The Icy Horrors of Laura Ingalls Wilder

I'm reading most of the Little House books as research for a parody I'm planning to write. Thought about writing a horror story, but it would be redundant. Wilder already wrote a horror story called The Long Winter.

Trying to walk from the schoolhouse to town in a heavy blowing blizzard with zero visibility, Laura worries about getting lost and never finding town. "She felt numb and stupid. She rubbed her eyes and saw a pink smear on her hand. Her eyelids were bleeding where the snow had scratched them."

"Her mittened hand was so numb that it hardly felt Carrie's hand. She was shaking all over and deep inside her there was a shaking that she could not stop. Only in her very middle there was a solid knot that ached, and her shaking pulled this knot tighter so that the ache grew worse."

"The winds struck her this way and that. She could not see nor breathe, she stumbled and was falling, then suddenly she seemed to be lifted and Carried bumped against her. She tried to think. The others must be somewhere ahead. She must walk faster and keep up with them or she and Carrie would be lost. If they were lost on the prairie they would freeze to death.

"But perhaps they were all lost. Main Steet was only two blocks long. If they were going only a little way to north or south they would miss the block of store and beyond was empty prairie for miles."

There's constant talk of how green the prairie grass is, how blue the sky is, and the twinkling stars, so you can imagine them waiting until the stars are right. Going to sleep after Pa played his fiddle, she imagines music is still coming to her from the stars. "The night was full of music, and Laura was sure that part of it came from the great, bright stars swinging so low above the prairie." The music of the spheres? Demonic piping of the blind idiot god Azathoth?

Ma calls it heathenish when Pa tacks up a lucky horse-shoe over the door of one of their houses. Maybe she's been struggling to make them all good Christians because she rescued Pa from one of those idol worshiping cults on the coast? And "On the Banks of Plum Creek" has a blizzard that Pa gets lost in. He stumbles over the edge of a creek bank into a deep snow drift, where he hibernates for a few days under the snow, surviving by eating all the Christmas candy. Puts me in mind of a few Lovecraft narrators exploring deep beneath the earth.

More to come eventually. In the meantime, here's a horror trailer by "secularish" put together from Little House tv episodes.