KRIS ASHTON

A few years after I moved to my current home, I started taking back streets to the train station every morning because the more direct route often got choked with peak hour traffic. It was on one of those back streets that I first noticed the mysterious vacant block that led to this story.

 

The property wasn’t sectioned off with temporary fencing, nor did it have piles of construction materials on it, or even rubble from a demolition. It was just a square of well-kept lawn between two other houses. Month after month I drove past this property and nothing happened to it.* There had to be a story in that, I decided. It was too surreal not to use.

 

But what story? Why was the block vacant?

 

I began to play with the idea of a hotshot young real estate agent who couldn’t understand why his older colleagues didn’t want to snap up a prime piece of land that didn’t appear to belong to anyone… only to find out why the hard way.

 

I took this idea for a drive again and again, but it always ended up in the same dead end. It was creepy enough, but thematically it had no juice and, more importantly, I just didn’t care about the character. So I let him go – and almost right away his replacements suggested themselves.

 

I wrote the first draft in two frantic sittings. What I had in the back of my mind was Stephen King’s story ‘The Night Flier’, where an unscrupulous tabloid reporter gets his just desserts. In the first draft of ‘Unreal Estate’, the married couple who served as protagonists, Josh and Janet, were rich and powerful and their arrogant abuse of privilege brought them undone.

 

But the story copped rejection after rejection, and there was a recurrent theme among the slush reader critiques: Josh and Janet were unlikable. When Dark Moon Digest shortlisted the story, it came with a sobering caveat that had a familiar ring to it. “We love the idea, but we just don’t like the main characters. Rewrite it and we’ll reconsider it.”

 

So that’s what I did. In hindsight, the problem was obvious. When Richard Dees in ‘The Night Flier’ gets his comeuppance it’s amusing, which is what makes the story work. When Josh and Janet got theirs, it was just unpleasant. There was no schadenfreude. By making Josh and Janet (who I redubbed Ally because it was a softer name) more empathetic, the downbeat ending also became harrowing – which is what you want from a horror story.

 

* Eventually someone did build a house on it. But I’d still love to know why it remained vacant for so long.