Shock Totem 1: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  Cautiously, Snowflake stuck his head through the doorway. She had her back to him. An eye for an eye, Kevin had told him, but it was no eye Snowflake would take this time. No. Nothing less than a little piece of her heart would do—to replace the one she'd ruined. To replace the one he'd never get back.

  And he'd start by snipping the tendons in her heels, so she couldn't run away. He was going to make a terrible mess, but it wasn't anything Buster wouldn't be able to clean up.

  And already the Golden Retriever was scratching at the back door for his breakfast.

  T.L. Morganfield’s work has sold to Paradox, Dark Recesses, and Realms of Fantasy. She attended the Clarion West workshop in 2002. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children.

  Her website is www.tlmorganfield.com.

  ‘TIL DEATH DO US PART

  by Jennifer Pelland

  She cowers behind the altar in her white dress, mascara tears streaking down her cheeks.

  He reaches out for her, then stops -- the tiny part of his brain that survived the change making him hesitate. The thoughts coming from it are scattered and primal, but sometimes, actual human awareness emerges.

  She bleats a name. It was his name once. She blubbers something about love.

  Love.

  He remembers love.

  It’s why he’s here. For her. On their wedding day.

  He’s always told her that he loves her for her brain.

  And now he can finally prove it.

  Jennifer Pelland lives outside Boston with an Andy, three cats, and an impractical amount of books. Her debut collection, Unwelcome Bodies, was released in 2008 and contains her Nebula-nominated story “Captive Girl,” along with ten other stories. Her debut novel, Machine, is due out at the end of 2011 through Apex Publications.

  She’s a member of the BRAWL writing group and Broad Universe, and belly dances with a few Boston-area troupes in her copious (ha!) spare time.

  Visit her on the web at www.jenniferpelland.com.

  ONE FOOT IN DARKNESS

  A Conversation with John Skipp

  by John Boden

  For most—horror readers and writers, at least—John Skipp needs no introduction. The rest of you, however…

  John Skipp came into prominence in the mid-80s, pioneering the splatterpunk style of horror with Craig Spector. Together, the duo tainted the 80s and early 90s with more than a half dozen nasty novels. They split as collaborators in 1993.

  Since their split, Skipp has continued collaborating as well as writing solo. He’s also branched out into music, film, and family. And in recent years, he has resurfaced as a ferocious blip on the literary radar; first with the novella Conscience followed by The Long Last Call, a novel. Both were repressed together in 2007. His most recent works are Jake’s Wake, a new collaborative novel with Cody Goodfellow, and Opposite Sex, an erotica e-book, by the lovely Gina McQueen (aka John Skipp).

  Most, if not all, of this is touched upon in the following interview…gleaned from the man himself through a series of e-mails and phone calls. Enjoy!

  • • •

  JB: What got you into the horror thing? Was there a certain book you read or something that made you stand up and go “I want to do this for a living”?

  JS: The earliest thing I can point to is that, when I was two and a half, I had one of those fevers that almost kill you. Seriously. I was hallucinating like a motherfucker...rats running down the walls, and I couldn’t stop screaming...till we actually had to do the Jacob’s Ladder thing, where my dad filled the bathtub with ice-water and submerged me in it. The rats hit the water and just dissolved. I remember this more vividly than anything...well, anything else that happened when I was two and a half, that’s for sure. Except for maybe my Grandma Skibski’s apple spice cake, which was reeeeeeeeally good.

  From that point on, anything that was remotely scary scared the living shit outta me. Like, I’d be watching cartoons on a Saturday afternoon, and a commercial for tonight’s late-nite feature, Frankenstein, would come on, and suddenly I’m going “AAAAUGH!!!” and shrieking through the house, hiding under the living room table, until I heard footsteps clomping up from the basement, and I’d go “AAAAUGH!!!” again, until my Mom walked in and just looked at me like oh, you poor boy. [laughs] I was a genuine scaredy cat.

  JB: So that fever thing sort of made you ultra sensitive in the fear receptors?

  JS: Yes. Exactly. Stupidly sensitive. But at a certain point, I just got tired of being scared. So I started making myself watch these scary movies. I would watch Dr. Cadaverino—Milwaukee’s version of that late-nite ghost host so popular in the early 1960s—with Styrofoam tombstones and a mad scientist lab with foaming beakers, and a headless assistant who was always bumping into shit. Fantastic show. I started watching those movies that were freaking me out, and suddenly realized that some of them were really scary, but a lot of them were just really stupid. So I started to sort it out. Then I fell in love with Creepy magazine when it came out, and Famous Monsters of Filmland. At that point, I was hooked.

  The first writer I fell in love with was Dr Seuss. Still a favorite. Then I found Edgar Allan Poe, through Creepy, and searched out the actual books. I used to draw the creatures from Creepy; I’d do these montages of panels I liked from the various artists. I started making up stories myself, but I didn’t really write them down.

  Then, in eighth grade, I had a really really shitty art teacher, who sucked all the fun out of art for me. So I sort of switched gears, joined the drama department, and wound up writing the school play, then went on to edit the creative writing portion of the school newspaper.

  All the seeds were already laid by then. I’d been reading Bradbury, the old Hitchcock collections like Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV, and the vintage Brit anthologies from Pan and Fontana. That’s how I found everything from Daphne de Maurier, Saki, and Robert W. Chambers to Robert Bloch, Henry Slesar, and Anthony Boucher. So I had the classics in my bones.

  Then, for my eighteenth birthday, my drummer’s girlfriend bought me a copy of Grendel, by John Gardner, which is the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view. This short, astonishing little novel was the first book I read that made me go, “I think I wanna try one of these.” It would be years before I even started a novel, but that was the one that planted the final seed of “Ya know what? I think this is doable!”

  But by then, I thought I was gonna be a rock star; and it wasn’t until that shit didn’t pan out that I finally threw myself into writing. That was a few years before The Light at the End and the New York Times bestsellers list.

  JB: I first encountered your work via a battered copy of The Light at the End I found in the auditorium in 10th grade as I was in ISS [in-school suspension]. I read it in one evening and went on a quest to find all the other books you guys wrote. I read and loved them all.

  I have always wanted to know how that collaborative relationship worked? It had to be tricky. Who came up with what and how did you make it all gel? It seems more clear to me now, having read more of your solo work and other collaborations, how strong your voice was in the early novels...

  JS: The thing was, I was the guy who was burning to write. Craig was a guy who was my best friend...we’d been in bands together. He went to art school, up in Boston—where they proceeded to beat the fun out of art for him, too—while I moved to New York City. I had started to sell some short stories to Twilight Zone magazine through T.E.D. Klein, who was the editor there. One day, Craig called me. He said he had this great idea for a story about this punk vampire in the subways. “You wanna try and turn this into a story, maybe we can sell to Twilight Zone and make a few bucks.” I’m like, “Yeah yeah yeah...I got some stuff of my own I’m workin’ on, but we’ll talk about it...”

  He bugged me off and on for several months, then he took a trip down to visit me and we decided to write it then...that weekend. We went to a friend’s roach-infested apartment in the Bowery—actually where The Cl
eanup is set—and we started talking about stuff, and I realized rather quickly it wasn’t a short story at all. It was a novel. We talked about it for awhile and for the next year or so I’d write pages and send them to Craig, then we’d talk at great length about what would happen next. He then moved down to New York and became a street messenger. We had a place together; we would jam on the stuff all the time. The fact of the matter was we only had one typewriter—I was the writer. I wrote most of that book, working off of his story. But we were both totally involved.

  After two years, the book was ready and got a shitload of rejections before it finally sold. That was when we realized we could do this as a career, and we wouldn’t have to be fucking messengers anymore.

  We sat down and made a five-year plan, complete with color coded charts, and went into Bantam Books and laid out this plan—and we got the deal. At that point [laughs], Craig got a typewriter and started learning how to do this shit. The first real training session was the novelization of the film Fright Night, which had to be done in a month. I did an awful lot of rewriting on him, but he started to get his chops up; and by The Scream, his voice was really coming into its own. Craig is great with a story, really great to throw things back and forth with, and really good at poking holes in shit that doesn’t work.

  One of the great things about collaborating, having somebody that you can really work with, is that after a while it isn’t you or me, but this weird collective, two-man hive mind, where the bees are just flying back and forth. And the only really important thing is “Did you bring the honey?” That’s how that worked...that’s how working with Marc Levinthal on Burrito was, and that’s totally how working with Cody is. And I have to tell you, outta all the people I’ve worked with, Cody is the only one who had a strong career going before I met him, and will have one after we’re done. He is by far the best writer I’ve ever worked with, and those other guys were good.

  JB: Reading your new work, I can really tell how much of Skipp and Spector’s voice was yours. The cinematic pacing, the wordplay, the whole approach to violence and character and spirituality…

  JS: Thanks for noticing. I really appreciate that.

  JB: Was the split with Spector amicable? Was it a matter of you had gone as far as you could go together and just split kind of thing?

  JS: No. And yes.

  JB: How was working with Goodfellow? Jake’s Wake is great fun...and seems as though it was to write.

  JS: It was fantastic. Now we’re a few projects in, we just finished a new screenplay which I can’t tell you about, cuz it’s a secret. We’re taking a few days off, which is why I have time to talk, and then we’ll start the next thing. We’re on a fucking roll.

  Cody’s a total maximalist, much as I was back in the Skipp and Spector days, where the first thing you throw in is the kitchen sink. You know? Just throwing everything, from every direction. Whereas I have become more of a minimalist, almost a dramatist, from working to build a film career and learning how film is made. Really focusing on characters and little moments.

  So he comes in from the big moments; I come at it from the little moments. We can both surf in each other’s terrain—I can go big, he can go little—but mostly it just means that we cover an incredible amount of ground in a very copacetic way.

  When you’re working with someone who really really loves to write, who loves the process itself and not just the rewards, and you’re not just an echo of one another—two guys trying to do the same thing in the exact same way—you wind up challenging each other in the very best way. It’s a real pleasure every day to sit down and bang away at this stuff, knowing that he’s fifteen miles away doing the same thing. Knowing both of you are working hard at it pushes you, and makes you proud. I love working with Cody.

  JB: How different was your mindset for writing Opposite Sex? I’d imagine the shackles of your normal scheme were gone as this was a “secret” pen-named project...at first.

  JS: Basically what happened is, my agent is one of the founders of this company known as Ravenous Romance, which is an e-book company dealing in that weird line where romance and erotica butt heads, because they’re very different things. You read a lot of things like “Love’s Throbbing Passion” and it’s like erotica for the lady of the house, but it’s got this big emotional content to it. I always found stuff like that fascinating. I’m a big fan of love, and I’m crazy about sex—and I like money.

  So when Lori asked if I’d write them a book, I said I’d want to do it under an assumed name, so as to not confuse people. So I came up with Gina McQueen...you know, one half Gina Lollabrigida and one half Steve motherfuckin’ McQueen.

  I wrote down a couple of ideas for stories and this was the one that really popped. The idea of these two people meeting at this hotel at a horror con weekend. It’s like Freaky Friday with fucking. I wrote it in seven extremely horny weeks. [laughs]

  There are certain authors with Ravenous who are doing a book a month, just slammin’ ‘em out. I thought, I could make a lot of money if I just did one of these every so often, but it was exhausting. It really was. And I don’t know how many more twenty-page-long hand-jobs I have in me. [laughs] But I’m definitely not ruling out more Gina McQueen. I’d just need the right idea.

  JB: All of your work has been so visually arresting, I cannot conceive of why Hollywood hasn’t been all over it.

  JS: Yeah, cinematic narrative style is where I come from. And you gotta understand, most of those books have been optioned, some of them many, many times. That said, there are all kinds of reasons.

  When Craig and I hit L.A., there were certain deals where it was clear that we were probably gonna get hosed and probably going to hate it. Then there were points where...there was at least one offer for Light At The End I wish we would’ve taken. That movie would’ve been made 15 years ago and it would’ve been great...we would’ve had a lot more money and things would’ve changed. So we made some good decisions, and some mistakes were made. And then splitting up just makes it weird.

  JB: I have heard about—but not seen—the film version of Animals.

  JS: Unfortunately, I’m not hearing great shit. But I haven’t seen it, either.

  JB: Why do you think it is that werewolf movies are so damn hard to do? The last decent one I saw was Dog Soldiers, and it wasn’t even one-hundred-percent great, there were some turdly moments in that one.

  JS: I liked it more than you did. I liked the idea of these guys armed to handle situations...but not that one.

  JB: Yeah, but for every Dog Soldiers you have fifteen Skinwalkers...

  JS: [laughs] Yeah, it’s a really hard one to get right and it’s sad how few good ones there are, but the good ones are goodies. The Howling is still great. American Werewolf in London is great. From there, you gotta go back to Werewolf of London, and the original Wolfman. Must admit, I’m very much looking forward to the remake on that one, with Benecio del Toro as Lawrence Talbot.

  JB: If I ever won the lottery and had untold millions, I’d take on The Bridge...but I fear it’d have to be animated.

  JS: Towards the end of Skipp and Spector’s time, Oliver Stone optioned The Bridge to do as anime. How fucking great would that have been?

  JB: How about Jake’s Wake, the film?

  JS: We were getting ready to shoot it on a very small budget. We had a great cast, a location, and everything. And right as we’re coming up on production, my production partner and I looked at each other and said, “This is not enough money.”

  So now we’re back in pre-production. And interestingly enough, The Long Last Call now has some very interesting momentum behind it. So we’ll see how that all goes.

  JB: Of all the things you’ve written/co-written...what’s your personal favorite?

  JS: I can’t...I can say the happiest writing experience I have had was The Emerald Burrito of Oz, just because it’s such a sweet-spirited work. Marc Levinthal is amazing. He’s an incredible musician, whose roots span from classical
, jazz, and punk to the most outside of outside music. He was the main musical force behind Green Jellö [name changed to Green Jellÿ in 1992]...ya know, “Three Little Pigs” and “Eat Satan’s Ham.” And he did the soundtrack for the film Valley Girl. But he can also really write. Just a sweet, humble genius with a fantastic weirdo imagination.

  Of my solo stuff, I gotta go with Conscience. From the Skipp and Spector days, right now it’s The Bridge. And as for Skipp and Goodfellow, I think our best work is ahead of us.

  But aside from Jake—which I totally love—there’s a book coming out called The Day Before that I’m flabbergasted by. We’ve written a pair of new stories—“Happy Birthday Nick the Stripper” and “Plastic Fantastic”—that have rekindled my love affair with the short story form. The new script is nuts. And we can’t wait to dig into this new novel, which will also be fucking nuts.

  JB: Having been one of the pioneers of the splatterpunk movement in the 80’s, what do you think of the literary scene today? Do you feel the torch has been reverently carried or pissed on...feel free to rant and ramble.

  JS: I am amazed by how many people were influenced by the early stuff, and how The Bridge seems to be the one that was a huge touchstone for guys like Cody and Brian Keene, Carlton Mellick III with The Menstruating Mall and all his wonderful, crazy shit.