Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12

by Apex Authors

  He lowered his arms and shook his bullet-bald head.

  Above, and around the curved path he'd mowed or flattened with his accidental retreat, the clattering quick clop of four hard feet approached. It wouldn't be long before the creature saw the man or smelled him, or simply followed the trail of the trampled foliage.

  At least, thank God, Kilgore thought, wasn't stuck. But his leg was pinned underneath him, and his ribs were aching from the turbulence. He sat up and retrieved his leg. He'd dropped one of the guns, but he had both hands free—and he used them to pat himself down for a damage check.

  His ass was numb. His knee was torqued. His right wrist was starting to swell. A dozen other assorted bumps, bruises, and scrapes made themselves known with a low-grade hum of pain.

  None of it was so bad that he couldn't get up.

  The twisted knee made a loud pop when he bent it, but then it felt better so he kept on crawling to his feet. Somewhere along the way, his bag had come unzipped and the contents had scattered; he'd lost some of the stakes, and the water gun had broken, leaking its contents all along his path. But he still had a light he was afraid to use, and he still had that second gun, which remained in its holster.

  And his Bible was still stuck in his belt.

  When he placed his hand on the rocks at his waist in order to make that final pull to bring him upright, he found his machete.

  Something in the way the blade shifted caught the moonlight and gave him away. No sooner had he snared it and braced himself for trouble, than trouble came galloping between the trees that remained.

  The creature knew these woods, too. It knew where the gully was, and even though it couldn't see much of the man who was standing in it, it could see that enormous knife glittering in the skim-milk glow of the half-covered moon. And it wasn't much afraid of knives.

  Then again, it had never been struck with a knife that was flung by a man who weighed nearly a quarter of a ton.

  The blade sank deeply into the soft tissue between the beast's jaw and shoulder, and again Kilgore's ears rang with the monster's ferocious squeal; but now the squeal sounded wet. Something was broken, and something was bleeding. No cry should sound so choked and damp.

  The beast turned away from the edge of the gully, not quite fast enough to keep from dropping one leg over the edge. It scuttled and scrambled, and it did not fall over the edge—for which Kilgore offered up a quick prayer of thanks. Whether or not the creature was injured, The Heavy didn't want to end up trapped in a trench with it.

  With a labored groan and another pop of his knee, Kilgore heaved himself up over the gully's edge and flopped down onto the low, angled ground.

  The skittering scuff of the monster's hooves limped out ahead of him, back toward the barn.

  "Sure,” Kilgore said to himself. “Sure, you're hurt.” If this monster was anything like others he'd encountered, it needed to feed and feed quickly if it was going to recover.

  Running was damned hard, in the dark, on a trick knee—but The Heavy got a slow trot underway, and he hated it. He hated chasing anyone, or anything. Over the years, he'd developed a tactic for monster fighting, and that tactic did not involve a whole lot of dashing around.

  He was big and he knew it. It was easy to look slow and soft and vulnerable. It was easy to draw the predators out to him.

  But the damned monster was loping toward the barn, and toward the frantically chattering goats locked within. Kilgore did his best to lope faster.

  He burst out of the vegetation with his remaining gun held firmly upraised and cocked. The object of his chase beat its head against the barn door, ramming it again and again, and squealing with each impact. The machete was still protruding from its neck, being farther jammed with every head-butt.

  Kilgore tried to roar, “Oh no you don't!” but he was winded, and it came out in a raspy cough.

  The creature turned. It scratched one front hoof into the dirt like a bull preparing to charge.

  And Kilgore didn't waste any time unloading three more shots into that rolling, bucking shadow the size of a bear.

  While it shuddered and shrieked, The Heavy drew his Bible with his free hand. It snapped up out of his belt, and he held it up over his heart like a shield.

  He approached the creature with swift and measured steps. It was dying. Nothing man, beast, or other made a noise like that unless it had glimpsed the light on the other side and felt the Goodness of it burn like lava. It writhed and whimpered, and it splattered Kilgore with hot, gushing sprays of blood as black as oil.

  "In the name of the Father,” it spun around in the dirt, throwing a death tantrum. “And the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Kilgore told it as he came up close and brought the gun down. “I unmake you.” One of the hateful red eyes glowered up from the paste-like mud.

  Kilgore fired into the eye because it was the only thing he could see well enough to aim for, and the fire there winked out.

  The creature quivered. One of its legs twitched, scraping a mindless reflex.

  The Heavy exhaled a huge breath and backed away. He knew, and the deep-bitten scars in his calf could attest, that there was no such thing as “too careful."

  Keeping one eye on the carcass, he rifled through his bag and pulled out his flashlight. “Now let's see exactly what the hell you are, Mr. Goat-killer.” His thumb caught the sliding switch and the bright white beam cut the night so sharply that for a moment, the man was blinded.

  When his eyes adjusted, he followed the circle of light down to the gruesome mass of bullet-broken bones, torn hair, and hooves. And that's when he saw the tusks. “Tusks? This is...” He used the edge of his steel-toed boot to nudge the pulpy skull. “A goddamned were-pig. Were-boar. Were ... son of a bitch."

  The corpse shifted by slow, nearly imperceptible degrees, sliding around in the muck and losing the edges of its hulking shape. Kilgore reached back into the bag and whipped out the digital camera. He readied the flash and framed the shot. He caught the image just in time.

  A moment later, the thing collapsed into an unrecognizable pelt.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Hal Duncan Interviews Jeff VanderMeer

  Award-winning novelist Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the best-selling City of Saints & Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard cosmique award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year's best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others.

  Hal Duncan: Your latest book, Shriek: An Afterword, is a return to the city of Ambergris, first explored in your collection of novellas and short stories, City of Saints and Madmen. Ambergris is a fascinating place—with hints of M. John Harrison's Viriconium or Alasdair Gray's Lanark, I think—one of those cities that becomes a character, one of those characters with a life of their own. Given the recurrent images of artists, poets and writers, mad and lost in (or under) its streets, just what is your relationship with Ambergris? Is it your creation, or are you its citizen, or is it a little of both?

  Jeff VanderMeer: At this point, the real world and Ambergris are so intertwined and my inspirations taken from the real world are so various that, on the page, there's not always that much difference. When I re-read the Ambergris material, I see all of the historical, social, and cultural things that have fascinated me over the past twenty years. I see less and less the literary influences, except in terms of specifics of technique.

  Like, at some point Viriconium and Lanark influenced Ambergris, but then they got subsumed, mixed in, or tossed out. The funniest thing about the Viriconium influen
ce is that it's actually more from one of the primary sources for both V and A: Decadent literature. A lot of the grace notes in City of Saints came from dead Frenchmen.

  So, at this point, I'm pretty much creator and citizen both. In the backgrounds of stories and novels, I'm mapping out my feelings about history and politics and all of that. In that sense I'm a citizen of Ambergris just as I'm a citizen of the United States. In the foreground, where the characters live, I'm still creator.

  HD: The Decadent connection seems quite pertinent. Both Ambergris and the city of Veniss in Veniss Underground are highly layered constructions, in terms of literary technique, in terms of history and, literally, with labyrinthine depths below. Veniss Underground could be described as a descent into Hell, in fact. To what extent are those depths the characters are exploring historical, social and/or psychological?

  JV: In Veniss, for better or worse, they definitely are exploring historical and psychological depths in addition to just the realities of an odd quest. Given the nature of the bioneering in the novel, I thought that it pretty much made sense because in some sense the rogue bioneer Quin is taking all of these historical and mythical influences and creating an underground in that image. And then, of course, I'm also retelling Greek myth, or layering echoes of that into the text. The main thing, though, was to do it economically. To find ways of storytelling that allowed that last long section to be a descent into a literal and figurative underground without slowing down the narrative. Because I really wanted the novel to be this short, sharp shock. And, since it's not really a SF novel, I also wanted it to be short because at some point the reader is going to realize that the author doesn't give much of a damn about creating a realistic future setting.

  HD: And there's similar underworld investigations in Shriek, with Duncan's explorations of the tunnels under Ambergris. But for all the shock of the horrific images—the weird brutalities—there's a richer vein you're tapping, it seems to me, than the simple dread of the genre horror story. There's a sense of sorrow which underpins much of your writing and, if I remember right there's actually a line in “The Transformation of Martin Lake” about all great art containing sorrow. Is that a statement of your own beliefs or theories about writing?

  JV: I think all great art contains sorrow because it contains secret knowledge of our mortality—the sheer brevity of life. And because our lives are a mixture of pain and joy. When I say that, I don't mean that as a bad thing. I think there's nothing worse than a life lived in the middle of that—experiencing neither great pain nor great joy. And while you can live a life of happiness and joy without pain, I think that kind of a life is a bit of a lie. Because people you love die before you. Because you suffer setbacks. Because the fullest potential of life exists at the extremes. I don't mean to suggest everyone is bipolar or manic depressive—just that you have to allow yourself to be open to extremes or I don't think you're truly living. So, in that sense, sorrow does permeate my work.

  HD: You travelled extensively as a child, I understand. Has that shaped (broadened or focused) some of those “historical, cultural and social” fascinations?

  JV: I think it mostly gave me a highly developed social and political conscience, but also a good sense for specific detail. I think my travels as a kid really honed that ability. I'd be overwhelmed by texture, image, sound, smell, and I had to make sense of it all. I had to be able to pick out those things that most resonated and hang on to them to make sense of what I was seeing.

  HD: In terms of those literary techniques and influences, you work with a wide palette, applying realist, modernist or post-modernist approaches as often as genre ones. Have you found much resistance to this, with most of your work being perceived as “Fantasy?” Is the genre/mainstream divide real, an illusion, or an illusion with real effects?

  JV: It depends on the country and how it is marketed. I find some resistance in the UK and the US, certainly. I find resistance from readers who want their writers to stand still, damn it, and behave. But I don't like to write the same thing twice. Ambergris has been a blessing for me because it is flexible enough to incorporate most of my approaches so I can at least have the stability of one setting while using many different narrative strategies. I think the genre/mainstream divide is an illusion in the same way any generalization is an illusion ... which is to say it varies from reader to reader, critic to critic. So, in some places the wall is high and wide. In others, it was never there and there's just this huge grassy plain flanked by mountains where everybody has a great big fun ol’ fiction picnic. Or something like that.

  HD: The narrative strategies in Shriek are a particularly good example, I think, of how you're comfortable using techniques some would deem “experimental"—with the whole manuscript being the narrative of one character subsequently found, edited and annotated by another. Can you talk a little about this central conceit ... what it brings to the story which you wouldn't get in a more conventional single-viewpoint narrative?

  JV: Most of my narratives in the longer forms have been about triangulating different character viewpoints. In Veniss, this took the form of three sections and three different character points-of-view, with a full picture of each of the three only emerging from reading how they each see each other. In City of Saints, it's more of a triangulated view of Ambergris and a few people in it, with several stories deliberately contradicting each other so that it's a lot like how we receive information in the real world. Shriek is just an extension of that, with the edits and annotations by the second character rising above just “no—it didn't happen that way” to create what I feel is real depth of characterization through the juxtaposition of the voices. It's in the conflict between the voices, and their agreement, that I found a way to do fairly complex characterization, and something that resonates with readers. Because it's a family situation, and everyone in a family has a different version of the same events—a slightly different mythology. So, in a way, too, it's about the way families function, even dysfunctional families.

  HD: One of the early scenes in Shriek—and it plays out so beautifully I'm loathe to spoil it for the reader with too much detail here—involves an ... encounter between Duncan and a publisher who really doesn't like his manuscript. Is that a “worst nightmare” or a “demon laid to rest?” You've said elsewhere that you write for yourself and any audience is a bonus; does it get under your skin, though, if readers take an active dislike to something you've done?

  JV: It gets under my skin if it's a wilful misreading of the text, by a reviewer or a reader. If they really “get” what I was trying to do and they just don't like it—hey, that's legitimate and I respect that. But I invest so much time in layering and perfecting the effects in my work that I do get upset when a reader or reviewer doesn't take equivalent time to look at the text. Which is silly—no one is under any obligation to do so. But I can't help how I feel, only how I act on those feelings. As for the scene between Duncan and the publisher, it is a kind of a send-up and conflagration of all of those horribly stupid things that happened during my own career in the 1990s, when I couldn't sell any of my novels to save my life and wound up in a series of dysfunctional professional relationships with failing small presses. One guy emails me from his honeymoon to say the money for my book has been spent on other things. One guy wants me to change all the characters in Veniss to surrogates from the Bible. Another guy, in thrall to his copy editor, tells me there won't be a limited edition of my book unless I change some of my story titles because the copy editor thinks of the table of contents as a kind of poem and there's repetition of the word “death.” That sort of thing. So, really, it should be Duncan jumping across the desk and just beating the crap out of his publisher. But I channelled it the other way instead.

  HD: Having been involved in publishing from all angles—writing, editing, self-publishing—working with independent presses like Ministry of Whimsy, and large NY publishing houses like Bantam, what are the pleasures and pains of wearing these differen
t hats? Do you get a buzz out of editing an anthology like Leviathan, for example, that's different from that of writing?

  JV: The buzz of Leviathan is close to the buzz of rewriting or editing. It is a very mathematical buzz. You're seeing how pieces fit together. You're testing the strengths of the pieces and you're trying to arrange it all in such a way that you create a totality that is more than the sum of the parts. Editing is a very creative endeavour and too many people who think it's just a kind of caretaker business get involved in it. You're not just guarding a lighthouse or throwing a party you invite all your drunken friends to. It's a lot more complicated than that. So there's definitely an adrenaline rush to that, a kind of high. But it's also a lot of painstaking detail work, a lot of PR, a lot pure effort. Also, the collaboration. I like to work with co-editors. The purest buzz is still writing fiction, of course.

  HD: One of the richest and most recurrent sets of imagery within your Ambergris work is that based around fungi; permeating the substance of the city and even the substance of characters, mushrooms and their spores are everywhere in Ambergris, and there's a threat that goes along with that, but also a sense of beauty, of wonder. Without wanting to reduce it to a simplistic symbolism, what does that imagery represent to you? Or rather what is it you're exploring through that imagery?

  JV: You know, I don't like reducing it down to words, even. When I write, it's a very organic process. Sometimes the structures are pomo, but the emotion and the imagery are right out of the subconscious. I'm continually writing something in a fever dream and then re-reading it and wondering where the hell that came from. And then and only then thinking about it consciously ... what does that mean? Is that image resonant or is it dead? And I have to know to some extent what it means because I then refine or focus the story around that. But, in general terms, I think the fungi represent the true alien qualities of our world ... the ones we don't even notice. The ones we walk by every day and think of as normal. The world is a fucking strange place but we dull ourselves to that, we dull ourselves to direct experience. And then we wind up doing one of the most horrible things we can possibly do: we take our world, the people in it, everything, for granted. We don't even really see them any more ... we see representations of them we've created in our minds. The fungi is a way of trying to break through that, to actually see how strange it all is ... and thus how wonderful and unpredictable. There's also the element of rot and decay that mushrooms tend to be associated with. The beautiful shapes and colours.