Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  * * *

  She would not last forever. He had to spend the time enjoying her while he still could. It was hypnotic watching the white tendons and pink, stringy sinew clenching, undulating, working her hips from side to side, weaving its magic on his groin. It was like watching color television, seeing the foamy blood squishing around inside, entrails pressing against the shiny plate of glass like mutant eels in a red aquarium, squirming to get out.

  * * *

  As disgusting as this scene is, I think it’s an important one in Grave Markings, because it reveals a great deal about the psychotic character of the Kilpatrick. I was told by editors several times that it was impossible to cut a large square of skin from a human body without killing the victim, but I managed to keep the scene intact by revising it three times for Dell, and finally adding the details about how carefully Kilpatrick inserted and mounted the glass under her skin, and to hint that she was already dying inside (“infection had spread” and “she wouldn’t last forever”).

  Nevertheless, I do trust my editor’s instinct—the scene is a bit too disturbing, even for me—perhaps too adolescent in its embracing of splatterpunk—and it might turn quite a few readers off in its cheap thrill of going for the gross-out. And needless to say, it objectifies women in a terrible way (which perhaps bothers me the most)—regurgitating that formulaic staple of the genre—the tired “woman as victim” cliché—because she is not only physically tortured, but also locked up in a room away from the world like a damsel in distress in those ancient medieval stories. And while I do agree with these critiques of this sick scene in the novel, I refused to cut it. Because I could have defended the scene in other ways, ways that I think I’ll explain here and now:

  1) This really happens. Long after I sold the novel, I attended the University of Idaho to pursue my Master’s degree while working on my second book. One day, driving through the gravel roads behind the campus, out in the no-man’s-land where the agricultural students tested groundwater and raised chickens, I saw something that I thought was a dream—or something straight out of the Weekly World News tabloid: cows, shining in what appeared to be spacesuits. But I soon discovered that the glare on their bodies was really just the sunlight, reflecting off plastic squares that had been duct-taped to their sides. I later found out that the students were studying the digestive system of bovines, and to do so had cut panels into their hides and covered the wounds with clear plastic to be able to see their guts in the process of digestion.

  It happens to humans, too. When doctors perform open surgery on the human body, they usually cover the exposed innards with something akin to brown cellophane. They even remove sections of skull to open a window up for brain surgery. And what scares me most, when I compare such butchery to this scene from Grave Markings, is that stitches and staples are hardly as hermetically-sealed as a pane of glass with the edges of the wound cauterized and burned in.

  2) This metaphorically happens. And just like those surgeons and scientists, readers and writers of horror fiction want to explore the unknown—to see what makes us tick—to spread open the flesh and sneak a peek beneath the skin. Robert Bloch has said that “Horror is the removal of masks,” and I think reality is a mask, too, in a weird sort of way. Horror fiction should be disgusting and disturbing, and perhaps it should stretch the limits of possibility, too. I think the passage above is more than just that, though: Kilpatrick’s gaze at the woman’s exposed guts while she belly dances for him is like what happens when a reader opens a horror novel and stares at the spectacle of the grotesque doing a sort of dance of sick images before his or her eyes. That’s right. A horror novel is a belly-dancer without any skin.

  3) This never happens. Okay, so maybe it is impossible for Kilpatrick’s victim to survive with a huge patch of flesh missing from her torso. So what? It’s fiction. And fiction is lies, all lies, but lies that tell the truth in a way that only our guts understand. And maybe that’s why the scene is so disturbing: because we can imagine what it would feel like, right there, somewhere between our nipples and our groins. How it happens in reality—how it happens in the headlines and in the secret laboratories—is irrelevant. How it happens in the gut is what really matters: to villain or victim, man or woman, reader or writer.

  And if I would have excised that passage from the novel, I would have been tearing the guts right out of my book. Literally. So instead—I revised and kept the guts intact, keeping them under glass, so to speak.

  But I bring all this up not to simply “defend” my work (for it hasn’t been attacked, actually), and the scene from Grave Markings detailed above really wasn’t that big of a deal to my editors—I’d be lying if I said it was an “argument” really, since it never came up in actual conversation, but occurred in letters and notes written in the margins of the manuscript. But it was a battle which I think most writers have fought: a battle inside, to trust instinct over judgment, emotion over reason, art over rhetoric. It’s not a question of right or wrong, or which position is the best. It’s a question of “truth” beyond the realm of “fact.” And the only advice I can give you is that to be true to your book, you’ve gotta be true to yourself. If you can do that, the stories will always write themselves.

  LUCK OF THE DRAW:

  SELLING YOUR FIRST NOVEL

  I think luck has a lot more to do with the writing biz than a lot of people are willing to admit. Luck is at the core of coming up with a good idea for a story—luck is at the center of getting it down on the page in a manner that portrays that idea best—and luck, most of all, is probably responsible for eventually getting that story published. This is not to say that a talent for storytelling, training in grammar and style, craftsmanship of delivery, and proper submission procedure are not important—they are indeed important—they are critical—but they are important because they are basic and expected of you in the first place. I’ve heard it said that, in a competitive market, editors are not looking for reasons to accept you, but for reasons to reject you, since your story is up against so many other excellent ones. And as it is in any occupation, just getting the basics right is never enough: you must shine to stand out from the shadows of the common, if you hope to succeed.

  But no matter how polished you make yourself, “shining” is totally up to the light source around you and the viewer who happens to be in just the right position to catch the glare. And this is what I mean by “luck”: being in the right place at the right time, even though you really have no control over those very same circumstances at all.

  As a writer, I’ve always felt just a little bit like a gambler. Sending out stories is like buying lottery tickets for the price of postage. When others say it is a good idea to write as much as you can and have as many stories or poems or articles or queries out in the mail as possible, it is indeed good advice, no matter how much it might sound like the ethics of a hack, because you are increasing your chances of being lucky. One writer I admire quite a bit (mostly because we are the same age, and I “grew up with her,” so to speak, following her work in the small press long before she became famous) is Poppy Z. Brite, who—in an interview that appeared in John Betancourt’s Horror magazine—gave the advice that a writer should try to put herself in as many possible places for the potential of luck to happen. And I think that’s the best advice I’ve ever heard. A roulette player should not put all his money on one number—he should play the field.

  Whenever I make a sale—and I mean anything—from a ten-line poem to a small press magazine to a novella-length story to a major anthology—I really feel like a gambler who hit the jackpot. When I sold my first novel, Grave Markings, to one of the best horror publishers in the business (Dell/Abyss Books), it was like Ed McMahon came to my house with a magnum of champagne and one of those giant cardboard checks for a bazillion buckaroos. Sure, I was thrilled and excited that I sold my first book—who wouldn’t be?—but at the heart of my emoti
on was the cliché: “I can’t believe my luck!” And I’m not just saying that. No matter how great my book may or may not be, selling that book to a major publisher was an act of pure luck. Let me tell you my story, and maybe you’ll agree.

  I set out writing Grave Markings (four years before it ever saw print!) as a challenge to myself, to simply see if I could sustain a story for more than 2500 words for once in my life. I did not, at first, write it with an eye toward publication—in my mind, it was an experiment, a “practice run” for the future…if I could pull it off. It was tough to do, but with the right amount of determination (i.e., psychotic obsession) mixed in with a steady gallon or two of hot coffee by my side, I managed to finish the first draft in about three or four weeks.

  I did not stop to look back during the writing of the book—I did not “revise backwards,” unless something was terribly amiss—and I worked without an outline. The key, I knew, from reading lots of other novels (and if you’re thinking about writing your first novel, you might want to pay attention here), was to envision each chapter as a short story in and of itself—with a clear beginning, middle, and end—ending each chapter with a hint of something to come, or with a mystery to solve in the next chapter (this is often called a “cliffhanger,” which chains one chapter to the next).

  If I saw the book heading towards its ending too quickly, I would toss in a complication, a hurdle, an obstacle to stop me from finishing the book too quickly. And this worked well, because something magical happened in the story’s ending, where all of the pieces I had scattered out before me came together, where everything made sense and just “clicked” (there’s no better word or explanation for this phenomena of closure; but if things don’t “click” at the end of your book, you can be sure that your book is missing something). And then—after weeks of obsessing over the thing—I was done. My experiment, I believed, had succeeded. Next time, I’d try to use what I had learned.

  Knowing that it was an experiment—as all early writing is, when you’re just getting started—I did not want to send it out to publishers. I thought it was too crude—too obviously experimental to send out professionally—and I believed it would only put me on some imaginary editorial list of “amateur writers to avoid.” To me, I had written something novel-length, and that was reason enough to be pleased. A friend of mine, though, someone I’d met through SPWAO (the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization), told me that just finishing a novel was reason to celebrate, and encouraged me to send it out, since it couldn’t hurt to try. What she really meant, of course, was that I might luck out, and I agreed. So, not having too much faith, I typed up a cover letter, added a bio sheet of my published short stories and poems (mostly small press—I had only a few pro credits at the time), and shoved the whole manuscript into a box and sent it off to Dell/Abyss Books—a publisher I picked primarily because they have cool cover illustrations—and because to me they seemed to be “the best.” Having heard so many horror stories about selling books to New York, I expected to never hear back from them. As far as I was concerned, my “experiment” would end up in a closet or a trash can, somewhere on 5th Street in New York City. Sure, I could salvage excerpts from the book and sell them as short stories (which I did: one of these, “An Eye for an Eye,” went on to appear in a biker magazine (Outlaw Biker’s Tattoo Revue), and was later reprinted in DAW Books’ anthology, The Year’s Best Horror Stories XX), but as far as I was concerned, it was probably time to start writing another one, now that I had the experience of the first.

  But this is how lucky I was:

  1) I SOLD IT. They called me back two months later (unheard of in the publishing world for an unsolicited manuscript!), and wanted to negotiate a contract right then and there, over the phone. I was lucky enough to get a good editor and an honest deal. I didn’t make a ton of cash (wealth through writing is a myth, my friends, until you’re a bestseller), but I still take heart in the fact that I made as much as Stephen King did on his first novel’s advance. Regardless, I sold it to a major publisher in the genre, one who not only has the best damned covers in the business, but has excellent publicity, high print runs, and publishing panache. Since my sale, Dell/Abyss has gone on to win many awards and to publish some of the finest books in the genre. Somehow, I had stumbled into fine company. And they invited me to join them.

  2) I BROKE THE RULES. Only an idiot would blindly send a book in a box like I did, not following proper submission procedure. And idiots get rejected without even getting the chance of getting read. The general rule is—after you’ve studied the market—to send a query letter first, asking if they’re interested in seeing your book (or buying any new books at all). Then, if invited, you can send the first three chapters of the novel, along with a synopsis or outline of the rest. And I probably don’t need to mention that an agent usually plays a role in all of this somewhere—from either selling the book (seldom), or negotiating the contract (always). Out of laziness (and a dash of both ignorance and guts), I skipped all that and just sent the whole thing to them in a box.

  I later found out that—essentially—my cover letter sold the book. The editorial assistant told me once that he had read the letter I put on top of the manuscript (which included an extremely brief synopsis of my crazy plot), snorted, and said, “if this guy can pull this off, I’ll eat my hat.” And somehow, I did. Sure, the story was okay. But do you understand how lucky I was? That’s all you get for all your effort: a glimpse, maybe a scan, of a one page letter on top of three or four hundred pages of sweat. And I was lucky enough to get even that chance.

  3) I FOUND A DREAM EDITOR. My editor, Jeanne Cavelos, has since left Dell Books, and I miss her terribly. She was not only a kind-hearted person, but a hell of an editor, with an innate sense of “what works” in a novel. She expertly helped me reshape the novel in revisions and was very understanding of my novice ways. But get this: she did not have me change what I had written in the book all that much. There were no arguments over prose style or plot—I was not told to cut this or prune that (which is standard, from what most writers tell me), though I must admit that much of it was “tweaked” and “polished”.

  Nope, most of the revisions I did on my own, because now I had a responsibility to however many tens of thousands of readers to give them the best damned book I could, and my editor had the faith in me to know that I could come through for them. The majority of those revisions were simply a matter of providing answers to some of the questions that Jeanne posed, and there were many of them—valid questions that any reader of the novel might ask. But what my editor did which was so significant—so helpful—was that she helped me add a great deal to the book. The first draft—written in so much ignorant haste—was “only” 350 pages. I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t: it equates to a small novel, one of those thin ones that make you wonder whether you’re getting enough “book” for your five bucks. So, with my editor’s guidance, I added over 150 pages to it, 150 pages that make the book so much better.

  And I was given pretty much free reign to do those pages however I wanted to. For example, she suggested that I give more information on the “Tattoo Killer’s” background—to show the reader how or why he does the sick things that he does. Well, I used that general suggestion as a springboard for entire chapters which now pepper the book, and genuinely enhance the plot, in an experimental way that I probably never would have attempted on my own as a beginning novelist. But because my editor let me, I took a risk. And now, in my opinion, these flashback chapters are some of the best in the novel. You’ll have to read Grave Markings to understand just how experimental these parts of the book are, but take my word, most editors would probably not allow the additions I made to remain—too risky for a new writer, they’d say—but not my dream editor from Dell. Jeanne Cavelos was a dream come true, and also a friend. I don’t know how often that happens between writers and editors, but I’m guessing it doesn�
��t happen often, in a business guided by profit more often than art.

  I’ve been lucky in more ways, but I think that’s enough to make my point. Luck is at the core of being a successful writer (no matter how you define “success”). But luck doesn’t come to you—you have to go to it. The old adage, “you never know until you try,” is quite true, whether it’s about finishing that first story or submitting it to Omni magazine. But just because you put your money down on the roulette table, don’t assume that you’re bound to win.

  Listen. According to a recent Writer’s Digest, only 1% of all books submitted by writers each year actually get accepted and published. Those are terrible odds. Frightening odds! Players in Vegas would never bet on odds like that. Yet there are an estimated 38 million creative writers out there, all compulsively playing the game anyway. If you have enough faith in your work—and faith is really what it all comes down to—then you just might luck out and beat those odds.

  I’m not trying to be modest when I say selling my first novel took a tremendous amount of luck. Since I’ve sold that book (and have gone on to write more…that’s right, I’m still playing the game; a sale is never certain), I’ve discovered that a lot of fellow writers have either supported me or have reacted jealously (I’ve mostly received support and encouragement, and I think this is true because the people who work in our genre are extremely nice and just damned good folks; very few are true snobs). As much as I believe that my book is a “damned good story” and “well-written,” and maybe even “the best damned horror novel of the Nineties”—hah!—I still have problems graciously receiving compliments, because I realize so much of what happened to me is luck.