Alice found herself standing on the surface of a smooth, almost waveless ocean. It stretched to the horizon in all directions like a sea of glass. Something illuminated it from below, as if the sun had descended to the ocean’s bottom, making the water flash like a blinding field of fire.
No sky. Instead, another ocean, this one roiling and frothing, domed above her and extended into the distance until it met the lower ocean at the horizon.
A man walked toward her across the water.
She had never seen him before. He wore a beggar’s robes. When he spoke, he radiated kindness and understanding, and many things became clear for the first time. Many convictions she’d previously held fell away under his gentle words.
When Alice was ready, the man started to walk again. He stopped, turned, and held out his hand.
She took it.
From then on, they walked together.
Afterword
The Cursed Journey of Cursed by Christ
Cursed by Christ began life as part of a much longer novel I wrote in my twenties titled Root of Evil.
In that megillah of a manuscript, a pubescent boy named Darren moves into the former Norwick manor house. It’s haunted by the evil ghosts of Alice Norwick, who resides in the apple tree out back, and her axe-wielding husband, Thorne. Alice’s ghost coerces the boy’s parents into eating her apples so she can control or kill them. Darren’s only ally in this conflict is the caretaker, who descended from Alice’s former slaves. The caretaker is a wise old man and practitioner of his family’s magic, the Knowing.
Although I finished the book in 2002 after ten years of labor, the device of the magical old black man, which I’d subconsciously borrowed from Stephen King’s The Shining, wore thin. Not to mention I couldn’t sell it. At 213,000 words long, I couldn’t cram it into a market asking for 70,000–100,000 word long books, and my attempt to divide it into a two-part series (The Knowing, ending in a cliffhanger, followed by Revelation) didn’t work, either.
Of course, let’s be honest here. Maybe it didn’t sell because it was my first novel—or first two novels, as it were—and so it wasn’t all that good. But at least Root of Evil and all the short stories I wrote during that time functioned as a self-taught graduate course in writing. When my subsequently written “first” novel, The Organ Donor, came out in 2002, reviewers remarked that I wrote as if I already had some titles under my belt.
I never gave up on the Norwicks, though.
Alice’s backstory in the 1860s eventually won me over. I’d written it as a major subplot that Darren experiences in a virtual reality-like telepathic immersion in the ghost’s memories. I realized Alice wasn’t such a bad person after all. Deluded, maybe, but not evil. So I did some major surgery—a ploterectomy—to remove her history from the surrounding novel and craft a new ending so she could achieve peace.
I titled the new manuscript Cursed by Christ, mostly in the form of what you have now. It went out the door in 2002 and within three years had three courtships with small press publishers. Each potential contract fell through for different reasons. One editor requested major rewrites that I wouldn’t agree to (what if you made it all about voodoo?), and another went out of business. The third deal imploded because I couldn’t abide that the company had published another writer everyone hated. Yeah, really. Does that sound like me now? I was afraid of guilt by association or some such crap.
I also worried about offending people with my title. Writers may brag about the attention of being banned by a library, but I doubt anyone actually wants it to happen. So I retitled it to The Dagger of God—and started piling up rejections out of hand. By 2013, I finally threw in the towel and decided it would never see print.
A portion did get published, however, as a 10,000-word short story called “Angel’s Wings,” about Alice’s time in South Carolina. Apartment 42 Publications printed it in Tales from the Gorezone (2004), edited by Kealan Patrick-Burke. I later put it in my first short story collection, Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment & Revenge (2005). So all hope wasn’t lost. As other writers might observe, there’s no wasted effort. Manuscripts can decay into compost to nourish the growth of new tales.
Still, some images haunted me, like the Forney altar creature and the Four Horsemen. I thought about the Civil War, the Reconstruction, and the origins of the KKK. I thought about the lies we tell ourselves and that others tell us.
I thought about the present. Racism remains alive and well in America. Klansmen march, and Rebel flags wave. African Americans and American women of all stripes might no longer be considered property, but they continue to be marginalized in various ways. And let’s not forget about mental illness, which isn’t going away any time soon.
So a story like this, I feel, is relevant. It should shock and offend you on some level. I’ve given up my worries about that during this long journey and have restored the original title.
I’ve also unclenched slightly on my scruples about self-publishing. All I wanted was to narrate this story as an audiobook. I really love that kind of performance. But Amazon wouldn’t let me distribute it there without at least an accompanying eBook edition. So, if you are reading this on your Kindle device, I thank you, but as Chancellor Gorkon said in Star Trek VI, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
Staunton, VA
April 13, 2018
About the Author
When critic Feo Amante gave my first novel, The Organ Donor (2003), a five-star review and labeled it a “straight-on modern classic of horror,” the praise went straight to my head. I wrote several more things, such as the novel Eyes Everywhere (2006), which Publishers Weekly described as “disturbing … compelling and insightful.” You can bet that went to my head, too. I also wrote a radio play and two stage plays premiered by theaters in Virginia.
My opinion column, “Author’s Notes,” ran for five years on the Horror World website and consisted of a blend of commentary, autobiography, and tutorials about the writing craft. Guide Dog Books collected a portion of those columns into its debut non-fiction title, Horror Isn’t a 4-Letter Word: Essays on Writing & Appreciating the Genre (2008).
Blood Born (2011), is an apocalyptic monster novel set in the Washington, DC, area where I grew up. My first urban fantasy novel, The Seventh Equinox (2013), is set in a fictitious city inspired by my current home of Staunton, Virginia. Dominoes in Time (2015) collects sixteen years of horror and science fiction stories.
Other works include screenplays for Darkstone Entertainment and the novelization of their film Plan 9 (2016). My most recent (published) novel, Empire of the Goddess (2018), depicts a nightmare version of modern America. Yes, one even worse than the actual America.
I live with my wife, the artist Deena Warner, and sons, Owen and Thomas, and three cats named Moody, Buttercup, and Shadow. In 2007, Deena and I opened a print and website design business, Deena Warner Design, serving the publishing industry. I’m a member of the Horror Writers Association and an enthusiastic practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
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