“Nothing mysterious about it: when I’d known them they were young and they’d gone off to begin careers, to get married, to discover themselves. Now, eight, nine, ten years later they were going through transition. Marriages dissolved, career changes, youthful escapades having palled on them, they were returning to the scenes of happier times. And they were getting back in touch with those they knew in those brighter days.
“But with the mind of the fantasist I made the leap into a fictional construct: what if some guy found his life being run in reverse but only in terms of the women he’d known?
“And that meant something ominous had to be at the end of the chain.”
~ * ~
DENNIS ETCHISON is a three-times winner of both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. His short story collections are The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts and Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories.
He is also the author of the novels Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic, Double Edge, The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III and Videodrorne, and editor of the anthologies Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I—III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and (with Ramsey Campbell and Jack Dann) Gathering the Bones.
He has written extensively for film, television and radio, including hundreds of scripts for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, Fangoria Magazine’s Dreadtime Stories and Christopher Lee’s Mystery Theater.
His next book is a much-anticipated collection of new stories.
“When I wrote ‘Got to Kill Them All’,” Etchison explains, “the latest American success story was the triumphant return of big-money quiz shows to prime-time network television. Such shows had been enormously successful in the 1950s,until a Congressional investigation revealed that some of them were fixed. It turned out that certain contestants, including the scholar Charles Van Doren, were provided with answers in advance to manipulate the outcome and guarantee ratings; when the scandal broke careers were ruined and such programmes quickly disappeared from the broadcast schedule.
“Eventually smaller, less serious game shows reappeared on daytime and syndicated TV, emphasizing humour and celebrity guests, but allegedly serious, intellectually challenging quiz shows remained lost to history for more than forty years.
“The first of the new wave of retro quiz shows was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? An American version of the British original, it debuted without fanfare as a low-budget, limited-run replacement series on ABC TV. It became an unexpected hit, scoring such phenomenal ratings that it soon began airing several nights a week, opposite copycat shows on other networks, including a revived version of the infamous Twenty-One, another UK transplant called The Weakest Link, and even one simply and shamelessly entitled Greed.
“At around the same time (February 2000), one could not help but notice that millions of American children had caught Pokemon fever. The word is the name of a game, derived from a wildly popular Japanese anime series, involving trading cards that picture hundreds of cartoon ‘pocket monsters’. One of the characters is a boy whose job it is to protect the world by tracking down these monsters and containing them safely in his pocket. His motto, the signature phrase of the Pokemon universe, is ‘Got to catch them all!’
“It did not require much imagination to speculate that some shrewd, enterprising producer might attempt to combine these two hot trends and reach an even larger audience. Replacing the word ‘catch’ with ‘kill’ seemed obvious for the story’s title, even reflexive to a horror writer. And what would the show be called? Well, green is the colour of American money, which is after all what commercial television is really about...”
~ * ~
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER is the multi-award-winning author of more than thirty novels and twelve short story collections, including Roofworld, Spanky, Disturbia, Paperboy and Hell Train. He has also written eleven “Bryant & May” mystery novels so far, the latest being Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart. These follow the adventures of two elderly detectives who investigate impossible crimes in London. The cases are filled with dark humour and often gory, bizarre deaths.
PS recently published Red Gloves, a collection of twenty-five new horror stories by the author to mark a quarter-century in print, and he scripted the War of the Worlds video game featuring Sir Patrick Stewart. He currently writes a column in the Independent on Sunday and reviews for the Financial Times, and his latest books are Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Vanished, the graphic novel The Casebook of Bryant & May, the sinister comedy-thriller Plastic, and a memoir, Film Freak.
“The great thing about writing the Bryant & May stories,” explains Fowler, “is that they adapt so easily to any format. I can take them into black comedy and to the edge of the supernatural, or I can take them somewhere much darker.
‘“Bryant & May and the Seven Points’ came from a dark place - London’s Camden Town, actually, where an exhibition of rare original carnival sideshow acts filled the Roundhouse last year. They were terrifically creepy, and I’ve always loved films about them, so, having also seen The Funhouse, Freaks, The Mutations and the forgotten 1973 horror film Sssssss! (strapline: ‘Don’t say it, hiss it!’), I couldn’t resist putting my elderly detectives into a situation where no one would be surprised to meet a psychopath ...”
~ * ~
NEIL GAIMAN is the most critically acclaimed British graphic novel writer of his generation. He co-wrote the best-selling novel Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), is the author of Neverwhere and American Gods, and became the first person ever to win the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal for the same children’s novel, The Graveyard Book, which spent more than fifty-two consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book has also won the Hugo Award, the Booktrust Award and many others.
For the movies, Gaiman co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were both based on his novels. He wrote and directed Statuesque, a short film starring his wife, singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, and his second episode of BBC TV’s Doctor Who, “The Last Cyberman”, was broadcast in 2013.
Recent projects include Chu’s Day (illustrated by Adam Rex for small children), Unnatural Creatures (an anthology), Make Good Art (a speech, now designed by Chip Kidd), The Ocean at the End of the Lane (a novel for adults) and Fortunately, The Milk (a very silly book for kids and dads, illustrated by Chris Riddell in the UK and Skottie Young in the US).
‘“Feminine Endings’ was written for a book of love letters,” explains Gaiman.
“In my head it is set in Krakow, in Poland, where the human statues stand, but it could be anywhere that tourists go and people stand still.
“Readers have assumed that the person writing the letter is male, and they have assumed the person writing the letter is female. I have been unable to shed any light on the matter.
“There is an odd magic to writing love letters, I suspect, even if they are scary-strange fictional love letters. Shortly after I wrote this story I met and, eventually, fell in love with a former human statue, and have been trying to tease out the cause and effect ever since - and, of course, whether or not I should be worried ...”
~ * ~
BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written more than 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, and five full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.
Recent or forthcoming works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both standalone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic, and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.
Hodge lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photograph
y; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels, and trains in Krav Maga, grappling and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Of “Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella”, he says: “There’s something creepy about people who are so relentlessly upbeat and cheerful that they wear this persona like a shiny suit of armour. You just know something’s going to blow eventually.
“I’ve always felt that to be an emotionally healthy, psychologically integrated person, you need to go through the dark times, the down days, without any filters in the way. Contemporary western society, particularly here in the USA, has developed a widespread aversion to this. Which no doubt explains the title alone of a 2011 entry from Harvard Medical School’s Health Publications: ‘Astounding Increase in Antidepressant Use by Americans’. This, while the multi-billion-dollar positivity industry preaches an end goal of 24/7 bliss, with strong implications that the failure to lock it down is a defect that needs to be fixed.
“So I felt like doing a piece that carries this ethos to its extreme.
“And just to show me that the story was intent on having the last laugh, its final word count clocked in at 5,150: California’s law enforcement code for an involuntary psychiatric hold.”
~ * ~
MICHAEL KELLY has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Society Award. His fiction has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 21, Supernatural Tales, PostScripts, Tesseracts 13 and 16, and has been collected in Scratching the Surface and Undertow & Other Laments.
He also publishes and edits Shadows & Tall Trees, and is series editor for the Chilling Tales anthology series (EDGE Publications). More fiction is forthcoming in Black Static and The Grimscribe’s Puppets, and his latest book as editor is Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I.
‘“The Beach’ is another of my tales that examines how our childhood experiences, good and bad, help shape us into the people we become,” reveals Kelly. “I was struck by a vision of a desolate beach that stayed with me for days. Once I had the setting, the story fell quickly into place. As well, I’ve long been fascinated with the giant monoliths on Easter Island, and I saw an opportunity to incorporate that into the tale.
“You truly can’t bury your past.”
~ * ~
JOEL LANE lives in Birmingham, England. His publications in the weird fiction genre include four short story collections, The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes and Where Furnaces Burn - the latter a book of supernatural crime stories set in the West Midlands - as well as a novella, The Witnesses Are Gone. His short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Gutshot, The End of the Line, Evermore, Gathering the Bones and two “Mammoth” series: Best New Horror and Best British Crime. A booklet of his short crime stories, Do Not Pass Go, was published in 2011.
As the author observes: ‘“The Long Shift’ stems from my long experience of the ‘scientific management’ culture that swept the corporate world in the 1990s. Managers are supposed to identify with their firm - which means they take on its sickest aspects as personal values. We should not assume that psychopaths are always social outsiders: in business, a psychopath might be considered a prime corporate asset, and end up on the New Year’s honours list.”
~ * ~
JOE R. LANSDALE lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen. He is the author of more than thirty novels and twenty short story collections, with over 200 short stories, articles, essays and stage plays to his credit.
Best known for his popular “Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” series of mystery novels (including Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Captains Outrageous and Devil Red) and the “Drive-In” horror series (The Drive-In: A “B”Movie with Blood and Popcorn Made in Texas, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, The Drive-In: A Double-Feature and The Drive-In: The Bus Tour), his other novels include Act of Love, Dead in the West, Magic Wagon, The Nightrunners, Tarzan: The Lost Adventure, The Bottoms, Zeppelins West, All the Earth Thrown to the Sky and Edge of DarkWater.
His short stories are collected in By Bizarre Hands, Bestsellers Guaranteed, Writers of the Purple Rage, High Cotton, Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories, God of the Razor and Other Stories and Deadman’s Road, and he has edited numerous anthologies, including Razored Saddles (with Pat Lobrutto), Dark at Heart (with Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, Retro-Pulp Tales, Lords of the Razor, Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard and Crucified Dreams.
Lansdale has also written numerous comic books, graphic novels and animated TV series, his novella Bubba Ho-Tep was made into a cult favourite movie by director Don Coscarelli in 2002, and his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was filmed for Showtime Network’s Masters of Horror series. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the British Fantasy Award, the Edgar for Best Crime novel, eight HWA Bram Stoker Awards, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writers’ Award, the Sugarpulp Prize for Grand Master of Crime Fiction, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Crime fiction, the Critics’ Choice Award, a New York Times Notable Book Award and the Grand Master award from the Horror Writers Association.
“The psychology of these kinds of humans has always intrigued and frightened me,” Lansdale reveals. “What is it that makes them see the world in such a different and shaded light, and what is it about them that ties sexual passion and violence together? I don’t have the answers, but the thing that disturbs me most is the certain truth that like all of us they have many of the same needs and concerns, and can seem so much like the rest of us, while in other ways being as alien as a being from a faraway galaxy that might look upon us as nothing more than things to be manipulated and used for perverse pleasure.”
~ * ~
BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H. P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own highly enthusiastic fan following for his world-wide best-selling series of “Necroscope”“ vampire books.
Born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast, Lumley joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and served in the Corps of Royal Military Police for twenty-two years, until his retirement in December 1980.
After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early-1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential “Cthulhu Mythos”. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel Beneath the Moors.
Upon leaving the Army, Lumley began writing full-time, and in 1984 he completed his breakthrough novel, Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh, a psychically endowed hero for the Great Majority - the teeming dead - with whom he is able to communicate as easily as with the living.
Necroscope® has now grown to sixteen big volumes, published in fourteen countries and many millions of copies. In addition, Necroscope® comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines and, in Germany, a series of audio books, have been created from the series. Moreover, the original story has been regularly optioned for movies.
Lumley is also the author of more than forty other titles. He is the winner of a British Fantasy Award, a Fear Magazine Award, a Lovecraft Film Festival Association “Howie”, the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The author’s most recent books include a new collection of non-Lovecraftian horror stories, No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, from Subterranean Press, and he has also completed a new Necroscope® novella for the same publisher.
“Back in 1974,” recalls Lumley, “when I wrote the story in this volume, I was still writing very much under the influence of H. P. Lovecr
aft. In addition to which, fancying myself as something of a limner in Indian inks, I was also much taken with the work of the weird and macabre artists (as this story will no doubt, er, ‘illustrate’?) - the old, the new, and the upcoming, from Hieronymus Bosch down to Virgil Finlay and Lee Browne Coye, and further yet through Stephen Fabian and Dave Carson - not to mention the unmentionable Richard Upton Pickman.
“And so in 1965, having laid down the pencil and taken up the pen (at the urging of none other than Michael Moorcock, then editor of the British reprint Tarzan comic to whom I had sent some comic strips, who told me as gently as possible my scripts were way superior to my artwork), I suppose it was inevitable that I should write ‘The Man Who Photographed Beardsley’.
“Any reader not already acquainted with Aubrey Beardsley’s marvellous black-and-whites, do yourself a favour and get on down to the library; that way you’ll also have a much better understanding of the story.”
~ * ~
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON is a novelist, short story writer and screenwriter/producer. He is also the president of Matheson Entertainment, a production company he formed with his father, famed author Richard Matheson, which is involved with multiple film and television projects.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 62