He was right. Lucy was easy to like. Then you’d go back to your room and read the story she’d turned in for that week, and find yourself wondering whether you could manage to stay awake all night so that you could check under your bed every five minutes for the boogie man. Cause you know it’s when you’re asleep that he gets you. And the funny thing about it? Lucy was and has remained a sweet, gentle soul. It’s just that you don’t always see the impishness in that grin of hers for what it is right away.
Lucy didn’t only write horror at Clarion. Her conception of how the baby in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass could have legitimately morphed into a pig fascinated me and had me thinking differently about biology than I ever had. I didn’t quite understand the science, but I could picture it from her description, and I have never forgotten it. “A Preference for Silence,” the story of the space-faring Cassandra, who “never lost her tea in zero gee,” first showed up at Clarion.
One day, Lucy showed up for the critique session wearing a bandaid on her leg. I nearly didn’t see it because she is that rare human being; her skin is the “flesh” tone of regular bandaids. I remarked on how unusual that was and how frustrating it is for this brown-skinned person to see the word “flesh” on boxes of bandaids when what they really mean is light pinkish-beige. And Lucy said the loveliest thing to me: “but don’t they sell bandaids to match your colour skin?” (There are more now, but at the time, not so much.) To Lucy, bandaids that could match various skin tones was just so obviously the right thing to do that she hadn’t thought to check whether that was in fact what was happening.
That sense of justice comes across strongly in her writing. Lucy’s very aware that there are horrible people in the world, and oh, is payback ever a gleefully, terminally sadistic bitch in her stories! Some of her characters are the very embodiment of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Lucy also doesn’t forget for a minute that bad things can happen to good people. There were times I was afraid to turn the page while reading this collection, because I just knew that something more horrible than I wanted to imagine was coming down the pike for some unlucky soul. Man. And people think my writing is viscerally graphic. They don’t know from viscera. Lucy does.
Is it sick and bad and wrong that reading Sparks and Shadows meant that I giggled my way through some of the most macabre fiction this side of the Seventh Circle of Hell? In fact, the last half of “Feel the Love” made me laugh out loud. It also shocked me. It’s been a while. Lucy’s one of the few people who can produce anything so irreverent that even I, who think that sacred cows are just perfect for tossing on the barbie (and enjoying with a fine Chianti), can find it blasphemous. Blasphemous in a good way, you understand. In a “sear the gloss off your illusions” way.
Lucy can write a poem about a one-horse twin. She can make Girl Guide songs kinky without changing a word. (Well, okay; perhaps they already were kinky.) But, not content with leaving it at that, she can spin off from the songs into a surreal futuristic feminine fantasy with a James Bond bravura. She’s welcomed you, via this collection, into her imagination. It’s a bacchanalia in there. And I must tell you; you may never find your way out again.
Acknowledgements
The first edition of this book was published by HW Press in 2007.
“Menstruation For Men” originally appeared in Horror Quarterly , Autumn 2004, and in the Horror Quarterly Anthology , 2005.
“The Dickification of the American Female” originally appeared in Clean Sheets , June 15 2005.
“The Sheets Were Clean And Dry” originally appeared in Masques V , Gauntlet Press, June 2006.
“Flesh and Blood” originally appeared in Blood Magic , Eggplant Literary Productions, October 2001.
About the Author
Lucy A. Snyder is also the author of the urban fantasy novels Spellbent and Shotgun Sorceress, the humor collection Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection Chimeric Machines. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
She was born in South Carolina but grew up in San Angelo, Texas. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio with a pack of cats and her husband/occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck.
You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com
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