Black Bedtime Stories
Welcome to Black Bedtime Stories is a collection of dark, haunting original short stories written by author Terry Didcott. Prepare to be chilled to the bone, thrilled to the marrow or even have a wry smile drawn across your face as you venture into the haunting underworld of the imagination. If there is only one thing that you can be sure of, it is that there is never a certain theme about anything in any of these stories.
Tales of Unexpected Twists
Dark bedtime stories wouldn't be very awe inspiring if they didn't have a clever twist near to the end. So these short stories, many of them fewer than a thousand words long, have some interesting twists and turns to keep you guessing right up until the very end.
Not all of the stories are filled with terror and fear! Some are just mundane takes that lead the reader through to an interesting climax. Others are mildly humorous and portray life situations that can sometimes get out of hand, or take a sideways look at the way to health fitness and growth from a different viewpoint that can lead to an interesting conclusion.
Realistic Stories
One of the aims of this site is to publish stories that have a realistic feel to them. That is, when you read them, they carry with them a sense of it could actually happen and also it might have happened just like that to someone you know or to a situation that you are familiar with. It could be that you have become interested in watching a green video and it is so real and in the now that you could swear that something similar is happening right now in your own street. Its that kind of reality that is real in the imagination and seems like it could be real in the real world.
Just imagine how a certain set of incidents could play out in a day in your own life and then you'll see that imagination can resemble reality. You could be leading a really healthy lifestyle one minute, then suddenly be plunged into a vortex of binge eating on every unhealthy type of food you could possibly imagine while losing the will to do any physical activity and find yourself gaining weight at a frightening rate while your health takes a plunge for the worst. You might think, in your fully healthy state that it could never happen to you, but just maybe it could happen to the person down the street! Such is the power of the imagination and that is the kind of thing I'm busy putting together for this website.
Stories that Inspire
Short stories should do one thing if they don't do anything else and that is to inspire the reader to create a vivid and entertaining mental picture of the story as it plays out. When we look at First Saturday Dancers, it conjures up a mental image of friends getting together once a month to do what they always do and as the story plays out, it becomes pretty obvious that things are happening that should not be happening. Its all about keeping a little back all the way to build suspense and keep the interest going. Its something that you can do much more easily with a short story because there is far less time to work with so you can compress the build up to a very few chapters and have it start almost a the beginning and not reach its crescendo until the end. Which is the way it should be!
Originality
All the stories that I'm publishing here are new, original and not published anywhere else except here on this website. So if you see duplicates of any of these stories, then they have been plagiarized and I would appreciate it if you could let me know where you saw them. This is so I can initiate a DMA action, which I will in every case. Thanks!
Recent Short Stories:
Door to Door
Being a door to door salesman in the Midwest in the late 1950s was a pretty fine way to live for Arnold Jones. He was still single at the age of 36 and liked it that way. It meant he could travel from town to town selling the latest must have encyclopedia sets for a small weekly payment. He was surprisingly good at his job and made enough in commissions to ensure a decent standard of motel to stay in and all the creature comforts.
...read more: Door to Door
Sleep for Beauty, Wake for Fear
In the dead of night when not a soul stirs and every faint sound is amplified a hundredfold in the still, silent air, the family slept peacefully in the old converted barn in the countryside. No one was prepared for the rude awakening that was about to befall them, nor would they at first comprehend the nature of the interruption to their peaceful slumber.
...read more: Sleep for Beauty, Wake for Fear
The Fitness Instructor
Hailey Johnson had been working as a fitness instructor and trainer for nearly ten years and held regular classes at her local gym. Living in a small town suited her because it meant that her classes were always fun events with everybody knowing everybody else. She specialized in aerobics classes for women of all ages, from late teens right up to pensioners. Everyone loved Hailey's classes and Hailey loved everyone in them.
...read more: The Fitness Instructor