You Cannot Shoot This Monster: Designing Fear In Station 13

I grew up on monsters you could shoot. Aliens in ducts. Creatures in the dark. You line up a weapon, you fight, you win or you die. It is clean. It is honest. There is a comfort in knowing where to point the gun.

Station 13 was never going to let you have that comfort.

From the very beginning I knew I did not want a creature that bursts through the bulkhead. I wanted a different kind of horror, the kind that lives in the gap between what you see and what you know, and in the distance between what you remember and what the records say. You cannot shoot that. You can only doubt it, and the longer you doubt, the more it eats you.

This is how I tried to build that feeling.

Start with someone who knows what “normal” looks like

If you are going to break reality for the reader, you have to start by convincing them that someone on the page understands reality very well.

Commander Anna Dimitrovic is not a random person who wandered onto the station. She knows the routines. She knows the systems. She knows what her crew looks like on good days and bad days. When she says, “This is wrong,” it matters, because she is not a habitual alarmist. She is the adult in the room.

That is the first step in designing fear you cannot shoot. You give the reader a stable frame of reference, a person whose judgment feels solid. Then you start putting hairline cracks in that frame and ask the reader to decide whether it is the world that is breaking or the person.

Make the systems lie before the people do

In a lot of science fiction horror, people start acting strange first. Station 13 flips that order. The station lies before the crew does.

Security feeds show movement in an empty corridor. Sensor logs disagree with each other. Audio cuts out at the moments when someone most needs to be heard. None of it is dramatic on its own. A glitchy camera. A miscalibrated sensor. Anyone who has worked with real hardware has seen that.

The trick is in repetition. One glitch is noise. Ten glitches that all happen to land at the worst possible moments start to feel like intention.

You can feel that in Anna’s frustration. She wants something she can point to, a clear fault, a broken cable she can fix. Instead she gets this steady drizzle of almost nothing. Every time she goes to prove a theory, the data is just a little off from what she expects. That slow erosion is the horror.

Never give the reader a clean camera angle

There is a temptation, when you write a scene on a space station, to treat the cameras like magic. You can cut to any angle, show everything, answer every question.

For Station 13 I set a rule for myself. No camera would ever give a comfortable view of exactly what you want to see.

Maybe the feed is shifted slightly out of frame. Maybe it is fogged, or too low resolution to resolve a face. Maybe the right camera is offline, so you are forced to watch through a secondary angle that loses half the scene. Cameras become another unreliable witness, one more voice in the argument instead of the final authority.

That is important, because if I ever gave you a single piece of footage that answered everything, the fear would collapse. The unknown would become a known, and even if that known was terrible, you would be able to aim at it. Instead, every piece of evidence creates two new questions. Something moved. What moved. Someone screamed. Who screamed. Why is it off the edge of the frame.

Let trust decay in small, plausible steps

You can put a knife in someone’s hand and say, “This person is dangerous.” That is simple. What is harder, and more interesting to me, is to make the reader think, “This person might be dangerous, but I am not allowed to be sure.”

So the crew on Station 13 do not suddenly turn into monsters. They misspeak. They forget details. They tell stories that do not quite match the records. They insist they were in one place when the cameras show them somewhere else, or the cameras show nothing at all.

Each incident is survivable on its own. People are tired. Space is stressful. Everyone misremembers something sooner or later. The question that eats at Anna, and at the reader, is not “Did someone lie once.” It is “How many small inconsistencies do you ignore before you admit that you cannot trust anyone else on the station.”

Fear you cannot shoot comes from that slow, sick feeling that the people around you are becoming unreadable. You cannot put a bullet in “I no longer know what you are.”

Anchor the reader in procedure, then weaponize it

One of the fun parts of writing Station 13 was leaning into the procedural side of running a tiny outpost. Checks, logs, maintenance routines, power budgets, resource allotments. If you show enough of that up front, the station starts to feel real. It has rules. It has habits. It feels lived in.

Once all of that is established, you can twist it.

A routine safety check reveals something that should not be there. A scheduled communication window passes in silence. A standard diagnostic returns a result that is almost normal, but not quite. Procedure becomes a measuring tape for wrongness.

Anna is a commander, so her instinct is always to fall back on process. When she starts to see that the process itself is compromised, that the tools she uses to make decisions are no longer trustworthy, that is where her fear spikes. She is not just afraid of what is happening, she is afraid that she can no longer tell whether she is making the right call for her crew.

Again, there is nothing to shoot. The enemy is a pattern of failures.

Put the monster where no weapon can reach

In most fightable horror, the monster is out there. It is in the vents. It is in the sea. It is in the house across the street. You might lose, but at least you can charge at it.

Station 13 keeps asking a different question. What if the real battlefield is in your own mind.

If Anna is wrong, if she is imagining patterns where none exist, then every action she takes in defense of her crew might be the thing that destroys them. If she is right, and something is manipulating reality on the station, then her own thoughts and perceptions are already compromised.

That is a cruel place to put a character, and it is exactly why this story exists. You cannot shoot a monster if the monster is the way you think. You can only grit your teeth and keep trying to reason your way through, knowing that every new piece of evidence might be a trap.

The fear I wanted here is not “something is going to jump out at me,” it is “I might already be lost, and I will not know until it is too late.”

Why write horror like this at all

It would have been much easier to put teeth and claws on the problem. A physical intruder, a parasite, a clear infection. Those stories are valuable and fun and I enjoy them.

Station 13 exists because I keep circling the idea of tests and signals and unseen designers across all my books. The Shepherd Descends looks at what happens when an almost godlike intelligence shows up with a grading rubric for humanity. The Entropy Seed asks whether we were built to fail from the start. The Veiled Core Chronicles shows a society shaped around a dangerous memory that no one fully understands.

In all of those stories, the characters are trying to act inside systems they cannot see. Station 13 shrinks that idea down and turns it into a pressure cooker. One commander, four crew, a metal shell around them, something wrong in the data, and no monster she can point a weapon at.

Fear you cannot shoot is the kind that stays with me after I close the book. It is the kind that feels a lot like real life, where you cannot solve every problem by aiming at the right target. You are stuck making decisions with partial information, hoping your mind is giving you a fair picture of the world.

That is the terror on Station 13. Not just that something might be out there in the dark corridors, but that the person you rely on most, yourself, might not be telling you the truth.

If this kind of horror speaks to you, the kind where the monster might be hiding in the data and in your own doubts, then Station 13 is very much that story. And if you are a writer who enjoys pulling the floor out from under your characters, I hope some of these choices give you a few ideas the next time you want to build a fear no one can shoot.