BEHOLD! BLURRING THE LINE

Winter of 2012-13. We still lived in our old apartment (and were awaiting a closing date on this house). For a few frigid weeks, my little sister, who worked the third shift, found herself without a car and in need of a lift to her job. And so, during that time, we drove her to the outer limits of our then-town, to a factory located at the distant top of a winding drive. At that hour, nobody was on the road. Still, the traffic light standing guard at the base of the hill seemed to taunt us, staying red no matter what side we approached from. While waiting for it to change, my imagination translated the red light into a giant, unblinking Cyclops eye. The kernel of a short story idea germinated on one of those late nights. It was cemented on another when, after turning up the drive, we very nearly collided with the biggest buck I've ever seen, who casually tromped across the road after Bruce slammed on the brakes. The buck regarded us with contempt, I swear, before continuing on his way into the dense pine woods. A snow storm thickened around us. The traffic light watched. The story idea was fully formed by the time we returned home, mercifully in one piece.

The following day, I began to pen "1-2-3 Red Light", a story about a notorious traffic light in a remote part of town with a tragic history -- and a thirst for blood. The story's longhand draft dashed itself off fairly quickly, only to soon go into a cardboard box with the rest of my files for our big move north to Xanadu. When I read the guidelines for Blurring the Line, a forthcoming anthology by the fine folks at Cohesion Press, I pulled the longhand draft from my file cabinet for editing on the computer. Blurring the Line would feature a unique take on the horror genre by offering up stories that straddled the boundaries of the fantastic, making the reader question fiction from fact. The whole 'ghost in the machine' approach seemed to make "1-2-3 Red Light" a decent fit for the call. It was. Soon after submitting, Editor Marty Young wrote back to say he dug the story. Today, it appears in the new release alongside a stellar list of authors, many of whom shared the back stories behind their stories in Blurring the Line.

Alan Baxter on "How Father Bryant Saw the Light": "For a long time I've been wanting to write a story that was in some way paying homage to that great horror novel, The Exorcist. But I also wanted to interrupt, to subvert, the strong Judeo-Christian framework of that book, and so much other western horror. I love the cosmic horror of people like Ligotti and Lovecraft, and the non-western horror from Asia and elsewhere, so I tried to meld all those styles a little. 'How Father Bryant Saw The Light' is the product of that desire. Hopefully I at least partly achieved what I set out to do."

Annie Neugebauer on "Honey": "In the nonfiction book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach mentions human mummy confection, a purportedly true practice in ancient Arabia. Elderly people sacrificed themselves by consuming only honey until death so their bodies could be turned into a medicinal concoction.The claim was bizarre enough to catch my fancy, and off I ran. I ended up with a short, strange, epistolary story in a voice reminiscent of Poe and one of the more outrageous concepts I’ve ever played with. So in short: just another Thursday. I took it to my critique group without giving it another thought. Their response was not what I expected. People made noises during silent reading, and when the timer went off there was an outburst. Loud, excited voices. Arguments, jokes, ideas, praise. It was crazy. Honestly, I was embarrassed by their extreme responses. I decided I would only ever publish this story if it got accepted by a bomb-proof market (i.e., You haven’t jumped ship validation). Well, Cohesion picked it up for Blurring the Line. I’m so excited to be a part of this bomb-proof anthology, even if that does mean my crazy-ass story is out. I hope you’ll read it."

Lia Swope Mitchell on "Empty Cars": "My dad and his wife spend a good bit of time in New York, and they’ve told me about this thing that apparently everyone learns if they ride the subway a lot: if it’s rush hour and every car on the train is packed except for one… don’t get on the empty car. There’s a reason it’s empty. And the reason is probably someone who’s having one of the worse days of their life. ‘We can pray for him,’ one woman said about an especially pungent man who was peeling the skin off his feet, ‘but we don’t have to smell him.’ That phrase -- don’t get on the empty car -- got me thinking about how people often try to close off and isolate things that disturb us. Maybe because they smell bad, but also because they’re sad and difficult and we don’t know what, if anything, we can do about them. So the story ‘Empty Cars’ is about someone who’s trying to close off one particular thing, something difficult and sad that she wants very much to ignore, and the result is that it ends up invading her daily life in all these comically grotesque ways."

Lisa Morton on "Woolen Shirts and Gum Boots": "My story for Blurring the Line, ‘Woolen Shirts and Gum Boots’, was taken from a nineteenth-century newspaper article found in a creepy scrapbook my bookstore once acquired. The scrapbook, entitled ‘Sweet Death,’ was a collection of nineteenth-century articles about strange happenings and horrible deaths. Although many of the stories in the book seemed to be more ideally suited to serving as the basis of a horror story -- for example, I almost considered doing one based on a piece about a new preacher who inexplicably went mad during his first sermon before a large crowd -- this story of two teenage girls dressed as men trying to flee abusive families really captured my imagination. I thought about how different things were then, about how the girls must have been both very courageous and maybe a little crazy to think they could do this. I ended up using as many details from the original article in my story as I could, and I hope I’ve captured some of what those two girls likely endured."

Patricia J. Esposito on "Distorted and Holy Desire": "It was my idea to go see the local band. A winter night of soft snowfall. He stood outside the venue, under the spray of streetlight. Black curls warmed his face, snow flakes drawing down his eyes. A small smile lifted. No one could imagine what was in store. A man, a body. Voice and guitar. I thought about slipping on the icy walkway. Instead, we slipped inside, unprepared. “That was him,” I whispered to my husband, and there he was skirting through the crowd, removing his scarf, winding in with his unwinding. None of us, propped on barstools and benches, could really be prepared for the splendor that was to come. But he began to strum, he began to reach; the room evaporated, and our bodies became the fallout of his nuclear emotion. Shattered and yet transcending. I wondered then if death could be this good. And I wrote the story of my fallout."-- On seeing Adrian Perez of Beautiful Collision at Kiss the Sky, Batavia, IL

Rena Mason on "Nita Kula": "I’d always wanted to do a version of a zombie story that had a scientific, fact-based, historical origin, and I’d always loved the premise behind The Serpent and the Rainbow and knew that if the opportunity arose I’d use something similar for what would probably be the closest thing I’d ever write to an actual zombie story. Being an R.N, I often found myself working side by side with traveling nurses from abroad. It takes a strong personality type to come from another country and be able to provide a vast range of care in a foreign land. Growing up somewhat sheltered, I envied this kind of adventurous personality, so I decided to use a traveler I’d met from New Zealand who had a very take-charge, shut up-and-just-get-the-job-done, no-bullshit attitude as my main character. She also probably pissed me off at some point, so in my story I made her vulnerable by using cultural differences in a densely populated, diverse city that’s an external visual paradise in order to push her over the edge into discovering the horrific possibilities that might lie within."

James Dorr on "The Good Work": "Let’s do it then,” Wendy said.  She led Coz and me out of the alley, around to the front door, where we started singing -- Coz just pretending, because of his froggy voice.  We started out with “God rest ye merry,” and then did some “Greensleeves,” and Wendy was real good like she’d practiced singing, or else had a real knack.   

(from “The Good Work”)

But how accurate is the Dickensian image of jolly underage carolers spreading Christmas joy from house to house in Victorian London?  I have read that in actuality it could be more like a shake down operation; the picturesque urchins would deliberately sing out of key, continuing until they were given bribes to go away.  Except that some children may have had a bigger, more serious game in mind -- one in which they must sing well enough to be asked inside."

Steven Lloyd Wilson on "Misktatonic Schrödinger": "I've had stirring down in the depths of my mind this idea of a Lovecraftian story set at the South Pole during a whiteout ever since, well, I read several of Lovecraft's novels on a trip to Alaska. I know, Lovecraft himself has several such stories, there's The Thing, and a dozen others. So, real original, but I had this feeling about it. And then there was that XKCD strip (https://xkcd.com/1235/) pointing out that sightings of UFOs and other such phenomena have plummeted since the ubiquity of cell phone cameras. But what if shining the light into the darkness doesn't show that nothing was ever there, but simply that the room is empty when you're looking."

Peter Hagelslag on "Fearful Asymmetries": "‘Fearful Asymmetries’ basically began—I wrote this two years ago—from a typical ‘what if’ premise, but then threefold: What if current trends of random killing sprees and terrorist attacks not only continue, but increase, and we decide to tackle this by extremely increased surveillance? What if we decide to guard the guardians through electronic and biometric means? What if that very system then gets hacked(*)? I personally do not believe we should use an army of genetically engineered, bio-modified, highly paranoid cyborg cops on every spot where we can expect danger (which actually means all public spaces). ‘Fearful Asymmetries’ tries to show why that’s probably a very bad idea. However, I am dismayed at how certain parts of this made-up story hold up. It seems things are indeed moving in that direction, which scares the shit out of me. To wit, a recent article in the Verge (Who controls the cop cam?): http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9724644/police-tech-body-cams-transparency-violence-taser . This story is indeed meant as a dystopia that should not come to pass, not as an accurate prediction of the future. So I do certainly hope it is wrong in its extrapolations. (*) = spoiler alert..."

BEHOLD: BLOOD RITES

Recently, we bought our dream house, far from the familiar, high in the hills of New Hampshire's White Mountains.  Before the momentous move (which tabled most other responsibilities, like updating my beloved blog) we rented a vast, two-bedroom apartment in the very house where local favorite son and native legend Fritz Wetherbee grew up (I interviewed Fritz in 2008 for a regional magazine, and found it somewhat neat that my now-former office was located in his then-former bedroom).

In the master bedroom of our previous home, placement of my antique dresser with its beautiful mirror and our gigantic antique oval mirror on a corresponding length of wall created an eerie multiplicative effect when viewed from certain angles.  It struck me that my reflection was performing a modern version of that old stage schtick where two actors ham it up in front of a mock mirror, one pretending to be the other's reflection.  Until, of course, the fake reflection messes up, and the game is revealed.  This concept dogged me until Thanksgiving Day of 2011, when I sat down to write a story's longhand draft based on some very bare bones. Thanksgivings are a special time in our home.  We always host an open house and a monstrous meal, with more side dishes and homemade pies than our guests can fathom or devour.  Since I was a teenager, I've also had the running tradition of penning a complete short story in honor of the day -- thanks offered up to the Muse, as it were.  I dashed off most of the first draft of my story "Phantomime" before dinner got served, finished it after dessert and the departure of our guests, and then filed it away until a personal invitation arrived from visionary publisher Marc Ciccarone and the fine editorial staff at Blood Bound Books, who'd previously featured my story "The Libidonomicon" in their brilliant erotic horror anthology, Steamy Screams.  A select list of writers were being given a shot at appearing in a new project, one which would literally drip with pedigree.  I fired off an edited draft of "Phantomime", which made it into an impressive Table of Contents in the stunning end result, Blood Rites: An Invitation to Horror.

Many of my fellow luminaries within the covers of this incredible book shared the back stories behind their stories.

Mark C. Scioneaux on "The Lady with Teeth Like Knives": "I had just watched the movie Insidious, and there is a part where it focuses on this horrific ghost lady, smiling with a row of sharp teeth.  That image stuck with me the most from the movie, and I decided to make a story around it.  In fact, I wrote the entire story while sitting in my truck at work one day.  Just penned it out quick on a yellow paper tablet, went home, and then typed it up.  The tale is simple, and follows the story of a man who thinks he got away with murder.  However, he finds himself haunted by a sinister ghoul, a lady whose teeth resemble knives."

Lisa Morton on "The True Worth of Orthography": "The idea behind ‘The True Worth of Orthography’ -- that the actual practice of writing is a magical act -- stems from my love of a series of books called the Abrams Discoveries series. These are beautifully designed little non-fiction books that cover everything from the history of rock music to the Aztecs to vampires, and they did one on the history of writing that was especially good. While I was reading it, I had this thought that writing is like telepathy -- we exchange thoughts without speaking - and that led to the notion that it's essentially a form of magic. The story, which centers on a magician who enacts spells by the physical act of writing them, grew out of that."

Maria Alexander on "Saturnalia": "In 1999, I had a really effed-up dream.  The dream was not only scary as hell, but extremely detailed and well plotted. It included an entire ensemble of strangers, a brother named Joshua who had died, and a town with a secret so dark it could only hide in a Louisiana swamp. The details of the dream were so deeply carved into my memory and psyche that I even named the main character after myself. I didn’t act like myself in the dream, though. I was naive, trusting, religious, forgiving…a person sure to find trouble."

Aric Sundquist on "The Candle and the Darkness": "This story originated from a central image of a mother and daughter fending off a growing darkness with nothing but a candle's flame.  For three months, I pondered where the story would go, until one day while doing research online for another story, I came across an old Roman Catholic prophecy called 'The Three Days of Darkness'.  The content fit perfectly with the story, so I infused the two together, added a bit of creepy back story, and completed a rough draft within a week."

John McNee on "The Lullaby Man": "The Lullaby Man was the title of the first horror story I ever wrote, back in 2006.  At the time, I wasn't sure if I was even capable of writing a real horror story, so I challenged myself to come up with the darkest concept I could.  What I arrived at  was the notion of a supernaturally-gifted pedophile who masquerades as the imaginary friend of his young victims to gain their trust.  That original draft (which took the form of a patient-psychiatrist confessional), is completely unpublishable, but the central idea stayed in the back of my head and, when Blood Bound Books invited me to submit to Blood Rites, I decided to revisit it and try to do it justice.  By this point, I'd developed the idea of telling the tale from the perspective of an adult survivor who had written her experiences off as childhood nightmares.  When she discovers the Lullaby Man really exists, she feels compelled to seek him out, whatever the risks."

Chad McKee on "Sleep Grins": "The source of inspiration for this story was, at least indirectly, my newborn daughter.  The whole process of having a child was fascinating.  As a biologist by training, I took that sometimes-irritating habit of close observation home with me and basically studied my child. The way she slept was especially interesting -- the little mannerisms and ticks and so on.  One thing was the way she made occasional smiles while napping -- the neurologist will tell you that it's not intentional, just the brain processing something, making more connections.  Totally subconscious. Yet, she also sometimes screamed and thrashed about as if in a nightmare prior to those grins.  It got me thinking: what was deep in your mind, even as a baby?  Memories or even memories of feelings?  As an adult, maybe you could have those little grins in your sleep, too. Maybe even when your subconscious mind is plotting revenge."

Daniel O'Connor on "The Binding": "I like things.  Real things -- books, vinyl albums, CDs, DVDs. Things we can hold., smell, and put on shelves.  Not a fan of downloads of any kind.  I also love classic rock, mystery, and horror.  I wanted to meld all of that into a story that could evoke past, present, and future, so I came up with this: 'Every Thursday night, four guys would meet at a local bar.  Watch some football.  Play some darts.  This Thursday, the fate of the entire human race rests in their hands. They also enjoy the jukebox.'  Astute rock n' roll fans might notice that, in a way, the entire story was inspired by a certain classic album.  Let me know if you get it!  My email address is AuthorDanO@aol.com."

Douglas J. Lane on "The Trapdoor":  I live in a pier-and-beam house like the one in the story, which is how many of the older bungalow homes in Houston are constructed.  Because it sits on pylons a couple of feet off the ground instead of a foundation, I hear house-settling noises in the night -- thumps, pops, creaks -- or animals in the crawlspace or, occasionally, in a wall.  One night, I heard what sounded like a door closing, and started thinking: what if there was a way to get inside from under the house that I'd never noticed?  But nothing interesting came through the door when I imagined it.  So I flipped it around: what if there was a trapdoor in the floor that led somewhere other than the crawlspace under the house?  Where would it go?  And as I wrote, I understood it went to the place of my characters' secrets and guilt.  Once I discovered what was waiting for them, the story came together quite quickly."

K. Trap Jones on:"The Butterfly": "To me, there's nothing scarier than the unknown.  True fear happens during a situation that is uncontrollable.  'The Butterfly' is a narrative told through the eyes of a common villager who is caught within the path of God's fury.  With no remorse and no sympathy towards those it devours, a mysterious storm barrels through a peaceful village.  I chose to wrap this horrific tale with imagery of a beautiful butterfly, which symbolizes the good in life even within times of death and decay.  There are events that we humans will never be able to explain and never be able to outrun.  'The Butterfly' was inspired by the song, 'Creeping Death' by Metallica."

Matt Moore on "The Leaving": "Sometimes, we don't know why, just what is.  This could be the friendship that's lasted decades.  Or, for the people of Jefferson Hollow, you don't go out after dark when a barnyard stink pervades the small town.  As a small town boy, I watched box stores force mom-and-pop shops to close, local restaurants fold while chains sprung up, and woodlands cut down for cookie-cutter developments.  Replacing centuries-old Yankee traditions with cultural homogeny was itself a horror story.  For years, I've wanted to explore these themes.  Good horror needs to be grounded in reality, providing an accessible and emotional anchor for the reader.  'The Leaving' was the perfect story for this.  And I wanted to explore one more idea: small town legends.  As a horror story, the legend needed to conceal something monstrous.  Haunted houses and the boogeyman have been done, so I turned to something innocuous into a deadly object of terror.  'The Leaving,' set in a grown town thanks to a new highway, balances secrets the locals keep from new arrivals with the secrets we keep from the people we love.  We tend to believe that concealing an awful truth will hurt less than revealing it -- this rarely ends well."

Desmond Warzel on "The Final One Percent": "I recently had another story ('Cosmetic Procedures') performed on an episode of  Cast of Wonders, the fabulous young-adult-oriented podcast featuring stories of the fantastic.  I took the opportunity to dispense a small bit of advice for would-be writers: 'Don't waste time being bored.  Look around.  The pieces of your stories are everywhere, and only you can make the connections.'  'The Final One Percent' is one example of such a story; its inspiration lay in a single observation, made in passing and then stored away for mulling over at leisure: a book review website titled Blood of the Muse.  The site ceased updating nearly two years ago, but the name has always stuck with me.  The Muses are classical goddesses; I'm no expert on mythology, but I know that Greek gods perform human biological functions (such as eating), and they also possess bodily fluids.  What, I wondered, would the blood of a muse be like?  If it could be extracted, would it retain the essence of its former owner, and how might it be put to use?  Interestingly, one major online magazine includes 'Muse' stories in a lengthy list of fictional topics they see too often among their submissions.  Certainly my memory is not beyond question, but I'm well-read enough to have encountered most major cliches at least once, and I'm almost positive I've never actually seen such a story.  Perhaps writers and editors shy away because it seems as though it ought to have been done before.  In any case, I'm rather pleased with my interpretation of the idea, and its appearance in Blood Rites is a welcome vindication."

Nathan Crowder on "Cold Comfort of Silver Lake": "The story comes from an unexpected list of influences.  The primary one is a long-established dislike of swimming in lakes.  The dream in the story is a dream that I had as my last marriage went through an especially rocky patch.  The setting is loosely modeled on the small mining town I grew up in -- and who knows what's lurking in the water there?"

Adrian Ludens on "Life and Limb": I enjoy researching and writing weird western stories.  That research naturally led to the topic of the Civil War.  I had published a story a couple of years ago that involved Confederate zombies and I had so much fun that I wanted to revisit the era.  That period in history lends itself well to supernatural/horror fiction, in my opinion.  I read that the term 'Sawbones' originated during the Civil War.  Thanks to a combination of projectiles (not bullets but mini-balls) that did a lot of physical damage, and the lack of cleanliness and hygiene in the tent hospitals, many a soldier lost his life -- or at least a limb.  Doctors found it easier to actually saw the limb off rather than try to repair the extensive damage.  The title and the final sentence of the story popped into my head first, and from there I hammered out the rest of the tale with zeal.  My local critique group suggested some minor revisions, and the Blood Bound Books editors (who are always excellent about offering helpful critiques) asked me to clarify one key point.  I hope readers enjoy the end result."

Brad C. Hodson on "The Philosopher's Grove": "Ancient Greece and Rome have always been obsessions of mine.  I've also always been interested in the origin of words and concepts.  Reading about how our modern idea of 'demon' was just a corruption of the Greek idea of 'daemon' (a corruption that happened largely through an misinterpretation of the Bible when translated from Greek to Latin to Englilsh), I started to wonder what it would have been like if the corruption of the concept had been a very real thing.  Xenocrates (and later Aristotle) both wrote about evil spirits and how the daemon could be subverted, so it seemed a natural fit.  Plus I love the idea of taking famous figures like Aristotle and Menander that we think of as stuffy old men in pristine robes standing around all day and showing how they really were: lustful, arrogant, raging drunkards.  In other words, they were just like us."

Jack-o'-Spec -- an early taste of Halloween

Growing up, my favorite time of the year was autumn.  The turning of the leaves (and pressing them between wax paper with an iron), the short, crisp afternoons (dark by four, but seated on sofa to watch reruns of Lost in Space), and the mysterious, building excitement of All Hallows proved to be vivid and life-forming elements.  I have often written about a recurring dream in which I gaze toward the deep woods that brooded across the street from our little cottage in Windham, New Hampshire, and if enough leaves had fallen and the wind was blowing just right, I'd catch glimpses of the castle on the other side of those woods.  Now in all truth, there is a castle in Windham, and I did see it from time to time, but not from our front yard -- usually, you had to be driving back down the twisting snake of Range Road.  The Searles Castle, a famous landmark and former nunnery now turned high-end party destination, is one of the most-haunting motifs from the early years that made me the writer I am today.

I still love Halloween, so I was doubly stoked when my story "The Two Houses," about young and inquisitive brothers living in a haunted castle built directly over the site where another with a dubious past once stood, was accepted into Raven Electick's Jack-o'-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy.  My story "Creature Double-Feature" had previously appeared in Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, editor Karen A. Romanko's fabulous homage to Tinseltown, and earned several fairly glowing reviews, reason enough to be excited for inclusion in this newest RE anthology.  But autumn, Halloween...there's just something so pleasantly surreal about that time of year here in New England.  It's as wonderful to me now as it was then.

Lisa Morton, who also appeared in Cinema Spec, blurbed the following for this latest release:

"Reading Jack-o'-Spec is like stepping into a Halloween party that's been going on for 2,000 years. There's something delightfully pagan about these stories and poems, something that captures Halloween's dark, autumn atmosphere. Whether it's a mad scientist invoking Halloween ghosts on Mars, boys trapped in not one but two haunted houses, or a rich evocation of poetic seasonal spirits, Jack-o'-Spec has something for all Halloween lovers." -- Lisa Morton, Author, The Halloween Encyclopedia

Why, I do believe she referenced my tale in that glowing endorsement!

So pass the apple cider and candy corn -- and enjoy an early taste of Halloween courtesy of Jack-o'-Spec.