by Shock Totem
But mostly, I just want to rip their fucking throats out, and shit down their necks.
I ain’t afraid of you, she says daily, like a mantra.
Oh, but you should be, I think, more and more.
It’s the closest to a demon that I will ever get.
And that’s how scary clowns are made.
John Skipp is the only New York Times bestselling novelist to win a pornographic Oscar for a scene with a singing penis. His splatterpunk novel The Light At the End inspired the character of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His 1989 anthology Book of the Dead was the beginning of modern post-Romero zombie fiction. His short fiction with Cody Goodfellow has graced Hellboy: Oddest Jobs and the latest Zombies vs. Robots collection. Their latest book is The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie.
Skipp is also the editor of four massive, encyclopedic anthologies (Zombies, Demons, Psychos, Werewolves & Shapeshifters, and editor-in-chief of mainstream-meets-Bizarro publishing imprint Fungasm Press. And as filmmaker, he and Andrew Kasch have co-directed the award-winning lactating manboob horror comedy Stay At Home Dad and the Slow Poisoner music video Hot Rod Worm, with Robot Chicken stop motion animator Michael Granberry, in which Skipp also plays the bongos. He lives in L.A.
HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
The stories behind the stories.
“Highballing Through Gehenna”
I ride the train a lot, the northeast corridor Amtrak route between my home in New York City and the family hub in Boston. There is an undercurrent of tension and urgency when you’re waiting to board, masses of people jostling for position, instinctively afraid that the train might leave without them. The terrain along the route itself is varied, small towns, abandoned, post-apocalyptic mills, anchored boats at seaside marinas and small cities. On one trip, likely inspired by a trackside pizza joint, I saw the rotating disk of the Deformation sailing towards our car. I mean, whammo, the image was conjured whole and furious on the spot. A silent bell-tone indicating Story Idea rang in my head and I began to play with it. What if these things attacked the trains on a regular basis? Why would anyone take a train through such dangerous country? Inspired by the empty, red brick structures of the mills, a theme of crumbling civilization introduced itself. I stole more from the actual experience around me, the sights and sounds, the tension before boarding. Next I injected a bit of what my gal likes to call “It’s the apocalypse and all you have are the people in this train car, you’re in charge.” Yikes, scary. Families. Business types. Academics. The only obvious competence lay with the train conductors, who radiated a sense of reliability. The characters stepped forth from this analysis and spoke up quickly to let me know who they were. Even the young telegrapher with rosacea. Not that I identified specific people and worked them into the story, but rather worked to understand the essence of who they were, and let the characters crawl forth from there. Oswego introduced himself unexpectedly and quite firmly as the glue necessary to hold together the slapped together technology and hasty reconstruction of a society on the ropes but not yet down.
Every once in a while a story lands whole in my lap before I even open my laptop and “Highballing Through Gehenna” was that rare beast. It scooped up details and feelings from my travel, passed them through the warped filter of my imagination, and poured out in close to a single sitting. I enjoyed digging up some actual train terminology but had to jigger my geography a bit...in the story they pass the remains of Pittsburgh, I think I originally had them passing Chicago, which made no sense at all when I looked at a map.
Even though I was dying to dig deeper into the details, to explain how Detroit of all places became the last bastion of civilization, to explore the disaster more fully, I held back. The Worth family are little people trying to survive something bigger than they are. Something huge. I stuck to what I remembered from my own experiences in the Northridge earthquake, the L.A. riots, Hurricane Sandy. When a giant thing washes over you the world shrinks and big picture considerations take a back seat to caring for who and what is immediately around you. I’m hoping that the ominous ending is seen in this light as well. Young Miri had best enjoy her chicken and waffles and the comfort of electric lights while she can, because the Deformation is coming.
In the story, English teacher and family man Dalton Worth surprises himself and proves his mettle. And of course the doughty Captain Oswego of the Pinkertons has his hand firmly on the tiller. But when I’ve looked around at the other passengers in the Amtrak Quiet Car on recent trips, I’m glad it’s just a story. I think if it were up to us to defend the train against the Deformation, we’d be toast.
–John C. Foster
“We Share the Dark”
Usually, this is the process: I come up with an idea for a story, and then I spend what some might consider a ridiculous amount of time writing notes about said idea, discovering all kinds of neat things about the characters and the world that often don’t even end up in the story proper. It’s only days and thousands of illegibly scrawled words later that I actually begin writing the work itself.
“We Share the Dark,” however, is one of those rare pieces where I sat down with an itch to write and absolutely no idea what I was going to write about. I had a vague image in my mind of a girl and a ghost watching a sunrise or a sunset together from the front porch. I thought it might be a romance between the two, and then Rob walked in. Then I figured Rob was just some awful, sullen ex-boyfriend who would only hang around for a few minutes...but then he kept coming back. And I was like, Dear God, is this turning into a LOVE TRIANGLE? A love triangle about a medium, a ghost, and a guy who is, for all intents and purposes, a cowboy? How did this happen? Should I make it stop? And just how creepy is TOO creepy for ghost sex these days?
Despite all this, I like to think it mostly turned out okay.
–Carlie St. George
“The Barham Offramp Playhouse”
“The Barham Offramp Playhouse” came about quite organically, as most of my stories do, with an experience or bit of weird minutiae serving as the dust mote around which ideas and obsessions naturally accreted over a period of years. In point of fact, someone did dump a house up on blocks onto the closed Barham Avenue offramp of 101North in the Cahuenga Pass, sometime in 2008 or 2009. During the two weeks or so it sat on the side of the incredibly busy freeway, it acquired graffiti tags and other signs that it had become not only an accepted part of the landscape but a destination.
I'm fascinated by ruins, and particularly by the new rituals that seem to create themselves in such spaces. Los Angeles is more haunted than any castle or concentration camp in Europe, and filled with more ruins than Rome. Haunted by the ghosts of dreams it took armies to make, and by legions of failed dreamers whose desperation is the defining achievement of their lives. The materialist notion of hauntings, as "psychic residue" or whatever, seemed to dovetail with the actor's imperative to open oneself up to the emotion of the role. They share with the vodun or Santeria practitioner a hunger to be haunted, to be possessed by something Other, if not exactly something higher...
–Cody Goodfellow
“Whisperings Sung Through the Neighborhood of Stilted Sorrows”
“moist, black palimpsestuous layers”
That seems to describe the schizoid, cut-up narrative of the poem. It’s a layered collage of dream-like images and associations, and the Freudians would have a field day. It began as snippets of psychosis, tied together by the weaving thread of a dark presence’s hunger.
“to whisper from behind closed bedroom doors,
trying to vaccinate the poor child
against schizophrenia?”
What is reality to a shattered mind?
–WC Roberts
“Watchtower”
“Watchtower” was born inside a fairy circle not far from Odiorne Point State Park in Rye, New Hampshire. The park used to be an observation outpost during WWII. Remnants of gun emplacements and concrete circles where mortars were positioned facing
the Atlantic Ocean to defend against Nazi submarine attack can be found scattered through the brush. It was the juxtaposition of these ruins of war with the naturally occurring—but fancifully named—ring of mushrooms that provided the spore that eventually became “Watchtower”.
Those ruins became a secret gateway between worlds, hope in a hopeless situation for my main character as he makes a desperate leap of faith.
While the setting for “Watchtower” evolved from a chance of nature, the characters were born during a writing contest. The challenge was to mix elements of traditional fantasy in a modern military tale. I’m not really a fan of using tropes, so I tried to avoid direct contact with the usual fantasy elements. I don’t know if I lived up to the letter of the contest, but I enjoyed writing this piece.
–D.A. D’Amico
“Death and the Maiden”
First time I ever used the word grave in a story.
An instinctive identification with the sidekick. Robin, Dr Watson, Tonto, Igor. It's an unhappy story; he doesn't get the girl, his experiment fails and he's doomed from the opening paragraph. Assistants have their uses but shouldn't get ideas above their station.
The Rosencrantz & Guildenstern trope. Minor characters have lives of their own and their own stories to tell. I was pleased with his back story. Did it explain his actions? It was just the way it came out.
The unreliable narrator. I didn't realise until it was nearly finished that Igor murders the child, simply for his own ends, as an experiment, explaining it by saying the child was already marked.
And no remorse. No sympathy for his parents. I don't know that I've ever met a sociopath. Is Igor one? Is it apparent before the end? He has the self-awareness to say he is his own monster, something that has taken a lifetime to create.
–David Barber
“Fat Betty”
Fat Betty is a real cross, located high on the North York moors, and supposedly nicknamed for a local woman, often said to be a nun, who died lost in the wilderness. I first saw it (her?) on a summer evening, when there were storm clouds gathering beyond the valley below. The foreboding weather seemed to be matched by the weirdness of the little cross, with its squat, misshapen form, its crude whitewash, and the soggy offerings of food and coins and wildflowers upon it. It felt a little out of time, a little uncanny, and it made me wonder who the food was for.
Of course, it was going to become a story. The dystopian setting was an odd choice that seemed to grow naturally from that sense of timelessness, and from a sort of sideways reference to the history of the Moorland Crosses in general. Most of them are much bigger than Betty, stone monoliths put up over the centuries as waypoints or landmarks, an attempt to impose a bit of human order on a lawless landscape by people whose lives must have been almost unimaginably harder than those of the walkers who seek out the stones now. It seemed only right that my protagonist be living through similarly dark times.
I’ve taken some liberties with the geography of the area: Stockdale doesn’t exist (to my knowledge), RAF Fylingdales isn’t visible from Betty’s side of the ridge, and the old railway line above the village of Rosedale is rather more than a short walk away. Greater liberties have been taken with the story, which is invented in total defiance of any actual folklore regarding the cross. There are supposedly “many legends” about Fat Betty, but none of the people or websites I consulted gave more than vague hints, with the occasional outright disappointment. Apparently, the food is left out so that hungry hikers can have a snack en route. How dull.
–Harry Baker
“Stabat Mater”
For me, this story cut a little closer to the bone than most. As “Stabat Mater” originated in Shock Totem’s flash fiction contest, I was required to work from a prompt given to all the entrants. Harlan Ellison spoke in an interview of a sort of urban literary myth, in which Hemingway allegedly threw his first book into the sea because “no one should ever read a writer’s first novel.” ST boss Ken wanted us to write a story based on this theory, but instead of throwing away a first book, we were to focus on throwing away a first child.
A difficult topic to approach, whether one has kids or not. There’s a brute power in the very thought of disposing of a baby. But another reason writing “Stabat Mater” affected me strongly was...well, I have only one phobia in the world, and that is of wasps and their flying, stinging brethren. They make me feel like nothing else can. I pictured having a wife, a very pregnant wife, a very pregnant wife kneeling in the leaves with wasps crawling on her...and the shuddering and the writing began. I might have brushed at my arms a few times. And along the way, I hope to have tapped into Nolan’s feeling of deeply sad inadequacy.
Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater kept coming into my mind during the seven days we had to write our contest stories. The piece traditionally relates to the sorrows of Mary at the Crucifixion of her son, Christ. I find Pärt’s treatment of it particularly dark. The music, scored here for three voices and three stringed instruments, is quiet and raging. I heard Lily in it, yes, but I also heard Nolan.
–Michael Wehunt
“Depresso the Clown”
Everybody needs a cause or two to rally behind, help others, and in the process lend meaning to their lives. And one of mine is to help redeem the Clown as a noble character in the human pantheon.
I really, really like clowns. I always have. To me, they function like the little kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, pointing out our naked foolishness to the world. Their painted-on smiles and bumbling antics are meant as mirrors to our souls. We’re supposed to relate to them. Laugh at ourselves through them.
A keen sense of our own ridiculousness is, I think, a key measure of our wisdom as a species.
The sad clown, in particular, is an icon of beauty: aching with sorrow on the inside, but determined to bring joy to those around them. Just ask the ghost of Federico Fellini.
So it breaks my heart that this valiant tradition, with its roots in honesty, has been unfunhouse-mirrored into a sinister, predatory symbol of hate and fear for the last several generations.
Personally, I blame Tim Curry, Stephen King, and the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space). Not saying I don’t like what they did. But suddenly, white face and a rubber nose was the equivalent of Hitler’s mustache in the “You Must Be A Monster” sweepstakes. An ugly turn of events. And a goddam shame, that I don’t think reflects particularly well on our own self-reflection.
Flat-out: we need that mirror.
For me, it all came to a head about four years ago, when I got a job closed-captioning TV and motion pictures for the hearing-impaired. And one of my first projects was this incredibly shitty slasher film, with a totally stupid and hateful killer clown killing totally stupid teenagers in totally stupid ways, for some totally stupid reason.
And I went, “ENOUGH! I wanna write some stories where the clowns are the GOOD guys for a fucking change!”
This resulted in an insane screenplay that Cody Goodfellow and I have been sitting on for a while, and are even now scheming into a graphic novel. Probably the funnest thing we’ve concocted together. I’d tell you more, but that would just be cheating.
In the meantime, I was suddenly inspired to write this story. To me, the image of a clown chained up in a basement pretty much says it all, in terms of what we’ve done to that once-proud member of our human community.
And with that, I rest my case.
–John Skipp
ARTIST BIO
Silent Q Design was founded in Montreal in 2006 by Mikio Murakami. Melding together the use of both realistic templates and surreal imagery, Mikio's artistry proves, at first glance, that a passion for art still is alive, and that no musician, magazine, or venue should suffer from the same bland designs that have been re-hashed over and over.
Mikio’s work has been commissioned both locally and internationally, by bands such as Redemption, Synastry, Starkweather, and Epocholypse. Shock Totem #3 was his first book-design
project.
For more info, visit www.silentqdesign.net.
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