Sometimes Boys Don’t Know by Donyae Coles

Growing up in the eighties, horror was everywhere. There were tons of magazines, anthology television shows, and my oh my, horror films galore. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this content was written by middle age white dudes.

Mind you, I have no problem with middle age white dudes. After all, I am such a dude. But in the eighties, white dudes had a monoculture of horror.

Donyae Coles takes that perspective and turns it on its head in her short story, “Sometimes Boys Don’t Know” and it is very much worth the read.

The setup is good. Boy meets girl at a party. Boy takes girl home but goes to an abandoned building instead. Then well, things go a little off the rails in all the ways that you expect, and all the ways that you don’t.

You can read it here online. It’s not a long piece (900 words) and was published by Nightmare Magazine. I enjoyed her quote at the start of the story that frames the entire experience.

As for Donyae herself, she’s a prolific writer and artist, so if you enjoy this sampling of her horror, check out her other stories at her personal writing site.

In the meantime, beware of taking strange people home. As James Gardner once wrote, “the loving you get might not be worth the loving you get.”