Shock Totem 6: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  “May we burn hers for her?” her mother pleaded.

  Lillian sat straighter in her chair and began tearing pieces from her own letter. “I don’t like it burnt,” she said, voice wavering. With a sniff, she tried to smile and began to eat.

  “We are helping these people, Lillian,” Father said. “You must help them, too.”

  Magnolia’s throat was stinging, probably bleeding, but she continued. Each of the pieces tore at her gullet worse than the last. She imagined the ink disappearing from each scrap, the words entering her body and dying deep inside. She imagined that somewhere nearby, someone was better now. Soon, she finished and put her hands in her lap. Lillian looked ill.

  Father evaluated each of them, and rested his gaze on his eldest, breaking the silence again.

  “Will you finish for us tonight, Joshua?” he asked. Magnolia slumped back and sighed.

  Joshua nodded and began to stand but his hands were trembling.

  “I will do it, Father,” Magnolia announced, and they turned their heads to her. “I want to do it.”

  Her father made a slight frown. It gave way to an even slighter smile. “Very well, Magnolia,” he said, his eyes scanning hers. “Gather the remainder and put them away. We will wait for you to return for supper.” Joshua sat down again and lowered his head, but he looked relieved.

  She moved to the end of the table and Father gave her an armful of envelopes, some opened and some not. He always brought home more than enough. She climbed the stairs to the upstairs room, the sacred room, and closed the door. The air didn’t move here. She could hear the neighbor kids playing in the sprinklers and shouting next door but tried to ignore them. They might have been a hundred miles away.

  It was almost dark now, but she knew where all of the piles were. She moved to the nearest one, knelt, and placed her burden on the floor without a sound. Moving envelopes from the top of the mound revealed grey, shriveled fingertips. She pushed more of the paper aside and stared down into a dead, hollow face.

  Father’s father.

  Dark holes behind slits were all that stared back at her, shallow caverns where fierce and sparkling eyes had once been. Sunken cheeks hugged his protruding teeth. He had a strange smell, distant but awful.

  After a furtive glance behind her, Magnolia reached into the waistband of her skirt and retrieved a small piece of paper. It was from her own notebook, in her own ornate cursive. It told of her longings to be like the other children on the street, with their computer phones and their shoes that lit up when they played. It spoke of sinful doubts and the sprouts of desire.

  She took a deep breath and winced, crumpled the note into a wad, and placed it into Grandfather’s mouth. She pushed it in until it touched the other notes, deep down until her knuckles were rubbing at his dried lips. Withdrawing her hands with a shiver, she clasped them tight and began to pray, squeezing her eyes shut.

  She prayed for forgiveness, for strength, and for the day she would lie up here and redeem her own children.

  Magnolia finished, and a hand folded over her own.

  “Amen,” a voice whispered.

  She screamed and leaped to her feet, finding herself looking into Father’s piercing stare. He was still in his uniform.

  “You’ll be late for supper, Magnolia,” he said. She just blinked at him, unable to speak. He squeezed her shoulder for a moment. They could barely see each other now, but it didn’t matter. She knew he wasn’t angry. He stepped back to the door, taking a look around at the cluttered floor, at the paper cairns made from the sins of strangers and their family’s heritage.

  “Are you all right?” he finally asked her.

  “The paper hurts,” she said and looked away.

  “Their sins are what hurt,” he said. He gestured at his father’s body and the other piles in the room. “You should see what our families had to eat back then.”

  They both contemplated this.

  “Wash up, now, and I’ll see you downstairs.”

  He stopped again before descending and lowered his eyes to Grandfather.

  “I used to put my letters in there, too,” he said. His voice was softer, almost a whisper. “It won’t help us, though.”

  Still, Magnolia smiled in the dark.

  John Guzman lives in San Antonio and is obsessed with writing horror stories when not chopping up video, disfiguring photos, and trying to bury legal disclosures in shallow, unmarked graves (they always come back). This is his first published work of fiction, but there are many more he is aching to share. Updates and other work can be found at www.johnguzman.com.

  WHEN WE CRASH AGAINST REALITY

  A Conversation with Lee Thompson

  by K. Allen Wood

  Rarely does an author blaze a trail through the small press as quickly and brightly as Lee Thompson has. In just a few years he has published three novels, seven novellas, and a dozen or so short stories, all with some of the leading publishers out there, and to great praise. And there are many more books and stories on the nearby horizon.

  Lee Thompson is proud, stubborn, enigmatic to an extreme, emotionally explosive, and most important, a goddamn fine writer. He’s a pretty good dude, too. And recently we spent a little time talking about all these things and more...

  • • •

  KW: So we go back a few years. I remember when you had nothing published, and now, in just a short time, you’ve amassed a body of work that takes some authors a decade or more to write. And that’s only what’s been published; you have many more books and stories waiting in the wings. How do you manage to pull this off without being James Patterson?

  LT: Thanks, Ken! I appreciate all your help and support and encouragement!

  As to getting a lot done, I’ve always been a workaholic, probably because it burns off worry and excess energy. So I just angled my attitude from physical labor and playing guitar/songwriting to prose. I try to write a half hour each day, but sometimes, if my focus is near-nonexistent, I just skip writing and watch cartoons or read. I think I’ve amassed a lot of work in the last three years because I’m a fast brainstormer and know what questions to ask myself to get to the heart of the story. I also like to write a very clean first draft so I don’t have to do ten of them.

  Overall, the writing is the least time-consuming aspect of it all. In the past two years I’ve spent an amazing amount of hours deconstructing old Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes to learn how they presented structure and execution. And my absolute best teacher has been hand-copying favorite novels, which I suggest every beginner tries. It will teach you so much about structure, pacing, characterization, dialogue, symbolism, metaphor, simile, tension, conflict, etc.

  KW: You’ve mentioned this before, the hand-copying thing. I’m not sure it would work for me, but why do you think you learn more by doing this than reading?

  LT: It’s worth a shot for you to try it.

  KW: I’ve been writing using keyboards almost exclusively since the early 90s. After thirty seconds of handwriting, my hand cramps up like crazy, so this won’t work for me. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to write in cursive.

  LT: Don’t be such a girl!

  KW: This interview is over...

  LT: Just find a favorite scene and hand-copy it and you’ll quickly see the benefits! And it’s good to start small like that, just copying favorite scenes here and there. To me, as a guitarist, it’s the difference between listening to Hendrix play “All Along the Watchtower” and learning to play it note for note on my guitar (which I can because I’m a badass.) It also forces you to slow down and really think about what the writer you admire is doing, how they’re juggling all the bowling pins of story at the same time.

  KW: Let’s talk about the Division Mythos. It’s a pretty bold move for a new writer to create something so vast and, potentially, confusing to readers. Why’d you do it?

  LT: The Division Mythos is basically four trilogies (Red Piccirilli’s, John McDonnell’s, Frank
Gunn/Boaz’s, and the gods themselves). I’d written the first of each trilogy, except the last one, before I realized they were all connected. Each story builds on the last and drives the narrative forward to a final showdown in Division.

  I also like the term Division itself and all it implies, because life is largely divided into chunks of people, energy, time, hopes, fears, and they’re all overlapping. I think Chaos is the natural order and we try to put it into a box and shape reality into what we want, or need, or feel it should be. But it can’t stay that way for long because it isn’t natural. Many of the themes throughout humanity’s history all revolve around Division, too.

  KW: So you didn’t intend to create a mythos, it just kind of presented itself as you were writing?

  LT: Yes, as I was writing. It totally came as I was brainstorming the novels and novellas that had these recurring characters. Once I knew they had other stories, as a continuation of already written stories, I just had to find the big story all of the independent novels and novellas were leading up to.

  But I had a long heart to heart with my publisher (Shane Staley at DarkFuse) and we decided the best thing to do for the next couple years is for me to write some standalone work. I’m nearly finished with an incredibly rich novel called Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy, which I think has so much life to it that it will make a lasting impact on readers.

  KW: That’s the vampire story, right?

  LT: Sure is! I remember when I swore I’d never write a vampire story unless it was something unique. And Gossamer is vampires with me tipping my hat to Barker’s “The Madonna,” Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and King’s Green Mile. I think it’s the best supernatural novel I’ve written, though The Collected Songs of Sonnelion, which will be out later this year, is my other favorite novel.

  KW: Sounds great, especially the news about Sonnelion, which I didn’t read when it was online. Another DarkFuse release?

  LT: Yes, DarkFuse will release it in signed/limited hardcover, print and e-book. It’s a great novel that ends the first Division trilogy.

  KW: Back to the Division Mythos... The classic horror mythos is Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and Stephen King obviously created the contemporary counterpart with the Dark Tower Mythos. How much of an influence were these two on your own mythos, if at all?

  LT: I’ve never read any Lovecraft and I’ve only read the first Gunslinger novel, which was terrific, but I don’t think they had much influence at all. I’d say what I want to strive for is in the vein of Clive Barker’s larger books/series, like The Great and Secret Show and Everville, and Peter Straub’s “Blue Rose Trilogy.” They were both massively impressionistic on me.

  KW: The Great and Secret Show and Everville are among my all-time favorite books. I’m assuming you’re talking about the scope of story rather than the elements, yeah? Particularly those of the fantastical sort.

  LT: The scope of the story and its fantastical elements! Barker at his worst is better than most writers could ever dream of being at their best. Plus I think it’s good for a writer to really push themselves imagination-wise. I get that it’s easy to just write the same old serial killer story with all the expected beats, but how much satisfaction is there in that?

  KW: The pace of your work is, in a word, breakneck. While other writers play at a slower pace and have to flesh out the world around their characters, you’re able to sort of ignore or just briefly touch upon those things because it’s all going by in a blur, largely irrelevant to the tale. Do you think this is an advantage you have over other writers?

  LT: I don’t know if it’s an advantage or not. I just know that it works for me. My main caveat—I don’t remember the source—is this: Keep it interesting for the reader. The settings themselves and all the extraneous details aren’t that important to the story to me, which is basically the characters clashing emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically with others and themselves.

  I enjoy a fast pace as well, in that it’s a technique to overpower the readers senses on several levels, and leaves a residue that they have to deal with after they reach the end of a novel, novella, or short story.

  KW: But sometimes a reader needs time to breathe. If you move too fast, you run the risk of losing them along the way.

  LT: True, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I want the reader to have to work a little, though they do have a hand in creating the pace themselves simply by how high their anticipation levels go. On the other hand, some books make us lazier readers; have you ever read one of those?

  KW: Sure. All the time. I have plenty of guilty-pleasure authors.

  LT: Me, too. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series is pure fun and probably my favorite for not having to do much work.

  KW: You approach character development in a different way than most writers. There is a lot of symbolism in your work, specifically with your protagonists, who, to a point, seem almost unreal. In When We Join Jesus in Hell, for instance, Fist seems to be this totem of Rage and Redemption and Vengeance. Do you fear that readers will have trouble connecting with your characters because they are so strongly symbolic of these things?

  LT: Great question. No, I have no fear that readers won’t connect with the characters. If anything, I’ve heard the opposite in reviews and from fans. If you flesh out a million little details about a character you’re stealing things the reader will fill in by themselves, with their imaginations and life experiences.

  Most characters are driven by only a few core beliefs, and the reader brings their own joy or sorrow to the story without even realizing it. Plus, it’s fun to condense to the point of symbolism because it opens up room for story.

  KW: Yeah, I hate it when a book is too detailed, specifically with speech patterns. When I read a book that’s full of characters saying, “b-but” or “n-n-no,” it drives me bananas. If a character is frightened, and the author has done his or her job, I can hear that fear in my own damn head without dialogue making the character seem a stuttering fool.

  LT: I hate that, too!

  KW: Every writer says there is a bit of himself in what he writes, and I have no doubt that is true. Having talked with you so much over the years, however, I often get a sense that your work is much more personal, that you put far more of you in your work than the average writer does.

  I’ll use When We Join Jesus in Hell as an example again. While reading it, I couldn’t help but think the entire novella was an apology letter from you to someone else, that Fist’s journey of loss, redemption, and vengeance was, somehow, your own journey. That may or may not be correct, and it’s irrelevant either way because we all interpret stories differently, but how much Lee Thompson, the man, bleeds into your work?

  LT: Ah, yes, there’s more of my real life, or people I’ve cared about, than there is fiction. The premise is mine, but the characters are subtle collaborations of memories and perspective from different chapters of my life.

  And yes, When We Join Jesus in Hell was an apology letter, every book is. That novella is just rawer and more focused on grief and guilt. There are a million things I wish I would have done differently in my life. There are lovers I’ve had who I didn’t treat the best because of my own hang-ups, fears and expectations. Many of my protagonists are idealists, like I am; and the hard truth they have to accept, like I do, is that when we crash against reality, it’s not reality that shatters.

  KW: I can dig that. We recently spoke about burning bridges. I’ve blown a few to bits in my day.

  LT: I think we all have. Those who can’t ever admit their share of the responsibility are the really screwed-up people, and I think they’re quite hopeless. I think it’s better to grieve a little for how stupid I can be sometimes than to cast all the blame on somebody else.

  KW: I asked you this before, but for the sake of this interview, what are you going to do when you run out of demons?

  LT: Man, you have awesome questions. I like to drink, and I also brood, so I won’t e
ver run out of demons.

  KW: That’s a bleak outlook.

  LT: Yes.

  KW: But if it keeps you writing...

  LT: This past year I have started writing under three pseudonyms: Thomas Morgan, James Logan, and Julian Vaughn. They’re a fun way to keep things fresh because I can tell different kinds of stories and challenge myself to grow as a writer. The first Thomas Morgan novel and first James Logan novel are in the hands of a great agent right now and we’ll hopefully see them sell to one of the bigger houses this year.

  KW: Is there any significance to these names, or are they just names you thought sounded good? And why go this route when you’ve worked so hard at getting the Lee Thompson name out there?

  LT: There is significance in the names for me. Thomas Morgan comes from my uncle Tommy, and Morgan from my Grandma Finley’s maiden name. James Logan comes from my brother’s middle name and the Marvel character Wolverine’s first name. Julian Vaughn comes from loving Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

  KW: Nice. I love that.

  LT: As to why I went with the pen-names is simple. I wanted to write drastically different kinds of novels. I’m also prolific. I’ll continue to build the “Lee Thompson” brand with a certain type of fiction, and each of the pseudonyms will be branded with their own unique kind of fiction. It’s actually a blast and I believe it really helps my growth as a writer. And I get to explore other demons with those that I can’t with my Dark Fantasy work.