NIGHT LIFE: The Story Behind the Book

Never say never. I speak from experience. There was a time when I vowed I would never write a sequel. To anything. I was opposed to sequels because most of them — whether books or movies — were not only inferior to the original but struck me as little more than a cynical attempt to keep cashing in on the popularity of something original and entertaining that was the result of actually applying effort and imagination to its creation rather than just rehashing something that worked the first time. And to be fair, that’s a pretty accurate description of most sequels. There have been exceptions, but they are rare

My erotic vampire novel Live Girls seemed to strike a cord with readers and became quite popular. For the next 18 years, the question I was most commonly asked was, “When are you going to write the sequel to Live Girls?” Not if but when, and not a sequel but the sequel, as if this book already sort of existed in some metaphysical pre-written form and they were just waiting for me to make it available. But I resisted.

I was always sincere when I said there would be no sequels because I wasn’t interested in repeating myself. I meant that. At the time, anyway.

When I finally decided to write a sequel to Live Girls, I was laid up with a lousy hip that, at that point, had required two operations (with a third to come), one of which was a hip replacement that didn’t seem to be working because I was still in tremendous pain. I was full of narcotic painkillers that weren’t all that good at actually killing pain but fucked me up so much that I almost didn’t care about the pain. Almost. Looking back on those eight years, I don’t remember doing much writing. I remember spending most of my time stretched out in a recliner in an altered state of consciousness, and avoiding walking, which only ground at the jagged chunks of broken glass that seemed to be lodged in my right hip. But in fact, I wrote a good deal during those years; I’ve found a number of short stories and novellas that I wrote, but which I have absolutely no memory of writing. Reading them was like reading someone else’s work, but it was mine. It was bizarre.

At some point, I started considering the possibility of writing a sequel to Live Girls. It was the first time I’d advanced to that point — where I was actually considering writing a sequel. The drugs might have had something to do with it, I don't know, but I began thinking about the possibilities. Would it focus once again on Davey Owen? Would he still be with Casey Thorne? 18 years had passed since the publication of Live Girls. Would the sequel take place 18 years later, or would it pick up where the first book left off? I had no idea. But I had a lot of time on my hands and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then I passed the point of no return. I got an idea I loved. Our first meeting with Davey and Casey in the sequel came to life in my head:

They are having a romantic nighttime picnic at the foot of the “Y” in the Hollywood sign on Mt. Lee overlooking Los Angeles. They are still together all these years later, still in love. And when they leave their mountain picnic, they =fly away.

I had the opening of the novel. Obviously, they had gone west to Los Angeles, because there they were dining beneath the Hollywood sign. And what’s in Los Angeles? The movie business, for one thing. And vampires, of course. This wouldn’t work without vampires. Bloodthirsty vampires in Los Angeles? Hell, it was practically a work of nonfiction!

And that was it. I was hooked. I had to follow it through to the end. The book has kind of a romantic opening, but I knew it would not be a romantic vampire novel.

No matter what story a novel tells, it’s almost always the characters who carry me through the book. I want to find out what they do, who they become, how the story changes them, if at all. I’d forgotten how much I liked Davey Owen. In Live Girls, he’d started out as a pretty spineless, self-pitying and even irresponsible guy but had been forced by extraordinary circumstances — and with the help of Casey Thorne — to grow a pair and grow up. Of course, those extraordinary circumstances would not have gone away. To vampires, 18 years would be like ... brunch. I knew they would not have forgotten Davey and they would still be out for revenge for what he’d done to them in New York. Those vampires still would be after retired journalist Walter Benedek, too, who’d helped Davey back in the Big Apple. I wondered how he would handle that. I had enjoyed writing Walter in Live Girls because I wrote him as one of my favorite movie actors, Walter Matthau, only a little younger. I don't do that sort of thing normally — but Matthau just seemed so right for the role! Suddenly, I looked forward to getting to know these people again.

But I was determined not to repeat myself, and I knew that if I focused on all of the same characters again, that would be pretty hard to avoid. This book would need new characters and much of it would have to be from their points of view. That’s my favorite part of the sequel — the new characters.

Night Life introduces private investigators Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph. She’s from Los Angeles, he’s from San Francisco, and they meet for the first time when they show up for a meeting with bestselling novelist Martin Burgess, a hugely successful horror writer. Burgess writes about ghosts, demons, vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures, and he harbors a genuine curiosity about their origins. He even goes so far as to wonder if they exist. So he hires Moffett and Keoph to investigate some things Burgess has heard about vampires living in Los Angeles. Where would a horror novelist hear such a thing? Burgess has plugged himself into a network of computer geeks who are seriously into the paranormal — extraterrestrials, ghosts, Bigfoot, demons, the Illuminati, a wide variety of conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. They keep him informed. Burgess knows that most of that stuff is nonsense, but when something stands out and looks possibly genuine, he pursues it. This time, he decides to hire professionals to pursue it for him — Gavin and Keoph.

Those three characters were the best part of writing Night Life. I enjoyed getting to know them so much that I knew I would return to them at some point. And I did. Gavin, Keoph and Burgess return in Bestial, the sequel to my werewolf novel Ravenous (another sequel!), which kind of links all four books together. I will be strengthening that link later this year when I begin work on a series of books in which the vampires of Live Girls and Night Life are pitted against the werewolves of Ravenous and Bestial, featuring characters from all four books. Those three characters also show up in Vortex, an upcoming novella from Cemetery Dance that has nothing to do with vampires or werewolves. I enjoyed Vortex so much, I’m considering expanding it into a novel — maybe even a few novels.

Night Life and Bestial aren’t the only times I broke my vow never to write a sequel. I followed my novella The Folks with a sequel (and I’m considering a third to wrap up Andy’s story). And there will be more. I still have ambivalent feelings about sequels, though, and I try hard to keep them in mind when I’m writing one. I try to make sure that sequels be connected in significant ways to the original but tell a different story in a different way.

Night Life is available as a trade paperback and for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and in several ebook formats from Fictionwise.com. If you enjoy the book, I hope you’ll post a review of it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can read an excerpt from Night Life here. If you have a Facebook account, drop by the Night Life fan page and click the “like” button, then do the same over at my fan page. To see my full bibliography, keep up with interviews, stories and new books, and interact on the message board, visit my official website.

The vampires in Night Life (and in Live Girls) are not pleasant. They don’t want to discuss your feelings. They don’t attend high school. They don’t sparkle. They’re mean and dangerous. It makes me feel kind of old to know that I’ve been writing long enough for vampires like that to seem refreshing!

MURDER WAS MY ALIBI: The Story Behind the Book

Every novel I’ve written has been a unique experience and has come into the world in its own particular way. Every now and then, a book will drop into my head out of nowhere in one whole piece, but that’s rare. Wonderful, but rare. The most common origin is a “what if” question inspired by something I’ve seen, heard or read. For example, someone might tell me a joke and I’ll laugh ... and then I might think, Hey, what if that really happened? After considering it a while, I might discover that what’s funny when told as a joke would be quite horrifying if it really happened to someone, and that might lead to a novel. Some novels are difficult to trace back to a specific origin. The seed of an idea will plant itself in my head at some point, then grow slowly over time until it’s ready to write. Sometimes I might be inspired by something — a conversation I overheard, perhaps, or a story in the news — that doesn’t really take the form of an idea ... just inspiration and the desire to write. I’ll sit down and start writing with nothing in particular in mind, and it will turn into a novel right in front of my eyes — that’s how Sex and Violence in Hollywood happened.

Murder Was My Alibi began with a man’s name: Myron Foote.

I don’t know where it came from or why it lodged itself so firmly in my head and refused to go away. I liked the sound of it. It was an unusual name and had a nice ring to it. What kind of person would have that name? For some reason, it sounded cynical to me, the name Myron Foote. I could not imagine him as a happy-go-lucky guy, a good-natured type who tended to look on the bright side of things. I don’t know why, but Myron Foote sounded to me like a man who would notice things others didn’t and would be bothered by many of them. That led to him becoming a private investigator, which took me directly to my keyboard, where I started writing.

For the last decade or so, I’ve probably read more crime fiction than anything else, and a good deal of the crime fiction I’ve read was written in the first half of the twentieth century. The work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler opened up a world I’d only glimpsed in great old black-and-white movies about tough-talking gumshoes and dangerous dames. Don’t get me wrong — those movies were iconic and I became a fan of them when I was very young. But the books of Hammett, who invented the tough-talking private eye subgenre of crime fiction, Chandler and many others of that time did not have the benefit of glossy cinematography or a swelling score to blunt their sharp edges. They were snapshots of a bleak world in which no one could be trusted and good things like love and friendship were twisted into hostile acts.

Those books led me into the grim world of noir. Most people in the know about this sort of thing seem to agree that noir pretty much began with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. It's a cynical genre, with protagonists who are not detectives investigating crimes but men trapped in the consequences of crimes. Sometimes these men are wrongly accused of a crime and sometimes they’re guilty as hell, but they are always losers. They’re driven by lust, greed and quite often by some twisted, unhealthy desires, and they’re self-destructive in all kinds of ways, as if they know what lies ahead is bad and they’d rather hasten their own demise to avoid it.

The world of noir makes the world of the street-tough private eye seem optimistic by comparison. And it is! Those private eyes might talk tough, drink too much and hang out with lowlifes, but they have their own ethics, to which they adhere rigidly, even though everyone around them is rotten to the core. The protagonists of noir fiction have no such ethics; they’re as rotten as everyone else in that world and they know it, just as they know they are doomed. In noir, everybody gets what’s coming to them, and it’s never good.

The land of noir has been inhabited by some astonishingly talented writers like Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, Gil Brewer, David Goodis, W.R. Burnett, Charles Williams and so many others, some of whom lived pretty bleak lives themselves. And talented writers continue to keep the genre alive. The noir universe is a fun place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It allows us to strip away all the decorations we hang on our lives in order to avoid the fact that we’re all infinitesimal specks in the universe hurtling directly to our deaths, an entertaining existential panic from which we can walk away unscathed and return to our undamaged lives.

When Myron Foote, the name that had been stuck in my head for a while, became a private investigator, I knew I was entering some configuration of these two universes, and when I came through on the other side, I had Murder Was My Alibi tucked under my arm.

Myron Foote is a private eye on the wrong side of the tracks who doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of violence but is sometimes a little too quick to hand it out to others. From his dumpy little office on the edge of the red light district, he works bottom-of-the-barrel divorce cases ... until a gorgeous redhead walks into his life and offers him $105,000 to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple. Too simple. But who could turn down that kind of money? Or that kind of redhead?

More than one hundred thousand dollars soon becomes more than one million dollars and the job takes him down a dark path littered with lies and secrets, blackmail and murder. It’s a path that leads straight into Cynthia Thacketer’s arms ... and into a deadly trap. Soon, all that stands between Foote and life in prison is an alibi he cannot use.

Murder Was My Alibi is set in the northern California town of Redding, where I was born and raised. But it’s not really Redding. It’s an alternate Redding, a darker Redding — a Redding that has a red light district, for one thing. Actual locations coexist with fictional places that never existed.

Purists, of course, will tell you that noir is not about private eyes, and stories about private eyes are not noir. I’m not going to dispute that. But you’ll find elements of both in Murder Was My Alibi. It’s available as a mass market paperback, for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble and in several ebook formats from Fictionwise. You can read an excerpt of Murder Was My Alibi here. To see my full bibliography, visit my website, and while you’re there, register at the message board and start a discussion. If you have a Facebook account, drop by the Murder Was My Alibi page and click the "like” button. Then drop by my fan page and do the same. If you read and enjoy the book, I hope you'll post a review of it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble — or anywhere else you like!

"All Writers Are Assholes," Said the Writer

This year has sucked. It has sucked so hard and so consistently that if I weren’t married, I’d date it. I have no doubt that not only would it swallow, but it would just keep on sucking without a moment’s pause.

I’m not alone, of course. I don’t know a single person for whom 2011 hasn’t sucked. That’s because I don’t know anyone in the banking industry or who owns a major corporation. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their ability to take care of their families. And now the holidays are here. The spending season. As Tom Lehrer sang:

Hark the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry merchants,
May you make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!

Dawn and I have had giftless Christmases in the past, and I’m sure this won’t be the last. I am, after all, a full-time writer; I went into this line of work expecting it to be financially unstable, with highs and lows, and it has not disappointed me. Gifts aren’t the centerpiece of Christmas for us, so their absence really isn’t that significant. What makes this year tougher than most — not just for us, but for everyone, I think — is the uncertainty, the suspense of wondering just how bad things are going to get before they ever start getting better again.

While I’ve never been a terribly optimistic person, I’ve gotten a lot better at looking at the bright side of things (while still remaining pretty realistic about them) and being grateful for what I have rather than dwelling on what I don’t, and that has come in handy lately. Things are bad, yes, but they could be worse. And in many ways, they have been in the past.

Something happened recently that reminded me of a period in my past that was pretty dark. As I thought back on it, I realized that, in spite of my current financial problems, I’m actually pretty well off. For one thing, I’m a much happier person now than I was then. For another, I’m not living with Snidely Whiplash.

In the mid-1980s, I was in my early 20s (though very inexperienced and sheltered up to that point) and had a couple of novels to my credit. I had moved from my home in far northern California to the other end of the state. I wanted to see if I could do some script writing — movies, TV, I wasn’t too particular. That was the reason I gave when asked why I’d moved to southern California, anyway. The truth was that I wanted to get away from the life I’d lived up to that point. At the time, I was timid, cowed and depressed, filled with self-loathing, and the only time I had any confidence at all was when I was writing. When I left northern California, I left behind an emotionally abusive family, particularly a violent father, and the smothering religion that had helped make me the person I was at that point and had inspired so many of my friends to turn their backs on me because they disapproved of my work. I was a bit of a mess, to say the least. I had already started trying to escape all of that and the pain it had caused by drinking; it had not yet become the problem it would grow into later, but it wasn’t helping — it just seemed to help because it was so numbing. I thought putting some geographical distance between myself and that life would be even better.

I lived in Glendale with a friend for a while, but that arrangement changed abruptly and I suddenly had to find someplace else to live fast. A writer friend of mine had a suggestion.

“I mentioned you to a friend,” he said. “He’s offered to rent you a room while you look for an apartment.”

That was exactly what I needed. And my friend's friend was another writer. But this wasn’t just any writer. This was someone I admired. I had never met him, but I’d heard him speak at conventions and I’d read his books. He was best known for something he’d written for television years earlier that was a favorite of mine and of just about everyone I knew. I’m not going to identify him by name and if you ask me, I won’t tell you. You might be able to figure it out, but I will neither confirm nor deny any guesses. This isn’t a hit piece, it’s just a memory of an experience I had. But I soon came to think of him as Snidely Whiplash, the arch-villain from the “Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties” segments of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, so that’s what I’ll call him here.

I had mixed feelings about living in Mr. Whiplash’s home until I found something more permanent. I thought it was generous of him to take me in; I would be paying rent, of course, but he didn’t know me and was helping me out enormously. My friend told me Snidely had done this for other writers in the past, and this gave me the impression that he was a pretty good guy. At the same time, it was a little intimidating simply because of his status as a writer. For that same reason, it was a little exciting, too. I had never approached him at conventions — I was far too shy for that — but I had watched him interact with others. He appeared quite friendly and the people who did interact with him seemed to love him. I hoped to get to know him and maybe learn a thing or two from him.

I showed up at his house with my bags and he seemed a bit chilly and abrupt as he showed me to my room. I was concerned that I’d shown up at the wrong time, or something — maybe I’d interrupted his work. I worried that I’d started off on the wrong foot. He gave me a tour of the house and the first thing that stood out was the toilet. It was the filthiest toilet I had ever seen in my life. It was perhaps the filthiest anything I had ever seen in my life. The bowl was black with faint streaks of brown and green. The filth was thick enough to be scooped up with a spoon, but it seemed to have been there so long that I didn’t think a mere spoon would be enough to remove it from the porcelain. That most likely would require small explosives. The rest of the house was tidy and clean, but I don’t think that toilet had ever been scrubbed. By “ever,” I mean since the day it was manufactured. I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be there long and went on with the tour.

When we were done, he told me to sit down on the couch. He seated himself beside me, turned to me and said, “There are some things you need to know.”

I expected a rundown of the quirks of the house, perhaps, or a few house rules. I did not expect what he said next.

“All writers are assholes,” he said. “All of them. No exceptions. They lie. They steal. They’re no good. You need to know that I know this. I’ll be watching you. Carefully. If you take anything, I’ll know. Don’t touch my books, my movies — don’t touch anything. If you do, I’ll know. Do not eat my food. Because it’s my food. If you do, I’ll know. If you want to eat, get your own food. If you’re late with the rent, I’ll assume you’re not going to pay it. You’re a writer, so I know you’re an asshole. But try to keep it to yourself.”

As he spoke, I felt myself shrinking, growing smaller and smaller. Unfortunately, I did not disappear. But oh, how I wanted to. I had never stolen anything in my life, and because lying had been as common as breathing in my family, I had made it one of the goals of my life to be honest in all things, simply because I didn’t want to be like them. And yet, Snidely had concluded that I was a lying thief within minutes of meeting me simply because I — like him, by the way — was a writer. I wanted to crawl inside that couch and die.

There was no humor in anything he’d said. He was dead serious. He even seemed rather angry. I was convinced that I had come at a bad time, that he must be having one hell of an awful day and I had shown up at precisely the right time to make it worse. I felt it had to be something like that. He couldn’t be like that all the time. He'd seemed so friendly and warm with others at conventions. And after all, he’d taken me in and was providing me with a place to stay at what was a rather desperate time for me. That wasn’t something he would do if he were like this all the time. That just wouldn’t make any sense.

But I was wrong. His behavior during that first meeting was the nicest he ever got during the few weeks I was there.

I stayed out of the house most of the time. When I was in the house I avoided Snidely as much as possible. I spoke to him only when it was unavoidable because the sound of my voice seemed to grate on his nerves. He would roll his eyes, then close them and become still for a moment, as if trying to snuff out the powerful temptation to scream at me. He always looked at me as if my presence were a brutal affront. I found the fact that it had been his idea to take me in absolutely baffling. He obviously loathed the sight of me and that had been the case from the first moment I’d walked into his house. But I was only there because he’d offered, and according to our mutual friend, he’d done the same for others. Surely he had not behaved the same way with the others. It had to be me. There was something about me that had brought this on.

There was a moment early on when I thought he was going to thaw a bit. On the desk in my bedroom was a computer, and one day, he told me I was welcome to use it if I wanted. I brightened, thinking this was perhaps an olive branch. But I had never used a computer before. I said as much — rather, I stammered as much, because he made me a nervous wreck — and he said, “I’ll get you started.” But he said it in the same tone one might say, “I’ll stomp your face.”

We went into the bedroom, he sat at the desk with me and began to show me how to use the computer. But I didn’t understand anything he said. Computers were alien to me and he was speaking computerese. To me, it was all gibberish. I tried my best to follow along, but that didn’t work. When I tried to follow his instructions, I screwed up once ... twice ... a third time, and each time, I became more nervous and felt more like an idiot. He was impatient in the beginning and only grew more so, until he finally snapped, “How can you write anything when you’re this stupid?”

And then it hit me. Most people simply would not put up with Snidely’s behavior. After that first little lecture about all writers being assholes, most people would’ve been out the door with a cheerful “Fuck you and the horse your father came into.” That’s certainly what I would do today. But I was a different person back then. I stayed for about three weeks, until I found an apartment, and I never responded to any of his cruel remarks with anything but cowed acquiescence. The reason for that was simple. I was used to it. What hit me was this:

I was living with my father again.

Although I didn’t realize it until years later, Dad was a bit of a sadist. He’d gotten it from his parents. A good example was the way he used to tell me about the end times when I was very young. The Seventh-day Adventist cult teaches a terrifying “last days” scenario that Dad would outline to me in detail. He would start slowly by explaining that the government would pass a national “Sunday law” that would require everyone to worship on Sunday whether they wanted to or not, and because Seventh-day Adventists worshiped on Saturday, they would instantly become criminals unless they went along with the law. We would have to flee to the mountains and hide in caves. But things would get pretty rough because in the last days, there would be terrible earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes everywhere. We would be hunted down like animals. Some would be shot on sight while others were taken into custody, thrown in prison and tortured. He piled on the details as he went along, making it more and more vivid and frightening. As this went on, I would become tense, afraid. I would tremble. The terror would build up in me as he continued until I finally burst into tears and sobbed. Then he would tip his head back with a hearty laugh. He enjoyed it. “Don’t worry,” he’d say, “there’s nothing to be afraid of! Jesus will take care of us!” There was no comfort in that. I guess I assumed that if Jesus wouldn’t protect me from Dad, he wasn’t going to be much help when the Sunday-keepers started hunting me down.

Unlike Snidely, though, Dad was physically violent, as well. And the fact that he was often irrational didn’t help. We had a freezer on the back porch, just outside the back door. To get something out of it, you only had to go down the first two steps outside the door, lean forward and open the freezer. But Dad was convinced that every time the freezer door was open, our power bill was driven through the roof. He was obsessive about it. This made no sense, but that was Dad. Whenever he told me to get something out of the freezer, I would shrivel up inside with fear and dread, because I knew he would be watching to see how long I had the freezer door open. If it was too long — and what was “too long” seemed to be determined by his mood at the time — he would become furious. Sometimes he would grab me by the hair and drag me back into the kitchen, shouting at me through clenched teeth.

Whenever I had to speak to Snidely, I felt that same fearful dread, that same inner shriveling. When Snidely told me I was stupid — something I’d heard from Dad more than once — I felt the same silent, withering agreement I felt when Dad said it to me, the same sense of Yep, you’re right, I am stupid, I know.

But at least Dad wasn’t that way all the time. He’d have his angry, mean periods, but later, he would try to make up for it. He would never apologize for it or even acknowledge that it had happened — years later, he would emphatically deny that he’d ever pulled my hair or hurt me in any way — but he would become pleasant and go out of his way to do things that might make up for it. That’s a pretty typical cycle of abuse. Snidely, though, never changed — not with me, anyway, not while I was in his house. He never smiled or laughed once. Everything he said to me was an insult. And he was that way all the time. That’s why I thought of him as Snidely Whiplash. Like a cartoon villain, there was no sign of humanity, nothing to redeem the bad behavior. It never stopped.

I suspect that Snidely had a broad streak of sadism in him, just like Dad. After all, according to our mutual friend, this had been his idea. He didn’t have to offer to rent me a room while I was hunting for an apartment, but he had — only to behave as if he despised me for some past wrong I’d committed. Everything he said to me was an insult or a set-up for an insult; every look he gave me was one of contempt. The only explanation that made any sense was that he’d wanted me there specifically so he could behave that way, because he enjoyed it. I really think he got off on it. That’s sadistic. Thanks to my upbringing, I had been trained in masochism. I’d never learned to enjoy it, but I knew how to live with it — mostly by concluding that I deserved it. In a way, we were a perfect match.

So I stayed out of the house as much as possible. I spent most of my time desperately hunting for a place to live. There wasn’t anything funny about living with Snidely Whiplash. But looking for an apartment in the Los Angeles area? Now that was hilarious. It was like being trapped in a movie co-directed by David Lynch and Federico Fellini.

One old apartment building I visited was like a movie set. It seemed empty. The only people I could see there were myself and the man who showed me the apartment that was available. There were no sounds, no signs of life. At first, it occurred to me that perhaps the place as abandoned and I had been lured there by some kind of psycho killer. When I first saw the guy, I thought he was wearing an ill-fitting hat, but it turned out to be a toupee. He was in his late fifties, but the toupee was jet-black and clashed with his pasty, sagging face. He wore a dark green western-style shirt with long sleeves, white pearlized snaps and gold piping on both pockets and the front and back yokes, powder-blue polyester pants and white shoes.

As he led me through the small courtyard with its cracked concrete and empty swimming pool, he told me about all the famous people who’d lived there before they got famous.

“You know who used to live in the apartment next to the one I’m gonna show you?” he said with breathless excitement. “Anthony Eisley!”

“Who?”

He looked at me in disbelief and repeated the name slowly and with great emphasis. “Anthony Eisley!”

I waited a moment for him to tell me who that was. When he didn’t, I shrugged and said, “I don’t know who that is.”

His eyes widened in disbelief. “He played Tracy Steele!”

“And ... who’s that?”

He sighed with frustration. “Robert Conrad’s partner on Hawaiian Eye!”

I saw no reason to tell him that I only vaguely remembered hearing about that TV show, which ran before I was born, but had never seen it.

As we slowly made our way up the stairs to the second level, he told me about other “famous” people who allegedly had lived there, none of whom I’d ever heard of, and seemed to be delaying our entry into the apartment. Once inside, I saw why. It was a dump. But even so, it probably would have been preferable to living with Snidely Whiplash.

The worst was a little house in Hollywood where there was a room for rent. The house was covered with ivy, there were bars over all the windows and the security door looked like it belonged on a high-security government facility. After I knocked (the doorbell had been removed), I had to wait a long time while someone inside unlocked the many locks on the door. It was opened by a woman who looked ... well, dead. Her pale, wrinkled skin hung from bones with no muscle tissue and she wore a tattered old blue robe. I introduced myself and she let me in. Her steel-grey hair was so thin that her flaky scalp was clearly visible above her skull-like face. She walked with a cane and her labored breathing was loud and wet. Her robe kept falling open and she wore nothing underneath; I had to keep averting my eyes. She didn’t say much as she led me through the house to the room. At first, I thought the walls were painted a sickly yellow, but soon realized that they had been white at one time. Not anymore. The house stank of urine and the ghost of countless cigarettes.

The room she showed me was small and looked like something out of my nightmares. The stripped mattress bore ugly yellowish-brown stains, and there were more on the walls. It looked like someone had exploded in there a long time ago and the mess had never been cleaned up. But you know what? As I stood there staring into that hideous room, I considered the possibility that even that might be preferable to living with Snidely Whiplash. But I decided to keep looking.

One day, on my way out to continue my search for a place to live, my car wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. I sat there at the wheel for a while, trying to figure out a way to deal with the problem without involving Snidely. I went back into the house and hurried to my room. I called a couple of friends, neither of whom was home. I could stay in the room and wait until I was able to reach a friend who could come over and give me a jump, which probably wouldn’t be until later in the day.

Or ... I could ask Snidely for help.

I decided I didn’t want to waste a day that could be spent apartment hunting. I took some deep breaths, steeled myself, then went to the living room, where Snidely was seated on the couch reading the paper. I stood there trembling and cleared my throat. He didn’t look up from the paper.

“Um, my, uh, my car won’t start,” I said with a nervous chuckle. “The battery’s dead. Could I, um ... well ... do you have jumper cables, by any chance?”

He slowly lifted his head. “Yes.”

I cleared my throat again and said, “Could, uh, could I use them to get the car started.”

He nodded once, then looked down at the paper again as he said, “I suppose so.”

I expelled a breath in a quiet sound of relief. “Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.” I looked out the window at my car parked at the curb. His was in the driveway. “Uh, would you mind pulling up next to my car so we can — “

“Oh, no. No no no.”

“Whuh-what?”

“No. You can borrow my jumper cables. But I’m not going to give you my electricity. You can’t borrow electricity because you can’t give it back. If you want my electricity, you’ll have to pay for it. With cash.”

I waited for a smile, a chuckle, some sign that he was joking, because I momentarily forgot that I was not dealing with a normal human being. I was dealing with a sadistic cartoon villain. I ended up having to wait until I could reach a friend, who then came over and gave me a jump. It was the same friend who had set me up with Snidely.

“How’s it going?” he asked. “Are you two getting along?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, and if I answered with complete honesty ... well, I was afraid I would be misunderstood. I didn’t have to answer. My friend read the expression on my face.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “He can be ... difficult.”

Difficult? That was the biggest understatement since the captain of the Titanic said, “We just might have a problem.”

Just when it seemed like my search was going to go on forever, it ended in a small apartment complex in North Hollywood. The manager was a toothless, grossly obese man named Floyd who spent most of his time wearing only swimming trunks, although there was no pool, sitting on a lawn chair that was invisible beneath his girth just outside his apartment, listening to talk shows or baseball games on the radio, looking like a statue carved out of lard. I took a tiny studio apartment on the second level. It had a sliding glass door that provided a perfect view of Floyd in his lawn chair. The day I moved in, a man was stabbed on the sidewalk in front of the building. But that was far more welcoming than the thought of going back to Snidely Whiplash’s place.

I have no memory of saying goodbye to Snidely. I think he was gone when I left the house. I made a clean getaway.

I saw him again later that year at a convention. My back stiffened when I saw him coming down the corridor in the hotel, chatting amiably with another man. I bowed my head and looked at the floor, intending to ignore him. But I was shocked when he approached me with a big smile.

“Ray!” he said as if we were old friends. After making me unbelievably miserable for weeks, he reached out to shake my hand. “How are you? Where are you living these days?”

I gawked at him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, and muttered some kind of response.

“You know, I forgot to get the house key from you before you left,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have it on you, would you?”

I took my keys from my pocket and, sure enough, it was still among them. My hand trembled as I removed it from the key and handed it over. He patted me on the back and wished me well, as if he actually liked me and we had a good relationship. He left me standing there, thinking once again of my dad, who never revealed his true colors around people outside of our family. Even our neighbors and closest relatives had no idea what went on in our house on a regular basis.

When I learned years later that Snidely Whiplash had adopted a child, I was so horrified, it made me sick to my stomach. Adoption is a double-edged sword. It provides loving homes to a lot of children who need them, and it provides children to loving parents who can’t have their own. But some of those parents aren’t loving at all, and it allows them to take home a child on whom they can take out all their frustrations and inadequacies — children they otherwise could not have ... and should not have. I was adopted when I was ten days old. There are plenty of people who would not have been bothered by the way Snidely treated me — stronger people than I was at the time. His behavior would have rolled right off their backs, I’m sure. But I had already been damaged by someone a lot like Snidely, and he only opened old wounds that were not yet completely healed. I hoped that adopted child was made of stronger stuff than I was back then.

I have given virtually no thought to Snidely Whiplash over the years. But he recently popped up on my Facebook page in the right-hand margin under “People You May Know,” because we have some mutual friends. It was an unpleasant blast from the past. Curious, I clicked on the link and visited his wall. As I read his posts, I noticed that he frequently tells his friends that he is not a nice person. In one post, he wrote something to this effect: I always tell people that I am not a nice person so they won’t be disappointed when they get to know me. But they don’t believe me, and then they get to know me and when they find out I’m not a nice person, they’re disappointed.

The responses from his friends were pretty funny. Just as he’d pointed out in his post, they didn’t believe him. They insisted he was a teddy bear, a pussycat, that his curmudgeonly behavior was just a front, that he only wanted people to think he was not a nice person to cover up the fact that he was a great bit softy inside. I noticed that the settings on Snidely’s Facebook page allowed people who were not on his friend list to post in comment threads. I thought I would help out poor old Snidely, who was having such a hard time convincing his friends of the truth. I wrote:

“Believe him. He’s a prick.”

It was my good deed for the day.

Looking at his pictures on Facebook brought back those weeks that I spent in his house and reminded me of the person I had been back in those days. It drove home the fact that as uncertain and messed up as things are financially right now, they’ve been a lot worse. It occurred to me that even if things went straight down the tubes and Dawn and I ended up losing our house and living in the street, I would still be better off than I was during that brief eternity I spent living with Snidely Whiplash.

But that hasn’t happened yet. We’re a lot more fortunate than many. It’s freezing cold outside, but the house is warm and the tree is up, covered in ornaments we’ve collected over the years — characters and ships from Star Wars and Star Trek, cartoon characters from Warner Bros. and Disney, the Three Stooges and Batman, Robin, Batgirl and Catwoman, and even Beavis and Butthead. And there’s a skull wearing a Santa hat on top. The cats make great lap warmers and there’s usually some coffee on. I have my wonderful wife and plenty of dear friends. What’s not to love? Sure, times have been better — a lot better. But they’ve been a whole lot worse.

There are some who say we should only remember the good times. I don’t agree. Sometimes remembering the worst times can make bad times seem a lot better. So if you, like so many others, have had a rough year and find yourself worried about what the future might hold this holiday season, take a moment to think back to a time when you were miserably unhappy, when your life seemed to have hit bottom and you felt like it would never again get better. Remind yourself that you got through it, that you survived, and that you can now look back on it and see how much you’ve grown and how much better your life is today, no matter how bad it might seem.

Then try to enjoy the holidays, anyway.

Thanksgiving 2011

Thanksgiving has changed a lot in my lifetime. For one thing, it has been significantly diminished as a holiday. We seem to go directly from Halloween to Christmas. This is mostly the fault of retailers, of course. Go into a store the day after Halloween and suddenly it’s Christmas — decorations, Christmas trees, Bing Crosby singing about snow. I did that this year. Halfway through November 1, I had “We Three Kings” stuck in my head. As cranky comedian Lewis Black says, “When I was a kid, Halloween was Halloween, and Santa wasn’t pokin’ his ass into it! And Thanksgiving — this’ll come as a shock — was it’s own holiday!”

He’s right. I remember going to my sister’s house on Thanksgiving as a boy, riding in the car with my parents through streets that were absolutely barren. Not a soul was out and about. Everyone was at home with all their relatives being miserable. Now they extend that misery by going shopping and battling stressed crowds so they can buy things that were marked up earlier so they could be marked down a little for “sales.” The first time I realized that the holiday had changed drastically was when Dawn and I were at her sister’s house one Thanksgiving and suddenly her sister said, “I’m going shopping! Anyone want to come?” I did one of those head-shaking cartoon double-takes and thought, Shopping? On Thanksgiving? There are stores open? Yes, they were open. And they’re open right now, on Thanksgiving Day, as I write this!

Even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has changed. As a kid, I used to get up early on Thanksgiving (that was a long time ago — I don’t get up early for anything anymore) just to watch the parade from beginning to end. Back then, it was a parade — floats, marching bands, big cartoon balloons floating over it all like benevolent monsters. Now the parade stops every few minutes so somebody can lip sync a song or a sequined group of pretty people can do a dance number. Many of these musical interruptions — er, um, pardon me, interludes — are performed by the cast members of shows currently playing on Broadway, essentially transforming the parade into a New York advertising campaign aimed at tourists. I have nothing against music, but dance numbers do not a parade make.

I’m starting to sound like some crotchety old fart complaining about how the kids these days have ruined everything. I’m not, really. I still watch the parade. In fact, I caught some of it today. But to avoid sounding like everyone’s grandpa, I’ll move on.

Along with being a day when everyone eats to the point of falling over in a stupor, it’s a day to give some thought to the things for which we are thankful. I’ve been doing that a lot in my life the last few years, but this is the day to talk about it, so I will.

I am thankful for so many things. If I’ve learned nothing else by this point in my life, I’ve learned that no matter how bad things get, there’s always something for which to be grateful. I think as long as we’re on this side of the ground — rather than in the ground — we’ve all got things to be thankful for in our lives.

I’m thankful for some of the best friends anyone could hope to have, both old and new. My friend Steven Spruill is more like a brother. We frequently refer to each other as our “brother from another mother.” He’s a writer whose work I admired years before I ever sold a word, a writer of enormous talents who has been a big influence on me, and he is a fellow survivor of the Seventh-day Adventist cult. We are separated in age by about 15 years, but I keep forgetting that. He’s family. Not real family, of course, but chosen family — which, in my opinion, is even better. No one has shown me more unconditional love and support over the years. Unfortunately, he lives in Maryland and I live in California. We have met in person only once at a convention back in the 1980s, something I would remedy in an instant if I could. I’m looking forward to getting together some day. If you’ve never read him, I hope you will check out his work as soon as possible. He’s written science fiction, horror and the best medical thrillers I’ve ever read, and his latest is Ice Men, a grueling novel about the Korean war. Visit his Amazon page and acquaint yourself with his talent. You can thank me later.

I met Karen Leonard in 2008 by phone. While researching a novel about the funeral industry (which I've never finished), I read Jessica Mitford's hilarious and informative The American Way of Death. It was the revised 1996 version of the 1963 bestseller, and I noticed that it was dedicated to Mitford's researcher, Karen Leonard. Mitford died in 1996, but I thought perhaps I could track down Karen and pick her brain about the funeral business. I found her online, emailed her and introduced myself. We spoke on the phone and it was one of those times when I immediately connected with someone. She was a horror fan, was familiar with my work and, like me, had an oppressive religious background. In the next week, we got to know each other extremely well by email and I soon felt as if I'd known her for decades. She is an activist who's worked with some fascinating people and has the most amazing stories to tell! Her husband Stephen Rubin is a professor who teaches critical thinking, and both of them are fascinating and funny and now feel closer to me than my own family. They came to one of my book signings in San Francisco, and this year, they visited Dawn and me here at home. Even though I've only known them for a few years, they are among my dearest friends.

And speaking of book signings — two of the people I'm thankful I know are Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman of Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I've been doing a signing there once a year for a few years now and I always look forward to it. Alan and Jude are great people, good friends and the store is one of my favorite places in the world. It specializes in science fiction, fantasy and horror and has a small cafe attached. If you're ever in San Francisco, don't leave until you've visited Borderlands. They're great people and I'm grateful that I know them.

Dawn and I have some wonderful friends here at home. We’ve known Jane Naccarato for too many years to count. I think Jane owns more books than anyone I know — her apartment is bursting with them! — and she comes over every few weekends with an armload of paperbacks she thinks we’ll enjoy. More recently, we’ve gotten to know Latrice and Ken Innes, and we’re better people for it. And my computer is better for it because Ken is a computer genius! We love them all.

Jenny Orosel and Bill Lindblad live in Texas and I’ve been shamefully negligent in my communications with them lately, but they’ve become valued friends. We knew Jenny first. She was at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco in 2006, where we were on hand to see the sparks fly between her and Bill. They soon became an item, then a married couple, and in the past week, Jenny gave birth to their first child, a gorgeous girl named Coraline. Every now and then, Jenny and Bill send us a box of goodies — books, toys, movies. They’re funny, brilliant, dear people and we’re fortunate to know them. Jenny has a wonderful column at Cinema Knife Fight called Meals for Monsters, where she reviews a horror movie and then recommends food to eat while you watch, including the recipes! If you’re a fan of horror movies and/or good food, I recommend checking it out.

We’ve made some new friends recently. At KillerCon in Las Vegas in September, we met Jason and Sunni Brock and hit it off immediately. Jason and Sunni seem to know everyone in the horror genre, and it’s a genre they obviously love. They’re both writers, and Jason is also an editor, director and producer, and their company JaSunni is responsible for some great documentaries about it, like Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, about the amazingly prolific writer who left behind so much brilliant work in print and on film.

Through them, Dawn and I have gotten to know the great William F. Nolan, a writer whose enormous body of work has made him nothing short of royalty to anyone who loves the genres of science fiction and horror. I’d met Bill back in the 1980s when I attended a convention in Tucson, and that was a big event to me because I have been a fan of his work all my life. Last month, the three of them paid us a visit and the whole time, I kept thinking to myself, William Nolan is sitting on my couch! WILLIAM NOLAN IS SITTING ON MY COUCH! Together, Jason and Bill have edited a new anthology called The Devil’s Coattails: More Dispatches from the Dark Frontier, which includes stories by Bill, Jason and Sunni and a host of great horror writers.

Also at KillerCon, we met some other friends I’d known only online. Carrie Clevenger’s rock musician vampire Crooked Fang is growing in popularity, and a novel is on the way! Her friend Dorothy F. Shaw writes sizzling erotica, among other things. I met both of them online and they’re wonderful human beings and tremendously supportive and generous friends.

Dana Fredsti and David Fitzgerald have become valued friends. I met Dana, a former actress (she’s in Army of Darkness!) and a talented writer, the author of novels like Plague Town: An Ashley Parker Novel, on Twitter. They put me up during a visit to San Francisco earlier this year and we had a wonderful evening of pizza and zombies and cats (like Dawn and me, they’re cat people). Along with being a great and funny guy, David is a writer, public speaker, the founder and director of Evolutionpalooza! and the Atheist Film Festival, and the author of the wonderful book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Prove Jesus Never Existed at All.

Believe it or not, I’m thankful for Facebook. I didn’t think I would ever say that. I resisted starting an account there for some time, even though people kept telling me I should be using it to promote my books. I finally gave in — reluctantly — and I’m so glad I did. Yes, I’ve been able to promote my books and it has helped sales a good deal. But the real reason I’m so thankful for it is that it has allowed me to connect with my readers, something I’d never done before to this extent. It’s enormously gratifying to know that the books I’ve written have been enjoyed by so many people — and so many wonderful people! Some of them have become close friends. If I try to name them, it’s inevitable that I will inadvertently leave someone out, and I don’t want to do that. But they know who they are, and I want them to know how grateful I am for their friendship. If you’d like to meet them — or any of the other people I've mentioned here — please join me on Facebook!

I’m incalculably thankful for my wife Dawn, who took care of me through years of illness and who has never uttered a word of complaint during those financial dry spells that all writers experience (we’re going through one right now!). She has enriched my life, saved my life, made my life worth living. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

In spite of those dry spells, I’m terribly thankful that I’m still writing. I don’t think I’d be capable of doing anything else, and even if I could, I’d go insane if I weren’t writing. Believe me, it hasn’t always been easy. There have been times when I’ve wanted to give it up, and the fact that I couldn’t do anything else has been the only reason I haven’t. Woody Allen once said, “80% of success is showing up.” I would amend that. I think 50% is showing up and the other half is just sticking around. Somehow, I’ve managed to stick around. I’ve been able to do that because of my readers. No one will ever know just how thankful I am for them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

KillerCon 3: Horror in Las Vegas

When I started writing professionally back in the 1980s, I attended a lot of conventions. Unfortunately, I spent most of the 1980s drunk and, in retrospect, that did not enhance my convention experience. I drank in part because I was so insecure and filled with self-loathing and being drunk helped to numb that. But it didn’t keep me from being, for the most part, an introverted wallflower. I mean, I didn’t put a lampshade on my head and dance the Charleston on a table, or anything. Add to that the fact that I had been trained by my family and most of the people in my life from early childhood onward to be ashamed of my writing, to avoid talking about it. Suddenly, I found myself at conventions where the purpose was to promote my work, and I was surrounded by people whose writing I’d admired my whole life, big names who had been towering influences for me, like Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon and others. But even though I was published when I attended those conventions, I didn’t feel like I belonged there.

This had nothing to do with the behavior of anyone at these conventions. Horror, fantasy and science fiction conventions are attended by friendly people who want to be there and who enjoy being with others who share their interests. The problem was me. I always had a nagging feeling of guilt, like I was pulling something over on everyone, engaging in some kind of fraud, and the fear that I would be caught at it never went away. By 1990, I’d stopped attending conventions and just stayed home and wrote. Isolation is great for productivity if you’re a writer ... but it’s not great for much else if you’re a human being.

I’m a much different person these days, but old insecurities don’t always go away; sometimes they just hide down in the basement, waiting till the time is right. I was thrilled by the invitation to be one of the guests of honor at KillerCon 3 in Las Vegas, but just a couple of days before the convention, that basement door flew open and those old insecurities came rushing out like a bunch of evil, recently dampened gremlins. This would be my first convention without liquid courage or any kind of pharmaceutical enhancement, and once the basement emptied out, all I could hear were the hissing voices of those insecurities telling me just how colossally I was going to fuck it all up. That changed once I arrived at the Stratosphere hotel.

Some conventions are big — some are downright huge — and have a prepackaged feel to them. They’re enjoyable, but they don’t have the kind of feeling of community you find at smaller conventions. KillerCon is small and everyone seems to know everyone. In some ways, it was like attending a reunion. But attending a reunion can be deadly dull if you’re not part of the group that’s reuniting. The great thing about KillerCon — the thing that struck me repeatedly throughout the weekend — was that even though Dawn and I had never attended before, we were made to feel a part of the reunion. I had met some of the other attendees at previous conventions, and there were a lot of my Facebook friends in attendance, but for the most part, these were people I was meeting for the first time. It just didn’t feel like the first time.

After arriving at the hotel and stashing our bags in the generous suite provided by the convention, we went in search of the party. We came in late and it was midnight by the time we set out to find the gathering, but I’d been to enough conventions to know that somewhere in the hotel, there were horror fans having a good time over drinks. As we stepped out of the elevator on the 24th floor, we almost ran smack into Sam W. Anderson, an online friend of mine and a talented new writer. Sam is part of Snutch Labs, a whole group of talented new writers made up of Erik Williams, John Mantooth, Kim Despins, Petra Miller and Kurt Dinan (who unfortunately was unable to make it to the convention). They’re a fun and hilarious group, and I wish I could’ve spent more time with them in Vegas, but as fun as they are, they’re dead serious about they’re writing — and they’re damned good at it. They were at KillerCon promoting their new collection, Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station, which I’ve read, blurbed and can’t recommend enough. Sam had just come from the hospitality suite and was on his way back to his room, but he led us to the party.

Once I started meeting people, those wet gremlins were shoved back into the basement and the door was solidly shut and locked. The convention ran incredibly smoothly and everyone was so pleasant and gracious. I’m just not accustomed to being called things like “sir” or “Mr. Garton.” In fact, the first time someone in the hotel called me Mr. Garton, my bowels loosened a little because I thought my dad had come back from the dead and she was talking to him. Some of the highlights:

We found Leah Anderson and Vincent Daemon at the party. I met Leah online and am happy to take credit for talking her into coming to the convention. She and Vincent are writers who have started a new magazine called Grave Demand, which publishes fiction too extreme or transgressive for mainstream publishers (they’re taking submissions now, so send them something you wouldn’t want your parents to read). We spent a good deal of time with Leah and Vince, and some of that time was also spent with Shaun Lawton and his wife Shasta. Shaun is the enthusiastic founder and editor of The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Shasta is a skilled artist. The six of us spent some time talking about our favorite writers and movies in the wee hours of the night when the rest of the KillerCon folks were shuffling back to their rooms and beds.

A big highlight of the convention for me was meeting my friends Carrie Clevenger and Dorothy Shaw. I met Carrie online earlier this year, and through her, I met Dorothy. Carrie is the creator of Crooked Fang. If you enjoy vampire fiction, you should be following his exploits. Carrie has recently made her first book deal, so Crooked Fang will soon be enjoying a much-deserved wider audience. Dorothy is a new writer whose work is difficult to shoehorn into a particular genre, which I find interesting because I’ve had that problem with some of my own work and I enjoy writing that defies categorization. Carrie and Dorothy have given me a firm kick in the ass when it comes to self-promotion — something I needed — and have been training me to look for any opportunity to plug my work. Thanks to them, and to the fine work of Dorothy’s multi-talented artist husband, Terrance “Wookie” Hoffman, I had a stack of beautiful promotional cards and bookmarks to pass out at the convention.

As small as KillerCon is, it’s still hard to spend as much time as you’d like with the people you want to get to know better. Ed Kurtz and I have been Facebook friends for a while, now, but KillerCon was our first meeting, and he was accompanied by his delightful wife Megan. Ed is a writer whose first novel, Bleed, was published this year, and he and Megan are, like Dawn and myself, cat lovers. Unfortunately, we only spoke briefly. I wish I could have spent more time with Jeff Burk, the maestro of Deadite Press, where amazing work is being done. Burk publishes boundary-smashing horror and bizarro fiction and his books sport some of the most eye-catching covers in the business. Deadite is publishing great writers like Bryan Smith, Nate Southard, the incomparable Robert Devereaux, and Ed Lee and Wrath James White, both of whom I’ll come back to in a moment.

While waiting for the elevator, I spoke only briefly with the charming Rose O’Keefe, the whip-cracker at Eraserhead Press. And I'm sorry I was unable to spend more time talking with writer PS Gifford, writer and artist John Palisano, writer Gord Rollo, writer, editor, director, producer and genre jester John Skipp, writer Lisa Morton, and so many others. There were some I didn’t get to talk to at all, like writer Gabrielle Faust. I’ve been familiar with Gabrielle’s work for some time and I’ve seen her picture online — she’s one of my Facebook friends — but I didn’t know the petite, stylish blonde woman I kept glimpsing was she. Finally, I asked Hal Bodner, who knows everyone (more on him in a moment), who she was, and when he told me, I had one of those forehead-slapping I-coulda-had-a-V8 moments, but by then, it was very late in the weekend and we never connected. I was very disappointed that I was unable to spend time with Rhonda Wilson, a genre regular who's become a great friend online. She was only at the convention for one day and our meetings were unfortunately brief. So many people and so little time. And so many elevators!

I met Gene O’Neill briefly — too briefly — and learned that he's from my old stomping grounds in the Napa area. He said he and a friend had once hooked up with a couple of Seventh-day Adventist girls from my old Napa Valley Sadventist alma mater, Pacific Union College in Angwin — very sheltered, inexperienced girls. Oh, yeah, I know what those sheltered, inexperienced Sadventist girls are like! The only problem is that they’re not like that with Sadventist boys because they’re afraid word will get around. They’re only like that with non-Sadventist boys — like Gene O’Neill! I didn’t get a chance to hear the story, but I’m going to hold him to it and corner him someday, because I want all the juicy details.

Like I said, it’s a small convention, but even so, the weekend just isn’t enough time to see everyone, even given the fact that I slept little and left the hotel only once for a couple of hours on Saturday night. Those couple of hours, by the way, were also a lot of fun. Our niece, Amy Trunoske, lives nearby and she came to the hotel, hung out with us for a while, then drove us down to Fremont street. It was standing room only as we watched one of the animated shows on the canopy that covers the entire street, then we checked out the shark tank in the swimming pool of the Golden Nugget hotel. It made for some great people watching; I would have been perfectly happy to sit there for a long time and just observe because the place was crawling with material ripe for fiction. But after having a meal, we went back to the convention and rejoined the festivities there.

Talking to everyone I want to talk to wasn’t helped by the fact that I’m still annoyingly hesitant to impose on people, to inflict myself on them. No matter how many books I write, despite the fact that I’m a guest of honor, I’ve been able to overcome my inherent shyness only to a certain extent. The important thing, though, is that these are people I wanted to spend time with and get to know better. How often do you find yourself in a situation where you want to be able to spend time with everybody? That isn’t very common. At least, it’s not for me. Usually in a large group, I find myself wanting to hang out only with a handful of people. That wasn’t the case here, and that’s what made it such a wonderful experience.

Most conventions cover genre fiction, movies, TV shows, comic books — the entire spectrum. One of the things that sets KillerCon apart is its focus on writing. Most of the people who attend are writers or aspiring writers and the topics of discussion tend to reflect that. I enjoyed a panel on writing groups that was moderated by editor R.J. Cavender of Cutting Block Press. It was a fun panel that included members of Snutch Labs, but I was especially impressed with R.J.’s remarks about editing. Sometimes it seems to me that the importance of editing is lost in a writer’s efforts to get published. It is impossible to overstate the importance of a good editor to every writer putting words on the page, I don’t care how big that writer might be. But truly good editors are hard to find. As I listened to R.J.’s insightful remarks, I kept thinking to myself, I want this guy editing my work! Fortunately for all of us, R.J.’s services are available through The Editorial Department.

Of course, the writing that is the focus of KillerCon is horror writing. I don’t think there’s a genre more maligned, misunderstood and even despised as ours. Horror writers always surprise their readers when they meet because they’re nothing like their fiction. Ever. It’s been my experience that writers of horror fiction are pleasant, gentle people. Many subscribe to the theory that we are as pleasant as we are because we get all our demons out in our writing, and if we couldn’t write, we’d all be engaged in widespread killing sprees or torturing our parents in the basement, or something. I don’t happen to subscribe to that theory because I’ve known too many writers in the genre, and I think they’d be good people no matter what. I could be wrong about this, but it seems the more extreme the horror fiction, the kinder and gentler the writer. Which brings me to three of KillerCon’s most illustrious figures — and most extreme writers.

We have Wrath James White to thank for KillerCon. It’s his baby. Wrath has a fascinating background. According to the bio on his Amazon page, he is “a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler.” When you combine his background and impressive size with the fact that he writes some of the most upsetting extreme horror in print, this could be a very scary guy. But he’s not. He's the kindest, gentlest man I've ever known who could probably break my neck with his thumb. He’s soft-spoken, brilliant and sensitive, and there is no better example in the genre of what a mistake it is to judge a writer solely by his work.

If you’re already a fan of the horror genre, then you already know who these next two guys are, and you’re probably a fan. And they are two more excellent examples of what I’m talking about.

I was so happy to learn that Ed Lee and Jack Ketchum were among the guests of honor at this year’s KillerCon. Both are genre legends. I first met Ed five years ago at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco, the only other convention I’ve attended since my early days in the genre back in the 1980s. While that was a great convention, I’d just had the third in a series of major operations on my hip, and I was in pain and completely wonky on prescription painkillers. I hobbled around WHC on a cane trying to ignore the fact that it felt like ground glass and thumbtacks were crunching between the bones of my hip. Although I was there, I wasn’t entirely present. I was able to chat with Ed there, but I remember not being very responsive, and possibly not terribly coherent. KillerCon gave me a chance to make up for that.

He may not be a huge bestseller with millions of books in print, but whenever I talk to readers about their favorite horror writers, the name Ed Lee always comes up, almost without exception. And it is always spoken with a big, affectionate smile He writes some of the most extreme horror ever. I mean, like, in the history of the human race. If the Marquis de Sade were alive today and could read Ed’s work, I can imagine him wincing at Ed and saying, “Dude, that is twisted.” But no matter how gut-churning Ed’s writing is, it never loses touch with the most important element of all in horror, the element that the best horror always builds upon: Humanity. Sure, you’ll find plenty of monsters and psychopaths and demons in the horror genre, but the horror that works always remains focused on people, not menacing creatures or spattering bodily fluids. Those other things surround the characters, but a horror story that doesn’t focus on people in one way or another is like a soup without a base.

No one meeting Ed for the first time without knowing what he does would ever guess that he writes what he writes. The same can be said for Jack Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr). I’ve been reading Dallas for thirty years and have always been drawn to his work because he not only maintains humanity in his horror, he writes about human horrors. His novel The Girl Next Door is a classic of the genre and a great example of his work. And I’ve never been able to finish it. I can handle all the horror you can throw at me, but this sort of thing messes me up. Based on an actual incident, the horrifying story of a family that holds a young girl captive and tortures her to death, this is perhaps the most upsetting book I’ve ever read — or tried to read. I promised Dallas I would finish it some day, but damn ... it’s a nightmare. And that’s a testament to his talent. I’d never met Dallas before, and he did a nice thing for me that might appear small to others but was big to me. He introduced me to Monica O’Rourke.

Monica and I first encountered one another online years ago. It didn’t go well. The internet is a treacherous place, and I’m not just talking about the computer viruses and donkey/midget porn. The screen and keyboard make it easy to forget that there’s a human being on the other end who has to deal with all the same daily crap life throws in all of our paths. Sitting alone at a computer makes it easy to forget — or not bother — to be sympathetic, compassionate, patient or tolerant. I think everyone has done that at one time or another; I know I have, a lot more than once (maybe you've heard some of the stories). Monica and I got started on the wrong foot. In fact, both feet were involved — we sort of jumped in the wrong direction. Bitter words were exchanged, harsh feelings were stirred. It seemed unlikely that a meeting in person would go any better than our meeting online.

One night at KillerCon while a group of us were standing in front of the elevator using the ashtrays — that was quite a party spot on the 24th floor, those elevators, and at one point, even the police were called in to quiet it down! — Dallas approached me and said, “I know you and Monica have had your problems in the past. She’d like to meet you, but she’s kind of afraid to.” I was, too! “Could I introduce the two of you?” he said. I thought that was a wonderful thing to do. Dallas introduced the us and it was a great meeting. Later that night, we ended up sitting in Dallas’s room and having the kind of relaxed, friendly conversation I didn’t think I would ever have with Monica, as if none of that earlier stuff had ever taken place. How often does something like that happen? With a few words and an introduction, Dallas smoothed over some old wrinkles and I made a new friend. There were a few individual incidents at KillerCon that, had each been the only thing that happened there, would have made the whole trip worthwhile. That was one of them.

Like a ghost rising from my convention-going days of the 1980s, William F. Nolan attended KillerCon, and I couldn’t wait to see him again. We met in 1984 or thereabouts when we shared a long car ride to a convention in Tucson, Arizona. That was a big deal to me because I’d been a fan of Nolan’s work my whole life. For those unfamiliar with the genre, Nolan is a veteran writer of science fiction and dark fantasy, the co-author (with George Clayton Johnson) of the novel Logan’s Run, which became a hit 1976 movie and is currently being remade. While that may be his most famous work, it’s far, far from his only work. He has to his credit 83 books and more than 750 magazine and newspaper pieces as well as several TV and movie scripts, including a favorite of mine, the 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings. He is a master of short fiction and his work should be required reading for any writer who wants to tackle the difficult task of writing quality short stories. Bill had been a big influence on me and meeting him was an event. I was only 21 or so at the time and my first novel had just been published. All of those insecurities I mentioned earlier completely ruled my life at that time, and I was wreck going into the Tucson convention, which was also being attended by Stephen King and Peter Straub. What was I doing there? Who the hell did I think I was? Bill saw this and took me under his wing. He was a calming influence and a great friend at that convention.

I didn’t really expect him to remember me at KillerCon, but he did. I also met his good friends Jason and Sunni Brock, with whom Dawn and I hit it off immediately. Jason and Sunni own JaSunni Productions and have produced a wonderful documentary called Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man. They also have a couple of other documentaries in the works. In addition to directing documentaries, Jason is a writer, editor and musician, and probably some other things I’m not aware of yet. You know that click! that happens when you meet certain people and you know immediately that you’re simpatico and there's a friendship in the works? That’s what happened for us with Jason and Sunni and we look forward to getting to know them better.

Bill and I shared a table at the mass signing and at one point, he leaned over, put his arm around me and said, “I remember you very well from that trip to Tucson and how uncertain and nervous you were. You were so young! But now, look at you. You're a major figure in the genre and you've created an enormous body of work. I couldn't be more proud of you if you were my own son.”

It probably doesn’t seem like much to anyone else, but hearing those words from William F. Nolan suddenly made it necessary for me to fight back tears. I nearly blubbered like a baby. I simply don’t think of myself that way and never have. Coming from someone I admire so much was overwhelming. My own father never said anything like that to me. Hell, he never read a word I wrote and dismissed anything I ever did. When I told my parents in 2006 that I was being given the Grand Master Award and explained to them what it was, he said, “That’s nice,” and changed the subject. For that moment, Bill Nolan was a father figure and I was hearing something I needed to hear. It felt good. Again, if that had been the only thing that happened all weekend, it would have been worth the trip.

Weston Ochse was hilarious, Jonathan Maberry spoke eloquently about writing and the writing business, Boyd E. Harris was enigmatic, Shane McKenzie of Sinister Grin Press was cool. And then there was Hal Bodner. When he’s not trying to kill the ants that are eating the maggots that are coming up out of his floor, as he was recently, Hal is a writer, the author of the hilarious bestselling novel Bite Club, among other works. I met him briefly at WHC in 2006, but it was too brief for me to discover what a force of nature this guy is. It’s such a cliche that I hate to use it, but it’s unavoidably accurate to say that he lights up a room when he enters it. No one at KillerCon made me laugh as hard as Hal and he did it several times. He knows everyone. And everything. He’s a walking encyclopedia of genre and convention knowledge and a natural mood-elevator. I enjoyed every moment we spent with him.

In fact, I enjoyed every moment of the entire weekend. It was an amazing high. There are a lot of people I haven’t mentioned here, and if you’re one of them, I apologize, but I’ve already yammered on long enough. Big thanks to Wrath White and his wife Christie Parsley White, Bailey Hunter of Dark Recesses, R.J. Cavender, Rena Mason and all the other people responsible for making it such a wonderful weekend.

If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll go through this article and click on the links to check out the work of all the people I’ve mentioned here. A lot of people have come to my blog and Facebook page for reasons other than my horror fiction, but I hope you won’t let the “horror” label turn you off. It’s a big genre and there’s something for everyone. There’s a good chance you’ll find someone here you’re not familiar with, but whose work you will enjoy.

I had forgotten what an invigorating experience a convention can be. I don’t often get to hang out with other writers, particularly writers in the horror genre, and it’s something I need to make an effort to do more often because it’s like a big vitamin B-12 shot to the creativity glands.