Creepy America, Season 1
Season 2
Coming Soon
Season 3
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Season 4
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Season 5
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Author Notes
Like most of my writing projects, the seeds for Creepy America were planted long ago and it took many years for it to fully blossom into a full idea. And it all started with a simple phrase: bread and circuses.
That was the line my high school English teacher wrote on the board; every day he would write a different allusion or word phrase on the large whiteboard as well as its explanation. For bread and circuses, it was the idea of entertainment and creature comforts given out to distract people from their real problems, first used to describe how Roman rulers would use gladiatorial combats and free bread given out at these events to boost their popularity whenever people were starting to become disgruntled. Something about that concept, about using entertainment as a tool of subtle oppression, intrigued me and I did what I always do when the muse decides to strike: I doodled. By the end of the school day, I had a drawing of the two protagonists, as well as eight of the main antagonists (the Little Bookers would be added years later, after a particularly vivid nightmare). I titled the whole paper ‘Bread and Circuses’ and let it stew in my mind for a couple of months.
At the same time, I had the good fortune to participate in that brief golden age of Netflix, back when the concept of a streaming service was novel and you could watch any classic television show for nine dollars a month. My dad, a huge fan of movies and television of all kind, had been a subscriber of Netflix since the early days of mail-in DVDs and once streaming was in our homes, he wasted no time introducing me to all of his favorite shows. Knowing my continuous fascination with ghosts, aliens, and all things generally strange, his first recommendation was X-Files, and I was immediately hooked. I was particularly drawn in not only by the mysterious and sometimes contradictory shadow government conspiracy, but also by the personalities of Mulder and Scully, which would go on to shape much of Liam, Zoey, and the omnipresent Archangel.
Another world was also clambering for my attention, though: the internet. I became a regular traveler of it during its awkward teething years, when 2.0 had been firmly entrenched but a slow tug-of-war was beginning to form between the legions of Newgrounds flash masters, niche content creators, and code wizards that had first made the world web so popular and the encroaching corporate overlords looking to create a sterile and non-threatening platform for media consumption, advertisement, and commerce. One of the factions that would rise would be Creepypastas, short horror stories circulated in forum boards and messages. In fact, the ‘Creepy’ in ‘Creepy America’ is a direct homage to the many late-night hours I would spend reading these stories, some well written, some not so much, and some so terrifying it would shatter any hope I had of sleeping that night.
But what I really found fascinating was how much effort was spent trying to make these stories seem real. Standard protocol in sharing these stories would be to not attribute the author, instead describing it as a real event or news story. For particularly popular ones, like Slenderman or the SCP Archives, others would jump in to help, drawing, photoshopping, and even filming ‘evidence’ to lend legitimacy to the outlandish. And it worked. Maybe not with everybody, and certainly not all of the time, but for some, it did, and this war of truths, fictions, and maybe-fictions consumed me for years.
Even so, not all the puzzle pieces were there. Every so often I would rediscover the concept of Creepy America, get excited, return to it, write an episode or two, then become unhappy with the result and throw it away. For me, writing projects are often like puzzles, and it’s only when I have all the pieces together can I finally start to slowly shape together the complete picture, and sometimes I can collect all of them in days. Sometimes, though, it takes years.
And for Creepy America, years it took, all the way until after college. At that time, I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, working a dead-end job as a housecleaner that didn’t even make enough to pay my bills. The only part I enjoyed about the job was the work, more specifically, the fact that I could just put my headphones on and just do my job by myself. Given all the listening time I now had, I got very into podcasts, and specifically one called ‘Alice isn’t Dead’, a horror series about a truck driver traveling across the United States. One of the sponsors of the podcast was the Teamsters Union itself, so episodes would often end with a description of how much truck drivers were needed and the kind of money you could expect to be making. That idea resonated with me, yes, the money, but even more so the journey, the ability to just in a vehicle and drive, leave behind my job, my responsibilities, my whole life that I was slowly and surely learning to resent and instead find somewhere new, everyday. After a couple of phone calls, a whirlwind trucking college in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, and brief training period, I was behind the wheel of a semi and would be for the next two years of my life, traveling from coast to coast.
That proved to be the missing piece. Driving OTR (over the road, an expression for drivers who drive cross-country and don’t have dedicated routes) let me see parts of the country I never thought I would see. Often, my loads would take me from the golden hills of California to the depths of New York City before slowly zig-zagging me back to the Pacific, taking me North, South, East, West, and every which-aways in-between. There’s really no way to describe the absolute magnitude of this country and the true spectrum of unique places to someone who hasn’t experienced it that way, about how traveling through the Texas countryside at night with the only thing punctuating the dark is the fire of oil rigs makes it feel like driving through a medieval portrait of hell, or how the woods of the Northeastern states appears like a living, angry entity, enclosing around the cities in such claustrophobic closeness it feels like a snake entangling its prey, or how the long, low hills of the Great Plains make you feel like you’re sailing across a sea of land, lost underneath a horizon that stretches on for longer than forever, or even how the low fog along the Pacific coast can transform it into something remote and alien where even wrought-iron lampposts look foreign and wrong. Seeing what America had to offer outside the tiny Midwestern bubble I had lived most of my life in was intoxicating, and every night after finding something new, I would cuddle up into the tiny cabin of my truck and try to find ways to weave these experiences into Liam and Zoey’s own road trip, combing the wonder of the mundane with the horror of the unnatural.
So if any of this sounds interesting, I encourage you to scroll up and take a look at some of the sample chapters I’ve made available on this website. After all, who knows what you’ll find in the America you never knew existed.