After the People Lights Have Gone Off

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by Stephen Graham Jones


  After the People Lights Have Gone Off

  I was doing an independent study with Nick Kimbro on the haunted house and reading all his papers and responses, and talking through all the books with him, I realized that I’d never written a straight haunted house story. So how then could I actually pretend to speak with any authority on it, right? This is also why I wrote Not for Nothing: because somebody asked me how a detective novel worked. It was a question I could answer like a critic, like a lifetime reader, like a fan, but to really understand, I had to get my hands dirty. So, with this one, I did. I just stirred in a new house, a perfect couple, and let things cook for a few pages. And, her rolling off the loft like that—I should cite my sources: that happened to my teacher in eighth grade. And I’ve always felt bad because I got in a fight in her classroom once, and there were desks scattering around everywhere—me and this dude were really going at it—until the History teacher had to come from next door, lift us apart. And I remember looking up to my English teacher on the way out, and the way she was looking at us, I could see she wasn’t mad, she was just worried we were hurt, and that was the worst part. That’s the part I still can’t shake.

  Uncle

  Another story for Paula Guran, one I wouldn’t have written if she hadn’t asked me to. I always seem to get lucky when she asks, though. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes an editor hits me up for story X, and I have to write stories Y, Z, and another Z before I ever circle around to the X I need. But, for Paula, I always get lucky, it seems. Which is to say, this story, it creeps me right out. I got the idea for it walking around a house I was buying with an inspector. He had one of those pistol-grip thermometers. It was so cool. I knew immediately that I had to have one, but then I knew also that I would terrify myself to no end if I did, because each unexplainable variation in temperature, that would be proof I wasn’t alone. So I haven’t bought one yet. And I don’t plan to. Way too scared.

  Solve for X

  This story took a lot of drafts to get right. Initially, it had a spaceship taking off at the end. But that was a little bit stupid. The tape and the cutting and all that, though, it was in place from the get-go. And the math-questions; I think they’re indirectly from a Discover article about unsolvable problems. Or maybe it was Wired. Either way, I thought, man, that sucks, not being able to crack these problems. Why can’t we? What’s wrong with our loser selves? Then the obvious answer, it was that we were stuck using machines to do the calculating. And some things require a more direct approach, a more human touch. I figured, what if you just asked a person, but framed that question exactly right? So that’s all this story is: it’s trying to ask the question in a way that the person can answer without having to think about it. Which is to say, they can accidentally say the truth, which is always there, we just don’t know how to get at it. Which is both a rip of Douglas Adams and of Plato, I know. But I suppose there are worse people to steal from.

  —Stephen Graham Jones

  31 January 2014

  Boulder, Colorado

  All of the stories in this collection are reprinted with the permission of the author, except for “Second Chances” and “Spider Box,” which are original stories, and are appearing here for the first time. “Thirteen” originally appeared in Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre; “Brushdogs” originally appeared in The Children of Old Leech; “Welcome to the Reptile House” originally appeared in Strange Aeons (and was later reprinted in Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013); “This is Love” originally appeared in Icarus (and was later reprinted in Best Gay Stories of the Year); “The Spindly Man” originally appeared in Fearful Symmetries; “The Black Sleeve of Destiny” originally appeared in Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; “Snow Monsters” originally appeared in Juked; “Doc’s Story” originally appeared in Letters to H.P. Lovecraft; “The Dead Are Not” originally appeared in Bourbon Penn; “Xebico” originally appeared in Weird Fiction Review; “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” originally appeared in Phantasmagorium; “Uncle” originally appeared in Ghosts: Recent Hauntings; and “Solve for X” originally appeared in Mixer.

  Thanks to Richard Thomas, for asking if I had anything horror. Thanks to Nick Kimbro, for talking haunted houses with me enough that I finally wrote the title story. Thanks to Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer; peeling through this TOC, I see that I wrote a few of these stories kind of in response to their The Weird. Two others I owe to Paula Guran, who hit me up for a Halloween story, then a ghost story. Thanks to Ellen Datlow, for letting us include “The Spindly Man.” Thanks to Jesse Bullington, for inviting me to an anthology, for which I wrote the only werewolf story in this collection. Thanks to Steve Berman, for prompting me to write another of these. Thank to Zack Wentz, for making “Welcome to the Reptile House” better. Thanks to T.E. Grau and Cameron Pierce and Joe Pulver and Jack Wang and Erik Secker and Steven Owen for running some of these in their magazines and books and sites. I always write stuff, get to the end and come up wondering what just happened, and what am I supposed to do with this evidence now? Why would anybody even consider a story like this? So, editors, thanks for considering. Thanks to Paul Tremblay, who read one or two of these before they went out. Thanks to the fiction workshops I’m supposed to be teaching, for looking at some of the other stories, making them better. And thanks just to the horror crowd. You’re about the most real people I know. And thanks to my wife Nancy, for giving me the afternoons it took to get all these down on paper, sure, but for giving me all the mornings and evenings and nights and weekends and weeks and months and years—for this life I can’t get enough of, thank you, always. It’s been just shy of twenty years. Let’s triple that.

  © GARY ISAACS

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections, and has some two hundred stories published. Stephen’s been an NEA Fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural fiction. He’s forty-two, married with a couple of kids, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM DARK HOUSE PRESS

  “The New Standard for

  dark fiction anthologies.”

  —JACK KETCHUM, author of The Girl Next Door

  A MIXTURE OF HORROR, CRIME, FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, MAGICAL REALISM, THE TRANSGRESSIVE, AND THE GROTESQUE ALL WITH A LITERARY BENT,THE NEW BLACK IS A COLLECTION OF 20 NEO-NOIR STORIES REPRESENTING THE FUTURE OF GENRE-BENDING FICTION FROM SOME OF OUR BRIGHTEST AND MOST ORIGINAL VOICES.

  The New Black is not to be missed.”

  —JOHN LANGAN, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky

  and Other Monstrous Geographies

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM DARK HOUSE PRESS

  “Bone-chilling.”

  —PAULA BOMER, author of Inside Madeleine

  30-SOMETHING EMILY COLLINS INHERITS HER RECENTLY MURDERED AUNT’S HOUSE, DECIDING TO MOVE TO HEARTSHORNE, OKLAHOMA, TO CLAIM IT AND CONFRONT HER FAMILY’S DARK PAST AFTER HER DEAD MOTHER BEGINS SPEAKING TO HER IN DREAMS, PROPELLING THIS GOTHIC, NEO-NOIR THRILLER TOWARD TERRIFYING REVELATIONS OF MURDEROUS SMALL-TOWN JUSTICE WHEN A HORRIBLE COMMUNITY SECRET IS REVEALED THROUGH THE SUPERNATURAL PULL OF ECHO LAKE.

  “Letitia Trent is the new poet-queen of neo-noir.”

  —KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM DARK HOUSE PRESS

  In print for the first time, Tuvim’s seminal lost work

  JOSHUA CITY IS ONE OF SEVEN MAJOR CITY-STATES, A POST-APOCALYPTIC ALTERNATE REALITY WHERE WATER IS SCARCE AND TECHNOLOGY IS AT MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOVIET LEVELS. AS THE NOVEL OPENS, THE BAIKAL SEA HAS BEEN POISONED, CAUSING A MAJOR OUTBREAK OF A LEPROSY-LIKE DISEASE CALLED NECROSIS. AGAINST THIS BACKDROP OF INCREASING VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION, WE SEE THE LIVES OF SEVERAL CHARACTERS PLAY OUT.

  “A cautionary tale, historical artifact, and literary

  work of the highest artistry.”

  —OKLA ELLIOTT & RAUL CLEMENT, from the introduction

>   Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Thirteen

  Brushdogs

  Welcome to the Reptile House

  This Is Love

  The Spindly Man

  The Black Sleeve of Destiny

  The Spider Box

  Snow Monsters

  Doc’s Story

  The Dead Are Not

  Xebico

  Second Chances

  After the People Lights Have Gone Off

  Uncle

  Solve for X

  Story Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Also available from Dark House

 

 

 


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