I stood there in that cheesy-smelling motel room, staring out the window, thinking about what I believed in. And I have to confess, it knocked me down. I couldn't for the life of me think of anything that I believe in that was absolute. I know it sounds kind of strange, but I'm just not sure if there are any absolutes in the world. I know there are Christians out there who would damn me to hell for this, but I'm just not sure. Folks, I'm being honest here. About the only thing from which I could never be swayed is the love I have for my wife and kids. Oh... and one other thing. That everything is about sex. Everything. From thermonuclear war to oral hygiene, from enormous phallic missiles coming out of the ground to renaissance painters adorning chapel ceilings with voluptuous images.
Eye contact is sexual. Politics is sexual. Health and fitness are sexual. Economics is sexual. Art, commerce, medicine, architecture, mathematics, cooking, eating, washing the dishes... even going bowling... all are sexual. Sex is more than mere life force, more than biological programming. Sex is both subtext and text, alpha and omega, yin and yang. Sex is why we're drawing breaths. Sex is, at the end of the day, our job. Our only job. And the best part of it is, it feels so damn good.
Even an absence of sex is sexual. All this talk lately of abstinence for high school age boys and girls, just saying no, looking the other way, keeping your pecker in your pants, whatever — all this does is make kids hornier. All this does is point out how irresistible — inexorable even — sex is. And the dirtier sex is, the better. The more forbidden it is, the more attractive.
We only go wrong when we try to inhibit it, or repress it, or contain it, or alter it, or otherwise fuck with it (pun intended). Which is, I guess, what this story, "Necrotica," is all about.
And then again, maybe it's just about bowling.
On "Big Bust at Herbert Hoover High"
If there's one thing short story introductions are good for, it's the shameless promotion of half-baked theories and philosophies. The story "Big Bust at Herbert Hoover High" is the nexus of several of these preposterous pet theories. For instance, I believe that all men, to some extent, secretly want to return to the womb. In other words, it's not just women's pants they want to get into. And this fixation often manifests itself in a fetishistic obsession with breasts. Not that I have any personal experience in this area. I've merely read about such things. I have no feelings one way or another about this part of the female anatomy. Why are you looking at me like that? It's just a goddamn story... for Chist's sake! It's just a stupid little yarn I wrote for one of Norm Partridge's anthos. It's not autobiographical in any way. You've seen one bosom, you've seen them all! STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!!
On "Stash"
In many ways, "STASH" encapsulates all my work over the last ten years. My obsession with... well... obsessions. My fixation with Hitchcockian suspense. My tendency toward exploring the seamy underbelly of suburban life. My propensity toward action. And my love of humor as a leavening agent. It's also a story that pays tribute to the greatness of my mentors, a greatness that I will also be grasping for yet never reach: Stephen King's clash of the surreal and the everyday; Harlan Ellison's quirky, voice-driven fantasy; Thomas Harris's dark, literary suspense; and Joe Lansdale's funky, regional, humanistic prose style.
The seed of the idea for "Stash" came from my buddy, Andy Sands, who was joking one day about the closeness of certain friendships. "He's a porn pal," Andy told me of one gentleman. "He's a what?" I asked. And Andy went on to explain that it had nothing to do with porn per se. It had more to do with what happens after you use the porn for so many years. You can guess the rest.
Flash forward several years. I got the enclosed story published in several venues, got TONS of mail, and I noticed a leitmotif in many of the responses. "Does this 'company' actually exist?" they would invariably ask. All of which led me to write a screenplay in 2006 based on the story. The movie version of STASH – my directorial debut – was released in 2009, and stars the great comic character actor Tim Kazurinsky and the late, great porn goddess Marilyn Chambers. It is a "mock-u-mentary" in the style of Christopher Guest, and I'm proud of the fact that it does what it sets out to do: It gets laughs. You can still find and stream this little puppy if you look hard. Turns out there are quite a few perverts out there… God bless 'em!
So I'll give the last word on the matter to Old Willy the Shake. As he wrote in Hamlet: "Nature her custom holds / Let shame say what it will."
On "The Beaumont Prophecy"
My only comments here are the enduring power of the ghost story… and the generosity of a wonderful fellow writer and editor in Chicago named Tina Jens. The ghost story endures, very simply, because it is about the past devouring the present. It is about guilt. It is about baggage. Things with which we all deal. These are the things that swim beneath the surface of "The Beaumont Prophecy." And thank God for Tina Jens. Tina is a brilliant writer and anthologist – one of her books, SPOOKS, included this ghost story
On "Obituary Mambo"
I confess that I have zero objectivity about this story, which represents my first professional sale. The transaction occurred way back in the halcyon days of the late 1980's, when horror was king of the spinner rack and the shopping mall bookshelf. God bless you, Peggy Nadramia, for your good taste and your wonderful literary mag GRUE, and for birthing my first baby into the world. The old cliché about the first-born is true – you love them warts and all, and you love them for all their faults. From my perspective this story represents a young writer trying to get at deeper themes and subtexts within the context of literary horror – something I've been honing for the past two decades. You be the judge as to whether it works as a yarn – I have no idea.
On "Due Date"
Years ago, somebody asked Raymond Carver, arguably our greatest short story writer, to name his influences. In a moving, nakedly honest essay — an essay not unlike the best of his fiction — Carver explained why his sole influences would always be his children. And not in the ways you might first suspect. His children were grand and horrible distractions. Although he loved them desperately, he was also imprisoned by them. They sucked away his creativity, his energy, his focus.
"Due Date" was one of the first things I wrote after the birth of my wife's and my first child. I don't share Carver's brooding frustration with fatherhood — I quite like it, as a matter of fact — but I do know the influence of which he writes. My kids have made me a better writer by making my life messier, noisier, richer, better... and sometimes scarier. "Due Date" is an expression of the latter, steeped in Carver's powerful and poignant minimalism.
On "Mama"
Freud was right. I always knew this deep down in my bones, ever since I was a kid. In other words, there is a subconscious, and it is rooted in childhood trauma, and it is often the hidden puppeteer of all the whacky shit that we do. You see, I learned about Freudian psychoanalysis when I was about 11 years old, and it just sunk a hook into me. Imprinted me. Everything I thought about — and I mean everything — gradually, eventually, inexorably, led me back to the ideas first foisted on the world by Ol' Sigmund. And I never even noticed the irony in the fact that I became a Freudian acolyte at approximately the same moment that I entered puberty. But that's how the subconscious works. You don't consciously notice any of this stuff. Until a shrink points it out. Anyway: I was delighted to read, in a recent Newsweek article, that neuro-scientists have virtually proven Freud's theories by locating — via high tech scanning technology — the area of the brain where the subconscious actually lives. Take that, all you Skinnerian skeptics! Which, in a roundabout way, and maybe a Freudian way, leads us to this modest little yarn. "Mama" is an unapologetically Freudian police procedural. In fact, I tried to imbue it with so much Freudian behavioral detail that it would positively jump off the chart of genre tradition, and maybe start to prod at something original... or at least interesting. Of course, I had a hell of a time finding a market for this little mongrel. Thank God, Tina Jens is out ther
e, moving and shaking and taking chances with her wonderful series of chapbooks, as well as her venerable reading series, Twilight Tales, at which I proudly count myself as a regular.
On "There's Somebody Down Here Wants to Talk to You"
May I just say a few words about Stephen King? Stephen King will be remembered as a master storyteller – a populist literary figure alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Just wait.
You'll see.
King is a product of our times – our paranoid, pulpy, lurid zeitgeist. But he is also a brilliant moralist. Which brings me to this story. Yes, I'm influenced greatly by Mr. King. And yes, when I was invited to write a "hit man" tale for an anthology edited by the mad, motor-mouthed master of bloody crime fiction, Joe Konrath, I was in a King-like mindset. I wanted to write a supernatural take on the hit man mythos. But I also wanted to write a moral tale. Something that picked the scab off the big lie that hit men are exciting, sexy, mysterious figures. And for my money, that's what King does (a lot better than I, by the way): he disguises morality plays with horrific trappings. Just take a look at "The Stand", ""The Body", ""IT" or "The Green Mile."
On "Glory Hand in the Soft City"
One of the grand poobahs of fiction anthologies — not to mention a grand master of the whole field of horror, thriller, and mystery writing — is a jovial, down-to-earth gentleman from Iowa named Ed Gorman. Although I only know Ed casually, I count him as a major influence and mentor. His stories and novels meld the hard boiled with the tender better than that of any other practitioner of this craft. Ed was one of the first A-list authors to champion my work... and although I'm biased, I think his short story "En Famile" is one of the best in the English language. Ed invited me to contribute a piece to a science fiction antho called Future Crime, and I jumped at the opportunity. I wanted to create a cyber-punk style story with heart, in honor of Ed's legacy. I researched "Glory Hand in the Soft City" more rigorously than any other short story I've ever written. Mostly because I wanted to get the science right. During my research I came across a book called The Biotech Century by Jeremy Rifkin. It actually changed my life — or at least changed the way I look at the future. When you can patent life forms, and reinvent nature, you better step back and take a good look at your most deeply held beliefs. But another reason I did so much homework on this one is because it was for Ed. When you get invited to one of Ed's parties, you don't show up in cut-offs and high-tops. You wear a goddamn Armani tuxedo.
On "The Butcher's Kingdom"
While Allan Pinkerton was inventing the modern private detective agency in Chicago in the mid-1800s, Edgar Allan Poe was in his late period, writing brilliant scientific treatises, such as "Eureka," about the nature of the cosmos. My postulation that Poe and Pinkerton not only met, but also influenced each other and collaborated on criminal cases, is based mostly on the historical fact that Pinkerton was a big reader, and loved Dickens and Poe, and would have been a big fan of "Murders in the Rue Morgue."
On "The Miniaturist"
I would like to say that I read H.P. Lovecraft at an early age and was deeply warped and influenced by him, but the truth of the matter is, I was influenced more by a cheesy Ace paperback cover for the Lovecraft novella AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS than any of the master's work – a book which I actually stole from a B. Daltons in Peoria, Illinois, and was too lazy to actually even look at the text. But that cover! A creepy, cadaverous, green face staring out at me with worms extruding from holes all over its skull! It must have pressed a button in my greasy little pre-pubescent imagination — who knows what sends us on our trajectories in life – but I was hooked on horror from that moment on. I thumb-tacked lurid covers all over my bedroom and started actually reading some of the stories in these books. And I guess it all leads to works like 'The Miniaturist' – and I suppose you should blame that illustrator at Ace.
On "The True Cause of the Great Depression"
Over the last twenty-five years I have been fortunate enough to have many of my novels and stories translated into foreign languages. I remember sitting in a meeting at the Book Expo, a big booksellers convention similar to an upscale Amway meeting, sitting across the table from a pleasant, well dressed, Eastern European woman, who proceeded to look at me and say, "We are going to make you huge in Bulgaria." I don't know if this ever happened, but I have always had good luck with my works in places such as Germany. In fact, a couple of years back, one of my German editors asked me if I would like to write a Christmas story in the crime genre for an anthology being put together that year. Crime and Christmas? Seemed like just the kind of twisted recipe that I love to cook up. But something weirdly poignant happened along the way, and I guess that's why this piece inhabits the final position. I like happy endings. Here's hoping we have more of them.
Jay Bonansinga
Chicago, Illinois
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