Here in New Hampshire's North Country, we have entered the gray time of the year. Days are already short in January, and nearby Mount Washington tends to draw cloud cover toward its summit and refuses to let go. For three weeks in December 2014, the sun shone through twice. Adding to the usual overcast, there's another mountain spreading long shadows in my very own backyard. Summers are green and beautiful, but too short. Winters here are long and gray, and best spent snuggled down in a bright warm house. Outside, all might as well be gothic Victorian moor, according to the gloom.
Last winter was our first gray season, a time I spent working like a dervish in what was then my new home office. I'm not a writer who needs to cast his net far for ideas -- my problem is that I have too many, and until I find a way to clone myself, there are always multiple projects howling at me to complete them. So when a friend presented me with a newspaper article about a man who'd survived the sinking of the
Titanic in 1912 only to drown years later, I balked. "This will make a good basis for a story," she urged. Still, I resisted. Until I read the article and realized how correct she was. And when the submission call for
Death's Realm was announced by the fine folks at
Grey Matter Press (who'd previously published two of my short stories in the anthologies
Splatterlands and
Ominous Realities), my pen flew across the page, recording the terrifying experiences of a Swedish immigrant named Edgard Palmveist, haunted by the events of that longest night. Out of the scores of submissions made to the anthology, "Drowning" was one of a handful selected, and it appears alongside an impressive roster of authors, who shared the back-stories behind their
Death's Realm stories with me.
Jay Caselberg on "Penumbra": "I
guess, starting off, that for me, 'ghost' is a good label, something that we
can use to quantify and give a meaningful presence in our minds to something
that is not so easy. Do I believe?—oh yes. First hand, I can recount several experiences
that, to me, have no other rational explanation. I have lived in ‘haunted’
houses, I have experienced things going bump in the night and there are two
choices: either let them scare the crap out of you or allow them as a part of
your reality. They have been such a part of folklore and storytelling for so
long, that even if you don’t believe, they are so embedded in our collective
race memory that it’s easy to understand why people do believe. So, let me leave
you with one question to get you thinking: what was the earliest age that you
saw or heard something that you believed should not be there?"
Jay O'Shea on "Pirate's Ransom": "Somalia has been torn apart by decades of war, its
waters have been plundered by foreign fishing vessels, and other nations have
treated its coastline as a dumping ground. Piracy is one of the few ways of
earning a living in this impoverished land. But piracy, always dangerous,
becomes more risky for those who have little to start with: Somali pirates
embark on missions without enough fuel or water to get back to land; once
they’re out on the ocean, they take a ship or they die. Somali pirates are also
addicted to khat, a plant containing a short-lasting stimulant that decays as
the leaves dry. A Somali pirate is desperate, hungry, fully committed to his
mission, and in the throws of amphetamine psychosis. What if these desperate
men boarded a ship only to be met by people -- and
things -- more desperate and more ruthless than they?"
Jane Brooks on "The Weight": "In the prelude to
Song
of Kali, Dan Simmons writes, ‘Some places are too evil to be allowed to
exist.’ He could have been referring to my hometown in south Alabama. So small
that it was served by only one caution light, two gas stations, and a single
K-12 school, it was nevertheless home to two hunchbacks, a vicious pack of wild
dogs, a dozen child molesters, tribes of banal and ruthless bullies, gutless
authority figures who punished the weak and rewarded the mean, sharpened rulers
disguised as typing teachers, and every other monster a child could ever have
to face -- including mothers twisted and corrupted by generations of abuse. ‘The
Weight’ draws from the private world one mother created for her and her
daughter in that terrible town, an awful, headachey place to which the
protagonist must return one last time."
John C. Foster on "Burial Suit": "This was an odd one. The title and first line of the
story came to me years ago, and I remember sitting down to write the first page
and then…nothing. I had no idea what the story was supposed to be, but as often
happens, I knew
something was there.
I’ve walked this road before, however. The same thing happened with my first
novel, a few pages and then a great expanse of nada, so I hung onto the page
I’d written and would periodically pull it out to read, putting my ear to the
ground to see if a story was galloping towards me. It wasn’t until our cat Lucy
passed away -- a.k.a. The Loose -- that the character came into focus:
dangerous, clumsy and somehow helpless, but with a horrifying means to address
the death of a loved one. The key for me was not that he was a murderer and
possibly a few eggs short of a dozen in the sanity department, the key was that
as horrible as he was, he cared deeply and was prepared to do anything he could
for his father."
Simon Dewar and
Karen Runge on "High Art":
Simon -- "The germ of 'High Art' leapt into my mind pretty
quickly after the submission call went out. I knew I wanted a story about a
bodily possession and revenge. I also wanted the character Ray to be an
embodiment of the worst traits some men possess, amplified and put to paper. I
threw the idea to Karen Runge, and she liked it and jumped on board. Her
talents helped make it truly creepy and extra confronting. We worked well
together because I write in a very flat, in-your-face style and she writes in
an emotive, alluring and descriptive style, so we balanced each other well.
Karen also helped breathe some life into the female characters in a way I’m not
sure I could have. I’m particularly proud of this piece, especially because
it’s a collaborative work. It’s repugnant, confronting, sometimes sexy, and
ends in a sick crescendo of violence. Horror fans out there will love it."
Karen -- "My Suspended in Dusk editor and fellow writer pal, Simon Dewar, sent me
an email that ran something like: Grey Matter Press is awesome, they’re
doing this anthology, how about we collaborate? I said yes, and he sent me
a smutty sex scene. Well, what are friends for? And so begins ‘High Art.’ Usually when I write -- which
I’d only ever done alone up until then -- I focus on a sensation or an image
set to a basic concept and run with it. I almost never plot. I very rarely know
how a story will end. ‘High Art’
had a direction from ‘go’: the premise (Simon’s), the gore method (mine), and
the rest couldn’t have been easier -- we just took turns writing until we got
it there. It was a blast! Given the subject matter, the fact that we’re a
male-female duo I think helped balance it as a piece. Looking at it now, to me,
our gory little story reads part noir thriller, part torture porn, part
cautionary tale. Weaving breadth, I guess, is the happy accident of
collaborations. As far as making art goes, we certainly had an easier
time than our characters!"
Matthew Pegg on "March Hays": "
Stories
come from random ideas colliding in the mind, like stray comets. Sometimes it’s
hard to track their trajectories. So what was I thinking when I wrote ‘March
Hays’? Manderley, Wildfell Hall, Aswarby,
Motley Hall: disquieting things happen in big houses. They offer an enclosed
environment with potential for a murky history and something nasty lurking in
the east wing.
The house in ‘March Hays’ owes its appearance to Staunton
Harold Hall in Leicestershire, which has the lawns, the stable block, the
chapel and the previous owner executed for murdering a servant. Its interior
shares features with Wightwick Manor, in Wolverhampton, where a secret door in
the drawing room leads to a hidden stair, and a panelled alcove with a built-in
seat offers a handy spot for an unseen observer. So March Hays also has its
mysterious door and cosy alcove, though not at the same time, of course… But the story’s a romance: what if the girl you played
with as a child is your soul mate? What do you do when she’s unattainable? And
it’s a war story. And there’s something unspeakable in the east wing. And
there’s a garden party. And gruesome mutilation. And a horse-ride in the snow.
And alcohol abuse by a minor… What
was
I thinking when I wrote ‘March Hays’?"
Aaron Polson on "Nine": "My stories usually come to life as fragments, and ‘Nine’
was no different. A random bit will pop into my brain and, after some time,
I've massaged the seed into something like a story. ‘Nine’ started like this: I
nearly severed my left little finger in a car door. There’s more, of course.
The boys in the story are mirrors of my own, little imagination machines who
turn everything into something else. One summer, a few years ago, they conjured
muddy water into magic potions to turn both of them into gorillas in order to
hide from passing cars. No one would notice the gorillas in our driveway, of
course, because they are so common in northeast Kansas. Boys can be weird. So
we have the boys, their vivid imaginations, the missing fingers…and loss. My
first wife took her own life three years ago -- not the same circumstance as
Charlie, but a loss. Death, especially that of a parent, can strain
relationships between parents and children. It raises big questions and stirs
identity crisis for the surviving spouse.
All this went into the pot. I let it simmer, worked a few drafts, and ‘Nine’
bubbled from the other side."
Hank Schwaeble on "Haunted": "Years ago, a
Houston woman committed a horrible crime in a fit of psychosis. The case made
national headlines and was the subject of frenzied cable news talk until the
next sensational story popped up. Aside from the general shocking nature of
what happened, two things in the aftermath stuck out in my mind. First was a
comment by a male anchor regarding how sorry one had to feel for the husband, a
remark that seemed rather uncontroversial. The second thing was an opinion
piece I read a few days or so later where a woman excoriated the husband and
placed most, if not all, the blame at his feet for putting his wife in a
position where she was under more pressure than she could bear and not getting
her the help she needed. Both of those points lingered in my mind for some
time, germinating. I remember thinking, he's either partly to blame, or he
isn't, but either way, the guy is going to be haunted for the rest of his life.
That's when the idea for this story started to take shape."
Paul Michael Anderson on "To Touch the Dead": "Stories
-- even the most deathly serious ones -- are goofy, roundabout things. For me,
one thing connects with another thing, which decides to party down with a third
thing, until I'm lying in my bed one night and I realize I won't be sleeping
any time soon. As far as I can tell, Richard Matheson is largely responsible
for ‘To Touch the Dead’. When he died in mid-2013, I thought of his legacy,
what he left behind -- which was his work, of course. If he was remembered at
all, it would be for the artifacts. And then that merged with the Allegheny
County Cemetery in Pittsburgh, where I grew up -- a large necropolis that you
could wander for a full day and never see every grave, every memorial, and you
quickly realized that
no one saw
them, not really. Who's visiting the grave of an early-19th century
family? At the same time, I was doing the edit on a book where a terrorist
attack figured prominently, and thinking that I'd never written about the
victims, just the aftermath. That merged with the idea of how we think about
death and the aftermath itself and, suddenly, I had an emotional gradient to a
story I didn't know was forming in the first place. I wanted to talk about
death and how each of us approached it, not as people who will eventually die,
but as people left behind when
others
die. The two main characters, across nearly a millennia in time, each approach
death from two different extremes, and I wanted to talk about how each
reconciles that within their environments."
Rhoads Brazos on "Omniscopic": "With
this piece, I wanted a quaint, 19th Century voice, one that would allow
outdated phrases at a whim and descriptions that would feel florid, yet somehow
still ring true to each character. In this, shades of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ shouldn’t be hard to
spot, not only in the voice but also in the characters themselves. We have
professor-scholars contacting other planes, after all. As to plot, I found it
interesting that whenever an otherworld door is opened, a human spirit steps
through. If you do the math, you’ll find it’s very poor odds. Imagine that each
person who ever lived -- that’s 100-billion talking monkeys -- had one spin at
the contact-a-spirit wheel. Statistically, no one should have yet succeeded.
We’d keep getting an ant or a sand flea or a beetle, lots of beetles actually,
a revolting number. Perhaps the reason spirits are so subtle is that while
we’re waiting for them to come floating down a darkened hallway, they’re
already crawling over our toes. Pleasant dreams!"
Martin Rose on "Mirrorworld": "‘Mirrorworld’
was inspired by a real life mirror. I forgot about it until now. I'm
broke-poor, so my furniture is usually stolen out of other people's trash or
bought from thrift shops. There was this dresser with an old mirror screwed on
the back. When I put it together, it still had the date stamped on it -- October
31, 1939. Halloween. This struck me on the weird side, which seems to be a
knock-on effect of acquiring all your possessions second hand -- your ability
to stumble onto coincidences both hair-raising and mundane increases a thousand
fold. And then you do that thing writers always do, usually when they're bored
doing menial jobs -- your mind starts turning sideways into the what-if phase.
Voila. At least, that's the simplified version. Whether or not that mirror has
been used in esoteric occult rituals, I'll leave that for your imagination, but
it passed out of my hands and over to a Satanist. So yeah, the cursed thing is
still out there, making the rounds. Moral of the story, check your mirrors. You
might have my Halloween mirror."
Brian Fatah Steele on "Harder You Fall": "If
we’re afraid of ghosts, then what are ghosts afraid of? I find there’s
something about that question that makes me smile. Perhaps because all we can
do is merely speculate. There’s so much we don’t know, although we claim to. I
wanted to explore that, see how it could come back to bite someone. A bit of
knowledge and a handful of power is nothing more than parlor tricks when you
come to realize there’s far more out there. I kept thinking about characters
who abused what they thought was absolute power, and what real power would look
like. Mind you, this was all confined to
Death’s
Realm, as it would be. Everything ended up having a slight Lovecraftian
vibe to it in the end, but it helped get the point across. Sure, the ghosts of
humanity’s dead might be preyed upon by a questionable few, those driven by
greed and influence. But what else could be dead?"
Stephen Graham Jones on "You Only Die Once": "I've
had that opening in my head for a long time, about the ‘scabhead,’ but had
never tried it out until Sharon Lawson said she needed something for 'post-death,'
and that cued up an Etgar Keret story for me, and I realized kind of all at
once that the reason I'd only ever had the first line for this was that I also
needed a world, or, in this case, an afterworld, another place, one where a
word like that could be completely normal. After that it was just putting flies
in bottles and the like. You know, writing a story. But that's true what
happens in the story, with the right kind of shadows. I've always known that
without really having to think about it."
JG Faherty on "Foxhole": "My
inspiration for ‘Foxhole’ came to me, as many do, from a ‘what if?’ thought
that I had, sort of out of nowhere. Basically, it was, what if a voodoo houngon
got drafted into the Army? I was sitting in the mall, waiting for my wife to
buy something, and just kind of daydreaming, when
POW, it came to me. I
had my phone with me, so I sent myself a quick email:
voodoo priest is a soldier. The next morning, I opened the email
and started thinking about it. What would make a voodoo priest special as a
soldier? That led quickly to zombies, but zombie soldier stories are a dime a
dozen. Then I thought, forget the voodoo priest part, focus on the zombie. A
zombie who is a soldier, among regular soldiers. From there I just kept
modifying the story until I got the feel I wanted: sort of a
Tales from the Crypt-type story about
this son of a voodoo priestess. I gave him a friend to protect and set the
scene in a future war. In the end, the story is about the relationship between
two friends who are closer than brothers. A far cry from where it started."
John F.D. Taff on "Some Other Day": "‘Some Other
Day’ began life long, long ago, practically at the beginning of my twenty-five-year
writing career. I remember getting the idea, writing the story -- which was
much shorter and a bit less ghostly -- and then promptly losing it. I switched
computers a few times, first with Apple products, then to Windows. Somewhere
along the way it vanished, but the idea stuck with me. A few months ago, the
idea dusted itself off and reasserted itself with a vengeance. As I must, when
ideas rear their ugly heads and demand a sacrifice, I stopped what I was doing
to write the story, mainly to shut it up. I couldn't remember the original's
title, but the new title was really the only one that would work. The new story
works better than I remember the original working. It's longer, with a better
foundation, and, of course, since I'm Grey Matter's resident King of Pain, more
poignant. The lesson here? Sometimes it's okay to lose stories because it's
possible they'll be better in the end."
