Michael Warriner - The Stuff of Nightmares

Some people might consider working as a performer at Disney World a nightmarish prospect. Deland writer Michael Warriner, however, used his time there to pen The Man in the Forest, a debut horror novel that is as unique as it is terrifying.  

 

Warriner, a native Floridian, was always fascinated with stories and music. “In high school and college, I was more into science, but writing was always in the background,” he explains. “In college, I began writing stories to kill time. I learned to see the stories in music and movies and liked to take characters and find different ways to tell their stories.”

After earning a degree in psychology from the
University of Central Florida, Warriner was offered a job as a group home manager and later worked in a behavioral health hospital for children with trauma backgrounds.  While there, he took a part-time job at Disney World. When the hospital unit closed, he transferred to Disney full-time and stayed for three years “I put pen to paper with The Man in the Forest about halfway through my time at Disney and finished it after I left,” he says. “I wrote in the break room.”

The Man in the Forest is the story of Vincent Morales, a musical prodigy who travels to a mysterious town in Romania to give a concert with his sister, Mary, and his friend, Tyler King. While there, he falls prey to the curse of the Forest Man, a horrific apparition who roams the woods bordering the town. Those who see the Forest Man are destined to lose their sanity as they are haunted by a series of horrific nightmares peopled by a murderous jester, a feral blind girl with a taste for blood, and an evil ventriloquist dummy named Johnny.  

Warriner was motivated to write the novel because he had a hard time finding horror stories he liked. “I admired the writing of Poe and Lovecraft who played with madness, and I wanted to play with the psychological side of horror,” he says. “I tried to avoid things I didn’t like in other stories, and I wanted to attack clichés. There are no teens or summer camps in the book, and each of the nightmares has its own hidden message. At the end, they all come together to tell a different sub-story and add up to the realization of the one true thing in the world to fear.” 

The idea for the story came from a spooky experience Warriner had while walking in the woods one night. “I was looking at the tree line and thought I saw the outline of a man,” he recalls. “When I looked again, nothing was there. I began asking myself ‘What if?’ questions, and the Forest Man was born.” Warriner admits that his characters are a bit like him. “The three main characters together form a full person,” he says. “I took each side of my personality and thought of how I could make a character out of it.  That made the dialogue exchange easy - you talk to yourself and reply to yourself.” The thing he likes best about the story is its ambiguity. “I like stories where a lot is unexplained,” he says. “By explaining, you lose the horror.”

Since the publication of The Man in the Forest, Warriner has been published in two short story horror anthologies. In Postcards from the Void, he contributed a piece titled “Springland Meadows,” and in It Came from the Garage, he penned a story called “The Highway Phantom” He has also written a short story for the upcoming horror anthology, Shadows and Teeth Vol.4, titled “The Laughing Man.” 

“I like exploring ‘What if?’ questions from many angles in my stories,” Warriner says, “and eventually answering them by the time I finish.”

For more information, visit Warriner’s Facebook page @ The Man in the Forest.