by Shining in the Dark- Celebrating 20 Years of Lilja's Library (retail) (epub)
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For all the readers of Lilja’s Library.
If not for you, this book would never have happened!
For Stephen King. I’m up for 20 more years, I hope you are.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CELEBRATING TWENTY YEARS OF LILJA’S LIBRARY: AN INTRODUCTION—Hans-Åke Lilja
THE BLUE AIR COMPRESSOR: A TELLING OF HORROR—Stephen King
THE NET—Jack Ketchum & P. D. Cacek
THE NOVEL OF THE HOLOCAUST—Stewart O’Nan
AELIANA—Bev Vincent
PIDGIN AND THERESA—Clive Barker
AN END TO ALL THINGS—Brian Keene
CEMETERY DANCE—Richard Chizmar
DRAWN TO THE FLAME—Kevin Quigley
THE COMPANION—Ramsey Campbell
THE TELL-TALE HEART—Edgar Allan Poe
A MOTHER’S LOVE—Brian James Freeman
THE KEEPER’S COMPANION—John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated from its original Swedish by Marlaine Delargy)
CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF LILJA’S LIBRARY: AN AFTERWORD—Hans-Åke Lilja
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CELEBRATING TWENTY YEARS OF LILJA’S LIBRARY: AN INTRODUCTION
20 YEARS. TASTE it. 20 years! That is a very long time. What have you done in the last 20 years? I have gotten married. I’ve gotten two great kids. I’ve lived in three different houses. And most important (at least in the context of this book) I have run the site Lilja’s Library—The World of Stephen King during all those 20 years. I haven’t updated the site every day for those 20 years but I have done my very best to keep all my readers up to date on everything that has happened in Steve’s Kingdom. And if I may say so myself (and since it’s my book I may) I’ve done a pretty good job.
So, when the 20-year anniversary was just a year or so away I started thinking that I needed to celebrate it with something extra. I just couldn’t let it pass unnoticed. At one point I spoke to Brian Freeman at Cemetery Dance about it and I think it was he who suggested that “Why don’t we do an anthology to celebrate the site?”. Well, why not I thought but if the idea would work I needed to get permission to use a story by Stephen King. I mean it would just not have worked to do a book to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of a site dedicated to Stephen King without including a story by the man himself, right? That would just be crazy.
So, I set out to get permission to use a story, and in mid-July I got the thumbs up to use “The Blue Air Compressor,” a story that hasn’t been published in any of Stephen King’s collections. I guess you can imagine my excitement. If you can’t, I can tell you that it included jumping, shouting and crazy laughter. With that story in place I could start to put the rest of the anthology together, which after getting the okay on “The Blue Air Compressor” seemed like the easy part to me. Boy was I wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every part of it but it was a totally new experience for me and I’m so glad I had Brian Freeman at my side to help me out. I had no clue about how the payment for something like this worked. I had no clue about writing contracts with authors.In fact, there was a lot I had no clue about but I got through it and as I said, I loved every aspect of it. I also got the chance to speak to some of the biggest authors out there. I actually spoke directly to most of the 13 (how fitting with 13 authors right?) authors that are in this anthology…and some that aren’t. Some it took some time to get in touch with (it’s not like if you could just Google them and get an email or phone number) and others responded in just a few hours after I had emailed them. Everyone that committed to joining me in the celebration either contributed a story they had published earlier or with an unpublished piece (it’s a very exciting feeling to be one of the first to read a brand-new story). Six of the twelve stories (yes, one of the stories is a collaboration and therefore there are 13 authors and 12 stories) have not been published anywhere before this publication. Some of them were even written directly for this anthology. Of the six that have, many were only published in magazines. So, chances are that you’ll read most of the stories in here for the first time. Something I’m very excited about.
One story was even originally written in my native language (Swedish) and that’s “The Keeper’s Companion” by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It was translated by Marlaine Delargy, and I was actually involved in some details with the translation with John, which was very exciting. I would never have imagined that I’d be consulted by the, in my opinion, biggest horror writer in Sweden.
The oldest story in this book is by Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote “The Tell Tale Heart” in 1843, more than 170 years ago and the newest story is “An End to All Things” by Brian Keene who finished it in mid-April of 2016. The anthology collects the horror and fear of 13 authors. Some I have just gotten to know, while I have known others for 20 years. Some are pure horror. Some will make you feel uncomfortable. Some will make you think. Some will make you cry and some will make you smile. My hope is that they will all entertain you and that you, like me, will love them all in their own way and once you finish the book…don’t forget to say goodnight to your pets. You never know when you’ll get another chance…
One last thing…
As I write this addition to my introduction in early April 2019, a little more than a year has passed since the first edition of Shining in the Dark was released. A book that was at first only meant to be released in the US has now been published in eight other countries (Bulgaria, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden, UK, Serbia and Brazil) and is, as we speak, being considered by publishers in four more. Both Simon & Schuster Audio and Hodder & Stoughton have released it as an audio book, and now the time has come for Gallery Books to release it in trade paperback edition. Imagine if I had known back in 1998, when I asked Scribner for an Advance Readers Copy of Bag of Bones, that 21 years later they would be releasing a book I created. Mind-blowing!
THE BLUE AIR COMPRESSOR:
A TELLING OF HORROR
BY STEPHEN KING
THE HOUSE WAS tall, with an incredible slope-shingled roof. As he walked up toward it from the shore road, Gerald Nately thought it was almost a country in itself, geography in microcosm. The roof dipped and rose at varying angles above the main building and two strangely angled wings; a widow’s walk skirted a mushroom-shaped cupola which looked toward the sea; the porch, facing the dunes and lusterless September scrub grass was longer than a Pullman car and screened in. The high slope of roof made the house seem to beetle its brows and loom above him. A Baptist grandfather of
a house.
He went to the porch and, after a moment of hesitation, through the screen door to the fanlighted one beyond. There were only a wicker chair, a rusty porch swing, and an old discarded knitting basket to watch him go. Spiders had spun silk in the shadowy upper corners. He knocked.
There was silence, inhabited silence. He was about to knock again when a chair someplace inside wheezed deeply in its throat. It was a tired sound. Silence. Then the slow, dreadfully patient sound of old, overburdened feet finding their way up the hall. Counterpoint of cane: Whock… whock… whock…
The floorboards creaked and whined. A shadow, huge and unformed in the pearled glass, bloomed on the fanlight. Endless sound of finger
s laboriously solving the riddle of chain, bolt, and hasp lock. The door opened. “Hello,” the nasal voice said flatly. “You’re Mr. Nately. You’ve rented the cottage. My husband’s cottage.”
“Yes.” Gerald said, his tongue swelling in his throat. “That’s right. And you’re—”
“Mrs. Leighton,” the nasal voice said, pleased with either his quickness or her name, though neither was remarkable. “I’m Mrs. Leighton.”
* * *
this woman is so goddam fucking big and old she looks like oh jesus christ print dress she must be six-six and fat my god she’s fat as a hog can’t smell her white hair long white hair her legs those redwood trees ill that movie a tank she could be a tank she could kill me her voice is out of any context like a kazoo jesus if i laugh i can’t laugh can she be seventy god how does she walk and the cane her hands are bigger than my feet like a goddam tank she could go through oak oak for christ’s sake.
* * *
“You write.” She hadn’t offered him in.
“That’s about the size of it,” he said, and laughed to cover his own sudden shrinking from that metaphor.
“Will you show me some after you get settled?” she asked. Her eyes seemed perpetually luminous and wistful. They were not touched by the age that had run riot in the rest of her
* * *
wait get that written down
image: “age had run riot in her with luxuriant fleshiness: she was like a wild sow let loose in a great and dignified house to shit on the carpet, gore at the welsh dresser and send the crystal goblets and wine-glasses all crash-a-tumble, to trample the wine colored divans to lunatic puffs of springs and stuffing, to spike the mirror-bright finish of the great hall floor with barbarian hoof prints and flying puddles of urine”
okay she’s there it’s a story i feel her
* * *
body, making it sag and billow.
“If you like,” he said. “I didn’t even see the cottage from the Shore Road, Mrs. Leighton. Could you tell me where—”
“Did you drive in?”
“Yes. I left my car over there.’’ He pointed beyond the dunes, toward the road.
A smile, oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. “That’s why. You can only see a blink from the road; unless you’re walking, you miss it.” She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes and the house. “There. Right over that little hill.”
“All right,” he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea how to terminate the interview.
“Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?”
“Yes,” he said instantly.
She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had, after all, been her husband’s friend, not her own. The face loomed above Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led him into the elderly, waiting house.
She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them. He felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could make of her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a psychic flashlight.
* * *
My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you’ll pardon my intrusion on your mind—or I hope you will. I could argue that the drawing aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and author is permissible because I am the writer: i.e., since it’s my story I’ll do any goddam thing I please with it—but since that leaves the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker’s fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both have to.
You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the dock; his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After writing four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut his own head off with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in Kowloon.
I invented him first during a moment of eight o’clock boredom in a class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. Dr. Terrell was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I thought
ivory guillotine Kowloon
twisted woman of shadows, like a pig
some big house
The blue air compressor did not come until later.
* * *
He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she sometimes dropped in when he was gone to the village, he kept the story hidden in the back shed.
September melted into cool October, and the story was completed, mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten. He felt it was good, but not quite right. Some indefinable was missing. The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy with the idea of giving it to her for criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again. After all, the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the final vector.
His attitude concerning her became increasingly unhealthy; he was fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoiselike way she trekked across the space between the house and the cottage,
* * *
image: “mammoth shadow of decay swaying across shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a geography in herself, a country of tissue”
* * *
by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her, could not stand her touch. He began to feel like the young man in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar A. Poe. He felt he could stand at her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one ray of light on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed open.
The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The decision making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It was right that it should be so—an omega that quite dovetailed with the alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on the fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs. Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an invisible hand.
* * *
In truth, he was guided; by an invisible hand—mine.
* * *
The day was white with overcast, and the promise of snow lurked in its throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already, as Gerald crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her dominion and the low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and gray, curled on the shingle of beach. Gulls rode the swells like buoys.
He crossed the top of the last dune and knew she was there—her cane, with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the side of the door. Smoke rifted from the toy chimney.
Gerald went up the board steps, kicked sand from his high-topped shoes to make her aware of his presence, and then went in.
“Hi, Mrs. Leighton!”
But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The ship’s clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her gigantic fur coat lay draped over the rocker like some animal sail. A small fire had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and crackled busily. The tea pot was on the gas range in the kitchen, and one tea cup stood on the counter, still waiting for water. He peered into the narrow hall which led to the bedroom.
“Mrs. Leighton?”
Hall and bedroom both empty.
He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth chuckles began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the kind that stays hidden for years and
ages like wine. (There is also an Edgar A. Poe story about wine.)
The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter. They came from behind the door to the right of Gerald’s bed, the last door in the cottage. From the toolshed.
* * *
my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch she’s laughing she found it the old fat shebitch goddam her goddam her goddam her you old whore you’re doing that ’cause i’m out here you old shebitch whore you piece of shit
* * *
He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting next to the small space heater in the shed, her dress pulled up over oak-stump knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his manuscript was held, dwarfed, in her bloated hands.
Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw bursting colors in front of his eyes. She was a slug, a maggot, a gigantic crawling thing evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house by the sea, a dark bug that had swaddled itself in grotesque human form.
In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became a hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the sterile craters of her eyes and the ragged earthquake rift of her mouth.
“Don’t you laugh,” Gerald said stiffly.
“Oh Gerald,” she said, laughing all the same. “This is such a bad story. I don’t blame you for using a penname. it’s—” she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. “It’s abominable!”
He began to walk toward her stiffly.