Daryl Gregory in his SF Signal guest post posits that nobody will make a horror movie out of We Are All Completely Fine.

I grew up during the golden age of slasher flicks. Jason, Freddy, Michael, and Chucky were my teenage companions. I remember being in the theatre for the original Friday the 13th, watching the face of that “final girl” as the credits rolled. She knew the nightmare would never be over. The monster would be coming back, though for a new set of victims and cheaper actors.

It was only years later that I began musing about what happened to those sole survivors after the movie was over. How were they not dysfunctional wrecks for the rest of their lives? Serious therapy-and serious meds-had to be in their future. Even when a hero or heroine returned for a sequel, the years of recovery (or attempted recovery) were barely touched on, or skipped altogether, before the new batch of bodies began piling up. But what was life like for them between the movies?

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So, since no movie on horror-victim therapy was forthcoming, if I wanted to find out what happened to those damaged folks, I’d have to write it myself. We Are All Completely Fine is about a therapy group made up of those last girls and boys, some of them still suffering decades after the trauma. Each member is from a different subgenre of horror: the escapee from the rural cannibal family; a woman who was the last girl after an attack by a supernatural slasher; a guy trapped in a Ringu-style techno horror story; a girl who fled a demonic cult; a guy who went up against Lovecraftian monsters when he was a kid. They gradually realize that their stories are connected, and not quite over.

There are good reasons why nobody will be making a movie of this story any time soon. The first problem is that except for a (literally) fiery climax, most of the exciting bits are over before the story starts. Decades over.

Read the rest of Gregory’s rationale at SF Signal.

For information on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story.