“This is Not What I Meant”—I wrote this while working the warehouse at Sears. 2000, 2001? I was still, of necessity, moonlighting from being a professor. I couldn’t decide which I was going to stick with, either. And, that warehouse, it was a freaktacular place, definitely. Each morning I’d wake at five, be the first person on the streets of Lubbock, and they’d all be dusted white with mosquito poison. Driving through it was like being in a snow globe, or the apocalypse. And then the warehouse, where we were all automatons, occasionally losing it and becoming so, so human all at once. So much stuff was stolen, so many jobs lost, so many people laying open-eyed on the shelves with the microwaves and air conditioners, hiding. This story is that hiding. I spent a lot of time on a certain shelf, pretending I was a box.
“The Case Against Humanity”—I half-suspect this is the core of everything I write. It feels true to me. It’s undisguised, it’s naked, it’s bare. And they we all deserve it.
“Hell on the Homefront Too”—This is my official first zombie story ever. And my only TG Sheppard story (so far—guy’s good). I didn’t write it for the zombie in it, though. I wrote it because I wanted to have a character named “Letch,” and because I’d been listening for days to “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Just over and over and over. That song cycles through my life, takes me over like that every few years, where it’s the only thing I can listen to. Because I can’t understand it—I can’t understand why the narrator’s telling us all this, and what her method for selection is. But it’s all perfect, too.
“I Was a Teenage Slasher Victim”—In trying to figure out how it is that Jason Voorhees and that crowd are always so strong, I wrote this story. Stories are the only way I can ever figure anything out. Future-muscles, though. It all makes sense now. And, I have another “I Was a Teenage ________” story I’ve been carrying in my hip pocket for nearly twenty years now. Waiting for it to ripen. In waiting, though, I burned its key line (in “Sea of Intranquility”). No matter, though. Good stories generate their own killer lines.
“The Many Stages of Grief”—Another story that comes from cubicle-land. Also, I guess I should say that, of every story and novel I’ve ever written, even The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, which I did in seventy-two hours, so had no time to hide, this is the most honest. This is the one where the main character is me, without any hiding at all. Not even a little. This was the year I was writing all true stories, just with different facts (another: “Hemingway Hills in the Afternoon”). As for why I wrote this: one of my brothers had a friend named Tad. And that always kind of freaked me out for reasons I couldn’t quite track. Like, I’d just get very nervous even hearing a story about him, like—can’t everybody else tell what’s wrong, here? Evidently not. So I wrote this, trying to figure it out. Turns out it was me who was wrong here.
“Catch and Release”—Man, I don’t know why I write about aliens so much. Blame Whitley Strieber. Blame Chris Carter. Blame this one tabloid I found under the stairs of a half-built house we moved into, a magazine I arranged black widows and wasps and candles and stolen rings and stuff around, and made myself sit with for certain long periods of time, and then sheetrocked that little not-a-room over, so that ritual is still going, thirty-five years later. Or, yes, though this story can’t hope to even approach him, blame Terry Bisson. Of all the stories I’ve done that are all dialogue, this is one of two that I think halfway match up with what I was initially hearing in my head. The other is “The Broaching.” And I never opened that magazine under the stairs, either. It had a guy on front that, looking from now, might have been Max Headroom. Then, though, he was an alien, and this was the only copy of that magazine, and I was terrified and thrilled and forever changed.
“Submitted for Your Approval”—Twilight Zone was just as important to the twentieth century as Einstein and Freud, I think. Or, Serling, he’s part of that trinity. What he gave us, it changed us forever, and in the best ways. And, it’s not knowing our minds or knowing the math of the world that’s going to save us, finally. It’s being able to dream ourselves into something else, something different. I can’t wait.
“Deathtrap Whirlpool”—I have two constant fears. One is that I’m driving somewhere and look down and there’s no key in the ignition, meaning none of this is real, and the other is that I’m an unwitting contestant on a future gameshow. That second is a function of narcissism, I know, and I guess I should apologize for it. But it might be true, too. Everything might depend on whether I open the door now, or after I’ve counted to four in a certain way. It’s a terrible weight to carry. Somebody’s got to, though.
“Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth”—I wrote this, man, ten years ago, now? And, just two days ago, I wrote another story kind of walking the paces of a different set of scientific . . . principles, theories, investigations, maybes. This guy in here, his brain and my brain, they’re one brain. And sometimes they’re unfolding at a rate it’s a trick to try to track. Best I can do is write, and write faster, like if I scratch that paper deep enough, it’s finally going to whisper all the secrets of the world to me.
“Rocket Man”—Everybody’s always worried about zombies eating you. But what if they also managed to lose you your girlfriend? The one who’s not even your actual girlfriend, but the love of your life, only she doesn’t know it yet? There’s some horror. Affairs of the heart always trump your insides being on the outside. And, some of you might notice that the playground rocket in this—dude’s done that before. Sorry? It’s just that it’s one of the touchstones of my growing up. Every time I’d run away, I always came back to that rocket in Stanton, Texas. It was always there for me, ready to take me wherever I needed to go. Thanks, rocket. I’ll be back soon.
“Because My Therapist Asked Me to Tell a Story Using Hamsters”—I think I wrote this while reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And I mixed it with the dad-in-disguise therapist from Infinite Jest. Just, the idea of talking to a therapist, it’s always kind of freaked me out. I’m sure they do good and necessary stuff, but—it’s why I never go on stage to get hypnotized: I’m fairly certain I would never be the same person afterward. Which, I mean, that might be better, I’m not saying it wouldn’t. But we hold on tight to what we know, too. At least I do. The reason I eat only glazed donuts, it’s that I ate one once, way back, and knew it was perfect, and I didn’t need to try any others, however so long I shall live.
“The Calorie Doctor”—This came from some ad I heard on the radio, I think. About losing weight. And I thought, man, this is a violent, violent world we live in. So I did what I could to document that a little.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to John Wang, who published a few of these at Juked over the years. Thanks to Court Merrigan, for prompting me to write one of them, and to Paul Tremblay and John Langan, who got me to write another. Thanks to a guy named Herb, for driving a purple bus once. I’m still waiting for that bus to come over the horizon one more time, Herb. Thanks to Jeremy Robert Johnson. For that amazing introduction, but he’s also the reason for some of these. You see somebody firing on all cylinders, and you want to go that fast too. Carlton Mellick III challenges me in the same way: I see what he’s doing on the page, and I think Would it be safe to go farther? Is it even possible? Not really. But it’s fun to try. Same with Vonnegut: I’ll never be him, but I guess nobody else will be either. Doesn’t stop us all from dressing up in his cast-offs, though. Thanks to Cameron Pierce, for bringing me into Lazy Fascist for, now, three books. If not for him, Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth wouldn’t have even been an idea. I mean, I knew I had this one directory of stories that were always oozing out over the fences, peering back over with their stalk-eyes and grinning goodbye in their secret evil ways, but, until Cameron hit me up to collect them, I never knew what they could look like all in place. And, thanks to Cameron for titling this one, too. My title was, as is often the case, stupid. Working with good people, though, I’ve had the luxury of getting to be stupid, as there
’s always someone there to catch me. Thanks to Diane Hueter Warner, for hiring me into a book cataloging unit once upon a time. A lot of these not only come from there, they were also written there. Thanks to Janet Burroway. The first of these stories, I wrote it for your workshop back in 1997, I think. And I still remember the silence of nobody having any idea what to say that wouldn’t either hurt my feelings or show that they had no idea what had just happened. Don’t feel bad; I had no idea either. And thanks to my wife Nancy. No matter how far these stories go, you’re there to take my hand, bring me back again. I can’t always speak proper words upon re-entry, but you don’t make me, either. Let’s watch some more Matlock, now. Let’s do that forever, please.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of The Last Final Girl, Zombie Bake-Off, Demon Theory, The Ones that Got Away, It Came from Del Rio, Growing Up Dead in Texas, and probably twice that many more. Stephen’s been an NEA Fellow, a Stoker Award finalist, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters award for fiction. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR Palm Desert.
JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON is the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of We Live Inside You, the cult hit Angel Dust Apocalypse, the Stoker Nominated novel Siren Promised (w/Alan M. Clark), and the end-of-the-world freak-out Extinction Journals. In 2008 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy-winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. He also runs indie publishing house Swallowdown Press and is at work on a host of new books.
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