by Greg Herren
Synopsis
What scares you the most? An impressive lineup of the biggest names in gay and lesbian publishing come together to share tales of things that go bump in the night, murder and revenge most foul, and dark creatures that will haunt your dreams, while putting a decidedly queer twist on the literary horror genre. Edited by award-winning authors Greg Herren and J. M. Redmann, the stories in Night Shadows are masterfully told, disturbing tales of psychological terror that will continue to resonate with readers long after they finish reading these delightfully wicked stories. Don’t read these stygian tales when you’re alone—or without every light in the house burning!
Night Shadows:
Queer Horror
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Night Shadows: Queer Horror
© 2012 By Bold Strokes Books. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-802-5
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: October 2012
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Greg Herren, J.M. Redmann, and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
This is for all of our coworkers at the NO/AIDS Task Force
A Question of Genre
So, we’d just turned in our companion volumes of gay and lesbian noir (Men/Women of the Mean Streets) and were congratulating ourselves with a couple of Cosmos (or three…four…maybe six or seven; don’t judge us!) and wondered what, if anything, we could do for a follow-up. This led to a rather sloppy discussion about genre, which eventually led to the decision that should our publisher want us to do a follow-up, we’d tackle horror.
Genre is the bastard stepchild of literature, always looked down upon by the highbrows in their ivory towers. They generally say the word sneeringly, with their lip curled in distaste, like they are scraping something off the bottom of their shoe. “Oh, you write mysteries,” we’ve heard, and other genre writers can attest to the disdain with which those who prefer serious lit-ra-CHOOR treat those who pollute the world with our lowbrow works; sometimes something they stepped in gets more respect.
But as a best-selling mystery author once said, to much applause from the audience, “It’s either genre, or it’s just boring.”
Probably the biggest complaint (or accusation) the Academy throws at genre fiction is it’s formulaic, which really makes little or no sense. Who would read a mystery where the case wasn’t solved at the end? Who wants to read a romance where the couple doesn’t resolve everything at the end? For that matter, isn’t a jury trial formulaic? Isn’t a pregnancy? A wedding?
The Great Gatsby, after all, is nothing more than a murder mystery told in reverse—the crime happens at the end instead of at the beginning. The book is arguably about Gatsby’s murder, and all the pieces that fall into place before he is shot and his dead body falls into the swimming pool. Sanctuary by William Faulkner is a crime novel at its heart; it’s a crime that drives the narrative; so is Crime and Punishment, and Les Miserables, and…you get the picture.
But why horror? Why would two writers primarily known for their mystery novels dabble in the world of horror?
Horror and mystery are a lot closer than most people would think.
The problem with classifying literature into labels is that there are always books that don’t really fit snugly into the box the shelf stocker at the local Barnes & Noble wants them placed inside; the mystery genre encompasses everything from police procedurals to private eyes to amateur sleuths to spy thrillers to noir, so there are always sub-genres inside of the genres themselves. And even those sub-genres can be divided into further sub-genres; private eyes can be divided into soft-boiled (Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, or Ellery Queen) and hard-boiled (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski).
Likewise, when most people think of horror, they think of werewolves and vampires and zombies; they think of Stephen King and Peter Straub and Poppy Z. Brite. But horror isn’t just supernatural creatures, nor does writing about supernatural characters make the author’s work horror (Charlaine Harris, who writes the Sookie Stackhouse novels the HBO series True Blood is based on, considers herself a mystery writer, not a horror writer). Daphne du Maurier, best known for the novel Rebecca and primarily considered a writer of romantic suspense (a subgenre of mystery that also includes writers like Mary Stewart and Phyllis A. Whitney), wrote some extraordinarily macabre short stories that are some of the creepiest and scariest short stories ever published (she wrote “Don’t Look Now,” “The Apple Tree,” “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” “The Blue Lenses,” and “The Birds”—which the famous Alfred Hitchcock film was based on). Patricia Highsmith, best known for The Talented Mr. Ripley novels (without which there could be no Dexter) and delightfully noir classics like Strangers on a Train, also dabbled in horror with her short fiction. Edgar Allen Poe is claimed by both genres; in modern times so are Michael Koryta (The Ridge, So Cold the River) and Dean Koontz; Stephen King was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Peter Straub has also on occasion blurred the line between the two genres.
So, what is the link between the two? It’s very simple, actually.
Mystery and horror are both about death, and violent death at that. Few characters ever die of natural causes in a mystery or a horror novel. Death drives both genres, and it is this interest in exploring the causes of death, its nature, and how we as humans cope with death that is the underlying similarity between the two genres.
Both genres are also driven by suspense, and the best writers in either field know how to build tension, to create page-turners that keep their readers up till all hours of the night reading, unable to stop until they know how it all comes out in the end.
This literary struggle between life and death, darkness and light has an especial resonance with queers. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered, as members of both a repressed and a suppressed community pushed to the margins by the mainstream, can understand and identify with the themes that mark these works—for both genres also focus on the marginalized and the outsiders, those who live in the shadows on the very edge of the mainstream world. Horror writers have recognized kindred spirits in the queer community and have often included queers in their works honestly. Karl Wagner was writing short fiction with lesbian and transgendered characters in the ’70s and the ’80s, and doing it in a non-judgmental way; their sexuality was just another character trait, and thus they came across as realistic and three-dimensional. Poppy Z. Brite’s work was including queer characters in the early 1990s, and Brite’s brilliance influenced an entire new generation of horror writers. Stephen King’s It included a terrible hate crime in its shifting point of view opening, switching back and forth between the present and the past. The list of horror writers who’ve included queer characters in their work over the years is too long to recount here—so it’s a little surprising to realize
that queer horror—horror work by queers about queers for queers—is far behind the mystery genre in this respect. Sarah Dreher, of course, included supernatural elements—everything from ghosts to time travel—in her Stoner McTavish mystery series, and Greg Herren’s Scotty Bradley mysteries has also dabbled a bit in the supernatural (the main character is a psychic; Jackson Square Jazz, the second in the series, involved the main character communicating with a dead man), but for the most part the queer mystery genre has developed much more quickly than its horror counterpart.
But that has changed somewhat since the turn of the century. Michael Rowe edited the two superlative anthologies Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2, and just last year his brilliant novel Enter, Night was released. Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder won a Stoker Award for their queer anthology Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadow of the Closet; Liaguno has also published an acclaimed novel, The Literary Six, while Helder has published The Vampire Bridegroom, an omnibus of his own horror poetry and short stories. Lee Thomas has published two extraordinary novels, The Dust of Wonderland and The German, as well as a brilliant body of work in short stories that any horror writer would envy. Noted journalist and anthologist Victoria A. Brownworth has also produced some extraordinary horror work; her collection Day of the Dead and Other Stories is a vastly underappreciated jewel. Rowe, Liaguno, Thomas, and Brownworth are included in the pages of this anthology.
Jewelle Gomez is an acclaimed poet and playwright whose fictional stories about the lesbian vampire Gilda (one included here) were collected as The Gilda Stories in the early ’90s; highly acclaimed, the book is still in print some twenty years later.
Felice Picano, of course, is an icon in the world of gay letters who has displayed an amazing versatility in his work—ranging everywhere from the suspense thriller (The Lure) to literary fiction (Like People in History) to the supernatural (Looking Glass Lives). Including him in this collection was a no-brainer.
Carsen Taite and Lisa Girolami are primarily known as romance writers, yet their contributions are deliciously creepy—evidence of a dark side to their own creativity that we hope they will continue to explore.
Steve Berman is the author of Vintage: A Ghost Story, a wonderful horror novel for young adults, and is a master of the short story.
We are also pleased to include works by three up-and-coming writers you will be hearing a lot from in the future: Carol Rosenfeld, Jeffrey Ricker, and ’Nathan Burgoine.
Enough of this bloviating! Turn the page and enter the darkened world of the macabre…and enjoy your stay.
—Greg Herren
—J.M. Redmann
New Orleans, June 2012
The Hollow Is Filled with Beautiful Monsters
Lee Thomas
His name was Zach, and he was nineteen years old when he left me for a man named Lincoln Schon, a man with whom I had an uncomfortable history. Straight from an Iowa suburb with his dirty blond hair and striking, perpetually adolescent features, Zach arrived in Manhattan to begin his freshman year at NYU. Though he dropped out of school after two months, he remained in the city, intent on experiencing what he considered real life. Using his simple charm and an approach to sex that was desert-like in that it was hot, completely open, and wildly expansive, he did well for himself. We dated for five months, and then he told me he was leaving. Not the city, mind you, just me. When I found out whom he’d left me for, my reaction was part fury, part amusement. The amusement lasted.
More than a year after he stuck me with the bill at Gascogne and earnestly hoped we would always be friends (the last in a lengthy succession of break-up clichés), Zach called while I was having a drink in an Upper West Side bar.
An unfamiliar number appeared on my phone screen, and I considered ignoring it. I’d erased Zach’s contact information after the breakup, not out of anger or a dramatic act of closure, but simply because I assumed our days of talking on the phone, talking at all, were over. In matters of organization, I tended toward expediency. If a shirt didn’t fit or no longer met my aesthetic needs, it got dropped off at the donation station; I didn’t keep it around to burden my closet, hoping that one day I could squeeze back into it or I’d find its color once again pleasant. Relationships fell under this same broad umbrella of organization, except they were easier to come by in New York than closet space.
My first thought, upon hearing his garbled, disoriented voice, was that Zach had taken a bad pill or too many good ones. His speech slurred and he babbled, and of the few words I could understand, “beautiful,” was the one he kept repeating, though in his impaired state, the word came out as “bootifuh.” During our time together, I’d never seen him overindulge in chemical recreation, but he’d been riding shotgun with Lincoln Schon for more than a year, and that meant he was in a significantly faster lane than me. Keenly aware of my surroundings—a cocktail lounge with too few people for me to manage a conversation with any genuine anonymity—I slid off the bar stool and made my way to the restroom, closing the door behind me to muffle the ambient chatter.
“…buh-iss-bootifuh,” said Zach.
I smiled at the stupid kid’s intoxicated rambling and shook my head. “Zach, who are you calling?”
“Cawing you.”
“Who do you think this is?” I imagined he was trying to track down Lincoln and had poked the wrong name in his contact list. But he said, “Raw-ee,” which was as close to my name as he could manage. “Okay, Zach. Why are you calling me?”
“Loss,” he said. “I’n loss. You not home.”
Had he said he was lost? And if he was lost, how did he know whether I was home or not?
“Where are you, Zach?”
The conversation went in circles for too long. Frustrated, I was about to hang up when he finally managed to explain himself through the lazy-jawed, inebriated gurgle that was his voice. He was in front of my apartment building. He wanted to see me, but the doorman had directed him to the curb because I wasn’t home. I considered asking him what he wanted but figured it would take an hour to get any kind of coherent answer from him.
“Zach, I want you to walk back into the building and put the doorman on the phone. I’ll tell him to let you wait in the lobby until I get there.”
Though the bar wasn’t far from my building, I hailed a cab and winced at the stench of incense in the car as I thought about Zach. Why had he tracked me down? What had he taken to get so thoroughly messed up, and why hadn’t he called his partner, Lincoln, or just gone home to ride out his buzz? I felt nervous about seeing the kid, and I told myself twenty times during the brief ride that I should have cut him off and hung up and continued on with my evening.
Miklos, my doorman, met me outside and gave me an amused smile as he held the lobby door open. I shook my head in a display of complete exasperation, and the burly Czech chuckled and bounced his eyebrows.
“That’s enough,” I told him as good-naturedly as I could manage.
Zach reclined on the brandy-colored leather sofa in the center of the lobby. He’d fallen asleep with one arm dangling, fingertips only a hairsbreadth from the floor. His hair was longer and currently disheveled, and he was dressed head to toe in Gucci, but otherwise he hadn’t changed. I still found him strikingly beautiful—he was too boyish to be called handsome—but a thrum of syncopated annoyance tempered my longing. During our time together I’d been taken by Zach’s youth, his energy. My ego had purred when we were seen in public, so many envious eyes. But after he left, I discovered the ache that followed was the by-product of rejection, not the sense that something important had been excised from my life. The rejection evaporated like a low puddle on a summer afternoon, and soon enough Zach was a memory, neither wholly pleasant nor worthy of hate.
Behind me, Miklos continued to chuckle.
At the sofa, I knelt down and said, “Zach.” His eyes fluttered and then closed again. “Hey, Zach. Wake up. You can’t stay here.” Up close, I noted how deeply his clothes were wrinkled. Smudges of dirt ran up his pant
leg and freckled the sleeves of his shirt. I also noticed his shirt was unbuttoned to the navel.
“Rawley,” he muttered as if in a dream.
“Yeah, hey, Zach, you gotta wake up. I can’t have you sleeping here. I’ve got neighbors.”
“Mmm.”
“What did you take, Zach? Do I need to call an ambulance? Should I call Lincoln?”
When I mentioned the name of his partner Zach’s eyes flashed open, and he righted himself on the sofa while scanning the lobby with darting eyes. He scrubbed at his face with his palms, bringing a touch of blush to his tanned cheeks.
“What am I doing here?” he asked. The slur and stammer had left his voice. Confusion replaced the dazed expression.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I’m thirsty,” he said. “You got any water?”
Of course I had water, but that meant taking the kid up to my apartment, and who knew what quantity of shit that would bring into my life? I didn’t know what he’d taken, but it had obviously fucked him up badly enough to consider my place a welcome harbor. Furthermore, I didn’t know if it had truly worn off or if he was in the eye of a drug-binge hurricane.
“Maybe we should call Lincoln.”
He fixed a warm and appealing smile on me. “Rawley, I just want a glass of water. I don’t need Lincoln’s permission for that, do I?”
“I don’t know what you need Lincoln’s permission for.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“Really?” I said.
Apparently, Lincoln had decided to fill Zach in on our history. I wondered how much of the truth he’d used in his version of the events, and my guess was, he hadn’t used much.
Lincoln was a Fifth Avenue dictator, a man of absolute confidence who managed every aspect of the world around him. A highly regarded and highly paid event manager, Lincoln planned celebrity weddings, post-award-show parties, corporate banquets, and fund-raising events for foundations that hadn’t genuinely needed supplementary funding in decades. His small army of assistants, a glaring of brown-nosed twinks, obeyed his every whim, lapping up his disdain and abuse like cream. He exerted similar dominance in his personal life, and his friends knew better than to argue, question, or disappoint him. He destroyed with an expression. He executed by remark. Even before his real success, in the days when we had been dating, he’d been insufferable. After enduring a dreadful affair through the better part of a summer, I cut my ties with the man using a speech, which in memory was remarkably similar to the one Zach had used on me, though I’d issued my good-byes to Lincoln Schon at least a year before the dazed kid on the sofa had been born.
