by Weston Ochse
MULTIPLEX FANDAGO
by Weston Ochse
This eBook edition published 2011 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital.
Dark Regions Press
300 E. Hersey St. STE 10A
Ashland, OR 97520
www.darkregions.com
http://www.darkregions.com
Text © 2011 by Weston Ochse
Cover art © 2011 by Vincent Chong
Editor, Norman L. Rubenstein
Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey
Cover and Interior Design By
Stephen James Price
http://www.BookLooksDesign.blogspot.com
Premium signed and limited print editions available at: http://www.darkregions.com/books/multiplex-fandango-by-weston-ochse
Multiplex Fandango is subtitled “A Weston Ochse Reader” for good reason. This collection contains a comprehensive representation of short fiction and novellas by the Bram Stoker award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, including his recent powerful Stoker finalist short story, “The Crossing of Aldo Rey” and his brilliant Stoker finalist novella, Redemption Roadshow, as well as acclaimed favorites, “Catfish Gods” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Also included in this omnibus volume of sixteen short stories and novellas are six original new works of short fiction written especially for this collection including such future classics as “Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Low Men Weeping,” and the stunning, “City Of Joy.”
Multiplex Fandango is, as prominent author Joe R. Lansdale notes in his Introduction,
“…about to burst onto the scene like a comet streaking across the sky, entering our atmosphere, leaving in its smoking wake skywriting from its tail that says: WES OCHSE, HE’S GOOD…The bottom line is this. Wes takes very odd things and finds their connections; his juxtapositions are amazing and original and just the sort of thing I like. This is a book that could almost have been written for me. I can’t give it higher compliment than that.”
Celebrated author Edward Lee has this to say of Weston Ochse:
"Make way for a new powerhouse on the block. Hard work and formidable skills have already shot-gunned Ochse to the front of the genre's exciting new pack of writers. With creative brawn, brains, and balls, the guy's locked, loaded, and switched to full-auto, blazing away with his unique and original brand of modern horror, one of the few new writers, I'd say, who will help re-define the field for the future."
MULTIPLEX FANDANGO
A Weston Ochse Reader
“Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” © 2009, “Fugue on the Sea of Cortez” © 2007, “Forever Beneath the Scorpion Tree” © 2010, “High Desert Come to Jesus” © 2009, “Low Men Weeping” © 2006 and “City of Joy” © 2009 are original, previously unpublished stories.
“22 Stains in the Jesus Pool” © 2004 Originally published in Feral Fiction
“Big Rock Candy Mountain” © 2010 Dark Discoveries
“The Last Great Love of Cary Grant” © 2006 Insidious Reflections
“Catfish Gods” © 1999 Published in Scary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors by Darktales Publications
“The Secret Lives of Heroes” © 2006 Horror Garage
“Hiroshima Falling” © 2007 A Dark and Deadly Valley Anthology, Silverthought Press
“The Crossing of Aldo Ray” © 2009 (Bram Stoker Award Finalist), The Dead That Walk Anthology, Ulysses Press
“The Smell of Leaves Burning in Winter” © 2003 Published in Appalachian Galapagos by Medium Rare LLC
“A Day in the Life of a Dust Bunny” © 2002 Asylum 2 Anthology, Darktales Publications
“Redemption Roadshow” ©2008 (Bram Stoker Award Finalist), Burning Effigy Press
Also by Weston Ochse
Novels:
Scarecrow Gods
Recalled to Life
The Golden Thread
Empire of Salt
Blaze of Glory
Novellas:
Natural Selection
Redemption Roadshow
Nancy Goats
Vampire Outlaw of the Milky Way
Lord of the Lash and Our Lady of the Boogaloo
The Loup Garou Kid
7
The Short Story
The short story as a medium is both terrible and beautiful. A good story is like a sharp blade. It’s a swift thrust to the chest. It’s a slow cut to the arm. It’s a pinprick on the cheek. It stings and bites, and when the blood gets to flowing, we feel the warmth of it.
Hemingway can hurt you like that. He can slice you with a perfect sentence, or in the case of “Hills Like White Elephants,” he can push the blade in so slowly you don’t even feel it until it’s too late.
Ray Bradbury wields a nasty blade as well. Beneath the exterior of this jovial aging Californian resides a bona fide serial killer of the status quo. My expectations were forever skewered when I read “The Sound of Summer Running” and was introduced to Douglas Spalding, Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes, and the idea that summer is a time of eternal magic. I’m still searching for those shoes.
Joe Lansdale is a literary samurai. His dojo is the page. His two-fisted katana swings completely eviscerated my sense of what should be when I read “Night They Missed the Horror Show” and “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.” I didn’t know such cuts could be made. Frankly, I didn’t even see them coming.
There are so many other professional knife throwers: Flannery O’Connor with “Everything that Rises Must Converge;” James Baldwin with “Sonny’s Blues;” Charlotte Perkins Gilman with “The Yellow Wallpaper;” Tim O’Brien with “The Things They Carried;” Sherman Alexie with “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven;” and Thomas King with “Borders,” to name but a few.
I’ve stood against the wall while each author hurled their blades, slicing me so many times I’ve lost count over the years. I don’t even bandage my wounds anymore. Instead, I stitch them with dental floss or bind the edges with staples. My skin now doubles as a literary road atlas, a Rand McNally version of the Illustrated Man, able to share what I’ve read with others by merely pointing at an elbow, a wrist or a rib.
Yes, I’m lucky to have been cut so many times.
I’ve been the fortunate target for their hard-won enterprise.
And yet there are so many more short story masters I’m waiting to be cut by. These are but a few. So for all of you I’ve named and for all of you I didn’t name, thank you for teaching me the wonders of the short story blade.
Thank you for cutting me so well.
Thank you for cutting me so deep.
Now it’s my turn to staunch the blood and cut for a while.
Weston Ochse
Tarantula Grotto
Sonoran Desert
June 2010
7
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my friends, readers and fans. All of you have inspired or helped me in some way especially those of you there in the early days of the cabal, like Doug Clegg, Brian Keene, Paul Legerski, Tim Lebbon, Mikey Huyck, Jamie Lachance, Kelly Laymon, F. Paul Wilson, Adam Niswander, Mike Oliveri, Wrath White, John Urbancik, James Futch, Feo Amante, Joe Nasisse, Drew Williams, Carlton Melnick, Maria Alexander, Rain Graves, Matt Schwartz, Ray Garton, Tom Piccirilli, Michelle Scalise, Jack Haringa, Simon Clark, Chris Golden, and Jim Moore. Last but not least, thanks to Ed Lee for his mentoring throughout the years, who I am certain is still flipping me off for that miserable death march across the hills of San Francisco.
Posthumous thanks goes out to Dick Laymon.
Thank you Shane Staley, Larry Roberts, Roy Robbins and Jonathan Oliver for publishing my work throughout these years; likewise to Denise Dumars and Bob Fleck for representing me.
Thank you to Norm Rubenstein for being a true fan, friend and editor and to Joe Morey for believing in this project.
Most off all, thanks to my wife, Yvonne Navarro, for being that spark of desire behind every thought, word and deed.
7
HIGH DESERT COME TO JESUS
For
Joe Lansdale and Ray Bradbury
HOT WIRED AND
STUFFED WITH GRIT
By Joe R. Lansdale
Here’s the scoop fair readers, and those among you who are not fair, but are the ugly ones, you know who you are. I have made a general plan not to write introductions any more unless they are to my own work.
This is not because I think I’m above it, but due to the fact that I have now been writing and selling for near on forty years, and have been a full time writer for soon to be thirty years, and I‘m feeling a little short in the extra time department. I have tried to read new writers and I have tried to encourage them, and I don’t think that will cease until I’m in the grave, or burned to ashes and distributed under a rose bush for dogs and insects to crap on.
But, to tell you true, as one gets older, and I’m still in my fifties, so I’m not exactly packing my bags and getting my bus ticket from the grim reaper—unless he surprises me and thinks we should vacation early—but I am at an age when I have come to the conclusion that I will only read what I want to read when I want to read it, and writing introductions has become too much of a distraction from my own work. I am writing more now than ever before, and I want to be left to it. Time has become more and more precious to me. I want to write my work, not write about other’s work, and I want what spare time I have after work to be with my family and to read exactly what I want to read when I’m in the mood for it, watch the films I want, do martial arts, and so on.
That said, it should be obvious by now I wasn’t all that enthusiastic when I was approached by Wes Ochse’s editor with a request that I read Wes’s work and if I liked it enough, would I write an introduction to the collection?
My heart sank.
My first thought was: Not again.
I know, I have asked writers to write intros for me, and I’m sure Wes does not like to feel or like to think anyone would consider him going door to door with his hat in his hand asking for an introduction, as he’s not that kind of guy. He’s just an honest, hard-working, steadfast writer who loves what he does.
Still, I feel I have earned some removal from the hamster wheel of payback, if only a little bit. Though, to be pretty honest, out here in the wilds of East Texas I pretty much had to figure it out myself. All the good ones do. I suspect this has been Wes’s case.
Let me tell you. I read a lot of novels and short stories with the possibility of writing an introduction, and most of them I have to pass on because I don’t care for them, or know they’re good, but just don’t have the interest or enthusiasm in them that’s necessary to write a glowing introduction. I am the first to say that my impressions of these books could be wrong—vastly wrong.
However, there’s this. I had met Wes a few times and we always had really good conversations. He even dedicated this book to me and Ray Bradbury, and being in Bradbury’s company in any manner, shape or form is pretty high cotton. But, it also made the matter all the worse, because if I read the book and didn’t like it… Well, it would make me feel pretty miserable. It’s a little like giving a toast to your wife at your anniversary party, telling how she changed your life, and how much better it’s been since she came along, how she made it all worth living, and when you finish, you lift your glass and smile at her, and she says, “You know, for me, it wasn’t all that great.”
I could use the excuse I didn’t have time to read it, which is a polite way out, and often true, but this was Wes, and I like Wes, and he’s a smart man, so I said: I’ll read it with the understanding that I will only write an introduction if I like the work. If I don’t, I’ll pass, as I always do, even if I might feel like the disappointed husband in my above scenario.
This was agreed to, understood.
I also agreed that I would not go into the book’s contents blow by blow, but if I liked it, I would trumpet its arrival into the world. I agreed to gladly be there at its birth and wish it the best, and bring it a baby present in the form of an introduction, but I wouldn’t change its diapers or babysit or teach it how to read or walk or tie its shoe.
And then I got this.
The book.
And I was wowed. I mean that. WOWED. This boy, he’s good. And for all his nice words about certain authors and their work, their influences on his writing, he’s his own man.
The bottom line is this. Wes takes very odd things and finds their connections; his juxtapositions are amazing and original and just the sort of thing I like.
This is a book that could almost have been written for me.
I can’t give it higher compliment than that.
As I said, I won’t talk much about the stories, but anyone who can write “Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” has my respect; white-hot prose that rolls like a well-oiled roller coaster with briars in the seats, containing screaming patrons with those briars up their ass.
Wes is absolutely fearless. Maybe that’s why so much of his work has appeared in small magazines. I know. That’s how I started my career, and bless those little magazines.
I have a feeling this collection, containing such gems as the aforementioned story, and some personal favorites like “Catfish Gods” and “The Secret Lives Of Heroes”, is about to burst onto the scene like a comet streaking across the sky, entering our atmosphere, leaving in its smoking wake skywriting from its tail that says: WES OCHSE, HE’S GOOD.
And he is.
So now, I fade away, and leave you with the stories.
All writers know that in the end, that’s what it’s about.
The stories.
Here they are. Enjoy. I know you will.
Joe R. Lansdale
Nacogdoches, Texas
MULTIPLEX – a movie theater complex with three or more screens. North America's first multi-screen theater was The Elgin Theatre, created in 1957 by Nat Taylor in Ottawa, Ontario.
FANDANGO – a style of folk and flamenco music and dance. It arose as a dance of courtship in Andalusia in southern Spain early in the 18th century. As a result of the extravagant features of the dance, the word fandango is used as a synonym for 'a quarrel', 'a big fuss' or 'a brilliant exploit.'
Pop-culture references include:
Procol Harum's song "Whiter Shade of Pale" contains the line We skipped the light fandango.
Queen's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" contains the line Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango?
The 1985 film Fandango starring Kevin Costner and Judd Nelson about five college students from Texas in 1971 who go on a 'last' road trip together, before facing graduation, marriage, and the Draft for the Vietnam War.
MULTIPLEX FANDANGO – a pop-culture, theatrical, book presentation of the works of Weston Ochse on Sixteen High-Definition literary screens.
Table of Contents
Sixteen Screens of Mayhem, Madness and Horror
Screen 1 Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Screen 2 22 Stains in the Jesus Pool
Screen 3 Fugue on the Sea of Cortez
Screen 4 Big Rock Candy Mountain
Screen 5 The Sad Last Love of Cary Grant
Screen 6 Catfish Gods
Screen 7 Forever Beneath the Scorpion Tree
Screen 8 High Desert Come to Jesus
Screen 9 Low Men Weeping
Screen 10 The Secret Lives of Heroes
Screen 11 Hiroshima Falling
Screen 12 The Crossing of Aldo Ray
Screen 13 The Smell of Leaves Burning in Winter
Screen 14 A Day in the Life of a Dust Bunny
Screen 15 City of Joy
Screen 16 Redemption Roadshow
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 1
Tarzan Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore
Starring Andy Friarson as Tarzan
and the Mexican Girl as Lady Jane
“The monstrous love child of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne and Quentin Tarantino. The Legend of Tarzan will never be the same again!”
–Stardust Magazine
A SENSAROUND GLAMARAMA PRODUCTION
“Me Tarzan. You Jane.”
– Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan the Apeman, 1932
The earth was rent as if a leviathan had burst free to sail the galaxy for better worlds to chew. Four miles long, hundreds of feet at its widest point, and more than a thousand feet deep, the Sonoran Rift was one of a hundred that had rent the Earth in the past three years. No one knew where they came from nor why they happened. Most had been kept a secret, but those like the Baltimore Scar and the Edmonton Crater, couldn’t be ignored. But the Sonoran Rift was the largest of them all, and if it hadn’t been for a disenchanted soldier spilling his guts to the network, no one would have ever had an inkling about it.
Andy’s network had tried four times to get someone near enough to corroborate the unbelievable statements the dying soldier had made, and each of their reporters had failed to return. The idea that another rift existed would be a news coup for the network that could garner millions in advertizing.
“Do you think what they say is true?” asked Leon, who rose from checking one of the seventy claymore mines in their sector.
That there are monsters in there? Andy didn’t even want to give voice to the thought, so he just stared.
“Hey Vato, I’m talking to you.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Andy said.