Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  An Introduction to Grave Markings: Tenth Anniversary Edition (2004)

  by Michael Arnzen

  This book is nuts.

  And I’m proud of that. There are lots of things in Grave Markings that require you, the reader, to install heavy duty disbelief suspenders into your incredulity machine. This is a sort of tall tale disguised as a gritty noir thriller. As you read it, you’ll have to work hard to forget everything you know about the standard methods of police procedure, you’ll have to duct tape the mouth of that realist inside of you when he starts wondering just how long it takes to make a full-body tattoo, and you’ll just have to trust me when it comes to the resiliency of the human abdomen or the tensile strength of skin. You’ll also have to put on your “rookie writer” reading glasses and overlook the passive voice, the adverbs, the expository “telling” when I should be “showing.” But if you’re willing to give this nutty novel the benefit of the doubt, you’re in for a hell of a treat because it’s about to “show” you quite a bit more than you probably expect.

  In my favorite cover blurb of all time, the late Karl Edward Wagner once called this book “a high speed chase into madness.” And since this is, above all else, a biker book, you’re essentially climbing on the back seat of this hog and need to realize that I’ll be standing on the handlebars and using my feet to steer.

  This book is nuts, indeed. It goes over the top. But I’m proud of the risks I took when I wrote it and tried to get it published ten years ago. It’s a first novel, and I apologize for the moments where it shows, but as you read along I hope you’ll be on the lookout for all the chances I took along the way. For when I reflect on this novel, I think of how risky it was and how I strove to write something that I wished others were doing at the time, but weren’t, and in many cases still aren’t.

  Every writer takes a risk when they decide to commit X number of months or years to composing a novel, since they never know if they’ll finish it, they never know if they’ll publish it, they never know if it’ll be any good. So just trying to write something longer than 5,000 words was a big risk for me at the time I wrote it—and since it was an unfamiliar process, I had to force myself to treat every chapter like a short story in order to intuitively guess my way through the plot structure. I wrote in a caffeinated frenzy, deathly afraid at every turn that I might bore the reader, as so many other novels I’d read had bored me. So I went gonzo, I went over the top, I went for the throat. I erred on the side of outrageous. The thrill of doing something original and truly horrifying drove me through to the end. And in my opinion, the imaginative risks that I took in creating Grave Markings are what won it the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Critic’s Guild Award in 1995, in addition to so many positive reviews.

  I also took professional risks when I was getting started, which added a hell of a lot of luck into the mix. I threw market research to the wind and simply shoved the manuscript in a box and sent it almost blindly to the publisher I thought had the coolest book covers. It landed on the desk of Dell/Abyss and I was very lucky to get a call two months later, expressing interest in the novel. Abyss, with its Nietzschean focus on the “monster in the mirror,” wound up becoming the publisher of some of the most remarkable paperback originals of horror in the 1990s, and featured other first novelists at the time like Poppy Z. Brite, Kathe Koja, Tim Lucas, and Robert Devereaux, among other horror greats like Dennis Etchison, Elizabeth Engstrom, Michael Moorcock, Kelley Wilde, David Silva, and so many others I can’t fit in this paragraph. That’s a group I’m proud to be associated with. And the fact that this book is coming out in a special collectable edition now, a decade later, says a lot.

  I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, because when I recently edited this book (salvaging files first generated on a dedicated “word processor” during a time when IBM 386’s were “hot” and well beyond my budget), I noticed flaws everywhere. Rookie mistakes that I would never make now, having read ten years’ worth of horror novels and studying literature for just as long. Back then, I was a senior in college, still learning the basics of storytelling but was just cocky enough to think I knew it all. Today, I’m a Professor of English teaching graduate level creative writing. The students in my classes are just like I was back then, but all I know now is how little I can and ever will really know.

  It was tempting to rewrite much of the novel. But I didn’t dare. To mess with the style would be like inking one tattoo over another. And that can fuck a good thing up. People tell me the story is good, the writing is imaginative and the plot is entertaining. But for me, ultimately, the power of this novel resides in its raw energy and the creative risks I took.

  For example: Am I the first writer to use the f-word in a novel’s opening line? I seriously doubt it, but I’m pretty sure it’s rare, because I’ve yet to see it done elsewhere prior to this book. It’s an in-your-face opening gambit that would turn most editors off, out of fear of offending the reader. But not Jeanne Cavelos at Dell/Abyss and not Shane Ryan Staley at Delirium Books. They know that this is what makes the horror genre so cool, see? It dares you to back away. To say “No one fucking understands art anymore”—and underline it—and to set it off in its own paragraph—doesn’t so much offend the reader as it challenges him. It pushes on his shoulder and says “C’mon, I dare you to try.” For all its physical “body horror,” Grave Markings is an exploration of what art really means in a culture gone out of control, and it asks you to think about it.

  The excess and the gore in the book really drive this home and many have told me that they kept reading—if only to see the next gory “tattoo” and how I would try to top it. Those bullet points of horror really hold the whole plot together, much like the crazy killings in The Omen or any number of b-movie slasherfests from the late 70s and early 80s. There’s a scene involving a pane of glass in this book that was almost dropped, but it’s the one moment of excess that people remember the most. I had to fight for it. The editor thought it was over-the top and suggested cutting it. I rewrote the scene by spending more time on it, lengthening the drama, drawing out the psychological impetus behind it. Then in a second read, the assistant editor commented on the book and said it was too unrealistic. I rewrote it again, adding more of the nitty-gritty details about (umm…how do I describe this without giving it away?), oh, let’s call it “preventative health.” But after I did that, even the copy editor had the audacity to say what I was doing with a plate of glass was just plain impossible. To placate her, I merely fiddled with some of the grammar, giving the impression of change. Ultimately, it survived. And all I did was make it worse and worse…by which I mean, more and more grotesque.

  That’s the sort of risk I mean. Defiance of censorship. That’s what much of this book is about, in the end. I started working on this book around the time when Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was under fire from the Moral Majority and Robert Mapplethorpe’s nude photography was getting picketed in museums for being offensive or lewd. I just didn’t get it. I’d always been fascinated by censorship and fought against it however I could (I was the sort of kid who would buy records with “explicit lyrics” statements on philosophical grounds). Tattoos became an extreme symbol of art to me. I wondered, how would they censor art if it lived on the human body? My very first tattoo-based horror story—a noir little number called “Marked”—was about a tattoo artist who had been censored for her art and in defiance kept leaving her mark by tattooing people she encountered on the road. “Marked” later appeared in a biker magazine and my short story collection, Needles and Sins, but I felt like I had barely scratched the surface of a motif I wanted to explore further—the art of tattoo—and what happens when it pushes the limits of freedom of expression.

  Biker culture became my venue for research and I wrote a lot for the biker mags as I was getting prepared for Grave Markings. The story Corky tells Roy about One Eyed Jack was one of several tattoo p
ieces I wrote for a magazine called Outlaw Biker’s Tattoo Revue. I always think of tattoo artists as storytellers and when I later started composing Grave Markings, it made sense to me to have Corky tell tall tales. So I put it in the book. Corky’s tale, “An Eye for an Eye,” was not only later reprinted in The Best of Tattoo Revue, but also appeared in the late Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories XX. (I should note that Steve Tem’s epigraph, “Skin,” also appeared in Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror that year). All this acclaim happened after I had sold Grave Markings, but before the novel ever appeared in print. Usually short fiction is excised from a novel and serialized to help promote it. Here, in some ways, luck allowed me to do the very opposite.

  (Conversely, there’s a Corky story in here called “Burn Out” which I haven’t even tried to sell elsewhere, even though it appears in the book as a stand-alone piece “read” by Roy in a biker magazine. I like the irony of the inverted reality here: the story Corky told orally did appear in a biker mag; the story Roy reads in a biker mag did not.)

  I sold this book when I was in my twenties. I still think of myself as relatively young. But as I was editing this edition, I started thinking of how much things have changed over the past ten years. Cell phones are everywhere, whereas at one point in this book, Roy Roberts encounters a “cellular, cordless thing” and struggles to figure out how it works. Roy also uses an ancient artifact known as the “typewriter”—and gets a tattoo of this archaic device drawn on his shoulder, as if it were some tribal rune. People use VCRs in this book and Vietnam was still a recent memory. None of this matters, but I think I have not only caught a snapshot of a culture that was undergoing technological change, but also a subculture that was beginning to go mainstream, too. This was written when bikers were still scary, but tattoos—the biker’s distinguishing feature—were becoming common. Today tats are like jewelry and Harley Davidson has gift shops in the shopping mall next to Victoria’s Secret. Crazy. This book was written on the cusp of that shift, and maybe Kilpatrick embodies some sort of cultural threat, some sort of social change or reactionary movement on the horizon.

  Maybe. At its core, this is just a “biker book,” but its simplicity is deceptive. The book has appeared on graduate student reading lists as an example of not only horror writing but also of “the postmodern gothic.” Reviews have raved, too, but my close writing friend Mark McLaughlin once good-naturedly described the book best as a “White trash Dr. Phibes.” I love that. It’s true that a few folks have been critical from time to time, and I can see where they’re coming from. I’ve been told that the main characters are all a bunch of boring schlubs who do little more than drink beer on the porch all the time. I’ve been told that this book is too “masculinist,” too “middle class,” and “too white.” I can see why people would leap to these conclusions, since there’s a lot of backyard boozing that goes on in this book, and the women in the book aren’t the most pure and innocent you’ll find in fiction, and Lockerman’s fate in this book says it all. But if you look at what I’m doing I think you’ll see that these, too, are risks I took that expose a great deal about the culture this book depicts, both pro and con. Kilpatrick—and those he alters—could be symbolic of all sorts of things. Like all art, high and low, the story is open to multiple interpretations. If I try to defend or explain too much I’ll ruin the book.

  So let’s just say it’s nuts. And it’s gotta be nuts to be any good. Don’t you agree?

  Creativity is courageous. Artists are rebels. There’s a thrill involved with exploring the unknown, with “outing” the truths that hide and cower in society’s closets, and with being honest in a world that usually just lies. This partially explains the connection I feel with tattooing, which is expression with commitment while also a rebellion against all that nonsense about organic purity.

  The impressionist Degas once wrote that “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime.” Ultimately, that explains a lot about this book and my writing process. And I’m happy I’ve got you here, ten years later, as my partner in crime.

  This hog is a vintage American model. It’s been in the shop for a while, but the kick start still works just fine. See? Oh, I know it’s loud. C’mon, check out this new chassis and this sweet leather seat. Pretty cool, eh? Get on. Let’s ride.

  —Michael Arnzen, Pittsburgh

  New Year’s Day, 2004

  ART CAN KILL

  Art is a strange thing.

  If I asked you to actually define the word, you’d probably have a difficult time. That’s because the meanings of all works of art are largely hidden, mostly personal, and—if effective—quite controversial.

  In other words, the true essence of art is unknown. And in the realm of the unknown, where fear is the prime emotion, we feebly try to convince ourselves that we are safe. That the art in question is a stationary object, a chunk of concrete or a plane of canvas. Lifeless. Dead.

  A tattoo, however, is not so safe. It is alive—a living canvas of colored flesh, an actual part of a human being. And it is always there, even outliving its owner in the grave. A purposeful desecration of the flesh by sharp, ink-tipped needles, designed to mean something, tattoo is perhaps the strangest and darkest of all arts.

  I wrote Grave Markings to explore the mystery of tattoos, to immerse the reader in that murky unknown territory where art achieves life…through the fire of desire. And hunger. And horror.

  Art is indeed a strange thing. But when it is created by twisted, insane hands—hands that writhe in shaping the dark, psychotic recesses of the unknown—then the artist is even stranger, is even more frightening.

  Because he knows that art is the creation of life. And that living things—from monsters to men—can kill.

  NO GUTS, NO GORY

  I’m a rather easy-going person, particularly when it comes to my writing. I know I’m not perfect, and I honestly believe what I tell my writing students all the time: that nothing is written in stone, no matter how hard you’ve chiseled; that nothing you write is ever completely “finished,” because it can be revised and revised and revised—and even when deep in your gut it “feels done,” it can probably still be improved. So when an editor asks me to consider revising my professional work—so-called “finished” material which I submit after grinding it through my own revision mill a million times—I’m still wide open to his or her suggestions: in fact, I embrace editorial recommendations, since they usually give me a point of view I hadn’t considered before, one that usually helps improve the work immensely. Sometimes it’s arguable whether a scene needs to be cut or changed—and in these cases I usually stomach the suggestions and trust the editor’s instinct. And typically, it’s the right thing to do.

  But sometimes, your gut tells you they’re wrong. You can’t pinpoint why. You just know—instinctually—that a passage or a phrase simply “works.” And in these instances, you have to trust your instincts. Let me give you an example.

  Here’s a controversial excerpt from my novel, Grave Markings, which should be at a theater (of the mind) near you around the time you’re reading this. I call it “controversial” because my editor, her assistant, and, it seems, even the final manuscript copy editor (who basically checks for typos and continuity flaws) asked me to revise this passage three times, strongly suggesting that I cut it out entirely. Normally, I agree and don’t even say good-bye to the words on the page as I draw a dark line across their vowels and bowels with the sharp tip of my ink pen. But in this case, I knew this scene had to stay, despite my editor’s better judgment. I knew it in my gut. And so I fought for it, and kept it, even though I didn’t quite have a good reason to do so, other than a strange grumbling in my gut. And now—in reflection—I think I understand why I felt this way. But first, the excerpt in question.

  Without giving
away too much, I should set it up by saying that in this scene, the villain of the novel—a psycho tattoo artist named Mark Kilpatrick—toys with a woman he’s locked up in his bedroom for weeks, whose body he uses as a sort of private, drug-induced belly-dancer…and even worse, as a “sketch pad” for his horrific tattoos. Well…he doesn’t use her whole body, exactly….

  * * *

  He looked down at her pelvis, her sunken abdomen…the only spot on her sickly white skin that was not tattooed.

  He thought it was amazing how intricately the muscles of the torso worked to produce such a sexy motion as belly-dancing. He watched the scabby red and exposed area—the patch that had provided a canvas of flesh for the museum piece, the large square that he had replaced with a pane of window glass to keep his mural from spoiling. The thick square of glass had polished, silicon-lined edges and smooth, rounded corners—perfect for fitting snugly beneath the uppermost layers of exposed dermis and fat—which prevented slippage from cutting her up inside. Lengthy, fabric-reinforced strands of black vinyl packing tape bordered the wound that encircled her exposed innards, effectively sealing the near-fatal exhibit with a mixture of both glue and hardened scabs. She had bled profusely when he removed the square of skin—but Kilpatrick had the foresight to cut only so deep, in order to leave a thin sheath of membrane to hold her organs in place—and he had cauterized the edge of the cut with a book of matches and a can of lighter fluid. It wasn’t perfect—infection had spread—but this only added interesting color to the artwork. She was Kilpatrick’s private piece of performance art, a dancer fit for a king’s private musings, and he was entranced by her beauty as much as by his own craftsmanship.