After that, we knew. The punches, the violence, charged us. Fed us. Made us stronger than any Eveready, more powerful than any Duracell or DieHard. And we could hold that power, like batteries, or we could shoot it back at the Grinder.
But when he became rich and famous, he didn't want to believe that anymore. He wanted to believe that he'd done it all himself. He convinced himself that he could live without us. And I think that he wanted to torture us, because deep down he knew that the championship was ours, not his.
So he stayed away from the ring. He made us feed on any little scrap of violence, and we were so used to feeding off violence that involved him that it was hard for us to survive on anything else. Lester managed with his gory movies. Splint with self-mutilation, Chynagirl with abusive sex. Me and StiltMilt, we just watched them.
But Melani wouldn't watch at all. She starved herself. Closed her eyes and withered away to nothing.
It was slow suicide. We all knew that.
The Grinder was going to let it happen. Until his old sparring partner gave him a beating and made him realize that he'd be in serious trouble if he let us die.
Spotlight beams danced on the canvas ring. I looked away from the Bonegrinder, studied his tattered entourage. Melani, a refugee from an Egyptian tomb, her eyes squeezed closed. Chynagirl begging her to open them. Milt and Splint wrestling, but Milt with the upper hand, pawing the floor, searching for Splint's knife. Lester staring down at the ring, fists clenched, stamping his foot like a frustrated child, a punk snitch with nowhere else to go.
"Wait'll the Grinder hears about this," Lester whispered. "I'm gonna tell him every word."
Below, the crowd cheered as the fighters were introduced. Sweetmeat stepped forward, and a thousand kids in black T-shirts leaped to their feet and chanted his name.
Sweetmeat turned and raised his fists. He was one of them, a phoenix risen strong and proud from ghetto ashes.
The kids in black roared like the lions of an unforgotten summer.
They had done in Carmilla and Bigjack. Shit, they'd nearly destroyed a whole city in a summer's time, and they weren't looking back. They'd burned, killed, done it all. Not content to sit back and watch, they'd fed off their own violence. They were raw, unfocused, but they had power to spare.
Not like us. The eight of us, who had only watched, never participating.
We weren't a match for them. Not now. Maybe we never had been.
The announcer introduced the Bonegrinder. His corner men slipped off his white satin robe and he stepped to the center of the ring, head down, looking lost in that heavily muscled body, a body that didn't seem to fit him anymore.
Before the Grinder looked into Sweetmeat's eyes, I left the box.
I spent the evening in an alley watching a couple of big tomcats go at it. I tried to get excited about all that hissing, I really did. But it just wasn't the same, and in the end it made me feel a little sick. The effort reminded me of one of those gory movies that Lester liked to watch, the one where the crazy vampire tried to go cold turkey by drinking cockroaches (which he whipped up in an electric blender) instead of human blood.
It was silly, what we'd been doing. Nothing but shortsighted. Playing with the Bonegrinder had been like playing with cats and cockroaches when all along we could have been playing with mayors, presidents.
Cities. Countries.
Sweetmeat's boys were raw, but they were powerful. We were weak, but we were focused.
At sunrise, I went to a donut shop where you could read the dailies for free. I drank coffee and read about the fight. The new champion felt real bad. He hadn't meant to kill the Bonegrinder; the Grinder had always been his idol.
Next to the article was a picture of Sweetmeat with his arm around Chynagirl. She wore sunglasses and a wispy veil, playing the role of bereaved widow to the hilt, but locked between the fingers of her right hand was a tattered copy of The Art of War. StiltMilt stood on the other side of the new champ, one hand on the big kid's shoulder. Behind the three of them, a bunch of kids stood guard, all wearing Sweetmeat T-shirts.
And of course there was a sidebar to the article; a suspect named Lester Barnes was being held for questioning concerning three dead bodies found after the fight in a luxury box rented by the deceased champion. Barnes wasn't being held at city jail; detectives were questioning him at a psychiatric evaluation unit.
I crossed the river for the first time in years. Walked around a fire-gutted neighborhood that I used to call home. Then I got tired of walking and smashed a few windows with a charred table leg that I found in a deserted apartment I'd slept in as a child. That made me feel a little better.
When the afternoon papers came out, I noted the name of the funeral home where the Bonegrinder's body rested in state. It wasn't far away.
Sweetmeat was scheduled to pay his respects in a few hours.
If I hurried, I just might make it.
I stopped at an uptown hotel, bought a disposable razor and a bottle of expensive aftershave at the gift shop, and cleaned up in the restroom.
I wanted to make a good first impression on the new champ.
Most of all, I wanted to shake his hand.
The Care and Feeding of First Novels
Making the transition from writing short stories to writing novels was not easy for me.
There, I said it. The words are up there on my computer screen. And now that I'm sitting here staring at them, I realize that they add up to a flat little sliver of understatement that just won't do.
So let me try again: writing my first novel was torture. It was a trip to the black hole of Calcutta, an exercise in misery of Poe-esque proportions. And it's something I'm very glad I'll never have to do again.
Yeah. That works a little better. And I promise I'm not exaggerating. After my first few attempts in the early nineties, I was nearly convinced that making the run from page one to "The End" of a novel was something I'd never be able to do. I must have started a good half-dozen novels before I ever managed to finish one. Piling up the pages as I worked on each of those books was like running a gauntlet—the more pages in my pile, the more beat-up I'd feel. My plot would become a tiger I couldn't hold by the tail; my characters wouldn't do what I wanted them to do; my confidence would wane, I'd read through my manuscript time and time again, looking for a way to fix the problems I saw there, and those pages would keep clubbing at me.
Finally, I'd give in to frustration.
That pile of paper would go in a drawer, or in the wastebasket.
The above is not a recipe for happiness...or success. That was the worst part of the whole exercise. After all, I'd done all right as a writer up to that point. I'd managed to break into the short story markets. I'd graduated from the small press magazines. I'd cracked professional anthologies. I'd sold a collection that garnered a couple of award nominations, and managed to win one of them. I knew that the next logical career step was to get a novel out there.
To tell the truth it was the only logical career step, but I couldn't seem to get my foot up on it. My earliest novel attempts still make me cringe. Looking back I realize that I made a big mistake—I studied the horror market, which is exactly what every writing book you come across will tell you to do if you want to write a horror novel. Ordinarily, that would be very good advice. But in my case I studied the market too well...so well that my imagination was constrained (if not downright trapped) by the conventions I found there.
I read book after book set in a Middle American small town. Often the central characters were a nice young married couple who'd just moved into the area. Usually they—and the other nice folks in the town— would end up confronting some form of supernatural evil as the story progressed. Visit any local bookstore in the eighties or early nineties and you were bound to find a couple dozen novels like that. Some folks even had a shorthand name for the sub-genre—they called these horror novels featuring nice young couples vs. supernatural bugaboos "Betty & Bob" books.[45]
&n
bsp; I figured I had to write one of those books if I wanted to break into the novel market.[46] God knows I tried. There was the ghost story set in the Napa Valley that featured the spirit of a dead juvenile delinquent who'd been gunned down by the local authorities. If I remember right, he possessed another young guy in order to take vengeance on those who'd wronged him years before. I even had a Ouija board in there (and a haunted car, too), along with the usual small-town stereotypes and a local sheriff and his wife standing in for Betty & Bob. I think I got about seventy-five pages of that one before I gave up.
I started another one. This time out I wrote about a folklore professor battling creatures from urban legend that were making the leap from myth to reality in a small university town. That one ended up in the wastebasket, too. Next I tried an idea about killer bats in the southwest. Less supernatural stuff there, and less Betty & Bob; that one was more of a monster book. The whole thing went well until I came across a novel called Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith and realized my idea had been done up pretty thoroughly by an established writer.
I tried a few more ideas, hoping I could channel Robert McCammon or any of the other guys who could seemingly turn out this stuff effortlessly, but the ideas never got past the let's toss this out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up stage. In this case, the cat in question was my imagination, and no way was it going to run its scratchy tongue across any of the stuff my brain was dishing up. Every idea seemed like a bad screenplay pitch. And while I kept telling myself that I could write just as well if not better than a lot of the guys who were publishing books that fit the templates I'd identified, there was just something about those ideas and those templates that kept my fingers off the keyboard.
What I eventually figured out was this—I wasn't going to be able to write a paint-by-the-numbers kind of novel. That approach wasn't going to work for me. The whole problem reminded me of a scene at the beginning of the movie Enter the Dragon, the one where Bruce Lee is trying to teach a kid how to kick. The kid is just going through the motions; his kicks are all mechanics and no heart. And then Lee whacks him on the head and says, "We need emotional content."
That's what I was lacking. When I reread my "Betty & Bob" fragments, I knew down deep in my gut that they were hollow as a carved-up pumpkin. There weren't any real people on those pages. While there might be some competent writing, there wasn't any emotional content.
So I gave up playing the game that way. I forgot all about Betty & Bob. I started over, this time determined to get more of myself on the page... along with some genuine blood, sweat, and tears.
Kiss of Death was my first attempt at doing that. It was going to be a horror novel, but I was going to write it my way. My story was going to revolve around three Korean War vets, who—through a shared experience in a horrible battle—came marching home with supernatural powers. I decided to set the story in the late fifties and populate it with the kind of characters found in hardboiled fiction. I wanted to write a horror novel with a dark crime sensibility that would tip its hat in the direction of several movies I loved—think Bad Day at Black Rock, or The Defiant Ones, or Dead Reckoning.
Or Night of the Living Dead. That was going to be in there, too, because the supernatural power my soldiers shared was the ability to raise the dead. One of those men was going to use his powers to raise a zombie army that would slaughter anything that stood in their master's way. it would be up to the other two to stop him, with the help of a man who had been held prisoner by their enemy and a woman caught up in the events for her own reasons.
The first chapter of Kiss of Death kicked the story into gear the way I'd hoped. For several months, the novel raced right along. I piled up chapter after chapter as I worked my way up to the blood-and-thunder climax I'd planned. When I hit that point, I had 271 manuscript pages.
The time had come for my villain to unleash his zombie army.
The time had come for my heroes to try to stop him.
I figured all that would maybe take another hundred pages. Then I'd hit those two words I was longing to type: "The End." The way I saw it, I should have been able to write the climax of Kiss of Death in my sleep. I knew exactly what was supposed to happen.
But I froze up. Completely. Solid as a goddamn glacier.
I couldn't write another word.
I realized, quite suddenly, that I didn't believe in the ending I'd constructed for my book.
And since I didn't believe it, I couldn't write it.
The problem wasn't the characters. This time I'd gotten them right. I could see those guys in my head, hear them when they talked. And neither was the problem with the setting, or the writing itself. I thought Kiss of Death was turning out to be a good little book.
The problem was the supernatural angle; i.e. my characters' ability to raise the dead. I could handle that fine when the supernatural elements weren't overt. I was comfortable when the shadows fell just out of sight, over there on the edge of the page. I could also handle my character talking about the powers they possessed and the reasons they were afraid of those powers. I could even handle writing about one character that was actually dead during most of the novel. But when it came time for me to turn the spotlight on the all-out zombie apocalypse I had planned for my ending, I just couldn't do it. As much as I wanted to, I could not make that army of dead guys embark upon the full-scale rampage I'd planned.
I'm still not sure exactly why. It's too easy to say that I didn't believe in my zombies (though, strangely enough, reading over those 271 pages now I'd have to say I did a good enough job to make the reader believe in them, even if I couldn't exactly make the trip myself). And it's not that I haven't successfully dealt with the supernatural in my fiction—I have, both in novels and short stories. All I can say is that I couldn't make it happen in Kiss of Death. Maybe it was the tonal mix of noir and supernatural horror. Maybe it was the cold, hard tack I took with the characters themselves. Whatever the cause, I know that the block still exists after all these years. Just typing the plot outline a few paragraphs above, I was fine until I got to that line about raising "a zombie army that would slaughter anything that stood in their master's way." I felt myself tighten up as soon as I typed those words. I didn't want to go any further...not even in a plot summary.
That's why my zombie army never went into apocalyptic overdrive.
And that's why Kiss of Death—all 271 pages of it—ended up in a box in my closet.
So I kissed off Kiss of Death. I gave up trying to write novels for awhile and concentrated on short stories. There were some good opportunities in professional anthologies at the time, and a few of the magazine markets paid better than average rates. I sold a few stories coming in through the slush pile. That was my only option when it came to getting my foot in the door with the better markets. I was still a newcomer—meaning I didn't receive solicitations from editors, but I was tuned in to the writer's grapevine and would hear about a lot of projects while editors were still reading for them. I found that if I queried those editors, most would at least give my work a look based on my resume.
Around this time, I heard about an erotic horror anthology Ellen Datlow was editing. She was calling it Blood & Roses, though I'm pretty sure the book was later published as Little Deaths. I had an idea for a piece about a guy closing in on thirty who was still obsessed by his first love, who was recently deceased. I had an opening scene in mind and not much else—my character had been a pitcher in high school, and as the story opened he'd be playing a game of his own invention called graveyard baseball in the local cemetery, throwing strikes at his dead love's tombstone with beer bottles he'd emptied while remembering the past.
The idea was pretty creepy and just past bent. I knew it was the kind of material I was built to work with, and I was excited about getting it down on paper. I figured I'd spend a couple weeks writing the story and send it to Ellen.
I worked on the opening section, ending up with five or six pages before calling it a night.
Reading over my work the next morning, I discovered that the pages I'd kicked out sure didn't read like the beginning of a short story. What they read like was the first chapter of a novel. Given my track record, that made me very nervous.
I backed off, but I kept thinking about the story. I was very conscious of the problems I'd had with novels. I was afraid that I'd get out in the deep water and drown if I tried to turn this idea into a novel. But I thought I had something different this time out. My pitcher wasn't the kind of guy you'd find in a Betty & Bob book. Storywise, what I'd written was closer to the dark suspense stuff I'd been doing.
Those were the stories that had done me some good. If I was known at all, it was for my dark suspense work. So I decided to dance with the girl who brung me, as the old prizefighters used to say. I wasn't going to change my style to fit the marketplace. I'd see what I could do with the kind of idea that played to my strengths, and I'd worry about the marketplace later.
That only left one problem.
I had no idea how to turn my first chapter into a novel.
So I did what seemed like a logical thing at the time.
I looked for a way to trick myself into writing one.
First off, I decided to contain my plot. Though the story would hinge on the past. I'd keep the current events of the story in a tight time frame. The entire novel would take place in a 24-hour period. Working within such tight parameters, I figured I'd keep my plot on track because the clock would always be ticking in the back of my head.
Second, I'd tell the story using shifting third-person viewpoint. Each character would have his or her own story, and each story would intertwine. While this might seem to make things more complicated, it actually gave me a sense of security. I told myself that I was really writing four or five different stories, and each of those stories would amount to fifty or sixty pages. That relieved some of the pressure I was feeling. A fifty or sixty page story seemed do-able.
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales Page 25