Shock Totem 9: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted
Page 15
† see Shock Totem’s Valentine’s Day issue.
–Bracken MacLeod
“Anteroom”
On a daily (or, more accurately, nightly) basis I’m beset by odd fragments of non-verse, practically too minuscule even for the term “micropoetry.” Often I’ll post them in a half-demented state on Twitter (@suddenlyquiet), and on rare occasions I’ll review these twigs and thorns to see if they cohere into something—one of those somethings is “Anteroom.” Thanks for reading it.
–Peter Gutiérrez
“Hey Man”
Like “Bop Kabala and Communist Jazz,” my beat poet/preacher talk pastiche in Shock Totem #3, much of the impetus for writing “Hey Man” was to play with the language, but in this case, I was playing out a fascination with the phrases “hey man” and “I’m in the mood.”
The phrase “hey man” is ubiquitous since it can be used for everything from greeting your best friend to asking for a light. It’s both informal to the point of rudeness and respectful in its acknowledgment of adult status.
According to Facebook memes (a reliable source if there ever was one), the designation “man” was started by 1930s jazz musicians to counteract the infantilism of being called “boy” by white people. I don’t know if that’s true (like I said, Facebook), but I like the thought. Mostly, it’s a phrase that creates a false intimacy, as if a complete stranger has the right to talk to you.
As far as “I’m in the mood,” I realized that when I was writing this story and repeating the phrase that there is no way that it doesn’t sound creepy. Beyond that, I am endlessly fascinated with The Black Death. I can’t entirely blame the fascination on Stephen King’s The Stand, but that certainly helped.
–Tim Lieder
“You Are Here”
I shut one of my cousin’s fingers in a trunk once when I was kid, and he was an even younger kid, but it didn’t come off, quite. I’ve always been scared I’m going to snip some toddler’s fingers off in an industrial door, though. Part of that’s from having had toddlers, and how the world’s always trying to grind them up, and part’s from just being careless with my door-closing sometimes, and often overdoing it, making a production of it, acting like a toreador every time I walk into a room. Hasn’t happened yet—baby fingers curling in on themselves on the floor—but still, I wrote this story as a form of inoculation. Or as a way to remind myself to be more aware of when little hands might be feeling along a wall.
I forget what the first couple of versions of this story were called. Until I workshopped it with one of my classes, and a student—Lisa Catto, I believe—mentioned the fine cracks on a tile floor like that, and how a severed finger would be at this junction of cracks and not that one, I never realized that the reason this moment was dilating out like a balloon inflating was that this was a hinge-point in this guy’s life. I always think of this William J. Cobb story “Letting the Dog Out,” that ends with a guy moving from the first half of his life to the second. That’s colored and inflected and infused so much of my fiction, that one line.
–Stephen Graham Jones
“The Box Wife”
The beginnings of “The Box Wife” flashed into my brain one night whilst I was lying in bed. Who would I be if I were not made from flesh? Where would I live? Who built me? Needless to say, I thought this was a bizarre and unique character angle from the get-go. As I slipped into half-sleep, my mind tumbled down a rabbit hole of questions: How much do we define ourselves based on other people? When does an object, when imbued with personification, develop even projected sentience? Can our sense of self ever be completely removed? Every question threw up many more, but throughout the entire process, the image of the physicality of the constructed wife was front and centre.
I’ve watched people reading this story and have seen their faces slowly twist into a grimace. I absolutely realise that “The Box Wife” is difficult to read, but can say only that the Wife has been an insistent voice from the very beginning. I could not un-think the character, even though I find the concept of the story horrifying.
I wanted this to be primarily a story of transformation and hope. When writing, I wanted to give voice to characters and identities (though not necessarily people) who have had their voices taken away; or perhaps, to those who have never had a voice to begin with.
–Emma Osborne
“Good Help”
I wrote “Good Help” for Jack Ketchum. Or more accurately, I wrote it for the Talking Scars workshop on Litreactor, led by Jack Ketchum. Close enough.
The assignment was this: Write about what you love. Write about what scares you.
Writers like Jack Ketchum, Stona Fitch, Brett Easton-Ellis and others like them have always been my heroes in dark literature. I find true horror, trauma horror, far more intense and frightening than many stories with supernatural elements. I love supernatural horror, too, but my fascination is less with the things that go bump in the night, more with the things that might bludgeon you over the head. And what makes that even worse? Things being bashed over the heads of those we love, of course. And now I had to write something which would ideally capture this fear, which would be reviewed by none other than Jack Ketchum.
I didn’t know where to start.
One of my weird horror-related hobbies is seeking out obscure disturbing films. Around that time, I’d been on the hunt for a Japanese Pink Film sanity-killer entitled A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn (feeble old man in isolation with lucid young female: what ensues?). I’d also been thinking a lot about my much-loved paternal grandfather, who passed away a few years ago while I was living abroad. Maybe my own guilt at not having made it home for his final months cut a scar into me. One that got me thinking: What does happen to the elderly when their family members are too preoccupied, too passive, or too trusting about the care of their elderly relatives?
Don’t ask me how a Japanese Pink Film and thoughts of my grandfather suddenly became connected in my subconscious. It really doesn’t beg exploring.
(Shudder!)
While those two elements swirled vaguely at the back of my mind, I spent a whole day on my first attempt at the assignment: a dramatic dystopian thing which didn’t give me that “this might be something” thrill writers reach for. Disheartened, I fell into true “tortured artist” mode, opened a bottle of wine, and thought about how gut-punchingly hard getting a decent first draft down can sometimes be.
What do I love? What scares me?
The lonely cow weeps…the old man I loved….
I formed an image and went with it. A paragraph in and suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I’d spent the entire day fruitlessly punching out prosy-pessimism, and in an hour I had a solid first draft of “Good Help.” It came so easily, the exact opposite of all that angst I’d been griping about while I sat slugging back cheap wine.
The deadline was looming. I sent it in pretty much unedited, and spent the rest of the night finishing that bottle of wine (and just maybe another one after) while I panicked about credible narrative and misplaced commas.
What did Jack himself eventually have to say about this story? Well, the opening line to his critique is one I will always treasure—even if it was almost impossible for my non-horror fan friends and family to understand (yes, mom, this really is a compliment!). He said:
“Karen—you scare me.”
I wrote about something I loved. I sure as heck wrote about something that scares me. And since we’re all horror fans here, I know you won’t take it the wrong way when I say I sincerely hope I’ve managed to scare you, too.
With love, of course.
–Karen Runge
“Alan Roscoe’s Change of Heart”
Believe me, I know how boring/pretentious this is going to sound, but it is true, and if you’ve come this far then I feel I owe it to you to be upfront and honest, so here goes: “Alan Roscoe’s Change of Heart” sort of came to me in a dream. In my defence, it’s the only story that has ever come to me i
n a dream, so please don’t think I’m making any great claims about the fertility of my sleeping mind. It’s an idiot. Mostly, my dreams involve plane-crashes, probably due to the fact I live quite close to an airport. See, an idiot.
However, I had a dream about my Mom’s two dogs. One of them had sustained a life threatening injury, and was in such a bad way that his heart stopped. So out from his furry little body popped his ghost. His brother, the other mutt in question, was clearly delighted to have someone to play with again, and off they scampered, dog and ghost, the best of friends. Conflict arose when the dead dog’s heart started again, yet the ghost dog still remained. Given the affable nature of dogs, all three eventually put aside their differences and formed a brand new pack, but for a while there things got a little tense and growly.
When I woke up, I was taken with the idea that the mechanics of becoming a ghost might break down like this, and particularly with the idea that you could haunt yourself. Given the recession, the first thing that came into my head was the idea of a wealthy guy giving away all his millions after a near death experience, only to be confronted by the ghost of his old, greedy self who doesn’t want his millions thrown away. I saw the potential for lots of dark humour and satire. “After Alan Roscoe died he was a much nicer person,” I wrote, and off the story went.
That first line was about as good as it got in the first few drafts. I couldn’t get the tone right. As I got into the story more, I realised the character of Penny interested me most. So I wrote it again from scratch, this time with Penny’s struggle to truly believe in the “new” Alan at the core. I found much less humour and a lot more horror here, and the story now explored a few things I’d not expected it to, such as the nature of “changes of heart,” and how the roles and behaviour expected of us can sometimes end up defining us.
–S.R. Mastrantone
ARTIST BIO
Silent Q Design was founded in Montreal in 2006 by Mikio Murakami. Melding together the use of both realistic templates and surreal imagery, Mikio's artistry proves, at first glance, that a passion for art still is alive, and that no musician, magazine, or venue should suffer from the same bland designs that have been re-hashed over and over.
Mikio’s work has been commissioned both locally and internationally, by bands such as Redemption, Synastry, Starkweather, and Epocholypse. Shock Totem #3 was his first book-design project.
For more info, visit www.silentqdesign.net.
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Digital Edition Copyright © 2014 by Shock Totem Publications, LLC.
Table of Contents
Notes from the Editor’s Desk
Unacceptable Content
Buddy
Saturday
Morning Books and Evening Books
Thirteen Views of the Suicide Woods
Anteroom
Strange Goods and Other Oddities
Hey Man
The Nightmare Rolls On
You Are Here
The Box Wife
Bloodstains & Blue Suede Shoes, Part 7
Good Help
Alan Roscoe’s Change of Heart
Howling Through the Keyhole