Other fiction

I'd just like to offer a quick shout-out to Dark Scribe Magazine for this very kind review of my story "The Devil Came to Mamie's on Hallowe'en" (as seen in issue #61 of Cemetery Dance magazine). Click here (and you should be reading Dark Scribe anyway!).

It Could Have Been A Zombie Story!

It's true - my initial submission to the MIDNIGHT WALK anthology was a zombie musketeer story. Yeah, even I have to smile when I think about it, but that's the honest truth. "All For One & Dead For All" wasn't quite ready for primetime and was rejected.

As an unofficial "zombie guy", it was almost a relief to not have another undead story published. I can write other things within the world of horror, honest.

Not one to take an ass whippin' lightly, I dug through the files and settled on a second effort, which turned out to be the "Late Check-in" ghost story. It was received with open arms, and actually sparked my decision to remain within the realm of fearful spirits with my upcoming bloody haunted house novel, THE BUTCHER BRIDE.

And good thing "Late Check-in" was accepted. My next best option was a zombie porno piece.

Seriously.

But what is it REALLY about?

Somewhere in between the time I first get a notion for a story - be it an image, a dream, a fragment in something I've read - and when I actually sit down to write, I ask myself the single most important question in the writing process:

What is this story really about?

Take, for example, "Diana and the Goong-si", my story from MIDNIGHT WALK. It would have been easy to dismissively say, "It's about the fact that I love Hong Kong's hopping vampire movies, and thought it would totally rule to set a hopping vampire tale in the time of Dracula." Perhaps that wouldn't be a bad story; in somebody else's hands, it might even be better. Who knows.

But for me it wasn't enough. The story needed to be about something, be it a strong emotional hook or even a sociopolitical subtext. Because I knew this would be a long piece, I decided to go for both (and it was interesting how they ended up meshing). For the emotional pull, I made my protagonist a strong woman who is filling a traditional male role - that of an adventurer in search of a lost love. I realized I could play with that notion in a number of ways, exploiting not just Diana's yearning and grief, but I could also let her be slightly transgressive by putting her in (necessary) drag at one point. Some time after I'd finished the story, I would occasionally find myself thinking, What would Diana do in this situation? The character has lived on past the story for me, always a good sign.

But beyond Diana was something else that began pricking at my consciousness, something about the 19th century setting and a voyage that encompassed numerous British ports, and that was the notion of colonialism (or imperialism). When I was a kid, I'd see movies where some WASP-y protagonist would laughingly teach some native assistant English, and I'd think, That's such bullshit - why isn't Mr. Englishman learning the native's language? In the 18th and 19th century, the British went far beyond mere whimsy in their domination of foreign cultures; read a few historical accounts of massacres, slave labor and enforced drug trade in India and China, and quaint notions of wise and benevolent empire fall by the wayside pretty quickly.

Was it sheer coincidence that I was also pondering America's role as an empire over the last 10 years? Well...

So I had Diana's character and a commentary on imperialism suddenly burrowing into this story, and - as I mentioned above - it wasn't long before they began to intertwine, as Diana discovered her own unease with her country's ruthlessness, adding even more to her emotional turmoil.

With those elements in place, the story virtually wrote itself for me (thank you, story!).

And yes, this philosophy serves me well on other work as well. I was, for example, recently invited into a new zombie anthology, and told that the parameters of the story had to include the traditional Romero zombie tropes: Flesheating corpses that must be shot in the head, etc. etc. I could probably have thrown together a fairly typical zombie action shoot-'em-up pretty quickly, but I wanted something else. I thought about what I'd be like in a post-zombie apocalypse world - alone, scared, barely surviving - and I realized I'd also be very lonely. So my story, "Joe and Abel in the Field of Rest", became a story about loneliness and some of the many forms of love. The story will be out later this year in the book THE DEAD THAT WALK, edited by Stephen Jones.

I hope some of you will tell me what you think these stories are really about. Your answer might be very different from mine, and that will make me very happy.

So How Did I Get Here Anyway?

I feel compelled to answer my own version of R. B. Payne's question from his earlier post on June 27, 2009: "Why horror?" For me, though, it wasn't other people asking me this; rather it was a question I asked myself.

While my friend R. B. was busy with his science fiction, I had my nose deep into crime fiction. The darker, more hard-boiled it was, the better. Even true crime caught my attention frequently enough. But never once did I think I would be writing within the realm of horror. In fact the very first novel I wrote was a crime novel. Come to think of it, the whole thing was a crime in and of itself, something I filed away deep into a box somewhere hoping never to see it again, yet unable to completely cast away the noble effort it took for me to write it.

It actually wasn't until my early adulthood that I was introduced to horror in any and all media. But when I started reading tales of the supernatural, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, non-gore horror, I found a world that I absolutely loved. To me, there was nothing more mysterious, not even a crime or mystery novel, than these sub-genres of "what-if" horror.

Funny thing is, my husband was the one whom we always expected to be published on the horror front. Yet he chose to set his horrors within the framework of a crime novel (An Occasional Dream) and was fortunate to be published by the wonderful gents, Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender, at UglyTown, a crime fiction publisher who has since, unfortunately, closed its doors.

So, the horror writer all of a sudden became a crime writer (though not for long as horror will always circulate through his veins), and the crime writer all of a sudden became a horror writer (where she will most likely stay).

And they lived happily ever after.

MIDNIGHT WALK's first two reviews

...are raves!

Famous Monsters of Filmland

Fatally Yours

Thanks to both publications for taking the time to look at the book and then review it in detail (and so quickly!).

The Secret of my Distress

One of the most significant questions in my life is: why don’t I write science fiction? Why the hell am I writing horror? (Seriously, this question bothers me more than why are we here?)

As a boy I read nothing but science fiction and pulps for years. Although I have many favorite writers, as a young writer seeking inspiration, I grew attached to Jack Vance. His imagery, turn of phrase, and wry sense of humor appealed to me. His stories are marvels of creating distant places and other times.

If I wore a hat, I would tip it to Mr. Vance. If you haven’t read his work, I encourage you to seek him out. He is not a science fiction writer per se, in fact, his work defies categorization. I read an interview with Mr. Vance once, and he remarked (this is a paraphrase) that “he never saw himself as a genre writer. He just wrote whatever came out.”

When I started to write, it was horror that came out. My friends, my wife, even my cat looked at me askew – what’s wrong with you? they would ask. (Of course, the cat only talks to me after a few glasses of wine.)

Answer: I am distressed.

By nature an introvert, by age, an activist. I grew up in a time when people believed we could change the world. I still believe that, it’s just turned out that it’s a lot harder than protesting in the streets and going to rock concerts.

To change the world, one has to look at it. Not through the illusions that we filter our everyday life with, but the unsanitary sewer that is reality. All of the answers are not on television, neatly wrapped up in an hour. For me, that’s what horror is – an unblinking look at reality.

Reality with all the tasty bits sliced off.

So I figure that horror stories come out of me because I am unhappy with the way the world works and I am trying to make some sense of our journey among the living. Death is not only the next station on this line – it appears to be the only stop once we are on this train.

So why not look reality in the eye?

Commit to reading a horror story every day.

It might just make you a better person.

Inspirational Boundaries: The Evolution of The Guixi Sisters

by Jodi Kaplan Lester

The idea for "The Guixi Sisters" came to me when I saw a photograph of my niece with two of her orphanage sisters. In the picture one of the girls had this particularly mischievous look on her face, and that's where my story began: three girls and ensuing mischief. Little did I know it would become much more to me than that.

As I began writing, I realized that my inspiration went much deeper than the picture. It was the love I had for my niece that became the driving force. Had she never been adopted, this story never would have come to be. But she was, and it opened up a whole new world for me as I was not just a passive observer.

I watched as my sister and her family jumped through all the hoops to bring their baby girl home. I counted the days, watched the clock. I was there. Three months before leaving for China, my sister got the first bit of information on her baby girl, including her Chinese name and two pictures. She sent them to me immediately. There she was, a pudgy blockheaded baby girl with wrinkly ankles, now my sister's daughter, now with a name. Now my niece. I couldn't wait for her to come home.

I helped my sister get ready for the trip to China. Sorting through all the paperwork, going through the checklist of medical supplies so she would be prepared for any of the common possibilities that inflict orphanage babies, running down the gifts she needed to get, the money and which denominations, the red envelopes. The list of cultural cues and etiquette seemed endless, yet were important because at a moment's notice they could be denied their baby girl.

I will never forget the night she was brought home. Sitting in my sister's house in the big chair with my back to the window, every time a car drove by I'd twist around to see if it was them. I waited with the rest of my family, now my niece's family. It was an amazing, joyful evening. When she arrived, she was a tiny little thing, nothing like her picture.

Not long after her arrival I started taking days with her. About once a month I would take her wherever, it didn't really matter, just so I could spend time with her. Our days would usually include a visit to Dark Delicacies because to me imagination sparks horror and horror sparks imagination, so I wanted to introduce her to this dark but fairly benign world. I also wanted to be sure that books were a big part of her life. I would always buy her a memento of some type. As much as she loved sucking on the devil ducks' horns, I stuck to the cute little fuzzy teddybear bats, things like that. She was my little something.

And so she grew and my love for her did as well, and then one day I found myself in the middle of this supernatural tale about Chinese orphanages and orphanage sisters that was moving in a dark direction, and I became concerned. My main character was not my niece, yet she was inspired by her. The whole story was. The information I used as material for my story was that which came from my experience of her as an adopted baby and often stemmed from questions my niece asked and things she said as she realized her parents were not biological, her name came differently from others, and that she was Chinese while the rest of her family was not. I couldn't stop my story now, but how do I continue it without exposing or exploiting my little love? I posed this question to some of my fellow Midnight Walk contributors and was encouraged to continue, for as the story grows, my character would eventually shed the skin of my niece and become her own individual.

So I kept writing. I looked closely at anything that came directly from my experiences with her and asked myself, "Is this something that is unique to my niece or is it something any child, adopted or not, from China or elsewhere, would ask or do or encounter?" If I only worked with events that were fairly universal I could avoid undesired exposure. And so I worked in this way, within these parameters and was able to finish the story.

Although the fate of the three girls in my story twists into a dark tale, I know deep in my heart that my story changes nothing about my niece except for maybe bringing us a little closer.