Dark Inspirations – How I Came to Write It

You love the disturbing, vaguely nightmarish roadside attractions out there in the middle-of-nowhere hellholes of America, right?

I know I do.  To me, it’s not a road trip if it doesn’t involve stopping in some godforsaken spot for some oddball site or bizarre experience. And one of the most memorable was running into THE THING.

Ever see THE THING?

Few roadside attractions are MORE bizarre than The Thing — that grand-daddy of southwestern gas station stopovers that blows away the rest in its sheer weirdness and twisty corridors.

When we drove with friends across the desert one Christmas holiday, we stopped at the nearly-unavoidable roadside attraction.

Now, the southwest is full of bizarre, unusual and downright messed-up little roadside attractions with snakes, scorpions, two-headed babies in jars…but The Thing was something more impressive than most — for all the right reasons.

The rule of a Roadside Attraction is:

The exhibit can never be as disturbing or creepy as imagining the person — and the deranged mind — that  put the attraction together in the first place.

The Thing satisfies on oh so many levels.

First, the entry fee  (back then — several years ago)  was about 75 cents . Good price! I believe the price has only gone up very slightly in the intervening years.

Then, you have to walk down these hallways full of Tim Burtonesque desert driftwood — and it predates Tim Burton — until you come to the most bizarre exhibit I’ve ever seen in my life:

A torture chamber, with women being whipped and people being beheaded (or at least, that’s how I remember it) — all carved from tree stumps.  Creepy! And yet compelling. And yet…creepy.

And then, like the cherry on this bizarro sundae — right next to the crushed nuts — there’s the Nazi car.

This vehicle is made all the more disturbing because someone put it  in this collection with the wood-stump torture chamber and The Thing itself and those Tim Burtonesque mangly desert-wood creatures.

What old crazy desert rat spent a lifetime amassing this collection? It’s not the current owners. It was someone who had a dark imagination, and maybe the kind that spilled into daily life. The Nazi car did it for me. And I hadn’t even seen The Thing at that point.

And it’s disturbing to have gone through the corridors to that goal — that Thing — but when you get to the Thing, it’s not shocking as much as it is just another spoonful of “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Should I reveal what it is?

Naw.

You’ve got to see it for yourself.

After visits to The Thing and to some other roadside attractions, I decided to write a horror version of this kind of place when I wrote my story, The Attraction.

Which, coincidentally, has one of my least favorite covers on the paperback and digital edition.

Take the video tour:

The Thing  is off that odd stretch of the 10 Freeway between Phoenix and Tucson — in an area of the desert with the strange name: Dragoon, Arizona. Plan your next vacation around it! It has earned its spot among the Places of Eternal Darnation.

Here’s the Book Trailer for The Attraction — made by COSProductions.com. Nice ‘n’ creepy. Be sure and turn up the sound, too.

Best,

Douglas Clegg