The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, page 36
“City of the Dog”: This was the second story I wrote for another anthology Ellen Datlow was putting together. The book was to feature new stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, to be a kind of thematic sequel to Poe. As with the previous volume, Ellen did not want pastiches; as she put it, “No tentacles.” I promptly broke this rule by writing a story that was more full of tentacles than a tank of octopi. To what I like to think of as her credit, Ellen did not reject the story out of hand—but she did admit that it was more, well, tentacular than she preferred, and said that she wanted to hold on to it to see what else came in in the meantime. In response, I withdrew that story from submission and declared that I would write another one, sans tentacles. Even as I had been writing that first story, I had been thinking that, one of these days, I should try to do something with another of Lovecraft’s favorite monsters, the ghoul. Confronted with the sudden prospect of having to complete a new story for Ellen, I decided to plunge ahead with the ghoul. My treatment of the monster was influenced in no small part by Caitlín R. Kiernan’s re-imagining of it in her fine novel, Low Red Moon; though my ghouls are somewhat less decadent than hers. I had been thinking of setting a story in Albany, where I spent two miserable years in the early 1990s, for some time; I knew it would concern a character whose life was falling apart, and who would see a monstrous face looking up at him from a drain opening. (This image undoubtedly was rooted in the climax of T. E. D. Klein’s brilliant “Children of the Kingdom.”) At one event or another, I had discussed my unhappy experience of New York State’s capital with Ellen, who told me that her own time there as a student at SUNY had left her with similar associations. It was a short leap to placing the ghoul into—or under—Albany. Perhaps because the setting evoked such a strong response in me, more explicit autobiography appeared in this story than is usually the case for me. In this regard, it’s not unlike “Laocoön,” the original novella in my previous collection; in both cases, a kind of lacerating self-exploration runs alongside the story’s more fantastic elements. The story ran longer than the first one I’d written for the Lovecraft project, and this, combined with my not finishing it until very close to the deadline, kept it out of what became Lovecraft Unbound. I was sorry not to make it into the book, but Gordon Van Gelder took the story for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and then Ellen herself took it to reprint in the third volume of her Best Horror of the Year. So the story I’d written for Ellen Datlow wound up in one of her books, after all, just not the one I’d planned on.
(As for that first story: I eventually revised it and placed it with a book of stories S. T. Joshi was editing, Black Wings II. More on that in the notes to my next collection.)
“The Revel”: An editor I met at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose in 2009 contacted me a couple of months after the convention was over to ask me to contribute a story to an anthology he was putting together around the theme of werewolves and shapeshifters. His request sent me back to the story I’d begun in the summer of 1999, when my wife and I first started seeing one another. At the time, it had been maybe another decade since I’d written anything that could be construed as out-and-out horror fiction; though I’d continued to read in the genre sporadically. (Now, I see that all the writing I’d done over those ten years—a long novel, a short novel, a novella, a couple of novelettes, a handful of stories—had mapped an emotional terrain of dread, loss, and absence: in other words, that I was already within the horror field without realizing it.) My wife was completing her dissertation on Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax and Visions of Cody, and in our conversations about what Kerouac had achieved in those books—especially Dr. Sax—Fiona told me that he had considered the popular culture of his youth a suitable vehicle for literary expression. For reasons that may have been no more complicated than that the time was right for me to hear it, this struck me with the force of revelation. Within a matter of weeks, I had plunged headlong into a new story, one that was both a story about a werewolf and a story about werewolf (and horror) stories in general. I wrote it by longhand while Fiona worked at her computer, the two of us stopping every now and again so she could take a break and I could read to her what I’d written. She was encouraging, and her comments were smart, exactly the combination I needed. For the remainder of that summer and on and off over the year that followed, I added to the story, which left the vicinity of story pretty quickly and steamed through novelette, novella, and kept going. Eventually, I put it aside, first to write nonfiction (research papers, essays, reviews), and then to work on the other horror stories it had made it possible for me to write. I didn’t forget about it; sometimes, I imagined I’d return to it for my third or fourth novel, when I’d achieved enough credibility as a writer for readers to give a crazy experimental work a chance.
When the opportunity to write a story for this anthology arose, though, I thought of that unfinished narrative, and decided it would be worth it to see if I couldn’t carve the mass of prose I’d produced into a story. (Okay, a novelette.) Interestingly, this led to the piece becoming more experimental in places, as I tried to figure out how to fit pages and pages of my werewolf’s depravities, not to mention his history, into a smaller space than I’d originally planned. From the moment I’d written that first sentence, all those years ago—which remained the same in this version—I had known that this werewolf was not going to be a figure of sympathy—no Lon Chaney, Jr. here, or the protagonist of Thomas Tessier’s fine The Nightwalker. This was not just going to be the kind of willing werewolf Stephen King had portrayed in The Cycle of the Werewolf, this was going to be one of the great beasts, something more akin to Grendel or his mother. (The primal monsters John Byrne had employed during his run on the first Alpha Flight comic series were in my mind, too.) In terms of metafictional ploys, I went further than I had before or since, and when it came time to give the story a title, I followed Laird Barron’s lead and stole a term from The Darkening Garden, John Clute’s lexicon of critical terms to describe what happens in horror narratives. For Clute, revel is the moment in the typical horror story when everything flies apart, which seemed to fit what I was trying to do too well to pass up.
As it turned out, I was a couple of days past the deadline for the anthology. I submitted the story, anyway, but received no acknowledgment from the editor. After about a week of utter silence, I sent the story to Gordon Van Gelder, who bought and published it very quickly. To my surprise and pleasure, Ellen Datlow took the story for the same volume of The Best Horror of the Year in which “City of the Dog” was already included. Talk about gobsmacked: I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I dedicate all my stories to my wife, but it was particularly nice to have one that derived from the very first thing I’d written for her honored in such a way.
“The Shallows”: The inspiration for this story dates back to the 2001 Necronomicon convention held in Providence, Rhode Island. This was my first trip to what was the last of these events. One of the panels at the convention dealt with new additions to the Cthulhu Mythos—what I suppose you might call pastiches. Writer and editor Darrell Schweitzer was on this panel, and during the discussion he opined that most Lovecraft pastiches were a waste of time, since, he went on, they added nothing substantial to Lovecraft’s vision. That said, Darrell suggested that there might be one more kind of Lovecraftian story to write, and that was the account of what happens after Cthulhu and his friends return to take control of the Earth. Such a story, Darrell said, would need to focus on what the remaining humans were doing to keep human, which he supposed would consist in small gestures, habits, rituals.
His idea stuck with me, and if I never went so far as to commit such a story to paper, I turned the idea for it over in my mind every now and again. When I received an invitation from Darrell to submit a story to an anthology he was editing in which the stories were set following Cthulhu’s victory, I already had a general sense of the story’s shape: a man maintaining his daily routines in the face of a radically fractured world. The first image I had for the piece was of a tiny cottage situated on a great stone shelf, the middle and further distance obscured by huge clouds of light. Along with that image came a title, “The Shallows,” which I knew referred to a part of this altered Earth where the cataclysmic changes wrought by the Lovecraftian apocalypse would be at a minimum. I imagined the person who lived in this cottage watching groups of people and other things coming and going out of the clouds of light, the depths. The problem with this plot, though, was that I couldn’t believe that the creatures passing by wouldn’t knock on the cottage door, and once they did, there was no way my protagonist would be able to survive them. I discussed the matter with Laird Barron over the course of a couple of phone calls, and it was during these that I hit upon having my protagonist telling stories about the life that was as a means of keeping it alive. I thought there might be some kind of creature accompanying him—not a grand, cosmic monstrosity, but something smaller, more domestic, that wouldn’t be a threat and that could serve as an audience for his stories. I pictured the creature as a kind of spider crab; Laird suggested it might be related to the beetles in his story, “The Forest,” who inherit the Earth in the future and who attempt to preserve the relics of human civilization. I liked the idea of the spider crab as a kind of organic technology sent to record one of the few surviving human’s memories. In the same way, I liked those memories, which were more of the “dirty realism” of Raymond Carver than the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, but whose narratives couldn’t help refracting their surrounding context. As I write this, my older son, Nick, is completing his training as an officer for the Baltimore City PD, and I suppose the story’s treatment of Ransom’s relationship with Matt reflects my own experience of being father to a son eager to embrace adulthood. Beyond that, the story of Bruce the dog has some basis in my family’s experience: the first house that Fiona and I rented was across and up the street from an old farmhouse whose owners kept a dog in a similar cage to the one Bruce winds up in. We used to watch the poor animal, bored silly, running around in there, chasing its tail. Fiona went so far as to walk over and ask the owners if they’d mind if she took the dog for a walk, but they refused. It seemed obvious that they’d found the dog more work than they could handle but, rather than admit their error and try to find another family for him, had chosen to persist in their mistake. They fed the dog, kept the cage clean, and from what I could tell, drove him out of his mind. I have to admit, in a lot of ways, I’m not particularly enamored of Lovecraftian pastiche. There are moments, though, when it allows you access to a kind of emotional resonance that it’s hard to beat. When Cthulhu’s Reign appeared in 2011, it met with significantly less critical response than I felt its contents deserved, and while I was grateful to have “The Shallows” reprinted by Ross Lockhart in his Book of Cthulhu, I’d encourage anyone interested to seek out the earlier volume.
“June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris”: Another jeu d’esprit, this time at the expense of my great good friend, Laird Barron. I consider myself fortunate in counting among my friends and acquaintances a good number of the better writers of my generation (a list that has to include Paul Tremblay, Sarah Langan, Michael Cisco, Simon Strantzas, Ian Rogers, Richard Gavin, Stephen Graham Jones, Nathan Ballingrud, Glen Hirshberg, and Nick Mamatas), but it’s with Laird that I feel the most fundamental connection, to the point that I’ve often referred to him as the other younger brother I never had. Which is somewhat odd, given that our personal histories are so radically different. We connected over our writing—in fact, it was Gordon Van Gelder who, the month after my first story appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, e-mailed me to say that I should check out the current issue of the magazine, because there was a story in it by another new writer he thought I would appreciate. I did appreciate “Shiva, Open Your Eye,” and Laird’s subsequent stories in F&SF and Ellen Datlow’s late lamented SCIFICTION, and when I wrote to Laird, it was a terribly formal, even mannered, e-mail expressing my admiration for his work. That admiration has never faded: I’ve written appreciations of his stories, reviews of his books, and fully expect to do so, again. What I respected—what I responded to in his fiction, and still do, is the tremendous integrity he brings to it. Laird takes the material of horror seriously—which isn’t to say there’s no room for either irony or out-and-out comedy in his fiction, but the joke is never on the reader. It’s an approach I believe we share, and while our friendship has expanded to take in such shared interests as martial arts, Japanese movies, and Archer, it remains rooted in our shared love of the horror field. So a couple of years ago, when the bottom dropped out of Laird’s life and he found himself in a bad place, it was inevitable that I would think of horror as a way to cheer him up. Specifically, in an echo of the “Jack Haringa” project, I contacted the writers I knew and who knew Laird with the proposal that, on a given day, we should post on our blogs excerpts from the Secret Life of Laird Barron. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and on the day appointed, Laird discovered that some of his more outré adventures had not gone unnoticed. There wasn’t a bad entry in the bunch, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t call attention to Kurt Dinan’s, which photoshopped Laird into any number of famous photos to tell the story of his involvement in the testing of a longevity drug. I knew I was going to treat Laird’s younger years, and his encounter with a situation straight out of one of his own stories. It’s kind of a shame—as of this writing, those pieces remain uncollected. But they did cheer Laird up, so mission accomplished, there.
“Mother of Stone”: By this point in these notes, you’ll have noticed how many of these stories came from invitations to contribute to themed anthologies—whose deadlines I sometimes missed, or whose editors sometimes rejected me. This story, which is original to this collection, had its beginning in another such invitation, to an anthology Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas were coediting on the topic of local ghost stories retold. Living in the Hudson Valley, I had my pick of some pretty choice legends: Sleepy Hollow’s about an hour away, and there’s more that could be done with that old Hessian, the Headless Horseman. As it so happened, though, I’d recently been handed an even more local ghost story by a friend with whom Fiona and I were having dinner. This friend had been a server at a local restaurant on whose grounds the statue of a headless pregnant woman had been excavated—after which, a car accident had claimed the life of the restaurant’s owner, who was driving a convertible and was decapitated. Because of this, and other, weird occurrences our friend wouldn’t discuss, a Catholic priest and a Methodist minister were brought in to perform an exorcism on the statue, after which, it was reburied. That was all our friend wanted to say—in fact, it was her husband who’d urged her to share the story with us in the first place. Of course I tried to research the events our friend had described, and, predictably, could find nothing. What I’d heard, though, was more than enough to build a story around, and this, I set out to do. From the start, I knew that the piece would be written in second person—mostly because I wanted to see what would happen if I told it this fashion. I figured it would place the reader in the story in an interesting way; only much later did it occur to me that this could also represent the protagonist’s feeling alienated from her life. I knew as well that the story would be relayed through multiple narrators folded into the protagonist’s interview process and that it would be an example of the exorcism narrative. I got down to writing. The story grew. And grew. And grew. It grew to the point it was going to be too long for Ellen and Nick’s anthology, and then it stopped growing, which is to say, right at the point my protagonist sat down for her interview with the Reverend Au Claire, on the verge of the account of the actual exorcism, the story stalled. I had read and watched the film adaptation of The Exorcist, which is pretty much the touchstone for these kinds of narratives. I was familiar with literary exorcisms such as those attempted by the protagonists of Stephen King’s “The Mangler” and Sara Gran’s Come Closer, as well as cinematic varieties like The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I was aware that, in many ways, the story I was writing was following the pattern established by those narratives: weird events escalating in intensity and severity, until the clergy are called in. Fair enough, but I wanted the exorcism itself to be something of a departure. The deadline for the anthology came and went without a solution presenting itself. I put the story aside and moved onto other projects. Every now and again, I returned to it, usually to flesh out one of the sections I’d already written. When I assembled this collection of stories, I decided to finish what I had taken to calling the statue story and include it as the book’s original. That, I figured, would give me the push I needed to work out the scene that was, in many ways, the heart of the story. It did, though I trespassed on the good graces of S. T. Joshi and Derrick Hussey (my editor and publisher, respectively) much more than, in good conscience, I should have. The story that resulted employs a number of devices that are at or near the heart of my work: the academic life and its pursuits; a local setting and history; the use of multiple voices; a concern with the persistence of trauma at levels ranging from the personal to the metaphysical. It’s a good way to end this book.
