BEHOLD: PENTAGONAL SEXTET!

At the end of March, as I readied to depart for a four-day stay at the luxury retreat center When Words Count, I received one of those rare and wonderful invitations asking me to submit not one but five short stories for a project by the fine folks at Great Old Ones Publishing. GOOP have been wonderful to write and edit for -- I've been involved with numerous of their quality publications, including their Mummy anthology, Bugs: Tales That Creep, Slither, and Crawl, and my beloved Tales From the Robot Graveyard. And what writer would say no to such a fabulous invitation -- to be part of a release meant to showcase some of the publisher's most celebrated writers? I wouldn't have long to be part of Pentagonal Sextet, about one month to gather up and submit my five tales. On my way out the door to Vermont and WWC, I stuffed two additional note cards with new story ideas jotted on them in with fresh folders and blank lined paper, and figured I'd heap them onto the pile of what I already planned to write while camped out in the Gertrude Stein Salon and my accommodations up in the Hemingway Suite.

My first afternoon at WWC, one of my proposed stories, "The Right to Drive" (about a near-future society where motorists no longer drive alone within the confines of their vehicles) got dashed off in longhand draft almost to completion before our chef appeared in the salon with appetizers. The story seemed perfect for what I was hoping to accomplish -- a sort of mini-collection, a kind of greatest hits, in which none of the stories were remotely like their siblings in terms of theme, sub-genre, or characters. By the end of the retreat (in addition to completing a murder mystery geared toward the annual Al Blanchard contest -- I didn't win, but placed in the top five on two of the judges' finalist's lists!), I had my second story drafted. Pentagonal Sextet contains the aforementioned techno-horror tale, one about giant monsters straight out of a nightmare, one about ancient evils and the monster hunters who pursue them, one about a haunted house, and, finally, 'Fiddleheads', about malevolent horrors from the deep woods. Pentagonal, featuring five stories each by six Great Old Ones writers, boasts one of the sharpest, most unforgettable covers ever. Many of my talented fellow authors shared the back-story behind their contributions to the project.

Sara Fowles: "I spend my days, as most writers do, taking ordinary moments and asking myself 'what if?' in order to transform them into something more fitting to an alternate reality. All of my narratives come directly from imagining these alternative scenarios. What if, for instance, demons were interested in stealing faces, not souls, and what if they shopped for them in the grocery store? What if I took a nap at work and when I woke up, the office had been transformed into a giant, bizarre corn maze from which I couldn’t escape? These are the two specific thoughts that ultimately became the stories 'Banana Man' and 'Corn Maze,' respectively. They occurred to me within the most banal of settings, yet the posited fictional realities presented provided me with endless entertainment and a few bouts of insomnia, as I found myself caught somewhere between the realms of dreams and reality. I have tried my best to replicate this effect via the stories I penned."

Eric S. Brown: "It was an honor to be asked to be a part of this anthology. I had been longing for a chance to write some short fiction again and this was the perfect chance to do so. My time had been being spent mostly with giant monster fiction (aka- my newer books: Kraken, Kraken Island, and Kraken vs. Megalodon). The tales in the book from me are all wildly random horror scenarios that came to me after I got invited to be in the book. They range from an end of the world Kaiju story to straight up ‘military horror’. I had a great deal of fun writing them."

Philip C. Perron: "Pentagonal Sextet is just a splendid book.  For my part, I love writing about the brooding and the melancholy and so, not too oddly, four of my five tales are like that. But also I noticed something else, that two of them became something different.  The story ‘The Fields of Salvation’ is about an Asian woman who has the genetic difference of albinism.  I thought about what would make someone stand out and therefore attract unnecessary attention.  As Asian folk go, hair and eye diversity is completely different than Caucasians.  So being an individual with albinism would most certainly look exotic, and in some cases would bring unwanted attention.  For the tale ‘Dolly, Do I Have a Soul?’, I chose to base the tale in the not so distant future where the lead woman is actually a clone of her own mother.  But more interestingly, its a world where cloning, at least in the states, is frowned upon.  So unfortunately for her, she has become a target of both progressives and conservatives since one side is against science gone amuck while the other may hold more traditional religious beliefs.  Honestly, there was no intention, but both tales when I re-read them for inclusion in this collection, surprised me in how they were both in ways an allegory for the LGBT community and how being a bit different can sometimes bring unwanted attention.  And both tales show two sides of a coin: the struggle of not hiding one’s identity while in the other, hiding one’s identity.  ‘The Fields of Salvation’ is about a young recently married woman who just happens to have the condition of albinism that she can't hide from, while in ‘Dolly, Do I Have a Soul?’, the woman is intentionally hiding from her own identity (that of a clone) so she can just live a normal life away from being judged.  I hope folks who read my stories take something with them after they put the book down, even if my intentions were only to just write five fabulous little tales of the weird."

E.G. Smith: "With ‘The Stick Devils’, I set out to write a story both longer and more action-packed than my previous work, with multiple frantic action scenes separated by reflective lulls . The Pacific Northwest setting is common in my writing, as is the man-against-nature theme and the eager toady versus know-it-all leader character conflict. The greatest challenge of this story was researching illicit pot growing to ensure that the dialog was accurate and the plot plausible. (And like any horror writer, I hope that the FBI, DEA or any other three letters don't look into my browser history. ‘I was just doing research for a story, officer.’)  It turns out that marijuana plants are oily and highly flammable, which helped drive the story's fiery climax. While I must give a nod to Joe Lansdale's Bubba Ho-Tep for the improvised flame thrower idea, I think that my story might be the first one with a hero running around with a stick through his neck while high on smoke from a burning pot farm."

BEHOLD: DEAD HARVEST!

In late 2012, while giving my then-Writing Room a dusting in readiness for our annual writers' group Christmas party, the idea for a new story hit in one of those very cool Eureka! moments.  I saw, quite clearly, a dusty room...only the dust, of which dead human skin is a major component, wasn't entirely lifeless.  Flesh had formed on the walls.  Something within that old house was growing in patches, trying to join together, to be resurrected.  "Uncle Sharlevoix's Epidermis" was born. A few weeks later, I landed for a second visit to When Words Count Writing Retreat Center in Vermont, where I taught a day-long workshop on living a literary life and, as blizzards socked us in for the new year, I completed the first draft of the story. During that wonderful time at the retreat center (where another short story and a novella were completed and much gourmet food was enjoyed), I received the phone call that confirmed our offer on the house we sought to purchase had been accepted -- a joyous but also distracting blessing.  When I returned home, the longhand draft went into a packing carton, and there it stayed until after we landed at our new/old New Englander in New Hampshire's North Country, Xanadu. Flash forward to this past August when, on a Friday night following a long day of writing on Xanadu's sun porch, I received notification that Mark Parker of Scarlet Galleon Publications had happily accepted the story for Dead Harvest.  The collection contains stories by some of the biggest names in horror -- fifty tales in all, with the book weighing in at a hefty/gargantuan 690 pages!

Many of my fellow contributors in the Dead Harvest Table of Contents shared the back-stories behind their stories.

E. G. Smith on "Autumn Lamb":  "The story was inspired by living in rural, Southwestern Idaho, where the friendly residents are easily outnumbered by both livestock and guns.  Millard is the stubborn first-cousin of many of the old farmers I've met around here.  He was originally going to be modeled closely on a good old boy neighbor who calls me up now and then to offer free bales of straw and tell semi-lewd jokes, but that quirk didn't fit the tone of the story and was left on the cutting room floor. I've raised goats (not sheep) and know what it's like to deal with a fox in the middle of a wintery night. Unlike gun-happy Millard, I adopted a gigantic Pyrenees-Bernard mix livestock guard dog, Hoss, who scares the predators away without any bloodshed, red or yellow."

Brian Kirk on "Seeds of Change":  "While I don't buy into the idea that the world is run by some secret Illuminati-like cult, I often wonder about the direction our society is heading in, how it's being guided, and by whom.  It seems like major decisions are being made that impact the masses without any concern over whether or not citizens agree with them, or attempt to get a consensus vote.  Placing nuclear reactors on fault lines is such an example.  As is genetically modifying our food.  We don't know the long-term effects of ingesting genetically-altered food, but Vice magazine recently published an article suggesting that GMO corn was causing farmers to become suicidal.  That worries me, and helped inspire my tragic story."

Jordan Phelps on "Beyond the Trees":  "This story began with a sharp contrast that just wouldn’t leave my head until I put it on paper. I saw a bustling festival in a large field -- there were bright lights, cheap rides, and wonderful smells. But most of all, there was joy. In the back corner of the festival, there was a stereotypical haunted house in which things jumped out at you, but nothing scary ever really happened. Behind all of this, there was the forest: a giant wall of shadows and claw-like branches that watched and waited behind the scenes. It began with this image, and with a young girl named Jane who had to see. From there, it explored the unknown: the differences between adults and children in dealing with it, the deep, primal fear it can bring forth without an ounce of shock value, and the horror of having no one to turn to when it chooses to present itself."

C. M. Saunders on "Harberry Close":  "Until quite recently, I lived in East London and worked in the south-west. That meant a near two-hour journey through one of the busiest cities in the world, during rush hour, twice a day. That journey used to drive me mad, with all the pushing, shoving, and elevated stress levels. It wasn't an easy route, either. A typical commute consisted of a fifteen-minute walk, two subway trains, an overground train, and a bus. If the weather was bad, or if there was some kind of strike or other disruption, it could easily add half an hour or more to my journey, which meant I would arrive at work late, then have to stay late to make the time back. I'm sure you get the picture. Anyway, the mid-way point in the journey was Waterloo station. I actually quite like Waterloo. It's one of London's nicer transport hubs. As I waited on the platform for my train every morning, I often found myself wondering what would happen if I somehow got on the wrong train. And where that wrong train may take me. Maybe somewhere like Harberry Close?"

Lori R. Lopez on “Cornstalker”:  “My stories and novels can originate from an image, a scrap of an idea, a full-blown plot unrolling in my head faster than I can scribble it down, or -- as in the case with ‘Cornstalker’ -- a single title, phrase, or word.  I came up with this pretty neat title, as I like to play with words, then immediately began to envision a creature stalking the corn, very large and imposing.  A back-story took shape involving a fictitious Native-American tribe.  This was some years ago, possibly ten or fifteen.  I’m not sure how many.  I have a number of ideas like that stuffed in a figurative closet, waiting for me to get back to them.  When I was kindly asked by Mark Parker to contribute something to Dead Harvest, it clicked that the time had come for this tale to be written.  While doing so, I had to pause and conduct research, including how to drive a semi-truck.  I don’t even drive a car.  I learned once.  That was years ago, too.  I’ve forgotten.  Well, semis are more complicated.  I didn’t actually go physically drive one, although that would have been cool.  It was all in my head, and boy, it was quite an adventure!”

Patrick Lacey on "Mrs. Alto's Garden":  "A few years back, I moved out of my childhood home of twenty-five years. As I left the backyard for the last time, I thought about how many animals had been buried there. There were countless goldfish, several cats, a hamster, and even a few lizards. Seemingly from nowhere, the location of most great ideas, I thought of oddly shaped flowers and vegetables growing from the spots where my pets now rested. It was a troubling thought, one that stuck with me for a long time. I knew I wanted to use it for a story one day but I couldn’t think of any characters or plots. Eventually, the idea blossomed (pun most definitely intended) and what resulted was 'Mrs. Alto’s Garden.' Happy Harvesting!"

Andrew Bell on "Extreme Times, Extreme Measures":  "My story isn't about scarecrows, cornfields, or farmers with funny accents.  Autumn for me is the ending of an era, the death of a character to make room for a better, stronger more confident person.  Someone who isn't going to be the butt of all jokes any longer.  I used to know kids at school who would do almost anything to fit in, to be accepted no matter what; even push some poor, unsuspecting fellow pupil into the incoming traffic on a busy road -- I knew such kids.  We all did.  And sadly, I think this overwhelming desire drifts on into adulthood.  So I thought: how far would someone be willing to go to prove themselves?  I come from a small town on the northeast coast of England called Hartlepool.  It is a town heavily reliant upon industry; steelworks, factories, power plants...a very bleak place which never seems to shake off the dark cloud hanging over it.  And although the story is not set here, it is based upon it.  It is a story based upon coldness, paranoia, and confrontation.  Finality."

Jeremy Peterson on "The Truth":  "In 2011, a friend of mine asked me to submit a story for a horror anthology based on the civil war. I’m no history buff, but it sounded like fun so I decided to give it a shot. In my mind’s eye, I saw a cowardly soldier abandoning his unit during a battle and hiding in a cornfield. A decent start perhaps, but where was the horror? At a loss, I asked my fourteen-year-old son what kind of terror you might find in a cornfield. How about the devil, he said. Of course my son would suggest the devil, I thought, we did name him Damian after all! So I gave him a big hug and gently shoved him out of the room, ‘cause daddy had a story to write. That is how my story, ‘The Truth’, came to be. That first publishing house accepted the story but they folded before the anthology went to press. So I tucked it away, wondering what I would ever do with a civil war story. Then one morning I spotted a call for Scarlet Galleon Publications’ Dead Harvest and the rest is history. It’s no, ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’, or ‘The Man in the Black Suit’, but I enjoyed writing it and I hope you all enjoy reading it."

Aaron Gudmunson on "The Guest":  "At some point in grade school, I recall reading a story in which the Queen of England unexpectedly visits a peasant's cottage on the outskirts of a poor village (I can't recall the title of the story, but if anyone knows what I'm talking about I'd love to reread it!). I always wondered how that would translate in America and thus the idea behind ‘The Guest’ formed. The story has been percolating in my brain for years and I finally wrote it one autumn weekend before the last presidential election. Some readers have asked me if there is any hidden political message within the story and I always answer that there is if you want there to be. Really, though, it's simply a speculative story about the anonymity of modern America -- how literally anyone can be mistaken for someone else these days…even the most powerful man in the world."