A Queer Horror Fan, As a Boy, Craved ‘Just One Moment Like That’
Richard Scott Larson’s memoir ‘The Long Hallway’
The Long Hallway is a new queer memoir about a frightening, lonely summer when the author was 12. It’s about how trauma can seem like a haunted house. We process the trauma by building the house, slat by slat, brick by brick. We become the haunting and the haunted. We walk through the house, waiting for an outcome, then waiting for the old outcome to change.
Infinite ‘Halloween’
Richard Scott Larson grew up one county over from St. Louis. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother. When he visited his father, he watched a Halloween VHS tape on “what sometimes felt like an endless loop.” He’d rented it under his mother’s name and never returned it. He wonders if she silently paid the fine to avoid an argument or if his father deliberately kept the tape “to encourage me to visit him more often.”
The film became a “portal” through which he imagined he entered the fictional bloodbath in an otherwise quiet town much like his own. Larson identified with the pursued girls but also with the…
