I’m immensely grateful to R.C. Matheson and Barry Hoffman for the invitation and kind reaction to “The Artist,” and I’m honored to have appeared in Brothers in Arms.
FAMILY TIES—I don’t remember whether this story was first written for a straight crime anthology or maybe one of the Cat Crime collections that were very popular at the time. I do know I had a great time writing it with Barry Hoffman, and that it very much reads like a homage to the supremely-talented Ed Gorman, especially that dark ending.
Looking back at the story many years later, I’ll be damned if I can pick out which sections were written by Barry and which parts are mine. I like that; I think that’s how all successful collaborations should be.
MISTER PARKER—I set out to write a simple Halloween story that involved a guy answering his door throughout the night to repeatedly find no one there. I wanted to make it spooky and atmospheric and a throwback to the days of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.
As is often the case with best made writing plans, that didn’t happen.
Instead, “Mister Parker” turned into a deeply layered character sketch of a very decent man with a troubled past. I could have probably written a lot more about old Bulldog Parker—I liked him that much—but I knew the story didn’t require it.
I truly wish “Mister Parker” had a happier ending, but it wasn’t meant to be.
MONSTERS—I’ve always loved The Legend of the Hook. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told that story myself, trying to scare my friends or dates when we were parked out in the middle of nowhere. I always wished I had a fake hook with a stump of realistic-looking, bloody, torn flesh to hang on my outside passenger door handle, so I could take the prank one step further. Someone really should sell those, by the way.
“Monsters” tries to turn the Hook legend inside out, or should I say outside in. Umm, that was bad, but you get my point. I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for this little tale, thought it was clever and fun. I’m not so sure readers agree with me on that—the story has usually generated a resounding silence—but that’s okay. Even ugly babies are loved by their daddies.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON—When I was a teenager, I had two favorite bookstores in Edgewood. The first was Carol’s Used Books, which was housed in a couple of trailers, sandwiched between a Dunkin’ Donuts and a pawn shop. I spent hours in that place, and I can still remember the exact layout (horror and mystery straight ahead and to the right), the sagging, carpeted floors, and the comforting smell of old books. Carol’s closed a long time ago. A used car lot stands in its place now. But I still have dozens of paperbacks on my bookshelves with the Carol Used Books stamp on the inside front cover, and that’s good enough for me.
The second store was called Maxine’s Books and Cards, and as luck would have it, Maxine’s was located right next door to Frank’s Pizza, the best pizza shop in the entire world. Maxine’s is where I first discovered Dean Koontz’s backlist—books like Darkfall and Shattered and Night Chills. It’s where I bought my first Charlie Grant paperback and my first horror anthologies. It’s also where I picked up new issues each month of Fangoria and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (with the occasional Archie’s Comics digest thrown in for good measure).
I always dreamed of seeing one of my stories in Ellery Queen’s. It felt like such a “grown up” magazine to me—the kind of magazine my father read. Mostly straight crime and mystery, but dark stuff snuck in there too from time to time. The best genre writers contributing their best work; you never got the feeling EQ published any trunk stories.
My dream came true when “Like Father, Like Son” appeared in the March 1997 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
I was so excited on publication day, I couldn’t wait for my contributor copies to arrive in the mail. Maxine’s was long closed by then, so I drove to the next town over and picked up a couple copies from a magazine shop. I stopped at my parents’ house on the way home and gave a copy to my father. That was a good night.
THE TOWER—One of two recent stories—along with “The Lake Is Life”—that feel very much to me like old-fashioned, campfire tales. The kind of stories best told in the middle of the dark woods, around a blazing fire, with owls hooting in the background, and unseen creatures rustling in the brush. I’ve always had a particular fondness for this type of story. They remind me of the old radio programs my parents liked so much.
The water tower in this story exists in the town I grew up in. It overlooks my old elementary school, and I never completely trusted it. The tower looked too much like one of H.G. Wells’ spindly aliens, and in the back of my over-imaginative head, I think I was always waiting for it to wake up and come to life.
Hanson Creek also makes another appearance in “The Tower,” but that’s about it for real-life references. The rest is just make-believe. I hope.
I really like the old man narrator of “The Tower.” I wish he hadn’t done the things he did.
BROTHERS—The second story in this collection about a bad seed brother. This one, written with my literary hero and all around great guy, Ed Gorman, was first published in England as a gorgeous paperback edition by Paul Fry, of SST Publications (look him up, folks; they do good work). This marks its first U.S. appearance.
Before all of you start thinking, Poor Rich, he must have grown up with one holy terror of a brother, here is an excerpt from the Afterword I contributed to the SST Publications’ edition of “Brothers”:
I myself have one older brother, and I love him dearly. He’s a fine, upstanding citizen. Father. Husband. Retired soldier. A good man and role model in every way.
He’s also a wonderful brother. Never tortured me growing up. Never locked me out of the house naked or shaved my head or tickled me until I peed my pants.
So, I’m at a loss when it comes to explaining why I’m so drawn to the darker bonds of brotherhood.
As with most of my short fiction, it’s just how I see the world around me, how I see it and feel it.
I’m a pretty cheerful guy, living an extremely fortunate life, but when it comes to my writing I definitely tend to ignore the sunshine and explore the dark shadows and dirty corners instead.
I guess it’s just where I feel the most at home, and where my vision is the sharpest.
“Brothers”—and “Blood Brothers,” for that matter—are stories about family and responsibility and how the past informs the present and very often leads to difficult choices. Sometimes, deadly choices.
It’s a dark story. An honest story.
So, there you have it. I dearly love my big brother, John. He taught me how to fish and watched Abbott and Costello movies with me. He even named his only son Richard—after me. It doesn’t get much better than that.
CEMETERY DANCE—I’ve written about this one a lot, so I’ll just give the short version for newer readers.
“Cemetery Dance” was one of the first short stories I ever wrote, and was the second story I ever sold.
But the magazine that bought it went out of business before they were able to publish it.
So did the second magazine.
And the third.
I was starting to fear the story was cursed when Pete Crowther finally published it three years later in his acclaimed anthology of superstitions, Narrow Houses.
Each of the editors who bought “Cemetery Dance” had commented at length about the tale’s unique title. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion several of them were trying to gracefully tell me that they thought the title was actually better than the story itself. Looking back, they may have been right about that.
When it came time to decide on a title for my own fledging magazine, I remembered their enthusiasm and chose Cemetery Dance as the name. And despite some strange looks at my bank and local Kinko’s, I’ve never once regretted that decision.
The story itself is a fairly minor one. An exercise in mood and atmosphere—a fly-on-the-wall view of one man’s descent into madne
ss and obsession.
The imagery in “Cemetery Dance” came from my childhood. As I wrote in my introduction to the story in Narrow Houses: “When we were around nine or ten, my friends and I used to believe that when the sun went down and the shadows emerged for night, the cemetery would come to life. Not the decaying corpses, mind you, but the cemetery itself…breathing for the dead.”
BLUE—Not a whole lot to say about this one. I wrote “Blue” for Alan Clark and one of his amazing Imagination Fully Dilated anthologies, wherein he assigned each author a different painting of his to write a story about; a clever reverse-twist on the usual illustrative process.
The artwork I was assigned correlates with the nightmare scene from the story:
…when she finally turns away from the window and glimpses herself in the fancy gold mirror hanging on the opposite stone wall, there is nothing left of her but a bag of bones—a parched skeleton—grinning an awful grin and smelling of wet, graveyard dirt, and her hair is limp clumps of rotting string, her dress nothing but tatters of faded yellow cloth…
I like the characters I created in “Blue” quite a bit, especially my sweet Momma narrator. As usual, she probably deserved better. I have a nasty habit of doing that to my people.
A CRIME OF PASSION—This early story marked a lot of firsts for me.
First time one of my stories ever appeared in hardcover (the Borderlands Press edition of the censorship journal, Gauntlet).
First time one of my stories appeared alongside work from childhood heroes, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison.
First time one of my stories appeared in a signed, limited edition.
First time a story of mine was ever reprinted (less than a year later in Martin Greenberg and Ed Gorman’s Women on the Edge).
It was also one of the first stories where I found myself paying as much attention to plot and story structure as I did characterization.
Years later, when Ed Gorman wrote this about “A Crime of Passion”—“The structure of the story is so brilliant, and the telling so polished, that I’ve been trying to do my own version of the story for the past three years”—I knew that I was slowly getting better at this writing gig, and it inspired me to work that much harder at it.
“A Crime of Passion” stretches the boundaries of good sense from time to time, but as a cautionary pulp tale of suspense and adventure, I think it does a decent enough job. Sometimes, that’s the best we can hope for.
HOMESICK—This short story arrived in one furious burst of writing—an hour or so from start to finish. Written in 1996, it was published in a Marty Greenberg anthology called White House Horrors.
If you were a reader or writer of dark fiction in the 1980s/1990s and beyond, you were very familiar with the name Martin H. Greenberg. He was responsible for publishing thousands of stories in hundreds of unique anthologies in a wide variety of genres: horror, mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy, even western.
Marty was a prince of a man, generous and kind and thoughtful, and I owe him a huge debt for treating me so well.
More than a dozen of the stories in A Long December also appeared in Greenberg anthologies. Thanks, Marty; you are missed.
DEVIL’S NIGHT—The second of a pair of Halloween stories in A Long December, “Devil’s Night” reminds me in a way of “Heroes,” in that both stories contain autobiographical moments and feelings—yet each was written well before those moments ever occurred in my life.
Let me explain. In “Heroes” I wrote about a grown son who is losing his father to the ravages of old age, and how he will stop at nothing to prevent that from happening. At the time of its writing, my father was in grand shape. Mid-60s and healthy and active. But I knew it wouldn’t always be that way. I knew things would eventually change, and like the son in the story, I also knew “that there was nothing sadder, nothing more heartbreaking than watching your hero die.” So, that’s how and why “Heroes” was born; I wrote it to help myself deal with something that was still some twenty years in the future.
With “Devil’s Night” it was very much the same sort of thinking. In 1996—when the story was written and first published—I was not yet a father. Nor was Kara pregnant. In fact, due to extensive treatments for cancer, there was great uncertainty as to whether I could ever produce a child naturally.
But I knew I wanted to be a father one day—more than anything. And I knew that if I were ever blessed with children, I would worry about those children. A lot. It’s just how I’m made.
And that’s where “Devil’s Night” came in. Those long night drives to think and relax were taken from real life, as were many of the details about the small town in which the story takes place. The layout of the high school in the story was the layout of the old Edgewood High School, before it was torn down to make room for a new one. The old post office really existed. And the narrator’s feelings of love and concern for his wife and newborn children were my own personal feelings and fears—only 3-4 years ahead of time.
That’s right, several years after the story was published, Kara gave birth to a baby boy named Billy. Four years after that, Noah came along. Miracles, both.
Even now, all these years later, I still worry about my boys—especially now that they are both teenagers. And, yes, I still take the occasional late night drive to think and relax—and dream.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN: A LOVE STORY—This is another one of those “ugly baby” stories I have a feeling I like a whole lot more than some readers. And, hey, I’m okay with that.
But, seriously, how can you not like a story that features an insane, grieving doctor with a Norman Bates complex, a makeshift basement laboratory, and midnight grave-robbing?
And the guy’s name is Francis Einstein. Frank Einstein. Frankenstein! Get it?!
Crickets.
THE SEASON OF GIVING—I’m a big kid in many ways, so I’m naturally a huge fan of Christmas. Always have been. But I’ve also always had a kind of innate understanding that the holiday season isn’t necessarily a time of joy and celebration for many folks.
Even as a child, I noticed that for every happy person I saw sitting in church or strolling the mall, there seemed to be two or three others who looked lost and lonely and sad. Sometimes, even angry. I worried about these people quite a bit, and they were a frequent topic of conversation with my very patient parents.
Once I got older, I learned about all the statistics regarding suicide rates spiking during the holidays, and the reasons why, and it all made sense to me.
So, when I got a surprise, last minute invite to write for Santa Clues, a collection of crime stories based around Christmas, I knew (despite the silly title) that the holiday theme was ripe for a story of real substance.
The only problem was I couldn’t think of one, and I was staring at a tight deadline.
I had my opening line of the story, which I really liked, and I knew my main character was a down-on-his-luck department store security guard dressed as Santa, and I knew he was going to help an abused little girl and her mother get out of a bad place—but that’s all I had.
I wrote the first half of the story, and got no further.
And time was running out.
Fortunately, Norman Partridge (go buy Norm’s Halloween classic, Dark Harvest, right this very minute; it’s that good) swooped in and saved the day by finishing the story for me. He worked his magic for a day or two, snail-mailed me his version (that’s right; this was before email, believe it or not), I gave the story one final writing pass, and we had “The Season of Giving.” Just in time for Christmas.
A CAPITAL CAT CRIME—Written for Marty Greenberg’s (remember him?) Cat Crimes series, this story was first published in Danger in DC: Cat Crimes in our Nation’s Capital. I’ve never been a big fan of the cozy mysteries where the cat helps the heroine solve a crime, so I chose to go dark with my kitty story. Of course. I guess you can’t get much darker than the end of the world.
THE SINNER KING—I�
�m not much of a fantasy reader or writer. My taste in fiction runs more to the dark stuff: mystery, crime, suspense, horror, adventure. Stories with an edge. So, when I was presented with the opportunity to write for Grails, an award-winning collection of fantasy tales, I decided to tiptoe around the book’s theme and stay in the shadows. (P.S. I lifted this Story Note directly from a previous appearance of the “The Sinner King.” Just to see if any longtime readers were paying attention.)
A SEASON OF CHANGE—Another one of those early stories (1996) that made me feel like I was maybe getting the hang of this writing thing. Decently plotted. A believable, mildly sympathetic lead. Hard-boiled and tough, but with a pretty tender heart beating inside.
I set out to write about loss and grief and the hidden dark side that lurks within even the best of us…and that’s what I ended up with. Sort of. Somehow I also ended up with a story that culminates with a strong sense of hope and rediscovery. A rare happy ending for a very unhappy tale.
MIDNIGHT PROMISES—I wrote this story when I was thirty years old. At the time, I didn’t have a hair on my body, and I weighed 150 pounds—the direct result of nine weeks of chemotherapy.
Fortunately, the other direct result of those nine weeks of chemotherapy was my cancer was gone.
Earlier in the year, extensive tests had revealed that I had cancer in both lungs, my liver, my lymph nodes, and my stomach.
The doctors told me I had a 50/50 change of surviving (which I knew, at the time, was bullshit; I was in rough shape).
I’ll save the story of my battle with cancer for another place and time, but suffice to say I was a very lucky guy.
A Long December Page 49
