Scary Radio Shorts on Weekend America

John Moe, host of American Public Media's Weekend America radio show, tells Boing Boing:

For Weekend America's Halloween show this year we invited some writers to come up with scary stories that last no longer than half a minute. We did it last year too and it was lots of fun. I figure scary stories are fun but honestly who has time for the whole "he walked down the hall, step...by...step" nonsense, GET TO THE ACTION, I always say.

So this year we have an interesting crew: David Rakoff, Dana Gould, comics creator Richard Sala, a children's book writer, a horror writer, all adhering to the strict 30 seconds or less rule.

It's on the air tomorrow or found online here: Tales of Terror. Here's last year's edition, which featured Neil Gaiman among others.

(photo: peasap, via weekendamerica.publicradio.org)

[#1 posted by fizzding , October 24, 2008 5:15 PM]

Some of the shorter examples of creepypasta(google is your friend) would be perfect for this venue.

[#2 posted by wolfiesma , October 24, 2008 5:47 PM]

Those stories are like Halloween bonbons.

[#3 posted by Peter , October 25, 2008 8:26 AM]

I've been trying to do a "One Hundred Words of Horror" (the general idea being to post short horror stories of exactly 100 words on Halloween) meme on my livejournal (for the 2nd year in a row, entries at http://newnumber6.livejournal.com/324288.html for last year's version), unfortunately only a couple of my friends have taken up the challenge and so it hasn't spread very far. If anyone wants to participate, here's the memetext:

In the spirit of upcoming Halloween, and as sort of a last minute whet-the-appetite for NaNoWriMo, I present "One Hundred Words of Horror for Halloween". Nano's about writing big, this is about writing small.

The rules:
1. Write short horror stories, and post them on Halloween.
2. Each story must be exactly 100 words. No more, no less (you can choose to count arguable symbols important to the story either as words or not as you wish). This amount does not include the title.
3. The stories must be in some way horror-related. This doesn't necessarily mean they have to be scary - you can deal with horror themes in a humorous way - but it's Halloween, so these should be in a Halloween spirit.
4. Post as many stories as you like.

(hope it's okay to post this, it's not so much an ad as something fun I'd like to see spread)