Night They Missed the Horror Show

Night They Missed the Horror Show is a horror short story by Joe R. Lansdale. It won the Bram Stoker Award for short fiction in 1988. The story can be read online, but I'm not going to link to it here. It's easy enough to locate, and I find it quite offensive. I don't see the humor. Or the horror either, for that matter. It's as if someone wrote a story to tell on one of the Criminal Minds or CSI shows, but stopped writing before the police got involved.

In an interview at Locus Online the author describes it this way: "It’s about a series of little horrors, yet it’s humorous when you stand back and look at it." Demon Theory closes with this:

All I can say to you’s just to read it, and then try not to think about it, and try not to keep thinking about it when you find yourself drifting back to it anyway. It’s a story that’s arcing way up over the diamond, over all the magical summers, and when it comes down it comes down hard, and the world’s a different place, and you’re a different person in it. We should all swing so hard.

Dead in the South says,

The story is profane, shocking and at times hilarious. If you are easily offended, it probably isn’t right for you.

The photo of the author at the top of the post is from Wikipedia.