by Brian Hodge
Some days, though, I must confess … it all just looks like a cartful of crap.
Madame Babylon. Fortunately this fits the shopping cart paradigm to perfection, with all sorts of disparate items that had been tossed in over several years. On a cassette I’d once bought, I had noticed that the copyrights, presumably those of the female lead singer/songwriter, co-existed under the moniker “Tribal Whore Music.” Tribal Whore … I found the phrase evocative, so into the cart it went, and by the time it was later plucked out again, it came with the intent of transmuting the associations it conjured to an urban environment. Since things can get sticky in the cart (please don’t pursue this), a few other things had adhered to it: a college course I’d taken called Collective Political Violence; much time spent in Chicago; a guy whose drink I accidentally knocked over in a bar, who said his name was Skeeter, and let me live despite my assertion that his parents must’ve had a real sense of humor; a very naughty picture seen online; a passage from a nonfiction book, source forgotten, describing the fervent sexuality of cities in pre-Christian antiquity; even a line about fish sauce from a Discovery Channel documentary, also otherwise forgotten. I do try to waste nothing, even if I can’t pinpoint where it all comes from.
The 121st Day of Sodom. I really want to say that, for inspiration for a certain kind of tale, you just can’t beat the Marquis de Sade … but that’s so bad.
Empathy. I had the last couple lines of dialogue, warehoused in a notebook where all manner of such homeless fragments reside — my written equivalent of the Rudolph Christmas special’s Island of Misfit Toys — for years before there was anything to put them with. As for the context that finally emerged, my most sincere apologies to Sophocles and King Oedipus.
Cancer Causes Rats. It’s been right at ten years since this story first appeared, in the same anthology as John Shirley’s similarly themed “Jody and Annie on TV.” These two stories now strike me as rather prescient, each in its own way, when looking back over the decade that has followed since.
Appropriately enough, about midway between then and now, this story also mutated into musical form, with a song of the same name released as a 7-inch single by a sludgecore (their term, not mine) band called Thug. They attempted a nifty trick in the pressing of the vinyl whereby the turntable needle wouldn’t track into the runoff matrix, but instead remain locked into the final groove so that the word “mutation” would repeat for as long as it would take you to realize it was never going to stop on its own. Except, because of the tempo and the physical distance involved at that spot on the spinning disc, it wasn’t a smooth loop, with instead about two-and-a-half utterances before starting over, so it actually sounded more like … well, a broken record.
Some Other Me. While this marks this story’s first print publication, it was originally written for an audio anthology, so from the very outset I was thinking in terms of something that would flow well as a performance piece. It was read by actor John Glover, which was cool, although not as cool as having my Shock Rock story read by Joan Jett on its audio version. This is another one that’s the sum of very distinct parts. The jars came from something seen on The Discovery Channel — it might’ve been the Challenger Collection, so named for the nineteenth century British research vessel that sailed around the world collecting fauna and flora samples from the ocean. Mr. Cavanaugh evolved from an old gentleman I used to see from the window by my desk in the house where we lived at the time. Over the course of several months, just about every afternoon there would be this click of crutches along the street and there he’d be, his identity and destination as much a mystery now as then. Soon he melded in my mind with a neighbor of Doli’s from when she was a little girl growing up in Chicago, a rarely glimpsed entity that the kids called “the shadow.” Atmosphere courtesy of the stop-motion filmmakers the Brothers Quay, more or less.
Nesting Instincts. Another case of working backwards. The image of the nest-woman came first, and when she wouldn’t leave … well, that’s always a good sign, although rife with responsibility, since it meant I had to, very delicately, find out who she was and why, oh, why had she ever opted to participate in such a procedure.
Before the Last Snowflake Falls. I was about to say that this was the first time I’d ever written a story inspired by someone’s artwork, but after giving it some more thought, that’s not true. An earlier story, “Stick Around, It Gets Worse,” drew in part from a few Joel-Peter Witkin photographs. And a much earlier story, “Autobahn Eternal,” would never have been thunk up at all had it not been for Rodger Gerberding’s wonderfully grotesque illustration in The Horror Show accompanying another story which, until that moment, I hadn’t realized needed a sequel.
But this one marks the first time the artist came to me — Alan Clark, seeking contributors to his second anthology wherein writers were tasked with the challenge of coming up with stories worthy of accompanying his paintings. By the time I got around to wandering through the online gallery to lay claim to my piece, they were awfully picked over, which is just as well, since on first perusal I couldn’t narrow it down to fewer than four. Over the next few days I shuffled through JPEGs of the candidates, trying to settle on one. Irritably enough, I kept gravitating toward the only one of the four that was black-and-white, which seemed like it would be shortchanging myself, as Alan would be sending a print, and his colors are really vivid. (He shortly thereafter did a luscious color rendition, so things worked out fabulously.) The painting was of an unnerving fellow whom I described exactly as he appeared. “The Husk Man,” I’d thought of him almost at first glance, and the name stuck. The painting became a snapshot of the scene a few paragraphs from the end, when he’s looking back over his shoulder in stern warning. After I’d sent him the story, Alan told me that if he’d been given the story first, that would have been the moment he chose to illustrate. When you’re on the same wavelength like this, that’s when you know the magic is happening.
An Autumnal Equinox Folly. “One Story, Many Tales” — that was the tagline on M. Christian’s anthology of works based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The pay rate was a pittance and it took weeks to do, because the period approach to language and rhyme I wanted to use were so challenging … but just try keeping me out of something like that. My contribution ended up being a bit like “The Compleat Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” a modern play devised as a riotous head-on collision of the Bard’s works. This one derives not only from the obvious source, but also borrows from or bastardizes Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth, and as if those weren’t enough, references A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the Sex Pistols. Plus, common sense dictates that whenever you have the chance for a jab at Prince Charles, take it. This was originally done like a play in prose form, with a maximum of dialogue and the periodic narrative/stage directions written in rhyme, but for this appearance I’ve converted it totally into play format. I have no idea why I didn’t go ahead and do it that way in the first place, unless of course at the time I had the head of an ass too.
Confession. Like “In a Roadhouse Far, Past the Edge of Town,” from my first collection, The Convulsion Factory, this was initially written for a big fat Barnes & Noble book of 365 short-shorts, but turned down for being too vicious. Because confession cuts both ways here, I wrote it with Alanis Morissette in mind, because this was right when she first appeared with that screechy diatribe “You Oughta Know.” Not that I took offense at the song itself, just that oh dear god it was everywhere, for weeks and weeks, and I got really sick of not being able to get away from it. Hmm, what to do, what to do…? During the writing — it didn’t take long — I cued the CD player to endlessly repeat Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession,” which is about an obsessive fan, and not nearly so gratingly nasal. All of which must really be endearing me to the Lilith Fair demographic right about now.
Cenotaph. Let’s call this one a case of divine intervention. I accepted an invitation from Tom Roche to do a story for an anthology he was c
o-editing with Nancy Kilpatrick, to be titled Gargoyles, although by the time it came out it had accrued all sorts of superfluous words to become In the Shadow of the Gargoyle. Nobody could explain why. In publishing, things often happen without any clear explanation. But I digress.
When I’d said to count me in, it was with no more insight into what I might do other than the phrase “the Michelangelo of the gargoyles,” which had popped into my head. Then no more. Then I had a birthday, most of which in those days — before our move from Illinois to Colorado — were spent in St. Louis. Doli and I spent that early October afternoon at a Scottish festival held in the wilds west of the city, on the grounds of what had once been a monastery.
Under the dealers tent (really more of a giant tarp), we found a Green Man pendant shaped a bit like a blunt arrowhead with a leafy, sleepy-eyed face. I had to have it. Had to. There were other Green Men, but there was just something about this particular one. So Doli bought it, and wore it all day, then that evening at my precise birth-minute, as we stood beside a lake, she took it off and draped it over my head as a gift, where it remains to this day. After which we laid siege to food and ale at a favorite Welsh pub, Llewellyn & Gruffydd’s. Soon after, the story took off, and found itself finished on the evening of Samhain. So I credit the Green Man for this one. Although he didn’t spare me the trouble of needing eight or ten nonfiction books to get all the facts straight. The gods are funny that way.
And that Green Man pendant? I’ve since learned that it’s a copy of a relief known as the Florentine Man, carved by … wait for it … Michelangelo.
Far Flew the Boast of Him. Every now and again I appreciate the opportunity to take someone else’s character or mythos, and find out where lies our common ground. This was written for an anthology put together by Christopher Golden for Dark Horse Comics, themed around one of the more successful characters under their roof.
When Chris asked me to contribute, I was familiar with Mike Mignola’s creator-owned character Hellboy in name only, not in content. Chris described the books as a cross between H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, and … I forget the third reference. But it was enough to intrigue me, so Chris then had Dark Horse send me some freebies (a part of this job that I dearly love). And since I very much liked what I saw, that settled it.
There are a couple of superficial parallels between the saga of Hellboy and that of DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer, John Constantine. Both are investigators of the paranormal, and both can usually be found wearing a trench coat, but that’s about it. Constantine is a mortal man, whereas Hellboy … isn’t. He’s a big red guy with a prognathous jaw, one normal hand and one hand that’s huge and made of a substance no one can identify, a tail and hooves and sawn-off horn stumps, and some deep questions about his origins. Moreover, Mike Mignola often manages to work a considerable amount of folklore from Europe and the British Isles into the storylines, either as components or as inspiration.
Which happily motivated me to make an Anglo-Saxon revisitation of my own. The title was extracted from the first few dozen lines of Beowulf. Of the story itself, Chris thought it concluded on enough of an elegiac note that it would make a fitting closer to the anthology. Unfortunately, when it originally appeared, some twit in the production department had decided to dispense with all of the story’s sectional breaks, so that it read as one long run-on scene. Presented here, then, in its intended form…
[Update: Thanks to this story, a few years later I got to play with Hellboy again on a much grander scale. Following the success of Guillermo del Toro’s first Hellboy film, Mike Mignola licensed the rights for four original novels to Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books. Chris would be helming one, but they still needed people to dream up and materialize the other three. The short-list was comprised of writers who’d already demonstrated the greatest affinity for working within this world … and it turned out that “Far Flew the Boast of Him” is one of Mike’s favorites among other people’s uses of his character. It all made for a happy reunion, and I had free reign to do pretty much what I wanted. The book that came out of it is called Hellboy: On Earth As It Is In Hell.]
Now Day Was Fled As the Worm Had Wished. This was written on the heels of “Far Flew the Boast of Him” — two stories in a row whose titles were derived from lines in Beowulf. In spirit, though, it’s more of a companion piece to “Cenotaph,” just further indulgence of a terminal fascination with the icons and lore of pagan antiquity, and the ways in which, in special places, the worlds of then and now seem to overlap.
Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife To a Cheyenne Gallows. This is my first and so far only Western, which I find surprising considering how much I’ve always loved them, if mainly in cinematic form. I’ve especially had a jones for the anti-heroes played to such perfection by Clint Eastwood, ever since I was a boy and my father introduced me to the Sergio Leone westerns. So, when editor Jason Bovberg extended the invitation, I jumped at the chance to add another myth to the Old West, one that I eventually started thinking of as The Outlaw Josey Wales as filtered through the sensibilities of David Cronenberg, then transcribed to the page by Cormac McCarthy.
Try as I might, I can’t recall whence came the idea of the wound that’s so central to the story. For me, what remains most memorable about writing this is the research, which mainly consisted of studying a biography of Bloody Bill Anderson, who really did wage a vicious guerrilla campaign in Missouri during the Civil War. I read most of that bio at the bedside of my grandmother as she lay asleep and dying during the first few days of the year 2000. Coincidentally enough, in traveling east to be with her, I’d driven past the exit for Centralia, Missouri, the site of Bill’s most notorious massacre.
Driving the Last Spike. The thematic request was strictly geographical this time: my impressions of Southern California, which I always love visiting, but would never want to live there. A few months before writing this, I’d been in L.A. for several days, and had made my first trip to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, which leaves you feeling a renewed awareness of how the entire city is built over the bones of the largest land mammals that ever lived. I’d found myself mesmerized, in a car wreck sort of way, by the proprietor of a vintage shop, whom I couldn’t resist transplanting for one scene. And this was also three months or so before we made our move to Colorado, so the implications of westward expansion were heavy on my mind.
An odd coincidence about this story is that I wrote it around a year, give or take, before catching the indie film Swimming With Sharks on Cinemax. Not only does it too feature a movie producer (played to venomous perfection by Kevin Spacey) held captive by his disgruntled assistant, but their last names are the same. Buddy Ackerman, Skip Ackerman … long-lost brothers, or more proof that ideas are tangible entities floating around waiting to be grabbed by anyone?
Little Holocausts. Sometimes all it takes is one single, powerful sight to open the doorway to something that wants to come through and have its say. In this instance, Doli and I had traveled through hours of cold autumn rain to spend a weekend with a houseful of friends at author Yvonne Navarro’s place in the Chicago hinterlands. As soon as we arrived, we learned that the long-time partner of one of the friends we’d expected to be there had died the night before of AIDS complications. So, wet and chilled and hungry, we poured mugs of soup to go and went back out into the rain with everyone else to visit the funeral home. I’d not yet met the man who died, and wouldn’t have recognized him from a picture I saw, he’d changed so. After the visitation, several of us went to the apartment he’d shared with our friend — the home where he had died — and we ate and drank and laughed and told stories, the way you do at these times. You laugh a lot, more than you think is possible. At one point I walked into the empty kitchen for another Heineken and noticed a box of adult diapers, no longer needed, waiting to go out to the trash. In its many connotations, that sight was just the most heartbreaking thing. This entire story came out of that moment — that, and the climate of intolerance we li
ve in that never quite seems to go away.
Dead Giveaway. This was my very first anthology sale, to the landmark Book of the Dead. Until that point, my only publishing credits were a few small press stories and a couple of novels on the way. But when I read somewhere that the duo of John Skipp and Craig Spector were editing an anthology of stories set in the world of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, I wanted so badly to be a part of it that I probably would’ve killed anyone they wanted. Fortunately, we had the same agent at the time, so I had her intercede and ask if I could send something their way for consideration. They said no, and that was the end of it.
Actually, it was worse than that. They said sure, which meant I then had to write something that I would have the cheeky nerve to believe might earn a place alongside the work of Stephen King and Robert R. McCammon and David Schow and others I’d heard were involved. At which point the challenge became how to stand out. I gambled — correctly, as it turned out — that most everyone else was going to be contributing grim stories that were as dark as the original film; that in short supply was going to be the comedic, satirical slant that characterized much of Romero’s follow-up film, Dawn of the Dead.
Months passed without a verdict, and finally, that autumn, I was attending my first convention. At a mass autographing in a ballroom, I stood in line at a table to have John Skipp sign my copy of The Light at the End. But first, I introduced myself and asked about the story, a stimulus that triggered John to drop his pen and leap to his feet and come surging across the tabletop to hug me or shake my hand, I forget which. Probably hug. He’s one of the most demonstrative humans on earth.
“We didn’t tell you?” he cried. No — no, I probably would’ve remembered a thing like that. He concluded that, for months, he and Craig each assumed the other had taken care of informing me that they were accepting the story. Later that weekend, Craig introduced me to one of their editors at Bantam as “our comic relief.”