Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  DEEP WITHOUT PITY

  I’ve recounted the background to this story at length in the introduction I wrote for the small press book Private Eye Action As You Like It, which collected hardboiled detective stories by Joe R. Lansdale and myself. I called the piece “The Short, Unhappy Career of Lew Shiner, Tough-Guy Writer,” and I’ll just hit the high points here. When I finished the story in the summer of 1976, I dreamed of being a private eye writer in the mold of Robert B. Parker, Timothy Harris, Arthur Lyons, and other young(ish) turks of the genre. It was not to be. Every time I sold a story featuring Dan Sloane, the magazine died. After poisoning three periodicals (Mystery Monthly, Mystery, and The Saint Mystery Magazine), I tried a novel, The Slow Surrender, which never found a publisher. Shortly after that, William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” showed me how SF could accommodate the kind of writing I wanted to do, and my career went in a different direction.

  I still love a good mystery, though my tastes have drifted more to the police procedural and writers like Jess Walter, Barry Maitland, and Mo Hayder.

  THE CIRCLE

  This is not one of my favorites of my own stories, though it seems to have its fans. It’s been in a couple of Halloween anthologies, I had a request to post it on Fiction Liberation Front, and it even got filmed (though never broadcast) for the NBC horror anthology Fear Itself.

  I did in fact write it for a Halloween gathering like the one described in the story, and all the characters are loosely based on friends who were who were regulars at the readings: Bill and Sally Wallace (“Walter and Susan”), Bruce Sterling (“Brian”), Walton “Bud” Simons and Gilda Ginsel (“Guy and Dana”), and Lisa Tuttle (“Lesley”). It got genuinely creepy once everybody figured out what was going on, and right before the Brian character said that they should burn the manuscript, Bruce (who has never been comfortable with horror fiction) cried out, “Burn the damned thing!”

  TWILIGHT TIME

  My father was an archeologist for the National Park Service, and I moved constantly as a kid. Until high school, the longest I’d been in any one place was the small town of Globe, Arizona, where I spent third through sixth grade. I loved Arizona—the dry air that smelled of creosote bushes and cottonwood leaves, the big artificial lakes, the rolling hills behind our subdivision. I first started listening to rock and roll on a transistor radio in sixth grade, and went to my first dance at the end of that school year. My father was a rockhound, and we spent a lot of time on the nearby Apache reservation, the biggest source of peridot gemstones on the planet.

  Given all that, it’s not surprising that I continued to dream about Globe well into adulthood. The image of the two kids standing beside the road came in an unusually vivid dream. When I realized that the setting was Globe in the early 1960s, and stirred in some contemporary music, a flying saucer or two, and my powerful nostalgia for the comics rack at the National Newsstand and the sci-fi movies that I’d watched on Sunday afternoons, I felt I really had something. I refused to give up even when the first version of the story was rejected by every editor in the business. I rewrote it and sent it around again, and this time Shawna McCarthy, the new editor at Asimov’s, went for it. It made the preliminary Nebula ballot and was my first story to be picked for a best of the year anthology (Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best SF #2).

  This story also features the Xirconian conspiracy that my friend Mike Minzer developed in the early 1970s. Among the hallmarks of this theory are: control of the TV networks by aliens since the 1950s, leisure suits as Xirconian military uniforms, and the substitution of empty form for content as the goal of the invasion. It’s a recurring motif in my work (along with the opposition organization YASK, the Youth Awaiting Saucer Kidnap, another Minzer brainstorm) that you can see in “Kings of the Afternoon,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” and my novel Slam.

  JEFF BECK

  If there’s such a thing as a typical Shiner story, this is it: a magic wish that doesn’t work out; a troubled marriage; rock and roll; and a big dose of working-class angst. I don’t think there’s anything pro forma about it, though, because I pulled all of it either out of my own experience or my own obsessive longing.

  My friend Anson Long had the thousand home-recorded cassettes. I’d known him since high school, and we hung out again during my early days in Austin, during which he turned me on to Doug and the Slugs, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, and other great bands. And it was Tommy Cox, lead singer of my sixties revival band The Dinosaurs, who worked the Amada punch press.

  In the first draft, Felix finds an actual magic lamp in a junk store. Somebody (Bud Simons? My then wife, Edie?) talked me into dropping that in favor of the magic drug. Whatever. I wish I could have dispensed with having to create a wish delivery mechanism over and over (Converse All-Stars in “Tommy and the Talking Dog,” the time machine in “Twilight Time”) and been able to go straight to the good stuff. Why isn’t there a Magic Wish Comics? Every month Aladdin’s Lamp shows up in a new place and time. Now there’s an idea...

  WILD FOR YOU

  Another traffic story. I used to have to travel between Dallas and Austin—200 miles of the flattest, most boring scenery this side of Death Valley—several times a year. My home and my friends were in Austin, but my parents and my computer job were in Dallas.

  This story happened pretty much like I tell it. A red convertible with WILD4U plates passed me as I was leaving Dallas, and I caught up to it in Waco where I swear a different, older woman was behind the wheel, now with a male companion. That was all my allegory engine needed, with nothing better to do for the rest of the drive, to crank out the story.

  Let me take this opportunity to say thanks to Robert and Nancy Squyres, who managed to find work for me year after year, even when they could barely feed themselves. They were my personal art patrons, and I will always be grateful.

  TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US

  In the early 1980s I was getting encouraging letters from the fiction editors of both Playboy and Penthouse (though I’ve still never sold to either). I tried to think of an idea for a fantasy story that would be sexy enough to go to a men’s magazine. Mermaids, I thought. How about a scientifically plausible mermaid? Given that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is, that a developing fetus basically goes through the history of evolution, she could have gotten hung up in the fish stage.

  The rest fell into place by itself. I set the story on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands in Honduras, where I’d been scuba diving with my father. As it turned out, both Lucius Shepard (“Black Coral”) and Pat Murphy (“In the Islands”) had also set stories on Roatan. I don’t know how we avoided being dubbed a “movement.”

  To make it an even smaller world, Lisa Tuttle had already published a mermaid story called “Till Human Voices Wake Us,” which I remembered after I’d already started submitting mine. I would have changed the title to “Between the Windows of the Sea” (quoting Dylan’s “Desolation Row”) if I’d sent it out again--but F&SF bought it before I had the chance.

  It’s too late to change the title now, as this ended up being one of my most visible stories. As well as appearing in Dozois and Dann’s Mermaids!, it’s in Sterling’s much-translated and reprinted Mirrorshades and Pat Cadigan’s Ultimate Cyberpunk.

  FLAGSTAFF

  The Sunday paper here in Raleigh actually prints short-short fiction by area writers. Because of the 1000-word limit, they frequently use excerpts from longer works, but when editor Peder Zane asked me for a contribution, I wanted to write something specific for him. Failing any other ideas, I did what I usually do and followed my obsessions. At the time I was being haunted by a memory of an overnight trip we made to Flagstaff one summer. I don’t remember the actual reason for the trip—something to do with the Park Service, I’m sure, as we spent our summers at one Indian ruin or another in New Mexico where my father was working. However, the motel, the whiffle ball and bat, the Jules Verne novel, and the Yahtzee dice are all part of that strangely emotional recollection.

/>   TOMMY AND THE TALKING DOG

  By 1981 I had entered the most productive phase of my career. I was publishing in F&SF regularly, and I’d started selling to a brand new magazine that was absolutely perfect for my sensibility—The Twilight Zone. This was a “bedsheet” sized magazine (like Omni or Thrasher), but printed on pulp paper, like the digests. Under the editorial hand of the fine horror writer T.E.D. “Ted” Klein, the magazine published some really great stories—it was the only magazine I sold to that I read cover to cover every month. Ted liked my work, as he did that of my fellow Texan Joe Lansdale, and both of us got to be regulars—boosting both our careers.

  Ted was the best editor I ever worked for. He always asked for changes, and I can’t remember any of them I didn’t agree with. And in the case of “Tommy and the Talking Dog,” he actually wrote the best line in the story. Toward the end, the dog pees on an expensive car—this after much discussion of a treasure that Tommy can’t seem to find—and Ted suggested that the drops spatter “like little gold coins.” He not only completely understood the story, he gave it a depth and richness it didn’t have before.

  I should also credit the influence of my bedtime reading from this period, the “Coloured” Fairy Books of Andrew Lang.

  This story includes the real names of two kids from, and the teacher of, my sixth-grade class in Globe, Arizona. As I was setting type for this project, I got an email from Bobby—now Robert—Cubitto, who’d been tipped off that his name was on Fiction Liberation Front. He also put me in touch with Dickie—now Richard—Benney, my best friend from those days. It was a completely unexpected benefit to get to catch up with both of them. For more about Globe, see “Twilight Time.”

  OZ

  I don’t know why I decided one day to conflate Ozzy Osbourne with Lee Harvey Oswald. A trivial idea, and not worth much, except that it provoked my dear friend and mentor Neal Barrett to send me an even shorter alternate universe Kennedy assassination story that featured Jackie Kennedy and flying saucers. We went back and forth a couple of times, each story shorter than the last, then I sent him “The World’s Shortest Alternate Universe Kennedy Assassination Story,” which consisted of the single word “Missed!” Neal screamed foul—“It means nothing without the title!”—but of course he had to, because otherwise he would have had to admit I had totally kicked his ass.

  LOVE IN VAIN

  In Austin in the summer of 1987 I read a long and extremely well-written article about the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the magazine or the reporter, though I can remember the look of the pages vividly). Lucas achieved a peculiar fame for his very vocal conversion to Christianity after his arrest, as well as his eagerness to confess to murders he’d never committed. Something about Lucas so repelled me that I couldn’t look away.

  Once I started writing I couldn’t stop, and in a matter of days I had gone through several drafts and had a finished story. I read it at midnight at the North American SF Convention in Phoenix that September, and got a gratifying reaction from the audience.

  Gardner Dozois was willing to buy it for Asimov’s, but convinced me to sell it instead to an original anthology he and his wife, Susan Casper, were putting together about Jack the Ripper. I added one line to make it fit that theme, but after publication decided the story was really better off without it.

  It was reprinted in both the Year’s Best SF and Year’s Best Fantasy anthologies, and I nearly pulled a hat trick when I sold it to a Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense book as well—but the story got dropped at the last minute.

  During my years in Austin, Bud Simons (see “The Circle”) was not just a close friend but a trusted sounding board for my work. His insights into Jack’s character were essential to this story.

  STEAM ENGINE TIME

  This was the first story Joe Lansdale hounded me into writing for him. My concept was simple: What if Elvis had been born 50 years earlier?

  Once I’d decided to set a rock and roll story in 1890s Austin, the great stuff started to turn up thick and fast: O. Henry was actually publishing a newspaper there at the time called The Rolling Stone. If I wanted a punk haircut for my character, well, they don’t call them “Mohawks” for nothing. I found a great book of old photos in the library that provided a wealth of detail, from the Tom Moore cigars and the Crystal Bar to the web of streetcar wires overhead. I even found an old map with the original street names, predating the numbers used on east-west streets today.

  Joe and I did go around a bit on the word “fuck.” Did people actually say that then? If not, then what? The slang dictionaries said it was around, so we went with it. Whether the Western Writers of America, for whom Joe was editing the anthology, were as sanguine about it, we never heard.

  KINGS OF THE AFTERNOON

  This comes from 1976, when I was living on Rankin Street in Dallas and holding down a variety of odd jobs. I was pushing hard on the writing, and I had just bought myself a present: a reconditioned IBM Selectric, one of the most beautiful machines ever made. This is the first story I wrote on that new typewriter.

  The title is so good I was convinced for days after I came up with it—I was washing dishes at the time, as I remember—that I had stolen it from somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. My best guess now is that I had Cordwainer Smith’s “The Queen of the Afternoon” somewhere in my subconscious.

  On one level it was an answer story to a post-apocalyptic Western by a fellow Dallas writer named Glenn Gillette. Rather than tying up their horses to broken parking meters, I wanted to see cowboys riding motorcycles and big 1950s sedans through the desert.

  On another level it was the first of what I think of as “alternate biography” stories (later to include “Jeff Beck” and “Mystery Train”). As well as James Dean in the featured role as Byron (Byron was of course Dean’s middle name), I pictured Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich as co-stars. With Dean’s fragile personality at the center, the story forced me to take some emotional risks I never had before.

  STICKS

  In case it’s not obvious enough who inspired this story, her name is coded into the title—something I didn’t notice until I’d finished the first draft. I was watching the video for “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and thinking what it would have been like if the backing band was not the Heartbreakers, but a bunch of studio musicians who’d gotten lucky.

  The emotional core of the story, which is one reason it still means a lot to me, comes from a very short relationship I once had. No, not with a famous LA singer; I changed all the inessential details like characters, setting, and professions.

  Stan’s Studio City apartment actually belonged to my good friend George R.R. Martin when he was doing a lot of work in Hollywood. He loaned it to me for a week when I was in LA researching Glimpses and promoting Slam. It later turns up as Laurie Moss’s apartment in Say Goodbye.

  I wrote the first draft of this in the summer of 1982. I sent it everywhere, with no luck, but I couldn’t let it go. I rewrote it in 1988 and sent it out, again to no interest. Finally my friend Paul McCauley asked me to contribute to an anthology of SF and fantasy stories with rock music themes that he was editing with Kim Newman. They agreed to take “Sticks,” even though it wasn’t a genre piece, because they understood the fundamental fantasy that drove it.

  THE TALE OF MARK THE BUNNY

  I don’t have kids of my own, but I like children’s stories, especially the brilliant work of Daniel M. Pinkwater (Lizard Music, The Worms of Kukumlima). I also like being around animals, whom I tend to anthropomorphize shamelessly.

  I was further inspired by Thomas M. Disch, whose “Brave Little Toaster” first appeared in F&SF, then was later published as a children’s book. I hoped for the same trajectory, but I think the socialist subtext (e.g., Mark and Lenny) was not as subtle as it needed to be.

  THE KILLING SEASON

  See “Deep Without Pity” for the history of Dan Sloane. I will mention here a story calle
d “Rip Tide,” which, if memory serves, I started shortly after this one, though I never wrote more than a few pages of it.

  “Rip Tide” was going to be one of those clever problem stories, in this case a kind of “locked pouch” mystery. A guy steals some diamonds, goes into hiding, then surfaces in Sloane’s office. He hires Sloane to drive him to Galveston, where he wades into the ocean, carrying the diamonds in a pouch, in front of a hundred witnesses. When the cops fish him out, there’s nothing in the sealed pouch but salt water. No evidence—the guy gets off. The diamonds are assumed lost. Months later, the guy shows up trying to steal Sloane’s unabridged dictionary. Turns out that after the robbery he traded the diamonds for stamps and had the envelope of stamps laminated. He hid that in the spine of Sloane’s dictionary, then took salt crystals into the ocean—where they dissolved into the water.

  The problem with problem stories, and the reason I suspect I never finished “Rip Tide,” is the lack of an emotional hook. The work of mine that I continue to care about comes from the dark recesses of the right brain, not from the intellectual left.

  SCALES

  I wrote a paper my senior year at SMU (the unnamed university at which “Scales” is set) on Lilith and the way Philip Jose Farmer had used elements of the myth in his novel The Lovers. Given all the research I’d already done, I was bound to write a Lilith story eventually, but Ellen Datlow pushed me to it when she asked me for an original story for her Alien Sex anthology.

  I had a hard time finding a title, and I was really pleased when I came up with “Scales”—until I realized that I’d stolen it from a brilliant (though unpublished) mermaid story by Nancy Sterling. (See “Till Human Voices Wake Us”—apparently I have a penchant for stealing the titles of mermaid stories by female Austin fantasy writers.) Nancy was kind enough to let me keep it.