The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Acknowledgements

  To Ellen Datlow, whose run with OMNI in the eighties was my first and by far most formative taste of what short fiction can and should be. To Sean Wallace, my editor for this, for saying that maybe we could do a collection, yeah. To Brenda Mills, for making all of these better, in spite of what they might have done to your dreams. To Paul Tremblay, for opening the door for me into this world; before, I’d always just been sneaking through windows. To Joe Hill, for showing what a collection of horror stories can be, if it tries. To Jesse Lawrence and Chris Deal, for catching, I think, every single snag in here, and at breakneck pace. To my characters, for not saying your real names. To Laird Barron, for writing like Roger Daltrey sings: with a razor line. To Stephen King and Peter Straub and Clive Barker and Robert McCammon: without your stories to keep me in my room so many nights, I’d surely be not as alive as I am now, though I might have slept better. To my agent Kate Garrick, for always making everything work. To Brian Evenson and Craig Clevenger and Will Christopher Baer, for writing so deep the paper bleeds; I can only hope for that kind of precision. To Nabokov, for a squirrel. To my brothers, Spot and Sulac and Sky and Tommy, for living through some of these stories with me, and to my sisters, Ginger and Katie and Jenny, for believing in the gore, but seeing that there’s more to it than that, sometimes. To Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, just because, and to Shooter Jennings and Bonnie Tyler and Bob Seger, for the obvious reasons. To Reader’s Digest, for their book Strange Stories, Amazing Facts; growing up, this was my Bible, and I still believe every word, am Gabriel because of it, but not Raphael. Never Raphael. To Randy Howard and Teddy Smith and Brett Watkins and Steve Woods and my cousin Darla Graham; you’re in more of these stories than I ever meant. But I’m not sorry for that. And, like always, thank you to my wife, Nancy, for reading that first story of mine when I was twenty, and then pulling it close, asking if you could keep it: yes, yes yes yes.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Boulder, Colorado

  5 April 2010

  About the Author

  Stephen Graham Jones started writing in the mid-nineties, with his first novel hitting in 2000. There have been seven more books since then, among them Ledfeather, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Demon Theory, and, most recently, It Came from Del Rio. The stories in this collection have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Vol.2, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and have been finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Black Quill. Jones grew up in West Texas, nabbed his Ph.D. from Florida State University, and, when not writing more and more books, teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

  Other Books by Stephen Graham Jones

  The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong

  All the Beautiful Sinners

  The Bird Is Gone—A Manifesto

  Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories

  Demon Theory

  The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

  Ledfeather

  It Came from Del Rio

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: No Escape

  Father, Son, Holy Rabbit

  Till the Morning Comes

  The Sons of Billy Clay

  So Perfect

  Lonegan’s Luck

  Monsters

  Wolf Island

  Teeth

  Raphael

  Captain’s Lament

  The Meat Tree

  The Ones Who Got Away

  Crawlspace

  Story Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author