IMAGINATION THEATER PRESENTS: “EXPIRATION DATE”

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Okay, okay, it’s been quiet long enough on the website.

Let’s shake stuff up!

So, just between us, “Can the living haunt the dead?”

I’ve asked this twice before, both times when my c-r-e-e-e-e-p-y short story “Expiration Date” was going to debut in a new print anthology. Well, this time I’m asking  because “Expiration Date” is coming at you over the radio starting Saturday October 26 from the uber-talents at Imagination Theatre!

For years Aldin Norton placed the building of his business over his wife, Connie, never imagining she might die. And he certainly never thought she would insist on being buried in her family plot rather than the mausoleum Aldin had erected for them. Now, three months later, Aldin is requesting a codicil be added to his will stipulating that when his time comes he is to be buried with a bottle in his arms. An ancient bottle that Aldin purchased from a peculiar shop across the street from Oak Hill Cemetery, the graveyard where Connie lies and the Nortons’ crypt stands empty. Aldin doesn’t tell his estate lawyer Brad Chambers anything about the bottle, but when Brad has it appraised he discovers some disturbing things about the bottle. Things that suggest Aldin is not as willing to accept Connie’s decision to spend eternity apart from him as he has been acting.

Connie Norton lies here…

…but Aldin Norton wants her buried here.

I was inspired to write “Expiration Date” in the nineties when I read a submission call for an anthology that wanted to pay homage to those fabulous but flawed Amicus portmanteau films like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden and Asylum. After “Expiration Date” was rejected for being too much like the stories in those Amicus films — such is the life of a creative writer — I submitted it to other anthologies, and in 2019 it finally made its print debut in The Monsters We Forgot, Vol. 1 from Soteira Press. Three years later “Expiration Date” appeared in print again in the seventh volume of Castle Bridge Media’s Castle of Horror anthology series, Love Gone Wrong.

And, boy, does love go wrong in “Expiration Date”!

But “Expiration Date” is more than an homage to Amicus films. It is also a tribute to Lights Out, the best damn suspense and horror radio program and one of the greatest suspense and horror anthology programs in any medium. Created by Wyllis Cooper and carried forward after his departure by Arch Obler, Lights Out presented intensely imaginative, unrelentingly creepy, and more than occasionally gory stories. If you ever heard Bill Cosby’s famous routine about listening to a radio program as a young boy about a chicken heart that grows and swallows the world, that was a real Lights Out episode. I wanted to capture that Lights Out feeling in “Expiration Date,” so after I sold my first audio script to Imagination Theatre in 2007 — the Sherlock Holmes adventure “The Case of the Petty Curses” — it was only natural that I adapt “Expiration Date” and submit it to IT for their Movies for Your Mind anthology segment. And resubmit it. And resubmit it. And resubmit it. And now, seventeen years later… here we are!

If there is a lesson I’ve learned from “Expiration Date” it is that patience and persistence can pay off.

This is my fourth script produced by IT but my first non-Holmes adventure, and you can hear it Saturday October 26 on the IT flagship station KIXI 880AM in Seattle.  You can also click here for a list of all the many radio stations and streaming services that carry Imagination Theatre. You can also listen to “Expiration Date” for a limited time on the Imagination Theater YouTube Channel starting Saturday November 2. And downloads and USB flash drives of “Expiration Date” will also be for sale at the Imagination Theater website starting in November.

Oh, and before I forget… HAPPY HALLOWE’EN!