The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  • I wrote The Steel Church as a reaction to the increased partisan polarization in America. It was a weird time. The Iraq War was in full swing, people were taking bulldozers to Dixie Chicks records, and the word “traitor” got thrown around with alarming frequency. My brain, being the bizarre creature that it is, just extrapolated from that to create a future America where civil war had been the norm for generations. It was a strangely fun story to write, though, and I’ve thought about returning to that story world several times. Hopefully someday.

  C. Michael Cook

  C. Michael Cook is the author of “The Boys of Bald Cave.” It appeared in Unspeakable Horror, which was nominated alongside the Horror Library Volume 3 for best anthology at the Bram Stoker Awards. Both were also shortlisted by Ellen Datlow for the year’s best horror.

  His other published short—“Unto the Sons, the Daughters”—was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 1998. It’s available on his website at cmichaelcook.com. You can also follow his blog cmichaelcook. blogspot.com

  • One summer afternoon in 1998 I was struck by the image of a man in a hospital, severely underweight and malnourished, but refusing all food. He was in restraints and sedated because he had tried to bite several doctors and nurses, and been sent there originally because he’d done the same thing to a neighbor’s dog. I thought solving the mystery of what was wrong with him might make a good story, and imagined him finally confessing that he couldn’t eat anything dead, that he could only bear to eat things that were still alive, and that he was starving.

  I approached The Living World from several different angles. One involved telling the story through a series of 911 calls, hospital reports, and therapy session notes and transcripts. None were very successful, and eventually it went fallow. A lot of ideas come to me this way. An image or mood or observation hits me and I then try to build a satisfying story around it. Too many fall by the wayside for want of a beginning, middle and end.

  I picked up the idea again in the fall of 2007. I’d taken some time off to write, and it was one of the more promising of several stalled projects. I don’t remember exactly how or why I decided to make all the characters women, or to tell the story from Melissa’s perspective—perhaps it was sheer frustration that nothing else seemed to be working—but those two changes jarred the rest of it loose. If I remember correctly, the bulk of the “first draft” (or more accurately, the umpteenth) came together over the course of an afternoon and evening. The story wasn’t fully polished when I pitched it to R.J., but near enough to know I had something that might be worthwhile.

  It seems I publish a bit more, and a bit more successfully, every ten years. With any luck, 2018 will bring good news about the two novels I’m working on.

  Kim Despins

  Kim Despins has published a number of short stories and a novel. She also collaborated with a group of talented writers to create a mosaic novel called Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station. One of her favorite stories, “Momma’s Grave,” is forthcoming in the Cemetery Dance anthology, Shocklines: New Voices in Terror. You can follow her on Twitter @kdespins.

  • This story originally started out as a piece about a Catholic priest struggling with his human urges and his past sexual encounters with a former girlfriend. Religious imposed celibacy has always struck me as unnatural, and my opinions did a little more than just peek through in the story. I could never get it to stop being so damned didactic. So I kept the first paragraph, dropped the rest and started fresh. The story took a new and completely unexpected turn and eventually became Skin. After the first draft, I sat back and thought to myself, “where did that come from?” That thought was quickly followed by “what is wrong with you?” During revisions I dropped the original opening paragraph as well. Nothing of the original story remains. Trust me, that’s a really good thing.

  Kurt Dinan

  Kurt Dinan is a high school English teacher in Cincinnati where he lives with his wife and four children. His debut novel, The Water Tower 5, is scheduled for publication in April of 2016. You can follow him on Twitter @ KurtDinan.

  • Into the After is one of the few stories that came to me while brainstorming What If? scenarios—What if a parent was so grief-stricken that his son decided to go to terrible lengths to help him? I’d just read an article about people profiting off the 9/11 tragedy, which helped me focus the story some, but I was struggling with tying it all together. It wasn’t until the third or fourth draft of the story that I came upon another What If? that helped me finish the story—What if someone the reader thinks is a charlatan isn’t? Once I had that idea, the rest of it finally fell into place.

  Lorne Dixon

  Lorne Dixon grew up on a diet of yellow-spined paperbacks, black-and-white-monster movies, and the thunder-lizard back-beat of rock-n-roll. His novels include Snarl, The Lifeless, Eternal Unrest, and the upcoming Blue Eel. Five of his short stories have appeared in volumes of +The Horror Library+. You can follow him on Twitter @LorneDixon

  • Ash Wednesday is an example of “situational horror,” a naturalistic approach to the genre that does not rely on the supernatural for its foundation. The moral question posed in the story, whether it is honorable to risk a good man to save a murderer’s life, allows a plausible scenario to serve as cautionary food for thought. Inspired by the Blackwell Island asylum fire of 1858 and the Frederick Mors prison escape.

  Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Bottled Abyss, along with Black & Orange, Divine Scream, and other novels.

  His short fantasy and dark fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. For his master’s thesis he wrote, Causes of Unease: The Rhetoric of Horror Fiction and Film, available in an ivory tower near you. You can contact Mr. Ethridge via Twitter @bkethridge or Facebook.com/benjamin.kane.ethridge

  • On The Vulture’s Art: Parenting a child really changed me. The things that used to bother or scare me transformed when I suddenly became in charge of another life besides my own. Losing a child to something tragic seemed an obvious jagged emotional edge to me—just horrible and unthinkable, of course. But about what losing one through the normal progression of time? What about the idea that our children will age and become adults, and that small life we took care of really does vanish over time? How awful would it be if there was something that could rob those precious years away? It’s bad enough that time passes on its own and those golden moments are distant memories, but what if you aren’t given the chance for those memories? For me the concept was appalling enough to put it down into story form.

  Ray Garton

  Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, short stories, and essays for more than 30 years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, suspense, and even comedy. His titles include Live Girls, Ravenous, The Loveliest Dead, Sex and Violence in Hollywood, Meds, and most recently, Frankenstorm. His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and have been collected in books like Methods of Madness, Pieces of Hate, and Slivers of Bone. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and, in 2006, received the Grand Master of Horror Award. He lives in northern California with his wife, where he is currently at work on several projects, including a new novel. Visit his website at RayGartonOnline.com or Facebook.com/ray.garton.3 or Twitter @RayGarton.

  • Technological advances have made everything “smart.” We have smart phones, smart cars, smart appliances. There’s a lot of talk about the development of artificial intelligence these days. Human beings are advancing themselves into obsolescence. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to apply these advances to sex toys. What would a “smart” dildo be like? The result was The Happiness Toy.

  Stephen R. George

  Mr. George is the author of 14 horror and suspense novels published in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has also written under the pseudonyms Jack Ellis and Valerie Stephens. He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and moved to Canada when he was nine,
in 1969, and has lived there ever since. He has worked in advertising since the mid 1990s, first as a freelancer and then as a full time copywriter and IT guy in an agency, and he still does contract work for an agency or two. He also teaches Web development courses at the University of Winnipeg, and runs a small web development consultancy.

  • I always found writing short fiction to be more difficult than writing novels and, so, Chainsaw Execution is one of only a handful of short stories I have written.

  Eric J. Guignard

  Eric J. Guignard writes dark and speculative fiction from the outskirts of Los Angeles, and his works may be found in stacks of disreputable publications haunting back alley bazaars. As an editor, Eric’s also published the anthologies Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations and After Death, the latter of which won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award. Read his novella, Baggage of Eternal Night (a finalist for the 2014 International Thriller Writers Award), and watch for forthcoming books, including Chestnut ’Bo (TBP 2016). Outside of the glamorous and jet-setting world of indie fiction, Eric’s a technical writer and college professor, and he stumbles home each day to a wife, children, cats, and a terrarium filled with mischievous beetles. Visit Eric at: ericjguignard.com, his blog ericjguignard.blogspot.com, or Twitter @ericjguignard

  • Footprints Fading in the Desert is one of my earliest short stories, written in July, 2011. Ultimately, that isn’t very long ago at all, but I only decided to pursue writing in February of that year. When I made that decision, my goal was to write two short stories a week, which I maintained for some time. Unfortunately, most of those tales were—and remain—awful! This one, however, turned out well, and I’m still proud of it. 2011 was a tough year, as I’d just lost another job in 2010, and was floundering as a displaced sales rep in a downsizing economy. My wife and I had a young son, and I was cashing out retirement accounts to pay bills. I’d recently attained my master’s degree, and the only work I could get was hanging Christmas lights in shopping center courtyards. The old maxim came to mind to “do what you love” and I understood its truth; prior, I’d worked lucrative jobs I didn’t enjoy, but suddenly they were gone, the money was gone, and I felt I’d wasted a decade for nothing. I’d wanted to be a writer in high school but was told not to misuse my time and to pursue business instead, which I did…oh, to do it all over. But enough sour grapes. I turned to creative writing in early 2011, and it tangentially led to a new career in technical writing, which was quite serendipitous. I don’t have much to say specifically about the process of writing Footprints Fading in the Desert. Ever since I was a boy, my favorite reading has been of survival stories. I started sketching out the opening scene, but didn’t know what to do with it. My wife and I were visiting somewhere, and I started pacing in a lonely room, and the storyline and ending just sort of “popped” into my head. Thanks Muse!

  Kurt Kirchmeier

  Kurt Kirchmeier lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where he splits what free time he has (never enough) between writing fiction and photographing nature (he has a particular fondness for birds). Kurt’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous print and online publications including Abyss & Apex, Murky Depths, Shimmer, and Weird Tales. You can find him on Twitter @saskwriter and his website kurtkirchmeier.com

  • My inspiration for writing Obsidian Sea came from a prompt I received in one of the many timed-writing challenges I used to take part in before switching my focus to novel-length works. What exactly the prompt was, though, I can’t recall.

  Bentley Little

  “Bentley Little” is the pseudonym of a U.S. diplomat who must remain anonymous lest his writings adversely affect United States foreign policy. Because of his regrettable off-duty behavior, he has been permanently banned from attending the World Horror Convention and from entering the country of Japan.

  • When I was little and traveled with my parents between Arizona and California, we would always stop at a Texaco gas station on the outskirts of Desert Center in the California desert. A new highway was built in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and the entire town was bypassed, but over the years I looked out the window of the car at the old road and watched as the gas station changed owners, went out of business, became festooned with graffiti and gradually deteriorated. Several years ago, I saw a special about singer/songwriter Carole King and, amazingly enough, she was shown filming a music video at that same abandoned gas station. The idea of a famous person at the gas station gave me the idea for this story.

  John Mantooth

  John Mantooth’s first book, Shoebox Train Wreck, was released in 2012 from Chizine Publications. His debut novel, The Year of the Storm, came out in June 2013 from Berkley. He lives in Alabama with his wife, Becky, and two children. You can follow him on Twitter @busfulloflosers.

  • Many years ago, I drove a school bus. I quickly learned there are only two options for school bus drivers: allow the screaming kids to drive him insane or block them out by losing himself in thought. Naturally, I chose option two and used the time to tell myself stories. As a result, almost all of my early stories were set on a school bus. This one was no exception. I do think it might be my only story where the bus driver was a robot, though. Still, I have to wonder which is safer? Insane robot driver or distracted (and possibly insane) human driver? It’s something to think about, but don’t think too hard, especially if you have kids who have to get on a school bus in the morning.

  Tracie McBride

  Tracie McBride is a New Zealander who lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 80 print and electronic publications, including Bleed, FISH and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthologies Horror for Good and Horror Library Volume 5. Her debut collection Ghosts Can Bleed contains much of the work that earned her a Sir Julius Vogel Award. She helps to wrangle slush for Dark Moon Digest and was the vice president of Dark Continents Publishing (2010—2014).

  Visitors to her blog are welcome at traciemcbridewriter. wordpress.com or Facebook.com/tracie.mcbride. Goodreads or Twitter @TracieMcB or email traciemcbride@hotmail.com.

  • Ghosts Under Glass was originally conceived in a dream; a nonsensical non sequitur featuring three hungry teenagers, one of them carrying a purple teddy bear, roaming deserted streets while ghosts menaced them through the window of a McDonald’s. Who were they? Where were they going? And what was up with those ghosts? Re-reading the story some years on from its construction, I’m aware that I never fully answered any of those questions.

  Ron McGillvray

  Ron McGillvray is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. His writing credits include the short story “The Garbage Collectors,” which was published in Horror Library Volume 2. His story “Big Boy” was produced as an audio version by Pseudopod and his story “A Night Out” was published by Dark Fire Fiction.

  Two of his film scripts, The Storm and The Goodbye, were both produced by Cellardweller Projects. The Storm was chosen as one of the films to be screened at the 2007 World Horror Convention. It also screened at the Shocklines Film Festival in New York City. His story “Head Case” was made into a film produced by Columbia College in Chicago. His film script Magic Man was optioned by Hyde Park Media. His Stage play The Line was picked up as part of the reading series by the Saint John Theatre Company.

  • My story The Garbage Collectors came about in a roundabout way. My wife decided it was time to do some spring cleaning and had me start throwing out unused and useless stuff of mine. One of these items was a lamp I’d had since high school, under the light of which I’d written many of my earlier unreadable stories. After putting it at the curb for garbage pick-up the next day, I thought about that lamp as I was getting ready for bed. I looked out our spare bedroom window and saw the lamp sitting at the end of the driveway. The thought popped into my head, I wonder if it is out there wondering what it had done wrong to have been thrown out with the trash? Even though I knew it was silly, I went back outside and rescued my lamp and hid it away in the bas
ement. Did I mention the lamp didn’t even work? Afterwards, lying in bed, I tried to rationalize it and wondered what would I do if I had to decide which of my children I had to put at the curb for the local garbage collectors? That was the germ of the story you are about to read, and I hope for your sake you never have to make that same decision.

  Shane McKenzie

  Shane McKenzie is the author of Muerte Con Carne, Pus Junkies, All You Can Eat, Addicted to the Dead, Fat Off Sex and Violence, and many more. He writes comics for Zenescope Entertainment and screenplays for LucahGore Productions. The first chapter of his novel Muerte Con Carne was adapted into a short film called El Gigante, and production for the feature-length film will begin in late 2015. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife and daughter. You can follow him on Twitter @ShanePMcKenzie.

  • Getting into one of the Horror Library anthologies was an early goal of mine when I first started trying to write. I wasn’t ready to try novels yet, so I focused completely on short stories. It was a really great way to learn, not only the craft, but how to stand out from the crowd, not to mention the ever important toughening of my skin. Because more than anything, I was receiving rejections. And that’s what I deserved at the time. I wasn’t trying anything new, wasn’t taking any risks. My ideas were always strange, but I was too timid to really trust my instincts and I was instead writing and submitting “safe” horror. Well that wasn’t working and it never should. Open Mind Night at the Ritz was the first time I really trusted myself and just let my imagination loose. Didn’t hold back, no matter how weird it seemed at first. Not only did I get an acceptance and meet a very early goal of mine, but I learned how to make an editor take notice, and I’ve been doing it ever since.