Blue Ribbon Winner

County fairs are everywhere in small-town and rural America. They're almost aggressively wholesome. Fresh vegetables. Homemade pies. Prize chickens. Livestock washed and brushed until they practically shine. Kids with sticky hands. Neighbors catching up. Women comparing recipes they've been making for forty years. Blue ribbons pinned to things somebody grew, baked, canned, or raised.

There's something comforting about all of it.

And that's exactly what made me want to put something sinister in the middle of it. I kept wondering:

What if there were something happening underneath all that wholesome familiarity that nobody knew about? Something we couldn't even conceive of because we were too busy believing we already understood what we were looking at?

That's where Alma and Berdie came from. At first, Blue Ribbon Winner looks like a story about two sisters and a family rivalry. One sister has won the same blue ribbon for forty years, while the other has spent forty years wondering why she can't make her pasties taste like her sisters’.

But Alma knows there's a secret. Her mother gave it to Berdie on her deathbed. And when Alma finally learns what that secret means, she decides she wants the ribbon badly enough to find out for herself.

I liked the idea that the horror wouldn't announce itself. There wouldn’t be a monster at the fairgrounds. No blood on the judging table. Nothing obviously wrong with the pasties sitting there under their little paper doilies. Instead, there would be a judge who takes one bite and suddenly becomes wanting. There would be a blue ribbon. There would be applause.

And there would be an empty chair at the fair.

The thing I find most unsettling about horror is often not the thing that happens. It's the possibility that something has been happening for a very long time, right in front of everyone, and nobody has thought to question it. What if the tradition isn't what you thought it was? What if the recipe isn't the secret? What if the thing being passed from one generation to the next isn't knowledge at all, but a hunger? And what if the people eating it have been telling themselves for forty years that it's just really, really good?

That's the kind of horror I wanted here. Not the horror that crashes through the front door.

The horror that wins the blue ribbon.