So Perfect
Grok # 8, Winter 2008
This feels like a Heathers story to me. Except it’s really—well, not about my dad, but one weekend my dad was alone in the house, states away, and then called me up Monday, said he nearly died the last three days. Every hour of those last three days. And that he still probably was going to. Because he, like I never had either, didn’t take the warning labels all over those Frontline applicators seriously. Probably because those applicators look exactly like the activators for rearview mirror glue, which, yeah, those can get messy, but you don’t die from that mess. This tick-be-gone pesticide, though, that stuff’ll plain tear you up. I mean, I’ve got enough on me to get sick before, but just small-dose strychnine sick, never three-days gonna-die sick. Anyway, add that whole scene to this one day I went to teach my Tuesday lit class, and I was in half-bad shape still, had had some kind of killer food poising for four days, from this greyblack, oily lump of bad-idea meat I found in the back of the fridge, that I thought I could put enough ketchup on that it wouldn’t matter how old it was. Turns out, there’s no amount of ketchup. Anyway, a student up front kind of noted aloud that I looked different this day (I suspect I wasn’t standing up straight yet), and I said yeah, I’d been sick, lost thirteen pounds over the weekend, and this girl sitting a few rows back, she got this look of wonder on her face, and raised her hand, waited for me to call on her, asked if I could breathe on her, please. And that way of thinking, that so obvious-to-her way of getting from some A to some B, I don’t know. It stuck in my head, and the only way I could try to make it make sense was to write from inside it, feel my way out, try to document what I could, and use some Redmond O’Hanlon imagery along the way (he can describe ticks in very uncomfortable ways). And, as for Candy Cane, I used to live in Denton, Texas, and I remember for a few months always seeing this girl at the edge of every scene, wearing these Seuss-looking red-and-white striped tights, like they were a statement of some kind. And so now I let her make that statement.
Lonegan’s Luck
New Genre 6, Summer 2009
This is me, trying to be Lansdale. Also, the way I’d planned it, this was the first of a collection of Lonegan stories, The Alone Again Chronicles or something, where he dies at the end of each story, but’s still around for the next, and cycles through vampires and werewolves and ghosts and aliens and all of it, just trying to scam his way through the Old West, until his true nature’s finally revealed. Still might do that, too. Only reason I haven’t so far—or, back when I wrote this—was that nobody would publish this one, and I kind of lost heart, thought all the usual things about my writing, my stupid stories, my grand ideas. So, thank you, Adam Golaski, for taking a chance on it, and thank you, Ellen Datlow, for selecting it for Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2. Maybe now I can write some more awkward-length Lansdale clones, and fall in love with them just as much. And also, thank you, Louis L’Amour. Except for all the Indians your characters were always shooting, or stealing land from, or marrying into slavery. But the rest, yes. I wouldn’t know how to be a person without reading all your books over and over. Or, really, your books were the ones I used to run off into the woods with in the dark, and read the first page by matchlight, then tear that page out, light it, read the next page by the burning page, and feel my way through that way, so that I’d just have a handful of burn at the end. But I’d be happy too, because the good guys won. Except I always made them secretly Indian, in my head. They were a lot more believable that way.
Monsters
Niteblade Horror and Fantasy Magazine #8, June 2009
This was supposed to just be a what-I-did-over-summer-vacation story. Innocent, flighty, nostalgic. Me, trying on a different past, one where I could have been that kid who got to go beach towns for the summer, have adventures and romances. I just wanted to see if I could do that, I mean, at least on the page. Looks like not. As soon as Matey got to be a police dog, then of course he’s a cadaver dog, because the other kind are boring, and then because he’s trained for what he’s trained for, that training’s useless unless there’s some walking dead dude under the boardwalk for him to sniff out, right? And it’s not like I could chase that guy out of the story after he showed up. He was there to do something, evidently. I just had to run it down with words.
But still, even after I finished—another one-sitting trick—I never thought it worked until I lucked onto that now-obvious title. It’s the only thing that lets the end happen right, I think. Because, I mean, that vampire dude, he’s bad news, sure, but he’s just doing what his kind does, too. As for the real monsters in this story, though, our narrator here, he knows where they live. I would have let him just go ahead and get infected, so he could dole out some justice, but of course, like I was saying, it wouldn’t be justice, then, right? It’d just be his kind doing what his kind does. Much worse—better—if it’s him doing what he’s maybe going to do by choice. Always better that way.
Wolf Island
Juked 12.17.2009
This is my second werewolf story. And I think it’s somehow a rip-off of that King story “Survivor Type,” where the heroin-smuggling doctor’s marooned on an island, has to eat most of himself to survive. That story and “The Jaunt,” they’ve never left me, never will. But, anyway, that story forever lodged in my head, there I am on the couch, killing Cheetos and watching a nature show, when this killer whale just slams up onto a beach in South America or somewhere, after a seal, and, man: Cheetos everywhere. I had never seen anything so cool. So of course my first thought was What else could possibly ever even hope to be that cool? Answer: werewolves. End result: this story. As very influenced by Barry Lopez telling me once about watching a couple—could have been one, I guess—of moose swim from some point of land in Alaska across to an island. Everything’s going fine, they’re thinking moose thoughts, when bam, this pod of killer whales finds them, just absolutely feasts. I could listen to that story all day every day for a week. Even just retelling it as poorly as I am now, I mean, I’m so excited my fingers are going too fast, so there’s wrong letters everywhere. And, this is definitely a pattern I see in all of my stories, all of my novels: I always want things to come down to the Hulk and Thor duking it out, say. Or that rattlesnake and the mongoose in Any Which Way You Can. Or Jane versus the whole sick federation of planets, or whatever they were in Xenocide. AVP, Jason versus Freddy, Terminator versus Terminator, all of it, yes. All stories are Highlander stories, as far as I’m concerned: There can be only one.
Teeth
Brutarian 44, Spring 2005
The weekend I sold All the Beautiful Sinners to Sean Coyne at Rugged Land—no: the weekend I sold the general, vague, idea of ATBS to Rugged Land, when there was no plot in place, no characters, no setting, no nothing except the suspicion that this would be thrillerish, maybe have a police car or two, I figured it wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to see if I could actually maybe do something in that arena. So, in about thirty-six hours, to prove to myself—and to Coyne—that I could, I whipped out “Teeth.” Which I so wish I didn’t have to suspect Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” was somehow instrumental for, as I hate that story, think it’s completely useless, way over-anthologized—he’s got some really excellent stuff, I mean, why not use that?—but, that idea of teeth-casts, I don’t know where else I could have stumbled onto it, either. So, yeah. Thanks, Carver. And, that name, “Kupier,” some article I was reading at the time—likely Discover, as my beloved OMNI was long gone by 2002—it was some asteroid belt I was meaning to write about. But, until then, I could at least sneak the name in, save it for later. And, those owl pellets, just the idea of them’s always fascinated me. Couple of years ago a friend gave me one, even, and I teased it apart with probes, for the mouse skeleton inside. Very cool. And, yes, again, this story probably owes everything to King’s “Survivor Type.” But, I mean, c’mon. Everything I write, it owes nearly every piece of itself to King.
Raphael
Cemetery Danc
e 55, Fall 2006
This was so far over Cemetery Dance’s word-limit, and from such a complete nobody—me, 2006—that I have no idea what compelled Robert Morrish to snag it from whatever leaning slushpile it was in. And, I mean, I kind of suspected it was a broke story anyway, only sent it out because I knew I couldn’t make it any better, and needed it off my desk so I could move on. But then Ellen Datlow picked it up for The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and it nabbed some good award nominations, and here I am, I guess, with all these other stories too, suddenly and unexpectedly. So, first, thanks to Robert and Ellen, and, second—again—this story’s just me, loving King’s It, a book I hope to never get over, a book I crawled into twenty years ago, never quite got all the way back out of. And, that book they read, that they bury in that cake pan, it’s Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Probably the single most important book of my life. When I was twelve, I was addicted to The Enquirer and all those, never even thought to suspect they might be making this up about aliens and Bigfoot—never had any reason to doubt any of it, as all the stuff my family was involved in at the time, it was no less out-there. Really, Enquirer was an anchor, some sort of touchstone. Living under the stairs in our perpetually half-built house back then, I was absolutely certain there was a bald guy with green eyes, and there were nights I would wake up with deer heads fallen from the wall into my bed, and wasps biting me on the neck, and my snakes were always loose in the house, and the neighbor was always burying my dog alive, and the only thing to do, the best place to go, was running off into the empty spaces. Like Gabe and the other ghosts. It’s calm out there, alone. Good. Until something like what happens with Melanie happens, yeah. That was a complete surprise to me. The way I had the story half-planned—original title: “The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” (what Gabe’s dad was watching)—was that one of their stories (Gabe’s) would come true at the end, and they’d learn the power of storytelling. Except then there’s Melanie becoming Melody, arcing her back away from the water, and I was all freaked out, had to leave the story for a while. Which is why, when it starts up again, it’s thirty-two years later. I did not want to be there at that water’s edge even one moment longer. Except, then, like with the rabbit story, that’s the only place there is, too. As Gabe has to find out. And, going into this one just now, I thought surely I’d find a different end, thought that surely it was broke, that everybody was wrong about it, but this ending, Melanie’s hair reaching down for him, man. It still scares me, makes me see things from the corner of my eye that I have to tell myself and tell myself aren’t really there. But then of course I look anyway.
Captain’s Lament
Clarkesworld #17, February 2008
I’ve never been on a boat. Or, is it a “ship” if you’re talking a sea-boat? I have no idea. I’ve never been on the sea, the ocean. My best dream is to someday see a whale, though. I think about that a lot. Enough that this voice, Muley, it’s by far the easiest voice I’ve ever tried. His oblique, half-antique way of talking, that nautical kind of diction, it feels more natural to me than—no, the only other voice I’ve ever done that feels so natural would be Francis Dalimpere, from Ledfeather. But that’s Muley. And, I wrote them both at the same time, yeah. There’s something about a character with such a romantic bent that it infects his language, it just feels so right, so real, so unfettered by the usual constraints. For a long time, Don Quixote was my favorite-favorite book, yeah. But then of course I put him at the back of the room in Jaws, scratching his nails down that chalkboard. And I was fresh from another last pass through Demon Theory too, specifically all the Urban Legend notes, so that got included as well. Except—I had no idea how to tell the backstory to the most well-known of all the urban legends without both giving that legend away too early or making it suddenly unscary. So, the only solution then is to make the backstory just as horrible, just as twisted, then couch it in a diction distracting enough that nobody asks what this guy’s right hand might or might not look like.
The Meat Tree
Dogmatika, Spring 2006
I always think this story’s in present tense, even when I’m reading it, can see all the past-tense verbs right there. Just feels so immediate to me. And, this was the first “long” story I ever wrote that didn’t get away from me, I think. No, there’s one other that works, “Sterling City,” but that might need italics, not quotation marks—do novellas get italics treatment? Anyway, that one went long in the best way, had that glandular problem, but this one, it was able to find the end quicker somehow—likely because it’s first-person instead of third, which always makes the exposition trick easier. For me, anyway. And, unlike nearly everything else I write, that starts with a voice, with a sentence unspooling in my head, this one actually started with an image: that tree with slabs of meat draped all through its limbs. And, I’d guess that’s somehow really Cormac McCarthy’s baby tree from Blood Meridian, but so be it. Much more interesting with meat, I think. Because then you have to wonder what kind of creature would leave it up there, and why? This time, the character, the narrator, he just kind of shaped himself around that, to answer those questions, then frame them in his own terms. And, maybe more than in any of these stories, this guy here, he’s me at twenty. Nearly every detail (except I could never eat a Slim Jim; sorry, Randy Savage). And, talking about that missing kid Jeremy, I think that’s guilt, from all the telephone poles I’ve half-knocked over with tractors, or at least strung their guide wires out to where they’re sagging, supporting nothing. And, those telephone poles, that’s where the faces of these kids go, right? It’s stupid, but I always felt about bad about clipping those poles with a knifing rig, or shooting them over and over, or seeing if they would burn. And yeah, this is the other lost-in-the-woods story of this collection. Which I wrote before the rabbit story. If I’d just re-read this one first, then I’d have seen that you always bring the woods back out with you. The experience isn’t something you walk through, remember fondly, later, at your leisure. It’s something you live through, take with you everywhere, no matter if it’s about meat trees or tea parties. If there’s ever a thesis to what I do, I suspect that’s it: everything matters. Especially the stuff you don’t want to.
The Ones Who Got Away
Phantom, eds. Paul Tremblay & Sean Wallace (Prime, 2009)
I wrote this all the way back in 2005, I think. Maybe 2006. And it’s one of those where I had zero idea where it might be going. All I had, really, was a first line, then a kid to be saying it, then a reason for him to be saying it, then that reason being a dead friend, then that dead friend dying this or that way, and suddenly I’m cruising in a stolen van past my eighth-grade bowling alley in Wimberley, Texas, where half my living up to that point had happened, it felt like, and the way things slowed down for that drive-by, it felt so final, so last-time, so perfect and forever. Still gets to me. And I miss Tim, all the Tims. And the first version of this story, from Phantom and from Five Chapters, for some reason I thought it was magic and accidental and bulletproof. But then I opened that file again, for this collection, and the first half of it felt so wandering to me, like I could see myself feeling this new storyscape out, seeing where the holes were I could slip through, that might open onto other rooms. Like holding match after match in front of a series of doorways, waiting for one of those flames to flicker more than the rest. So I printed up draft after draft after draft of this story for two days, and read it until I hated it, then read it some more, and finally, now, here, it’s a way that works, I think. The first half matches the second half, I mean. And, thanks to an ex-student from forever ago, Kenneth Simpson, I think, who first cued into this, saying that two of these small sections, if they were flipped, then it’s the same story, right? I looked at it at that day, had to agree with him, and that was the seed, that was my first glimmer of suspicion that, if those two could be flipped, then were either really that necessary? And, if they weren’t, then what else might be extra? So, yeah, the version here, it
’s the same story as ran the first time, just, I hope, better.
Crawlspace
(Mostly unpublished)
Or, there’s a version of it out there, “Gabriel,” but it doesn’t work. Which is okay sometimes, except “Gabriel,” it comes so so close to working, then drops everything at the end. A lack of nerve on my part, I don’t know. Or just plain stupidity. But “Gabriel,” it was draft two of this novella, which is the same story—it had started out as a sister-piece to “Raphael,” was going to be a series of stories, but then I didn’t know any more angel names—except it’s in five parts, I think, of which “Gabriel” is pretty much just the first. In the novella, we get to see Gabe grow up, get evil, and Quint’s living at these Forest Arms apartments, which are so haunted—or, infected by him anyway. It was really fun, but I lost the handle on it, and there was just all this stuff happening, happening for reasons that, on second read, didn’t seem to make much sense, except that they were all cool things. But that’s not a story. So, I’m glad I scrapped it. Twenty-five or thirty thousand words, but so what. There’s always more. Except I couldn’t get Quint and Gabe out of my head. And I so wanted to, so do not need them crowding my thoughts with their strange, completely understandable, really-real (trust me) ESP. But back when I wrote this the first time, I had no idea that a woman could have twins where each twin maybe had a different dad. Once I heard that on the news or wherever—Law & Order, probably—the way this story could work kind of clicked in my head. Usually, with any story you’re telling, economy’s the key; you’ve got to reduce the character-count as much as you possibly can, and then a couple of people more. But, here, it turned out that what was needed was for our guy’s guilt and certainty and paranoia to actually have been born into the world, and to be haunting him now, letting him become something else if he could just trust it. And, as for him and Tanya, that whole bad scene, I think it’s my mash-up of Robert Boswell’s excellent “The Darkness of Love” story and that painful, terrible, wonderful scene Louise Erdrich plants in Love Medicine, where Nector leaves an I-don’t-really-love-you-goodbye note on the kitchen table for Marie, his wife, then changes his mind, comes back, finds her there but the note still there as well, only, was it under the salt, or the pepper? This whole story’s built on that, I think.
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