Psychomania: Killer Stories

by Stephen Jones

  He began his career in the late-1970s as an advertising copywriter and writer for stand-up comedians. At twenty, he became the youngest writer ever signed to an overall deal with Universal Studios and was made story editor of the critically acclaimed Quincy M.E. He also wrote and co-wrote scores of episodes for The Incredible Hulk, Battlestar Galactica, Simon and Simon, Amazing Stories, The A-Team and many others. After leaving Universal, he worked as head writer and producer for comedy and dramatic series at every studio in Hollywood.

  Matheson moved quickly into feature-film writing, working with Steven Spielberg on Harry and the Hendersons and Three O’Clock High, a spec feature script he co-wrote that Spielberg bought. To date, he has written, co-written and sold over twelve spec screenplays - considered a record. He has also scripted a number of TV mini-series, and adapted the double Emmy Award-winning “Battleground” episode for Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes, along with three episodes of Masters of Horror.

  Matheson wrote and created Splatter, a web-based horror project for Roger Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and the web-series Shockers, which Matheson also directed. He recently adapted H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine as a four-hour mini-series for TNT.

  Matheson is considered a master of the short-short story and has published more than seventy stories of psychological horror in magazines and major anthologies. Thirty of his critically acclaimed stories are collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, with a Foreword by Stephen King and an Introduction by Dennis Etchison. His second collection, Dystopia, gathers sixty stories with an Introduction by Richard Matheson and an Afterword by Peter Straub. The volume also includes tributes to the author’s writing from Clive Barker, Ellen Datlow, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell and many others. Matheson’s debut novel, Created By, was a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and his magic-realism novella The Ritual of Illusion is available from PS Publishing.

  He has worked as a paranormal investigator with the UCLA Department of Parapsychology on numerous cases, including the notorious house upon which the 1982 movie The Entity was based. He is also a professional drummer and studied with legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker. Matheson has played with The Smithereens, Existers and Rock Bottom Remainders. His latest band, As Above So Below, was founded with guitarist and best-selling novelist p.g. sturges.

  About “Kriss Kross Applesauce”, the author recalls how, “As the Yule nears, annual ‘family’ letters, high-beaming chipper updates, arrive in my mailbox from people I have failed to dodge, barely know or can’t believe I’m related to; a blur of miscellany and pep, blaring with exclamation marks and numbing detail. No narcotic can match their effect.

  “Psychiatrists suggest madness is defined less by what the insane do and more by why. A short list would include chronic punning, bowties and cannibalism. A complete one would include holiday letters.”

  ~ * ~

  PAUL McAULEY is a former researcher turned full-time writer who lives in North London. He has published nineteen crime and science fiction novels, including Fairyland, which won the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards, Mind’s Eye, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. His latest novel is Evening’s Empires.

  McAuley has also published more than eighty short stories, winning the British Fantasy Society award for “The Temptation of Doctor Stein”, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for “The Choice”.

  “This story about a science fiction fan who takes everything far too literally was written for a psychological horror anthology,” he explains, “and is set in a town that has a passing resemblance to the Cotswold town where I spent most of my childhood.

  “Things are always worse in reality than in fiction - even horror fiction. The last time I visited the place, a drive-through McDonald’s had sprung up next to the bus station.”

  ~ * ~

  MICHAEL MARSHALL is the author of six international best-selling thrillers, including The Straw Men series, The Intruders and Killer Move. His most recent novel, We Are Here, was published in the UK in 2013.

  Writing as Michael Marshall Smith, he has also produced more than seventy short stories and three novels - Only Forward, Spares and One of Us - winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth Awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has been awarded the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction a total of four times, more than any other writer.

  Recent projects include a new story collection entitled Everything You Need, a 10th Anniversary Edition of The Straw Men, and his next novel. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and son.

  “‘Failure’ is a first for me,” reveals the author. “Though I’ve written a lot of short stories in my time - and began my career with them, as have so many writers - I’d never written one as Michael Marshall before. All I can say is that I found the process different, but not so very different. The two Michaels have always been sides of the same coin.

  “This story is set very close to where I now live, Santa Cruz in Northern California. It’s an addition to the Straw Men mythos, but it’s also about being a parent. Writing the story actually helped me realize that’s what the Straw Men books have always been most fundamentally about, in fact - the struggles involved in trying to tame and civilize the childish mind, how hard it is to succeed, and the potentially huge cost of failure when you don’t.

  “Children invade your life. They take over. I’ve heard it wisely said that you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest kid, and that’s very true. But it’s perhaps also the case that you’re only ever as safe as your least cunning child, and that’s what someone discovers in this story.”

  ~ * ~

  MARK MORRIS is the author of over twenty novels, among which are Toady, Stitch, The Immaculate, The Secret of Anatomy, Fiddleback, The Deluge, and four books in the popular Doctor Who tie-in range. His short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of both Cinema Macabre, a book of horror-movie essays by genre luminaries for which he won the 2007 British Fantasy Award, and its follow-up Cinema Futura.

  His recently published work includes the official tie-in novel for zombie apocalypse computer game Dead Island, a novelization of the 1971 Hammer movie Vampire Circus, several Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish Productions, a short story collection entitled Long Shadows, Nightmare Light, and The Wolves of London, book one of the “Obsidian Heart” trilogy from Titan Books.

  “Part of the reason why I write is to try to understand how people think and feel,” explains Morris, “particularly those whose values and opinions differ wildly from my own.

  “Like many people, I’m both repelled and fascinated by the psychopathic mind - by why certain people are driven to kill, and particularly by the reasons why they lack compassion for, and empathy with, their fellow human beings.

  “Lone psychopaths are frightening enough, but what I have always found most horrifying are male/female couples, such as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and Fred and Rose West, who hunt, torture and murder their victims together.

  “Repellent though the subject is, I have always wanted to write about such a couple, and so when the chance to contribute to this book came along, I jumped at it - and oddly the idea for ‘Essence’ leaped instantly and completely into my head, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity for years.”

  ~ * ~

  LISA MORTON lives in North Hollywood, California. She is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”.

  Her feature-film credits include the cult favourite Meet the Hollowheads, the vampire film Blood Angels, and the mutant-shark thriller Blue Demon.

  She is a four-times recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for horror writing, and her 2012 rele
ase, Trick or Treat?:A History of Halloween, won the Grand Prize at the Halloween Book Festival.

  Her most recent books include the novel Malediction and the novella Summer’s End.

  About “Hollywood Hannah”, she will say only that certain parts of it might be autobiographical... but she won’t say which parts.

  ~ * ~

  KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club, all under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

  His non-fiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.

  He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (supplying the latter’s popular “Video Dungeon” column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries.

  Newman’s stories “Week Woman” and “Ubermensch!” were both adapted into episodes of the TV series The Hunger, and the latter tale was also turned into an Australian short film in 2009. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote an episode (“Phish Phood”) for BBC Radio 7’s series The Man in Black, and he was a main contributor to the 2012 stage play The Hallowe’en Sessions. He has also directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl.

  The author’s most recent books include expanded reissues of his acclaimed Anno Dracula series and the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the D’Urbervilles (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

  As the author points out: “I should say that I don’t subscribe entirely to the vision of Alfred Hitchcock as a sex pest/perv set out by the play Hitchcock Blonde and the films Hitchcock and The Girl; he seemed always - and especially in the years of Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and Mamie - to be more obsessed with his work (and his reputation) than his leading ladies.

  “Obviously, Psycho, the subject, resonated with Hitch first of all, and then with audiences world-wide, because of the major relationship in Robert Bloch’s novel and Ed Gein’s life, between the murderer and his mother.

  “I first saw Psycho when the BBC broadcast it as part of a season of archetypal American films (along with The Music Man) over the Bicentennial 4 July weekend in 1977 - a witty piece of scheduling that Hitch would have loved.”

  ~ * ~

  REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorized biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and six collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the fifth, Mrs Midnight (Tartarus Press), won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011 and was nominated for two other awards.

  Tartarus has also reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, in new editions with new illustrations by the author, as well as his most recent collection, Flowers of the Sea. His novel The Dracula Papers I — The Scholar’s Tale (Chomu Press) - is the first of a projected four.

  An omnibus edition of Oliver’s stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its “Masters of the Weird Tale” series, and his stories have appeared in more than fifty anthologies, including several in the “Mammoth” stable.

  “It was the editor who suggested a late-nineteenth-century Paris setting for ‘The Green Hour’,” reveals the author, “and the idea immediately appealed to me. I love the literature of the period, and some of my most successful theatre writings have been adaptations from the French of plays by, among others, Maupassant, Feydeau and Hennequin.

  “All three of them died insane as a consequence of syphilis, a tragic illness for which in the nineteenth century there was no known cure. From that morbid thought came many others, and who better to find his way through the dark labyrinth I had made of them than Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal Auguste Dupin?”

  ~ * ~

  EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49) has been described as “the father of modern horror” (as well as scientific and detective fiction). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the death of his mother and the desertion of his father resulted in Poe, aged three, being made the ward of a Virginia merchant who later disowned him.

  In 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who died prematurely of tuberculosis eleven years later. Suffering from bouts of depression and alcoholism, Poe attempted suicide in 1848 and, the following year, he vanished for three days before inexplicably turning up in a delirious condition in Baltimore, where he died a few days later.

  Poe published a volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827, and his first short story, “Metzengerstein”, appeared in 1832. His tales of madness and premature burial never gained him wealth or recognition during his lifetime, but among his best stories and poems are “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Black Cat”, “The Premature Burial”, “The Raven” and, of course, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which is included in this volume.

  Originally published in The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine in 1843, the author’s classic tale of creeping madness has been adapted for film, television and radio on numerous occasions, most notably on screen in 1941 (as an MGM short directed by Jules Dassin), 1953 (an animated version narrated by James Mason), 1960 (as a feature starring Laurence Payne and Adrienne Corri) and in 2012 (featuring Peter Bogdanovich as the Old Man). However, none of these dramatizations can match the intensity of Poe’s original short story.

  ~ * ~

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT had to re-sit his psychiatry exams at medical school. This both helped confirm his chosen career as a surgeon, and gave him more experience to draw on when he was asked to write the wraparound story and linking segments contained within this volume.

  The author’s stories have been collected in the award-winning The Faculty of Terror, Coffin Nails, The Catacombs of Fear, Against the Darkness and Wicked Delights, while his latest books are The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine (Spectral Press), which is a tribute to the classic Vincent Price horror films he grew up watching, and Differently There (Gray Friar Press), a novella inspired by his own recent experiences at the other end of the scalpel-blade.

  “The relationship between medicine and the media has always been quite shaky,” explains Probert, “and so what better forum to explore that in than an Amicus movie-style framework story?

  “I’ve always admired Robert Bloch’s ability to present quite an acerbic world view in his stories, but at the same time make them very entertaining for the reader who wanted nothing more than that. It has therefore been a pleasure to be allowed to try and emulate the kind of framing device Bloch himself used in the 1972 Amicus film Asylum.

  “So, presented here for your delectation, and for you to think about a little more if you so wish, is my imaginary encounter between a journalist and a psychiatrist - either or both of whom might not be who they claim.”

  ~ * ~

  JAY RUSSELL is the pseudonym of a writer born in New York, aged in Los Angeles, and currently living in London with his wife and two daughters.

  “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Shushie” is the latest adventure in the fantastical/comic life of reluctant supernatural detective Marty Burns, who also stars in a handful of cleverly titled short stories and the novels Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright and Greed & Stuff. Russell’s other books include Blood, Brown Harvest (a World Fantasy Award nominee for Best Novel), The Twilight Zone novelization Memphis/The Pool Guy, and the short story collection Waltzes and W
hispers.

  The author claims that his lack of literary productivity is a consequence of having lost his lucky “Balso Snell” autograph model fountain pen down the back of a sofa in 2004. He borrowed Kim Newman’s to write the present tale, about which he notes: “Marty Burns is back! Hullo? Anyone there? Testing, testing ... is this thing on?”

  He goes on to add: “The real psychos I’ve met in my life don’t wield knives or axes or have secret torture chambers with industrial-sized rolls of cling-film. They’re people who give you no clue about their mania (s) until it’s too late. Which is also the definition of ex-wives/husbands, I suppose. Marty has several ex-wives, and Shushie is the sanest of them. So look out.

  “This is also the latest in an absurdly occasional series of short Marty tales riffing on movie titles/themes. The editor has done everything humanly possible to pry more out of me. I can only pray he never gives up ...”

  ~ * ~

  DAVID J. SCHOW is a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter (teleplays and features), columnist, essayist, editor, photographer and winner of the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild awards (for short fiction and non-fiction, respectively).