I still am.
There’s obviously a fair amount of autobiographical detail in “Midnight Promises.” A lot of the hospital stuff, and the apple tree/tumor dream from the story was an actual reoccurring nightmare from that period of my life, as was the nightmare that didn’t make it into the story—the one where I was a corpse-conductor on a huge, shiny black train of death that roared across a ruined, radioactive and charred countryside, thick black smoke billowing from its immense exhaust pipes.
It was an interesting time for me—and my loved ones.
I didn’t let anyone read “Midnight Promises” ahead of time. Late that year, when it first saw print as the title story in my debut collection, it caught a lot of people by surprise—and it made some of those people pretty upset. Some of them friends, some of them family.
I remember when Kara finished reading the story, she threw the book across the room where it crashed into a wall and fell to the floor.
A good story is supposed to elicit a reaction, right?
THE NIGHT SHIFT—One of two dialogue-only experiments in the collection, and a return to Frank and Ben, my favorite two police detectives from “Night Call.” An absolutely perfect example of a story that was written, first and foremost, to entertain myself…and then, hopefully, others. Broken record, I know, but I really need to revisit these guys soon.
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE—Fangoria called this one “intense” and a newspaper reviewer praised it as “an unrelentingly dark vision of the werewolf myth.” Both descriptions are accurate, maybe a little too accurate.
Looking back on “Only the Strong Survive,” I wish Barry and I had sprinkled in a little black humor. I think the story is ripe for it, and I think it would have helped the characters be a little more dynamic and interesting.
THE INTERVIEW—I miss Richard Laymon—his voice and his laughter and his unique talent. I miss our phone chats and his books and stories. Dick was one of the good guys, and the genre is a much less interesting place without him in it.
When Dick asked me to write a story for his first-ever anthology, Bad News, I knew I had to come up with something special to mark the occasion.
I had an image stuck in my head of an old man sitting on his front porch in the middle of the night, just rocking away on his rocking chair and watching the neighborhood sleep. He looked like a friendly enough guy—but I sensed there was more to him. Something troubling, maybe even dangerous.
I decided to write the story using only dialogue, something I had never attempted before. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed every word of it—and my guy on the porch turned out to be a very sweet old man who had just…snapped.
I still have Dick’s letter telling me how much he loved the story in a desk drawer in my home office.
THE POETRY OF LIFE—One of a handful of stories in this collection that was inspired by a dream. I’ve always been a big dreamer, my entire life, and I remember quite a few of them. But this one was…different.
I didn’t just dream about this middle-aged music teacher—I dreamt that I was her.
Everything I thought and felt and observed and did in this dream came directly from her/my point of view. I actually walked in this woman’s shoes, and when I woke up in the morning, the last two lines of the story were echoing in my head—“I had to walk slow. The guns were heavy.”
The dream bothered me for days. Those two sentences bothered me for days.
So, I wrote “The Poetry of Life.”
A LONG DECEMBER—I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to wake up one morning and find out that your best friend was not who you believed them to be—that they were leading a double life.
I don’t mean the clichéd double life involving a mistress or a second family stashed away in a nearby town. Or the timid housewife moonlighting as a call girl stripper.
I’m talking Ted Bundy or Robert Yates or the BTK serial killer Dennis Rader.
What would it feel like to wake up and turn on the news and see your best friend’s picture underneath a banner headline that read: SERIAL KILLER?
The emotions that would come rushing at you—shock, disbelief, denial, confusion, anger, guilt, fear.
I can’t even begin to imagine what it would feel like.
But I’ve always wondered.
“A Long December” was my answer.
ONE FINAL NOTE—The stories included in A Long December were written over a period of almost thirty years—the earliest story (“Cemetery Dance”) penned when I was just a wide-eyed twenty-year-old college student and the most recent (“A Long December”) completed a week before my fiftieth birthday.
Many years ago, acclaimed crime writer, Ed Gorman, blessed me with the following praise: “Rich writes gracefully but without pretense. He knows all about the double-whammy, the device wherein the last few paragraphs of a story are able to raise hard cold goosebumps along the arms, and force the body to shudder.
“But what Rich does best of all is tell us about himself and by this I don’t mean the egotistical ramblings of a Thomas Wolfe (or sometimes) a Norman Mailer…I mean, he is able to convey through his fiction the joys, sorrows, fears, and aspirations of a very decent and very talented young man who is very much a child of his age. Most good novelists, I think, are also good journalists—they are able to tell you honestly about their particular moment on this planet, and what went on during it, and what it amounted to, and how it felt to live through it. There is this same journalistic quality in virtually all of Rich’s fiction. He takes great snapshots of America in the 1990s.”
I hope Ed is right, folks. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do in my stories—take something meaningful to me (a person, a place, a moment in time) and tell a good and interesting story about it. An honest story.
All the stories in A Long December might not be good and interesting (that’s up to you, and I do hope the majority of them pleased you in some way), but they are honest. They are my truth, and the best I could do each time I sat down and put pen to paper.
It’s fascinating to think back to where I was in my life when each story was written: a college apartment, a parking lot, a library, a grassy hill, a hospital room, a lot of different desks in a lot of different rooms.
Some of these stories were first published at a time when cell phones and DVDs and compact discs didn’t exist, when payphones appeared on most street corners, and the Internet was just a burgeoning dream.
Many were written before I was married, before my wife and I had our two boys, before both my mother and father passed away. Others before my cancer, and still others before the expansion of my publishing company.
It’s all a little dizzying—and humbling—to think about.
As usual, Ed found better words than I ever could have: these stories are some of my favorite snapshots from those almost thirty years; A Long December, my personal photo album of the many people and places and moments I wanted to tell you about.
Thirty years…I’m amazed and grateful to still be here, still telling my stories, and I’m especially thankful to all of you for listening.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
“Blood Brothers” copyright 1997 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared as an original chapbook, edited by William Schafer, published by Subterranean Press, Flint, Michigan.
“The Man with X-Ray Eyes” copyright 1998 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in The UFO Files, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, published by DAW Books, New York, New York.
“The Box” copyright 2014 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared as an original chapbook, published by Cemetery Dance Publications, Forest Hill, Maryland.
“Heroes” copyright 1993 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Predators, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, published by NAL Roc, New York, New York.
“Ditch Treasures” copyright 2016 by Richard Chizmar, appears here for the first time.
“The Silence of Sorrow” copyright 1996 by Richard Chizmar, originally
appeared in Midnight Promises, published by Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“After the Bombs” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Twice Upon a Time, edited by Joshua Allen Mercier, published by The Bearded Scribe Press, Atlanta, Georgia.
“Last Words” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in The Burning Maiden: Volume 2, edited by Greg Kishbaugh, published by Evileye Books, Crystal Lake, Illinois.
“Night Call” copyright 1998 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in The Last Midnight, edited by Jerry Skyes, England.
“The Lake Is Life” copyright 2016 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Tales From the Lake: Volume 2, edited by Joe Mynhardt, published by Crystal Lake Publishing, South Africa.
“The Good Old Days” copyright 1998 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in The Conspiracy Files, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Scott H. Urban, published by DAW Books, New York, New York.
“Grand Finale” copyright 1994 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Voices From the Night, edited by John Maclay, published by Maclay & Associates, Baltimore, Maryland.
“The Artist” copyright 2016 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Brothers in Arms, edited by Richard Christian Matheson and Barry Hoffman, published by Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“Family Ties” copyright 2001 by Richard Chizmar and Barry Hoffman, originally appeared in Murder Most Feline: Cunning Tales of Cats and Crime, edited by Ed Gorman, published by Cumberland House, Nashville, Tennessee.
“Mister Parker” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Dark Hallows, edited by Mark Parker, published by Scarlet Galleon Publications, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
“Monsters” copyright 1998 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in A Horror a Day: 365 Scary Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg and Stefan Dziemianowicz, published by Barnes & Noble Books, New York, New York.
“Like Father, Like Son” copyright 1997 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, New York, New York.
“The Tower” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Hides the Dark Tower, edited by Kelly A. Harmon and Vonnie Winslow Crist, published by Pole to Pole Publishing, Baltimore, Maryland.
“Brothers” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar and Ed Gorman, originally appeared as an original novella, Brothers, edited by Paul Fry, published by SST Publications, Birmingham, England.
“Cemetery Dance” copyright 1992 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Narrow Houses: Tales of Superstition, Suspense and Fear, edited by Peter Crowther, published by Little Brown, London, England.
“Blue” copyright 1998 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated, edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom, published by IFD Publishing, Eugene, Oregon.
“A Crime of Passion” copyright 1991 by Richard Chizmar, originally published in Gauntlet 2, edited by Barry Hoffman, published by Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“Homesick” copyright 1997 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in White House Horrors, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by DAW Books, New York, New York.
“Devil’s Night” copyright 1996 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Midnight Promises, published by Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“Bride of Frankenstein: A Love Story” copyright 1993 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Frankenstein: The Monster Wakes, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by DAW Books, New York, New York.
“The Season of Giving” 1993 by Richard Chizmar and Norman Partridge, originally appeared in Santa Clues, edited by Carol-Lynn Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, published by NAL Signet, New York, New York.
“A Capital Cat Crime” copyright 1993 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Danger in D.C., edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by Donald I. Fine Books, New York, New York.
“The Sinner King” copyright 1994 by Richard Chizmar, originally published in Grails: Visitations of the Night, edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward Kramer, published by NAL Roc, New York, New York.
“A Season of Change” copyright 1996 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Night Screams, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, published by NAL Roc, New York, New York.
“Midnight Promises” copyright 1996 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Midnight Promises, published by Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“The Night Shift” copyright 2000 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated: Volume 2, edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom, published by IFD Publishing, Eugene, Oregon.
“Only the Strong Survive” copyright 1995 by Richard Chizmar and Barry Hoffman, originally appeared in Werewolves, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by DAW Books, New York, New York.
“The Interview” copyright 2000 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Bad News, edited by Richard Laymon, published by Cemetery Dance Publications, Forest Hill, Maryland.
“The Poetry of Life” copyright 2015 by Richard Chizmar, originally appeared in Chiral Madness 3, edited by Michael Bailey, published by Written Backwards Press, Calistoga, California.
“A Long December” copyright 2016 by Richard Chizmar, appears here for the first time.
“Story Notes” copyright 2016 by Richard Chizmar, appears here for the first time.
Author Bio
RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder/publisher of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than 20 anthologies and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. He has won two World Fantasy awards, four International Horror Guild awards, and the HWA’s Board of Trustees’ award.
Chizmar (in collaboration with Johnathon Schaech) has also written screenplays and teleplays for United Artists, Sony Screen Gems, Lions Gate, Showtime, NBC, and many other companies.
Chizmar is the creator/writer of Stephen King Revisited, and his next short story collection, A Long December, is due in 2016 from Subterranean Press.
Chizmar’s work has been translated into many languages throughout the world, and he has appeared at numerous conferences as a writing instructor, guest speaker, panelist, and guest of honor.
You can follow Richard Chizmar on both Facebook and Twitter.
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