I was raised on a steady diet of Agatha Christie and Readers' Digest "Drama in Real Life" which in retrospect explains everything about me. Being the youngest in a family of hyper-vigilant murder mystery fans meant getting told at the age of six that if someone flashed their headlights at me and I pulled over, I would end up shoved into a drainpipe with both my arms cut off...JUST LIKE IN READERS DIGEST DRAMA IN REAL LIFE!
For some reason a lot of the more vivid selections of this dubious genre came back to me this morning. I think because I'm headed for a really dark part of my next draft that is going to get a little bloody, and RDDIRL truly pulled no punches. I remember reading about a bear attack where a girl's scalp (calm down, she lived) was severed so completely from her skull it "fell back onto her shoulders like the hood of a sweatshirt."
Here is a perfect example of one of their hooks:
Anyway I was delighted to find a bunch of them here if you want to traumatize yourself. Happy Monday!