The Night Listener and Others
Page 37
To end this story note in a more positive vein, I was tickled to find that in Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, Burroughs had written: “Very good story: “To Feel Another’s Woe,” by Chet Williamson— twist on vampire theme.” Thanks, Bill!
“YORE SKIN’S JES’S SOFT ‘N PURTY,” HE SAID (Page 243) (Razored Saddles, ed. by Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBruto, 1989)
My ole pard Joe Lansdale and I have been friends ever since we met at a World Fantasy Con and heard each other read aloud our stories from Dave Schow’s Silver Scream anthology. Joe wrote the intro for my first collection, and I’ve appeared in a number of anthologies edited by the Lansdale clan, as well as acted in Christmas With the Dead, based on Joe’s story. When he invited me to contribute to an anthology of weird westerns, I decided to get very dark, and this story was the result. One of the cruelest, yet most romantic pieces I’ve ever written. In his intro, Joe said, “This one is like looking down the cold, dark interior of a rifle barrel.” I’d love to see it done as a graphic novel someday, with painted versions of Eustace’s illustrations, maybe by the great Tim Truman. The story was a final nominee for both the World Fantasy Award and the HWA’s Stoker.
THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. JAMES (Night Visions 7, ed. by Stanley Wiater, 1989)
For me, the novella is the perfect form for weird fiction. It provides enough length to get into your main characters in depth, and allows you to create tension that’s difficult to sustain at novel length. I had a wonderful time writing this piece, and one of the joys was during the research process (pre-Internet), when I went down to my local library and gave the librarian a list of books I needed from interlibrary loan. The librarian saw that I wanted books on cremation, curing and drying meat, and careers in the ministry, raised her eyebrow, and said, “This is going to be a strange one, isn’t it?” It was, and my attempt to reach as deeply as I could into the character of the Reverend St. James was aided by frequent snacks of really good beef jerky, pieces of which I let sit in my mouth like fleshy communion wafers while I wrote.
The theme of this novella is obviously how people can use religion to excuse anything, a concern that’s as pertinent today as it was when I wrote it back in the late eighties. I’ve explored it in greater length in my novel, Defenders of the Faith, and consider it one of the great problems not only in America but in much of the world today. It’s incredible that so many people in our 21st century rationalize their own prejudices with millennia-old books of tribal laws. And even more incredible that we let them get away with it.
THE ASSEMBLY OF THE DEAD (Noctulpa # 4, 1990)
I first tried to market this story to The New Yorker, to which I’d sold, in 1983, “Gandhi at the Bat,” a humorous short story which has been reprinted numerous times and was in Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing From The New Yorker. Trying to parlay a humor sale into a sale of dark fiction was difficult, as shown in the response from New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell (who had bought “Gandhi”), which stated in part: “.…ur editor, William Shawn, would not be able to read this story the whole way through; he is open-minded, but death and dismemberment are not at the top of his list, to put it mildly.” The suggestion that I could have not only offended the legendary Mister Shawn, but also given him the vapors, makes this my favorite rejection letter.
THE HEART’S DESIRE (Weird Tales, Fall 1990)
One of my biggest thrills in my writing career has been the publication of a special Chet Williamson issue of Weird Tales, which has always been my favorite pulp magazine. And why not, with its dark and vibrant history beginning in 1923 and continuing to the present day? My friend Darrell Schweitzer interviewed me for the issue, and three of my stories appeared in it, one of which was “The Heart’s Desire,” about the lies that can sometimes take over our lives.
THE PACK (Masques IV, ed. by J. N. Williamson, 1991)
Credit for this grisly tale has to go to my wife Laurie’s Uncle John Kerr, who is not a fan of horror fiction. “Why,” he once asked me jokingly, “don’t you ever write about puppies and kitties?” Be careful what you wish for, Uncle John—you may just get it. I should also add that Uncle John’s playing of the musical saw is always one of the highlights of Kerr/McCandless family gatherings. It’s the ideal instrument with which to silence annoying music critics.
THE SWING OF THE KNIFE (Narrow Houses, ed. by Peter Crowther, 1992)
My first professional sale, “Offices,” (Twilight Zone Magazine, Oct. 1981) was about my experiences in the business world, and this story continues that tradition. The knife that Nichols toys with was mine, and I would spin it in precisely the same way at those dull, endless, pointless meetings. Mine didn’t have quite the same result as Nichols’s knife, fortunately. This particular story was also instrumental in introducing me to this current volume’s editor, Pete Crowther. Narrow Coffins was, I believe, his editorial debut, and an excellent one, due for reprinting.
THE PEBBLES OF SAI-NO-KAWARA (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb. 2004)
For over ten years, Japan was a second home to my son Colin. He studied in Osaka for a year, and received a degree in Asian Studies at Temple University’s Tokyo Campus. He worked at Anchor Inc. for a year as a videogame designer and translator, then went to Square Enix, where he spent several years before returning to the states, where he worked with 17-Bit and now with Shinra Technologies. Laurie and I went to Japan for several weeks in 2001, and have been back twice since. We’ve seen the tourist Japan, but we’ve also seen as much as we can of the Japanese Japan, slurping noodles in cellar ramen joints, dipping into the local baths, and frequenting the districts in which few if any gaijin are seen.
Japan enthralled me, and offered me prime settings for fiction. The most haunting of these was the Hasse Kanon Temple at Kamakura, which is as I have described it in “The Pebbles of Sai-no-Kawara.” When I wrote the story, I was concerned that it might be seen as an anti-abortion screed, since I’m personally pro-choice. The story is, in my view, not about abortion, but about choices made, choices that in this case could not easily be lived with. I’m thankful that I never had to make the decision that Lattimore and his wife did, one which, years later, returned to haunt him. The question would always remain, what if? In Lattimore’s circumstances that question’s answer, whether real or imagined, is devastating.
A FATHER’S TEARS (Quietly Now, ed. by Kealan Patrick Burke, 2004)
Charles L. Grant has always been considered the master and lead proponent of “quiet” horror, the kind of stories that eschew the graphic and favor the subtle. I first met Charlie at the First World Fantasy Convention in 1975, when he was on the “New Voices in Fantasy” panel, and I was a rabid fan. When I got to really know him ten years later, I found him to be a sheer delight—acerbic, funny, opinionated, and charming. We worked together during the early days of HWA, and I sold him stories for Final Shadows and The Seaharp Hotel, both of which were reprinted in my earlier collection.
This story, however, first appeared in Quietly Now: An Anthology in Tribute to Charles L. Grant, one of those delightful tribute volumes that appeared before the honoree has left the stage. Charlie died in 2006, two years after this book appeared, mourned and remembered by many. I was quite glad to be a part of the volume.
JEAVES AND THE DETERIORATING RELATIONS (Joe R. Lansdale’s Lords of the Razor, ed. by Bill Sheehan and William Schafer, 2006)
Horror and humor don’t often blend well, but P. G. Wodehouse has always been among my favorite authors, actually making me laugh out loud while reading, a rare achievement. So when I was given the opportunity to write a tale in the world of Joe Lansdale’s God of the Razor, I decided to overlap that world with the English country-house world of Wodehouse, and trust that stomach-churning hilarity might ensue. I came as close as I possibly could to capturing Wodehouse’s unique style, and had an absolutely ripping time writing it. The result seems to be oojah-cum-spiff (as P. G. would put it), since the public readings I’ve giv
en of it have elicited audible and plentiful laughs. Purists will note that Wodehouse’s characters, among them Jeeves and Wooster, have undergone minor name changes to prevent the writer from major litigation.
THE SMOKE IN MOONEY’S PUB (Taverns of the Dead, ed. by Kealan Patrick Burke, 2006)
Another story taken from life. From 2002 to 2008, I played guitar and provided lead vocals for Fire in the Glen, a Celtic duo, with my fiddle and bodhran playing buddy Tom Knapp. We played a lot of smoky bars and pubs, and when I came home, it was straight to the cellar to strip off all my clothes, which were reeking of smoke, and then into the shower to wash my hair and try to cough the crap out of my lungs and throat. It was when I started to think about the age and the nature of the smoke in some of those pubs that the germ of this story was born. We also loved to play an occasional Irish rebel song. There were some listeners who hated them, and others who sang along almost savagely, and I was always surprised and, I confess, pleased that those simple songs could produce such strong emotional reactions. All those experiences burned inside me until “The Smoke in Mooney’s Pub” drifted up.
FROM THE BACK PAGES (Retro Pulp Tales, ed. by Joe R. Lansdale, 2006)
Now this one was fun! I’ve been a pulp magazine collector ever since I bought a 1935 Weird Tales when I was nineteen, and when Joe Lansdale offered a chance to write something pulpish, I thought it might be fun to do a “back-of-the-book” story that used excerpts from the supplemental features of certain pulps. I recalled H. P. Lovecraft’s idea of “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” and decided to correlate the contents of disparate pieces from very different pulps over a thirty-five-year period, bringing to light a story that would not otherwise be told. All the departments and features I used are real ones, with the exception of the letter column in Terror Tales. (The weird menace pulps weren’t real big on idea exchange—read, drool, and move on…) Even the taxidermy book is real. It probably doesn’t matter to most readers, but it does to me, and this kind of research is fun!
AND SO WILL I REMEMBER YOU (At Ease With the Dead, ed. by Barbara & Christopher Roden, 2007)
This tale probably comes as close to a “classic” ghost story as any in this collection. It was written for Ash-Tree Press, which published Figures in Rain, my first collection. As I stated in the original notes, this story, except for the supernatural elements and the meeting with Anna Huber’s descendant, is mostly true. Todd Pruzan’s article on Mrs. Mortimer indeed led me to the perusal of my own copy of The Peep of Day, which bears all the annotations quoted in the story. During the writing, I tracked down the location of Anna Huber Hostetter’s gravestone, and even took a photograph of the book on top of the stone. And yes, I thanked her for giving me the story. She has not as yet responded.
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (666, ed. by David Moody, 2007)
I was invited into this immensely high-paying young adult anthology, and tried to ride the edge as much as I could. The germ of the story came as the result of spending several days in a wonderful and caring hospice when Laurie’s mother was dying, and the thought that maybe the dying aren’t meant to go into “The Light,” but rather into the darkness. I liked this story so much that I wrote a treatment for a projected series of Y/A novels, but only submitted it to Scholastic, which had published the original anthology. They declined, and I wonder if it was because the anthology seemed to be unsuccessful in terms of sales. Maybe the tykes just weren’t ready for really dark stories, though I was pleased to see one young reviewer’s comment: “The only one I really loved so far was the one by Chet Williamson.” Here’s lookin’ at you, kid…
MARLEY’S CAT (Shivers V, ed. by Richard Chizmar, 2008)
One of my favorite publishers, Richard Chizmar, (whose Cemetery Dance has published my novel Second Chance, and my more recent novella, The Story of Noichi the Blind), asked me if I had a story that would be suitable for the Shivers series of anthologies he edits. I’ve written a story for Laurie every Christmas since 1980, a few of which have later appeared in anthologies, and the most recent at that time was this piece of dark whimsy that put a new spin on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Rich was delighted with it, and thus it found a more public home.
THE FINAL VERSE (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May-June 2011)
My pal Tom Monteleone contacted me one day to see if I’d be interested in doing one of a series of chapbooks with an accompanying CD for Borderlands Press. It could be a reprint, and I would record the story for the CD. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to write an original story, and, what’s more, something that would be written specifically to be heard. I love American roots music, and got into bluegrass when my son Colin started playing bluegrass fiddle in middle school and I began to accompany him when he entered fiddle contests (most of which he won). So I came up with a story about a song, specifically about its long lost-final verse. I wrote an original melody to go with the lyrics, and recorded the story in Tom’s basement studio, with me doing the vocals and guitar accompaniment. Tom ran into cash flow problems (the bane of small presses everywhere) and offered to let me have the story back rather than keep it indefinitely, so I sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Gordon’s a fine, painstaking editor, and after I made a few changes he requested, it was published there, and Ellen Datlow also picked it up for her Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 4.
In the past few years, along with writing, I’ve been narrating audiobooks for Crossroad Press, all of which are available for download at Audible.com. Along with a number of my own novels, I’ve recorded work by Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale, Michael Moorcock, Tom Piccirilli, Jack Ketchum, Kealan Patrick Burke, Charles L. Grant, John Skipp & Craig Spector, and many others. One of these days, I’m going to rerecord “The Final Verse” so people can actually experience the story the way it was meant to be experienced— aurally. Until then, if you’d like to make up your own little tune for “Mother, Come Quickly,” feel free!
APPOINTED (Black Wings II, ed. by S. T. Joshi, 2012)
I’ve never written much Lovecraftian fiction, and when I do it tends to be more satirical, as with my tongue-in-cheek “From the Papers of Helmut Hecker,” which appeared in Lovecraft’s Legacy (and my previous collection, Figures in Rain ). S. T. Joshi had asked me to contribute a story to his second HPL-inspired anthology, and “Appointed” came to me when I attended Horrorfind in Gettysburg for the first (and so far only) time. I was equally impressed and de pressed by the many older actors there whose claim to fame consisted of having been in a few (usually sub-par) horror films, and who were selling their signed 8x10 glossies and DVDs of films in which they’d appeared. Despite these actors’ greater fame, I couldn’t help but feel, dare I say, superior, in that my fellow writers and I were sitting at our tables selling something we had actually created, i.e., our own books that we had written, while the actors were interpreters, only one element of a film, and could only sell their own images rather than something they had created from whole cloth (and believe me, as a member of Actors’ Equity for nearly forty years, I know how much easier acting is than writing). The hotel and dealer’s room are pretty much as described, as are many of the con guests. Who “Wesley Cranford” is will remain my secret, though my inspiration wasn’t at all as seedy as Cranford, though he was certainly as dignified and polite a gentleman.
SILKEN WORDS
This is a previously unpublished story, written very much with Robert Bloch in mind, particularly the Robert Bloch of such tales as “The Weird Tailor.” As such, it’s almost retro, and I like to imagine it appearing in an old 1953 Weird Tales, or being adapted as a 1960 episode of Thriller. In glorious black and white, of course.
BLANKET MAN
This final story in this collection is nearly previously unpublished. A Canadian small press publisher wanted to create a chapbook of my work and house it in a special box. So I decided to write another story set in Japan and pair it with “The Pebbles of Sa
i-no-Kawara.” The chapbook’s title would be Kaikon, which means “remorse” in Japanese, a fitting title, since both stories dealt with that emotion. The publisher created wonderfully evocative art, printed the chapbook on lovely Japanese papers, and designed a small wooden box in which to house the book, with sculpted bas-relief resin elements on both front and back. An unexpected chemical reaction in the plastic resin rendered it unstable and sticky after a short time, and the publisher called off the project in despair. He had already printed a number of the booklets and sent me some of them. Those that he had left he marked as review copies so as not to devalue those he had given me. So the chapbook, and the story, were never officially released.
“Blanket Man,” while dealing with remorse, also deals with its cousin, guilt, perhaps because it’s so easy for an American to feel guilty in a strange land and culture: guilty of not knowing the language, guilty of not understanding and appreciating the customs, guilty, in short, of being an American. The blanket man I describe was all too real. He caught my attention as Laurie and Colin and I walked across the Sanjo Bridge one warm and sunny July afternoon. We passed back over the bridge an hour later, but the figure was gone and I didn’t see him again. I was hoping to, since I, like my character McBride, wanted to give him something. The figure stayed with me. Though the blanket might have merely been protection from the sun, my imagination suggested that there was more to it than that. My remaining days on that particular Japan trip were spent thinking about the blanket man. He colored my thoughts in Kyoto, in Hiroshima, and in Tokyo, and though I’d written nothing down, by the time I returned home the story was already constructed in my head.