When the tornado hit, Ms. Amstrong could do nothing but pray none of her family would be killed.

DO HORROR WRITERS EVER TREMBLE? It all depends on what is thrown at them. Well known Horror Writer/Graphic Artist Barbara Armstrong was enjoying a summer hiatus with her family in the Huntsville, when disaster struck.

“It was a warm evening and we had been swimming” the writer recalls. “It clouded over around 7:15 p.m. and started to rain, so we went inside.” Moments later, a tornado swept across the inlet on Penn. Lake and hit their cottage.

“The lights went out at 7:30 the thunder started and in less than ten minutes we were wearing all the signs of a twister - the black sky, the rapid lightning flashes and the roar of the wind.” She hesitates, recalling the frightening experience. “Mom and I yelled for the kids to come to the back of the cottage, to the washroom. All I could think was – get the kids in the tub! I knew we were in big trouble when Shana (10) yelled that they’d “just seen a tree blow past the window.”

The twister was still a fully loaded water spout throwing literally tons of rain and lake water at the front of the ninety year old structure. The trembling foursome waited out the moments of terror listening to the snapping of trees and loud thuds on the roof and walls of their cottage.

“We spent the time praying the roof would stay on and that nothing would smash through any of the glass doors and windows that make up the entire front of the cottage.”

Steven (14) states “the water looked like it was boiling in over the door frames.” They had no idea at the time, that thirty feet of the veranda roof and the 4 X 4 eight foot high beams that held the roof up had been ripped off and thrown throughout the woods.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes when we went out at 8:00 pm, when the storm was over. Twelve huge trees where lying across the driveway, three more just feet from my car. We found pieces of the veranda roof over 500 feet away from our place up on the road behind the next door cottage.”

Rescue came in the night when husband Alex and his brother, sister-in-law and niece drove up from Toronto to assess the damage to both the cottages and arrange work crews to clear dozens of trees from the driveways and the road into the area. Hydro remained out for four consecutive days.

Ms. Armstrong started as a local freelance writer in 1997 and went international in 2000. A collaborative poem between herself and daughter Shana won the Editor’s Choice Award for best poem in May 2002 for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from the International Library of Poetry and poetry.com. But horror has always been Barbara’s forte.

“I enjoyed a good scary story as a child; I’m just trying to pass it on.” Great Canadian North a short piece about several psychotics is now available in Mickey Stroda’s Growing Pains (Best Seller-Bailey’s Pond) on www.nospine.com and SPOT, a psycho thriller piece will be out in Robert Sloan’s Launchpad Anthology Love and Death later this year. Ms. Armstrong’s talent as a graphics artist is displayed on the cover of both these books. And as a top selling horror designer, she has been commissioned to produce four more covers by September’s end.

Will we be reading anything about tornados in her next horror piece? “No,” she laughs. “Twisters have already been done. But the fear that builds when one is witnessing first hand an unstoppable destructive act of nature ~ that my friends, will definitely be there.”