Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  We spent most of that week riding British rail from one end of the country to the other and back again. Early on the trip, I half glimpsed an approaching stop—Wolverhampton—and suddenly had Warren Zevon howling in my head.

  Jon and I popped into a bookstore that afternoon to do a signing, and while I was there, I bought myself a notebook. The first draft of “Wolverton Station” was written over the five days that followed, scribbled longhand entirely on trains. Hogwarts could’ve gone by out the right-hand window and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  And where does the story end? In a lot of ways, I feel that thematically it closes at almost the exact place American Werewolf in London begins: the pub.

  Drinks on me, boys.

  BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

  Much as “Throttle” was written to honor Richard Matheson, “Silver Water” first appeared in Shadow Show, a collection assembled by editors Sam Weller and Mort Castle to celebrate Ray Bradbury. Theoretically it was inspired by “The Foghorn,” one of the better-known bits of Bradburiana. But (don’t tell Mort or Sam) the story is really my mom’s fault. Bradbury didn’t figure into it, not at first.

  I was raised in Maine, but my earliest memories are of the United Kingdom, in the months after my little brother, Owen, was born. My parents were shaggy hippies, and after Ford pardoned Nixon, they wanted to get the fuck out of the States, were sick of the place. I think my dad was also attracted by the idea of being an expatriate writer, like Hemingway or Dos Passos. So they shuffled us all off to a damp, dark little house outside London.

  I was a wee guy then and thrilled by the possibility of a dinosaur lurking in the depths of Loch Ness. I wouldn’t shut up about it. Finally my mother loaded my brother, my sister, and myself onto a train, and we went to Scotland. My dad stayed in London to collaborate with Peter Straub on drinking a case of beer.

  Only there were torrential the-end-is-nigh rains, and the roads to the ancient loch washed out. We got halfway there and had to turn back. And that is my first childhood memory—the rain sluicing across the windshield, a flood rushing crosswise across the blacktop, orange cones blocking our path. And later I remember the shiver of awe that rolled over me when I spotted the blackened Gothic spoke of the Walter Scott Monument, stabbing at the low, swollen clouds.

  Decades later—on the road with Jon Weir for that same Horns book tour—I glimpsed the Scott Monument and it all came rushing back to me, the whole futile quest to reach Loch Ness. How odd that even as a six-year-old, I was fixated on monsters.

  I mused on my memories of that attempted family trip to Loch Ness for days and by the end of the tour had come up with a story I was never going to write, about some kids finding Nessie’s washed-up corpse. I didn’t dare try it—I could do the kids, and I could do the beast, but I wasn’t sure I could write convincingly about Scotland.

  America has a few lake monsters of its own, however. The most famous is Champ, a plesiosaur rumored to paddle about Lake Champlain. At some point I came across an apparently true news item from the mid-1930s, about a ferry striking a half-submerged lake creature, colliding hard enough to damage the boat. In an instant I had an explanation for the death of the monster, and a way to transplant my story to the United States, where I felt I was on stronger footing as a writer. I already had a first draft when I was invited to contribute to Shadow Show, and so I seasoned it with a bit more Bradbury to show my appreciation for a writer whose work did so much to help me find my own voice.

  Sometimes life really is like a novel; the earlier scenes foreshadow what’s to come and certain motifs make regular appearances. A long time ago, in a different century, I spent a week with Tom Savini on the set of Creepshow and got my first inkling of what I might want to be when I grew up. Here in 2019, Creepshow is returning as a TV show on a streaming horror network by the name of Shudder. Tom Savini’s protégé, Greg Nicotero, is the driving creative force behind the show, and “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain” is one of the stories they decided to bring to life. And would you believe Savini himself is directing? Keep an eye out for it.

  FAUN

  This story, on the other hand, is a pretty conscious descendant of Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder.” In stories of Oz, Narnia, and Wonderland, the little door to topsy-turvy land is always discovered by a child who needs something: to learn the value of home, or to serve a cause bigger than herself, or to avoid creepy old fellas like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, what might happen if an enchanted portal were found by someone with a more mercantile heart and a lot less moral fiber.

  There’s a debt here to C. S. Lewis, but the tale also owes a lot to the work of Lawrence Block. Block has something of a knack for the savage final twist. When he asked me to contribute a story to an anthology he was putting together, At Home in the Dark, I knew I wanted to write something that would reflect his values and instincts. Hopefully “Faun” does. What a pleasure to have read and enjoyed Larry for so many years and to now get to trade e-mails with him!

  LATE RETURNS

  I hate the idea of dying when I’m only halfway through a book.

  ALL I CARE ABOUT IS YOU

  One of these days, I’ll learn how to write a story with a happy ending.

  I’ve written a lot in this collection about creative parents and the power of influence. Nietzsche had a fine saying, however: One repays a teacher badly by remaining always a student. “All I Care About Is You” is, I think, its own thing, with its own rhythms and ideas and emotional texture. It appeared in The Weight of Words, an anthology of stories inspired by the protean art of Dave McKean, but, as with “Silver Water,” I already had a draft before I was asked to jump in. Contributors were offered a selection of illustrations and asked to pick one and write a story about it. As it happened, though, there was a piece among them that looked as if it had been specifically crafted for “All I Care About Is You,” almost as if McKean knew what I was going to write before I wrote it. And maybe he did.

  I’m not entirely kidding. The best works of art have a tendency to fall through time differently than human beings. They remember, but they also anticipate. A good piece can mean different things to different people at different times, and all of those meanings are true, even if they contradict one another. McKean didn’t know what I was going to write and didn’t need to. His imagination knew what might be written, and that was enough.

  THUMBPRINT

  “Thumbprint” is the oldest story here. It was composed in 2006, after PS Publishing released their edition of 20th Century Ghosts but before the publication of Heart-Shaped Box. I was, at the time, dimly aware that I was in trouble. Professionally, things had never looked better, but psychologically, I was beginning to tussle with anxiety and the pressure to write another novel. I had already begun a couple of things that didn’t make it past page ten. Stories roared to life and were shot down before they took their first steps. “Thumbprint” was the only thing that made it through the enfilade, a nasty story about a hard, resilient woman who came back from Iraq with blood on her conscience, only to find herself stalked by an unseen hunter here in the States. In retrospect I guess Mal was tough enough to make it home from the sand and tough enough to carry me through this particular story. It was published in Postscripts in 2007. Later, comic-book writer Jason Ciaramella and artist Vic Malhotra adapted “Thumbprint” into a bare-knuckled graphic novel, heavy on the war, light on the peace.

  THE DEVIL ON THE STAIRCASE

  The first draft of the story was written in longhand while I was on a holiday in Positano. Because it was a vacation, I didn’t intend to be writing anything, since one conventional definition of a vacation is “a time in which you are not working.” Only I get restless when I don’t write. I don’t feel like myself anymore. A couple days into the trip, on a hike up one of the Amalfi coast’s vertiginous staircases, this idea popped into my head, and by next morning I was scratching away.

  That first draft looked like a
ny other story. But when I began typing up a second draft, the title looked like this, before I centered it:

  The Devil

  on the Staircase

  Which to my eye seemed like two steps leading downward. I remembered Malamud’s comment about form matching content and went to work rebuilding my flights of fancy into flights of stairs.

  Trivia for design buffs: The staircases work only when printed in a monotype such as Courier where every letter takes up exactly as much space as any other letter. Reprint my staircases of words in a font like Caslon or Fournier and they melt apart.

  TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD

  I made one mistake in this story. Back when I wrote it, it seemed reasonable to imagine that a kid facing the undead hordes would turn to social media for help. Truth is, though, here in 2019 it’s clearer than ever that social media won’t save us from zombies—it’s turning us into them.

  MUMS

  Sometimes I think the national crop is not wheat or corn but paranoia.

  IN THE TALL GRASS

  At the time of this writing, director Vincenzo Natali has just wrapped up a movie-length adaptation of this story for Netflix, and by the time Full Throttle is in bookstores, In the Tall Grass will most probably be available to stream in nearly 190 countries. That’s a pretty wild result for a short story that was written in . . . six days.

  Both here, and with “Throttle,” the experience of working with my father has been the same. Ever see one of those Road Runner cartoons? I always feel like Wile E. Coyote strapped to the rocket, and my dad is the missile. We came up with this story over flapjacks in an International House of Pancakes, on a week when we were both in between projects. We started writing the next morning. It was first published across two issues of Esquire.

  My brother, Owen, has also worked with our dad. They wrote a whole novel, Sleeping Beauties, a big, brawling, Dickensian story of wonder and suspense and ideas. That one comes across less like one rocket and more like a whole salvo of ballistic missiles. Check it out.

  YOU ARE RELEASED

  Did someone say something about launching the missiles?

  My dad has always been a nervous, white-knuckle flier, and in 2018 he jointly edited a collection of stories about terror in the high skies (his copilot was horror and fantasy critic Bev Vincent). I fly quite a bit myself—I enjoy it, although I didn’t always—and on one transatlantic trip I looked out my window and imagined the cloudscape suddenly punctured by dozens of rocket contrails. When my father asked if I wanted to contribute something to Flight or Fright, this idea was already well developed.

  “You Are Released” is, I suppose, my attempt to write a David Mitchell story. Mitchell is the author of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and over the last decade I’ve sort of fallen in love with his sentences—which float and dip and soar like kites—and with his gift for kaleidoscopic narratives that quickly shift from one time and place and perspective to another. I learned a lot about the business of being a pilot from a book called Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker, who is himself a bit David Mitchellian in tone. It was Vanhoenacker who drew attention to the rather poignant phrase “you are released,” which is what traffic control always says to an aircraft as it crosses out of their airspace.

  My thanks to retired airline pilot Bruce Black for talking me through proper procedure in the cockpit. His granular attention to detail made this a much better story. Usual caveat, however: any technical errors are mine and mine alone.

  This may be a peculiar thing to say about a story that concerns the end of the world, but I wanna thank Bev and my dad for giving me a reason to write this one—it made me happy.

  There wouldn’t be a Full Throttle if not for the support, generosity, and kindness of the editors who first published nine of the stories herein: Christopher Conlon, Bill Schafer, Sam Weller, Mort Castle, Lawrence Block, Peter Crowther, Christopher Golden, Tyler Cabot, David Granger, and Bev Vincent. Jennifer Brehl, my editor at William Morrow, read, edited, and greatly improved each of these stories. A story in these pages was specifically written for Jim Orr—I am grateful to him for allowing me to share it with a wider audience and should add that the story in question wouldn’t exist at all if not for Jim’s generous contribution to the Pixel Project, an organization dedicated to reducing violence against women (see: thepixelproject.net).

  Jen Brehl works with some of the best in publishing, many of whom went all out to craft and support the release of this book: Tavia Kowalchuk, Eliza Rosenberry, Rachel Meyers, William Ruoto, Alan Dingman, Aryana Hendrawan, Nate Lanman, and Suzanne Mitchell. Publisher Liate Stehlik makes it all happen. I am particularly grateful to copyeditor Maureen Sugden, who has unsnarled my grammatical catastrophes in every book, going all the way back to Heart-Shaped Box. I’m equally thankful for the team that works with Jen’s UK counterpart, editor Marcus Gipps. My thanks to them as well: Craig Leyenaar, Brendan Durkin, Paul Hussey, Paul Stark, Rabab Adams, Nick May, Jennifer McMenemy, and Virginia Woolstencroft—I owe you. The novelist Myke Cole looked over a couple stories here to make sure that when I wrote about guns I did so with a modicum of accuracy. If I fucked up, don’t blame him.

  I am so grateful to Vincenzo Natali for all his hard work to bring In the Tall Grass to the screen—and to Rand Holsten, who cut his way through the high weeds of Hollywood to make the deal happen in the first place. Thanks as well to Greg Nicotero and his team for including “Lake Champlain” in the first upcoming season of Creepshow.

  My friend Sean Daily has been my screen agent for about a decade now and has worked up a really silly number of film and TV deals on my behalf, for everything from eight-hundred-page novels to thousand-word blog posts. My thanks to him for representing the stories in this book.

  The oldest pieces in Full Throttle were agented by my longtime friend, the late Michael Choate. The more recent fiction has been shopped about by Laurel Choate, who keeps the business end of my life in good running order. My love and thanks to both.

  How much do I owe to all the booksellers who have said such kind things about my stories and done so much to connect my books with a wide audience? My deepest thanks to every bookslinger who finds joy in connecting readers with stories. Your work matters and is a pure good.

  And hey—how ’bout a little thanks for you, the reader? You could’ve been surfing Twitter, or staring at YouTube, or thumbing the shit out of a PlayStation controller, but you decided to read a book instead. I’m grateful to you for letting me share a little space in your head. I hope you had some fun. I’m already looking forward to next time.

  The happiness of my days is the result of a collaborative effort with some of the most thoughtful and loving people I know: my parents, my sister, my brother and his family. I especially want to thank my three sons, Ethan, Aidan, and Ryan, for their humor and kindness and for their patience with their often distracted father. Finally, my thanks to Gillian, for marrying me and letting me have a place in her life and at her side. I love you so much. When we’re together, I always feel like a king.

  Joe Hill

  Exeter, New Hampshire

  The Witching Season, 2018

  About the Author

  JOE HILL has written screenplays, novels, comics, and many short stories, including this one.

  A LITTLE SORROW

  A man named Atkinson—as lonely as a castaway and as empty as a cupboard—found his way to a dank curio shop at the end of a nameless alley. He asked the shopkeep if he had something for the pain.

  The shopkeep put his hand on a sickly child, with dark rings under his colorless eyes. “I can sell you a small persistent sorrow. Guaranteed for life, very little upkeep, and utterly faithful. This one has a faint odor of mothballs. Otherwise? Mint.”

  They soon agreed on a price, and Atkinson sank to one knee so the Little Sorrow could climb on his back, where it would remain for the rest of his natural life. The small child whispered that Atkinson was no good; his lif
e had been for nothing; his mother had felt disgust for him from the first moment Atkinson fastened onto her breast. The child told him this with great solemnity and quiet conviction.

  Atkinson staggered as he rose to his feet, felt a pinch in the small of his back, the weight already making him ache with fatigue. He inhaled deeply (a dizzying reek of mothballs) and let out a great sigh of effort—and relief.

  “Company at last,” he said, and he carried the whispering child out with him, feeling much lighter than when he had come in.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Joe Hill

  Strange Weather

  The Fireman

  NOS4A2

  Horns

  Heart-Shaped Box

  20th Century Ghosts (story collection)

  Graphic Novels

  Locke & Key, Volumes 1–6 (with Gabriel Rodríguez)

  Wraith (with Charles Paul Wilson III)

  Copyright

  These stories first appeared in the following publications: “Throttle,” He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, ed. Christopher Conlon (2009); “Wolverton Station,” Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, ed. William Schafer (2011); “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, ed. Mort Castle and Sam Weller (2012); “Faun,” At Home in the Dark, ed. Lawrence Block (2019); “All I Care About Is You,” The Weight of Words, ed. Dave McKean and William Schafer (2017); “Thumbprint,” Postscripts 10, ed. Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers (2007); “The Devil on the Staircase,” Stories, ed. Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio (2010); “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” The New Dead, ed. Christopher Golden (2010); “In the Tall Grass,” Esquire, June/July and August issues (2012); and “You Are Released,” Flight or Fright, ed. Stephen King and Bev Vincent (2018). “Dark Carousel” was first published as a vinyl original by HarperAudio (2018). “Late Returns” and “Mums” are original to this collection.