We were driving south to see my in-laws, and this was along the way. Of course, I had to stop. The town was just like I thought it would be...just not for Jackson, IL
For Sunny Valley, OH.
It is the right size, in the right location, and certainly has the right feel. It is set near enough to the Appalachian Mountains to get the right feel.
Driving through the Appalachians also gave me many ideas for both of my fictional towns.
Jackson, OH, and Jacksonville, IL
These two towns are about 760 miles apart and don't have a lot in common.
My fictional Jackson, IL, owes a debt to the real Jacksonville, Illinois. It is not a copy of it. Yet it provides the sense of place that I need. From Jacksonville, I get a Midwestern town of the proper proportions and the right kind of civic life: the streets, the neighborhoods, the schools, the churches, and businesses that serve as my point of reference. Jackson, IL and Jacksonville, IL are not exactly the same, but but walking around either during the daylight hours should feel the same.
With a population of 20,000 or so, Jackson is a small but substantial town. There are enough people for characters to lose themselves in the crowd now and then, and one does not know everyone. You have your different social circles, your hospital, your clubs and rivalries, and local institutions. Still, it is small enough to be recognized.
Sunny Valley is another matter. With only about 5,000 residents, the difference is considerable. Here, people will tell you where you were last night.
There may be a single high school and a grocery store that everyone patronizes. A modest downtown with a diner where certain families have been coming for generations, a few churches, a funeral home, a clinic, a library, and perhaps a hardware store older than anyone’s memory. And then the town just stops. The streetlights run out, and the houses give way to trees.
That is how Jackson, Ohio, began to make an impression on me. It had less to do with the town and more with the drive through the Appalachian hills of southeastern Ohio. Mile upon mile of ridges and valleys, of roads that wind into the woods where visibility is poor.
I found myself thinking that something could be out there. Not in the flippant sense of "the monster lives here," but because the landscape made it seem entirely plausible. The forest can put things out of sight; the hills have their secrets. In that moment, it occurred to me what Sunny Valley had been lacking.
.jpg "Not so Sunny Valley")
Sunny Valley came before Jackson.
In the beginning, Sunny Valley was an exercise in putting together a supernatural teen milieu of the early 80s. I put it most simply by asking: what would Buffy be like if she were in Ohio in 1983-4?
It was a sound approach, and I had a blast with it. You had your share of kids and monsters, oddities in the woods, the kind of supernatural conundrums that make for a good teenage horror game. There was even a Hellmouth-ish sort of thing in Sunny Valley.
But when I put my mind to Jackson, things changed.
Jackson took on a life of its own. It put down roots in the form of history and old families, adults with more to say than they let on, and teachers looking out for their students. Witches, ghosts, conspiracies, and long-held grudges all came to the fore, building a whole community of the supernatural on top of the ordinary one.
Jackson was no longer just a venue for an adventure; it was a place.
I was of the mind for some time that Sunny Valley had run its course. It had provided the 80s campaign I needed to figure out what Jackson should be.
Until I made the trip to Jackson, Ohio, and drove through the Appalachian Mountains.
Sunny Valley 2.0
I used to say Sunny Valley had a Hellmouth and Jackson had history. But I have come to see that as not entirely true.
Jackson has the history, certainly. Sunny Valley is defined by its geology.
It is a minor distinction, yet one that means everything to me. There is no need for a magical hole in the ground to account for the awful things that go on in Sunny Valley; the mountains will do just fine.
Take the Appalachians. Their story reaches back hundreds of millions of years, through mountain-building events older than anything in human experience. The Rockies were still in their infancy when these ranges were already ancient. They have been eroded and reformed over eons that put our recorded history to shame.
The people of Sunny Valley like to think of themselves as an old town. The mountains have other ideas.
Sure, you can find a house or two in the valley that is close on two hundred years, or a family name from the first settlers, an abandoned mine, some pre-Civil War churches and old cemeteries. But to the mountains, all of that is from this morning, geologically speaking.
And with that, the nature of the horror is altered.
In Jackson, the supernatural is steeped in history. In Sunny Valley, it is prehistory.
Jackson asks: What if the weird kids were right?
Sunny Valley asks: What if your grandparents were right when they told you not to go up there?
That is the difference in a nutshell. Or perhaps there is an even more straightforward way to tell them apart: look at which way the characters are running. In Jackson, they tend to run to the trouble. In Sunny Valley, those with any sense put distance between themselves and it.
When you drive for a few hours in the mountains, you get a lot of ideas.
Sunny Valley 2.0 is not scarier because the monsters have more hit points. It is scarier because some things were never meant to be fought in the first place.
Two Different Kinds of Horror
Jackson is dangerous, but Jackson allows heroism.
That is the town where Rowan can ride Tempest into the final battle against the Hollow King while Andy announces her arrival by playing an 80s hair-metal song on his trumpet.
It is ridiculous. It is glorious. And it belongs in Jackson.
Jackson is a place where the kids eventually discover that they are not alone. Teachers protect them. Older witches know things. Friends show up. People choose sides. The supernatural can be terrible, but it can also be opposed.
Sunny Valley should not work that way.
If someone tried that sort of heroic entrance against one of the older things in the mountains, it might not even understand what the child was trying to accomplish.
At best, it might say, "Hush, child."
That is the kind of horror I have in mind for Sunny Valley. I am not after stronger monsters, but older ones. The sort who do not hate us because, to them, we are not worth hating. They predate the town and its first settlers, and likely predate any name we have given these mountains. Most should predate the concept of names.
You will find the folk stories here are less by way of explanation than survival instructions: don’t whistle in the dark; don’t answer a call from the woods if you can’t put a face to it; avoid the old road over the ridge once the snow comes; if there is knocking under the floor, you leave. Nobody can tell you why. They will only point out which families were the ones who didn’t heed the rules.
Sunny Valley is no longer "Buffy in Ohio." It is edging toward an Appalachian cosmic horror.
The numbers make a difference. Jackson is a place of 20,000 people with its layers; it has the critical mass for a supernatural community. Sunny Valley has 5,000 souls and an expanse of empty land around it.
There is a distinction here. Jackson is home to its share of old monsters, some of which predate the human race. Yet for all that they are comprehensible to humans in some measure, they have a history and motives, hungers and grudges, names and bargains. Even demons are tied to us in some way. They can hate us. Tempt us. Love us. Hunt us. Make deals with us. We matter to them.
Sunny Valley is not like that.
What one finds in the Appalachians is something else entirely. Those are things that were old in the time of the dinosaurs. To call them demons, gods, or ghosts is to apply a word humans have invented. They are of an older order.
Where Jackson’s monsters have a past, Sunny Valley’s have geology. And that makes for a different kind of coexistence. The town’s founders did not so much subdue the wilderness as come to terms with what was already there, learning the rules necessary to put down roots. Or it could be said the humans were merely put up with.
Jackson's oldest monsters remember humanity.
Sunny Valley's oldest monsters remember a world without us.
%20(7).jpg "Jackson")
Then there is the matter of the real towns in the mirror. I have no desire for my fictional Jackson or Sunny Valley to be stand-ins for Jacksonville, Illinois, or Jackson, Ohio. They are mirrors.
Jacksonville provides the texture and scale for my Midwestern setting. But Jackson, Ohio offered something else entirely to my Sunny Valley. Not in population, but geologically. One can walk those small-town streets and then drive out to the wooded hills and get a sense of the other half of the picture.
In a way I didn’t foresee, the process has come full circle.
Sunny Valley was instrumental in making Jackson, and Jackson has shown me that a town must be more than scenery. Now a real Jackson has sent me back to Sunny Valley. Not to make it more like Jackson, but less so.
Take the places outside Sunny Valley that are well known, yet not in the manner of a tourist spot or a famous haunts. The old mine road, the logging trail abandoned for thirty years, the hollow where no house has been built, the fire tower visible from town but unclimbed by memory. A grandfather won’t bother with explanations about bad roads or bears, as an adult might to a teenager. He will be direct: "Don’t go up there." In Jackson, that is an open door to adventure. In Sunny Valley, it is sound counsel.
I think this covers the four comparisons without the need for separate essays.
Jacksonville to Jackson, IL is inspiration made into a community. Jackson, OH to Sunny Valley is inspiration turned to atmosphere. The evolution from Sunny Valley 1.0 to 2.0 is the shift from fighting the supernatural to surviving something very, very old. And between Jackson and Sunny Valley lies the question of what each can sustain as a horror story.
There is a line I want to keep: "Jacksonville helped me imagine where people live. Jackson, Ohio made me wonder what lives beyond them."
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