The Mirror at the Estate Sale
After purchasing an old, ornate mirror from an estate sale, a couple notices that their reflections begin to display actions and emotions that they haven't expressed. As days pass, these reflections seem to become more sinister.
Suggested length: A short story: 1,500 to 5,000 words, or flash fiction under 1,000
Start the clock
Pick a sprint, press start and keep going until it stops. Momentum beats polish on a first draft.
Make it yours
Three ways to take this prompt somewhere nobody else will.
- Start somewhere safe and ordinary, like a kitchen or a school run.
- Let one rule of the house or town be broken, and show why it existed.
- End before the danger is over.
Writing horror books
Something is wrong here, and it's getting closer.
Horror is defined by the feeling it creates: dread, then fear, then the urge to keep reading anyway. The threat might be a ghost, a creature or the person in the next room. Underneath, the best horror is about something real: grief, guilt, the things we can't control.
What readers expect
- Dread that builds
- A threat that can't be reasoned with
- Characters out of their depth
- An ending that doesn't let you off easy
A tip before you start
What you don't show is scarier than what you do. Let the reader's imagination fill in the dark.
More Horror prompts
- Voices in the Old ForestA group of friends goes on a hiking trip in a remote forest where no human has stepped for decades. As night falls, they realize that something in the…
- The Book That Makes Things RealAfter inheriting a strange old book from a relative, a college student realizes that every time they read a passage aloud, bizarre occurrences…
- The Hospital’s Last RoomsAn urban explorer decides to infiltrate an abandoned psychiatric hospital rumored to be haunted. Inside, they find unsettling sculptures made from…
- The Room of ClocksA character wakes up in a room lined with clocks, all ticking out of sync. Each clock shows a different time, and with each full hour, a deeply…
Fifteen minutes in? Keep going.
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