But I'll always appear,
If you'll keep visiting me here
Under the Darkening Tree.
Story Notes
When I began to read tales of horror and the dark fantastic in the late 1980s, some of the first collections I read (and to my mind some of the best ever written) were Stephen King’s. I used to love his story notes at the back — partly because his prose is sufficiently habit-forming that I would have been content to read his To Do lists — but also because I was fascinated to hear where the stories had come from, and how they’d come about. I always made sure I saved them until the very end, however. While it’s not as destructive as learning how a magic trick is done, pulling aside the veils on a story has similar effects: you’ll never again be able to read it in the same way. Sometimes this adds another layer of interest, like a director’s commentary track on a great movie, but it also runs the risk of popping the fragile bubble of make-believe that helps a story work in the first place.
There will be spoilers in the following notes, so be warned: either save them until you’re done with the story, or — if you don’t want to know how or indeed why the rabbit was put into the hat before the show — don’t read them at all.
Be further warned that you will not find the meaning of life in here, nor any notably useful pointers on the writing of fiction. These are merely a few observations about how the stories in this collection came to be written, and why. Like the speech given by the father of the bride at a wedding, they’re there as background information, and do not constitute or imply a verbal guarantee that the marriage will work.
* * *
THIS IS NOW
I wrote this story for the BBC when they were putting together a website dedicated for genre or ‘cult’ fiction. [Sidebar: it’s weird how some spellcheckers insist that you spell ‘website’ as ‘Web site’, and want to capitalize the ‘internet’ as if it’s a place, like Germany (though of course in some ways it is). Our relationship to these spaces is changing faster than software can keep up with.] I can’t remember whether the BBC wanted something specifically about vampires, but that’s what I ended up doing — though I kept their role very low-key, and in fact took a certain amount of trouble not to even call them by that name.
So much genre fiction is, of course, not about what it appears to be about — and what it’s usually really about are crucial turning points in people’s lives, viewed in retrospect. The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death. These things are, I suspect, what this story’s actually about.
Sounds like a hoot, right?
THE WOODCUTTER
This is the most recent story in this collection — the most recent I’ve written at all, in fact. It’s also the only story I’ve so far written in the chair where I’m sitting right this moment, in a new house I’m still not even close to being used to. I guess the story must therefore be at least partly a reflection on having moved to a different country, though I don’t feel the way the protagonist does (at least not consciously, or for more than a second, once in a while).
The idea at the core of the tale has been knocking around my head for quite some time, waiting for a home. I remember watching a pub magician working the tables one night in the Crown and Two Chairman in Soho, and thinking: but what if those aren’t tricks?
THE LAST BARBECUE
I wrote this for Stephen Jones’s ZOMBIE APOCOLPYSE! FIGHTBACK, the second in his series of shared world (or shared narrative) confections in which he expertly weaves a story out of contributions from many different writers.
Part of the venerable cannon of “Where I went on my holidays” fiction, my segment is set on the shore of South Lake Tahoe, where my family had recently spent a few days. Tahoe’s a strange place. Beautiful, yes, but otherworldly. Waves gently lapping upon a sandy shore, as tots dip their toes in the silky water. Snow-capped mountains all around. A hot air balloon serenely crossing the sky in the far distance. There’s something about the environment that puts me in mind of living on some gigantic spaceship in the far distant future, and coming to the People’s Recreational Facility for my annual week-long break from toiling on the hydroponic farms.
Lake Tahoe is also, interestingly, not far from the Donner Pass. I didn’t realize this when I wrote the story. I love it when that happens.
THE STUFF THAT GOES ON IN THEIR HEADS
One of the most intriguing but unnerving aspects of being a parent is watching your child’s development, in particular observing the mingling of changes in their personality caused by external influences, with elements that seem hard-wired. Just as it can be a struggle to comprehend that your kid really can’t see that 6 + 6 = 12, it’s sometimes hard to remind yourself that their brains haven’t had decades to wear familiar and comfortable tracks, to develop mental highways that have big, obvious signs above them and which anyone can follow and understand.
Children’s minds are cloudy and unpredictable, perhaps even unknowable. The last great wilderness. The boundaries within are more permeable, too. What they believe to be the case may be true, even if it’s not.
UNNOTICED
Another story with a real world inspiration. When we first came to live in Santa Cruz we rented a wonderful house over on the East Side, one block from the ocean. It had been hand-built by some guy in the 1940s and featured an upper deck which afforded a rare degree of prospect for the neighborhood. It felt a little like living on a ship. That area of Live Oak is primarily made of up old, single-story vacation rentals or small houses, but dotted amongst these on the main roads are occasional larger buildings of less discernible purpose. I became intrigued by one of these, and it gave birth to this story.
And yes, there genuinely was a large vintage car taking up most of the reception area. I could, I suppose, have gone in and asked about it, but I prefer most mysteries to persist, rather than be solved.
THE GOOD LISTENER
This story came about because I was invited to contribute a piece of fiction to an online initiative under the joint aegis of Sony and The Guardian newspaper, who wanted to explore how new technology would continue to be incorporated into the fabric of our lives. I wrote the story and then recorded my reading of it in a zany sound studio on the edge of Santa Cruz, which appeared to be in the middle of either being built or knocked down, I was never sure which. As the recording was then zapped over the internet to a London studio before being installed on the web as a podcast, the whole experience was pleasingly self-reflective: an example of new technology’s reach.
The place where the story is set — the Dream Inn hotel — is of greater significance. We came to live in Santa Cruz because we wound up being “stranded” here for several weeks when an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland grounded European air travel. (Note: telling people over the phone that you’ve been “stranded” in a boutique beach hotel in California… tends to piss them off). We had zero expectations of the town and only ended up there in the first place by accident. Fate gave us a chunk of time to get to know it, and we came very quickly to like the place very much. It as this that set us on course to eventually leaving London after a quarter of a century, and going to live in California instead.
And I suppose it’s the little quirks of fate, and unexpected encounters, that this story is about.
AND A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING
An early story, this one riffing off an childhood interest in Zen and positioning things in space.
That’s.
About.
It.
SUBSTITUTIONS
This one had a simple genesis — and it’s pretty much what happens at the beginning of the story. Often the stories that are most fun to write are these where you take an event from real life and say: “But what if something different had happened at the end? What if? What then?”
I was at home one morning trying to work, when a van arrived from Ocado, the North London default for supermarket delivery. I’d already absentmindedly unpacked half of the bags which had been deposited in our kitchen by the cheery delivery guy, before flags started to go up.
Gradually I realized... this isn’t our stuff.
What I found interesting about this was partly the fact it took a while for me to cotton on, and thus how much commonality exists between people living in the same area (if I’d been confronted with a bumper pack of tofu in the first bag, the penny would have dropped sooner); mainly that I’d never realized how much something as simple as your shopping said about who you were, and the life you might be leading. Your own bags are full of the mundane stuff you expect to see in your fridge, and therefore seem to have no narrative. They do, however, as you realize when you get a surprise peek into someone else’s world.
I called the delivery company and they sent the guy back and it all got sorted out quickly and simply. That’s the mundanity of real life.
Short stories aren’t real life. In stories you can take an event or idea wherever you want... even if where it ends up isn’t nice.
DIFFERENT NOW
This is an earlier story than most in this volume. It was written soon after I'd come to live in London, and slots neatly into my Early Miserablist period. As opposed to my Slightly Later Miserablist period, which I’m working on now. The classic miserablist short story form involves a young, alienated man living in a small flat in an anonymous urban environment and being confronted with the breakdown of a relationship while the world goes wonky around him.
This is a classic Miserablist short story.
UNBELIEF
You very rarely come across unthemed anthologies these days. The idea of a group of stories not bonded together by some high concept, however wearisome – celebrity lesbian vampires, vacation-based science fiction tales with the word “spatula” in them – is apparently a tough sell. The problem with these themed anthologies is you often end up (to my mind) with a bunch of stories that wouldn’t stand up without the structuring conceit, and that perhaps didn’t really need to be written in the first place.
The challenge of an unthemed anthology is being put in the rare position of having no constraints . Writers are forever bitching and whining about being pigeon-holed or forced to meet publisher or reader expectations: being told to “do whatever you like,” however, can bring you up short. What do I like? If no one was watching, what would I do?
When Neil invited me to contribute to STORIES, therefore, I was becalmed for a while. Then I wrote Unbelief, which is a rather short, odd story. There probably aren’t many editors in the world who would have taken it. But... they did. Bless them.
WALKING WOUNDED
This is a story about transitions. After spending many years lurching in and out of an important and at times wonderful — but in its later stages rather dysfunctional — relationship, I’d finally broken free (or was I pushed?) and found the person who would become my wife. This tale’s motif of sorting through baggage doubtless tells its own story.
The bit where the narrator cracks a couple of ribs was, sadly, inspired by Real Life Events. Nearly twenty years later they still give me gyp from time to time.
AUTHOR OF THE DEATH
This collection is by Michael Marshall Smith. You may or not be aware that I also write novels under the name Michael Marshall. (If this is news to you, then go out and buy them. Buy them all. BUY THEM NOW.)
The distinction between the two writers has never been especially clear in my mind, but one afternoon I wondered: what if, out in the world, it made an actual difference which guy was doing the writing? The title is a play upon critical theory’s daft notion of the death of the author, of course, and overall it’s kind of a silly story, perhaps. But I had fun writing it... and if someone out there has the same reaction to reading it then that’s my job done, right there.
SAD, DARK THING
There are two small facts worth noting about this story. The first I that it was the first tale I ever set where I’m now living — Northern California. I wrote the story while back in London, between our second and third exploratory trips to the region, and the fact I was ready to try placing fiction here probably shows that a big part of my mind had already moved in.
The second is it’s one of those stories that dropped into my head almost fully-formed. My friend Stephen Jones emailed one morning, saying: “Just saw this phrase — thought you might be able to do something with it.’
The phrase was “Sad, dark thing”.
I sat very still for a few minutes, while an oblique, melancholy story seeped into my head, as if some odd narrative substance was dripping around the inside of my skull, outside my control.
Then I emailed Steve back, saying yes, I believed I could, and thank you very much. Hopefully I paid back the favor later, in that the story I wrote wound up going into Steve’s BOOK OF HORRORS, one of the first published by Jo Fletcher’s new imprint. It was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award.
This is one of many reasons why, when Stephen Jones emails, I take care to read what he says.
THE SEVENTEENTH KIND
This was inspired by us finally getting cable (quite some time ago now) and becoming briefly obsessed with QVC, the shopping channel. We used to love lurching back from the pub, settling back, and watching people giving their all trying to shift units of all manner of crap – live on TV. The two favorite quotes mentioned in the story were things we actually heard. After a while I became particularly intrigued by the presenters, wondering how they felt about the whole experience — from the superbly-coiffed guy who gave it 110% every time (regardless of how banal the product) to a woman whose eyes seemed to betray, once in a while, awareness of the absurdity of it all: and who once memorably lost it during a half-hour debacle in which a whizzy new piece of salad-making equipment utterly failed to do what it was supposed to, instead pinging bits of celery and tomato all over the studio. I thought she was going to die laughing.
There was something weird, too, about the idea of the people who might be watching all this in the small hours, and calling in with their comments and questions. I pictured them sitting alone, at home, alone, bathed in the light of the flickering screen... and wondered who they were.
From somewhere in between the two came this story.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT
Being a parent is scary sometimes. Yes, a lot of it is day-to-day and affable and some of it’s infuriating. I won’t lie to you about that. But there’s a simple and horribly powerful love involved, too, and with that comes the possibility of terrible things.
Ever since we met, my wife has been my first reader. Every novel or story or screenplay that I’ve finished gets printed out and put warily in front of her (or, these days, converted to pdf and emailed for consumption on her iPad). She’s my filter. She tells me whether a story basically stands up or not.
She’s never read this one. I didn’t send it to her. I know it stands up (and was hugely honored when it won the British Fantasy Award in 2011). I know also that my wife really, really wouldn’t enjoy reading it. She puts up with enough through being married to me. Even I have limits.
THE THINGS HE SAID
Something I’ve noticed as I continue to write short stories (and, after a decade in which I produced almost none, the pace does seem to be picking up again, thankfully) is that the same subjects come up time and again. This isn’t surprising, of course. Themes and situations and tropes are bound to reoccur. Once you’ve written one or two vampire stories, or a handful of zombie tales, you may come to feel that you’ve done the straight-ahead approach and become attracted to more oblique takes: stories that put the apparent subject in its proper place (the background, as color, or as an organizing structure like a musical key), and instead attempt to deal with the underlying meaning.
The Things He Said is one of these. I
t’s a story about zombies. Kind of. It’s more about how people deal with epic adversity, however, and about how much (or how little) change it may cause. Some people are good, some are bad, and there’s a lot of us in that murky area in between. The end of the world won’t change that.
THE GIST
The Gist is by far the most complicated project I’ve ever undertaken, and also the longest I’ve ever taken to write a story. I wrote several novels in the time this took to steer to its conclusion… Quite early on in the process I conceived of the idea of having the tale — which concerns a translator, and strange old books — subsequently translated into a series of languages, with the translator on each occasion only being able to ask questions of the person before them in line: to see, in effect, whether the gist survived.
I finally finished the story (it took years not because it was hard work, but because it just seemed to want to take its own sweet time) and spent a year laboriously setting up a series of five languages, which then promptly fell apart at the first hurdle. I was on the verge of abandoning the entire project but thankfully Bill Shafer at Subterranean encouraged me to give it another try, so I set up a far more restrained version, just going from English to French and then back again.
It wound up being one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done, and I’m delighted with Subterranean’s book.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED
I suppose this is partly a reflection on married life, though in my case the relationship is reversed. My wife is the one who knows where the hell everything is. Some of the time.
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