Geoffrey L. Mudge
Geoffrey L. Mudge is a writer of horror and dark fantasy. He has very few published works, but he hopes to rectify that problem in the indeterminate future. He spends most of his time, during which he should be writing, chasing ghosts and looking for money in holes in the ground. Mudge currently resides in New Mexico with his wife, Brandi, and their dogs, Hazel and Moxie.
• Strangely enough, the inspiration for Reverend Wainwright came from my wife. She was suffering through some severe medical issues and was in a great deal of pain almost constantly. As we lay in bed one night, she was squeezing my hand and crying and I asked myself what price I would pay to take away her pain. Once that seed was planted, the character of Reverend Wainwright began to grow. Unfortunately for me (depending on your perspective), I’m cynical enough that even in my imagination the person that could help would only do so for nefarious reasons. Wainwright was immediately more interesting as the antithesis of a healer, abusing the hopes of the terrified to extract his toll.
The initial incarnation saw Wainwright as more of a shady snake oil salesman. However, as the scope of the story grew, I wanted to be able to bring more people to him than one might imagine a salesman could draw. The choice to make him a faith-healer came quickly and was much more satisfying. Using the trappings of religion to pervert it allowed Wainwright more freedom in his actions and also let me hint at his backstory without delving into any significant details.
Of course, he would need helpers as he traveled and I knew I didn’t want him to collect his troupe from the captured children. Without giving away too much (I am most certainly not done exploring these characters), there is a definite connection between the Reverend and the hands and there is one small, and seemingly insignificant hint hidden in the story as to what they actually are.
I actually knew how I wanted the story to end before a lot of the other details were in place. Right off the bat, I decided that this narrative would not be about a regular “day on the job” for the Reverend, but rather a worst case scenario where the system breaks down and the true nature of the characters is revealed.
Daniel L. Naden
Daniel L. Naden has always been a writer. It’s an affliction, a blessing, a curse…a dominant part of his life for as long as he can remember. He has published work in the areas of politics, humor, philosophy, and of course, fiction. Dan’s stories explore the irony in life, through the lens of horror, suspense, & sci-fi. His writing has appeared in great anthologies such as Horror Library Volume 2, Our Shadows Speak, and Dark Distortions, along with top-notch markets like Dark Recesses Press, Astounding Tales, Ragged Edge Publishing, Montage, and Pajamas Media. In 2013, Dan’s short story, “Loss,” won the Best In Show, Short Fiction Story in the metro-wide Art@ Work competition, put on by the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City. In 2014, Dan took top Art@Work honors once again with his story, “Just One.” Dan and his wife Paula reside in Gardner, Kansas. They have four grown children and two grandchildren. You can follow him on Twitter @AuthorDanNaden
• They say you’re supposed to write what you know and as a parent of four, the challenges of raising children seemed like a good fit for a story about a little girl with a frighteningly large talent. Like a lot of my stories, Drawn got its start from a simple what-if. What if a little kid had the power to grab whatever he or she saw, with just the power of wanting it to come? Simple as that, an idea that popped into my head one day, then exploded as my writer’s mind began turning the concept over and over, trying to figure out what it would mean, seeing the story spin itself out around it.
What intrigued me the most about the idea behind Drawn was how much more complicated would be the process of raising an infant who had the power to take what she wanted, whenever she wanted it. I found it interesting how adding a little thing like seamless telekinesis to a child’s development could turn the normal joys and challenges of parenthood into something more of a nightmare. And how we could find just how big little Anna’s power actually is.
Marc Paoletti
A former journalist, Marc Paoletti holds a master’s degree in fiction, and writes copy for the top advertising agencies in the world. He is the author of Scorch, a thriller that draws upon his experiences as a Hollywood pyrotechnician, and co-author of The Last Vampire and The Vampire Agent. His acclaimed short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies. Visit him online at www.marcpaoletti.com, and follow him on Twitter @MarcPaoletti.
• I wrote Apple quickly, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. Don’t get me wrong—I stand by the story. I’m just a bit disturbed that such nihilistic material would flow from my fingers so easily. In fact, the story put me off writing horror for quite some time. Editors R.J. Cavender and Boyd Harris were kind with their praise over beer and BBQ in Chicago, but I’m pretty sure that’s because they’re dark bastards themselves. I say that with respect, of course, and realizing it takes one to know one. I felt similar pride/revulsion when I heard the story had earned an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. I hope people enjoy the story, darkness and all.
Greggard Penance
Greggard Penance spends most of his creative efforts writing nonfiction for small magazines. He has no public persona, and likes it that way. Every blue moon, he cuts his true muse loose, and gets his horror on. His dog only sleeps in his bed when he’s not home.
• A number of experiences find a way to express themselves in most of my works. Sporting the Waters of the Bermuda Triangle is no different, though nothing is more primal to me than the depths of an ocean. We don’t know what’s down there, and that has always worked my spine into kinks. Then, you mix in other elements, such as an eerie place like The Bermuda Triangle, a central character who is in the predicament that he is in, and throw in a crossover into other dimensions, and my brain twists trying to remember how this whole thing came about.
I’ve never felt safe in open waters since watching the film Jaws as a teenager. I think the story has been brewing since then. I read Michael Crichton’s Sphere sometime after that, and wanted so much more from it. I wasn’t invested enough to write a novel on such a strange mix of images that were haunting me, and besides, this story wouldn’t translate well into one, so I began it as a short piece. I saved the unfinished manuscript on my hard drive not long after 9/11, and like many other works, it sat there for a good while. Then I read a haunting short story that took place in deep waters a few years later, and that prompted me to dig my story out and blow the proverbial dust off.
Cameron Pierce
Cameron Pierce is the author of twelve books, most recently Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon and Bottom Feeders (with Adam Cesare). His work has appeared in Dark Discoveries, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Giallo Fantastique, Letters to Lovecraft, The Barcelona Review, LitReactor, and many other publications. He is also the editor of four anthologies, including The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, and head editor of Lazy Fascist Press. He lives in Astoria, Oregon with his wife. You can follow him on Twitter @ CameronPierce.
• I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare was written under the influence of Bentley Little, sleep deprivation, and The Day the Country Died, the seminal album by the British anarcho-punk band Subhumans. At the time I wrote it, I was living in San Luis Obispo, on the coast of central California, taking college classes and working as a paperboy. Often, after delivering papers all night, I would go to the 24-hour doughnut shop on S. Higuera and write, or I’d go home and write until I passed out from exhaustion. This was the most normal short story I wrote during that period. Several years after appearing in Horror Library Volume 2, I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare appeared in my first short story collection, Lost in Cat Brain Land, which was awarded the Wonderland Book Award for best bizarro collection of 2010.
Danny Rhodes
Danny Rhodes’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, most recently in Black Static and Crimewave. A future story is due to appear in Cemetery
Dance Magazine. He has written three novels: Asboville, Soldier Boy and FAN. Visit his website at dannyrhodes.net, on Facebook, and Twitter @danrhodesuk
• Follower was initially inspired by a photograph of the body of George Mallory, a climber who took part in the first British expeditions to Everest and who ultimately died on the mountain in 1924. Mallory’s body was lost for 75 years until its discovery in 1999. Due to the mountain’s climate, the body was incredibly well preserved. There wasn’t much of a journey from witnessing that photograph to the imagining of a story in which a modern day adventurer, lured by social media, competition, the chance of flirting with fame, and blinded by a sense of indestructibility, might suffer a similar fate. The pursuit of Morris up the mountain by a being from another age was my attempt at administering the sort of quiet, unrelenting unease MR James mastered in some of his classic ghostly tales.
Sunil Sadanand
Sunil Sadanand lives in New York City. His work has been featured in Chizine, Flesh & Blood, the Horror Library anthologies and other small press publications.
• In many cases it’s difficult for me to pinpoint the origin of a story idea. Usually they come from nightmares, or some burst of inspiration where two or more unrelated ideas come together. In this case, I remember specifically when the concept for Trapped Light Medium came to me. I was in a summer camp, and someone gave me a magazine devoted to gruesome subject matter. I’ve no idea what the title of the magazine was or where he got it from. That such a thing existed fascinated me. That there was audience for this type of stuff was even more interesting. There were graphic photographs of victims of car accidents, biker brawls and other seemingly random acts of violence. Close-up gunshot wounds and stabbings. A full page spread devoted to torture camps in Kenya, where victims were purportedly raped by dogs trained specifically for this purpose. I was sickened and numbed and disturbed. Then I started thinking about who took those photographs. Who went around snapping off pictures of the bodies? How did he know these things were going to happen? How did he know?
Alan Smale
Mr. Smale’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, and numerous other magazines and original anthologies. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, A Clash of Eagles, won the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the first book in a trilogy set in the same universe, Clash of Eagles, appeared in Del Rey in March 2015. You can find him online at alansmale.com, Facebook/alansmale, and Twitter @alansmale
• The high-walled schoolyard in Bound is a gritty but faithful recreation of the playground in the northern England primary school that I attended until I was seven. (The devastated surroundings, less so.) And even though I wrote Bound ten years ago, I can still vividly recall all kinds of details about its world that never made it into the story.
Joan Berniker
Sara Joan Berniker lives, writes, and reads in Peterborough, Ontario. Her fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Playboy, and Albedo One, among others.
Jeff Strand
Jeff Strand is a four-time Bram Stoker Award finalist, and zero time winner. His 20+ books include Pressure, Dweller, A Bad Day For Voodoo, and Dead Clown Barbecue. You can visit his Gleefully Macabre website at jeffstrand.com, follow him on Twitter @JeffStrand, or friend him on Facebook at JeffStrandAuthor.
• I can’t usually pinpoint the moment of inspiration for a short story or a novel. Often, it’s a very uninteresting, methodical process of brainstorming that leads to a story idea. In the case of The Apocalypse Ain’t So Bad, though, the inspiration came from reading Brian Keene’s novel Dead Sea. Now, I’m not copping to ripping off Dead Sea. It has the nihilistic tone that’s common in zombie/post-apocalyptic fiction, but what struck me in Keene’s book were the discussions about, “In a world ravaged by the undead, why should we even bother trying to stay alive? What’s the point?” The answer, as provided by the novel, is: “There is no point, and we shouldn’t bother.” That mega-bleak world view made me think that it would be funny to write a story about a character who feels the opposite. The apocalypse would suck, sure, but unless you got bit by a zombie or lost your reading glasses, there would be an upside, right? Part of you would have a blast on the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s okay to admit it.
John F.D. Taff
John F.D. Taff has more than 75 stories in publication in such markets as Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Big Pulp, Postscripts to Darkness, Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, and Shock Rock II. Six of his shorts have been selected as honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies over the years. His short story collection, Little Deaths, was named the No. 1 horror collection of 2012 by Horrortalk. The End in All Beginnings, his recent collection of five novellas published by Grey Matter Press, has been very well reviewed and was called “the best novella collection in years” by Jack Ketchum.
Books of the Dead Press will bring out two of Taff’s novels this year, Infestation in the spring, and The Orpheus Box later in the year. Grey Matter is also publishing a standalone novella, The Sunken Cathedral, this spring. You can follow him on Twitter @johnfdtaff
• The Immolation Scene began a long time ago as an idea for a story on spontaneous human combustion. I remember reading about this as a child and seeing a wonderful black-and-white picture of an old woman’s support hose-clad leg near a charred recliner—all that remained of her after she apparently ignited. There the idea sat, though, until I read the liner notes, of all things, for the soundtrack to the movie Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, specifically Track 12, The Immolation Scene. Great title, I thought. And though the story takes nothing from that (admittedly not great) film other than this, it got me thinking about my long dormant idea. Sometimes you just need a catalyst to make an idea work, and this was mine. The story came together pretty quickly and easily after this.
Ian Withrow
Ian Withrow is the author of several short stories. A graduate of Princeton University and the Stonecoast M.F.A program at the University of Southern Maine, he currently resides in western Montana, where he worships good music, great books, and spends his nights with every limb tucked safely beneath the covers. You can follow him on Twitter @withrow406.
• I was thirteen years old when Jerrod Steihl Goes Home first spewed out of my head. Two hundred words of my handwritten scribbles composed for a homework assignment that had been given to my seventh grade English class. Because why not give your teacher a story about a student unleashing unworldly hell on his school? To Mrs. Burnette’s credit, though, she gave me nothing but encouragement. ‘Keep writing,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever stop.’ Fifteen years later, the story returned. Again, the result of an assignment, this time as I was working toward my MFA. It was longer than it had been before—new characters emerging, aspects of the setting subject to change—but deep down, the heart of it was the same. If you let it aerate for a while, keeping the book open so the story can breathe, you’ll taste the influences at work: Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, and the ever-potent King. Mostly, though, there’s Jerrod. Finally at home in these pages, the seed-planter of inky trees.
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 39