Shedding: A Horror Story by Chris Wojcik

Author:Chris Wojcik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: blood, dog, monster, daughter, weird, shapeshifter, father, scary, pet, skinwalker

On Writing 'Shedding'

The initial idea for 'Shedding' came to me while watching Zombeavers, a schlocky horror film in which a group of young adults and a dog go to a remote cabin in the woods where they are assaulted by evil beavers for 70 minutes. I found it far more entertaining than I expected. The film adheres strictly to the formula popularly dissected in Cabin in the Woods. Of course the dog is one of the first to get killed off, but it left me to think – What if the dog had lasted longer? What if all of the humans had died, the last survivor was the dog, and the film became the story of a dog fighting against impossible odds to kill these evil creatures that slaughtered his owners?

I spent far more time than I’d like to admit developing this idea from its first iteration as a slasher screenplay starring a dog, into the story you just finished reading. The evil that Olive encounters in the woods is a skinwalker, a type of shapeshifter that takes the form of those that it kills. I settled on this type of monster over any other because it forced Olive to violently confront her owner by the end of the story – quite a dilemma for a dog. This would have worked just as well, if not more so, using zombies. But I’m incredibly tired of zombie stories. And I was an obsessive Animorphs fan as a kid, so the opportunity to write a story featuring a shapeshifter was much more appealing.

The story was written sporadically between July and October of 2015. I outlined a few of the major scenes and then began writing the first draft. The death of Drea’s baby brother was unplanned and came to me in the midst of writing. I contemplated taking it out but ultimately decided to leave it in. On the one hand, it’s a plot point that never concludes. Drea and her father never have a moment of reconciliation before they are each killed. However, I feel that the backstory fleshes out all three characters a little bit. And having Drea and her father make up just before they died felt too artificial.

On the whole, I’m fairly satisfied with how ‘Shedding’ turned out, and I appreciate the time you took to read it. I hope you found it entertaining!

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