From the Bookshelf: ONE MAN'S CASTLE by J. Michael Major

There’s a moment early on in J. Michael Major’s brilliant crime novel, One Man's Castle, where it grows increasingly more difficult to breathe. The reader begins to believe he’s there, underneath that house, not simply observing the confrontation between tragic homeowner Walter Buczyno and unwanted return visitor Harris, the young punk who first broke into the Buczyno house when Walter’s wife Dottie lay dying in an upstairs bedroom. Down there, aware of the icy cold filtering in through the smashed basement window Harris used to access the house, and then standing outside with Riehle and Capparelli, the detectives assigned to the case when pipes frozen by Harris’s home invasion lead police to uncover human remains in the Buczyno crawlspace, thus forcing Walter to flee. The brutal Chicago winter is like another main character in Major’s fantastic page-turner, in which equal time is split between Buczyno’s flight and the detectives’ pursuit of a man they at first label a serial killer. A fantastic read, I couldn't put Mike's novel down -- it's the perfect novel for these increasingly short, dark days. It's a great read for any time of the year, in fact.

I first had the privilege of getting to know Mike after we both appeared in Splatterlands, an anthology of unapologetic, gore-soaked horror published by the fine folks at Grey Matter Press. Since, he's become a valued colleague and friend. It was my pleasure to sit down and talk with Major, who took home the 2014 Lovey Award for his novel (handed out at the annual Love is Murder conference), and which was just released in paperback from Worldwide Suspense, a division of Harlequin.

What is it about the crime drama/mystery genre that inspires you as a writer and reader?

The fact that it allows me a venue where I can explore issues that anger/irritate/frighten me in the context of a story. My ideas often come from a combination of something I have read or seen combined with a completely different event that I’ve watched on the news, and I think: If I twisted both of these ideas a certain way and combined them, what would be the result? The crime/mystery genre, like the horror genre, allows the writer to explore the various gray areas that define good versus evil in our complex and confusing modern world. And I try I present them in a way that readers can relate to. 

Please open the door and invite us into your writing space -- what would we see?

There are a couple of places in our house where I enjoy writing. One is at the desktop computer in the corner of our family room. I am surrounded by books written by my favorite authors, photos of my family, and a shelf of reference books when I need to consult something. There is a window above the shelf where I keep my Lovey award, though I usually keep the shades closed. In this space, the surrounding darkness helps me focus on the intense action and horrific scenes. My other favorite space is at the dining room table, where I often open the window to enjoy the view of our backyard and smell the scents of everyday living, like freshly mown grass or something cooking on the grill. Here is where I usually write the lighter, down-to-earth scenes in the story.

One Man’s Castle is an intense page-turner -- muscular writing, engaging story and characters. Share the back-story behind the creation of your novel with us.

Well, first, thank you very much for saying that it is an intense page-turner! I sincerely appreciate it. The novel started out as a combination of two short stories, “One Man’s Castle” and “The Grieving Puppeteer.” I had been writing short stories for many years. My writing friends kept pushing me to write a novel, and I kept fighting it, saying I didn’t have the time needed to write one. But after the short story of the same name was done, the characters of the detectives didn’t shut up in my head, so I knew there was something more there that my mind wanted to explore. The first thing I did was read and analyze how other authors expanded their stories without simply turning them into longer, padded versions. (One example was how Lawrence Block converted “By the Dawn’s Early Light” into When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.) In the OMC short story, Walter got off the plane and the detectives immediately apprehended him. So the first thing I needed to do was not have him get on the plane coming home. OK. Then where would he go? What would he do? The short story version also had the detectives already working together. How about if I showed them meeting for the first time? What are their back stories? What might their conflicts and motivations be? Then I took Walter’s story of pent-up, long-term rage and contrasted it with the initial shock of the puppeteer’s loss and his downward spiral into insanity, and wove them together. I wrote down all the ideas, then put them in order in an outline with chapters that only had a one or two sentence description. This gave me the general idea of what needed to happen and where, but allowed me the flexibility to discover other things during the writing of each chapter. (One example was when Walter stops along the Mississippi River to take a leak and sees something that is very important for later. I was very depressed at the time I was writing this chapter, and I realized that at this point in the story, Walter might consider suicide. So I used my own depression to enhance what he was feeling. I hadn’t planned on that at all, and it made the scene more vivid.) Like this, I treated each chapter as a short story, making it more bite-sized and less intimidating, checking each one off as I went along, until I put them all together and finally completed the novel.

(the hardcover release of ONE MAN'S CASTLE)

What’s the J. Michael Major creative process?

Sadly, “haphazard” is probably the best description. As I said earlier, the initial ideas come from a combination of two separate events that need to “percolate” in my head for a while. My day job is time consuming, and while I am able to jot down ideas or phrasings here and there, most of my actual writing is limited to Wednesdays and Sundays. I also can’t just sit down and crank out a few pages. Like a Method actor, I need to become the character -- what does he see, feel, smell -- before I can begin writing. So this takes time. Then there is the fact that I write out of order. I long ago learned that I don’t write linearly. I wasted a lot of time trying to write the way everyone wanted me to. I finally realized that if Chapter Four is next on the list, but Chapter Seven is playing in my head, then I had better work on Chapter Seven. All the kinks could be worked out later during revisions. That’s what word processing is for. Never think “Oh, I’ll remember how I wanted to write that when I get to it,” because you won’t. Staying in the moment keeps things fresh and detailed. Honestly, I wish I could say that I was more disciplined. But hopefully by reading this, those readers who have hectic lives and want to write a novel, but are overwhelmed by the process, will think: “Well, heck, if that unorganized guy can do it, so can I!”

What are you presently working on?

I am writing my second novel that uses the same detectives from One Man’s Castle, as well as a couple of short stories. Thanks for asking, and for this great opportunity. I had a blast!

BEHOLD -- NIGHTSCRIPT 1!

(A thing of beauty, in the hand of editor C.M. Muller)

A long time ago, I moved out of my first apartment and into my second, a sad, tiny hovel (some 350 square feet) in the back of a towering former mill baron's home that had been chopped up into fifteen units. The place was filthy and impossible to keep clean, boasted a scoping view of the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts from its back deck, and was, for fourteen months, home to me, my three cats, and my muse. I don't have a ton of great memories of that apartment; a few. But soon after buying our house thirty-one months ago, my imagination returned to that place on Park Street, given a kind of permission slip to go back delivered via a Halloween prompt handed out at our writers' group's weekly meeting. I mined some of the more bizarre memories and instances of my time there: the giant centipede with the black hide and blue circles dotting its multitude of legs that I killed early one morning, convinced I must be dreaming; the creepy basement where washer, dryer were located, and an enormous soaring staircase dismembered from inside the house led to nowhere; and the sad, constant wails of the stray cats that populated that part of the city. A longhand draft of "Strays" soon dashed itself off in the present, in the big New Englander I now call home, but the experience left me shaken, which I suppose is a great sign for any piece of writing, and which seemed to help my small tale concerning the strange goings-on at an apartment house in an unforgiving corner of the city -- on its first foray out the door to editor & publisher C.M. Muller, who was reading for an anthology of literary, weird fiction, the story sold (and brought with it one of the most humbling, uplifting acceptance letters of my writing career). This month, Nightscript 1 made its anticipated debut, and it's as beautiful to behold as beautifully strange on the inside. Many of my fellow Nightscript 1 authors shared the back-stories behind their wonderful stories.

Bethany W. Pope on "The Death of Yatagarasu": "I was walking my husband to work one morning last autumn when I saw a raggedy crow hop behind the fender of a car. I just saw him for a minute, a glimpse of draggled, blackish-gray and pink patches of skin, and then he was gone. We walked on, and I left my husband at the gates of his office. On the way home, alone this time, I saw the crow again. He was trying to cross the street and enter a large green park on the other side. He was too old and sick to fly, and his eyes had gone a vague and milky white, like antique marbles. He was so blind that he kept striking the tires of the cars that were parked by the curb. Crows can live to be about thirty, in captivity; this one looked older than the earth. I approached him, bent down, and lifted his light, hot body into my arms. His skin felt feverish, as though his heart were a kiln and the door was open, and he stank of rot and broken leaves. I carried him across the street like an infant, pressed against my breasts, thinking about all the crows I've met before, in life and myth. I thought of Yatagarasu, the three-legged Crow, who eats the searing fruit of the sun and brings the world to darkness. I thought about the death of flesh, and the death of gods. Everything ever made has an ending. In the park, there was a bare-limbed hawthorn in a patch of faded green. I laid the crow to rest beneath it, and I stayed with him while he shuddered, and died. Then, I went home and wrote my story."

Ralph Robert Moore on "Learn Not to Smile": "There’s a lot I could say about ‘Learning Not to Smile’, but let me limit myself to this:  Father Panik was a real person.  He founded Father Panik Village in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the late Thirties to provide affordable housing.  In the late Sixties, while working at a bank in Bridgeport (the “armpit of New England” according to Paul Newman), I was assigned the task of distributing food stamps at Father Panik, because no one else at the bank wanted to do it.  Once a month, I received a police escort to the distribution center, where I’d be locked inside a cage (for my own protection, because of the high murder rate), the front door of the distribution center would be unlocked by the police, the long lines would stream in, and I’d have to determine whether each request for food stamps was valid or not (there was a lot of fraud in the system.)   I met quite a few fascinating people during that time, bars between us.  And truly loved my job.  Father Panik Village was eventually demolished by the City of Bridgeport in 1993.  Too many murders."

Marc E. Fitch on "The Trees Are Tall Here": "The inspiration really came from two places: first, we had recently built a house and moved in. I would stand outside, particularly at night, and look up at the trees swaying in the wind and that is when the opening line of “The Trees are Tall Here,” came to me because the trees were really tall. This part of the neighborhood had been untouched over the years of slow development and so the trees surrounding our new home are tall and, under the right circumstances, menacing and deep. Secondly, I was greatly inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s long story, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” I’m a big fan of Blackwood. He was really reaching in his stories to understand what lies beyond the veil of reality. I was trying to capture some of that magic in “The Trees are Tall Here.” When CM sent me his acceptance letter I was quite happy to see that he, as well, could see the story for what it was meant to be."

David Surface on "The Sound That the World Makes": "‘The Sound That the World Makes’ was inspired by two memories from growing up in Kentucky. First, there was a Trappist monastery several miles from my hometown. I drove past it many times during night-rides in the country and always wondered what went on behind its walls. Some friends visited it on Christmas Eve and observed the monks’ midnight vigil ceremony, and their description of it stayed with me. The other memory is a film we had to watch during Drivers Education class in high school. It was basically a collection of car crashes with horrific injuries and fatalities, and was meant to be shown to adults with multiple DUI offenses to ‘scare them straight.’ Even if you closed your eyes, you could still hear the screams of the injured and dying. I’ve managed to reduce the power of that memory over the years, but it seemed like the kind of thing that could take over your whole life if you let it. Those two very different memories both found their way into this story, the way different elements come together in dreams.  (The monastery’s still there. The film, I hope, is dust by now.)"

Christopher Burke on "Fisher and Lure": "The story started from an image of a rocky beach with a dirty old boot on it as a visual prompt.  With that, I had a first sentence, to which I gave an alliterative sound that would help evoke a lonely beach/ocean setting and a rhythm that felt akin to walking.  Soon, a strange kid disrupts the reverie.  One theme that fascinates me is the existence of some degree of deception in language itself and in the way we narrate our lives to convince ourselves of our importance.  Similar to the boot in the story, the images and symbols to which we attach importance can never really be said to convey a whole truth, even within fictions dealing in gray areas.  Alienation and discomfort -- critical components of weird fiction -- are most present in real life when we realize that some fundamental assumption about our world has been turned on its head.  That is the sensation I wanted to be at the heart of ‘Fisher and Lure,’ in addition to having fun with an unpredictable character.  I truly did not know where he/they would go from one paragraph to the next until we got to the end."

Daniel Mills on "Below the Falls": "The story first took shape following a visit to the Emily Dickinson House in the spring of 2010. I am a great admirer of Dickinson’s work and was entirely enraptured by the elegance of the house itself and by the beauty of the grounds. All the same I could not but wonder how differently Dickinson’s life might have turned out had she been born in to a different social class, a less enlightened family, or even to a different time, one with little appreciation for poetry or beauty. These thoughts prompted me to write an early draft of the story in which a Dickinson-like narrator is forced into marriage against her will and subsequently confined to an institution. Years passed and I continued to revise the story until the narrator’s voice came to sound less like Dickinson’s and more like my own. This was unintentional but hardly surprising. Five years later, Dickinson’s voice has vanished from the tale completely. In its place we have the voice of a damaged outsider, victimized by circumstance, who strains after beauty in words where other avenues are denied her. The same is true, I suspect, of many horror writers -- including me."

Charles Wilkinson on "In His Grandmother's Coat": "I live on the Welsh Marches, an area of Great Britain that also inspired Arthur Machen, a writer of supernatural and weird fiction. My home is in Wales, but I can walk over the bridge to England  in two minutes. Borders and liminal places are frequent motifs in my fiction.  The mink coat in the title of my story is perhaps a memory of the one my mother owned. She wore it in the 1950s, but by the sixties it was seriously out of fashion for all the right reasons. It remained in her cupboard, soft to the touch, but neglected and somehow sinister. 

John Claude Smith on "The Cooing": "The story came to me while in Rome, Italy, during my summer stay there a year or two ago.  My girlfriend, who lives there, and I were on vacation -- yeah, I know, isn’t being in Rome vacation enough? -- and at some point in our explorations, I heard a cooing sound coming from an abandoned building.  That’s all it sometimes takes.  I started writing the tale and realized I wanted to take a more subtle approach, something I look to explore more often.  I felt, after I got it going, it had a vibe that related to English horror tales, perhaps.  But…the tale takes place in the southwest of the USA.  Yes, that is correct: I was in Italy, writing a somewhat English horror tale set in the USA.  Also of note, there was one paragraph CM Muller suggested we delete as, well, even if I was attempting something more quiet, yet weird -- the final images --  I had…overdone it (as I am wont to do) in the deleted paragraph.  After I read it with CM’s suggestion, I knew the tale was now as it was meant to be."

Jason A. Wyckoff on "On Balance": "‘On Balance’ is my first story written on commission. Yeah, okay—it was commissioned by my mom. As I suspect is the case with other writers, I am not the only storyteller in my family. So when my mother rediscovered the novelty gift which bears her name, she asked various relatives to use it as the inspiration for a piece of short fiction. It made the rounds and eventually came to me, where it sat on a shelf for…I don’t know…four years? In the interregnum I began writing, er, ‘professionally’, and decided I should pass it on to the next victim, reasoning, ‘I love you, mum, but I don’t have time to write anything I can’t at least try to sell.’ Naturally, having made the decision, the inspiration for a story came to me. What if I couldn’t get rid of it? What if it kept coming back? Moreover:  What if it wasn’t a personal totem or a cursed object but instead its recurring appearance resisted interpretation -- even though it must mean something? What if you received an envelope with the return address ‘YOUR FATE’ and you couldn’t open the bloody thing? What might that do to a person?"

Patricia Lillie on "The Cuckoo Girls": "A monster who comes at you, teeth bared in a full-on assault is terrifying, but you know they're coming for you. You have something to fight. What about the monsters you don’t see? The ones who blend in? Monsters who change the course of your life without you even knowing? Those are the monsters that scare me. (Also, overheard -- and misheard -- conversations among strangers in public places are great story starters.)."

Kristi DeMeester on "Everything That's Underneath": "‘Everything That’s Underneath’ started with the idea of the door and the doppelgänger but quickly become something else altogether. While I was writing it, I was having my own health problems. For a few weeks, I’d had tingling and numbness in my left arm and hand that radiated up into my shoulder, neck, face, and tongue. Something that I thought was a strained muscle. It wasn’t until a few months after I sold this story, that my own diagnosis came in. Looking back, this story is strangely prophetic. As if my mind had an understanding that I shared the same disorder as Benjamin before any doctor made the official call. Looking back now, it feels almost as if I wrote the entire story while in the throes of some fever dream, and the story sits heavy in my bones, but every word is mine."

Summer Lovin' -- Had Me A Blast

(Arrival to Anthocon 4, with the luminous Roxanne Dent and the
equally brilliant Judi Ann Calhoun)

On a balmy August night in 1980, I exited the rear doors of the long-gone Salem Tri-Cinema and my life was forever changed. I'd just taken in the movie Xanadu with my circle of high school friends and was so inspired by the flick's theme -- that our dreams are worth pursuing if we have the backbone to try -- that my life was forever changed. An enormous full moon lit the sky. The air was sweet and intoxicating. As we negotiated the rear of the cinema and ambled toward the parking lot, I had that Eureka! moment: I loved to write, and I was going to be a writer, both end of story and the beginning. Thirty-five years later (twenty-five of them as a published writer), and especially now that I've gotten so unthinkably older, I've come to appreciate the summer months both for the warmth and also for keeping me young at heart. Soon, it will be winter, and I'll be negotiating around the house like something out of Toulouse Lautrec.

This summer actually kicked off early with a spell of gorgeous sunny weather at the start of April that ran for a full week. During that time, I finished a first draft of my M/M high fantasy novel, Kingdoms Be Damned, seated outside on the sun porch. As winter waned, one night while cooking dinner I challenged myself to come up with my own genre. What I created was "Sweat Punk" -- a futuristic storyline in which humans had willingly sold off soul for technology and longed to reclaim what they'd renounced. In late April, I put pen to page and began work on a novella, Sweat Punk: A Love Story. I was instantly sucked into the world I'd created and specifically the love between my two leads. For months while working on the story in the background, I found myself walking about in a daze, eager to return to them and their seemingly-impossible situation. I wrapped the first draft in early July. Like Kingdoms, I soon plan to begin computer edits on the project for submission.

In May, I hit the Big 5-0. One of my fondest goals for my fiftieth year on Spaceship Earth was to write my Space:1999 novel Metamorphosis. I put pen to page on my birthday and, like Sweat Punk: A Love Story, wrote it in the background, throughout the summer. The experience was so uplifting, so ridiculously fun, as I drew the courageous men and women of Moonbase Alpha into the biggest space battle in the history of the universe. I began reading the novel at writers' group meetings and, on those nights, was a kid again.

In early June, I headed to the fourth Anthocon, a world-class conference held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Anthocon saw the launch of several anthologies containing my short stories, including the stellar Dreamscapes into Darkness, where my tale "One More" is cozied up against a reprint by D. H. Lawrence, and From the Corner of Your Eye: A Cryptids Anthology. Most exciting was the release of my new book, Tales From the Robot Graveyard, which sold out within two hours of my arrival to the dealer's room. I managed to escape from Anthocon with one copy, signed the rest (along with a plethora of other anthologies), and gave two open mic readings. My two writers' groups -- Berlin Writers' Group here in the north and Nashua Writers' Group from the south -- were well represented, and over a dozen of us lunched together at the classic diner attached to the hotel next door, sight of the original con.

Most of my summer days began with iced coffee and blueberry bubble water in my Writing Room, but soon transitioned to the sun porch, my summer de facto home office. There, bookended by cats, I wrote a new horror-themed screenplay on spec, numerous short stories, and, during the first half of July, half of a new novel, which I plan to complete next month during National Novel Writing Month. I found myself besieged by new ideas from every direction -- while taking in the Chris Pratt event movie Jurassic World with friends on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, three ideas latched onto me, leaving me scrambling for pen and paper (despite having an excellent memory for details, I still don't trust my brain enough to recall everything).  I sold numerous short stories in a multitude of genres to various magazines and anthologies, and enjoyed the long, laid back (but hardly lazy) days.

(screen capture from the feature film Brutal Colors, due to be released soon)

On September the third, we paid off our mortgage on our house, Xanadu -- lovingly named after that movie from my formative youth, a place where dreams come true. As I write this report on my summer adventures, a cold wind is blowing down from the mountains, knocking leaves from trees, a clear promise of winter. My plan for the cold months is to do what I did throughout the warm: live, write, and dream. And among those winter dreams, surely, will be ones concerning a return of the greenery outside, the balmy summer breezes, and the upsurge of passion I always experience when the days grow longer and brighter.

September 2015 Writers' Group Party at Xanadu

For ten years now, between our first house, our celebrated former apartment, and our new house, Xanadu, we've hosted an annual September party for friends and members of my writers' group. This year's event, in addition to marking a decade of great memories (and, often, some great writing prompts for the reading portion of the fun, which have resulted in numerous story sales), was particularly special: it signaled the end of the mortgage on our sweet old home, which has become quite the literary destination in New Hampshire's North Country. In addition to the usual fun (read: spectacular food and first-rate readings), I planned to do a ceremonial burning of the mortgage papers (photocopies, of course), and to share our once-in-a-lifetime fortune with our friends.

The brilliant writer Grace Paley once quipped that in order to be a writer, "keep a low overhead". I never forgot that spark of genius and have, for twenty-five years, done just that, striving to live a happy life, within my means and the means of a working writer. After a wonderful writing retreat with friends from my Southern New Hampshire writers' group in October of 2012 to the northern part of the state, I found this house.  When the price dropped 10 K overnight, we held a family meeting -- if we loved the house, we'd make an offer, relocate 150 miles from one front door to another, and begin a new life, with a low overhead.  Thirty months after closing, we made the final payment. The house became ours. A house that writing built. Thanks, Grace, for the inspiration and impetus!

Back at the May party, I handed out fortune cookies from our local buffet to all guests -- the reading prompt for September's gathering. Writers were urged to use the fortunes inside to craft their stories, poems, and novel chapters. I cracked open my fortune cookie and, wonder of wonders, the fortune read: "You will be recognized and honored as a community leader". The back, prompting me to learn Chinese, read: kan bing (phonetic) -- "to see a doctor."  In May, I had just begun penning my Space:1999 fan fiction novel, Metamorphosis and figured I'd found the impetus to speed along -- 'leader' translating perfectly into 'commander', aka John Koenig, Commander of Moonbase Alpha, with a liberal dose of Doctor Helena Russell mixed in. I worked on the novel in the background throughout the course of the summer while writing to other deadlines, and read Chapter 11 when my turn in the rotation arose.

Eighteen guests arrived on a gloomy, rainy Sunday, September the 13th (coincidentally, a significant day in the Space:1999 universe -- the date Earth's moon is blasted out of orbit, kicking off the lunar odyssey for the 311 courageous men and women of Moonbase Alpha). It had poured the previous Saturday night. The house sparkled, and my office was immaculate following my end-of-summer cleaning/organizing/filing marathon.  My backup plan for the ceremonial mortgage burning was to hold it on our sun porch. But the sun broke through right when we planned to light the matches, and sunlight rained down. We held the burning on our front lawn, with its million-dollar view of the Androscoggin River and surrounding mountains (a friend videoed the ceremony, which included a reading of Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan by our group's famous poet, Esther M. Lieper-Estabrooks, but the video got corrupted). Despite a stiff breeze, the matches lit, and the mortgage papers went up in smoke.

The readings were, as always, spectacular -- I love the idea of fortune cookies as source material for inspiration and writing prompts! The food, equally stunning. Among the buffet offerings, which stretched around the kitchen as is always the case, were: baby meatballs, chicken and dumplings, homemade potato salad, veggie platters and dip, baked crab dip and crackers, a luscious Jello salad, homemade soup, chips, cole slaw, pumpkin tarts, donuts, cherry pie, soda/coffee/tea, candies, and the luscious cake made for the occasion by Cote's Cakes and Cupcake Bar, one of the best cakes I've ever tasted. We'll definitely be using them again -- our annual Christmas party, theme as yet undetermined, to be held on December the 12th, in the not-too-distant future.

BEHOLD! FROM THE CORNER OF YOUR EYE, A CRYPTIDS ANTHOLOGY

Growing up as an imaginative boy in then-rural Windham, New Hampshire, my youth was haunted by grainy photographic images of the Loch Ness Monster and the famous Patterson-Gimlin film, reportedly capturing a female Sasquatch in motion. I've often emoted that a love for creature double-features and the classic SF TV shows of the time inspired me to become a writer, but Nessie and other lore like Greek mythology are to be thanked -- or blamed -- as well.  From the beginning, I've been lured toward the fringes of the modern world, captivated by the one only able to be glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

On a balmy summer weekend in 2014, my good friend Douglas, one of the mission controllers in charge at Great Old Ones Publishing, drove up to our home for a weekend of writing, reading, and dining. During that time, I mentioned that I thought I knew the subject for his company's next big anthology project: Cryptids -- those life forms real or only dreamed up that inhabit the shadowy outer limits of our modern, clinical world. The project was saluted and made manifest in the gorgeous, beastly form of From the Corner of Your Eye: A Cryptids Anthology, and I put pen to paper to write my first draft of a submission based upon Iceland's celebrated giant ice worm, Lagarfljótsormur. I'd been fascinated with this particular cryptid after video surfaced in 2012, possibly confirming the creature's existence. I dashed off my story, edited it, and submitted. "Visibility" was accepted, and appears alongside a fantastic carnival of tales selected and edited by the stellar David F. Kramer. Many of my co-authors shared the back-stories behind their excellent stories.

Pedro Iniguez on "The Night Has Teeth": "Ferocious, cold, unforgiving, dangerous: these aren’t just words that describe the dreaded Akhlut; these are words that describe Barrow, Alaska. In my story, an ancient wolf creature the Inuit people called the Akhlut, terrorizes the unfortunate jailed occupants of a Barrow correctional facility. Claustrophobic much? Barrow, Alaska, the northern-most city in the United States, is a secluded, freezing, and unforgiving place just as dangerous as any creature that could have been imagined. It’s reachable only by airplane. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. That’s the kind of confining, suffocating setting I wanted to place this story; a place where the land is as likely to kill you as its deadly creatures of myth and superstition. Toss those elements in with incarceration and you get our protagonist who finds himself in a very unfavorable position. As the story says, it’s like being stuck in ‘a prison within a prison.’"

Sam Knight on "Running From Thunder": "Growing up, I watched any and everything I could about cryptids. It was rare to see much other than the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, and when there was something else it was often so hokey even a little kid like me knew it was bunk. But one story stuck out. In the 1970s a boy who claimed (and supposedly had witnesses and injuries to support the claim) to have been picked up by a giant bird and carried until he fought his way free. When I heard about the incident, I was about the same age as the boy and shocked at the thought of being carried off by a bird! An attack from above truly was indefensible. And the idea, when compared to things like lizard men and aliens, seemed plausible. Then I found out the American Indians had legends about them, calling them Thunder Birds. If a cryptid could be real, it was this one! To this day, I find myself watching the sky. When the opportunity to write about a cryptid came up, there was only one choice for me! In fact, I recently did it again."

Jon Carroll Thomas on "Follow the Mothman": "My family is rooted in West Virginia, not far from where the Mothman was originally sighted. I have long been aware of the creature even if I was not entirely familiar with the legend. Then I read John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies. It was an odd book and raised more questions for me than it answered. But it did get my imagination going. The main character of my story evolved from Keel’s descriptions of Indrid Cold, a cryptid in his own rite and arguably the basis for the ‘Men In Black.’ I began to imagine the Mothman from his perspective and a quirky and dark mystery took shape. Around the same time, I also began reading the ‘Silver John’ stories of Manly Wade Wellman and I think a little of that came through as well. Though there is no firm resolution to my story, I like thinking that my character is still out there and having strange adventures."

Eric Nash on "Poseidon's Standing Stones": "Holidays to the coast as a kid had me searching the flat-line horizon for sea-monsters. I found none, so I imagined them. Years later, I imagined one again. I then gave her a place to live, a modest social life including friends from English legend, and of course, a leisure interest. Every monster needs a hobby. All this, I thought, ought not to stretch one’s imagination too far since individuality is embraced by the society I live in and neighbourhoods have become extremely transient. Maybe she would live unnoticed in a town, possibly making weekly trips to the Benefits Office. Maybe she would be saddened by the lament of the gull or be comforted by the gentle shush of the sea. Maybe she would find love. Or maybe not. And here we are. How was I to know things were going to happen as they did?  After all, she is a cryptid and they’re supposed to stay hidden, aren’t they? Something about the corner of one’s eye, or is that just myth?"

T. Fox Dunham on "Dark Waters": "Futility is 'Dark Waters', my story in Cryptids: From the Corner of Your Eye. I selected the Kraken to champion this nihilistic vision, my paralyzing fear materialized through cancer. I dread that no matter what stones I throw into the ocean that the ripples will always be drowned out by lunar-cast tides. Humans can work with the sea, but they can never tame it, and this symbolizes the cosmic chaos that controls our lives. I wrote it in October sitting at Starbucks in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. It stormed all day -- the first real cold rain as summer truly cooled into the barren and freezing season. It was a one-day write -- an obsession that forced me to compose from early morning to late evening, finishing each draft, editing then getting it out before my fiancée picked me up. We planned to be joined in marriage the next summer, and I struggled to get comfortable with the idea that lymphoma would allow me a normal life. The cancer rages with tentacles -- an overwhelming force that cannot be conquered or really influenced. Control over our lives is an illusion. This is why I made my character’s uncle a defrocked priest after he faced the apathy of his god. And he has to see it -- the divinity in all its fury and rage, destroying islands in the body of a terrible beast. We were married in Scotland in May -- a dream. My cancer has returned as I feared. I was just diagnosed, though not with lymphoma. It could become blood cancer. We don’t know. We swim in these Dark Waters now."

David Smith on "The Beast of London": "Every few years there is a story in the news of big cats being sighted in England. These carnivores are not native to our shores, and we’re certainly not comfortable with their presence. It sounds fantastical, like Nessie or Bigfoot, but in fact some of these animals have been real. I was intrigued by how a modern city like London would respond to such an animal. I knew for certain, we could never co-exist with it…Shortly after the story was published, an American dentist slaughtered a big cat purely for pleasure, and was subsequently vilified around the world. Most of the horror was expressed by people who live in cities, in which almost every aspect of nature has been obliterated; so I guess it’s much easier to hate an individual than it is to accept responsibility for our collective impact. You don’t need a gun to be responsible for the death of the natural world. So I hope this story briefly makes you step back and wonder: just how close will you allow the Lions to get to your front door?"

(Editor Kramer, left; Cover artist and contributor E.G. Smith, right)

Ken Hueler on "River Twice": I’ve never been to Japan, so immediately I decided to move the kappa to U.S. Previously I had seen an episode of River Monsters where the host, Jeremy Wade, examined the kappa myth (probably giant salamanders -- and those suckers are HUGE), so I snuck his name into the story.

Kristi Petersen Schoonover on "Stones": "One of my favorite themes to work with is loss, and the profound and sometimes maddening sadness which accompanies it; I’m always looking for fresh ways to explore the impact of tragedy on an individual. The Pope Lick Monster, who convinces his victims to leap from a railroad trestle to their deaths, is the embodiment of the broken heart; he either drives us to destruction, or he simply leeches our will to live. His legend -- with a few twists of my own, such as the crying of barred owls I visited at an animal rescue center in winter and the odd piles of stones that as a kid I used to find in the woods of upstate New York -- gave me the opportunity to pen a unique take on what happens when we cannot overcome that monster known as grief."

B. David Spicer on "Rougarou": "When deciding which cryptid to write a story about, I decided early on that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which has almost certainly been extinct in the United States since the 1930s, had to be in the story. Like Bigfoot, people claim to see the Ivory-billed Woodpecker all the time, but it can’t ever be verified. So I decided that my story would involve a group of people looking for it, but finding something else... But what else? Knowing the bird’s historic range, I figured that any relict population would have to be in some remote area, like the bayou country of Louisiana. I dug into the folklore of that region and found the Rougarou, a werewolf-like creature based on the French legends of the loup-garou. So I had a monster and a reason for a bunch of hapless city-folk to be isolated in an unfamiliar place, both classic elements of horror stories. I added a Cajun guide with a past connection to the Rougarou, which tied the two parts of the story together. My path to ‘Rougarou’ was convoluted, but I liked the results when I finally got the idea settled."

From the Bookshelf: ACADIA EVENT by Mj Preston

Artist Marty Croft discovers that escaping his criminal past isn’t possible when crime boss Gordon Shamus forces him into one last mission.  Said mission is a run along dangerous ice roads in Canada’s frigid northern clime to collect diamonds from Acadia Mine where, unknown to Marty and Shamus alike, a discovery has been made: alien corpses and technology in the very heart of the richest of the diamond deposits.  Scientists brought in to examine the long dead ETs awaken the alien menace, reactivating the plans of the Skentophyte Collective, who take over the mine and open a gateway to their home planet.  Hundreds of Skent swarm through and begin to harvest the bones of humans and animals alike -- their food source and the imperative for a full-scale Skent invasion of the Earth.  Unless Marty and a core group of misfit heroes can stop alien and human enemies alike.

Author Mj Preston creates an epic page-turner in his newest release, Acadia Event, with Canada’s frozen north as the setting and the Earth as the ultimate prize for whichever side wins the war.  I first had the pleasure of reading Preston's work when I accepted his submission into Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification, which I edited for the fine folks at Great Old Ones Publishing (Preston also did fine cover art for the anthology).  As with his Mummies submission, I found myself drawn into the story from the first page, seduced by Preston’s muscular writing and knack for telling a vast tale involving a large and memorable cast of characters.  Fans of classic King should read Acadia Event -- as should anyone interested in a great novel.  Preston is an author with a bright future, and it was my pleasure to speak with him about his adventures, both in his real and literary lives.

Takes us into those arctic days -- as a real life ice road driver, just how cold did it really get up there?

Temperatures vary. I now work and live in Alberta, which in itself is a cold prairie climate, but up there the cold is extremely dangerous and unforgiving. I’ve seen temperatures dip to -70 Celcius. Metal, plastic, even exposed human skin, becomes brittle in those temperatures. Machinery has to be left running and can only be shut off for short periods, or it runs the risk of not starting.  As portrayed in the book, there is a ‘no man left behind policy’, because doing otherwise could impose an unintended death sentence on the individual. You have to understand all of these things before operating in an environment like this and you have to have the gear to survive. I had a basic understanding of operating in cold climates, because I was a soldier for 12 years and did annual winter warfare training.  As Big Garney Wilson says to Marty, ‘There is no hunkering down and waiting for the mechanics.’ North of the 60^th Parallel and just below the Arctic Circle there are no mechanics, just seasoned drivers who know how to switch out an alternator or how to use a torch to heat up a frozen airline or switch out a clogged fuel filter. I was in awe of these ‘Men of the North’ and how they treated such extreme conditions as just another day on the road. These guys are a breed all on their own, some are outright misfits, poetically spewing expletives and sharpshooting each other with sarcasm, but when you are in trouble they don’t hesitate to gear up and get into the cold. In one instant during my second season on the ice we had a guy spin out on a portage at night and he asked for help. A driver named Vladimir suited up and set out to help him before the warning of skulking wolves went out over the radio. This was a 1000 meter jaunt. Before Vlad knew it, he was surrounded by a pack of wolves and had to face down the alpha of that pack. All he had was a flashlight and his wits. What Vlad did was keep the Alpha in his sights and kept yelling at it until he reached the other driver’s truck. When he climbed inside, the other driver said something like, ‘Vlad, what the hell are you doing out there? Don’t you know there’s a pack of wolves running around?’ Vlad related this to me through a hoarse voice up at the Ekati Diamond Mine. I was transfixed as he acted out the event, but I was also inspired by the story. What a cool Ice Road Story he had.

Your novel is fantastic.  Please share with us your process as a writer.  What’s a typical Mj Preston day like?

Thank you, feedback on Acadia Event has been very humbling. Process? Hmmm… I approach writing without much forethought. I don’t do outlines or strategize, I just sit down, touch my fingers to the keyboard and with a little luck I end up going down the rabbit hole. I don’t go in completely blind, but usually I find that where I intend to go and where I end up in a story are two completely different places. That in itself is great byproduct of this craft. In a way, as I am sure you will agree, it’s like being the first eyewitness on the scene. Typically, my day involves a lot of driving in every imaginable climate. Summers are wonderful, no black ice, no fog and no whiteout. Driving, although time consuming, offers up a long periods to think. Many of the action scenes in Acadia were played out in my minds-eye as drove to and from the Northwest Territories and by the time I got those scenes down into print I had a wide screen movie playing out in my head. Most of my writing happens between 7:00 and 11:00 a.m. in the morning. A lot of Acadia Event was written over the steering wheel of a Kenworth, sometimes in the most unusual places. I had another driver ask me where I found the time to write this book and I replied, ‘When you saw me with my laptop open, I wasn’t surfing porn or playing on Facebook, I was writing.’

(Preston reading at 2015's Anthocon Conference)

Share with us some of the back-story to Acadia Event.  How did the novel develop? 

Back in 2012, I was promoting my debut novel, The Equinox and rethinking my career options. In fact my whole life was in turmoil, I’d been laid off, I had family issues and I was pretty disillusioned. A friend of mine, who has a cameo in the book told me I needed to come out and run the ice. That even if this was my swan song for trucking, I needed to do this one last hurrah. I felt akin to Marty Croft, because I really didn’t want to be there and in essence I was escaping my troubles when I set out for the NWT. My savior was my pal Brad Hardy, who like ‘Big Garney Wilson’ got me up that Ingraham Trail to the ice road. Marty’s terror as he races with the devil up the Ingraham and the Inuksuk trails really is my story. I was terrified, felt every pull and turn, climbing those icy grades like a roller coaster and being shoved down the other side toward impossible curves. I did twenty-one trips up the Ingraham that first season, it took me about seventeen trips to stop being terrified and the whole season to get comfortable. Aside from being scared to death, I was inspired by the north and as we beat it up and down that ice road, while Brad flogged my first novel, I began to feel the tug of my muse. By the time the season was over, I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go with the story and having actually been up there it was a lot easier to formulate.

Is there another ice road tour of duty planned?  In other words, do you have any future plans to continue the story of Marty, et al, and the Skent invasion?

I don’t know if there is a sequel anywhere in the future. I was asked about that with my first book as well. As it stands now, I have no intentions of writing a sequel, but reserve the right to change my mind. I may revisit Acadia in a short story or a novella, but who knows?  We may not have seen the last of the Skentophyte Collective. It certainly is an inviting universe and they are now permanently embedded into my psyche. If James Cameron stops ignoring my messages and makes a blockbuster out of Acadia Event, I’ll be happy to write a couple more books about the invading Skent.

(Mj and Mummies)

What are you presently working on?

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a psychological horror novella called Highwayman.  It is the story of a serial killer with ambitions of infamy, but it is also a lead in to my next novel tentatively called 4. The new book 4 is a police procedural horror, with no extraterrestrial or paranormal elements, but I still consider it a horror novel.  As much as I hate comparisons, I would say it is in the vein of Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs. I hope to have it out sometime in early 2016, but every time I set a deadline I end up revising that date. So, with in mind, I’ll say, ‘Coming Soon.’  

BEHOLD: THE IDOLATERS OF CTHULHU!

In 2011, it was my absolute pleasure to edit the anthology, The Call of Lovecraft, which contained an exceptional story by author H. David Blalock, "The Shed".  On a gray, cold Friday earlier this past March, I received an IM from Mr. Blalock, inviting me to submit to his new project for the fine folks at Alban Lake Publishing, Lovecraftiana with a unique theme.  For his The Idolaters of Cthulhu, stories would be told from the perspective of the heavies, those villainous humans and anti-heroes who stand vigilant for the return of ancient cosmic evils, aiding their cause. In fairly short time (the very day, as I recall), I had the concept of my story: a young girl wandering a stretch of stormy New England beach collecting shells who discovers a jeweled relic straight out of Innsmouth -- a crown meant only for her head. But as I wrote the first draft of "Breakwater", the story became so much more than I expected, a tale of survival and the ends a person or species is willing to go in order to prevail in the face of extinction.

I submitted "Breakwater" and soon heard back from H. David -- the story was accepted into the anthology, which would feature a cover by the brilliant artist Michael Bielaczyc and a reprint by the master himself, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", one of my all time Lovecraft favorites. Idolaters recently arrived in my mailbox, looking as beautiful if not more so than imagined.  It was my pleasure to speak to many of my fellow authors in the Table of Contents, who shared the back-stories behind their stories.

Harding McFadden on "Casual Blasphemies": "Of all the various critters that Lovecraft littered his stories with, I suppose that my favorite have always been the inhabitants of Innsmouth.  When I stumbled across the guidelines for this anthology, it seemed an obvious choice to try to write about them, and their forms of worship, as, to be quite honest, trying to wrap my mind around many of the other followers seemed to be quite beyond me.  In a great old movie, a character says, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’  I try to stay humble by knowing mine.  As for the rest, you can blame an introduction that Robert W. Price wrote a decade ago for an Innsmouth collection.  In it he states his belief that old Marsh might not have been a villain, but rather someone trying to make the best of an impossible situation.  Coming at it from an atheist point of view, he saw the interbreeding of Innsmouthers with  Deep Ones as a way to postpone, or even eliminate, the coming destruction of his people.  From that beginning, I tried to imagine what a worship would look like then.  It wouldn’t be something drastically different from any random church gathering, though with a different sort of gospel than we would use.  To that, add in a bit of religious fanaticism, and eventual patricide, and there you have it.  In truth, I forgot all about writing this story until a few hours before the deadline, so I started pounding my head against a wall while knocking it out with all haste.  That it was purchased at all was an astounding thing to me.  I hope that you all enjoy it."

DJ Tyrer on "Fane of the Faceless God": "Generally, cultists in mythos stories are portrayed as evil and crazed, which is fair enough, given that most such stories are told from the point of view of (relatively) sane humanity, and, indeed, it stands to reason that some such people will literally have had their minds broken by what they have learnt. But, just as not every terrorist or serial killer is some froth-mouthed loony, I am fascinated by the idea of cultists who are rational. Such people, like Celia in my story, would be perfectly capable of functioning within human society to further their plans. But, in addition, they do not see themselves as evil or insane, even though their actions and motivations might seem so to others. Just as the Great Old Ones are incomprehensible to mere humanity, functioning as they do on an entirely different scale, so the rational cultist functions on a different level to normal humans, making a meeting of minds all but impossible, yet tantalisingly close. Entities like the Great Old Ones produce a frisson of fear because they remind us of the limits of our knowledge and power. In contrast, those cultists who are a step beyond the human remind us that our humanity may be little more than a veneer and make us question just what makes us human."

Robert Krog on "The Ones Who Remember": "H. David Blalock told me about the Lovecraft homage anthology sometime back, probably in 2014 at one convention or another, I'm not sure which one.  I told him I wasn't really a big fan of Lovecraft and that I wasn't all that familiar with his works.  David is persistent though and asked me more than once to write a story for it.  Since I'm a big fan of David and his work, I gave in sometime earlier this year.  I'm not sure when or from whence the idea for the story came to me, but come it did.  The villain of the piece was inspired by some of the lifeless partners for whom I worked back when I had an office job.  I am sure that many of them were sociopaths or psychopaths that would have welcomed the coming of a Great Old One to destroy the world, aiding and abetting it in all ways that they could. There's something soul deadening about the pursuit of money and power and something maddening about the meticulous routine one must endure at times to pursue such.  Thus the villain, Mr. Rains was born for my story.  The heroine, Jessica, could be one of any number of lovely fangirls I've seen wandering conventions dressed in costume, combined with one of any number of competent office workers I've known.  The rest was research.  Lovecraft's work was equally inspiring.  Challenged by my wife, I did personally test the bit about the duct tape.  It works." 

         

Brian Fatah Steele on "A Better View": "I love themed mythos anthologies. I love how there’s this scaffolding in place that allows the author to build completely unique stories around them, exploring whatever themes and concepts fit in. Lovecraft purposely created in a vague manner, and that all allows us these decades later to continue on his legacy.  Anyone who is steeped in the mythos has a favorite Great Old One, and mine has always been Nyarlathotep. I gravitate towards The Crawling Chaos for a number of reasons, but mostly because this entity has no set form and is often portrayed as an emissary that interacts with humans. Of all in the ‘pantheon,’ this creature seems to have the most complicated agenda. Here to kill us, enslave us, enlighten us? Ultimately, for we feeble humans, it doesn’t matter. Sure, there’s going to be those worshippers up until The Stars Align, but what about after? The planet has been ravaged by the return of the Great Old Ones, and any survivors would be shaken to the core by such sights. These broken, battered people would need a sign, something to give them hope. But what is ‘hope’ to an ancient alien deity from the other side of the universe? They are now free to wander the earth, playing with us as they see fit. We could now be anything to soldiers, to slaves, to toys, to food, to fuel. We are so far below them, we couldn’t try to hope to understand. But we would try anyhow."

Jonathan Dubey on "Arms of the Gods": "I'm not going to lie and say I've read everything H.P. Lovecraft has ever written, though I know a lot of people have. I can with a clear conscience say that I've enjoyed what I've read. I've noticed patterns in his short stories; he almost always writes from first person point of view, almost always male, and almost never gives a character description or name of his protagonist. I believe that he did this in a way to make the reader feel like they were in the story, like, this guy could be me. I like the idea of making a reader feel like they're part of the action. In Idolaters of Cthulhu, we were asked to submit stories from the perspective of a villain -- someone wanting to bring about the evil from beyond. I wanted to do justice to Lovecraft's style, and still give you a story that you would care about and hopefully scare you a little. I chose to make the protagonist a woman, but keep the rest of the pattern. All that was left was motive. Why would someone choose to do these horrible things? In my mind there is only one true reason, one excuse: Love."

Amanda Hard on "Fatwa": "‘Somebody will always be incensed’ was the prompt one of my writing teachers sent out last spring. From that, I built a short tale of a writer who accidentally damned himself to Hell by channeling the lyric poetry of fallen angels. I worked on the seed idea for a few months, but I couldn’t resolve what seemed to be the injustice of the poet’s fate. I found my solution when I considered what might happen if Lovecraft’s Starry Wisdom cult survived into today; if its followers accepted predestined paths determined by a significantly ‘higher’ power. A fatwa, in Islam, is a legal ruling for a specific case, similar to a Supreme Court decision, but not actually legally binding. The ruling is left up to the individual to accept or dismiss, based on his or her faith and moral compulsions. In this story I wanted to question both destiny and faith, to swap them around and investigate whether either one is behind the actual mechanism of art-making. While I think it’s something of a cheat to have one’s protagonist ‘accidentally’ call up the Great Old Ones (almost always through his or her incredibly irresponsible decisions and general negligence) I do sympathize with my character’s obsession with notating the music of the cosmic spheres and  anticipating the terrible promise of a future of his own making."

E. Dane Anderson on "The Meat Junkies": "The original idea for ‘The Meat Junkies’ came about one late night while driving a friend home. Elliot Avenue in Seattle is an odd mix of light industrial, fast food places and a lot of other assorted businesses, almost none of which are open at night.  The near quarter-mile stretch of street can be quite deserted after dark. At the south end of the road is an oddly placed ice cream shop, situated nowhere near decent parking, and like the rest of the area totally deserted at night. My friend and I asked each other if either of us had ever seen the shop open. We hadn’t. I quickly joked that it must be a front for something. My friend immediately said ‘aliens!’ And taking a cue from the old Peter Jackson film, Bad Taste I upped the ante and said that it was a secret way station for aliens who were trading in human meat. After I had dropped her off, the story started to form in my head. The aliens became Shoggoths with all their human loathing characteristics. The setting changed slightly to a much bleaker type of urban decay landscape. And in the forty minutes it took me to drive home, I had the rest of the story outline worked out. Originally, it would have ended with a black-ops team showing up and using a spray chemical to disintegrate the Shoggoths. But in keeping with the Lovecraftian tradition, I thought it best that the humans lose."