Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #11

by Apex Authors

  We were un-made and re-made, all of us.

  And we knew everything; that no one thing was true. It was all true.

  And it was all so ... fragile.

  We are in here with Vincent, with C'haill-ol-i and the Device, and we know, Claire and I, why the actions of the Device were perceived as evil, and why Vincent's anger at the world is still a very dangerous thing. We strive every moment to teach them about understanding, about acceptance, about love.

  But we also share their fury, their desire for destruction, and look upon the world and the multiverse with equal parts compassion and contempt.

  And we draw on the blackboard sky of the multiverse, creating new worlds, new races, new possibilities, always knowing that at any given moment, on the flash of a nearly-ruined child's anger, any or all of it can be erased.

  We draw on the blackboard sky of the multiverse, and yet still hold a special affection for Earth and those who walk upon it. But this special affection walks hand in hand with a special hatred, that born from the beaten, half-broken spirit of a child who deserved neither the pain inflicted on his body nor the affliction now carried in his soul.

  We have a special eraser for this particular place on our blackboard sky, for if and when it is decided that the Earth no longer has a place in our state of Absolute Unitary Being. Every so often, just for fun, we do the math. So far, the equations balance out. But numbers can change, waves can alter, feelings can be hurt beyond repair.

  Sometimes, Vincent smiles down upon the Earth and says, “They'd better be nice."

  So far, the equations balance.

  So far.

  Still, we keep the eraser within easy reach.

  Interview with Gary A. Braunbeck

  Everybody plays a role, even in the literary genre of horror. There's Brian Keene, the rebel with a zombie-chip on his shoulder. We have Stephen King, the distant rich relative. And Cherie Priest, the young hot-shot on the rise. In such broad strokes of categorization, one could place Gary Braunbeck as the gentleman artist. His words are painted together to create unmistakeable masterpieces that pull at your heart and your fears. In person, he's a gentleman who sports a sharp intellect and noble nature.

  On behalf of Apex Digest, Steven Savile presents this in-depth interview with Gary Braunbeck.

  Steven Savile: Could you explain a little about how you became a writer? Your background and what drove you to choose horror?

  Gary Braunbeck: I was born and raised in Newark, Ohio (the city on which a lot of Cedar Hill, Ohio is based), in a lower middle-class blue collar family; I was baptised a Catholic—now a recovering Catholic—and once briefly studied for the priesthood until I was asked not to by several priests and monsignors at the seminary; I have no college education (I was lucky to graduate from high school); and I was not a very social person until I got involved in theatre and debate in high school.

  I don't know that I so much “chose” to be a writer of dark fiction; I simply gravitated toward it because it is the type of fiction that best allows me to explore and express my worldview. I know that both my father and I had a special affection for old horror movies—when I was a child, we'd watch them together every Friday night when he got home from work; Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, all the classics. My love for all things dark and scary began there.

  SS: They say write what you know, but sometimes it strikes me as terrifying to read something like In Silent Graves and contemplate that the author might know such things—how much of the process is cathartic to you as opposed to pure fiction, story for story's sake?

  GB: Only one scene in In Silent Graves was taken from my own life, and even then it had be re-structured quite a bit—fiction doesn't give a damn about how something really happened, it's only interested in how that something can be re-formed to suit the story being told. In the case of Graves, it was the death of the newborn. My first wife and I had a daughter who only lived 6 days, and because we were experiencing some serious problems in our marriage at the time, I was never allowed to see my daughter until after she died—even then, it was only through the good will of a sympathetic 1st-year intern who helped sneak me into the morgue—and this was well after my daughter had been opened up and her organs removed. Since the body was to be incinerated and not buried (at my then-wife's insistence), no one had bothered to close her up afterward. I had about two minutes to say good-bye to this infant whom I'd never even had the chance to say hello to. Hold a dead baby in your arms for 120 seconds and then see how long you carry that feeling with you.

  That moment—revised and re-shaped—found its way into In Silent Graves, and many people who've read the novel say it's one of the most heart-rending scenes they've ever encountered in a horror novel, and I suppose it's because I decided going in that, even though I was restructuring the sequence of events and adding a few things that didn't actually happen, I was in no way going to whitewash the remembered feelings. You can't do that in a story—be it a horror or not; readers can tell when a writer is trying to manipulate their emotions, and once that happens, the story's ruined.

  I can't separate the “cathartic” element of your question from the “story for story's sake” element, because when one employs and reshapes an incident from one's own life in order to serve the story, the two things walk hand-in-hand. Yes, there is an element of self-exorcism to everything I write, but it has to take place through the story's sensibilities and structural requirements. For as much of the grief as I was able to release by writing that scene in Graves, I still carry a lot around with me, and I'll never be rid of it. I don't want to be rid of it. But at least now I can live with it better than I could before I wrote Graves.

  SS: You tackle some incredibly difficult subjects in your work, ones that run very close to the truly horrific in human terms instead of the monstrous outsiders we can band up against and defeat—how much of this is conscious? Does it reflect a world view, dare one suggest, of a pessimistic variety?

  GB: The simple answer—it is a conscious decision to deal with internal horrors instead of external bogies and beasties. There are at least a dozen writers out there who can give you a ripping good yarn about zombies or vampires or serial killers or demons summoned from Hell or what-have-you ... the safe kind of horror that is meant to keep your stomach in knots for a few hours or days, however long it takes for you to read the novel. Brian Keene's zombie novels are great fun—they're fast-paced, suspenseful, entertaining (I mean that as a compliment), easily accessible to hundreds of thousands of readers, and don't really force the reader to confront anything deeper than the shambling horror clawing to get through the door—but they're not intended to, and that's what makes them safe and fun and popular. They're what Joe Lansdale calls “popcorn” books (not meant as an insult). I wish to hell I had it in me to write “fun” novels, but my particular worldview can't be filtered through such bogies and beasties. I have to have the greatest and most dangerous darkness come from within the human heart, because in my worldview that is precisely where it lies. The monsters aren't “out there,” stumbling from the midnight mist of graveyards, they come from inside us.

  Bear in mind, I'm speaking only for myself. I begin each story or novel with an impulse, and a subject, image, or particular theme I want to explore, and, of course, an area of experience that I can draw upon. I have never been in the armed services (I was 4F by the time I was 10) so I wouldn't dare try to write about a career soldier as a central character. Someone like Weston Ochse, who's had a military career, can write about such a character with a great deal of knowledge, authority, and unimpeachable authenticity. I'd be a poseur, talking of affectations that most readers would see through before they reached page 10.

  If you're going to truly disturb a reader, if you want to give them a reading experience that they're going to carry around for them for days after they've finished a book or story, then you have to be absolutely merciless when it comes to portraying the inn
er darkness we all carry around. That darkness can be as obvious as the impulse to torture and kill, or it can be as subtle as the denial of grief or the habitual inclination to turn away from the suffering of strangers.

  Look—all of my work shares the same central concern: it grapples (or tries to, anyway) with the connections between violence, suffering, and grief, and how we try to reconcile those things with the concept of a Just universe watched over by a benevolent God wherein even the most insignificant and trivial of our daily actions have some greater meaning. I don't think I have a pessimistic worldview; I think it's more a pragmatic one that's been run through a pessimistic filter and then presented to you by a cautious optimist. I look upon my stories and novels—and, God, I hope this doesn't sound self-serving or pretentious—as being cautionary tales. There's a line from one of my Cedar Hill stories where a character says, “We must love one another or die,” and there's another line from another Cedar Hill story that goes something like, “The mystery isn't that there is so much darkness; the mystery is that there is any light at all.” There is, somewhere, a bridge uniting those two thoughts, and I'm stumbling my across it, trying to make that final connection so that my definitive worldview will at last show itself to me. But I know this is where it lies, somewhere between those two thoughts; there is something that links them, and I'll find it one day.

  Now, after hearing all that, are you still shocked that nothing I've written has ever turned up in The Year's Best Humour Writing?

  SS: A lot of your writing strikes me as being intensely personal, intimate even, especially when dealing with subjects like death, which is a staple of bad horror (the theme not the intimacy), now given your own health problems, and the loss of loved ones, has it become harder to be shallow? After all the world loves a monster romp, giant crabs, Godzilla vs. Mothra, and all that jazz—or have you never felt the urge.?

  GB: In other words, “Why the hell don't you lighten up, Braunbeck?” Thanks, Steve—coming from the guy who wrote Laughing Boy's Shadow—otherwise known as The Great Light-hearted Slapstick Romantic Chuckle-fest of 2007, that makes me feel so good about myself.

  Seriously, though, I have been trying to lighten the mood in my work—"The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss” from my collection Destinations Unknown was the first time I'd ever attempted to write a story that was intended to be funny, to show what my sense of humour is like ... and to prove that I do, indeed, have a sense of humor.

  Health problems and the loss of loved ones ... concentrating on the last seven years, those go together. I lost too many people over too short a time when my own life was swirling the drain, and I acted very stupidly and flung myself head-first toward self-destruction, and now I'm paying for it, as I damned well ought to be.

  So, yes, I flunked Shallow 101, but have hopes that one day I, too, can learn to be as vacuous, inane, and empty-headed as any well-toned sun-bather/body-builder on a Southern California beach in July—you know, the type of person who finds Jackie Collins's work to be deep and challenging—although I suspect Ms. Collins's work deals with a different type of crabs than what you're talking about.

  Goddamn—that was almost a joke, wasn't it? Quick—to quote one of my favourite songs by The Who—"Tell me some bad news before I laugh and act like a fool."

  SS: For a long time you were primarily known as a great short story writer—this is changing now, with more novels coming from Leisure, the latest of which Mr. Hands started out life as a short story in Cemetery Dance a few years ago. Your short stories are nothing if not intense—how easy has it been to carry that same intensity into your novels, or do you find yourself consciously writing differently in the different forms?

  GB: I'd like to think that my novels share many of the characteristics that readers have come to associate with my short work, but the truth is that the level of intensity one tries infusing into a short story simply cannot be maintained over the course of a 300-plus page novel. The closest I've come to doing that, I think, was with the final third of In Silent Graves and the entirety of Prodigal Blues. Those two are forever linked in my mind not only because they share similar moral concerns, but because the first draft of each was written in an almost feverish burst. The final third of In Silent Graves was written in one marathon, non-stop sitting that lasted nearly 3 solid days ... with the occasional bathroom and I've-got-to-eat-something-before-I-pass-out break. The first draft of Prodigal Blues was written over the course of 2 weeks of similar marathon sessions, because I knew that if I took a break, if I backed off for more than a few hours at a time, I'd lose the immediacy that was needed to maintain the story's momentum—and when you're writing something like Prodigal Blues, a novel where the events take place over a less than 72-hour period, maintaining that momentum is vital. I don't care what other writers say; for me, in order to infuse a novel with that sort of intensity, I have to work myself into something not unlike an emotional frenzy, jam it into a vial, and then do all I can to remain in that state until the first draft is done, releasing it bit by bit as needed when the story calls for it. Call it “Method Writing,” if you want. But for me, it works—it kicks my ass like you wouldn't believe—I was down for the count, emotionally and physically, for about 10 days after finishing the first draft of Prodigal Blues, but it was worth it.

  All of which is a long-winded way of saying that no, I don't write differently when switching between novels and short fiction. Each is an endurance test, the former lasting much longer than the latter, but if you're not going to fling yourself head-first into something, there's no point in even starting. For me, it's all or nothing once the main character speaks his or her first line of dialogue.

  SS: I've read a lot of your stuff, including the incredible Fear in a Handful of Dust which ought to be required reading for young writers—how did that one come about? And on that personal side again, did you intend to lay your soul bare or was that just part of the process that happened naturally as you moved on with the writing of it?

  GB: Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror As a Way of Life came about because Alan Rodgers—who used to edit Twilight Zone's NIGHT CRY magazine (where I made my first professional sales) was working with Wildside Press and contacted me about doing a couple of books for them. He thought it might be interesting for readers if I wrote a non-fiction book about horror. Initially, I think we both were expecting it to be something along the lines of Danse Macabre, but the more I began looking at the themes that were emerging, the more I realized that it wasn't going to be the same kind of book as King's—and no way was it going to be anywhere in the same league. (I had some fun with that in the first part of the book, when the writer—me—is trying to write the non-fiction book and keeps getting distracted because his edition of Danse Macabre keeps talking to him, asking him why he's even bothering.)

  The further into the writing of Fear that I got, the more I realized that, if I was going to make any salient points about writing horror fiction—and by that I mean points that hadn't already been made a hundred times before by other, better writers—then I had to do more than explain the “how” and “when” and “why” of writing a short story or novel. I mean, c'mon, Steve—you've had to have sat on panels at cons before and had someone in the audience ask “Where do you get your ideas?"