Getting back to the similarities between “Carrion” and “The Left-Hand Pool” . . . well, I’m a writer who likes to revisit a concept or location or what have you if there is something different to extract from it. As I like to say, Monet didn’t only create one image of water lilies; he produced 250 paintings of them, over a thirty-year period. Water lilies and the pools they float upon can present different effects in varying light, and from varying angles. No one artwork can capture their entire essence.
And now that I’ve given a rough overview of the collection, and whatever general tone or unpremeditated themes might loosely unite it, I’ll continue with the other stories.
Spider Gates
My son Colin—twenty-four years old as I write this—is autistic, and several events from his own life contributed to my inspirations for this story. Odd events, which seem to suggest that on at least a few occasions he has seen beyond the barriers . . . and not just in the sense of fantasizing play. But I’ll let you decide how to interpret these occurrences.
When Colin was about fourteen, we were walking into town together—perhaps on a library excursion—and for some reason I had the song “This Is Halloween” from the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas running through my head, but I hadn’t sung it aloud. Nevertheless, Colin suddenly turned to me, exasperated, and said, “It isn’t Halloween!”
On another occasion around that same time, while waiting for the special needs van to drop Colin off from school, I sat at my computer looking at a rather alluring photo of my future wife, Hong. Hearing Colin at the front door, I minimized the window before he could see the image. He entered the house, came into the room with me, and exclaimed, “Put some clothes on, you crazy bitch!”
I laughed in shock at his words, but at the same time I marveled and asked him, “Colin, who are you talking about?”
“Hong!” he said.
There was no way that he might have seen the photo on my monitor.
My father passed away in 1999 when Colin was only seven. A year later, on the very day my dad had died, I sat at my computer with Colin standing at my side. At no time had I mentioned that this was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death, nor had I mentioned it to anyone else in his presence. Suddenly Colin looked past me into a darkened bedroom close beside us and exclaimed in a tone of surprise and recognition, “Grampa!”
I snapped around to look into the darkened bedroom myself—but I saw no one there.
Feeding Oblivion
This story was very much inspired by my mother, who was alive at its writing but passed away in a nursing home before the book in its entirety was completed.
Mr. Faun
In 2013, a painting by Barnett Newman sold for $44,000,000. It’s a large blue canvas with a white stripe down its center. Ah, but such a white stripe!
I’ll let this observation serve to explain the kind of thing that was on my mind, and that I sought to express, when I wrote “Mr. Faun.”
A lot of modern horror fiction revolves around dissolving marriages, disharmonious relationships, dysfunctional families. I’m not excluding my own work here. It can get to feel like a trope. In this story, however, I wanted to portray a good relationship between the protagonist and her husband.
The Left-Hand Pool
See my discussion of “Carrion,” above.
The specific jumping point for this story, though, was a divided body of water just as I describe it in the story—presenting two very different moods—that I still pass every day on my way to and from my day job. No monsters sighted yet, however, to alleviate that monotonous drive.
riaH gnoL
Like “The Green Hands,” “riaH gnoL” found its initial inspiration in a painting by artist Kim Bo Yung, this one created with my fiction in mind. (There’s a nice Ouroboros for you.) I decided to approach that image, of a two-headed woman with three breasts, metaphorically. Another inspiration came from a conversation I had with a young woman who told me she was attending bartending school, and that she is schizophrenic. I was moved when she thanked me and shook my hand for having talked with her. I feel a little bad about using her in some small way in my story, but then people talk to a writer at their own peril.
The Toll
My favorite television program of all time, I’d say—beating out even the original Star Trek and Twin Peaks— is the original black and white Outer Limits, which was no doubt influential in the blending of horror and science fiction in much of my body of work. I approached “The Toll” as if I were scripting a story for that chilling, atmospheric, and thought-provoking* series.
(*Oh, and such monsters it had!)
Saigon Dep Lam
As of this writing I’ve been to Vietnam nine times. (My ex-wife Hong is Vietnamese, and we have a daughter, who at the age of seven has already visited Vietnam four times herself.) Most of the damaged people who assemble at the end of this story, the man of mixed race included, are based on real people I’ve observed, primarily in the city of Bien Hoa. When I saw him, I wondered what that angry-looking man’s story was, just as Lan does.
In 2006 during a trip to the city of Dalat, a woman whose face was a mass of scar tissue begged me for money at a market. Hong had advised me not to give money to beggars, to avoid attracting more of them, so I continued on past her. But the thought that her burns may have been the result of napalm dropped by Americans haunted me, and I told Hong this. The next day we went back to the market in search of the woman, so I could give her some money. We didn’t find her again.
The Green Hands (Parts 1 and 2)
As I mentioned earlier, often I have a story largely plotted out in my head, and sometimes in physical notes, before its writing. Other times, I start out with only an image or rough scenario and let the story grow organically as it would, trusting to my intuition along the journey, knowing that I’ll work my way to the right ending. (I think I have a good sense of direction in that regard.) I went into “The Green Hands” with no idea where it would go, how long it would be, and how it would end, and I very much wanted it that way. I wanted it to unfold as a dream does, and we are all improvisational imaginers when we sleep, aren’t we? Of course, as the story progressed I started to shape the clay in my hands more decisively, and determined I wanted to make two stories of it, which almost seem to exist independently of each other; two separate stories with the same title, to remind us they aren’t really separate after all.
The feel of the second part of the story was inspired by the cosmic horror of William Hope Hodgson, and its imagery by a dreamlike painting by my dear friend Kim Bo Yung.
Less consciously, I suspect I may also have been inspired by the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by French author Michel Bernanos. You may have read this story in the massive and massively important book The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I’ll take credit for its inclusion there; or, to be fair, I’ll give my maternal aunt, Marge McGee, credit for that. Aunt Marge came across a copy somewhere, in some bargain bin I imagine, and thought her horror-loving teenage nephew Jeffrey would like it, and the book certainly did make a strong and lingering impression on me. Many years later I enthusiastically described the book to my friend Jeff VanderMeer, and he asked if he could read it, so I mailed it to him. Eventually Jeff had a new translation rendered by Gio Clairval for its appearance in The Weird . Anyway, I think in some insidious way The Other Side of the Mountain may have had its influence on the surreal, nightmarish, and desolate atmosphere I strove for in the second part of “The Green Hands.”
Good Will toward Men
Though I’ve written many stories set in my far-future dystopia of Punktown, I write each one—whether it be a short story or novel—in such a way that it can exist as its own independent entity. This is true also of the short fiction and novels I’ve set in my vision of Hades (begun in 2003 with the novel Letters from Hades ). “Good Will toward Men” is set therein. You needn’t have read any other of my Hades stories to enjoy it.
I’m not the greatest proponent of organized religion, and my Hades stories might just convey that attitude.
Like “Saigon Dep Lam,” “Good Will toward Men” is a Christmas story, yet they couldn’t be more different. No author likes to admit that he has had stories rejected, but I will confess that I wrote this story for a Christmas-themed horror anthology and it was rejected for not being Christmasy enough.
I actually can’t find much fault with that assessment.
God bless us, every one.
The Temple of Ugghiutu
This story’s history is so long and convoluted, I can’t clearly recall all the details anymore. It was written in the ’90s; this I know. I believe it was for a project being put together by a friend, James Ambuehl. For whatever reason, the original project never came to be. The story had been written on a word processor of mine that had later expired and since become obsolete, its files not compatible with other systems. With no hardcopy, the story was inaccessible to me (along with some other short stories, and even a couple of novels—sigh!). But lo and behold, years later James revealed he still had a hardcopy of “The Temple of Ugghiutu,” and he mailed it to me. I placed my returned story with a themed anthology of Lovecraftian fantasy . . . but then that project never materialized.
Ah, but there’s more to the story. A story within a story.
During the period in which “The Temple of Ugghiutu” was lost in limbo, I was writing a novel called Monstrocity, which is set in my milieu of Punktown. I had decided to reuse the idea of the god Ugghiutu as the novel’s central threat. In Monstrocity, one of the characters relates a fable from her alien culture to the protagonist. This fable is a basic retelling, from memory, of “The Temple of Ugghiutu.”
I got one major detail wrong, though. In the original story, the temple that is a manifestation of Ugghiutu is purple. But in Monstrocity, I portrayed the materialized Ugghiutu as being black in color, as I have in subsequent stories. Nevertheless, the color purple is prevalent throughout Monstrocity, with disturbing allusions. I even requested that the cover of the novel be purple. I once read that purple is a psychologically unsettling color. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I wanted to use it as a recurring signifier of wrongness close at hand. In Monstrocity, there is a sinister purple business tower in Punktown, and this is echoed by references to looming purple mountains in the retelling of the Ugghiutu fable. The point is, perhaps while writing Monstrocity I had subconsciously remembered something about the color purple from “The Temple of Ugghiutu,” after all.
Here, excerpted from the novel, is that fable from Monstrocity, should you care to compare it to “The Temple of Ugghiutu.” Consider it a special bonus track.
Zul and the Black Temple
Zul Tubal-Zu was a girl with a beauty greater than the two moons combined, but her tongue was as black as her hair. When Zul was ten, her hair was bound in her first tevik, but her tongue should have been bound or hidden away as well. For when her hair, which hung to her seat, was cut so as to better fit within the shimmering tevik, her mother by accident tugged on that ebony curtain, and Zul let out a curse. Her mother fainted dead away, but the servants seized upon the fiery-tongued child and dragged her to her room in the house of the farm where her father raised a fine herd of glebbi.
Three years passed, and Zul obeyed the law of silence that she had donned with her tevik, speaking only within her father’s house, never before company, and always in tones of respect, as befitted a child on the doorstep of adulthood. But when the time of staining came, and Zul woke one day to discover herself a woman, it was soon found that her black tongue had merely hibernated like a durbik these past years, waiting to again spew its venom.
For when Zul was given the Veins of Ugghiutu, at the touch of the blade she let out a curse that might have made the strongest herdsman on her father’s farm faint dead away. But the priests held her steady, and despite her wails and sobbing they completed their task, ashamed that they should sully their blades with the blood of such a creature. One priest even offered to unburden Zul’s father of so horrid a child, by using his blade in another manner, but Zul’s father apologized and told them that he hoped Zul was not yet hopeless.
Still, now that she was of age to marry, Zul’s father grew greatly anxious, hoping that Zul would not disgrace a future husband’s family and thus bring dishonor upon his own.
Zul returned to her silence as her scars healed, and attended her labors about the farm. One morning she rode on the back of one of the glebbi, guiding a group of twenty to the farthest reaches of her father’s land in search of fresh grazing. She had been forbidden to do this, for their farm was on the edge of the Outer Land, and only the most seasoned herdsmen were to venture to these fields. But it had not rained in many days, and the greens that the glebbi favored were dwindling, so Zul thought she was doing her father a favor by disobeying his commands. Still, she knew full well that there was never a good reason for disobeying the orders of one’s father.
The mountains of the Outer Land loomed dark purple against a pale gray sky, and silhouetted thus, put Zul in mind of some fantastic city of castles. She was sorely tempted to leave the herd to graze here and ride her glebbi to the foot of those mountains where they thrust abruptly up from the soft earth. But she was able, at least, to resist that impulse. For she knew that in the Outer Land, Ugghiutu’s dreams wound through the crags, and slithered along cliff faces, and wailed and howled, all in the guise of black winds.
Still, she pushed the herd nearly to the foot of the mountains of the Outer Land. And in the deep, cold shadow of those soaring purple peaks, she found a building that she had never seen before or heard her father speak of. It was too large to be one of his sheds or barns, and it did not look like a dwelling. As she drew nearer, Zul saw that the building, being black and eight-spired, was a temple to the demon/god Ugghiutu.
Zul marveled at its solemn beauty. She had seen temples in the village and in the city when accompanying her family to market, but being a female, she had never seen the interior of one of these glossy black houses of worship.
Zul dismounted and left her glebbi to feed amongst the others. She cast her gaze around her, but saw that she had not been followed. Who, she thought, would know if she peeked inside the black temple? If she saw a priest inside, she would duck back. If he pursued her, she would claim to be lost and weep for assistance. Her father would defend her. His love had proven that foolish and overly forgiving in the past.
And so, Zul crept up to the front portal of that edifice, which loomed taller and more majestic as she approached. The eight spires were slim and polished, jutting their spear-like points at the sky. There were few windows. The walls of the temple were not formed of block upon block, but were smooth, so that Zul imagined the entire temple had been carved out of a single great mound of volcanic glass.
There was no door at the front portal, just an oval opening through which Zul peered, craning her neck. She discerned little in that murky interior, though a faint light filtered through a few small windows. But she strained her ears and heard no chants, no music. She smelled no incense. Was this temple now disused, long abandoned?
The girl stepped across the threshold.
The interior of the temple was as cold as one of her father’s barns in the winter. Zul hugged her arms tight to her young body. She shuffled timidly across a floor apparently formed from one unbroken sheet of obsidian blackness that looked like a pool of tar, looked like it might swallow her and drown her at any moment.
Off this main entrance hall with its high ceiling and odd supporting arches there branched several other hallways, round in shape and narrow. Zul gazed into each of them. Like the entrance hall, they bore no decorations. She chose the corridor in the center. At the end of this tunnel there was an ebony curtain hanging over the opening. She reached to it and found it was leathery and heavy. She pushed it aside just enough to spy into a new chamber, but seeing no priests there, she entered it. There was a
ramp here, winding in a spiral around and around to a high upper level. Several round windows let in misty rays of gray light.
Zul ascended the spiral ramp. At the top of this small tower there was a larger window, and from this she looked out upon the pasture where her glebbi had been left to graze.
Where the plump, dull glebbi had been passively munching their greens, there were now scattered withered carcasses like animals dead of starvation or thirst. At first, Zul believed she was seeing the remains of a herd that had become lost out here and died perhaps months earlier. But as she stared, she saw that one live glebbi remained. And she saw a great black form lower from the sky toward it. A great black boneless limb with a point at its end, which speared the plump glebbi and lifted it into the sky. Its fat legs paddled the air and it let out a small, forlorn moan. Though the animal was raised high out of her sight, Zul knew that it was being drained like a fruit squeezed of its juices. And she knew that the vast limb she had seen, glossy and black, was one of the eight spires of the temple.
Haunted Worlds Page 27
