By the time you read this, George Taylor will be dead.

Okay, calm down. Don’t go stampeding for your favorite search engine or AI research tool to find George Taylor so you can warn him. Don’t dial 911 to tell them to stop me before I kill (again?). George Taylor isn’t a real person. Not to you, anyway. He doesn’t have a birth certificate, a high school transcript, or a CV. He has no parents, no wife, no children, and no relatives.

You see, George Taylor is one of my characters in The Horrors, the macabre Vietnam-era novel I’m currently working on. To make horror, something horrible must happen. George’s ticket has got to be punched. Sorry, George. When you gotta go, you gotta go. Eggs, omelets.

George may be fictional to you, but he’s flesh and blood and bone to me. I created him with the unassisted power of my mind, and now I have to consign him to the oblivion from which I conjured him. However, if it gives you any comfort, I’ve never killed a character before. Oh, I’ve had them die of natural causes, but I’ve never before come home from a hard day of slaving away over the hot Band-Aids and said, “Tonight I shall kill a named character.”

He’s had a hard make-believe life, poor George. His ears were cut off by Chinese interrogators in the Korean War. He drinks too much. He makes his living as a soldier of fortune. Because he joined up with my merry band of misfits, he’s reached the end of a road littered with poor decisions. It’s the last mistake he’ll ever make. Finally, he will be at peace. Requiescat in pace, George.

I don’t want to kill him. I kind of like the guy. Unfortunately, you don’t do your story or your characters any favors by going soft on them. Good characters get smacked around, just like good people do. George is just the first of many. This book is going to be littered with heaps of corpses before it’s all over, like a Roman tragedy without any Romans.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to say a prayer for George. I don’t know where characters go when they die. I hope it’s someplace nice, like Fiji or King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.