Torn Realities
Page 1
TORN REALITIES
An Anthology of Lovecraft Inspired Short Fiction
Edited by Paul Anderson
Post Mortem Press
Cincinnati
All stories copyright © 2012 by their respective authors.
Rawhead Rex, copyright © 1984 Clive Barker
Anthology copyright © 2012 Post Mortem Press
Cover art, copyright © 2012 Philip Rogers.
All rights reserved.
Post Mortem Press - Cincinnati, OH
www.postmortem-press.com
SMASHWORDS eBook edition
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H.P. Lovecraft,
"The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Without question this book is 100% Paul Anderson.
I gave him a task and he exceeded my expectations, sort of. Now don’t take the “sort of” as a negative. I have a rather high opinion of Paul and his ability to understand not only the mechanics of writing but also the art. He is a true craftsman who I am confident will one day find his route to the acclaim and respect he deserves. He sort of exceeded my expectations by living up to lofty goal I set before him. I knew he had it in him, I expect great things from him and he delivered. Basically what I am saying is (if you pardon the baseball analogy) I expected a home run and Paul hit a grand slam.
Prior to this book, Post Mortem Press has published nine anthologies, Torn Realities is number ten. As the person who selected the 120 or so stories in the first nine books, I knew the task I was asking Paul to complete would be a challenge.
There was only one hard and fast rule, do not give preference to Post Mortem Press veterans. Sounds a little like ignoring the ones who most need your attention, but there is a method to my madness. Above all other goals, Post Mortem Press must be a credible place to find the best in new fiction. If we want to gain and retain that reputation, we need to become even more selective when it comes to what we publish.
If you know Paul, you understand why I asked him to edit this book. He pulls no punches. He isn’t afraid to tell an author if their story doesn’t have the right stuff.
Paul has selected the cream of the crop of over one million submitted words. I didn't count the number of submissions, but I know it was well over 200. I hope he is as proud of this book as I am.
Alas, you didn’t buy this book to read my stream of consciousness rambling, you bought it to read some excellent short stories. I will leave you to with a final thought, tread carefully, as what you know as reality is about to change.
Remember, they’re just stories.
Eric Beebe
March 2012
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is the Academy Awards acceptance speech portion of our program, so feel free to move on if you are none of the following people:
Eric Beebe, the publisher of Post Mortem Press and, subsequently, my boss (funny how that works) for saying to me, "You, sir, are good enough."
C. Bryan Brown, editor over at Title Goes Here and co-everything at Misanthrope Press, who initially encouraged me to submit "Surviving the River Styx" to the PMP anthology A Means to An End back in late 2010. None of this would've happened without his nudging.
Harlan Ellison needs to be mentioned. After listening to me bitch one day about writers who feel the obnoxious urge to argue with editors after said editors have told them "No" nicely, Harlan sent me two letters he used to send out when editing and rejecting stories--one a basic (if entirely Harlan) form rejection, one cut-you-to-the-core-and-leave-you-bleeding. Perked me right up, oddly enough. Thanks, Harlan.
Clive Barker, who trusted an unknown short story writer-turned-editor with his work. It became the centerpiece of an already strong anthology.
To the writers, who let me do this in the first place by trusting me with their stories. Thanks, guys.
And finally, to my wife Heidi and daughter Amy, to whom this book is dedicated. Joe Hill once dedicated his book of short stories to his wife, saying "We are my favorite story." You, me, and Amy are not my favorite story, hon--we are my favorite epic.
Paul Anderson
March 2012
Table of Contents
(Introduction) Paul Anderson - GRAY AREAS: AN ESSAY
JW Schnarr - OPT-IN
Jamie Lackey - WHAT WAITS OUT THERE
C. Deskin Rink - ANKOR SABAT
Philip Roberts - BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY
C.M. Saunders - THE ART OF LUCID DREAMING
Clive Barker - RAWHEAD REX
Brad Carter - THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARIANS
Kathryn Board - THE TROLL THAT JACK BUILT
James S. Dorr - THE CALM
Gerard Houarner - CASA DE LOS CADÁVERES
Kenneth W. Cain - IN THE SHADOW OF THE EQUINE
Joseph Williams - VISIONS OF PARIN
Mitch Richmond - AMSTERDAMNED
Lee Davis - THE RESIDENTS OF MOSSY ROCK
Matt Moore - DELTA PI
Jessica McHugh - A RIDE IN THE DREAM MACHINE
Bob Mustin - THE OFFERING
Jeff Suess - HALLOWED GROUND
Allie Marini Batts - THE SEVENTH PLAGUE
GRAY AREAS: An Essay
Paul Anderson
- 1 -
Ask any 8th grader who Edgar Allan Poe is and, invariably, you'll get back the answer, "He's the guy who wrote 'The Raven'." Take a general survey of regular people and the two biggest "horror" icons they know will be Poe--because we all read him in English class--and Stephen King--because we've all seen at least his movies.
But what about Lovecraft? Arguably, there'd be no such thing as "modern" horror if not for that loner New Englander, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. King and Barker and Wilson and Campbell and other horror greats might still be publishing, but it wouldn't have been things like It or The Books of Blood or The Keep.
That's a bit of a ballsy statement. Let me explain.
Prior to Lovecraft--who was only marginally successful during his lifetime; it was decades after his death that his influence really took affect--horror was couched in two camps: psychological and the Judeo-Christian morality tale. To the readers and writers of 19th century horror, there was nothing else; for something to be horrible or evil, it had to either be imprisoned within the cracked mind of a character (the works of Poe, another writer whose greatest fame came after his death), or a slight against God (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, etc.).
Even Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan--which Lovecraft adored, by the way--takes the typical Victorian Christian view by couching the plot within the confines of the superior, moral Victorian society with Pan seen as a destructive, evil pagan god, driving men to commit suicide through its female surrogate.
Because of this, when Lovecraft came on the scene with his weird fiction, horror was startling black-and-white; either you were insane and evil, or you were playing God...and evil.
But, to be fair, that's what readers wanted. Defining horror within black and white is incredibly comforting to the average person, whose day is usually rife with all sorts of gray-area wrongs and evils. As Stephen King--who's unabashedly named Lovecraft as a major influence on his
own work numerous times--once argued, horror is the genre where you can point to something definite, specific, and tangible and say, "That's evil." In horror, you draw a magic circle around yourself and keep on the lookout for the outsider.
Lovecraft changed all that. His horror was all gray and, through this, the comforts of horror up to that point were removed. No one and everyone was or could be the outsider.
Lovecraft generally considered his stories to be works of cosmic horror, thereby removing the concepts of humans as superior creatures and the comfort of a Judeo-Christian God and placing the characters much more in the real world by not making them out to be anything but regular people. On any given day, a typical person doesn't stand around and say, "My! I'm feeling intensely superior and upright today! With my God behind me, I know truly what the world is like!"
Lovecraft understood that and used it.
His stories of inherited guilt, searching for forbidden knowledge, and the idea that beings greater than humans viewed the species either amusingly or inimically, knocked out the blocks of what horror was defined as at the time. Even in an early story like "Dagon" (his first published work, actually, and has a morphine-addicted protagonist about to commit suicide--all this before 1920), we see a mariner exploring a world that is Earth...but is like no other place on Earth and, once there, confronting a decidedly unChristian deity. His cycle of stories that came to be called "The Cthulhu Mythos" further expanded that idea.
And even though Lovecraft was admittedly influenced by writers like Poe and Machen, he took what they did into startling new directions. Poe was interested in how the mind affected one's view of the world; Lovecraft was interested in how the world--or rather, the things beyond the world--affected the mind.
Although Machen crafted strong, suspenseful stories of ancient evil attacking modern times, those modern times were of upright, moral people and the "ancient evil" was usually Pagan in origin. Lovecraft wasn't adverse to this concept--see, again, "Dagon"--but the ancient evil might be Pagan, but were more often whole-cloth creations.
What we're talking about here is the presentation of evil and its place in the world and, thus, the comforts of the reader/passive-participant. Horror is the one place where audiences can purge their own anxieties or, rather, put aside the anxieties of their daily life for something that is horrible, terrifying...but will never happen to them.
Thus, horror must be comfortable to a certain extent. It must be defined as black and white. And, through horror, evil. Evil must be boxed, taped, and labeled, ready for presentation to the masses.
With Lovecraft, and ever after, evil is cheek-and-jowl with the audience by making the audience aware of how prescient it is. By making it a part of them. By knocking out the blocks of distance and moral superiority--either by culture or the being-head-of-the-food-chain logic--it brings evil closer and to them. Some smartass once commented on the banality of evil...but it's true.
Richard Matheson's brilliant novel I Am Legend puts the evil into the neighbors and friends of the protagonist; the vampires after Robert Neville aren't slights against God or insane...but they're still evil. They still wish to kill. The writing of Jack Ketchum, which are rarely supernatural at all, takes this evil-as-everyday even further in Off Season, Hide & Seek, and The Girl Next Door. Neither of these disparate writers were Lovecraftian and the subject matter they dealt with would never be considered "cosmic"...but their characters were. The Mariner in Lovecraft's "Dagon" could've been a Ketchum sketch; the scholars in "The Call of Cthulhu" could've been comfortable with Matheson, or even Jack Finney.
It's hard to think of it any other way now, but prior to Lovecraft, this didn't happen, and, when there were characters who were...outside the mainstream, shall we say?...they were the villain, the outsider, the target to be purged.
Was Lovecraft perfect?
No, anymore than King or Poe are and were. In spite of his startling concepts and methods, Lovecraft wasn't the be-all and end-all. He had severe deficits in plot execution (sometimes his characters were stuck in their current course of action because of outside forces but, at other times, those "outside forces" were Lovecraft himself, not wanting to let the plot unfold naturally), dialogue (no one talks the way the characters did in "The Colour Out of Space"), construction (Lovecraft, like Poe before him, couldn't stop writing in a way that was horribly out-of-date) and galloping racism (to be fair, Lovecraft hated anyone who wasn't strictly Anglo-Saxon English).
But, for all of that--and lesser things have ended a writer--Lovecraft struck a blow to the status quo in horror and, because of this, shifted the direction stories of the macabre. Even today, his brand of off-beat, we-are-alone-and-powerless ideas still reverberate, whether in King's It or F. Paul Wilson's Adversary Cycle and Repairman Jack novels. For that alone, Lovecraft is iconic.
-2-
The spark for this book came, naturally enough, from reader demand.
Eric Beebe, Post Mortem Press's publisher, went on a barn storm of conventions in 2011, determined to generate interest and income for his new company. It worked--alarmingly so in an era where doom-criers constantly trumpet the death of books and reading--but that's neither here nor there in this little introduction.
You're holding this book right now because of those conventions. When he talked to people, they asked for a Lovecraft anthology.
In October/November of 2011, Eric shot me an e-mail asking if I was interested in being a "story selection editor" for an upcoming Lovecraft anthology. At this point, Torn Realities was without even the barest hint of guidelines or title beyond "Lovecraft themed".
Eric and I bashed out the guidelines. We knew, going in, that we would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a legion of Lovecraft anthologies. We needed our Lovecraft anthology to be different, to stand head-and-shoulders above the others. How?
The one thing all the other anthologies have in common is Cthulhu.
To be fair, it might be Lovecraft's greatest (read: most well-known) creation: a god from before the time of man and man's own concepts of what a god should be and Lovecraft's greatest trick was to keep his creation almost completely off-stage. Re-read "The Call of Cthulhu and the Elder God never takes center stage; all exposition is left to secondary references and the remnants of "Cthulhu cults", allowing the god to loom large within the story and the reader's imagination.
But nowadays Cthulhu is everywhere. Tee-shirts, mouse-pads, computer wallpapers, toys; hell, I have a miniature plush Cthulhu my wife got me for Christmas once. It's sitting amongst my daughter's toys as I write this.
And the stories. Dear God, the stories. In all those anthologies Torn Realities was about to compete against, Cthulhu is rampant, dominating, and completely unable to induce fear any longer. For Christ's sake, there's Cthulhu-erotica.
I sought stories dealing with Lovecraft's other themes--forbidden knowledge, the idea that we are essentially untethered from the workaday world, or lunacy-inducing creatures predating the dawn of man--or kept his most famous theme (the idea of mind-boggling other gods) more general. I wanted stories that sought that gray area in horror by given me tales of regular people in irregular situations.
But would people respond to this non-Cthulhu, Lovecraft-inspired, anthology?
They did, as you can see.
In droves.
I read nearly a million words--or, roughly, ten massive novels--for this anthology and, it was worth it. These stories--whether they're balls-to-the-wall horror, fantasies, science fiction--honor Lovecraft in every way without treading on his work. And the writers--everyone from relative beginners in the field to solid pros to icons in horror--did. My jitters that no one would be able to take their writing and ideas beyond the standbys were completely unfounded.
Thank the Elder Gods for that.
OPT-IN
JW Schnarr
I got this towards the end of the slush period and it stopped me in my tracks. It might've been written by the love child of Chuck Palahnuik and Willia
m Gibson. I knew I wanted this tale to open Torn Realities. JW--who's appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and Slices of Flesh, and wrote the novel Alice & Dorothy--crafted a creepy tale of longing that tips its hat towards Lovecraft while going in a completely different direction.
There's a dirty wad of spit on the glass inside a bus stop. It's green and yellow in places, and it curls your stomach to look at it. Maybe there's a bit of brown in there because it was left by a smoker. Maybe there's blood. It has a stink to it too, doesn't it? Everything does. You're holding your breath hoping not to puke and waiting for the bus and for some reason you just don't have the will to turn around and look at something else. You don't dare take your eye off it because it's going to do something terrible the second you look away. Only when that bus comes, it's you that does the terrible thing.
An old Chinese struggles to get by you with her perfectly waxed hair and her fold-down walker that she uses to get around because she can't afford new legs on her pension. You pretend like you lose your footing and bump her. It was an accident. Your feet slipped on another gob of slime, one you didn't notice under your feet coming at you like a green hunting snail. Maybe the snot crunches under your feet and you lurch out of that old bus stop, bumping the Chinese into the glass. She takes the wad of snot with her as she struggles by, oblivious to the corruption you've caused. She clucks like a chicken. And you taste spicy bile in the back of your throat.