne Rice, and Louis L’Amour. That last one probably looks a little strange sitting beside the others, but he belongs there because each of those writers taught me something different about storytelling.
King showed me how effective it is when the impossible shows up somewhere completely ordinary. A small town, a family, a hotel, a neighbor, a car—something familiar enough that you can immediately imagine yourself there. That has always worked on me more than horror that begins in a world where everything is already strange. If everything feels wrong from the first page, you don’t have much normal left to lose.
Koontz had a different kind of pull. His stories moved. There was usually something coming, something being uncovered, or something the characters had to survive, and he was good at keeping you turning pages. Even when the premise got weird, the people in the middle of it still mattered.
Robert McCammon hit me differently. His stories could be dark and imaginative, but there was usually a lot of heart underneath them. He could go big without making the people feel small. I think that influenced me more than I realized at the time. I like weird things, monsters, strange places, and impossible situations, but I don’t want the characters to feel like props waiting around for the next creepy thing to happen.
Anne Rice brought atmosphere into the mix. Beauty, sadness, longing, old places, complicated monsters. Her characters could be frightening and sympathetic at the same time, and I’ve always found that more interesting than a monster that exists only because the story needs something evil. If the creature has a past, wants something, regrets something, or sees itself completely differently than everyone around it does, now I’m interested.
Then there’s Louis L’Amour. He obviously wasn’t writing horror, but he knew how to tell a story and keep it moving. People made decisions. They got into trouble. They solved problems. They moved on to the next thing. I read a lot of his books because they were easy to fall into and hard to put down, and I think that stuck with me just as much as anything I got from the horror writers.
I still don’t have much patience for stories that spend forever showing you how beautifully the wallpaper can be described while nothing actually happens. I like atmosphere. I love atmosphere, actually. But eventually somebody needs to open the door.
That combination probably explains a lot about the way I create now. I like strange ideas, but I want them attached to something—a character, a little humor, a question, a story. I don’t want an image to just look cool. I want it to make me wonder what happened before that moment and what is about to happen after it.
That was never really a strategy for Nine Sixteen. I didn’t sit down and write a creative manifesto or decide that everything needed to be cute-but-wrong. I just kept making things and noticing that I always drifted back toward the same territory. If something was only cute, I wanted to mess with it a little. If something was only dark, I wanted to give it some warmth or make it funny. If something looked too polished or too obvious, I usually wanted to put one weird little detail in it that made the whole thing feel different.
That probably explains why I’m drawn to old storybooks, folklore, abandoned places, ghost stories, strange animals, monsters with personalities, and anything else that sits somewhere between comforting and unsettling. I like that tension. A completely terrifying thing is just terrifying. A completely cute thing is just cute. Put the two together and suddenly there’s something more interesting going on.
I also think implication is usually better than explanation. I’d rather see a light on in a house that should be empty than have somebody immediately tell me what lives inside. I’d rather see a character behaving perfectly normally in a situation where nobody should be calm. I’d rather wonder why something is there than be handed the answer right away.
That is probably the common thread running through most of the stories I’ve always liked. The strange thing shows up, but the strange thing isn’t necessarily the whole point. The interesting part is what people do when it gets there. Do they run from it? Do they investigate it? Do they convince themselves nothing is wrong until that is no longer an option? Do they make friends with it? Do they make the decision that every reader knows is a terrible idea before they make it?
That is the part I enjoy, and I think that is what I want Nine Sixteen to be built around too. Not just horror, not just cute characters, and not just products. I want the things I make to feel like there is something behind them. Maybe a full story. Maybe just enough of one to make you curious. Sometimes that will turn into a character or a whole collection. Sometimes it will stay as one image. Sometimes it will probably be an idea I thought was brilliant at midnight and looked at the next morning wondering what exactly I was thinking.
That is what Stories From the Dark is for. It gives me somewhere to put the parts that don’t belong on a product page: original stories, things I’m working on, ideas that are still half-formed, the creative process behind some of the artwork, the people and books that influenced me, and probably a few thoughts that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.
I’ll also be completely candid: I don’t really know if any of this works. I don’t know if people want to read my stories, hear about how I come up with this stuff, or spend time wandering through the strange little things I make. Darling Nightmares is probably the best example of that uncertainty. I love what I’ve created with it. The amount of time I’ve spent building that world, figuring out who those characters are, rewriting things, throwing things away, fixing details nobody else may ever notice, and trying to make the whole thing feel real has been enormous. It has also been one of the most rewarding creative things I’ve ever done.
I have no idea if Darling Nightmares will ever become a commercial success. Obviously, I’d love for it to. I’d love for these characters and stories to find an audience and for Nine Sixteen to grow into something much bigger than it is today. But somewhere along the way I realized that I’m not sure commercial success is the only thing that gets to decide whether it was worth doing. I made something that I genuinely love, and I’m proud of the world that came out of it. That already counts for quite a bit.
So that’s probably what this section is really about. I’m going to keep making things, writing things, following ideas that seem interesting, and seeing where they lead. Some of them may turn into something people connect with. Some may go absolutely nowhere. I don’t really know yet.
For once, I think I’m okay with that.
Stories From the Dark
Creative Process • Nine Sixteen Supply Co.
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