BEHOLD: DREAMSCAPES INTO DARKNESS

According to the original note card upon which the story idea was jotted, I dreamed up "One More" in 1992 -- not long after sending my first stories out into the publishing universe.  To quote, "I'm at the ocean-side home of an austere man with silver hair..."  It wasn't until the summer of Y2K that I penned the actual first draft, which went into my archive of completed manuscripts.  For years, that dream haunted me, in which I found myself homeless and living on meager pickings from trashcans along a stretch of rainy beach.  My dream-character then found further horror in the ocean-side house of said silver-haired man, who had constructed a bizarre version of a roller coaster inside his lair.

When the fine folks at Firbolg Publishing put forth an open call for Dreamscapes into Darkness, an anthology that came with a warning to be careful for what you wish for, I cycled back to that story, and the main character -- a hungry, homeless boy desperate for his next meal.  The hunt for sustenance leads him past the trashcans and promise of returnables, to a house among the dunes he's been warned to avoid.  I dusted off that first draft manuscript, fired it off to Firbolg's leading lady, Doctor Alex Scully, for review, and was thrilled to receive an acceptance to the fine anthology, which also contains reprints by the likes of such literary superstars as Mary Shelley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.P. Lovecraft.  "One More" is, in fact, nestled beside a reprint of "The Rocking Horse Winner" by none other than the brilliant D.H. Lawrence.

Several of my talented contemporaries in the table of contents were kind enough to share the back stories behind their stories in Dreamscapes into Darkness.

Patrick Lacey on "That Other Place": "I wish I could tell you a mind-blowing, earth-crashing story about where I got the idea for my Dreamscapes piece, but, like many of my other story ideas, this one came out of the ether. I was walking past a tree one day and imagined, for no reason I could pinpoint, that there was a window embedded in the wood. Not a decoration or a piece of junk but an actual window. It was stupid, I thought. You couldn’t make something so random into something scary. But the idea stayed with me. I’d already written about everyday objects/occurrences that become evil (see: video games, a dumpster, a cuckoo clock, and even junk mail), so why not this? I got thinking about what I’d do if I could see through the window, about what would be on the other side. Would it be a world similar to ours or entirely foreign? And if something lived in said world, would it be friendly? I assumed not if I was writing about it. Combine all this with my fascination with alternate dimensions and you have the boring but lucrative story behind ‘That Other Place.’"

Roxanne Dent on "Heart of Stone": "Initially, I received the idea as a writing prompt from a Sunday writers' group soiree. The word was ‘Stone.’ But the story itself developed after I attached the two words, ‘Heart of.’  I thought about the romantic relationships I’d had when I was young. I was often attracted to ‘Bad Boys,’ or those who had issues and couldn’t or wouldn’t commit. I was left in the dust, hurt and depressed.  It finally occurred to me I wanted to be the one who healed them of their pain and live happily ever after. It was unrealistic, arrogant and doomed to failure. The idea of creating a character with those exaggerated traits falling in love with the epitome of evil, unconscious of her motivation, caught my imagination.  Setting the tale in a church like the one mentioned in The Da Vinci Code, with the statue of a demon coming alive, came to me when I woke up one morning. It also tied in to my love of history and the supernatural.

K. Trap Jones on "The Weathermaker": "The inspiration came from a question lingering within my mind, ‘What if controlling the weathering elements were a job?’ The task has to be stressful with the way the atmosphere functions and the different environments requiring unique weathering patterns. The character of the Weathermaker needed to be unstable and I wrote the tone for him built around an elderly philosopher with severe anger issues. I imagined him being alone within a remote cabin and constantly having to monitor weathering patterns in order to avoid catastrophes. One slip could cause a typhoon or hurricane; one spike of anger could spark horrendous tornadoes. Although he is not a violent man, I wanted to create a personality built on frustration and resentment for the task he is burdened with and the lack of respect he feels civilization grants the weather. The combination of anger and resentment towards people surfaces when the Weathermaker has to sometimes deal with the occasional rogue death hiccup in the system.  When an adrenaline junkie crosses the threshold of purgatory and washes upon the shores of the Weathermaker’s land, he must not only deal with the anger of the old man, but also the reality that he alone has to continue upon the path of death in order to continue towards the afterlife."

(Promotional artwork for "One More")

Rob Smales on "First Horse": "When I write, I either write a flash fiction (something extremely short), or I run a bit long -- and these days, my tendency is toward the long. Sometimes…okay, often, I have trouble coming in under the maximum word count publishers are looking for. When the idea for First Horse occurred to me, I realized I would need an explanation of spirit guides, for readers who were unfamiliar with the concept. I did some research (the internet being a wonderful thing), and came up with plenty of Native American legends that mentioned spirit guides, but none that explained them, or gave their origins. So I wrote one. I enjoyed writing the tale that opens the story, the legend of Warrior and Dog, that Grandfather Whitefeather tells to Jimmy Tsosi. I’ve read Native American myths, and was trying to mimic the voice you hear in them -- a voice distinctly not my own. It was fun. But there was a problem: by the time I was done, I’d taken up over a quarter of the word allotment given by Firbolg Publishing, and I hadn’t even started the story I wanted to tell. *sigh* I picked up my editing pen…

B. E. Scully on "The Son Who Shattered His Father's Dream": "Parents always want the best for their children. But what if ‘the best’ ends up being the absolute worst thing any parent could imagine?  My short story “The Son Who Shattered His Father’s Dream” was inspired by an article in The New Yorker magazine titled ‘The Empire of Edge,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe. It chronicled the rise and fall of a young trader who got caught participating in a huge financial scandal, and focused especially on the trader’s childhood -- both the unconditional support and the crushing expectations of the man’s formative years. In fact, I took the title of my story and the anecdote behind it directly from an actual incident in this family’s life. The story was fascinating and, even though the trader certainly did have his fall coming, it was heartbreaking, too, particularly for his family. It got me thinking about the tricky territory parents navigate between pushing their children and perhaps pushing them too hard and way too far -- sometimes even straight off of a cliff. So I took all of this and turned it into my own more dark, much more sinister tale."

(The note card for "One More")

Nancy Hayden on "No Man's Land": "A few years ago, my husband and I visited the Western Front in France. I was interested in the Argonne Forest as this was where millions of U.S. soldiers fought at the end of the war, including my great uncle. Thousands were killed. We walked along a logging road in the re-grown Argonne Forest, past partially filled in shell holes, and found an old WWI trench that cut back into the woods. We decided to explore the trench. We hadn’t gone very far when my husband became uneasy. That wasn’t like him. A little further along, he said he had to get out of there, and before waiting for me to answer, he hurried back the way we’d come. When we were back on the logging road, he confessed to feeling anxious, like something was pulling him down, each step harder than the last. I don’t know what it was, but something was going on in that trench. And that’s where my story begins -- a husband and wife exploring France’s abandoned WWI trenches. Only for them, it wasn’t as easy to get out."

Kurt Fawver on "An Interview With Samuel X. Slayden": "If you've read my story, you'll know that it involves the torture (or perhaps terrible enlightenment?) of a group of writers who are well-known and well-regarded in the world of the story. However, when I initially wrote the tale, I used caricatures of authors from ‘real life’ as the bases for my fictional authors. As I edited, I decided that approach was too fraught with problems to be sustainable. One, I didn't want to represent any real author negatively for fear of offending and two, I didn't feel I ‘knew’ the famous authors I was using in any personal sense, so that the caricatures were too thin, too one-dimensional. So, I took my authors back to the drawing board and rewrote them all. I think the result was better, more realistic characters that had no cognate in reality. That said, even in rewriting, I did leave a few ‘trademark’ qualities stuck to several of my ill-fated authors. So it might be an interesting exercise for a reader to try to figure out what ‘real’ author was originally the foundation for each of my tormented scribes."

Joe Powers on "Lead Us Not Into Temptation": " This story, about a reformed child predator who finds himself back on the hunt, was based on a random guy I saw in the bank parking lot one morning. Something about the way he looked and carried himself made me wonder what he was up to, and I created this monster in my head based on that quick observation. I’d started dating someone new around the time I completed the first draft. She’d been very enthusiastic and supportive of the stuff I’d shown her to that point. Horror writers are a strange lot that are, at best, often viewed with wary skepticism, but she didn’t seem fazed by my chosen genre. Without really thinking it all the way through I sent a copy of the draft to her and eagerly awaited her adulation. It occurred to me not long after this might not be the best way to impress the mother of a young daughter. Luckily for me this wonderful woman -- now my fiancée -- drew no conclusions about my character from my questionable subject matter. We laugh about it now, but looking back it could have gone south in a hurry."    

The Bold and the Beautiful

I've always been a diehard Alphabet Network soap viewer (until those schmucks went ahead and cancelled All My Children and my favorite, the superb One Life to Live), so forgive the title of this post.  It seemed appropriate for a shout out for the latest release from Firbolg Publishing, Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, which contains my short story "Every Seven Years, Give or Take." I was honored to be part of this anthology, which boasts a veritable 'Who's Who' of gothic literature, present and past.  Notable names include the Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, K. Trap Jones, B. E. Scully, Sydney Leigh, Norman Partridge and, nestled among the Table of Contents, yours truly.

Publisher Alex Scully has done a fine job assembling a thick and gorgeous book.  Or books, as is the case. I was thrilled when a fat package arrived in the mail on Monday, May 20  It contained my copy of the special edition World Horror Con 2014 hardcover release of the anthology, gorgeously enhanced by four vibrant color interior illustrations. There's something extra-special about reading your work in hardcover. The book (officially considered 'textbook-size') is so big, so beautiful, it doesn't stand upright in any of the glass-front bookcases that contain my archives of published work.

End is filled, cover to cover, with stories of environmental horror in which mankind's hubris comes back to haunt us. My particular contribution to the book owes to a dream I had twenty years ago, in which I was trapped in a house located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.  Olfactory authorities claim we don't 'smell' in our dreams, but I remember vividly the thick fragrance of sap from the Douglas firs that surrounded the house, as well as the steady drip of rain.  Beyond the house, among those trees, terrible danger lurked.  Within the house, an equally deadly threat brewed.  Both were the result of our disposable society's shortsightedness.  We recycle almost everything here in our fair mountain town, and we compost year-round.  Still, having a tale in this book has made me feel like our small family is making a difference in helping to heal our wounded planet.

And then there's that Table of Contents. Who wouldn't love to have their original short story published alongside a reprint by the author who wrote Frankenstein?  Or the stellar Mister Poe, my favorite wordsmith of all time? The autumn my first book, Ghost Kisses, was released, I spent Thursday afternoons on the college campus where my then-writers' group met, reading his stories and mine and reciting "Lenore" -- that elegant elegy is still tattooed upon my grey matter, able to be invoked start to finish at a moment's notice.  As for Mister Hawthorne...

When I was in grade school, I boarded a bus for a memorable field trip to the House of the Seven Gables. I was blown away at the time to find myself standing in the setting of a book I had read and loved. In the gift shop, I purchased a postcard of the house in a green mat, which hung on my bedroom wall, unframed, from a thumbtack. Somewhere along the way, the postcard got lost.  Last year, my fabulous writing pal Judi Calhoun (a talented name to watch for), upon hearing the story, found the very postcard online -- and framed this one for me as part of my Christmas presents.  It now sits proudly in my Writing Room, atop the archives of my published work.  A week or so after Christmas, I learned that "Every Seven Years, Give or Take" would appear alongside a reprint of Hawthorne's classic, "Rappaccini's Daughter".  Bold stuff.  And quite beautiful.

The End is the Beginning!

Most dreams play out over a matter of seconds. Some nightmares last far longer. So was the case with one I experienced twenty years ago, in which I found myself trapped with other survivors in a house hidden among tall Douglas firs, located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. We moved around the house quietly, ever mindful of an unidentified danger lurking outside the walls of our fortress and prison. It rained nonstop throughout the nightmare; it was always night beyond the windows.  I only caught glimpses of the faceless horrors lurking on the other side of the door, which was even more effective -- my imagination has always responded to instances when what you don't see is more terrifying than what you do. Before dream's end, the situation inside the house degenerated to a level as dangerous as the one outside, and there was something else I remember quite clearly: the trees, and the rich smell of the needles and pitch.  It burned in my nostrils.

The dream quickly got recorded on a note card and went into my catalog of ideas, but was not so quickly written.  Not until 2010, when the longhand manuscript was dashed off in a matter of days and then went into my file cabinet, part of the 'inventory' I keep of completed first draft manuscripts.  Out it again came in December of 2013, and off it went to Firbolg Publishing's latest anthology call, Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, a collection of environmental-themed horror fiction edited and compiled by the brilliant Dr. Alex Scully. I'd already appeared in their amazing previous release with my story told from the perspective of H.P. Lovecraft's ultimate big bad, C'Thulhu, Dark Muses, Spoken Silences -- and which featured reprints by Poe, Polidori, Lovecraft, and Washington Irving, along with a lineup of some of my favorite contemporaries.  And I was beyond thrilled to learn that my tale, "Every Seven Years, Give or Take", would be part of this important book.  As with the previous release, End features reprints by such notables as Mary Shelley, Lovecraft, M. R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mr. Poe, my favorite writer of all time.  And again I share an incredible Table of Contents with many of today's most talented scribes, many of whom shared the back stories behind their stories.

Eric J. Guignard on "She Will Rise Again":  "As a lover of fairy tales and Greek mythology, I delight in the fantasy concepts of invisible gods and elements surrounding us, spirits residing in trees and flowers, animals, and even inanimate objects. Mother Nature, in particular, is a wonderful personification of the life-giving and nurturing aspects of the world we live in. I wanted to explore the idea that if she were a real being, what would be the circumstances or effects of her existence as one of substance but who is hidden from civilization. After a few failed envisionings, she ended up with a C'Thulhu-esque element, as one who slumbers while the planet turns, rising only with sacrifice and when she is needed."

B. E. Scully on "Nothing But Skin and Bones":  "I was living in the eye of the urban hurricane known as Los Angeles when life picked me up and threw me into the whirlwind. When I landed, I was in hill country, West Virginia. Mountaintop removal had been going on for years by then, and right in the middle of lush, blue-green mountains you’d see these flattened, barren stretches, like the surface of the moon. It sometimes happens with mountaintop removal that old family cemeteries get wiped off the mountain along with everything else. The dead get discarded like trash in a landfill. I left West Virginia years ago, but those displaced bones and that dark, disturbed earth stayed with me. When I sat down to write a story for The End Is the Beginning, I went back to those mountains and found a man sitting alone in one of those blasted moonscapes. The rest of the story is what happens when the living and the dead get pushed too far, and start pushing back. As for me, I’m putting my money on the birds, the bees, and the bones."

Tais Teng on "The Art of Losing Wars Gracefully":  "When pigeons awoke me one morning with their insistent and deeply annoying cooing I realized that, though, we built the cities we never really own them. For the pigeons our proudest high-rises are only cliffs, nesting places. Fire ants gnaw the timbers of our homes and have their own highways in our walls. Below us rats rule the sewers and there are urban foxes hunting in our back-gardens. All my life we have been at war with the animal kingdom: mice steal our cheese and nibble our bread no matter how good we hide it. There was a wasp-nest once in our front garden; the exterminator had to come back three times before those insects were gone. ‘You should not plant anything edible there for at least  a year,’ the exterminator told us. ‘The poison I used is rather strong.’ That skirmish with the wasps didn't feel like victory and we knew they would be back. I got it: never try to win a war with animals, a draw, a temporary stalemate is the best you can hope for."

Kenneth W. Cain on "Her Living Corals":  "My story came to me while studying my Nano-reef tank. There are many mysteries in this tank, which make my mind wander.  I’ve always had a fear of the ocean. Not the water itself, but the haunts in its depths. These waters often frequent my stories. Who knows what exists in the deepest recesses of the ocean? What a man or woman is capable of within those areas? With this story I wanted to explore the ongoing ruin of our coral reefs. While keeping and maintaining reef tanks can be a rewarding experience, it can never compare to the real thing. The seas are full of life, brimming with extraordinary creatures, some of which can barely be seen. Besides millions of beautiful fish, there are copepods and amphipods, many varieties of snails, tiny anemones and feather dusters, limpets and chitons, starfish, and so much more that we need to preserve. Do yourself a favor, if you haven’t explored these reefs; check it out before its too late. In the meantime, do your part to help."

K. Trap Jones on "The River":  "The inspiration came from the idea that sometimes we take nature for granted. We look upon her with beauty, but often times ignore the power that she can possess. I wanted to tell a story of how easily something bad can happen. With one slip of a foot, a traditional fishing trip can go horribly wrong. Mother Nature, to me, can be a gentle loving soul, but then unleash rage at any given moment. Through this narrative, I wanted to give both sides of Mother Nature almost like a wonderful woven spider web. From afar, the web is spectacular, but once it has you in her grasp, the situation alters from beauty to dismay. Through the depressive narrative tone and the mental anguish of the narrator, the story comes off as a battle between the will of man and the overall endurance of Mother Nature. One slip was all that it took."

Rose Blackthorn on "Consequences":  "My story is set in a small town on the Oregon coast, not far from where I once lived. I have an abiding love of the ocean and its wildlife, including not just those who live in the water but the myriads of birds and animals who live near the shore. I think people for a long time have thought that the renewability of the ocean was boundless, but it’s becoming clearer now that over-fishing and the indiscriminate dumping of waste is building to a possible point of no return. With the nuclear plant in Japan bleeding toxins into the Pacific, it just adds another layer of worry about what is happening to our natural planet. So, I wrote a story about a woman who is dealing with general life issues -- aging, divorce, trying to make ends meet -- who is lucky enough to live in a beautiful place that she loves. Then I added in one variation of a worst-case scenario to the changes wrought in nature, and the possible consequences. Honestly, the whole idea scares me, too."

Julianne Snow on "There Is No Wind That Always Blows":  “When I saw the call for Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, I was immediately struck with a number of ideas that could work. After discarding all of those I settled on the premise for a wicked little apocalyptic tale that asks what would happen if the winds picked up to the point they wiped most of humanity from the surface? In Chaos Theory there is a statement: It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. But what if more than one butterfly flapped their wings in unison? Could a cataclysmic event actually occur? And what would the remnants of humanity do to survive? ‘There Is No Wind That Always Blows…’ explores the physical and emotional strain such an event wreaks and leaves you wondering if the next gust of wind will ever end.”

Mark Patrick Lynch on "The Mourning Worm":  "A pleasure of writing SF is the world building. Creating planets, alien moons, and exotic space stations can be great fun -- but sometimes a little demanding. In 'The Mourning Worm' I went for a real location, a place I’d actually stayed in. Gregory’s cottage is as described (though as yet awaiting the interior refit), surrounded by the dense woods and rolling countryside of Wiltshire. It is enchanting in almost every aspect. But real locations bring with them their own hazards. In this case it was the low beams of the ceilings. I’m 5’11 (and a half). The cottage was built hundreds of years ago, when people were shorter in general... Yeah, you do the math. I didn’t come out of that stay with a concussion, but my head was like Braille for someone who reads the bumps and orbits of skulls. Maybe it was as I was wandering around a wee bit senseless that the notion for 'The Mourning Worm' came to me: holes in the world, absences…like the memories and minutes I seemed to have lost after I forgot to duck while walking from one side of a room to the other."

Sydney Leigh on "Rabenschwarz":  "There’s something about the fact that while intended for children, fairy tales are actually rather terrifying -- their settings, mood, atmosphere, and messages are all fascinatingly macabre. I felt this might make for an interesting backdrop for an environmental horror story, and loosely based ‘Rabenschwarz’ on 'Foundling-Bird', one of the lesser-known tales from the brothers Grimm. The unknown has always been the most frightening possibility for me in terms of natural disasters, ecological horrors, and the infinite list of environmental threats -- and the first thing that comes to mind when I worry about what the future brings is always the extinction of animals. The idea of them being removed from their natural habitats by mankind is the driving force behind this story, which plays on the idea that an unseen presence dwelling in the forest is not taken into account while some fairly grisly events are unfolding and no one quite knows who to blame. I’m afraid the supernatural element in the story allows for a happier ending than I think the animals in our world will have...so the presence of this force, raven-black and understandably sinister in nature, was my way of illuminating that for the reader."

Lawrence Santoro on "So Many Tiny Mouths":  "Someone said horror starts when innocence sets foot in the forest.  Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden for example; the forest primeval. Pennsylvania, 1950-something:  Summers, mom, dad, cousins and I would hop into the old man's Chevy and head toward the Atlantic Ocean.  Three hours later our first half-dozen layers of winter skin would have blistered to a sweat-slick peel and salt-water taffy would have yanked the year's fillings from our heads. Before becoming beach-blanket brisket though we had to cross inland Jersey, eighty-plus non air-conditioned miles, me in back meditating on undertow, riptides, and sand sharks.  Thus occupied, I didn’t notice that most of Jersey was trees.  Those eighty-some miles, the whole of central Jersey, was a geo-political entity: the Pine Barrens. Nighttime, homeward-bound, cousin Fred (who knew about such things) whispered tales about the woods that unspooled by our car in the dark.  They were inhabited by six-fingered folk who lived in caves, who prayed to odd and grubby gods, made their own gas from pig shit and ate lost travelers.  They were "Pineys” and you stayed away from them. Much later, I made a film in the Barrens.  Alas, Pineys turned out to be garden-variety Americans.  I got to know them -- somewhat -- and the Barrens -- a bit -- and have tried I don’t know how many times to get the place down on paper.  I keep trying.  Love, I think.  This is one such effort.  I think I’m closing in, but wouldn’t bet that I’ve got it.  It’s an elusive place.  The forest always is. By the way, Earl Sooey?  He's fiction, a coincidence.  No one I met.  Really."