Preposterous Twaddlecock

NIGHT LIFE: The Story Behind the Book

2012-01-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-24T15:16:00.001-08:00

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

2011-09-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

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.

My New Website: Entering the 21st Century

2011-09-21T00:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been any good at selling myself. When I started writing, publishing was a lot different. Publishers promoted their writers, even lowly midlist guys like me. I didn’t get a lot of promotion, but there was some. In addition to that, I attended a lot of conventions back in the 1980s. But most of my time since 1983 has been spent writing. (That was true before 1983, too, but I wasn’t doing it for a living then.) I was laid up for eight years with a bad hip that required all kinds of medical procedures and three operations, and I was lost for a long time in a haze of prescription painkillers. When I recovered from that, I discovered that things had changed. The publishing business had become a different world and suddenly, when it came to promotion, I discovered I was on my own. This has required an adjustment that has taken me a while to make.

I received a lot of advice on how to promote myself, but the hard part was actually doing it. The internet provides a vast array of outlets for promotion, and I started looking into all of them. The social networks were an obvious choice, but I didn’t want to put myself out there and become some kind of endless one-note promotion machine, like that Jay Sherman automaton in The Critic that kept saying, “Buy my book! Buy my book!” over and over again, because after a while, that can get on people’s nerves. And I’ve never been the type to talk about my work process much because I’m of the opinion that knowingly boring the hell out of people is rude and I just can’t imagine why on earth anyone would give the slightest damn how many words I’d written on any given day. But I had to do something.

I started on MySpace. It was difficult at first, to say the least. I winced every time I posted something to promote a book and an angry voice in my head kept chewing me out. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Everybody and his plumber has a book to plug! What makes you think anybody’s going to pay attention to YOU? The response was ... weak. I blamed myself. I was taking the wrong approach, I was turning people off, I had fucked up!

But friends told me I wasn’t the problem. MySpace, they said, was the trailer park of social networks and I belonged on Facebook. I couldn’t understand what possible difference that could make, but I reluctantly decided to give it a try. I got a Facebook account, but I thought I’d try to get a feel for the place before I turned on my red light and started dancing in the window like an Amsterdam whore. I decided to be myself. This was a risky prospect because, as many people have pointed out to me over the years, I’m opinionated and some of my opinions tend to send the villagers after their torches and pitchforks. But I’ve never had a problem voicing my opinions — my problem is saying, “Buy my book! Buy my book!” So I decided to try being entertaining. Funny, even. This is a tactic I had used in school to avoid being ostracized like a leper and/or picked on by bullies. I began to work in some promotion now and then — links to my books online, to reviews and interviews I’d done.

This worked surprisingly well. In fact, Facebook has turned out to be a great experience. I’ve reconnected with old friends and made a lot of new ones, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I’ve gotten to know some wonderful people with whom I share interests, opinions and backgrounds. I have some of the funniest and brightest friends on Facebook. A day does not pass without at least one big out-loud laugh from something posted by someone on my friend list. But most importantly, it has allowed me to connect with my readers. Writing is a solitary business. You sit in a room creating characters, populating worlds with them and, if you write horror, making terrible things happen to them, and if you write for a living, you do that a lot. I mean, a whole lot, because writing doesn’t provide huge paychecks unless you’re one of the relatively few who write blockbusters, so you have to keep producing steadily. That’s why I stopped attending so many conventions — I needed to work.

On Facebook, I’ve met a lot of my readers, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised and deeply moved by those who’ve expressed their appreciation and have told me what my work has meant to them. I honestly never expected anything like that. My religious upbringing programmed me to be ashamed of my likes and interests, and that was later extended to my work. My family and many friends, the people closest to me, preferred that we all just pretend my work didn’t exist. It was treated like Sloth in The Goonies. That’s a significant part of the reason I’ve found self-promotion so difficult. But communicating with my readers has helped to change that. And it has made promoting my work much easier.

But I digress. The question is, has Facebook worked as a promotional tool? In the words of a well-known American stand-up comic and mythology expert, you betcha!

As my self-promotion skills improved, I could no longer ignore one very significant fact: I was the last writer in the known universe without a website. Along came my web designer friend Vince Fahey to save the day. Good thing, too, because I don’t know the first goddamned thing about making a website. And now ... I have one.

RayGartonOnline.com is now live with a message board where I’ll be hanging out, information about and links to my books online as well as links to interviews, a full bibliography, and starting in the last week of September, we will be having contests and book giveaways. I’ll be keeping my villager-stirring opinions on my Facebook page. The website will focus only on the work and on starting an online community, which I hope you'll join. Come over and log onto the message board, say hello, start a discussion and maybe win a book! See you there.

THE LOVELIEST DEAD: The Story Behind the Book

2011-09-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

Most people I know love a good ghost story, and I think that extends to people I don’t know, as well. The ghost story seems to be universal. Whether or not you believe in spirits of the dead, a good ghost story told in the right setting can make you jumpy, give you gooseflesh and make the darkness a menacing thing even if it’s in a familiar room. I know people who don’t like other kinds of horror fiction or movies who enjoy a good ghost story. I’m not sure precisely what it is about them that is so effective for so many, but ghost stories seem to chill us in ways that no other horror subgenre can.

The first horror movie I ever saw was a ghost story. William Castle’s 13 Ghosts showed me that being scared could be fun. I couldn’t have been older than five when my cousin, who was a couple of years older than I and lived next door, rushed over to get me. “You gotta see this thing on TV!” he said, barely able to contain himself. “It’s got ghosts and a haunted house and a hidden treasure and — just c’mon!” He practically dragged me to his house. I sat down in front of his TV, watched for a while, and my little skull nearly exploded all over my aunt’s furniture. There was a guy on TV wearing special glasses that allowed him to see ghosts — What a great idea! Where can I get some? — and he was in his basement watching ghostly, floating skeletons burst into flame! And later, his son puts on the glasses and watches a headless man try to tame a lion — a ghost lion! I mean, how cool is that?

Some of the most terrifying horror fiction and movies have been ghost stories. Among my favorites are Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, which became Robert Wise’s brilliant less-is-more 1963 film The Haunting (I like to pretend that the 1999 movie never happened), Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House and the 1973 film adaptation, John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, Stephen King’s novel The Shining, and the 1982 hit Poltergeist. These books and movies are only a few examples, but they are capable of making me actually feel physically cold, the kind of cold that requires a blanket. They're all haunted house tales, the most common and popular kind of ghost story, although ghosts can pop up anywhere in fiction and film.

For years, I’d been wanting to use in my writing an experience I had in the early 1990s, but I hadn’t figured out how. Sometime in 2005, it occurred to me that in more than 20 years of writing horror novels, I’d never written a ghost story, and I decided to remedy that by drawing on that experience. The result was The Loveliest Dead.

I was hired to write a book called In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting. A version of that later became a re-enacted docudrama on the Discovery Channel called A Haunting in Connecticut, and still later, a 2009 movie called The Haunting in Connecticut. It was the story of a family, Al and Carmen Snedeker and their children, who moved into a former funeral home allegedly infested with demons with a fondness for anal rape. How did they know the house was infested with demons? They asked the experts — “demonologist” Ed Warren and his “clairvoyant” wife Lorraine. I took the job because I was familiar with the Warrens. As a boy, I used to read of their adventures in the National Enquirer and found them spooky and entertaining, and they were involved with The Amityville Horror. I thought it would be fun to meet them and work on their book.

In their role as paranormal experts, the Warrens relied heavily on their Catholic faith and the teachings of Christianity to back up all of their conclusions and claims and were rather pious about it. But off the job, they were quite different. He was loud and foul-mouthed and became enraged if any of his claims were questioned, no matter how delicately, and she was gossipy, catty and took any disbelief in their work as a personal attack and responded accordingly. When I had trouble getting the stories of the individual family members to mesh, I asked Ed for advice. He said, “They’re crazy. All the people who come to us are crazy. Just use what you can and make the rest up. You write scary books, right? That’s why we hired you. Just make it up and make it scary.” They claimed to have video tape of some of the supernatural incidents that happened in the former funeral home in Connecticut and told me about it at length, repeatedly promising to provide me with a copy. But I never saw the tape because they claimed they couldn’t find it. They’d been doing this for more than 30 years, they allegedly had video evidence of actual supernatural activity — and they misplaced it. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Ed and Lorraine gave me a tour of the "occult museum” attached to their house, but they wouldn’t do it until after dark because ... well, it’s scarier after dark. The museum is at the end of a long, dark, narrow passageway, a room filled with alleged artifacts from cases they’d worked on, things like possessed dolls and objects supposedly used in Satanic rituals. Ed was my tour guide and his spiel was as accomplished as that of any veteran carny. The whole thing was designed to frighten, just like a good ghost story told around a campfire. Ed and Lorraine and I were in the same business — scaring people. The difference was that I happily admitted that my stories were fictional while they did everything they could to convince people theirs were accurate accounts of things that had actually happened when they knew perfectly well they were not. In short, they were rank frauds and they exploited troubled families in the course of their work.

In the case of In A Dark Place, Ed and Lorraine Warren exploited the Snedekers, a family dealing with some serious problems like drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse — but they were a family who wanted to be exploited. They welcomed it! Everyone involved was eager to make a book deal, and then, with luck, a movie deal. While I was with them in Connecticut, Carmen Snedeker — who was running an illegal interstate lottery operation that she was afraid I would reveal in the book — repeatedly asked me how much I thought they could make from a movie deal. The Snedekers needed help, but not the kind the Warrens were offering. After the experience, I talked with another horror writer who’d been hired to write a book for the Warrens and his experience mirrored mine. So did his conclusions.

If you’d like to know more about my experience with the Warrens, you can read this interview at Damned Connecticut and listen to this MP3 of my interview on the Monster Talk podcast for the whole story. In A Dark Place has been out of print for a long time, but for the last two years, it has appeared on the BookFinder.com list of the most requested out-of-print books. Used copies of the hardcover and paperback editions sell for anywhere from one to three hundred dollars. If you find a copy for less than that, grab it!

When I began writing The Loveliest Dead, I didn’t know much about how the story would turn out, but I knew it would include a married pair of aging paranormal “experts.”

After the sudden death of one of their two sons, the Kellars move into the big old house Jenna inherited from her father. There’s a rusty, vine-covered swing set in the back yard. Who are the mysterious children who play on it at night? Their son Miles claims that when he’s in bed in the dark, a man rises up out of his bedroom floor and threatens him. And what’s down in the basement? At first, Jenna is convinced they are being visited by the spirit of their dead son, but it begins to look like something else occupies the house with them. Out of desperation, they call on Arthur and Mavis Bingham, professional paranormal investigators whose work in the field is chronicled in tabloid newspapers and popular books. But Lily Rourke, a woman living in another town with a psychic talent she does not especially enjoy having, is experiencing premonitions about the Kellars, and she tries her best to get to them and help them. The truth behind what’s going on in the Kellar house is not only horrifying, but it puts the Kellars in grave danger — especially their children.

Here are some excerpts from a few reviews of The Loveliest Dead:

"Ray Garton's The Loveliest Dead eases the reader into what is easily the most mature, heartfelt, and unflinchingly disturbing novel of his career. The unspeakable horror that lies at the center of Dead's mosaic-like mystery is the darkest nightmare of every parent, only in Garton's hands, the revelation of this nightmare is only the beginning. A powerful, terrifying, unforgettable achievement. Ray Garton is back, and he will shake your soul's foundation with this one."--Bram Stoker Award-winning Author Gary A. Braunbeck

"There's a lot of The Shining in the opening chapters, yet where King's novel reached for high operatic horror, Garton keeps his terror up close and personal. You never feel like you're in one of those grand Addam's family-style haunted houses. This is the kind of house you probably live in, and that makes the terror all that more real. There's a lot of The Amityville Horror, with ghost-busters, psychics, and mediums crawling out of the woodwork to investigate these goings on. There's even a bit of Shirley Jackson thrown in, and yet with all this mixing and matching of style, the work is unmistakably individual. The Loveliest Dead has the feel of something you'd read in the newspapers, maybe a tabloid, but definitely a plausible sounding tabloid. So take a walk with Ray Garton through one of the creepiest haunted houses you're ever going to visit. He treats his readers with respect; he treats his characters with respect; in short, Ray Garton is a writer to respect." -- Steve Vernon, Horror World

"Garton shows a sure hand in stringing readers along, delivering scenes to elicit goosebumps at just the right moments. ... I’m a sucker for haunted house stories, and Garton’s — mixing The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door — is a good one. It hooks from the start." — Bookgasm

"Garton proves his masterful writing skills yet again with an exquisitely put together story that squeezes the heebie jeebies out of you!" — Mystery Galore

The Loveliest Dead is now available as a trade paperback, and for Kindle at Amazon and Nook at Barnes and Noble, and in many ebook formats at Fictionwise.com. You can read an excerpt from the book here. If you have a Facebook account, spend a little time haunting The Loveliest Dead’s fan page and click the ectoplasmic “like” button. While you’re at it, drop by my fan page and click the “like” button there, too, or go to my personal Facebook page and let’s be friends. E-Reads is releasing my entire back list. To see what’s available and to keep up on new releases, please visit my E-Reads page. If you enjoy The Loveliest Dead, or any of my other books, I hope you’ll spread the word by posting a review at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

SEX AND VIOLENCE IN HOLLYWOOD: The Story Behind the Book

2011-07-28T12:42:00.001-07:00

Movies have always been a passion of mine. I think the movie that hooked me as a little boy was The Wizard of Oz. I never missed it when it aired on TV once a year. On weekends, I watched all the movies that aired on cable — from the horror movies on =Creature Features every Saturday night to the old movies that ran all day Sunday. But I was not allowed to go to a theater to see movies. We were Seventh-day Adventists, a denomination that prohibited going to movie theaters. We were told that if we went entered the local multiplex, our guardian angels would not accompany us, and if we should die while in there, we would be doomed. This stemmed from something written by the cult’s prophet and founder, Ellen G. White, who condemned theaters in her voluminous, mostly plagiarized writings. But she did that back in the 1800s, well before movie theaters existed. So the Adventists extrapolated.

Movies became a kind of forbidden fruit. Mark Twain wrote, “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” As usual, he was right. Not being able to see them on the big screen like other people made me crave them. I became a sponge, soaking up movie lore and trivia.

In 1977, my freshman year in high school, I worked up the courage to risk eternal life and enter one of those dens of wickedness — a movie theater. I had the help of a friend named Bob, who was not an Adventist, but whose mother had sent him to the Adventist school I attended, anyway. I told my parents I was going over to Bob’s house after school and would eat there. Instead, Bob’s mother dropped us off at the mall, which had a theater. Three movies were playing there: Star Wars, The Gauntlet and The Goodbye Girl. I was the only remaining human being in the free world who had not yet seen Star Wars at least once — even my Adventist friends had thrown caution to the wind to see the biggest movie in the galaxy. Of course, they didn’t have to deal with my parents. But Neil Simon was one of my writing heroes, so I chose to see The Goodbye Girl.

As we were standing in line at the box office, Bob pointed to one of the benches along the mall’s promenade and jokingly said, “Look, it’s our guardian angels! They’re sitting down to have a smoke!” Icewater suddenly flowed through my veins, my mouth became bone dry and my palms started to sweat. I actually began to tremble with fear because I was about to enter ... a movie theater.

You have to understand that I had always been taught that a movie theater was no place for a good and decent person. The church didn’t seem to mind if we Adventists watched movies at home on TV, but entering that building was a sin — as if the building itself were somehow wicked. By the time I made it to that box office line in 1977, I had come to believe that the inside of a movie theater was a cross between an opium den and a low-end whorehouse. I expected people to be having sex in there, shooting up heroin in the back rows.

Then there was the fact — very real to me at the time — that my guardian angel would stay outside. Not for a smoke, of course, because that was even more sinful than going to a movie! But I would be alone in there. Even accompanied by Bob, even surrounded by the other moviegoers — I would be spiritually, cosmically alone. What if I died in there? What if I choked on some popcorn? What if the place burned down? What if I had a cerebral hemorrhage? What if I tripped and fell on someone's heroin needle? What if god just decided to stop my heart out of annoyance at my rebellion? My soul would be lost — all for a Neil Simon comedy. I nearly soiled myself with panic.

It took him a while, but Bob managed to calm me down and we bought our tickets. Inside the theater, I was shocked to find that alcohol was not being sold at the snack bar. Not even beer! No smoking was allowed in the auditorium, there were no visible signs of drug use and people weren't humping like rabbits, either! Oh, sure, the floor was sticky, but not from anything biological. The movie was wonderful and remains my favorite Neil Simon film, but I left the theater with a much bigger impression than the one left by The Goodbye Girl: movie theaters were not only not dens of iniquity, they were wholesome places! The theater was a hell of a lot more wholesome than my own home, where I learned that my parents had found out I’d gone to a movie. My mother shrieked, “You’re lucky Christ didn’t come while you were in that theater!”

I had tasted the forbidden fruit, and it had not disappointed. After that, my love for movies only grew more passionate and I saw two or three a week. I read books and watched documentaries about movies and the people who made them. I wrote stories in my spare time throughout my childhood and my writing was as influenced by the movies I saw as by the books I read.

It was only a matter of time before I wrote something that was immersed in the movies. It finally happened in 1999 with Sex and Violence in Hollywood. At that time, I had been thinking a lot about how violent movies had become within my lifetime. I’m not one of those people who thinks violence in movies or books or video games makes people violent — given the kind of books I write, that would make me an insufferable hypocrite. I don’t have a problem with violence in entertainment myself, but I’ve noticed that as it has become more explicit over the years, things that we once found shocking seemed increasingly tame, even naive.

In 1960, the shower scene in Psycho was horrifying, but 20 years later, it seemed rather innocent compared to all the throat-slashing and head-severing in Friday the 13th. And it wasn’t just movies; violence had become more pervasive throughout our culture. And it wasn’t just fake violence! A look at the news on any given day revealed that violence was very much a part of our daily lives.

With each new level of violence presented to us, we’ve become a little more desensitized to it. I was ruminating on this when I sat down to write Sex and Violence in Hollywood. It didn’t have a title yet, though, and I really had no idea what it was going to be about. All I knew was that I wanted to write something that involved the movies and our growing numbness to violent images.

I began with a sex scene. Adam Julian, a young man in his early twenties was having sex with a woman in her forties. I didn’t even know their relationship to each other at first. By the end of that scene I did, though — the woman was the wife of Adam’s father, whom he hated. After that, I was off and running. After all, I had to find out why Adam hated his father! The book flowed faster and more smoothly than anything I had ever written. At times, it felt as if I were merely taking dictation. It was, in fact, the most enjoyable writing experience of my life.

It’s kind of a thriller and kind of a comedy set against the backdrop of Hollywood, with enough touches of horror to keep it from getting too bright and sunny. Adam and his best friend Carter Brandis are hardcore horror movie fans and their love of the genre permeates the book. It deals only peripherally with our desensitization to violence. It’s much more concerned with sex, violence and Hollywood, and features a big, high-profile, celebrity trial. There are even some cameos by real-life celebrities.

My agent showed more enthusiasm for Sex and Violence in Hollywood than anything I’d ever written. He was ebullient. I was concerned that perhaps the ending was a little too extreme, but he convinced me to leave it alone. He shopped it around to all the New York publishers, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They loved it! But ... they didn’t know what to do with it. I had written almost nothing but horror in the previous 16 years and this was not horror ... although it had elements of horror. It couldn’t accurately be called a thriller ... although it had elements of a thriller. It wasn’t a legal thriller ... although the last third of the book covers a big celebrity trial. It was funny ... but it wasn’t really a comedy. It was sexy ... but it wasn’t really erotic fiction. When it came to categorizing Sex and Violence in Hollywood, the book was an orphan child. Despite the fact that they all loved the book, the New York publishers turned it down with regret.

In 2001, it was finally published by Subterranean Press as a limited edition hardcover. Unfortunately, my regular readers didn’t know what quite to make of it, either, and showed little interest. That was a depressing turn of events because I thought then, and still think today, that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Over the years, though, the book pulled in some new readers, one of whom called it a blend of Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Collins — which I took as a big compliment! It has received some great reviews. One of the most enthusiastic was from Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Weston Ochse. You can read his review here. And here are some excerpts from others:

"Nasty, raucous, at times hilarious, Garton’s latest delivers what the title promises, in spades. But the core of the book is a sensational murder trial clearly inspired by the O. J. Simpson case. The cast features an abrasive female judge who swoons over the film stars who flit in and out of the courtroom, tongue-tied prosecuting attorneys, a nerdy defendant who reserves his right to silence, and Rona Horowitz, a pint-sized, high-octane defense lawyer. Even Johnny Cochran, among a host of real-life celebrities, makes a brief appearance. The defendant may be guilty as hell, but part of the fun is watching dynamo Rona cook up one outrageous legal trick after another to try to extricate her client. Meanwhile, the story’s hero, young buck Adam Julian, is sleeping with his hated schlock-film producer father’s new wife, as well as her underage but wildly sexed, drugged and dangerous daughter. [Julian’s sweetheart] Alyssa is the unlikely chip the author will eventually cash in to supply enough gore for two or three more trips to the courtroom. ... This over-the-top excursion into the underside of Tinseltown provides more thrills than a high-speed car chase on an L. A. freeway."
— Publishers Weekly

“Trust Ray Garton. This talented author of many of the more distinctively strange horror novels of the past decade and a half could — probably — write the sort of break-out commercial novel that would make his name a household word right up there somewhere in the alphabet just before the King, Koontz K-section in the book stores. … Check out his substantial new novel, Sex and Violence in Hollywood. It’s a fascinating work with all the commercial elements: greed, Hollywood, murder, Hollywood, lust and graphic sex, Hollywood, psychopathia. Oh, and Hollywood. Garton’s novel is muscular, paced something like a car with a brick duct-taped to the throttle, and edgy with a sharp and nasty little tongue lodged firmly in cheek. ... The deliberately broad and superficially bland title manages to reel in vivid portraits of a generation more lost than usual, an accurately jaundiced view of how thin the dividing line seems to be between fantasy and reality. ... As a bonus, the reader gets a sardonically entertaining legal thriller slipped between the ribs of what might be termed a dark associational suspense work. ... The author cranks his epic to a balls-to-the-wall ending that could trigger late-night reader debates for quite a while.”
— Edward Bryant, Locus magazine

"Worth every penny of its price. You are in for one mean, hard, vicious ride; it’s about as searing a satire as you’re likely to encounter. I defy anyone to survive the last 50 pages unshaken."
— Gary Braunbeck, Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist

"Visceral, provocative, and graphic, Sex And Violence In Hollywood would make a perfect vehicle for the next Quentin Tarantino film. Equal parts crime novel, Hollywood expose and legal thriller — Garton alternately channels Jim Thompson, Joe Esztherhas, Dominick Dunne and John Grisham — it’s a genuine pleasure to read, a trashy thrill ride with unexpected depth. Gleefully milking the dramatic potential of Adam’s dysfunctional family, various Hollywood lowlifes and America’s legal system for all they’re worth, Garton also slips in some sly commentary on modern culture, the media, and the judicial system, celebrating and condemning their excesses. Purists might ask, 'Is it horror?' Well, not in the supernatural sense, but certainly in the utter emptiness of the main characters’ lives. Rest assured, however — there are some genuinely horrific moments, not the least of which is the shocking denouement."
— Henry Wagner, Hellnotes

“Sex and Violence in Hollywood is not only Ray Garton’s best novel, but it may be one of the best novels published, in this or any other year.”
— Weston Ochse, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Scarecrow Gods

"Sex and Violence in Hollywood is a realistic, non-supernatural melodrama of greed, murder, and twisted family relations that offers exactly what the plainspoken title promises. ... It’s a kinetic, plot-driven novel filled with cliffhangers, betrayals, unexpected developments, and moments of stark, disturbing violence. It’s also, at times, a very funny book, filled with cogent observations of an insular, narcissistic society. Sex and Violence in Hollywood possesses wit, energy, and a relentless momentum that carries the narrative steadily forward. At its best, Garton’s latest has the raw, in-your-face power of a Quentin Tarrantino film. It comes highly recommended to anyone looking for a nasty, colorful, high-adrenalin good time."
-- Bill Sheehan, Locus magazine

Sex and Violence in Hollywood is finally available in paperback, for Kindle, for Nook, and in many ebook formats at Fictionwise. If you have a Facebook account, visit the Sex and Violence in Hollywood page, and while you’re at it, drop by my Facebook fan page and lick the "like" button, and friend me at my personal page. If you enjoy Sex and Violence in Hollywood, I hope you'll rate it and even leave a review at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

E-Reads is releasing my entire back list in paperback and as ebooks. To see what’s available and keep up with new releases, visit my E-Reads page.

SHACKLED: The Story Behind the Book

2011-07-19T13:52:00.001-07:00

In the 1980s, a bizarre phenomenon began in the United States that captured my attention and held it for more than a decade. The information you’re about to read is the result of research and hindsight. When it was actually happening, the truth about all of this got little or no attention, and although I followed the news stories, I did not yet have all the information. Even when I wrote Shackled, I wasn’t aware of the whole story. While it was going on, cameras and microphones were focused on the shocking details and the accusations and claims that sounded like something from a horror movie.

Like everyone else, I first became aware of it in 1983 when it was reported that Judy Johnson, mother of a student at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, claimed that her child had been sodomized by her estranged husband and one of the McMartin teachers, Ray Buckey. An investigation began. But Johnson repeatedly contacted the District Attorney’s office with accusations that were increasingly macabre. She claimed that people at the preschool were having sex with animals, that preschool administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey had “drilled a child under the arms,” and that “Ray flew in the air.” Here is an excerpt from a summary of an interview with Johnson, reported by the Deputy District Attorney:

“Billy describes having communion in a church. A prayer similar in sound to the Lord's prayer was recited. A goat climbed up higher, higher, higher. Then a bad man threw it down the stairs. It woke up later. ... Ray picked his rt. pointer finger. It bled. Ray put it in the goat's anus. Nobody had clothes on under the robes. Billy had a robe on too. They put a Band Aid on his finger. ... Lots of threats were made against Billy and his family. It is unclear whether it was a doll or real baby (Billy says real baby) but the head was chopped off and the brains were burned. Billy said Peggy [McMartin] killed the baby. Peggy had scissors in the church and she cut Billy's hair. Billy had to drink the babies [sic] blood. Ray wanted Billy's spit. He put it on the altar. The baby was big like Billy. It screamed. When Billy's bottom was bleeding Ray put a tampax in his bottom to stop the bleeding, then he took it out. The red circled people in this ad [referring to a newspaper ad for a local health club] are all familiar to Billy. The 3 women are witches."

Johnson had been diagnosed with and hospitalized for acute paranoid schizophrenia, but that information was withheld during the trial. When it was finally revealed, the prosecution maintained that Johnson’s mental illness was brought on by the stress of the trial, although it was later revealed that she had admitted to prosecutors that she’d been mentally ill before the whole sensational case began. In 1986, she died in her home from complications of chronic alcoholism. But by then, the snowball of accusations, rumors and media frenzy had become gigantic and unstoppable. The initial accusations were made in 1983, the preliminary hearings began in 1984 and the trial lasted until 1990 and cost a total of 15 million dollars. It was the longest and most expensive trial in American history.

Accusations made by the children were every bit as bizarre as those made by Judy Johnson. Satanic rituals were described during which children were sexually abused in tunnels, secret rooms and at airports and car washes. Children claimed to have been taken away in hot air balloons and airplanes, to have seen witches fly through the air, and one child identified movie actor Chuck Norris as one of the Satanic child abusers. But investigations turned up no physical evidence of anything described by the children.

One of the initial prosecutors, Glenn Stevens, claimed that his fellow prosecutors had withheld vital evidence from the defense and he left the case. During the trial, Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder met with the children and parents involved and Stevens claimed that Smith and Pazdar influenced the testimony of the children. Who were Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazdar? I’ll come back to them in a moment.

Videotapes of the children being interviewed by people from Children’s Institute International, a child abuse clinic in Los Angeles, revealed that the method of questioning was highly suspect. The questions were extremely suggestive and coercive and led children to make false accusations. Some believe the method of questioning led to false memory syndrome. The trial ended in acquittals and dismissals, but even so, the lives of those in the McMartin family were destroyed.

The McMartin case was not the only one, it was just the most prominent. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, accusations of Satanic ritual abuse — some at preschools and daycare centers, as in the McMartin case — swept across the country like a wildfire. Nearly all of them involved the same lurid and horrifying details of Satanic rituals, necrophilia, cannibalism, human sacrifice, children being urinated and defecated on and other mind-blowing atrocities that came up in the McMartin case. Also present were the same leading, coercive questioning techniques used on the children in that case. With no substantial physical or corroborating evidence, arrests were made, trials were held and people were convicted.

Volunteer activist groups like Believe the Children were formed to educate people about the widespread problem of Satanic ritual abuse. Organizations of therapists published material to inform other therapists and law enforcement of the symptoms of what became known as SRA. Out of this came the revelation that a worldwide conspiracy of multigenerational Satanists who were extremely well-connected and powerful was kidnapping children and abusing them in horrible ways and using them as sacrifices in their rituals, which allegedly increased their supernatural power. Stories arose of Satanists who were actually summoning Satan. This worldwide conspiracy also included Satanic messages and supernatural powers involved in popular rock music and role playing games. It seemed that Satan’s agents were lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce on America’s children.

But none of this appeared spontaneously. All of it sprang from just a few sources. The first two were a couple of men who became very popular in Christian circles during the 1970s.

Mike Warnke was a Christian evangelist and comedian who claimed that, before converting to Christianity, he was a Satanist who climbed the religion’s ranks to the position of high priest. He told tales of Satanic rituals and explained how Satanists kidnapped and raped children and young people, using them in rituals that brought them, the Satanists, supernatural power. He talked about women who were used as breeders to provide babies for the Satanists to sacrifice in their rituals. His book The Satan Seller was published in 1973 and became a huge Christian bestseller. As a result, Warnke became a popular speaker who was in demand all over the country, and his Christian comedy records sold in big numbers. For two decades, Warnke was a Christian star who was respected as an “expert” in Satanism. In 1985, he was even featured on the May 16, 1985 episode of the ABC news magazine 20/20 called “The Devil Worshipers.”

Another popular speaker in Christian circles during the 1970s was a man named John Todd. Like Warnke, he was an in-demand speaker who claimed to have been a high priest in what he called the “Satanic Illuminati.” He claimed to have been John F. Kennedy’s “personal warlock” and told stories of being present for the ritualistic dedication of master recordings of popular rock albums to Satan himself, who often made an appearance at these ceremonies. He spoke of a vast Satanic conspiracy to take control of the United States and the world. He claimed that Ayn Rand was the mistress of one of the Satanic Illuminati’s highest ranking members, Philip Rothschild, who ordered her to write a novel that outlined their plan to take over the world. The result was Atlas Shrugged.

These two men helped lay the foundation for what was to come. The actual structure was built by a woman named Michelle Smith and her therapist, and later husband, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. In 1980, their book Michelle Remembers was published and became a bestseller.

Michelle Remembers tells the story of how Smith’s mother, part of a multigenerational Satanic cult in the city of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, forced Smith to participate in rituals beginning when she was five years old. It claims Smith was kept in a cage, sexually molested and tortured, rubbed with the blood and body parts of sacrificed babies and adults whose murders she had been forced to witness. The last of these rituals allegedly lasted 81 days and included the actual summoning of Satan himself. Smith claims that Jesus Christ, the virgin Mary and Michael the archangel intervened during that ritual and not only healed all of the physical scars she bore from years of abuse but removed all of her memories of those horrible events until the time was right for them to be revealed again. (As Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady would say, “How conveeeeeenient!”) According to Pazder, that time came when he began treating her for depression and recovered these “repressed memories” while Smith was under hypnosis. Pazder claimed that Smith had been a victim of the Church of Satan, a worldwide cult that predated Christianity.

In spite of the book’s many irrational claims — not the least of which was that the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, predated Christianity (which is a little like saying bumper stickers predated the invention of the automobile) — Michelle Remembers was published as nonfiction.

When reports of Satanic ritual abuse began to surface all over the United States in the next few years after the publication of the book, Pazder was consulted by law enforcement as a Satanic “expert.” He, too, became a popular public speaker and TV guest. In 1984, he was called in to consult with law enforcement on the McMartin Preschool case. That’s when prosecutor Glenn Stevens, who left the case because of the egregious way it was being handled by his fellow prosecutors, claimed that Pazder and Smith were given access to the children and influenced their testimony. So it’s no surprise that their testimony frequently mirrored the ugly details in Michelle Remembers.

In fact, the testimony of the accusers in all of the Satanic ritual abuse cases that followed were repetitions of the details in that book, and the idea that a global conspiracy of Satanists was not only reinforced but it started a panic. Michelle Remembers was routinely used as a guidebook by law enforcement in profiling cases of Satanic ritual abuse.

Most of the details of Smith’s story are identical to details given by Mike Warnke in his book about his experience with Satanism, and Pazder’s claim that there existed a worldwide conspiracy of ultra-powerful Satanists who were kidnapping, torturing and sacrificing people, especially babies and children, and that breeders were having babies specifically to be used in Satanic sacrifices, mirrored John Todd’s tales of the Satanic Illuminati.

That might be a significant fact in their favor if all of these people — Warnke, Todd, Smith and Pazder — were later revealed to be greedy liars and utter frauds.

The Great Satanic Panic of the Late 20th Century was greatly aided by a media eager to showcase the sensational stories that included plenty of sex, violence and jaw-dropping horror. And no one jumped on the Satanic express faster and in a bigger way than synthetic journalist and slavering media whore Geraldo Rivera — or, as I like to call him, Horrendo Revolta. He did a number of TV shows on the subject that only poured gasoline on the fire. In 1988, his 90-minute primetime Halloween special, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, borrowed it’s name from Satan’s Underground, the book by Lauren Stratford (also published as nonfiction), who claimed to be a survivor of Satanic ritual abuse and whose book launched her career as a public speaker and “expert” on the subject. The book was a Christian bestseller and she appeared on Geraldo’s special.

You can watch Geraldo’s special on YouTube in nine parts. I strongly recommend that you give it a look because you can see the number of completely unsubstantiated claims that are made — wild claims about cannibalism and infant sacrifice — and the out-of-context soundbites Geraldo runs as if they are hard news. The show accepts at the outset the existence of a vast Satanic network. When Geraldo starts talking about “breeders” who provide Satanic cults with babies to sacrifice in their rituals, what does he use to support the idea? A clip from the 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby — which never claimed to be nonfiction.

The most articulate guest on the show is Michael Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set, and one of the primary boogie men in the country according to Christian conspiracy theorists. He makes some extremely valid points about the real philosophy behind his religion and other Satanic beliefs, which bears no resemblance to the claims made by Christians about Satanism. He also points out that others on the show claim to have been involved in Satanic cults that routinely engaged in human sacrifice, but not one of them has ever identified a single guilty party for law enforcement or provided the names of anyone else involved in those cults. At one point, he says, “Who are they? Name them. Identify them and arrest them.” Aquino’s calm, rational responses are virtually ignored by Geraldo in favor of the feverish, outlandish claims of his other guests.

When Aquino calls for names and arrests, the response by the alleged “survivors” is that no one will believe them. One woman claims that no bodies are found because the Satanists “consume them.” Really? Bones, too? “Satanists ate my evidence!”

Former FBI agent Ted Gunderson claims that nothing can be done by law enforcement. Since retiring from the FBI, Gunderson has worked as a private investigator and claims that the worldwide conspiracy of Satan worshipers has been responsible for a host of high-profile crimes and incidents, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the accidental skiing death of Sonny Bono. He also claims the United Nations is poisoning the population with chemtrails as part of the Satanic Illuminati's effort to decrease the population. The only evidence we have here, of course, is the evidence that Ted Gunderson is a fucking loon.

Geraldo strung together a list of unrelated crimes committed by deranged people who possessed Satanic paraphernalia or claimed to be Satanists and concluded that an enormous network of Satanists were killing people all over the country. He paraded in front of the camera people who appeared to be drug-addled or mentally ill or both — some of whom were so dysfunctional that they could hardly speak — and pointed to their inarticulate claims as hard evidence of this network. It was a low point in television, a field where low points are common — but this was lower than usual because of the disgusting claims being made without any evidence and the damage those claims did to so many over the years.

A big culprit in all of this was the unreliable and damaging “repressed therapy movement,” a form of therapy that attempted to extract repressed memories from people, sometimes under hypnosis. As many as one in five people who have memories “recovered” using this kind of therapy have memories of Satanic ritual abuse, including the elaborate details outlined above. But hypnosis is not always necessary. Sometimes all you need is ... Geraldo Rivera.

Rivera’s shows on the Satanic Panic were not just bad TV, they did real damage. Paul Ingram lived in Olympia, Washington with his two daughters who one day watched one of Rivera’s Satanic ritual abuse shows. They ended up accusing their father not only of abusing them, but of leading a Satanic cult and overseeing the sacrifice of 25 babies. Using sleep deprivation and hypnotic interview techniques, interrogators from Ingram’s church, the Church of the Living Water, convinced him that he suffered from multiple personality disorder and had repressed the memories of the abuse and his Satanic activity. With no evidence, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In 1995, Geraldo apologized for publicizing what he came to realize was a complete fraud that had damaged so many lives and he recanted on CNBC, adding that he thought the “repressed memory therapy movement is also a bunch of crap.” But after all the manipulative disinformation he had aired over the years, his brief apology on a little-watched cable channel was hardly sufficient.

In the 1990s, most of the biggest names in the Satanic ritual abuse business — and it was a business, and still is! — were soundly exposed as liars and frauds. People like Mike Warnke and John Todd and Lauren Stratford and the Satanic conspiracy team of Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder — and much of that exposing was done by the Christian magazine Cornerstones. And yet, despite being exposed as frauds, these people — with the exception of Todd, who died in 2007 in the Behavioral Disorder Treatment Unit run by the South Carolina Department of Mental Health after serving half of a 30-year prison sentence for rape and child molestation — are still at it! And there are still plenty of people who believe everything they say, people convinced that the Satanic conspiracy is growing and that countless people are still being harmed and killed by devil worshipers.

Why do the Satanic Panic stars keep going even after they’ve been debunked? Because there’s money to be made and attention to be drawn to them. One can make good money as a public speaker, and then there are books and videos and audio recordings to sell. After all, there are still plenty of people who believe them in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they're full of crap. These are people who place their religious beliefs above the reality in front of their faces, people who prefer a scary fantasy to an unpleasant, mundane reality. They need something to fear and blame. These people are all Christians, of course, because Satan is specifically a Christian deity, and a Satanic conspiracy makes more sense to them than the possibility that greedy fellow Christians might use their belief to bilk money out of them.

Christianity played a big role in the SRA scare. The accusers, therapists and activists involved were mostly fundamentalist Christians who identified as “Satanic” anything their religion condemned and anything that smacked of the “occult.” The word “occult” originally referred to something that was secret, hidden from view, concealed or beyond understanding. But it has come to mean primarily anything relating to the supernatural, and to Christians, it is synonymous with “evil,” even if the true meaning of a particular symbol — like the pentagram, for example — is actually benign. In order to take those stories seriously, one first must believe in an evil being called Satan who is actively involved in people’s lives. I’m not trying to belittle the people who believe that ... because I was one of them.

During the 1970s, I heard the recorded lectures of Mike Warnke and John Todd — and another Christian teller of Satanic tales, Bob Larson (who’s also been discredited by Cornerstone as a liar and fraud) — a lot. They were played for me and my fellow classmates in the Seventh-day Adventist school I attended. Warnke’s talks were always funny, but what he was talking about was not — he joked about Satanism and being privy to kidnappings and the ritualistic abuse and sacrifice of young people, which aren’t what you would normally call comedy gold if you’re claiming those things actually happened. For one entire week in 1977 at what was then Lawncrest Junior Academy (now Redding Adventist Academy in Redding, California), Mr. Currier’s math class was devoted solely to listening to a series of cassette recordings of John Todd outlining the whole Satanic Illuminati conspiracy.

(Incidentally, my math teacher Mr. Currier later got into trouble for molesting the young wheelchair-bound girls with muscular dystrophy he’d taken into his home as foster children. To the best of my knowledge, he was not a Satanist — he was a Christian school teacher. But Satan still got the blame because later, Mrs. Currier explained to me that the devil was responsible for the whole thing. See? Satan is very convenient because you can blame him for everything!)

You know what? Those guys — Warnke and Todd — scared the shit out of me. My parents could never understand why I enjoyed watching horror movies on TV so much. They just couldn’t get it through their heads that the vampires and werewolves and ghosts in the old movies I watched on Creature Features every Saturday night were a relief from the nightmarish horrors instilled in me at school and in church. I’ve been writing horror fiction for a living for the last 27 years in part because of the fear-mongering paranoia I was taught by guys like Warnke and Todd.

You have to understand that I was raised to believe that Satan was an active threat to me at all times. As far back as I could remember, I had always been taught that I had to pray to god for help and be good to get his approval, but Satan’s attention was always focused on me. He was constantly peering over my shoulder, breathing down my neck, tempting me, goading me, threatening me, deceiving me. Because of my interest in forbidden things like novels, comic books and horror movies, I was told he was working through me, that he was using me. I was taught that god would always win, but at the same time, I was taught to fear Satan. When I watched a horror movie like Rosemary’s Baby on TV as a kid, it was like watching a documentary! It merely confirmed everything I’d been taught.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1981, I was seriously questioning everything I’d been taught to believe. A lot of years would go by before I would finally be free of the fears and superstitions that came with those beliefs, but that was when the serious thinking began. When I started hearing the stories of Satanic ritual abuse, I nearly wet myself! This wasn’t Rosemary’s Baby or The Brotherhood of Satan on TV — this was the news! My first thought upon hearing those stories?

Holy shit, everything Mike Warnke and John Todd said was TRUE!

I had grown up believing in all kinds of conspiracy theories that are simply taken for granted among Seventh-day Adventists in particular, and many among Christians in general. They’re so common that no one thinks of them as “conspiracy theories,” but simply as the truth with which they live. Seventh-day Adventists believe that there are ongoing back-room meetings in the U.S. government in which the Catholic church is trying to get the “Sunday law” passed, which would make Adventists criminals for observing the Saturday sabbath rather than going to church on Sundays. There are plenty of Christians, besides Adventists, who believe the Catholic church is the beast of Revelation. Some Christians believe Jews are conspiring to rule the world and wipe out Christianity. Many believe that all of science has conspired to bury the truth of creation with the lie of evolution and, depending on who you talk to, that either Satan planted fossils to fool us or god planted them to test our faith. So a Satanic conspiracy to molest and sacrifice children wasn’t exactly a big leap.

When I wrote Shackled in the mid-‘90s, I still didn’t have all of this information. The Satanic Panic was just beginning to calm down. But I had some very serious doubts, because the information I had did not add up and carried the unmistakable scent of bullshit. But I did what every writer of speculative fiction does — I asked, “What if?” What if something like this were really going on?

Shackled is about tabloid reporter Bentley Noble, who works for the Global Inquisitor. While researching a story about a woman who talks to the late Liberace, Noble stumbles onto something so horrible, so unspeakable, that he’s not sure if even his own tabloid will report on it because it’s so unbelievable. Children are disappearing and what’s being done with them is almost too awful to accept. With the help of a true crime writer and Pastor Ethan Walker, whose own son Samuel has been taken, Noble goes into the dark underworld of human trafficking and discovers that there is no limit to the evil that men can do.

A lot of people have told me that Shackled is one of the scariest and most upsetting books they’ve ever read. That, of course, is music to my ears. But some mistakenly believe that the book is based on actual events, and that misconception stems from the fact that the Satanic Panic was widely reported on, but the truth behind it received very little if any coverage. The truth is seldom sensational enough for the media. Shackled is entirely a work of fiction inspired by what has turned out to be a contemporary legend, like Bigfoot and alien abductions (complete with anal probes). I did not write it, as some think, to make people aware of a real problem. I wrote it only to entertain ... and to terrify. I hope it does its job.

Shackled is available in paperback and for Kindle and Nook and in many ebook formats at Fictionwise. If you have a Facebook account, please drop by the Shackled page and click the “like” button. While you’re there, stop by my fan page. If you’d like to read an excerpt from Shackled, you’ll find one here. E-Reads is making all of my books available as paperbacks and ebooks. To see which ones have been released and keep up on new releases, please visit my E-Reads page.

If you’d like more information about the Satanic ritual abuse scare, here is an article from the National Center for Reason and Justice and a website with a long list of links on the subject.

RAVENOUS: The Story Behind the Book

2011-07-12T16:20:00.001-07:00

For too long, the werewolf has been the Rodney Dangerfield of the horror genre. He’s never gotten any respect. He’s never gotten the respect he deserves, at least, not in my opinion. And this is despite the fact that he’s been the star of some great horror movies.

In 1935, Henry Hull played The Werewolf of London and six years later, Lon Chaney, Jr. turned into The Wolf Man, probably the most iconic werewolf. The latter was Universal’s biggest moneymaker in 1941, but after that, Larry Talbot’s wolf man was relegated to making appearances in movies that focused on other monsters, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Two years before he moved to the Ponderosa and became Bonanza’s Little Joe, Michael Landon’s hormones got the best of him in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, an enjoyable but low-rent drive-in werewolf movie from American International Pictures. For decades, Hammer Studios turned out dozens of horror films, including eight Frankenstein titles, seven Dracula movies ... but only one werewolf movie in 1961, The Curse of the Werewolf.

Aside from hackneyed, low-budget schlock, it was twenty years before another loving, quality effort was made to bring the werewolf to the screen. The Howling and An American Werewolf in London were both released in 1981, which remains the best year for werewolf movie fans in all of human history. 1994 saw the release of Mike Nichols’s top-drawer production Wolf and in 2010, The Wolfman was lovingly remade with effects by the great Rick Baker. Both got a tepid reception and failed to revive interest in monster movies.

While the werewolf hasn’t been ignored, compare his record to all the movies that have been made about ghosts, or vampires, or the lumbering, brain-hungry zombie, or even the one-note mummy.

The werewolf pops up in literature from time to time. Two from the 1980s come immediately to mind — Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf and Robert McCammon’s memorable werewolf-Nazi mashup The Wolf’s Hour. There have been some wonderful werewolf novels from W.D. Gagliani, William D. Carl, Jonathan Maberry and others, of course, but they have been sporadic. These days, werewolves seem to be most commonly found in urban fantasy or paranormal romance. The werewolf as monster — I mean, the scary kind — are much harder to find.

Over the decades, the vampire has had all the horror cachet. The vampire is horrifying because he’s a walking corpse and wants to suck your blood and turn you into a walking corpse. He’s sexy because he gets to keep his good looks and he can’t be killed, so he’s been around for a long time, has seen everything and has lots of experience. The vampire is erotic because what he (or she) does is deeply intimate and involves penetration and sucking. His allure is that he can relieve you of your mortality and allow you to “live” on and on as a supernatural being superior to all those around you. The vampire changes with the times. He began as the mustachioed, grey-haired man with hairy palms in Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel and has morphed over the centuries into sparkling, angst-ridden teenagers.

But the werewolf remains unappreciated, underused and taken for granted. When the editor at Leisure Books became convinced that werewolves were going to be the Next Big Thing and asked me to write a werewolf novel, I jumped at the chance.

It had been so much fun writing Live Girls back in the 1980s. Vampires had always been sexy — Stoker’s Dracula had kicked Victorian prudishness in the nuts — but the sex was never explicit. I set out to change that. I wanted to do the same thing with werewolves. Sex was not associated with werewolves at all, not even implicitly, and I couldn’t understand why. After all, the transformation from human into werewolf removes all inhibition and self-consciousness. The werewolf gives no thought to social conventions, taboos, the law, or whether or not either party uses protection. The werewolf is the id unleashed, a human’s animal nature stripped naked. And what do animals do? They eat and fuck. They fuck and eat. It occurred to me that a werewolf might do both at the same time.

Of course, werewolves aren’t as suave as vampires. They don’t charm and seduce. They’re animals. They take what they want. Sexually, that would be a kind of rape. I say a kind of rape because rape as we know it is not a sexual act, it’s a brutal act in which sex is used to dominate, demean and demoralize the victim. In the violent act of rape, sex is the weapon used, not the desired goal. A werewolf, being an animal following animalistic urges, would simply be fulfilling a need without any agenda, but also without any concern for the person involved. I want sex, you’re here, so I’m taking it from you — except it would not be an articulate thought, more like an urge. Sex would be the goal, but against the will of a human target, of course, it would be rape. Rape is not sexy. But it’s a horrifying threat and appropriately monstrous behavior for a monster, which is what a werewolf is. The connection between the werewolf and sex would have to be found elsewhere.

In 1941's The Wolf Man, writer Curt Siodmak concocted the werewolf mythology we know today. He invented it from whole cloth. Maria Ouspenskaya, playing the old gypsy woman Maleva, delivers the memorable line, “Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” This has long been thought to be an authentic Gypsy or Eastern European folk saying, and some sources even list it as such. But Siodmak made it up.

Siodmak came from Germany, where his life was disrupted by the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis. Suddenly, Siodmak — like so many others — was a hunted criminal simply because he was a Jew, just as Larry Talbot was suddenly a monster, marked by the pentagram. Siodmak invented the entire werewolf mythos — the connection to the moon, the pentagram, the idea that a werewolf could be killed with silver, all of it. He made lycanthropy a supernatural curse that was passed on through the werewolf’s bite. Anyone bitten by a werewolf would become a werewolf during the next full moon.

But what if instead of a supernatural curse, lycanthropy were a condition passed on through bodily fluids? What if it were, say, a virus? Better yet, what if it were a sexually transmitted disease that could be passed on by having sex with someone you didn’t know was a werewolf — a werewolf in its human form? And with that, I had my modern-day werewolf.

Ravenous is set in the quiet coastal northern California town of Big Rock. But it doesn’t stay quiet for long. I was pleased by the reviews the book received. Here are a few samples:

“For Garton, lycanthropy is an STD, spread mostly through rape, that runs rampant through a small town fraught with affairs and intrigues. His werewolf is a terrifying creature: not a remorseful, helpless cursed human but a homicidal beast driven by a dual urge to breed and feed. Hurley is a sheriff to root for, and Garton’s well-paced horror novel reworks the werewolf myth to great effect.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Ravenous does for werewolves what 'Salem's Lot and Garton's own Live Girls did for vampires.”
— F. Paul Wilson, creator of Repairman Jack

"Ray Garton has done it again. As a chilling masterpiece of dark fiction, Ravenous is right up there with Live Girls. Just as Stephen King's ‘Salem’s Lot triumphs because of the strength of its characters and the utter, engrossing reality of the town they live in, Ravenous will be remembered by readers long after its last sentence. Our beloved Grand Master of horror has never written a bad book, but Ravenous is right up there with the best novels anyone has written. In Garton's masterful prose, the werewolf finally becomes as real, as convincing and as archetypally compelling as the vampire long has been. Garton's brilliant reconceptualization of the ancient legend feels so right, so utterly terrifying, that it will become the benchmark against which all other novels of its kind are judged. I couldn't put it down. It haunts me. It will haunt you."
— Steven Spruill, author of Rulers of Darkness and Ice Men: A Novel of the Korean War

“Ray Garton's Ravenous reads like a joyful mash-up of Desperate Housewives and Predator, adding the hunt to the tally of our daily desires. Witty, warped, and steeped in blood, this novel of hungry horror tumbles toward a delicious finale that will only leave you wanting to read more and more of Garton's ferocious fiction.”
— Douglas E. Winter, author of Run

“Ravenous grabs you by the throat in Chapter 1 and never lets go. Ray Garton, master frightener, is at his best in this one. Read it alone at your peril.”
— Gary Brandner, author of The Howling

“Ravenous is Ray Garton's most disturbing, affecting, and ferocious novel since Crucifax — which is to say, he's going to cost you a lot of sleep with this one. There are images and sequences in this book that only a frontal lobotomy will make you forget.”
— Gary A. Braunbeck, Bram Stoker-award winning author of Mr. Hands and Coffin County

“Garton’s attention to detail in description is second to none, especially when describing the setting. His descriptions of the original werewolf colony alone are enough to make the readers feel they are there. ... The story takes hold of the readers from the first few pages and doesn’t spit them out until the last page. The characters are compelling and the monsters more than terrifying. After reading Ray Garton’s Ravenous, I guarantee you will never look at your neighbors in the same way again.” — Dread Central

“In Ravenous, lycanthropy is a virus that is transmitted sexually when an extant werewolf couples with an uninfected person. Garton plays with the suspense factor since a person does not have to know they’re infected to pass on the disease. That the infection makes the recipient randier than usual only means that it spreads more quickly in this small town. ... And around the halfway point, all bets are off. Garton plays for keeps. There are no favored characters. Everybody is a possible target for sex or supper, even if they were only introduced pages before. But in a Ray Garton novel, the walk-ons get a full characterization, too. Garton doesn’t shirk in his writing, which makes him one of the top horror writers working today.”
— Craig Clarke, Down in the Cellar

When I finished Ravenous, I knew I had more of it in me and went to work almost immediately on the sequel, Bestial. And I plan to return to these werewolves in the near future.

Ravenous is now available in paperback, and as an ebook for Kindle and Nook and in multiple ebook formats at Fictionwise. You can read an excerpt from Ravenous here. If you're on Facebook, drop by the Ravenous page and click "like," and then hop on over to my fan page and do the same. To see my entire bibliography, keep up with new releases and participate in discussions on the message board, please visit my website. If you enjoy Ravenous, I hope you'll post a review on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

If you miss the old fashioned werewolf that isn't interested in being understood or having its feelings validated, and if you also enjoy a good scare — and if you have an interest in sex — I hope you'll give Ravenous a look. But be careful ... it's contagious.

MEDS: The Story Behind the Book

2011-07-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

Every writer puts pieces of himself and his life into his work. It’s unavoidable. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of doing it. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine pointed out to me just how much of my own life was in all of my books. I was astonished. I’d had no idea I was writing about myself to that extent. But my new novel Meds grew directly from specific events in my life in ways no other book ever has — not the story the novel tells, but the novel itself. I spent more time on it and researched it more thoroughly than any other novel I’ve written and I’m thrilled that it’s finally available to readers. The story behind it is a bit long. I’ll try to be as brief as possible, but I apologize in advance for the length of this blog.

In 1999, my right hip began to hurt and rapidly grew worse, until I was hobbling around like an old man. It was incorrectly diagnosed as arthritis and treated as such for more than a year, during which time it only continued to get worse. Then one of the medical geniuses involved suggested an MRI, which found osteonecrosis. An attempt was made to save the bone with an operation called a core decompression, which I had early on the morning of September 11, 2001. I was wheeled into the operating room shortly after the Twin Towers fell and had no idea what I would wake up to after surgery. It was frightening. Half a dozen holes were drilled into my hip bone that morning in an effort to restore blood flow. We had to wait a whole year to see if the operation worked. It did not.

The next step was a total hip replacement. But even after that, the pain did not go away. In fact, it got worse. And worse. When I walked, I felt like my hip was filled with gravel and broken glass — so I didn’t walk much. I took a lot of drugs in the years that followed — Vicodin, Norco, Methadone, Oxycontin, Fentanyl patches, and copious amounts of marijuana. I did anything to dull the pain, which never went away. I spent most of my life during those years in a recliner, in pain and wiped out on drugs, little more than a grumpy vegetable.

A couple of years after the hip replacement, my doctors began to wonder if the prosthetic hip could perhaps — maybe, just maybe — be the cause of my pain. More procedures were done to explore this possibility and it was determined that the prosthetic hip simply didn’t fit the way it should. My only alternative was a second replacement.

I’m told the second surgery went well, but all I knew was that I was back in the damned hospital, going through the whole ugly, painful process all over again — not only the surgery, but the unpleasant physical therapy that followed, the effort to maintain as much use of my leg as possible after three operations in the same spot. Later, it was determined that the second surgery had been successful and the physiological cause of my pain had been repaired. But the pain did not go away. My doctor explained that my chronic pain was the result of a combination of things. Years of constant pain, which had a physiological cause, had convinced my brain that the pain was still occurring even though the cause was removed. The pain was real, but the source was no longer my hip. Apparently, my brain was confused about the issue. This was not the first time my brain has been confused about something and won’t be the last — it was just the most painful. Also, after years of taking narcotic painkillers, I was experiencing the rebound effect those drugs had. I had become addicted to the drugs. My body had developed a tolerance for them and wanted more, and when more was not provided, more pain was the result.

All of this was very depressing. And I was already depressed! In the 1980s, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which explained a great deal about my life up to that point; depression had been a big part of it. My doctor put me on antidepressants and drugs for mania (although I experienced that only occasionally), and I had been on them ever since. Over the years, dosages were adjusted, one drug was replaced with another, sometimes I was on more than one drug for depression at a time. Added to those prescriptions were antianxiety drugs and pills to help me sleep. My bathroom looked like a makeshift pharmacy. There were orange bottles of pills everywhere.

During those years, I had some strange symptoms that were, at times, frightening. Among the worst was the periodic inability to remain still. During these periods, I had to keep moving — a leg would jitter, an arm would twitch, or I would sit for a bit, then shoot to my feet and pace, then sit, then shoot up and pace. What kept me moving was a kind of electrical buzzing that seemed to zap through my body and made me feel like ripping out of my skin. Remaining still was not an option. This was always an unnerving experience, not only for myself but for anyone with me at the time.

Then there were periods of anger, rage, times when I wanted to break everything in the room. And I experienced suicidal bouts during which I became virtually obsessed with ending my own life. Over the years, I have probably imagined every possible way of killing myself, because during these periods, that’s all I did. When I reported these experiences to my doctor, I was told they were symptoms of the mental illness that the drugs were treating and if I weren’t taking the drugs, they would be much worse. Naturally, I believed that. So did my doctor at the time.

When the problem with my hip started, more pills were added to my museum-like collection of orange bottles until I hardly had enough room for all of them. During those years, every morning was exactly the same. I would wake up in pain, slowly make my way out of bed — a difficult, excruciating process — and hobble on cane or crutches to my bathroom, where those rows of orange bottles greeted me. And every morning, I had the same thought. I would look at all those pills and think, I could end this pain right now. I could take all of these pills and just go back to bed. It was tempting. But I couldn’t do that to my wife. During all those years, Dawn took care of me, made sure I was always as comfortable as possible and never uttered a word of complaint. She did everything by herself. She had to, because I was useless. I couldn’t repay that by just checking out and letting her come home to a corpse in the bed. But still ... it was so tempting.

In 2007, my doctor received an advertisement in the mail. It was hawking a natural supplement that made a number of startling claims, as they all do. He tossed it at the garbage can — but missed. The advertisement fell to the floor. He picked it, gave it another look, read it a little more closely, and he thought of me. He had recently retired from private practice, but he had been my doctor for the better part of two decades and had gotten me through a battle with alcoholism and had helped me struggle with depression. As he went over the material that had come in the mail, he began to think it might be just what I needed, even though I was no longer his patient. He came to see me and told me about something called NeuroReplete, a program of amino acids that had had great success in treating an impressive list of disorders — including chronic pain.

I was skeptical. So was he. For every genuinely effective drug or treatment, there are a couple dozen “natural” remedies advertised in the back pages of magazines or on late-night TV that make a litany of promises on which they cannot deliver. While I have nothing against folk remedies and natural treatments that actually work, it’s a field populated by hucksters and liars out to make a quick buck off of desperate and/or gullible people — like religion, or politics. But before calling me, my doctor had done some research and found that, unlike most of these remedies, NeuroReplete was backed up some hard science and years of research by Dr. Marty Hinz in Duluth, Minnesota.

NeuroReplete addresses a host of primary neurotransmitter depletion diseases including depression, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s dementia, insomnia, OCD, ADD, ADHD and others, and has also been helpful in weight loss. I know, I know, this sounds ridiculous. If you’re as skeptical as I — and I’m pretty damned skeptical about everything — you’re rolling your eyes, because this sounds like a typical miracle-cure pitch, like infomercial bullshit. And even though I trusted my doctor, I felt exactly the same way. But I was so miserable — in so much pain, so depressed, so ready to give up — that I decided it couldn’t hurt to try the stuff. If you’re interested in NeuroReplete — how it works and what it treats — you’ll find plenty of information here.

NeuroReplete requires initial lab work and then regular monitoring after that, but before I could start the program, I had to stop taking all the drugs I’d been on for so long. The supplements would conflict with the antidepressants I’d been on for two decades and the painkillers I’d been taking for several years. This was a scary prospect. I knew a little something about withdrawals, having quit booze cold turkey after about ten years of very heavy drinking and landing in the emergency room, projectile vomiting blood, convulsing with shakes and hoping for death. But quitting those drugs was the only way I could give NeuroReplete a try. So I did.

I tapered off the painkillers but was a little more abrupt with the antidepressants. Quitting those drugs was a nightmare. I was a mess for a while. By the time I got them out of my system, I was exhausted, but I was ready to start the NeuroReplete program. I expected nothing. Were I a betting person, I would have put money on their not working.

I would have lost that bet.

About four days after starting the program, I woke up one morning and began the process of getting out of bed. But something was different. Getting out of bed was easier. Simply moving was easier. Because the pain was gone. It had not decreased, it didn’t feel better — it was gone. I got up and walked to the bathroom and found that limping was not necessary because there was no pain. But — did I mention this already? — the pain was gone! It didn’t stop there, though, and this is where the story gets kind of weird.

The world changed. Everything changed. Not only was I pain-free, but I just kept feeling better ... and better ... and BETTER. A thick fog had lifted abruptly and the world was no longer the dark, oppressive place it had been for the last 44 years. I no longer felt certain that I was the most repugnant creature in the room at any given time. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. In fact, there were times when I wondered if I were losing my mind. As far as I could tell, insanity was not a side effect of NeuroReplete — it had no side effects. But everything was suddenly so different that I couldn’t help wondering if I were going barking mad! I soon began to realize that the only thing that had changed was me, the inside of my head, the way I saw everything. I was different, and the change was so abrupt and unexpected that it was a little like being hit by a truck while napping on the couch.

More than once, Dawn said to me, “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” People who knew me well were astonished by the change in me. They said everything about me was different — my behavior, the way I looked, the way I talked, the way I walked, even the way I stood. The change in me was sudden and drastic and it went far beyond simply being pain-free for the first time in years. I felt so good, I spent most of the time wanting to cheer! At first, I thought I might be in a manic phase. But I knew what those felt like. Mania is draining. Even as you’re riding high on a manic crest, you can feel it sucking the life out of you underneath the hyper rush of all that invincible creativity, and when it ends, you’re like a jet airliner crashing into the side of a mountain. I felt none of that. This felt ... healthy.

Around Christmas time, my doctor came to the house for a visit. He kept looking me up and down with a slight frown of disbelief as he asked me how I felt, if I were having any pain, if I’d felt any symptoms of depression. After the questions, he stared at me some more, then said, “I can’t believe the change in you. I’ve known you for twenty years and I’ve never seen you looking or acting so ... happy. It’s like someone reached way down and pulled you out of hell.”

I spent about a year trying to explain to the people in my life what I was experiencing. I’m usually pretty good at explaining things — words are what I do and normally, I don’t have a problem communicating with people. But the changes had taken place inside my head, and even people who had known me for a long time had never been there. They’d never seen the landscape in there and were unfamiliar with the weather. They could see the outer differences in me, but not the interior changes, and trying to explain them just made me sound crazier than a bag of wet cats. So I stopped.

My doctor continued to be amazed by the changes in me and consulted Dr. Hinz about it. Such drastic changes, it turned out, were not uncommon in people who went on the NeuroReplete program. My doctor went over my medical history, which included a period in my childhood when I spent a lot of time in the hospital with an illness that baffled doctors. They found that one of the problems was that my kidneys were wasting potassium as fast as I could take it in. My doctor suspected that if they’d looked closer, they would have discovered my body was also dumping amino acids at an alarming rate. He strongly suspected I’d been dealing with neurotransmitter depletion my entire life. It certainly made a lot of sense and explained ... well, everything.

All the symptoms I had experienced while taking antidepressants, antianxiety drugs and tranquilizers for so long were quite conspicuous in their absence. Those horrible periods of being unable to hold still were gone and I had no suicidal tendencies. I was sleeping dream-free — at least, I couldn’t remember any dreams — after a lifetime of restless sleep plagued by nightmares. I asked my doctor about all of this. Where had these symptoms gone? He explained to me that before retiring, he had pulled way back on the number of antidepressants he’d been prescribing because of information that had come to light about the drugs. He said there was a chance many of the symptoms I was experiencing were, in fact, caused by the antidepressants. “Even the suicidal urges?” I asked. Yes, even those.

I found this disturbing. Antidepressants were being handed out by doctors like Skittles at Halloween — but they were causing the very symptoms they were supposed to alleviate? This called for some research. I began reading up on antidepressants. I told my agent about the changes in my life and mentioned that I was interested in possibly writing something that was related to it. I also told him I was researching antidepressants and prescription drugs, just for my own edification. He recommended a book by his friend and client, Dr. Peter R. Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood Altering Medications.

I’ve been reading horror fiction my whole life, but Dr. Breggin’s book, which is nonfiction, is the scariest damned thing I’ve ever read. It's filled with documented accounts of people whose lives have been ruined — people who have died and even killed — because of the dangerous side effects of antidepressants, tranquilizers and other mood-altering drugs, side effects the manufacturers either did not warn about sufficiently or deliberately concealed.

Remember that horrible electric zapping feeling I sometimes had that made me unable to hold still? I learned from Dr. Breggin’s book that it’s called akathisia. You may know it as “restless leg syndrome,” but in its more extreme form, it is not confined to the legs. It is a drug-induced neurological disorder, a common side effect of antidepressants and antipsychotics. I was lucky that my experience with akathisia was mild. It has driven others to suicide and violence and resulted in injury and death.

Dr. Breggin’s book led me to a lot of other work on the subject of the dangers of prescription drugs and I began to see a troubling pattern in the way pharmaceutical companies test, advertise and, frankly lie about their products.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to pharmaceutical drugs. Medical science has given us — and continues to give us — amazing drugs that have alleviated or stopped suffering, saved lives and allowed us to live longer. I know plenty of people who simply would not be alive if it weren’t for the drugs their doctors prescribed to them. I have nothing against these drugs and the great things they can do. But I’ve got a real problem with an industry that sidesteps the medical establishment and irresponsibly markets these drugs directly to the public, convincing people they need them when that’s not necessarily the case. Even worse, initial test results are massaged and manipulated — the term is “tortured” — to make the drugs look safer and more effective than they actually are, and they are marketed before some of the worst side effects are revealed. Quite often, even doctors are unaware of some of these side effects. Much of the information that doctors are provided about new drugs comes from the very companies that manufacture those drugs, so in many cases, doctors know only what the pharmaceutical companies want them to know. So when their patients report some of the side effects they're experiencing, doctors say what my doctor said to me: That’s a symptom of the mental illness that the drugs are treating, or something to that effect. This happens not only with antidepressants, but with all kinds of drugs.

What about the FDA? Aren’t they supposed to be the watchdog that protects us from this kind of chicanery? Tell me something. If you worked at the FDA and a big drug company approached you with an offer of a cushy job, fat with salary and bonuses, that you could take when it comes time for you to leave the FDA — we’re talking the kind of job most people dream of and lust for — and if that drug company also happened to have a product it wanted to sail through the review process, a product it wanted to get on the market as soon as possible with as little trouble as possible, might not the glimmering brass ring of that future job move you to give the drug company a bit of a hand in achieving its goals? And what if that were the case with a lot of people in the FDA? Newsflash: It is!

Are you beginning to get the picture? This doesn’t happen only in the FDA, of course. Our entire government is a hall of revolving doors through which corporate America seduces the elected and appointed officials who are supposed to be working for us. But for now, I’m focusing on the FDA. It has become little more than the lapdog of the pharmaceutical industry. As a “watchdog,” it is toothless, sedated and dozing.

The pharmaceutical industry has turned the United States into a nation of drug addicts. We’re addicted to drugs we’ve been convinced we need, even if we don’t, by the slickest, most calculated and manipulative commercials on television, which tell us that the slightest ache or twitch must be medicated immediately for instant relief and to ask our doctors if drug X is right for us. We’ve become convinced that there is a pill for everything. I’ve talked to some doctors about this. They’ve spoken candidly with me only on the condition of anonymity. They don’t want to be connected to negative remarks about an industry that regularly provides them with nice dinners and trips to conferences about the latest drugs — conferences that happen to be held in beautiful vacation spots. Oh, yes, you didn’t know that? Your doctor is regularly visited by representatives of drug companies — always the most attractive and ingratiating young people imaginable, by the way — who invite them to gatherings of doctors in, say, Mexico, where they can learn about the newest innovations in pharmacology ... when they’re not lounging on the beach in the sun. Nothing illegal, mind you. It’s all perfectly above board, according to the law. Of course, just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ethical or right. Sorry, I got sidetracked for a moment.

These doctors have told me that those colorful, soothing commercials have convinced their patients that they know best what they need; they come to the doctor’s office convinced they need do nothing to improve their health because there’s a pill to fix whatever’s bothering them. Right? I mean, isn’t that what we’ve been told? That is entirely the work of the pharmaceutical industry, an industry that has seduced us with pills that hold dangers about which we’re being kept in the dark.

Oh, sure, the risks come out sooner or later. Once enough people have been sickened, damaged, or killed by the side effects — or have been driven to hurt or kill others, which is more common than you think (I strongly recommend that you read Dr. Breggin’s book) — then the side effects are revealed and added to the warning label. These are quite often side effects the manufacturer has known about all along but has made an effort to conceal and has conveniently neglected to point out to anyone. After all, that information might get in the way of the ultimate goal here — BIG FAT PROFITS!

If you think that pharmaceutical companies are concerned about your health and well being and want to treat your illnesses and make you better ... well, you might want to sit down because I’ve got some unpleasant news for you. The pharmaceutical industry really doesn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your health and well being. Healthy people don’t buy their product. Sick people do. Wanna know a surefire way to stay sick? Believe everything the pharmaceutical industry tells you about their products. Making people better would be self-defeating for this industry. It’s not what they do. What they do is generate revenue. There’s no revenue in good health.

Yes, yes, I know this sounds paranoid. But I’m a skeptic. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories and I require evidence for everything. Well, I dug up the evidence for this myself. And it made me angry. It made me want to do something about it. But who am I? I write scary books for a living. Who the hell’s going to listen to anything I have to say about prescription drugs? So I did what I do best — I wrote a story about it. And that’s how Meds happened.

Meds is a thriller that tells two parallel stories. The first is about Eli Dunbar, a man who’s trying to repair his shattered life. Eli discovers that something is making people all over town become murderous and violent, something they all have in common ... and when he learns that it’s something he has in common with all of them, he becomes terrified, because it means he is a ticking time bomb. The other story is about Oran Rubinek, a professional hit man with an eye toward retirement who has discovered that he really does not like the final job he’s been hired to do. These two stories converge in what I hope will be a suspenseful read. No, it’s not a polemic, it’s not a sermon. It’s a book designed, first and foremest, to be an entertaining thriller. The fact that I was able to throw in some useful information was a bonus.

I’m not telling you to stop taking all of your prescription drugs. Please don’t do that. I’m not a doctor, although I’ve seen people play them on TV. I’m saying that you should be aware of the fact that no one is looking out for you when it comes to drugs. That is a job only you can fill. The internet is an amazing source of information. Take some responsibility for your own health and start researching everything your doctor prescribes. Do as much research as possible and learn everything you can.

I hope you enjoy Meds. I hope it takes you away from your daily life and transports you into an exciting story, because that’s the book’s purpose. But I also hope it will make you aware of some unpleasant facts about the drugs being prescribed to us. It’s a thriller with, I hope, some chilling side effects. If you enjoy the book, I hope you’ll tell a friend, or go to Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com and write a review. It’s available as a paperback and for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and will soon be available from Fictionwise in multiple ebook formats. If you're on Facebook, visit the Meds page and click "like!" While you're there, drop by my personal page and friend me, and visit my fan page for updates. E-Reads is in the process of releasing my entire back list. To see what's available so far and keep up with new releases, visit my page at the E-Reads website.

TRADE SECRETS: The Story Behind the Book

2011-06-01T15:09:00.001-07:00

What man hasn’t fantasized about finding a beautiful woman in his garage one rainy night — a woman he’s never seen before but with whom he feels an immediate emotional connection — who leads him into a deadly adventure that ends up turning his entire life upside down?

Well, okay ... maybe that’s just me.

I’ve always loved stories like that, though. Remember Hitchcock’s North by Northwest? Cary Grant plays Manhattan advertising executive Roger Thornhill who has lunch in a restaurant one day and happens to raise his hand at precisely the wrong moment. Unnoticed by him, some shady thugs are watching him, and because he raises his hand when he does, they mistake him for a government agent. They lead him out to a car and take him away. That begins a thrill ride that involves Roger being framed for murder and leads to a breathtaking climax on Mt. Rushmore — and lands Roger in bed with Eva Marie Saint.

There’s something extraordinarily appealing about that possibility. Let’s admit it, most of us have pretty ordinary lives that are fairly short on thrills and intrigue. The idea that our everyday routine could suddenly be disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious stranger who might lead us into an exciting, breathless adventure is a pretty seductive one, isn’t it?

Back in the mid-1980s, I visited a friend in Baltimore, Maryland. I had one day of sightseeing before I was hit by the worst flu bug I’d ever experienced. It knocked me to the floor and then kicked the crap out of me. I spent most of my time in Baltimore in bed. In addition to being sick, I was pretty miserable that my trip to Charm City had been ruined and embarrassed that my friend had to put up with a sick houseguest. But there was nothing I could do about it, so while I was stuck in bed, I did what I always do — I wrote. I had a notebook handy and, mostly to distract myself, I began a story with nothing particular in mind. In the opening, a man found a beautiful woman huddling in his garage on a rainy night. He didn’t know her, had never laid eyes on her before, but his first thought upon seeing her was, I’ve found you. I didn’t get very far, but it took my mind off of how bad I felt. Over the next few years, though, the idea returned now and then. I would look it over, consider it, then put it away again.

By the end of the 1980s, I’d written five books, a couple of novellas and several short stories, all in the horror genre. I was in the mood to write something outside of that genre. Horror gives you a certain amount of freedom. You deal with vampires, werewolves, demons and other supernatural creatures. Horror works best when it’s grounded in reality with real people who are in real situations. But because it deals with the supernatural, once you’ve established that familiar world, you are free to become untethered from reality. The framework may be rooted in reality, but within that framework, the dead walk and are thirsty for blood, people can turn into monstrous beasts and the denizens of hell roam the earth to make people miserable. Remove the supernatural element and suddenly things are very different.

The dead don’t walk. People don’t turn into anything. Hell is something the clergy uses to frighten money out of their congregations. In the real world, the supernatural isn’t an option. If you’ve grown accustomed to it, not having it to fall back on is a challenge. I wanted to be challenged. I returned to that idea that kept haunting me — the one about the guy who finds the beautiful stranger in his garage.

I did what I usually do — I wrote that initial scene and then followed it to see where it would lead me. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was writing a love story, although an unconventional one. When Gerard Brady discovers that woman hiding in his garage, there’s a reason he immediately thinks, I’ve found you. Of course, I didn’t know what it was when I started out, but I discovered it — just as I hope you will.

Trade Secrets was an exciting writing experience. No monsters, nothing supernatural. Everything took place in the confines of hard, cold reality. Of course, that’s not to say there are no monsters in the book. After all, reality holds plenty of monsters. They just aren’t supernatural. Somehow — for me, anyway — that makes them scarier. There are more than one in Trade Secrets, but I think the scariest is Edna Macomber. She’s my personal favorite of all my villains.

When I was in school, there was a woman named Mrs. Macomber who was, to me, a monster. She was the mother of a classmate. For reasons I never fully understood, that woman hated me on sight. She was very angry. All the time. She did not walk, she stalked. She stormed. She charged. In my memory, I always see her with her fists clenched at her sides. There was a rage constantly boiling inside her, and much of the time, it was directed at me. She was a “room mother” and spent a lot of time at the school, always involved in one capacity or another. Any achievement I had, anything I managed to accomplish at school that was known to everyone — winning a competition, or a class election, things like that — infuriated Mrs. Macomber because she had it in her head that I somehow had snatched it — whatever it might be — away from her son.

Her son was a nice guy but he was socially awkward and tried a little hard to fit in and be funny. For that reason — and because nobody liked his mother — he was often picked on. He had some health problems that worsened as he got older, requiring a lot of treatment, including blood transfusions. Years later, he contracted AIDS from one of those transfusions and died. I’ve always regretted not getting to know him better because I’m sure he could have used a friend; with that woman for a mother — domineering, smothering, constantly present, and so very angry — it’s a wonder the kid wasn’t a complete wreck all the time. Anyway, Mrs. Macomber had it in for me and all my friends knew it. When she showed up on campus, one of them usually warned me with the chilling words, “Macomber’s coming.” Those words play a chilling role in Trade Secrets.

Edna Macomber has a cruel job. She enjoys her work. What she does and who she does it for are among the book’s secrets, which you’ll have to read to learn. Even though Trade Secrets isn’t a horror novel, I succeeded in frightening myself when I created Edna Macomber.

Trade Secrets is available for the first time ever in paperback, and Kindle, Nook, and in multiple ebook formats at Fictionwise. If you have a Facebook account, visit the Trade Secrets page and click the "like" button. While you're there, drop by my Facebook fan page. For publishing updates, a full bibliography, media links and a message board where we can discuss books, movies, TV or whatever, visit my website RayGartonOnline.com.

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DARK CHANNEL: The Story Behind the Book

2011-05-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

I live in far northern California near Mt. Shasta. In the shadow of the mountain is a quaint little town that looks like it belongs on a postcard. The colorful mythology surrounding Mt. Shasta has made the mountain a New Age mecca, which has benefited the town.

According to the folklore of local Native American tribes, Chief Skell descended long ago from the heavens to the mountain’s summit and his spirit resides there to this day. Mt. Shasta is also central to the creation myth of northern California tribes. According to legend, the Great Spirit cut a hole in the sky through which he pushed snow and ice to create the mountain, and then he used it as a kind of step ladder to descend to the earth.

In 1904, legend has it that a man named J.C. Brown, while prospecting for gold for the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of London, England, discovered a cave that sloped downward for 11 miles, leading him to a subterranean village filled with gold, ancient armor and shields, and the mummified remains of long-dead residents, some of whom stood up to ten feet tall. 30 years later, Brown told his story to John C. Root, who assembled an exploration team of 80 people. But on the day their expedition was to begin, Brown and Root disappeared and were never seen or heard from again. Some believe that those mummies were the remains of survivors of the lost continent of Lemuria and that the village allegedly found by Brown was part of their vast city under the mountain. Some even claim many Lemurians still live in that underground city. If you happen to see one of them, the Lemurians, it is said, will wipe your memory clean of the encounter — which leads one to wonder how anyone could possibly know that and be able to remember it.

The story of the Lemurians originated in a fantasy novel called A Dweller On Two Planets, written in the 1880s by 17-year-old Frederick Spencer Oliver. The novel gives an account of the Lemurians moving to Mt. Shasta after their continent sank into the ocean. According to the book, the Lemurians live under the mountain to this day. Frederick’s parents were astonished by this accomplishment; they believed their son to be a big slacker who was simply not very bright, so they figured there had to be some other explanation for his novel. They decided the book must have been channeled through Frederick by otherworldly forces. It was marketed as such and remains in print to this day. Now if someone tells you that refugees from the sunken continent of Lemuria built a city underneath Mt. Shasta and if that person presents this information as historical fact, as many do, you can smile and say it was all made up by an imaginative teenager.

While visiting Mt. Shasta in 1930, mining engineer Guy Ballard encountered a man who introduced himself as Comte de Saint-Germain, one of the so called “ascended masters” (which has always sounded to me like a degree in mountain climbing, as in, “Of course I’m qualified to climb that mountain, I have an ascended masters in mountain climbing!”) and ended up founding the religious movement known as the “I Am” Activity.

Some people think the mountain is a refueling spot for alien spacecraft, although I suspect the aliens have found other planets on which to gas up since prices have gone through the roof here. The spacecraft descend to the mountain under the cover of large saucer-shaped clouds that conceal them from onlookers. (For those who enjoy facts, these, of course, are lenticular clouds, which occur naturally at high altitudes.)

The rich mixture of beliefs about the mountain are reflected in the town of Mt. Shasta. At first glance, it looks like a pretty typical little mountain town. But on closer examination, you’ll find stores selling magical crystals and geodes, books on meditation and crystal power, ascended masters, how-to guides on being a shaman and other similar subjects, kitsch and chotchkies representing fairies, Hindu gods, space aliens, Jesus Christ, pagan deities and Native American folklore, and other evidence of the mystical phenomenon known as commercial exploitation.

In 1987, New Age guru Jose Arguelles came up with what would be the first worldwide synchronized meditation, which was correlated with an unusual astrological alignment signifying, to people who think astrological alignments signify things, a shift in the planet’s energy from one of war to peace. This global meditation was called the Harmonic Convergence, and the plan was to gather people at various “power centers” around the world. Arguelles believed that if 144,000 people were to meditate in each of these “power centers” at a scheduled time, this new age of peace and enlightenment would be launched. (In the years since 1987, we have discovered that simply wasn't the case.) One of those “power centers” was Mt. Shasta, less than an hour’s drive from me. Well, there was no way I was going to miss out on a day of people-watching like that. (Writer Mahesh Grossman does a short, funny one-man musical show on his experience at the Harmonic Convergence.)

Mt. Shasta was the most crowded I’ve ever seen it that day. People came from all over the world to ... to ... well, to do whatever the hell it was they planned to do — meditate, vibrate, massage each other’s chakras, whatever. A lot of these people were dressed like they’d just flown in from New Delhi. Other were dressed like they’d just flown in from 1970. The town’s main street was lined with vendors selling crystals, jewelry, mystical drums, all kinds of New Age literature about everything from meditation to past life regression to communicating with the inhabitants of other planets.

A guy who bore a strong resemblance to Tommy Chong was selling what looked like some kind of tribal drums. I didn’t know how they fit into the Harmonic Convergence milieu, so I asked. This was a mistake. Chong launched into an explanation of how one could draw energy from the universe down to the earth using his drums. He explained to me the healing power of drum circles. He demonstrated some of the drums. He did everything but write a ransom note, which would have been appropriate because I felt I was being held captive. He was such a nice guy that I didn’t want to cut him off abruptly and move on (back then, I was much more patient with nonsense than I am now), so I listened. But ultimately, I had to disappoint him by not buying any drums.

There were a lot of crystals for sale. One booth in particular, run by an attractive auburn-haired woman, had an especially beautiful selection of crystals and stones on display and I stopped to look them over. The woman greeted me and asked what I was looking for. I said I was just looking.

“What properties are you interested in?” she asked.

“Properties? I don’t understand.” Was she selling real estate, too?

“Well, different crystals and stones have different properties, different energies. Some heal, some bring abundance and prosperty, fidelity in love, clarity of mind and — “

A laugh slipped out before I could stop it. I shrugged and said, “I’m just interested in what they do best — look pretty. I really don't believe in that other stuff."

Her face changed. She reminded me of Donald Sutherland at the very end of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was afraid she was going to alert the others that there was someone walking among them did not belong. So I quickly moved on.

There were a lot of demonstrations planned that day, and I was eager to see one in particular. In fact, it was the main reason I had driven to Mt. Shasta for the Harmonic Convergence. It was a “channel” — a woman who claimed that an ancient entity spoke through her to impart the wisdom of the ages.

Channeling had become quite popular at that time, mostly due to a woman named JZ Knight, who originally used the word “channeling” to describe the process by which a 35,000-year-old entity named Ramtha spoke through her. Guess where Ramtha is from. Go on, take a guess. Lemuria! It's a small universe, isn't it? That’s right, while all the other Lemurians were taking up residence under Mt. Shasta, Ramtha set up shop inside the head of a Tacoma, Washington housewife and mother named Judy Hampton in 1977. Judy became JZ Knight — and she also became very rich with the help of her imaginary friend. She was everywhere in the 1980s, popping up on The Merv Griffin Show, Oprah, Larry King Live and a host of other shows. She got a lot of attention from celebrities like Linda Evans, who was famous for her catfights with Joan Collins on the wildly popular primetime soap Dynasty, and Shirley MacLaine, who, in addition to being an Academy Award-winning screen legend, is known for her views on ”star beings” and UFOs and reincarnation.

Ramtha (speaking through Knight, of course) claims to have been a Lemurian warrior who battled the Atlanteans more than 35,000 years ago with an army made up of 2.5 million soldiers. That would make Ramtha’s army more than twice the size of the estimated population of the entire planet at the time. This lends some credence to the theory that JZ Knight is full of shit. But shit sells, and this puppetless ventriloquist act certainly worked for Knight. A lot of people have bought into Knight’s message that each of us is a god and capable of creating our own reality. Have you ever been to a dinner party where each person inhabits his or her own reality? Trust me, the conversation sucks. Whenever I find myself in a situation like that, I quickly create a reality in which no one else is able to create their own reality, and it clears things right up.

I had seen Knight on TV several times, doing her shtick. Ramtha sounded like James Mason trying to do an impression of Yul Brynner, and while doing Ramtha, Knight became very animated, often pacing the stage, squatting and swaying and gesticulating with her arms and hands. Now 65, Knight is still around. She's been tucked, pulled, peeled and Botoxed to within an inch of her life — today her lips are twice the size they were in 1985, suggesting that Knight has enlisted a team of cosmetic surgeons to help create her reality. She doesn't seem to move around as much as she used to anymore and Ramtha’s accent is much less pronounced. He sounds a lot more like Knight now, perhaps after a couple too many cocktails and not enough sleep.

After seeing Knight on TV so often, I couldn’t resist the chance to see a channel perform at the Harmonic Convergence. She appeared in a rickety old theater in the town of Weed (yes, that’s right — Weed!) just up the road from Mt. Shasta. I don’t remember her name, and I never heard of her again after that weekend. There’s a good reason for that: She was terrible. Her message was similar to Knight’s — “Fuck reality!” — but in spite of the fact that her husband was on stage with her the whole time, seemingly coaching her, this woman’s performance was amateurish and completely unconvincing. Like Ramtha, the entity she channeled claimed to be an ancient, benevolent entity who was generously passing on his ancient wisdom and experience to the people of the modern age.

As I watched her dubious performance, I entertained myself by wondering what would happen if she really were channeling some being ... that wasn’t telling the truth. Just because a 30-thousand-year-old entity says he has our best interests at heart and wants to impart all kinds of cosmic wisdom to us doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true, does it? I mean, call me crazy, but is it really a good idea to believe everything we're told by every 35,000-year-old entity that comes along? What if he were lying? What if he had a hidden agenda? Sure, crackpots like JZ Knight want only one thing — money. Well, two if you include fame, but I think money is the driving force behind convincing people that some invisible, long-dead guy is talking through you. But what if the crackpot weren't a crackpot and the being speaking through her had other plans? What if it was just using the attractive, charismatic channel as a way of getting attention and amassing followers? And what if his plans for those followers were ... unpleasant?

The seed of Dark Channel was planted that day. Nearly a decade later, I dusted off the idea. By then, the novelty of the New Age movement of the 1980s had worn off, but it had been thoroughly absorbed by our culture. That day spent converging harmonically in Mt. Shasta gave birth to Hester Thorne, the charismatic founder and leader of the Mt. Shasta-based Universal Enlightened Alliance and the channel for a millennia-old entity named Orrin. Some people say that Thorne is an accomplished fraud. But they are wrong. Others — people who are troubled, damaged and dealing with serious problems in their lives — find hope in Orrin’s message of peace and unity. The only problem is ... Orrin is lying.

My New Age horror novel Dark Channel is now available as a paperback, and for Kindle, Nook and in multiple ebook formats at Fictionwise. If you have a Facebook account, please drop by the Dark Channel page and click "like," then visit my fan page. You can also read an excerpt from Dark Channel. To keep up with new releases, check out my entire bibliography, read reviews of my work and interact on the message board, please visit my official website. E-Reads is releasing my entire backlist as well as my new novels. To find out what’s currently available and keep up with new releases, please visit my E-Reads page.

CRUCIFAX: The Story Behind the Book

2011-04-19T17:59:00.001-07:00

Back in the mid-1980s, I lived for a while in a tiny studio apartment in North Hollywood. That’s in southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where all the towns melt together in one long blur of strip malls, fast food joints, gas stations, donut shops and traffic lights. There was always a lot of traffic and it took forever to get anywhere. A simple outing to get some groceries felt like a long road trip.

To get out of my depressing apartment, I went for a lot of walks and spent late hours writing in an all-night coffee shop in nearby Studio City called Tiny Naylor’s. Sometimes writing was difficult because the people-watching at Tiny’s, which unfortunately no longer exists, was so distracting. Every Wednesday evening, a group of familiar character actors – the kind of actors whose faces you recognize but whose names you don’t know – came in together. The group always included Mark Lenard, who played Spock’s father Sarek on Star Trek, and Dave Madden, who used to play Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family and whose distinctive voice carried throughout the restaurant whenever he was there. They were the only two whose names I immediately knew, but the group included other familiar faces from movies, TV shows and commercials. Tracy Ullman and Jodie Foster came in frequently and most trips to Tiny’s included at least one celebrity sighting. The San Fernando Valley is probably the capital of the porn industry and Tiny’s got a lot of business from people I often didn’t immediately recognize with their clothes on. The late Erica Boyer once sat down in the booth next to mine (and I couldn’t get up from my seat for an hour) and I had a conversation with porn star Jerry Butler at the coffee counter. Down the street from Tiny’s was the famous Queen Mary night club, and after it closed at 2:00 a.m., the drag queens came in for coffee and breakfast. They were among my favorite regulars because they were so friendly and funny and they always seemed to be performing, even while they ate. One of them was a wiry little old guy who had to be at least 75, who always entered Tiny’s dancing.

But I digress.

There was some pretty interesting people watching on the streets, too. I don’t know what North Hollywood is like now, but back then, it was rather seedy. On my walks, I encountered a lot of winos and drug dealers and hookers – the kind of background color that showed up in a lot of my fiction from those years. But mostly, there were kids. Teenagers whose dress and hairstyles reflected those seen on MTV at the time seemed to be everywhere. They wandered the streets, sat around in small groups, haunted the video games and pinball machines in convenience stores. I suppose that doesn’t sound too unusual, but it seemed odd to me at the time because there were so many of them. They didn’t go to school and they were around day and night, almost as if they had no homes to go to. I saw the same teenagers over and over again, and the creepy thing was ... they watched me. They’d follow me with their eyes as if they were suspicious of me. Maybe it’s because they knew I was watching them. I’m an inveterate voyeur and people-watcher and I try to be unobtrusive about it, but I think they caught on fast that they’d captured my attention.

Those kids weren’t the only ones who haunted the video games and pinball machines in the convenience stores – so did I. My apartment was lonely and depressing and never felt like any kind of home, so I spent as little time there as possible. When I was there, all I did was drink, so by staying out as much as I could, I probably saved my already tormented liver from further damage. I tried talking to a few of those teenagers at the video games in the 7-Eleven, but they weren’t interested in a conversation with me.

They seemed to have nothing better to do, no place to go, and I suspected there was no one wondering where they were. There was something very sad about them. They almost seemed to be waiting for something. I had no idea what that might be, but they were awfully patient about it. I wondered what would happen if they just didn’t go home again. Were their parents involved in their lives at all? How long would they have to be gone before their parents would become concerned? What if whatever – or whoever – they were waiting for finally came along and took them away?

These were the thoughts that led to Crucifax. After Live Girls, I wanted to write something that did not involve vampires, or the squirming black manifestations of evil from Darklings, or the seductive and hungry monsters from Seductions. I wanted to do something completely different. Those aimless, wandering North Hollywood teenagers gave me Mace, a kind of modern-day rock-and-roll Pied Piper. But instead of leading rats out of the village, he leads the teenagers of the San Fernando Valley out of their homes and schools and into his basement lair where he offers them all the sex and drugs and rock and roll and freedom they want. But it comes, of course, at a terrible price.

I submitted the novel to Simon & Schuster under the title Crucifax Autumn. My editor didn’t like that title, though – and that wasn’t all she didn’t like. There’s a particularly gruesome scene in the book involving a cunnilingual abortion. It’s cunnilingual because a character performs it with the aid of his three-foot-long tongue. Then he eats the fetus. The scene was long and extremely graphic, and my editor’s response was, “There is no way this book will be published with this scene as written!” She was quite pregnant at the time, but I don’t know if that had anything to do with her reaction to the scene. I strongly disagreed with her and went to my agent, Richard Curtis, certain that he would back me up. I was wrong. He thought the scene was unnecessarily explicit, too long, and made the story grind to a halt. I was young, stupid and drunk, and this made me angry. I lost the battle with my editor and ended up watering the scene down. Then I fired my agent. This was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.

Crucifax, my fourth novel, was published as a paperback original by Pocket Books in 1988. But the unexpurgated Crucifax Autumn was published as a limited edition hardcover with beautiful cover art by the great Bob Eggleton. The story of the “censored chapter” in the book became quite famous in the horror genre, and that chapter was reprinted several times in magazines and collections, including Paul Sammon's Splatterpunks.

Some years later, I stopped drinking, sobered up, grew up and came to see that Richard Curtis had been right. The cunnilingual abortion scene was unnecessarily explicit and too long. I was guilty of doing something that I had always criticized in other writers – holding up the momentum of the story so I could go for the gross-out and make my reader squirm with disgust. I returned to Richard Curtis with my tail between my legs, and he was good enough to take me back. I'm still with him today. The trimmed chapter in Crucifax is the superior of the two editions, I think, and it is the one I’ve decided to stick with for all future editions of the book. And speaking of future editions of the book ...

Crucifax is available again for the first time in more than 20 years, this time as an E-Reads paperback, and as an ebook for Kindle, Nook and in multiple formats at Fictionwise. Now you can take a trip back to the San Fernando Valley of the late 1980s and find out what those little creatures are that lurk in the shadowy corners of Mace’s subterranean lair.

E-Reads is in the process of releasing my entire back list. To see what’s available and keep up with new releases, please visit my page at the E-Reads website. And be sure to visit my website and register at the message board to win books!

Cemetery Dance: One of the Good Guys

2011-04-11T18:41:00.001-07:00

There haven’t been many constants in my life that are still constants today. Things change, relationships change, people come and go, there are ups, downs and in-betweens. Life is always in flux. But there are a few things that remain. I’ve been with my wife Dawn since 1988. I have books on my shelves that I’ve had for 40 years and probably won’t get rid of until they fall apart my in my hands and can’t be repaired. And then there’s Rich Chizmar and Cemetery Dance Publications.

Don’t ask me when my relationship began with Cemetery Dance. I couldn’t tell you without doing a lot of digging around in my office and, even worse, some math. I was still drinking when I hooked up with CD, and that probably has a lot to do with why I can’t remember. I haven’t been a drinker in a long time. The fact that Rich started dealing with me while I was a drinker makes it pretty amazing that we still have a relationship today. My stories have appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine and in some of their anthologies and Rich has published many of my novels, novellas and collections. There was a period in the 1990s when I would have disappeared completely had it not been for CD. Rich kept me writing. In some ways, he kept me alive.

Cemetery Dance Publications has become a mainstay in the horror genre. As much as it has grown, it remains a small independent publisher. The horror community tends to take it for granted. There’s a joke about CD. Maybe you’ve heard it.

“There’s Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, Pacific Time and Cemetery Dance Time.”

This joke refers to the fact that CD is not always punctual with its releases, does not always stick rigidly to its schedule. CD takes heat for this. Sometimes a check is late, and believe me, when that happens, we writers have the capacity to go completely monkeyfuck crazy in ways one does not often find in people of other professions. But like I said, we – all of us, fans and writers alike – tend to take the company for granted. Many are unaware of how the company is run.

Nobody in the genre has more genuine affection and respect for writers than Rich Chizmar. Rich is a writer himself and he knows what we do, how we do it and why we do it. He knows that writers are usually dysfunctional in one way or another, quite often damaged. And he likes us, anyway. He also does what he can to take care of us, to show us support when it will do the most good, throw work our way when it’s needed. But what you hear about is tardiness, grumblings from the fans, the usual complaints from writers. When a check is late, we writers sometimes fly off the handle, make angry phone calls, shoot off outraged emails, and all of this lands in Rich’s lap. I’ve done this myself. I’ve done this recently. We don’t know what’s going on at Rich’s end. Sometimes life gets in the way of things for publishers, too – a family crisis can pop up, illnesses occur, loved ones die, financial problems arise,and we’re quick to forget that this is not Simon & Schuster we’re dealing with, here, it’s still a relatively small, independent publisher with limited staff and funds. Most are also unaware that sometimes a check is late because a Cemetery Dance writer is in crisis and Rich has made an effort to do some shuffling to help him or her out. That’s the kind of person he is. But instead of getting the credit he deserves for that, he gets yelled at for something else.

Sometimes people in this business get credit they don’t deserve. Someone will come along and crow about his love of the genre and his great respect for writers when in fact he’s found a genre he knows nothing about filled with young, inexperienced writers so desperate to get published that they don’t care how hard a publisher fucks them and won’t complain either out of fear of reprisal or simply because they’re too dazzled by the sight of their book on a book store shelf. This is just a hypothetical example, of course. I’m not pointing fingers, just trying to make a point. The credit an undeserving person or company might get is often because most people are unaware of what’s really going on behind the scenes. Of course, the same can be said of criticism.

Rich Chizmar and Cemetery Dance deserve more credit than they get. They really do know and love the genre. They really do have great respect for writers. If that weren’t the case, I’m sure Rich would’ve thrown in the towel long ago. He certainly takes enough crap from us writers when we’re up against a wall and desperate for a check we’ve got coming. It happens. If writers were good business people and financial planners, they wouldn’t be writers. But in that desperation, we sometimes forget that the only check we’ve got coming at the time is from Cemetery Dance, because it’s still there, still buying our work, still supporting us, still producing fiction in one of the most disrespected genres in all of publishing, and in beautiful editions of which we can be proud.

I’m talking to myself here as much as anyone else because I’ve been guilty of this plenty of times. That’s why I’m writing this. I think it’s important for us to stop when those desperate times come, take a breath, and remember who we’re dealing with, who we’re about to shout at over the phone, who we’re about to send that angry, vitriolic email to in our blind desperation for money before we do it. This is Cemetery Dance we’re talking about. Rich has put up with us this long and he’s still around, still doing it. While CD has been successful, the guy could just as easily find the same success in some field where he’d have the luxury of dealing with more stable people. He doesn’t do that because, to paraphrase Sally Field’s old Oscar speech, he likes us, he really likes us.

So the next time you want to complain about a late release, or if you’re a writer, a late check, take just a moment to stop and think about this. Times are tough for everyone right now, and at some point they’ll get better, and then later, they’ll get tough again. Let’s hope when that happens that Cemetery Dance is still around, that Rich is still doing what he does so well, what he does with such affection. If a little tardiness is the worst thing you can complain about, then for crying out loud, be thankful. You want to hear some real horror stories about publishers? You want to hear about writers deliberately being ripped off? You want to hear about genuine contempt for writers hidden behind smiling public words of praise? How much time have you got?

On second thought ... nah. That’s not what I’m here for right now. But trust me, it happens. It hasn’t happened with Cemetery Dance. You don’t hear those stories about Rich Chizmar. Because they don’t exist. That’s one of the reasons he’s still around. He’s a good guy, a decent guy, and sometimes that alone gets in the way of efficiency.

So, a book is late? A check is late? Cry me a river. It could be worse. Trust me. Much worse. MUCH worse. And it has been. For many. But that sort of thing has never been done by Rich Chizmar. He’s on our side, and he’s one of the good guys. In all the years that I’ve had a relationship with Cemetery Dance – the longest and most fruitful professional relationship I've ever had – I’ve never met the man. But I think of him as a friend, and I’m grateful for CD. We could all be a little more grateful.

LOVELESS: The Story Behind the Book

2011-04-09T16:17:00.001-07:00

“When are you going to write something nice, Ray? Something I can read? When you are you going to write a love story?”

This has been the mantra of my family for decades. None of them reads horror fiction. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that none of them reads. To hear them tell it, the main reason they don’t read is that I have not yet written something nice that they can read. Something like a love story!

The fact is, I’ve written many love stories. Nearly every one of my novels contains a love story – even my horror novels, although Loveless: A Dark Love Story isn’t one of those. Of course, they’re not the kind of love stories my family would consider nice. The kind of love story they’re talking about is the kind of thing Nicholas Sparks writes. And if they’re waiting for me to write one of those ... well, all I’ve got to say is, pack a few sandwiches and get really, really comfortable, because it’s going to be a long wait.

My novel Loveless: A Dark Love Story is the kind of love story I write. I can’t help it. It’s out of my hands. Everything I write, even if it’s meant to be funny, takes a dark turn or two or three at one point or another. If it didn’t, it would feel dishonest to me. I think fiction should be a reflection of reality, not a distortion of it. In my horror fiction, things happen that have nothing to do with reality – people turn into werewolves, vaginas have fangs, spiders the size of Volkswagen Beetles eat people. But all of these things happen in an environment that is firmly grounded in reality.

Lots of good things happen in life. Wonderful things. They happen to all of us at one time or another. But bad things happen, too. They happen to good people for no other reason than ... well, for no reason. They just do. There’s a quote I love from Lawrence Kasdan’s sadly underrated 1991 film Grand Canyon. It’s delivered by Danny Glover:

“World’s a hard place. Sometimes you just get lucky. And, of course, sometimes you don’t. One thing’s for sure is that if you’re alive, some terrible shit’s gonna happen to you, and maybe some good things, too. But you can always count on the terrible. If it doesn’t kill you, you’re gonna be around to see it come down some other way.”

Some will say that’s an awfully pessimistic attitude. I think there’s a good chance those people enjoy the work of Nicholas Sparks. I think it’s an awfully realistic attitude. And a healthy one. I guess that’s reflected in my fiction. Bad things happen to good people for no reason. What’s wrong with facing up to that fact early on so you’re not surprised by it later? What’s important is how we deal with those bad things. Dealing with them is a lot easier when you have someone you love – and someone who loves you – by your side. And for me, that’s where the love stories come in.

Loveless is a love story about two lonely people. One of them is Amy Grady. For 16 years, she’s been married to her husband Roy, a man whose unpredictable anger and violence can explode at any moment, a man who slaps, punches and kicks her, and a man she no longer loves. Their teenage son Danny has been living with this tension all his life and it has taken a toll. The other lonely person is Walter Loveless, who has just moved in next door to Amy. He has been living a life of secrecy and isolation for so long that he is almost unaware of his loneliness anymore because it has become such a part of him.

Amy watches him – handsome, rugged – but is too shy to speak to him. But when they are finally brought together, electricity crackles between them and the attraction is instantaneous and powerful. But Loveless has secrets and a past that haunts him. Someone from that past – someone deadly – is still pursuing him. When Amy decides to escape her own past, she runs headlong into his.

Loveless: A Dark Love Story was first published in 2008 with my novel Murder Was My Alibi in a single limited edition from Lonely Roads Books that has become known as the Arthur Darknell Double because it was published under a pseudonym I intended to use for crime fiction, an idea I have since abandoned. Now it is available for the first time as a paperback and ebook for Kindle and Nook, and in multiple ebook formats on Fictionwise. If you have a Facebook account, drop by the Loveless page and click the "like" button! And while you're at it, stop by my fan page and do the same. E-Reads is publishing my entire back list, including titles like this one that have never before been available in mass market editions. To see which titles are available now and to keep up with new releases, please visit my page at the E-Reads website.

LIVE GIRLS: The Story Behind the Book

2011-04-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

Live Girls was the result of my first visit to New York City. I was spending the day with my (then) editor in his office and he suggested I visit Times Square just a couple of blocks away. He told me to have fun ... just hang onto all my receipts and don’t make eye contact with anyone on the street.

“Eye contact?” I said. “Why not?”

“Because some people will misinterpret it, or take advantage of it. And don’t smile at people. You smile too much. That’ll make you look like an easy mark.”

Was I visiting Times Square or an institution for the criminally insane? I certainly wasn’t visiting the Times Square that exists today. This was early in 1986, before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up Times Square and moved Disney in, preparing the way for Mayor Michael Bloomberg to turn it into a family-friendly tourist destination. This was the old Times Square: dirty, gritty and a little dangerous.

I was 23 at the time and had led a pretty sheltered existence for most of my life. I’d grown up in a small town in a very protective religious family and had attended religious schools from grade one into my freshman year in college. My editor's warning made me nervous. For me, Times Square was an eye-opening experience.

As I strolled by the adult book stores and peep-show parlors and winos and hookers and guys selling drugs openly, I was often overcome, not unlike Davey Owen in Live Girls, with the irrational fear that one of my former bible teachers might spot me slowing down to get a better look at one of the posters outside an adult movie theater. It took a while, but I finally mustered the courage to go inside one of those dens of iniquity.

The establishment I entered is described, almost to the letter, in Live Girls. It was a dark little hole-in-the-wall peep-show with no posters or barkers out front like most of the others. There was only a single sign made up of three red neon words: LIVE NUDE GIRLS. The “I” in LIVE and the “DE” in NUDE flickered and buzzed. I purchased the minimum number of tokens and walked down a long, narrow corridor that turned to the right. There were doors on each side, some with men standing outside, waiting their turn.

I found an empty booth, went inside, closed the door and locked it. It was dark, humid and smelly in there. My heart was thundering. Although I’d never been inside such a place, I’d heard and read of them and knew that once I dropped my tokens in the slot beneath the red light, a panel would open and there would be a naked woman on the other side of the glass – a LIVE NUDE GIRL, just as the sputtering sign outside had promised.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed a small opening beneath the vague outline of the rectangular panel. Pale, gray light came through the opening, falling on the black, glistening, sticky floor beneath my feet and faintly illuminating a small plastic plaque next to the token slot that read: INSERT TIP THROUGH SLOT. I realized the opening below the window had indeed been a slot at one time, but the center of it had been expanded into a crude circular opening. Well ... perhaps “expanded” isn’t the right word. There were rough grooves in the edges of the wood, as if someone had used a makeshift tool to widen the slot, something like a pocket knife or a sharp-edged piece of metal. Or ... teeth? Yes, it looked almost as if it had been chewed open. That thought gave me a brief, enjoyable chill ... and then another that wasn’t so enjoyable when I noticed the opening was level with my crotch. But the real chills didn’t come until I dropped my tokens and the panel slid open.

The girl on the other side was nude ... but I had some doubt as to whether she was “live.”

She was the color of chalk and so horribly thin that I winced involuntarily when I saw her. Her dark hair was greasy and fell in limp strands past her shoulders. Her face was little more than a skull with yellowish-brown half-moons beneath her dead, sunken eyes. Her lips parted only once, briefly, during my short-lived stay in that booth, but when they did, I saw that her tiny, snaggled teeth were a dark gray color. There was an angry sore on her lower lip. Her neck appeared much too thin and frail to hold up her head. Her chest was a sharply-etched ribcage with two thin flaps of flesh hanging over it, mere ghosts of breasts. The flesh around her nipples was puckered, like skin left too long in a tepid bath. The left nipple was pierced, sported a small ring and was swollen and inflamed. Her arms and legs were jointed sticks that wore bruises the color of over-ripe bananas.

I stopped breathing, just held my breath for a long time, thinking that she should be in a hospital, not on the other side of that window exposing herself for tips. I was at once repulsed and fascinated as she closed her eyes and began to perform.

Her performance consisted of a zombie-like gynecological self-examination. Her movements were stilted and she leaned her head back limply, as if in a stupor. When she lay back on one elbow and spread her legs, I gasped. Her shaved pubis and inner thighs were covered with an oozing rash.

I left. As I passed the men in the corridor, I wondered why they were waiting. There were other unoccupied booths. Were they waiting for their favorite LIVE NUDE GIRLS? Or had they chosen to wait because they knew what they’d find in those unoccupied booths ... like the one from which I’d just made a quick exit? My imagination raced with possibilities.

I returned to my editor’s office and began to write. I already had my title, that was easy. And I had my premise; after seeing that pale, corpse-like girl in the booth, that was easy, too. Live Girls began as a short story about vampires that ran a peep-show in Times Square. But the story became a novel, which was published in January of 1987 by Pocket Books.

Live Girls received some very good reviews. Some critics were kind enough to give me more credit than I deserved. The idea of vampires in a sex-for-sale setting was seen by some as a metaphor for AIDS. To be honest, that had never crossed my mind. But, hey, if they wanted to credit me with some depth, who the hell was I to get in their way?

After the book was published, I received some mail and even a couple of phone calls (I have no idea how they got my number) from people who wanted to know how I’d found out about them, about their secret, nocturnal, bloodsucking activities. Vampires were contacting li’l ol’ me!

Yeah, right.

Live Girls made a couple of chain book store bestseller lists and was very popular in the UK. The New York Times called it “artful” and one veteran, award-winning writer of quiet horror (now deceased) claimed it marked the end of intelligent writing in horror fiction. Dean Koontz called it "gripping, original and sly," and Ramsey Campbell called it "The most nightmarish vampire story I have ever read." It was published in several different languages and has found readers all over the world. A few years after it went out of print, I learned that mint-condition copies of the Pocket paperback were selling for outrageous prices, and the UK hardcover was selling for twice that! It became collectible and garnered some respect. And you know what? That shocked the hell out of me.

In the years since its initial release, there have been a number of movie options. Some of the people who’ve optioned the book have had some rather unusual ideas about what to do with it. One wanted to set it in a Blade Runner-like future. Another wanted to turn it into a rap/hip-hop musical. My favorite was the genius plan to cast it with a Brat Pack reunion – Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, that whole crowd. Kind of a John Hughes movie with titties and fangs. Fortunately, none of those ideas ever came to fruition.

Since the original publication of Live Girls, I’ve written about 60 books. I’ve encountered a lot of people who’ve never heard of any of them – but they know Live Girls. The novel has been reborn in reprints and has been kept alive by used book stores, flea markets, garage sales and eBay. I’m very grateful to the many readers it’s had over the decades, especially to those who’ve been kind enough to write me flattering letters and emails.

Two years ago, I got an email from a young woman who told me the story of how she was named. While her mother was pregnant with her, she’d read Live Girls. Not only had she enjoyed the book, she'd fallen in love with the names of two of the vampires – Anya and Shideh. So she named her daughter Anya Shideh. Anya told me that people frequently complimented her on her names and she’d always appreciated them. She wanted to thank me for them. Frankly, that made me a little misty-eyed.

Now Live Girls has been published by E-Reads as a paperback and as an ebook for Kindle and Nook and in multiple formats from Fictionwise. If you're on Facebook, please visit the Live Girls page and click "like!" While you're there, drop by my personal page and friend me, and visit my fan page for updates. E-Reads is in the process of releasing my entire back list. To see what's available so far and keep up with new releases, visit my page at the E-Reads website.

THE NEW NEIGHBOR: The Story Behind the Book

2011-04-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

By 1990, I had kind of developed a reputation for writing erotic horror. I would say this was entirely unintentional ... but it wasn’t. I use sex in my writing for a reason. I’ve always felt that one of the things that makes horror fiction work is familiarity. Take a familiar situation, characters the readers can identify with, make your readers comfortable with those things and then throw in a supernatural or twisted threat that turns all of that upside down. How many of us have been to a beach in our lives, whether it was the ocean or a lake? How many of us have gotten into the water not knowing what else was swimming around in there? That is why Jaws was such a blockbuster success. After the release of the movie in 1975, people were terrified of getting into the water. I knew people who didn’t even want to get into the bathtub! Suddenly, something safe and familiar had become dangerous and frightening. That’s what the horror genre does when it works.

Things like vampires and werewolves and the other creatures that populate the horror genre don’t really exist (there are people who will argue that point – some quite vehemently – but I tend to avoid those people) and we never have to deal with those creatures in our daily lives. So in order to make them work in a story, I think it’s vital that they be surrounded by characters and situations that are familiar to all of us. We may not deal with vampires in our daily lives, but we all know what unemployment is like. Werewolves may not be a common problem, but relationship trouble is. We may never have to shoot a zombie in the head, but we may have to watch a loved one die a slow, agonizing death of cancer. The monsters are stand-ins for these horrors and others – real-life horrors. They are an entertaining way to release the tensions and anxieties created by these real horrors in our lives. But those monsters have no effect unless they are placed in a world we know that is populated by people like us, who have experiences, anxieties and feelings in common with us. What is the one thing we all have in common? Sex.

They say sex sells. And that’s true, of course. But it sells because sex is something we all want, need and participate in at one time or another. It is during sex that we are the most vulnerable – literally naked and defenseless. When I was writing my first novel, Seductions, which is a very sexual book, I thought to myself, Wouldn’t it be fun if I could do to sex what Jaws did to swimming? Obviously, I didn’t succeed, and I doubt anyone could – even the threat of AIDS didn’t do that, and that was pretty damned scary. But I keep trying. Hey ... a guy’s gotta have some goals.

When I wrote The New Neighbor in 1990, I wanted to inject more than a supernatural threat into a typical small-town neighborhood. I wanted to take a Leave it to Beaver neighborhood and turn it into a black orgy of lust, adultery and incest. I wanted to write a horror novel that was a porn novel -- a porn novel that was a horror novel. While I was working on the book, whenever anyone asked me what I was writing, I’d respond, “Penthouse Forum from hell.” But in 1990, nobody was interested in that. It was too graphic, too dark – just too much. Reading the book now, that seems odd, because all these years later, it doesn't seem quite that extreme. But in 1990, it was too extreme for the publishers who read it. Then I met Joe Stefko of Charnel House. Joe is a fascinating guy. An successful musician, he toured with John Cale of the Velvet Underground for two years in the 1970s until Cale chopped the head off a live chicken on stage in London. Joe, a vegetarian and animal-lover, had told him in advance that he would walk off if it happened, but Cale did it anyway. And Joe walked off. He was Meat Loaf’s drummer during the three years that Bat Out of Hell was such a raging success. But decades of Joe’s life have been spent with The Turtles, where he remains on the drums, quite happy. “I have played with a lot of other acts during these Turtle years but none have been as much fun,” Joe says in his bio on the band’s website. “I even turned Meat Loaf down to stay with them. Life is short and fun is at a premium.”

But Joe is also a publisher. He started Charnel House in 1989 with the idea that book craftsmanship was an art form, and he turned it into the country’s foremost publisher of finely bound and printed limited edition books in the horror and science fiction genres. The New Neighbor was the company’s second title. It was published in two extremely limited, expensive, drop-dead gorgeous editions. There were 500 copies of the numbered edition, 26 copies of the lettered edition. The illustrations are by JK Potter and they are stunning. It was an enormous honor to have my work illustrated by such a brilliant artist. Potter is the best, and his work in this book is, I think, among his best.

The lettered edition was hand-sewn, bound in crimson Morocco leather with a strip of lace stocking embedded down the front cover and a black silk garter strap and clip for a bookmark. Because of the graphic sex and violence in the book, the publisher’s lawyers advised that each customer state in writing that he or she was at least 21 years old. You might find a one of the Charnel House editions available for sale now and then, but they ain’t cheap. I’ve seen the lettered edition sell for as much as $1,500. I will always be extremely proud of the Charnel House editions of The New Neighbor, but it was so limited that very few people read the book.

The novel languished in obscurity for 14 years until it was reprinted by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2005. Once again, a beautiful edition was published (CD link) with a gorgeous cover by Caniglia. It was limited to 1,000 signed copies, 52 lettered. My only complaint was that the book was inaccurately called a “vampire novel” on the publisher’s website.

Now, 20 years after its original publication, The New Neighbor is available to a much wider audience. It’s not limited this time – in fact, it’s unlimited as a paperback and ebook.

The Pritchard family is living a life of familial contentment on Deerfield Avenue, a street where the neighbors are friendly and the yards are neat. Then Lorelle Dupree moves in across the street. She is uncommonly beautiful, warm and friendly ... and powerfully seductive. One by one, the Pritchard family succumbs to her advances. But they aren’t the only ones. Lorelle gets to know everyone on the street. The residents of Deerfield Avenue slowly become ill, exhibiting flu-like symptoms, and the better they get to know Lorelle, the sicker they get. And then ... the killings start.

The New Neighbor is available in paperback and as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, and in a variety of formats at Fictionwise. E-Reads is releasing all of my books as paperbacks and ebooks. To see what’s been published so far, take a look at my E-Reads page.

Operation Homo-sek-shool

2011-03-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

[This is a truncated version of a chapter from my unpublished novel Dismissed from the Front and Center, which was inspired by my two years at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding academy. Our protagonist is Arty, a painfully shy, deeply insecure, overweight boy who has taught himself to be funny to fight that shyness, and because he thinks that’s the only way he will ever be accepted. He has taught himself ventriloquism and has brought his dummy Chester to Beautiful River Academy. Chester is an immediate hit and helps Arty get elected vice president of the Class of ‘81. The president is Stanton Pardy -- the "Pardy Animal" -- a pious, arrogant student who, along with his ultra-religious clique, seems to think Arty is also ultra-religious and has become convinced that they are simpatico. This chapter takes place early in Arty’s first year at Beautiful River, while he and his roommate David are trying to settle in.]

Once every semester, Seventh-day Adventist schools have what is a called a Week of Prayer. The week usually has a theme geared toward – who else? – children and teenagers, which is determined by the guest speaker, who comes to the school and speaks at all the religious services and visits all the Bible classes, and both of the dorms at boarding academies.

For our first Week of Prayer at Beautiful River, the guest speaker was an enormously tall black man named Elder James Berens. He was imposingly broad, with close-cropped hair, small eyes, and hands like shovels. He spoke at Monday morning’s chapel service for the first time.

“It’s a pleasure to be here at Beautiful River Academy,” he began, “where I’ve been made to feel very welcome.” He towered over the chapel’s pulpit and dwarfed the large bouquet of autumn colors that sprouted from a cornucopia-shaped vase in front of it.

We sat in the main chapel in the rear of the administration building, all of us missing a class because Week of Prayer always messed up everyone’s schedule. Of course, most of us didn’t mind – anything that got us out of classes was just fine with us.

Elder Berens had a microphone at the pulpit but hardly needed it. He had one of those voices that rumbles in your chest and makes furniture vibrate.

“This week,” Elder Berens said, “we are going to deal with an abomination. What is an abomination?”

Two seats down from me, Beau muttered, “Any food the cafeteria staff has to name themselves.”

“Let’s see what Webster’s dictionary says about an abomination.” He looked at his notes on the pulpit. “‘Anything greatly disliked or abhorred; intense aversion or loathing; detestation, a vile, shameful, or detestable action.’ Let me repeat that: ‘A vile, shameful, or detestable action.’ We’re going to discuss something that the bible calls an abomination. It’s something that is spreading over the world like a plague. And it is something that is alive and well right here at Beautiful River Academy. It’s running unbridled through all of our schools, but this week we are focusing on you. Right here. This school.

“The abomination of which I speak,” he went on, “the vile, shameful, detestable action I’m talking about is ... homo-sek-shoo-ality! It has taken hold right here at Beautiful River Academy. It has grown roots here. I look out over you now, and I can see it. Yes, I can see it. It’s rampant here! This has been my own personal burden --- to root out homo-sek-shoo-ality in our schools and churches. This has become my job, the lord has given me this task, which I take very seriously, and I have come here to do that job at Beautiful River Academy. Homo-sek-shoo-ality is here in this school, in this very building. Right now!”

Several heads turned to look around the chapel suspiciously, as if they might be able to spot it.

Elder Berens held up his bible and said, “Let’s see what the bible says about homo-sek-shoo-ality.” He put the bible on the pulpit and opened it. “Leviticus thirteen, twentieth chapter, from the Living Bible: ‘The penalty for homo-sek-shool acts is death to both parties. They have brought it upon themselves.’ Did you get that?” When he spoke again, he shouted, and his voice rattled the chapel windows: “‘They have brought it upon themselves!’”

He paused a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was normal again. “Now, when the bible says the penalty for homo-sek-shoo-ality is death, does that mean we should go out and kill homo-sek-shools? No. If that were the case, then I would have no choice but to kill some of you sitting here today. But that’s not what the bible means. It means that death will eventually come to the homo-sek-shool, most likely an early death because the homo-sek-shool lifestyle is an unhealthy one. And what does the bible say? It says ‘they have brought it upon themselves.’

“I have been doing this for a long time,” Elder Berens continued, “and I’ve learned to spot the disease of homo-sek-shoo-ality. I can tell by a young man’s handshake if he has homo-sek-shool tendencies. I have shaken some of your hands here, and I have felt those tendencies in your grip. I know. The lord knows. And we’re going to spend this Week of Prayer dealing with it.

“I’ll be on the campus the whole week. I’ll be eating with you in the cafeteria, worshiping with you in your dorms. I want to get to know you. I want to discuss your problems. And most of all, I want you to recognize the problem of homo-sek-shoo-ality. If it’s a problem for you, it doesn’t have to be. With god’s help, you can be cured. I am here for you. You know who you are, and you know that what you are doing is wrong. It is a vile and shameful and detestable action and you know this, you feel this in your heart even as you do it. That is the quiet voice of the holy spirit speaking to you, urging you to turn away from this abomination.”

Up to that point, I had been through twenty Weeks of Prayer. Some had been better than others. Some had been downright dull. But this one was different than all the others. This one stood alone, because this guy was clearly monkeyfuck crazy.

It was 1979, before the outbreak of AIDS. Wherever he was when AIDS came on the scene, I’m sure Elder Berens was as happy as a pig in shit. He no doubt saw AIDS as the death penalty the bible had promised homo-sek-shools. I could almost see him doing a little happy dance after hearing about AIDS for the first time and saying, “I told you so, you limp-wristed pillow-biters!”

After that first Week of Prayer meeting, David, Frank and I left the chapel in the ad building a little stunned.

“I heard it, and I still can’t believe it,” Frank said.

“He’s crazy,” David said.

“We have to do something,” I said.

“Yep,” Frank said. “Definitely.”

“You have anything in mind?” David asked me.

“Let me think about it.”

Elder James Berens was just asking for ... something. He was begging for it ... whatever it was. As the bible said of homo-sek-shools, he’d brought it on himself.

We had a few gay students --- at least, David and Frank and Beau and I suspected they were gay, but we didn’t come right out and ask them because it didn’t matter, we didn’t care, and we weren’t boorish cretins. I wanted to go to those guys and tell them Elder Berens spoke for himself alone, but I didn’t know positively that they were gay, so I never did.

I spent that Monday wondering what could be done about Elder Berens. And I got an idea. I talked it over with my roommate David, and he gave his enthusiastic approval. That evening before dinner, David and I went up to Frank’s room and I told them what I had in mind. “What do you think?” I said.

Frank grinned and said, “Brilliant. Let’s do it.”

I said, “We need to get a bunch of guys in here and explain it to them.”

We gathered as many as we could in Frank’s room – guys we could trust and were pretty sure would go along with it. Beau rounded up his group of friends, which included Ted Bowman, Dan Bately, Oscar Rorisch, and some other guys whose names I didn’t know yet. I knew a few seniors from the school’s singing group, the Riveraires – Matt Smith, Aaron Boland, and Mike Finley, and they brought some friends of theirs. Charlie Morano came, too, and brought a couple of his senior friends. The room was packed, standing room only. It felt like we were trying to see how many guys we could pack into a phonebooth.

Without Chester on my arm, I was a little nervous. The dummy was my protection, my buffer. If these guys thought my idea was stupid – or worse, offensive for whatever reason – I wouldn’t be able to blame it on Chester.

“Okay, guys,” I said, putting up a confident front and trying to keep my voice from trembling, “we’ve got to do something about this clown, Elder Berens,” I said.

Rumbles of agreement came from the group.

“I have an idea,” I said, “but it won’t work if just one or two or three people do it. We all have to do it. Berens claims that homosexuality is rampant here at Beautiful River. We know that’s not the case. This guy’s about as obsessed with homosexuality as Dean Billey is with masturbation. But I’d like to see what Berens would do if he really were to encounter rampant homosexuality. He’s going to be wandering all over campus for the next week and he’s going to talk to as many of us as he can. What I want each of you to do is give him your very best impersonation of a stereotypical homosexual.”

“What do you mean?” Ted Bowman said.

“When Berens is around, I want you guys to camp it up. Lisp, flap your limp wrists – just do an impersonation of Mr. Long in the cafeteria kitchen.”

More laughs, and someone said, “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am. This guy wants rampant homosexuality? We’ll give it to him. If he shakes your hand, give him the limpest grip you possibly can. If you see him at a distance, wave to him like this.” I waggled my fingers in a girlish fashion. “Give him the most effeminate looks and smiles you can. Wink at him.”

“Whoa,” Dan Bately said. “You want us to act gay?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But what if he thinks we’re gay?” Dan said.

“That’s the whole idea!” I said. “Look at it this way --- this guy is going to think you’re gay anyway. He’s said he can tell who has homosexual tendencies from a handshake. That’s somebody who sees homosexuals hiding in his soup. And besides, he’s only going to be here a week, then he’s out of our lives forever.”

“What about the people who won’t be leaving after a week?” Aaron Bowland said.

“Well, they already know you’re not gay, right?”

He thought about that a moment, nodded slowly, then shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Come on, guys,” I said, “this could be a truly beautiful thing if we pull it off. There are a lot of us here, but if you know of anyone else who might play along and not blow it for us, then tell them about it. Let’s make this guy crazy. Let’s put this asshole up to his neck in rampant homo-sek-shoo-ality. Come on, you fairies, let’s hear those lisps, let’s see some limp wrists!”

With a lot of laughter, everyone started doing their version of a gay cliche. They warmed up to the idea, got into their performances, and cracked each other up. In a few minutes, the room looked like a convention of Liberace impersonators, with a few Paul Lyndes and Charles Nelson Reillys thrown in.

“Great!” I said. “You guys have got it! Now, act that way whenever you see this douchebag around campus. Will you do that?”

They all agreed.

Frank and I exchanged a thumbs-up.

“Okay, guys,” I said, “we’d better break this up before we get the attention of one of the deans. Berens will be somewhere in the caf tonight, so be ready to start Operation Homo-sek-shool.”

I knew all of them wouldn’t go through with it. Some would chicken out, and that was fine. But if half of them would do it --- even a third --- we could have some fun.

* * * *

It began that night at dinner. I went to the caf with David, Natalie and Frank. On our way down the sidewalk, Beau, Ted and Dan called for us to wait up.

“I got an idea,” Beau said. “What if we hold hands with another guy whenever we go by this dinkwad?”

They were getting into the spirit of it. I praised Beau’s idea and told him to do it.

The six of us went into the caf together, got in line, and got our food. We looked for Berens as we went to a table, but he wasn’t there.

I looked around for Stanton Pardy and saw him at a table with his friends. I was relieved to find that he’d already seated himself for dinner. That meant he’d leave me alone. I hoped.

We were halfway through our dinner when Elder Berens entered the caf with a tray of food. He was so big, it was like watching Herman Munster walk through a daycare center. He went over to Stan’s table and sat with them. It figured. He says he wants to get to know us all, spend time with us, but which table does he go to? The table of pious, self-righteous bible-carriers. I wondered if he thought Stan was gay. That would be funny.

When Beau, Ted and Dan finished their dinner and got up to leave, I said, “Go by Elder Berens’s table. Remember what we talked about.” I looked at Beau. “And do that thing you suggested.”

As they walked by Berens, Beau and Ted joined hands. Berens smiled at them as they passed until he saw their hands. Then his smile faltered a little. They gave him a waggle of their fingers with their wrists limp. Berens’s smile dropped off his face as if it had been slapped off. Hard.

David, Frank, and I snorted with laughter.

It had begun.

For the next two days, Elder Berens was waved at, winked at, and was the target of blown kisses. Boys held hands when he walked by and lisped greetings at him. Once, Frank and I clasped hands as we walked up behind him.

“Hello, there, Elder Berens,” I said swishily as we passed. I gave him a girlish wave.

Frank winked at him.

Elder Berens’s small eyes widened a little as he stopped walking and his mouth slowly opened.

Wednesday evening, he gave the worship service in the boys’ dorm chapel. He stood at the pulpit and leaned a hand on each side of it, elbows locked. He surveyed us with his small eyes slightly narrowed.

“I have been to many schools in my time,” he said slowly, his deep, rumbling voice quavering a little. “In fact, I have been to every Adventist boarding academy in this great country of ours. I’ve been to most of the junior academies. And most of the churches. I’ve spoken at these places and gotten to know the people, the students, the teachers. I have been to all these places, and never ... “ He shouted the next word. “Never!” A brief pause, then: “Never have I been anywhere so completely imprisoned in the grip of the iron fist of homo-sek-shoo-ality as this academy!”

Down the pew from me, Beau made a snorting sound and muttered, “Iron fist,” as he jerked his fist up and down.

“Satan is hard at work on you boys,” Elder Berens said. “He has you in his hold. And we are going to work on that tonight. I’ve talked to your dean and it’s okay with him if this worship service goes overtime. We are going to go to the lord tonight, boys. We are going to have ... an altar call.”

Ah, the altar call. The altar call is to the Week of Prayer what the come shot is to porn movies. And it is often just as messy.

The altar call was the climax of every Week of Prayer, the ultimate weapon of the week’s speaker. He would save all his emotional, tear-jerking material for that last day of the week, and then he would let loose, pour it on. There usually was a lot of sniffling and sobbing among the girls, but if a speaker was really good, he could squeeze some tears out of a few guys, too, as he called them up to the front of the chapel to rededicate their lives to Jesus. Altar calls were shamelessly mawkish and emotionally manipulative in the extreme.

But the altar call always came at the end of the week. This was only Wednesday. It was like the porn starlet getting splashed in the face with semen at the beginning of the movie. It just didn't feel right.

Elder Berens was pulling out the big guns early.

He stepped out from behind the pulpit and began to pace in front of it like a caged lion that hadn’t eaten in a while. His booming voice rose on certain words and slammed into the walls of the chapel. “We are going to go to our heavenly father tonight, boys, and we are going to plead with him to bathe this school in his healing love. We are going to plead with him to pluck you from Satan’s grasping claws by curbing your homo-sek-shool desires if we have to STAY UP ALL NIGHT TO DO IT!”

“Pluck you,” Beau whispered.

Ted said, “No, pluck you.”

Dorm worship service usually lasted about half an hour, forty-five minutes tops. Elder Berens kept us in there for two and a half hours. He paced the stage and rattled the beams of the chapel with his roaring voice as he warned of the doom that awaited us. He talked about the damage we were doing to our bodies by committing sodomy. He discussed anal warts and anal and oral gonorrhea. He said there would come a time when we would no longer be able to control our bowels because of our damaged anuses. He pleaded with us, shouted at us, roared at us to please, if nothing else, think of our anuses! And his voice loosened the fillings in our teeth. At one point, he even said, “What would your dear mothers think?”

My mother would have fainted five minutes into his talk.

There were beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip by the time he ended with an altar call. His big mitt-like hands trembled as he implored us to come up to the front of the chapel and kneel down before god and devote ourselves, our lives, our bodies (and our anuses!) to Jesus. By the time he was done, we were all kneeling in a big crowd up front, and he was the one near tears as he begged god to turn us away from our evil, perverse, anus-damaging ways and to snuff out our homo-sek-shool tendencies.

When it was all over, our ears were ringing and our knees were aching. I figured that was the end of Operation Homo-sek-shool. I figured we’d shot our wad – an appropriate turn of phrase considering a giant black man had just tried to save a room full of teenage boys from homosexuality by having them get on their knees in front of him and dedicate their lives to an ancient Jew who had never married and spent all his time with twelve other guys.

But then something happened that made me happy to be alive.

Beau and Ted joined hands as they walked out of the chapel. So did Matt Smith and Aaron Boland, and Dan Bately and Oscar Rorisch. I took David’s hand as we walked out. More, and still more guys joined hands as they left. I glanced over my shoulder.

Elder Berens stood in front of the pulpit staring open-mouthed at us. He lowered himself clumsily to sit on the top step leading up to the stage.

I waggled my fingers at him and winked.

“God is not mocked!” Elder Berens roared, pointing a long finger at us. Spittle flew from his mouth as he shouted, “You have just lied to god, I’ll have you know, and you will be punished for your perversions! You are an abomination before god and the penalty is death!”

As we left the chapel, I heard Elder Berens say, “Dean Billey, in the name of god, you need to take these boys in hand!”

Given his obsession with catching boys masturbating in the dorm, I suspected Elder Berens’s words gave Dean Billey an erection.

It was ten o’clock, fifteen minutes past lights out, but the lights were still on and would probably remain on long enough for us to get into bed. We had time to duck into Frank’s and Beau’s room. We high-fived each other as we laughed hysterically. There were a couple of days left in the week of prayer, but this was the peak for us. This was our altar call.

The next day, Elder Berens was on fire in morning chapel. The guys kept it up for the rest of the week – they swished, lisped, held hands, winked, waved, and blew kisses. Elder Berens gave the sermon in church that sabbath, his final appearance at Beautiful River. By then, he seemed deflated, defeated, almost morose. His big shoulders sagged and his head drooped. His sermon, about Sodom and Gomorrah and the rampant homo-sek-shoo-ality that brought about their divine destruction, was short.

“I am very discouraged, my friends,” he said at the end of his sermon. “Homo-sek-shoo-ality has taken root in this school, and those roots are deep. I have done my best, but now I can only leave it in god’s hands. That, after all is said and done, is what we must all do in the end – leave it in god’s hands. I will pray for this school and its students. I will pray long and hard. But before sin can be forgiven, it must first be confessed. And I’m not sure everyone here is prepared to confess their sins.”

He performed another altar call in church, and he got a good turn-out. David, Frank, and I were not among them. We were all altar-called out.

After Elder Berens was gone, everything went back to normal. Guys stopped holding hands and talking with lisps.

Except, of course, for Mr. Long in the cafeteria – and I don’t think any of us would have had it any other way.

* * * *

On Monday morning as I walked through the center of the ad building on my way to Mr. Stefano’s English class, Elder Gash stepped out of his office and said, “Arty, could you step in here a moment.”

Uh-oh, I thought. He knows about Operation Homo-sek-shool.

He led me through the outer office and into his inner sanctum.

“Have a seat, Arty,” he said.

I sat before his desk and he took his seat behind it. I did my best to hide my nervousness.

“Although this is your first year here, Arty,” he said, “you seem to have your finger on the pulse of this school. I’ve been watching you closely. You have quite a gift, you know – your ventriloquism, and your singing. God has blessed you. You have your own circle of friends, but I’ve noticed that you’re comfortable talking to people in other groups. I suppose all high schools are filled with cliques, we’re no exception. But you seem to be on speaking terms with people in several. I admire that. The other students seem to like you. They certainly admire Chester a great deal.”

“Thank you,” I said. This was turning out a lot better than I had anticipated.

“So I thought I would ask you this: What did you think of the Week of Prayer, Arty?”

I considered my words before responding. I decided to be honest. “You want my honest opinion?”

“Please.”

“He seemed like a nice enough man, but I think Elder Berens was way off base.”

“How so?”

“Homosexuality is not rampant here at Beautiful River.”

“How can you be sure of that? Elder Berens was ... well, quite shaken up by what he perceived as a nest of homosexuality. That was his word, a nest.” His usual frown grew deeper as he slowly shook his head. “I’ve never heard anyone refer to Beautiful River as a nest of anything.”

“Look, I’m not saying we don’t have some gay students, we probably do. But no more than any other group this size. Homosexuality has not taken root here at Beautiful River. We have problems here that are a lot more important than homosexuality that need to be dealt with.”

“Problems? What kind of problems?”

“Drugs. Alcohol. Loneliness. That’s probably the biggest one, loneliness. There are a lot of homesick, lonely students here, far away from home, who may not have a lot of friends. There are some who have no friends. They just don’t fit in and aren’t accepted. Some because they can’t afford to dress as well as others, or because they’re overweight, or socially awkward, or they think they’re not attractive or interesting enough to fit in. Those are the real problems here, Elder Gash.”

He leaned forward, interlocked his hands on his desk and cocked a brow. “You say there are people doing drugs and alcohol on campus?”

I lowered my head a moment and sighed. “I don’t know of any specifically, but drugs and alcohol are problems everywhere, right? And drugs and alcohol are nothing more than symptoms of the underlying problems – loneliness and ... pain. There are some kids here who feel all alone in the world, even though they’re surrounded by people.”

“So ... you don’t know of anyone specifically who’s using drugs and alcohol on campus? Because if you did, and you were to tell me, your name would never come up.”

I stared at him for a long time, my head tilted to one side. I wanted to lunge across the desk, grab his lapels and shake him as I screamed, Will you wake up and look around you! But I did not. “No. I don’t.”

Gash’s lips pursed even more than usual as he thought about that a moment. Then he nodded once and said, “I’ll keep that in mind, Arty. Thank you for your honesty.”

“I’m flattered that you would ask me, Elder Gash,” I said. I wasn’t flattered. The man was a pious, paranoid, close-minded, mean-faced putz.

He stood, and I stood with him. “I want you to know that if you ever have anything on your mind --- something about the school, something you’d like to tell me, anything at all --- my office is always open to you.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

I couldn’t get out of that office fast enough. His office smelled like soy milk.

* * * *

A few years ago, I reconnected with Mr. Stefano online. He remained my favorite teacher and had been the only person on the faculty at Beautiful River who treated his students like human beings – with respect and dignity and warmth. We exchanged a few emails, caught up with each other’s lives, and joked about our days back at the academy in Healdsburg. During our exchange, he mentioned a number of people I’d known and told me what they were up to. One of them was Elder James Berens.

He had died in 1986. Of AIDS.

("The Placenta of the Christ," another chapter from Dismissed from the Front and Center)

'NIDS: Scary Spiders and the People Who Love to Hate Them

2011-03-18T02:58:00.000-07:00

It seems everyone has at least one spider story. Here’s my favorite.

For a short time in 1989, Dawn and I lived in a house full of holes. It was rather old, hadn’t been put together too well in the first place and had no insulation. When I say it was full of holes, I’m not speaking figuratively. In several places, there were little holes in the walls through which one could see the yard outside. We sometimes referred to the place as Spider House, or Bug House. We couldn’t keep them out and they were everywhere. More than anything else, our home was invaded by wolf spiders. They’re very common, but that doesn't make them any less creepy. I’ve never been crazy about spiders. I’m not phobic, like some people I know, and I don’t fly into a panic when I see one, but I would prefer to get through my day without coming into contact with them. That was not possible in that house.

One night, I was ready to go to bed. I drank pretty heavily back in those days and was usually in some kind of inebriated state, so when I was ready to go bed, I was ready to go to bed! If I didn’t, I would end up sleeping wherever I happened to be in the house at the time, if you know what I mean. As Dirty Harry Callahan once said, “A man has got to know his limitations.” I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. As I was brushing, I smelled a strange odor. It was a grassy smell, like a freshly mown lawn. And then ... I tasted that odor. I spit into the sink. There were bits of something in the foamy gob of toothpaste. Little spider legs. I froze as I suddenly understood what I was smelling and tasting, as I became conscious of what I had just done.

In my boozy, bleary-eyed state, I had gone on automatic pilot as I went through the ingrained routine of removing my toothbrush from its holder, taking the toothpaste from the cabinet and squeezing some onto the brush. I’d paid no attention what was already on the brush at the time – a wolf spider. Then I had brushed my teeth.

New and improved Crest! Now with Wolf Spider!

Horrified, I dropped to my knees and began retching and spitting pieces of the spider into the sink. Having heard my cry of alarm, Dawn came into the bathroom and asked what was wrong. I couldn’t speak. I could only spit and gag and spit. And gag some more.

We human beings have a love/hate relationship with spiders. Well, not all of us. Some of us just love them and keep them as pets. But they’re the minority. We love to hate spiders. That’s made obvious by the long list of popular movies made about them over the decades – all movies in the horror and science fiction genres ... especially horror. The arachnid has become inextricably associated with the horror genre.

My writing has been just as influenced by movies as it has by literature, and that is especially evident in my new book 'Nids, which is now available as a paperback and ebook. ’Nids comes from some of the movies that gave me the creeps when I was little boy, sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching Creature Features on Saturday nights with one hand placed near my eyes so I could cover them quickly if necessary. There were a lot of spiders in those movies. Sometimes they had small roles – they clung to the cobwebs strung through creepy sets inhabited by Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing or Vincent Price. But sometimes, they got strong supporting roles, or even starring roles. Three childhood favorites come to mind.

In the 1950s, vampires and big, lumbering monsters made of corpse parts were nudged aside by giant, rampaging insects. One of the earliest was the 1955 Jack Arnold classic Tarantula. It made a huge impression on me with its convincing special effects – a real tarantula was steered over miniature sets using air jets. The first time I saw it, my eyes ached from being open so wide for so long. Leo G. Carroll is the obligatory scientist who has cooked up a growth formula that really works. John Agar is the manly hero and Mara Corday the appropriately submissive and helpless romantic interest (remember, it’s 1955). And if you look closely near the end, you’ll see a young Clint Eastwood piloting a jet. But when I was that little boy sitting on the floor, the real star of this movie was that big tarantula that slowly crept across the desert landscape.

In the 1957 science fiction classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, based on Richard Matheson’s novel, Scott Carey is exposed to an eerie cloud made up of radiation and insecticide and begins to shrink rapidly. Soon, he’s living in a doll house and sitting on thimbles. But a tarantula has a scene-stealing role in a memorable sequence in which Scott battles the relatively gigantic arachnid. Once again, I was delightfully traumatized by this as a boy as my mother said, “You’re not going to sleep tonight and it’ll be your own fault!”

Then there was Bert I. Gordon’s giant spider entry, The Spider aka Earth vs. the Spider from 1958. Bert was a master of low-budget schlock and specialized in giant bugs and animals in movies like Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People, The Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants and others. Forrest J. Ackerman, the grandfather of genre fandom, dubbed him “Mr. B.I.G.” The Spider was a perfect blend of classic drive-in monster java – a giant spider, teenagers and rock and roll. Bert was known for his low-rent special effects, and The Spider was no improvement. But even so, it was still a giant spider.

Hollywood’s fascination with arachnids didn’t end in the 1950s, though – they’re just not as big as they used to be. The Giant Spider Invasion clunked embarrassingly across drive-in screens in 1975. There was Kingdom of the Spiders in 1977, a movie for which I still have great affection. It’s definitely drive-in fare, but I love the very ‘70s downer ending. And it stars William Shatner! Spiders and the Shat! What’s not to love? 1990 brought us Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia, which is a damned creepy movie that still holds up beautifully more than twenty years later. I dare you to watch it without squirming. There was the low-budget, straight-to-video Spiders in 2000. A respectable budget made 2002's Eight Legged Freaks watchable, but it still wasn’t very good – kind of a moron movie with spiders. The made-very-quickly-and-cheaply-for-TV-movie crap factory that used to be SciFi but is now SyFy gave us Ice Spiders in 2007. Spiders – like horror movies themselves – will always be a cinema staple.

I don’t remember encountering many spiders in horror fiction, but they show up now and then. I recall how exciting I found the H.G. Wells story “Valley of the Spiders” as a boy. There’s an unbelievably horrifying scene in Peter Straub’s novel Floating Dragon that involves little red spiders and a rather unpleasant bowel movement that made it necessary for me to put the book down for a while.

What is one of the most common decorations at Halloween? The spider – usually clinging to or dangling from a large web.

Whether they’re big enough to stomp on buildings or small enough to take a nap on your toothbrush, spiders are scary and we love to hate them. They never fail to get a reaction from us.

During the years that I was mostly housebound -- hell, I was mostly chairbound -- with a bad hip that required three operations and kept me doped up on the finest mind-altering painkillers the pharmaceutical industry has to offer, I pampered myself by returning to some of the things I loved as a boy. For example, I went through a period during which I immersed myself in the pulpy, swashbuckling science fiction of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein in his early work, then for the first – and only – time, I tried my hand at writing in that genre. For better or worse, the result was my novella Death Hunt on Ervoon. Then for a while, I watched a lot of big bug movies, which got me on a spider kick – Tarantula, The Spider, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and even a string of really bad spider movies. That resulted in my book ’Nids, which has just been released as a paperback and ebook.

’Nids takes place in the small town of Hope Valley, which is the home of BioGenTech, a sprawling medical research facility on the edge of town. One night, an explosion occurs at BioGenTech which is witnessed by some horny teenagers parked at nearby Lovers’ Lookout. When one of those teenagers is horribly killed in the dark woods a little later, an “unidentified animal” is blamed. But Hope Valley doesn’t have an “unidentified animal” problem – it has a spider problem. And no one has any idea just how big that problem is.

This is a book for everyone who has at least one spider story to tell, for everyone who has fond memories of horror movies about spiders, for everyone who find spiders creepy, and even for those who love spiders. Does that cover just about everyone?

’Nids is available from E-Reads in paperback and as an ebook for Kindle and other formats. E-Reads is in the process of releasing all of my novels, novellas and short stories. To see what’s available and keep track of new releases, drop in on my E-Reads page.

The Placenta of the Christ

2011-03-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

For some years now, I’ve been working sporadically on a novel called Dismissed from the Front and Center, which is based on my experiences at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding academy from 1979 to 1981. This doesn't fall into my usual genres of horror or suspense. If it's anything, I guess it's a comedy, a novel but also a kind of memoir -- a novoir? The book is still under construction, although a full draft exists. It is set in the Seventh-day Adventist subculture – specifically one of the many schools in the cult’s large educational system – which no one but Seventh-day Adventists ever really experience. I guess that's why I’ve been a little nervous about this book. Will anyone be interested? Will anyone want to read it? I thought I’d post a chapter here and try to find out. I was going to post a chapter called “Operation Homo-Sek-Shool,” but it runs a bit long and probably would have to be posted in two parts. I decided instead on the chapter below, "The Placenta of the Christ." If there’s enough interest, I might post the longer chapter later.

Remember, this is a novel. That means it’s fiction. But it is quite faithful to my two years in a Sadventist boarding school. Most of the incident described below actually happened.

* * * *

At the end of chapel one morning, Tom Spinner, the vice principal, rushed to the pulpit. He always rushed to the pulpit, as if to get there before the powers that be changed their minds about letting him speak. He was a man of medium height with auburn hair that looked like it had been cut in the dark. It was parted on the right and flopped down on his forehead boyishly. He had a long mustache that extended beyond the corners of his mouth. When he spoke, it was in an artificially deep voice. I don’t know how Mr. Spinner really talked, but whenever he talked to students or spoke from the pulpit, it was in that fake deep voice that trembled slightly as he struggled to maintain it. It always sounded like he was trying to do an impression of Mr. Sulu on Star Trek. On that misty November morning, he went to the pulpit and leaned close to the microphone, as always – his artificial deep voice was not very loud – and said, “I have noticed that when you are dismissed from the chapel, you all leave at once and get bottlenecked at the doors. This is a problem. I have come up with a way to remedy that.”

He spoke so seriously, so somberly, he might have been announcing that a meteor the size of Texas was on a collision course with earth. As he spoke, his eyebrows rose high above his watchful eyes.

“From now on, at the conclusion of our assemblies, I will announce that you are dismissed from the front and center,” he said. “Then the first row and the center row will get up and leave. Once they have gone, the subsequent rows will get up, one at a time, and leave. Is that understood?”

No one responded, because I don’t think anyone knew what the hell he was talking about, and I’m sure no one cared. No one listened to Mr. Spinner much, and that morning was no exception.

He paused and looked over us all to see if his announcement had sunk in. “Now, let’s bow our heads in prayer.” Mr. Spinner used his phony voice when he was talking to god, too. I always wondered if he thought he was fooling god with that voice – he certainly wasn’t fooling us. His prayer went on for a while, then he said, “In Jesus’s name, amen. Now – “ He paused for effect, then leaned so close to the microphone that his lips almost touched it and said dramatically, “You are dismissed from the front and center.”

Everyone stood up and left at once and bottlenecked at the doors in the rear of the chapel.

Mr. Spinner frowned at the departing students and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white.

The next day at chapel, after the closing prayer, Mr. Spinner shot to his feet and rushed to the pulpit again with a couple of long, quick strides.

“It seems you did not understand what I tried to explain to you yesterday. Listen carefully. When I announce that you are dismissed from the front and center, the first row and the center row are to stand and leave, followed by the second row, and the row behind the center row. Then, when they’re gone, the next consecutive rows are to get up and leave one at a time, and so on. So let’s get it right this time. Now – “ Another dramatic pause, mouth close to the mike. “ – you are dismissed from the front and center.”

Everyone got up and left at once.

Who the hell knew which row was the center row? Nobody was getting extra credit in anything for finding out, so who the hell cared?

Every day at the end of chapel, and on sabbaths at the end of church, Mr. Spinner rushed to the pulpit as if someone else might get there first and very solemnly announced, “You are dismissed from the front and center,” and every day at the end of chapel, and on sabbaths at the end of church, everyone stood up and left at once and bottlenecked at the doors in the rear. Although Mr. Spinner seemed to think the bottleneck at the doors was a problem, we students didn’t care. Where were we going to go? To class? We were in a hurry to get to class? No, I don’t think so. And it was more fun to mill around and talk than to sit waiting for our row’s turn to leave.

He tried explaining his idea a few more times, then just gave up. But at the end of the program, he never stopped rushing to the pulpit and announcing it. That no one listened or cared seemed irrelevant. What was important was that he go through the ritual, that he say the words each time. It had been his idea, of which he seemed quite proud, and it was his only contribution to the entire program, so by golly, he was going to announce it every day, whether we cooperated or not. And we did not.

Mr. Spinner was an odd man. He was a darter – he darted everywhere he went, taking long, fast strides as if he were racing the clock. He always gave the impression of being an extremely busy man, although no one was certain exactly what it was he did. He was the vice principal, that was all we knew. That meant that if Elder Gash was hit over the head with a skillet by Gory Rash during one of their screaming fights up on Faculty Hill and was rendered comatose or dead, Mr. Spinner would be principal. As far as we could tell, that was all it meant. I think many of us sensed that such power would go straight to Mr. Spinner’s head with unpleasant results, so it’s probable that we were all secretly hoping Elder Gash, despite his many faults, would remain conscious. Mr. Spinner’s only apparent accomplishment to the entire school during my time there seemed to be the idea of dismissing everyone from the front and center; he ignored its utter failure and continued to milk it for all it was worth.

His only other memorable accomplishment was a dubious one – a disastrous chapel in the girls’ dorm, a chapel so horrifying and legendary that it was still being talked about when I graduated over a year later. For all I know, it is still being discussed at Beautiful River Academy to this day. I was not present for the chapel, of course, because it was in the girls’ dorm. But it was relayed to me in great detail by Natalie Ruskoff and others. The next day, it was the topic of conversation.

It started out like any other girls’ dorm chapel. Mrs. Hockstetter, the girls’ dean, opened with a prayer. Karen Kniddly played the piano while the girls sang a few hymns. Seated in a chair behind the pulpit was Mr. Spinner. In his lap, he held a rectangular stainless-steel pan. A wooden clipboard served as a lid. On top of the clipboard was his bible.

“We have a special guest this evening,” Mrs. Hockstetter said after the musical portion of the program was over. “Mr. Spinner is here to conduct tonight’s chapel. Mr. Spinner?”

She stepped away and Mr. Spinner shot to his feet and rushed to the pulpit before someone could snatch it away from him. He put the pan on the pulpit and opened his bible on top of it. He leaned in close to the microphone and droned in that deep voice, “Good evening, ladies.”

Several of the girls said, “Good evening,” in response.

Mr. Spinner opened his bible and said, “In John 14:6, Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’” He turned a page in the Bible, then said, “In John 15:5, Jesus said, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.” He carefully closed the bible and looked gravely over the girls seated in the pews before him. “What does that mean? He is ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ The life, he said. That means that Jesus is not only the son of god, not only the savior of the world, he is ... the life. What does he mean when he says that we are the branches and he’s the vine? We’ve all heard those two verses many times, from the time we were little children, right? But what do they really mean?”

He paused with the usual drama and looked back and forth over the girls, as if he expected an answer when he really didn’t. They knew that, and did not give one. This was a chapel, not a Bible class, and they knew the only voice Mr. Spinner was interested in hearing was his favorite voice in all the world – his own. It might have been annoying to the rest of us, but he loved it.

“Think of a woman who is with child,” Mr. Spinner went on. The word “pregnant” had not quite come all the way out of the closet among Sadventists back in 1979. “The fetus growing inside her is fed and nourished by the placenta. Without that placenta, the fetus would not grow, it would die. It would shrivel up and die. Jesus is to us what that placenta is to the growing fetus. He holds us in his protective care. He feeds and nourishes us. He makes us grow. Without him, spiritually we would shrivel up and die. There would be no nourishment, no growth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and most of all, he is the life.”

Mr. Spinner took the bible off the clipboard and set it aside on the pulpit. Then he took the clipboard off the pan and set it aside.

He said, “I have brought with me this evening a visual aid, something to illustrate how Jesus feeds and nourishes us as the vine feeds its branches. It illustrates how he really is the life.”

Mr. Spinner took from the pocket of his suit coat a pair of pale rubber surgical gloves. He slipped them onto his hands. Then he took the pan in both hands and stepped around the pulpit. Away from the microphone, he raised his phony voice as much as he could as he came down the steps and onto the main floor of the chapel. He reached into the pan and lifted something out to show the girls in the front row of the column of pews to Mr. Spinner’s right. The gelatinous object he held looked like slimy, dark-red, thinly-rolled raw pizza dough with a tawny, rather translucent skin. It was wet and bloody and glistened and trembled with each movement of Mr. Spinner’s hand.

“This is a human placenta,” Mr. Spinner said.

Gasps rose from the group as he walked over to the girls in the front row of the left column, holding the placenta over the pan. Then he walked down the center aisle.

“I want to make sure you all get a very good look at this,” he said. “Would you like to pass it around?” He put the placenta back in the pan and offered it to a girl seated on the end of one of the pews.

She shrank away from him with a horrified gasp, pushing against the girl seated next to her, made a disgusted gurgling sound and said, “No!”

He offered it to girl after girl, as if offering them salvation itself.

A chorus of “Eeewwwws” rose from the girls as he moved back and forth in the center aisle, determined to show it to all of them. One of the girls let out a piercing shriek.

Mr. Spinner lifted the placenta out of the tray again as he passed it around to show all the girls. It slipped from his hand and dropped right into the lap of a heavyset Hispanic girl named Juanita Reynolds. Juanita’s scream filled the chapel as she slapped at the placenta in her lap and knocked it to the floor. She stood and stumbled away from the pew and screamed as she left the chapel in a lumbering run.

There were disgusted yelps from several girls, while others gagged into the palms of their hands.

Four girls threw up – two on the chapel carpet, one on herself, and one on the girl seated next to her, who screamed.

One girl fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts.

Six of them ran out of the chapel holding their stomachs and/or mouths.

But Mr. Spinner did not seem to notice any of them. He picked the placenta up off the floor, put it back in the pan, and continued to expound on the similarities between the slimy, viscous glob of tissue and our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Thinking back on it now, I am reminded of a line in the Woody Allen film Hannah and her Sisters. Max Von Sydow’s character has spent an evening watching television for the first time in years, and he complains about the televangelists. He says, “If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.”

Had he been there, Jesus wouldn’t have been the only person throwing up in the chapel that evening.

The next day, the placenta of Christ was the talk of the campus. Where had Mr. Spinner been when that gem of an idea occurred to him? At the desk in his office? At the dinner table? On the toilet? Lying in bed with Mrs. Spinner? “Honey, Jesus just gave me a brilliant idea!” No one could figure out why anyone, even an odd guy like Mr. Spinner, would bring a real human placenta into a chapel as a visual aid. I couldn’t figure out how the hell Mr. Spinner had managed to find a placenta. I tried to imagine him getting it from the hospital in Healdsburg:

Hello, I’m a professional educator and I’m looking for a placenta. Do you have any spare placentas lying around? I’d like to use a placenta to illustrate the love of Jesus Christ. Where do you keep them?

I could think of no other way he could have gotten one. Was there a black market for placentas? Had Mr. Spinner found some guy parked in an alley selling them out of his trunk? They’re not exactly a readily-available commodity because, let’s face it, there’s not a big demand for them outside the womb. I decided it probably had come from a hospital. I wondered why Mr. Spinner hadn’t been chased out of the hospital like some kind of lunatic.

* * * *

The next day at work, I discussed the chapel with Mrs. Spinner.

Like her husband, Mrs. Spinner was always in a hurry. She ran around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, darting here and there, talking fast and always looking frantic and rushed. I wondered what made the Spinners such hurried people, always appearing desperate to meet some deadline. They were like overwrought characters in a movie rushing to find and defuse a bomb with a digital readout steadily ticking down to its explosion. It’s typical of Sadventists to charge around frantically on Fridays as they prepare for the coming sabbath, but the Spinners did it every day, all the time.

Hope Spinner was a small woman, and quite pretty, with long black hair and a nice figure. The only thing that marred her beauty was a broad, flat nose that was disproportionate to the rest of her face. Mrs. Spinner’s nose was why Jesus created plastic surgery. But even with the nose, she was quite attractive, and everyone wondered how in the world a strange, annoying man like Mr. Spinner had ended up with such a pretty wife.

Naturally, Sadventists are not the swearing kind, so sometimes they invent innocent slang to serve the same purpose. Mrs. Spinner’s favorite phrase was, “Good honk!” Whenever I told Mrs. Spinner something interesting, she would say, “Good honk! Really?” Coming from a grown woman – or anyone, actually – “good honk” sounded ... well, ridiculous. But she said it a lot.

“Where did Mr. Spinner get that placenta?” I asked her.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask him. He’s very resourceful, though, and when he sets his mind to doing something, it gets done.”

I thought, I wish he’d set his mind to getting a decent haircut and talking normally.

I said, “I’m not sure, um ... well, I don’t think that chapel was such a good idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well ... a real placenta? In a chapel?”

“He said several girls devoted their hearts to Jesus after that chapel.”

“A lot of them threw up for Jesus, too.”

“Good honk, don’t say that, Arty! That’s sacreligious.”

“But it’s true.”

“Stop it. Nobody threw up.”

“I’m afraid they did.”

She frowned at me. “Really?”

“One girl fainted.”

She tucked in her chin and looked at me doubtfully. “He never mentioned that.”

“Haven’t you heard everyone talking about it today? It’s the talk of the school. That placenta is on everyone’s lips.”

“Why?” she asked with a frown.

“Well ... because he brought a human placenta into a chapel service.”

“So? It was to make a point.”

“People are ... well, frankly, they’re disgusted by it.”

She waved a hand dismissively and said, “Oh, good honk, what’s wrong with them, anyway? It was only a placenta.”

Yes. Good honk, indeed.

("Operation Homo-sek-shool," another chapter from Dismissed from the Front and Center)

© copyright 2011 by Ray Garton

Notes From A Recently Deflowered Vagina Virgin

2011-02-22T02:02:00.001-08:00

The cast and director of California State University, Sacramento's 2011 V-Day production of The Vagina Monologues. Top row (from left): Jaimie Davis, Sadie Jeffries, Katherine Williams, Jasmine Wyrick, Divya Goconda, Carolina Mendoza, Elizabeth Johnson, Rochelle Robinson, Charity King. Middle row (from left): Liz Rowell (director), Macellina Amonoo, Julie Tan, Natasha Tricoche, Linda Bean. Bottom row (from left): Ariana Lozano, Keyko Torres, Liz Redford, Michelle So, Meredith Carey, Megan Brubaker, Chelsea Castillo, Jamie Jackson.

Until Saturday, February 19, I was a vagina virgin. The Vagina Monologues has been around since 1996 and it has been widely performed and celebrated, but it’s taken me this long to see it. Dawn and I attended the final performance of Sacramento State’s annual V-Day production of the play. Our friend Liz Rowell has been involved in the production for the past six years, but this year – her final year – she was the director, which made our first time even more enjoyable. It was a vibrant show with a cast of talented students who dove head-first into their roles and made the popping of my Vagina cherry a memorable experience.

It was originally my intention to write a review of the production, but first, I decided to do a little research and soak up some of the play’s history. This led me to some things with which I disagreed, and that led me to forming opinions and that led to – well, my point is that this isn’t the blog I intended to write and it’s probably longer than it would have been otherwise. Just so you know.

Here’s a little history of the play for those who might still be unfamiliar with it – although that seems unlikely because it has become a feminist phenomenon. The monologues are drawn from interviews Eve Ensler first conducted with friends about relationships, sex, and violence against women. But these friends referred her to other women who had other stories to tell. In an interview on Women.com, Ensler said, “It was like this great vagina trail I was sucked into.” The initial reluctance of the interviewees soon gave way to an enthusiastic outpouring of stories and feelings, all of which went into the monologues. The play opened at HERE Arts Center in New York City on October 3, 1996, and has remained an evolving, living thing ever since.

In the Women.com interview, Ensler was asked, “Why do you think you've become so impassioned by vaginas as opposed to, say, breasts? Or giving birth? Or other women-only experiences?” She responded:

“I was drawn to vaginas because of my own personal history, because of sexuality, because women's empowerment is deeply connected to their sexuality. And, I'm obsessed with women being violated and raped, and with incest. All of these things are deeply connected to our vaginas. ... I think growing up in a violent society is a big part of it. I lived in a very brutal household, so all that deeply shaped this.”

That obsession moved Ensler and a group of other women to establish V-Day in 1998, a non-profit movement that raises money to increase awareness of and work toward stopping violence against women. Every February, colleges and communities across the country perform The Vagina Monologues to benefit the movement. Each year, V-Day spotlights a specific group of women who are being victimized by violence somewhere in the world, and a new monologue is written about that group. In 2008, the spotlight was on the women of New Orleans, in 2009 and 2010 it was on the women and girls of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and this year it was on the women of Haiti. It’s easy for those of us who live in the United States to forget the fact that in other parts of the world, violence against women is an everyday part of life – rape as warfare, female genital mutilation and the oppression of women by religion are as common in other parts of the globe as sporting events and yard sales are in America. V-Day passionately points this out. It demands that attention be paid and steps be taken to stop violence against women wherever it occurs.

Over the years, both The Vagina Monologues and V-Day have been the target of a good deal of criticism. I see that as a good sign because I’m of the opinion that if you aren’t pissing somebody off or at least being criticized, then you’re not getting anything done. Unsurprisingly, much of that criticism has come from religious conservatives, but some of it has come from other feminists, as well.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) – a hell of a mouthful that I do not recommend swallowing – has urged people to protest the play because it is “a piece replete with sexual encounters, lust, graphic descriptions of masturbation and lesbian behavior.” On TFP’s website, references to the play’s title are written like this: “The V***** Monologues.”

Typically, words are censored because they are considered obscene or offensive. “Vagina” is neither. It’s the actual name of a part of the female anatomy. But the people at TFP have censored it as if it is an obscenity. Why? Well, it looks to me like they think it is an obscenity. It is this kind of thinking that makes The Vagina Monologues absolutely necessary.

The Network of Enlightened Women is a conservative organization that, judging by its title, thinks rather highly of itself. It was founded at the University of Virginia in 2004 and has leveled severe criticism at the play for being vulgar and demeaning to women. In a 2006 article titled "V is for Vulgar," organization president Meredith Ramsey writes, “First and foremost, The Vagina Monologues effectively reduces women to their vaginas.” She claims the play “is demeaning to women, degrading to men, dangerous for children and uncouth.”

While I must credit Ramsey with being enough of a fucking grownup to actually write out the full word “vagina,” I have to dismiss her criticism along with TFP’s. They reveal far more about the critics than about Ensler’s play. These are people who do not see the world as most people see it. They believe that sex is shameful, genitals are naughty, women should behave a certain way, and we simply should not talk about any of the things discussed in the play no matter how many women are being hurt because that would be ... well, uncouth. Again, it is this kind of thinking that makes The Vagina Monologues absolutely necessary.

In America these days, the words “conservative” and “christian” are virtually synonymous. American conservatives champion the rules and regulations of Christianity whether individual conservatives are religious or not. As I’ve said many times before, the Republican party is no longer a political party – it is now the political arm of the Christian religion. Prominent among conservative values is the idea that women just shouldn’t get too damned uppity. They are wives and mothers, dammit, and they need to remember that! (Sometimes, of course, they have to be reminded.) They’re supposed to stay home where they belong, be subservient to their husbands, and if they decide not to have children, well, then, they’re just not hooked up right. And if they decide not to get married, they must be lesbians, and we all know that's a sin and an abomination unto the lord – unless, of course, a man is allowed to watch and then join in when he’s ready, in which case the lord doesn’t seem to mind so much as long as everyone involved isn't so uncouth as to talk about it. Genitals are dirty things. They became dirty as soon as the first woman screwed up everything for everybody by listening to the talking snake in the magic garden, eating the forbidden fruit, and then seducing the first man – who was perfectly innocent in all of this, mind you – into doing the same thing. Before that happened, there was no naughty sex and genitals were mostly for urinating and all was right with the lord. God had told the first man and woman to “be fruitful and multiply,” so obviously, there was sex going on, but nobody called it fucking and they only did it in the missionary position, so it was okay. But then along came that talking snake and Eve wanted a snack, so everything went to hell. That’s why women bleed every month, don’tcha know. God’s punishing them for throwing a wrench into everything. And now we have to make sure that women stay in line and act as man's “help meet,” as the bible instructed. Merriam-Webster defines “help meet” as, “A woman who keeps her mouth shut, her legs open and the kitchen clean.”

Okay, okay, I admit it, that’s not how Merriam-Webster defines “help meet” – mostly because the phrase “help meet,” like the ridiculous beliefs described above, is archaic and has no place in the modern world. But organizations like TFP and the Network of Enlightened Women cling to that archaic way of thinking and apply it to everything around them – including The Vagina Monologues, which TFP can’t even write without censoring itself because this archaic way of thinking makes the vagina a bad, dirty thing that must be hidden away and never discussed.

But conservatives aren’t the only ones who criticize the play and V-Day.

Betty Dodson is a pioneer in sexual liberation. She is a sex educator, author, feminist, artist, and is a well-known champion of positive attitudes toward female sexuality and masturbation. For 25 years, she ran Bodysex groups in which women learned about and discussed their bodies and sexual pleasure and learned to reach orgasm through self stimulation. You might think that’s something that everyone naturally knows and can do, but if that were the case, people like Betty Dodson would not be necessary and we wouldn’t be living in a world filled with the shame and self-loathing that has been the generous gift of religion. I’ve always been a great admirer of Dodson’s work – I think what she does is important, even vital, in a culture that’s obsessed with and hungry for sex but ashamed and afraid of it and wildly confused about it. Dodson has been an outspoken critic of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day for what she sees as an emphasis on sexual violence rather than sexual pleasure. In an article on her website, Dodson writes about a production of the play she attended at Madison Square Garden:

“Goddess forbid people would be sent home happy with new information about women's sexual pleasure. Instead, this powerful venue, Madison Square Garden, sends us home feeling guilty about all the women in Africa, Bosnia and Afghanistan who are being raped, tortured and genitally mutilated. Many leave with the false belief that all the millions raised will actually end sexual violence against women. This becomes a bad joke when we realize that American women must continue the struggle to preserve our right to choose abortion, have easy access to birth control and sex information now that the religious right controls the White House. ...

“That's the main problem with V-Day. Women end up with a false idea that V-day will end violence against women and girls. Ending violence is a worthy cause and I'm all for it, but consistently equating sex with violence offers no real solution. V-Day promises us that awareness plus education equals prevention. I can only hope that by the time they get to the education phase, a group of orgasmic women will replace The Vagina Monologues with Clit Conversations that will teach women how to take sexual pleasure into their own hands.”

I understand the point Dodson makes, but I don’t agree with it. I’ve only seen the play once, and if I were to sit down and read it and sit through multiple performances, I might find things about it that don’t quite sit right with me. But the production I saw was exhilarating, disturbing and eye-opening, and that’s what art should do – make you feel things and think things. I admire what it does, and I think it is successful in doing it. The Vagina Monologues is not meant to send people “home happy with new information about women’s sexual pleasure.” If that’s what you want, then I strongly recommend Dodson’s work. She does that beautifully, and I think it’s a very important thing to do. Among other great things, her work points out double standards, the obstacles that stand in the way of sexual pleasure, and then sweeps them aside to embrace that pleasure. That is what Dodson does, and she does it better than anybody.

I think it’s a mistake for Dodson to expect Ensler’s play to do the same thing, because that’s simply not what it intends to do. Ensler has other things on her mind and The Vagina Monologues is about those things. The play does not focus only on women in other countries “being raped, tortured and genitally mutilated.” It includes that, yes, but it also talks about Native American women on reservations in the United States, where violence and rape occur three times more often than anywhere else in the country (something I didn't know before I saw the play). It talks about a little girl here in America who is raped and brutalized. At no point did I get the impression that the play arrogantly believes it will single-handedly end violence against women, but it seems to know that the only way it will end – if it ever does – will be through an angry refusal to remain silent while it goes on. Yes, awareness and education are extremely important, but I saw nothing in the play to suggest that they are the only solution. Without awareness and education, however, nothing will happen.

If you want to see a film that tells a dramatic, emotional story that will move you, it might not be a good idea to see a film written and directed by, say, Judd Apatow or Mel Brooks. If you do see a film written and directed by Apatow or Brooks, it’s really not fair to complain that it did not tell a dramatic, emotional, moving story because it didn’t intend to – it intended to make you laugh with jokes about farts and boobs. The problem is not the movie you saw but the fact that you saw that movie when you were in the mood to see another. If a movie by Apatow or Brooks fails to accomplish its goal of making you laugh with jokes about farts and boobs, then criticizing it for that is appropriate. But it’s unfair to criticize it for what it isn’t.

We are all shaped by our experiences and by how we process those experiences. Eve Ensler has said that “growing up in a violent society” and living “in a very brutal household” were part of what “deeply shaped” The Vagina Monologues. As a victim of brutality herself, Ensler is angered by the brutality against women that she sees around her. Her work is an expression of that anger and she has tried to channel that anger in a way that will raise awareness in others and work toward stopping the brutality. I can’t find anything to criticize in that.

Dodson refers to Ensler as “an evangelical minister” in the way Ensler focuses on the subject of violence against women. She thinks The Vagina Monologues is hateful toward men and heterosexuality and blames them both for this problem. This makes me scratch my head. Did we see the same play? I didn’t come away with that feeling at all. Dodson writes:

“It's very difficult to criticize V Day without sounding anti-woman or pro-violence. Dare we ask why so many feminists think women have cornered the market on being victimized by violence? Will we sound too insensitive in mentioning the violence caused by poverty, hunger, and wars that affect women, men and children of every gender? Are we to ignore all the wives who verbally abuse and dominate husbands? It's almost as if feminists insist on ignoring the power that many mothers wield in the home to preserve the image that all woman are helpless victims incapable of violence. ... Could we cut to the chase and say that the source of violence against women comes from the extreme fundamentalists in all the major religions including Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims? That all forms of authoritarianism exercised by both women and men are the source of violence along with ignorance and prejudice?”

Those are excellent points and in a sense, I agree with them. For example, I wish there were more plays (and movies and novels) that expressed anger about the violence and sexual abuse committed against young boys, because so much of the violence against women is the result of young boys being violently abused and molested and growing up to be violent abusers because that's what they know, the environment in which they developed. But while these are good points, I'm not sure they’re entirely fair. If this play were to tackle all of those things, it would no longer be The Vagina Monologues – it would be something else entirely. Again, I think it’s wrong to criticize any piece of art for what it isn’t, for what it doesn’t do. Yes, all of the things Dodson lists above are very real problems. No, violence against women is not the only problem in the world and it's certainly not the only kind of violence out there. And yes, dropping the blame on individual men is a mistake when the problem really stems from institutions that have set themselves up as unquestionable and beyond criticism – in other words, religion. That’s usually my target.

I do a lot of writing about the many ways religion has damaged – and continues to damage – our world and the ways in which it has resulted in bad government, hateful bigotry and sexism, the rejection of science and knowledge, a kind of institutionalized and dehumanizing self-loathing, both physical and psychological child abuse, wars and widespread willful ignorance. Every time I write or speak about this subject, someone – usually several someones – accuse me of being an “evangelical minister.” They claim I’m no different than Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell condemning homosexuality or feminism or Harry Potter. This, of course, is mind-numbingly ridiculous because it ignores one major fact: I am not condemning homosexuality or feminism or Harry Potter. If I were, then I would be like an evangelist minister, but I’m not. Does the fact that I’m passionate about my subject mean that I’m like an “evangelical minister?” I can't understand how. Lots of people are passionate about lots of things – they are not all evangelical ministers. This is a nonsensical criticism. In fact, it’s not a criticism at all – it is a deliberate insult meant to discredit me disguised as a criticism. They also point out that religion is not the only source of bad things, that bad things come from all kinds of places. This usually makes my head explode. Does the fact that bad things come from other sources justify or absolve the evil that religion does? Of course not. But that’s what these someones are saying, whether they’re aware of it or not. When I talk about the evil that religion does, I’m talking about the evil that religion does. What these someones are saying is, “Don’t talk about that, Ray! We don’t like it! Talk about something else or shut up!” My response is, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to or read it. I’m not shutting up.

The Vagina Monologues addresses violence against women and girls. If for some reason you don’t want to hear about or be aware of violence against women, then don’t’ see The Vagina Monologues, because that’s what it’s about. Go see something else. Because Eve Ensler isn’t shutting up. And she shouldn’t.

I don’t mean to suggest that Betty Dodson is the only critic of The Vagina Monologues, or that her criticisms are unreasonable. She’s not and they’re not. I’ve spent this much time on her comments because she’s reasonable, and because I’m familiar with and admire her. There has been a good deal of criticism of the play from other feminists, as well, and while I don’t have the room to focus on all of it, two points in particular stand out because they deal with things to which I am very sensitive. They are articulated well by feminist author Wendy McElroy in a 2002 article on her website (link).

“A play that claims to unveil the truth about vaginas but, somehow, overlooks the salutary role men play in most women's sexuality has no credibility. Worse than this, The Vagina Monologues equates men with ‘the enemy’ and heterosexual love with violence.”

Once again, it’s hard for me to believe that we’re talking about the same play. I saw nothing in The Vagina Monologues that struck me that way – and I’m a man! I get prickly when I hear a woman complain that “all men” are insensitive or violent or unfaithful or ... anything. It simply isn’t true – just as it’s not true that all women are anything. Men and women have one thing in common – they’re human beings. And human beings inhabit a vast spectrum of behavior ranging from good to abhorrent. However, I never cease to be amazed by the insensitive, cruel, shocking, stupid and ugly things that many members of my sex do on a fairly regular basis, and I know there are a lot of double standards that allow men to get away with behavior for which women are vilified. It’s just that I’m sensitive about the “all men” qualification. It simply isn’t true that all men engage in these bad behaviors and I resent the accusation that they do. I didn’t see that accusation in The Vagina Monologues.

If Ensler's play truly equated men with "the enemy," then it would not include the monologue titled "Because He Liked to Look at It," about a woman who meets and becomes involved with a man who is kind and tender and loves the pussy so much that the first time they're together, he sits and stares at it and talks about it for an hour. It's a wonderful piece that does not contain an ounce of hatred for men or heterosexuality. Why doesn't McElroy mention it?

I felt the play was pointing out not so much the violence of individual men but the violence against women that is inherent in a culture and a system that is favorable toward men – because for so long it has been dominated by men – but subjugates women. Despite all of the advances we’ve made since the cultural explosion of the 1960s, that culture and system still exist.

I don’t think all violence toward women is physical. I think things are done in our society that can result in women being physically harmed, and I see those things as a kind of violence against women. There are a couple of excellent examples that occurred recently.

In January 2011, New Jersey Republican Chris Smith introduced H.R. 3 into the House, a bill that attempted to redefine “rape.” It proposed making the Hyde Amendment permanent. That’s the amendment that prohibits government-funded healthcare programs from funding abortions except in the case of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. H.R. 3 added the word “forcible” – it proposed that abortions be funded only in the case of “forcible rape.” As far as I’m concerned, Smith’s proposal was an act of violence toward women because essentially, it’s saying, “Were you really raped? We’re not so sure. Does your definition of rape match our definition of rape? Let’s check first, because if we don’t think you were raped, you’re on your own, honey.”

Then there’s the Pence Amendment. Mike Pence, a Republican congressman who represents Indiana’s 6th district, is an evangelical Christian who, in 2007, staunchly opposed a hate crime bill because he feared it would endanger Christians who condemn homosexuality. In other words, the bill might get in the way of a Christian’s right to discriminate against, mistreat or persecute homosexuals with impunity. This year, Pence proposed an amendment that would strip Planned Parenthood of all government funding because Planned Parenthood provides abortions. The amendment passed with a vote of 240 to 185, with 11 Democrats voting for it and seven Republicans against. None of the government funding that Planned Parenthood receives goes toward abortions, but supporters of the amendment claim that the money indirectly funds abortions. Because these supporters are opposed to abortion – which, by the way, remains legal – they want to remove all of Planned Parenthood’s funding, which would bring a halt to the things it provides – like birth control, medical exams, screenings for breast and cervical cancer, family planning information and HIV testing, among other valuable, even lifesaving, services. That is violence against women. This congress has voted to throw a whole lot of women under the bus – make no mistake, women will die if Planned Parenthood disappears – because some people disapprove of a controversial but perfectly legal and, most importantly, extremely personal procedure that is received only by women.

Like I said, despite all the advances we’ve made, we still live in a culture that is systematically biased against women – mostly because of Christians who want to legislate their personal religious beliefs for everyone so that everyone must live by them.

I give these two examples to illustrate the fact that violence against women is not just some guy beating the crap out of his wife or girlfriend. It doesn’t take place only in foreign lands. It’s part of the fabric of life in America. It’s an attitude as well as a physical act. Pointing that out, trying to raise awareness of it and get people to feel something about it does not “equate men with ‘the enemy’ and heterosexual love with violence.”

This is not like a typical play that is imagined from beginning to end by the author, populated by fictional characters who do things that didn’t really happen. This is made up of the personal experiences of individual women. When one of the women says of her first sexual experience with a woman, “I’ll never need to rely on a man,” neither her words nor her sexuality are meant to apply to all women. This is her experience and it is included with the stories of other women who shared their experiences. If you take this to mean that all women should have the same experiences or feel and think the same things, then you are missing the point of the play. (Also, you're just a little bit odd, if I may say so.) Nothing about the play suggests that all men are violent rapists or that heterosexual love is a bad thing. Some of the stories involve violent men who rape and homosexual relationships, yes, that’s true. But to say that it’s making a general statement about these things that applies to everyone is like saying the story of Helen Keller is an insult to all blind and deaf mutes who do not accomplish precisely all of the things Keller accomplished in her lifetime.

By far, the most criticized part of the play is a monologue titled “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could.” A grown woman tells of the abuses she suffered early in life, and then recounts her first sexual experience at the age of 16 with a 24-year-old woman who gives her alcohol and gets her into bed. Originally, the woman’s age was 13 at the time of the sexual encounter. This has upset a lot of people. Wendy McElroy writes:

“Both by statute and by feminist definition, the ‘seduction’ scene is rape. Nevertheless, the Coochi Snorcher declares, ‘ ... if it was rape, it was a good rape.’

“Such idealization of child molestation would have created a firestorm of outrage if the offending character had been male. But the molester was female, so The Vagina Monologues won an OBIE Award on Broadway and noted actresses clamored to be included in the cast. When the New York Times reported the buzz about Ensler, it called her ‘the messiah heralding the second wave of feminism.'

“However, audiences probably won't hear the Coochi Snorcher speaking of ‘good rape’ in the 2002 performances. In past years, some sections of The Vagina Monologues have caused embarrassment to the organizers and university officials who have backed V-Day performances. The script has been changed.”

McElroy is right – if the 24-year-old woman had been a man, there would have been a lot of outrage. That’s a prevalent double standard in our society that usually sends me into a rant – and it’s a double standard that favors women. If The Vagina Monologues were a straight play that told a fictional story that put a positive spin on the statutory rape of a 13- or 16-year-old girl, this probably would be a very different blog. I qualify that with “probably” because, to be honest, it would depend on the tone of the play. I don’t like making hypothetical generalizations, especially when it comes to plays or movies or novels, because fiction can depict all kinds of acts and behaviors that, in reality, are wrong but do it in a way that does not condone those acts or behaviors. But this isn’t that kind of play.

Ensler took these monologues from real people who were sharing their own personal experiences. The Coochie Snorcher herself saw this as a positive experience. Yes, it was statutory rape, and yes, the 24-year-old woman was wrong. Got that? I’m saying she was wrong. But compared to the abuses suffered by the Coochie Snorcher previous to this experience, she saw it as her “salvation,” as she put it. It was her experience, and that was how she processed it. If she saw it as a good experience, if she claims it opened her eyes to positive things and changed her life in a good way, no one is in any position to tell her she’s wrong. We don’t have to approve of what that woman did and there’s nothing wrong with expressing our disapproval. But to condemn the entire play because of one woman’s interpretation of something that happened to her is a big reach.

In a 2000 article about V-Day, McElroy refers to The Vagina Monologues as “pro-rape.” Wow. That’s pretty mind-blowing. I admit, I learned all of this only while researching this article. I don’t know who’s who in feminism and which factions are clashing with which other factions over what, but like any movement, I know there are differing opinions involved and some of the disagreements can get ... well, heated. This sure looks to me like there’s more going on here than just an opinion of a play – know what I mean? Calling The Vagina Monologues “pro-rape” is like calling E.T. anti-extraterrestrial. And it makes it a little difficult to take McElroy seriously.

Here’s what I think of The Vagina Monologues. It addresses a problem that needs to be addressed and does it in a way that is entertaining and moving. It encourages women to value and nurture their sexuality rather than be ashamed of it. It embraces women and denounces sexism, violence and oppression. And it raises money for a worthy cause. I can’t see any negatives in that.

The production I saw at California State University, Sacramento, featured a rainbow of enthusiastic and talented women who were passionate about what they were doing and wholeheartedly believed in it. And it was brilliantly directed by my friend Liz Rowell.

If The Vagina Monologues comes to a college or community near you next February, go see it. If you’ve never seen it before, I think you will find it a wonderful experience. If you’ve seen it before and found in it the same value I found, see it again to support the cause.

TRAILER PARK NOIR: The Story Behind the Book

2011-02-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

Although I’m known mostly for my horror fiction, my latest novel, Trailer Park Noir is not a horror novel. It’s a dark tale about the residents of Riverside Mobile Home Park, a small trailer park in the northern California town of Anderson.

I grew up in Anderson. In fact, I grew up next door to the trailer park that’s described in this novel. For the book, I moved the park to another part of town so it could be on the shore of the Sacramento River, but it’s the same one I lived next to as a boy. The real one was called Shady Hill Trailer Park. It had no pretensions – it was not a “mobile home park,” it was a trailer park, dammit!

I lived in a tiny little house on what was then called Old Churn Creek Road. It was a somewhat rural area with the houses pretty spread out. On the western side of our house was another house where my uncle and aunt and cousins lived. On the other side of their house was a creek and a hill beyond which were a few mores houses on roomy plots of land. On the eastern side, in our yard, my paternal grandmother lived in a little trailer (I’ve written about Grandma Berens in this blog before). Across the narrow street from our house was a patch of dense woods.

Behind Grandma’s trailer was a fence, and on the other side of that fence was Shady Hill Trailer Park. Directly on the other side of that fence was Sally’s trailer. Sally was, at that time, the oldest and most wrinkled human being I had ever seen in my life. Granted, my life had not been going on for very long. I must have been around five years old or so; I had not started school yet. I don’t remember exactly how I met Sally. I suspect wet met at the fence between Grandma’s trailer and hers. I don’t remember Grandma Berens ever meeting Sally, though I’m sure that, at some point, she did. Sally was cheerful and happy and liked everyone and Grandma Berens was a miserable, hateful old bitch. I don’t imagine Grandma would have liked her one bit. Sally ended up inviting me over to her trailer for some treat – cookies, or something, I don’t remember. What I do remember is Sally.

She was a heavy smoker and probably looked older than she was. Her skin was etched with countless wrinkles, some deeper than others, which formed a chaotic map of wear and tear on her face. She had no teeth. Her voice was hoarse and her laugh – she laughed a lot – was rattly and wheezy. I remember her hands being as wrinkled as her face and quite big, although I probably got the impression of size from her large knuckles, which were knobby with arthritis. Thin as a rail, her upper back had a slight hunch to it. She was quite spry and active, seemed to be smiling all the time, and she loved children. It was common to see children visiting her trailer and I got to know a couple of them. My mother met Sally and liked her, so she allowed me to walk around the fence behind Grandma’s trailer and visit Sally whenever I wanted. Sally was always happy to see me and I remember enjoying my visits with her. Looking back on it, I have no sense of how long I knew her, but it couldn’t have been long. One day, I went to her trailer and knocked. Her front door was open, the screen door was closed and her television was playing inside. But she didn’t come to the door. That wasn’t unusual for Sally because she often wandered around the trailer park and visited other residents. I walked out to the paved road that cut through the small trailer park and looked around for Sally. That was the first time I got a good look at Shady Hill Trailer Park from the inside.

It was like a neighborhood within a neighborhood, another world that existed right next door. There were a lot of trees and most of them were silk trees, all bright with pink blossoms that danced in the warm breeze. There was a row of trailers on each side of the paved road that ran down the center of the park and then looped around a barn-red, partly ivy-covered house at the other end. It was the home of the park’s managers. Each trailer had a little patch of grass and many had been decorated with pinwheels and colorful plaster gnomes. I’d passed by the park’s entrance many times in my parents’ car, but I’d never been inside. It looked like a charming little village hidden away from the world.

I saw no sign of Sally. I decided to try again later and went home. Later that day, Mom learned that Sally had died in her trailer. Other than seeing people die on TV in series and movies, this was my first experience with the reality of death. A couple of days later, Mom dressed me up in my church clothes and took me to Sally’s funeral. It was held in the tiny chapel of the funeral home in Anderson and there were only a few people there. The atmosphere in that claustrophobic chapel was smothering. It was all unfamiliar to me and I was extremely uncomfortable. Then I saw Sally. She was lying in a large box at the front of the chapel.

“Come see Sally one last time,” Mom said, walking me to the big box.

I had been led to believe that Sally was gone, and to me, "gone" meant that she was no more, that she had ceased to exist. But there she was, lying in that box. She looked different, though – almost like a department store mannequin. She didn't look real. Drawing from the Seventh-day Adventist teaching about death, Mom explained that it was only Sally’s body, that Sally herself was gone. She was sleeping, unconscious, waiting for Judgment Day when Jesus would return in the clouds and all the dead people would be resurrected for that great cosmic game show, Let’s Make An Eternal Deal! Then it would be decided if Sally and all the other resurrected folks would go to heaven and be with Jesus for all eternity or be thrown into the Lake of Fire to burn and suffer for a period of time appropriate to their sins. And then they simply would cease to exist. Of course, Sally’s chances weren’t too good. She might have been a nice, happy lady who laughed a lot and was kind to children, but she smoked and she didn’t observe the Sabbath because she wasn’t a Seventh-day Adventist. So Sally’s ass was probably going to fry. But at least I’d had the opportunity to know her for a little while.

I’m not sure what horrified me more – the idea that Jesus would throw Sally into the Lake of Fire or the fact that her dead body was lying out in the open for people to look at before she was buried. I kept thinking somebody should close the box and give Sally some privacy. To this day, I think open casket funerals are barbaric and I refuse to participate in them. When I die, I’m going to be cremated immediately and kept in my Batman cookie jar on top of the television.

During my visits to Sally’s trailer, I met a couple of the kids from the trailer park. One was Marcy, the granddaughter of the park’s managers. She didn’t live there but visited often. She had blond hair and wore glasses with black oval frames. One day at Sally’s, Marcy talked about the fairies who lived in front of her grandparents’ house. That got my attention. I asked her to show them to me. She took me up the road to the barn-red house with all the ivy growing on it and showed me a little fountain that stood amid some of that ivy in front of the house. It was pink and blue, although the colors were very faded; it hadn’t been used in a long time and was dried up and dirty. Marcy pointed to the holes where the water used to come out and said, “They live in there.” I said I wanted to see them and asked when they came out. “You can’t see them,” she said. “They’re invisible.” I guess I was a skeptic even at that tender age because I wasn’t buying it. Invisible fairies? I knew for a fact that fairies weren’t invisible! I never missed an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney, and every Sunday night, the show opened with Tinkerbell getting right in my face and waving her wand around – and I could see her very clearly! Obviously, Marcy had been misled. I tried to explain the facts to her, but she wasn’t interested. “My fairies are invisible,” she said. “Your fairies can be whatever you want them to be!” Marcy and I spent time together whenever she visited her grandparents. She taught me how to play “doctor.” It was her idea and she laid out all the rules. That might be why I’ve always had a great appreciation for women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to say so.

I also met Buddy during one of my visits to Sally’s trailer. Buddy had blond hair, too, and I remember him frowning a lot. He spoke loudly and had a lot of mood swings. One minute, he was my best friend; the next, he was angry and acting like he hated me. In other words, playing with Buddy was a lot like living with my family. One day, he got very angry for no reason I could understand – which, given my experience with my father, seemed perfectly normal to me – and chased me out of the trailer park. He threw rocks at me and called me all kinds of unpleasant names. One of those names was new to me – I’d never heard it before. Obviously, playtime with Buddy was over, so I went home. Mom was in the kitchen sitting at the table with three women she knew from church. When I came in, they were laughing and talking about whatever it was church ladies talked about in the late 1960s and there were a couple of open bibles on the table. Curious about that unfamiliar name Buddy had called me, I stepped up to the table and said, “Mom, what’s a ‘fucker?’”

There was an abrupt silence as they froze while staring at me, followed by the sound of four church-lady chins hitting the surface of our kitchen table. One of the ladies burst into tears, buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Mom shot out of her chair and hurried me out of the kitchen, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, “Don’t you say things like that, that’s an awful word, don’t you ever say that again, do you hear me?” It was a long time before I said that word out loud again, and even then it was quietly and only in the presence of very close friends I could trust. I didn’t want to trigger anymore nervous breakdowns in anyone. By the time I was 20, I’d stopped caring. Now I tend to use that word as punctuation.

I have no idea whatever became of Marcy or Buddy. Back then, the residents of Shady Hill Trailer Park were mostly senior citizens. As the years passed, that changed. Now it’s run down, filthy, and is frequently visited by officers of the law. The residents are younger and much tweakier, if you know what I mean. It’s not a very safe place. Mom still lives in the same tiny house next to the trailer park and prefers that the residents stay on their side of the fence. Not long ago, I drove by the entrance of the park and saw three young women standing beside the road. They weren’t doing anything – just standing there. They appeared less than hygienic and their clothes were ... well, they were dressed like ... look, there’s no delicate way to put this, okay? They looked like hookers. When I got a better look at them, I realized they couldn’t be any older than 13. It’s that kind of place now. When I wrote Trailer Park Noir, I wanted to capture the feeling of Shady Hill Trailer Park that I experienced as a little boy and then reveal the dark underside. But somehow, that eluded me. It was overshadowed by what the park had become.

Trailer Park Noir is about some of the residents of Riverside Mobile Home Park. Anna Dunfy is a single mother trying to make ends meet by doing temp jobs – when she can get them – and stripping at night to support her mentally handicapped daughter Kendra, an astonishingly beautiful girl with a woman’s body, the mind of a child and a dangerous urge to do something naughty. Unfortunately, there are plenty of men willing to help Kendra out with that urge. Marcus Reznick is a recovering alcoholic who’s also trying to recover from witnessing the horrible death of the love of his life. Now he’s starting his life over, and he’s starting it at the bottom -- at Riverside Mobile Home Park, where he encounters a powerful temptation. Steve Regent is an internet pornographer who has moved to Riverside to work on his new website – TrailerParkGirls.com. He’s looking for beautiful women, and he finds them. But something very ugly finds him, too. Sherry Manning is a drug addict who lives at Riverside with her drug-dealer boyfriend, Andy Winchell. When a friend of a friend ODs in their trailer, his identity and powerful connections make Sherry fear for her life and the lives of her friends. It’s a run-down little trailer park in northern California, but it could be anywhere in the United States. It is unassuming, unremarkable and looks like a million other trailer parks. But don’t let the sleepy appearance fool you – it’s a nest of dark secrets, boiling lusts and murder waiting to happen. Trailer Park Noir is available in paperback and as an ebook in various formats.

E-Reads is in the process of publishing my backlist as paperbacks and ebooks. You can see what books are available so far by going to my E-Reads page. For some reason, Trailer Park Noir has not yet been listed there even though it’s been available in paperback since January 4, but all of the other books available are on display.

I hope you’ll pay a visit to Riverside Mobile Home Park, where there’s plenty of shade ... but no escape from the heat.

Just in Time for Christmas (Barely)!

2010-12-23T17:12:00.000-08:00

My new publisher E-Reads is in the process of releasing most of my back list. They have just published two of my books that, until now, have been available only as expensive limited editions.

Murder Was My Alibi is a noirish crime novel about private investigator Myron Foote and what happens when he takes on a job for a gorgeous redhead named Cynthia Thacketer, who wants him to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple, but it’s not, of course – nothing is simple when it involves more than a hundred thousand dollars, which soon turns into more than a million dollars. The book includes a cast of characters ranging from shady to quirky, some of whom pose big problems for Foote.

I set this book in the northern California town of Redding, where I was born and raised. I’ve fictionalized a bit, though. There is no “red light district” in Redding, so I had to invent one. But for the most part, the depiction is accurate.

Murder Was My Alibi was originally published in what has come to be known as “the Darknell Double.” That book also included the novel Loveless (coming soon from E-Reads), and both were written under the name Arthur Darknell, a pseudonym under which I’d planned to write crime fiction. I have since abandoned that idea and am releasing the books under my name.

The Girl in the Basement is the story of 15-year-old Ryan Ketterling, a boy who has been bounced from one foster home to the next and endured a great deal of abuse in the process. Now in the home of the Preston family, he meets and falls for fellow foster child Lyssa and thinks perhaps his luck has changed. But something strange is going on in the Preston house. Maddy is a slow girl who is kept in the basement who sometimes speaks in a gravelly, adult voice. Sometimes she knows things about other people she could not possibly know and makes predictions that come true. And there are mysterious people from the government who come to visit Maddy down in the basement. As Ryan delves deeper into the mystery, he begins to see that his luck has not changed after all.

While they are not as common as vampires, werewolves, and other horror themes, the story of possession is a tradition in the genre and has been covered pretty well. But this one doesn't include the usual elements -- Catholic priests, exorcism rituals, that sort of thing. Here's an excerpt from a review by award-winning writer Gary A. Braunbeck:

“(The Girl in the Basement) is definitely not the story you are expecting. ...Think you know what's going to happen and how it's going to happen? Forget it. ...What makes this ... one of the most accomplished pieces of Garton's career is not just the remarkable restraint he exercises when dealing with the more overtly horrific elements ...but the depth of emotional realism he displays when dealing with the characters. ... This is hands-down the single most compassionate piece he's ever written; every character is fully fleshed out, both their strengths and weaknesses, their pettiness and kindness, their courage and cowardice, are on display here, and as horrific as this 'possession' of the little girl is, it pales in comparison to the portraits Garton paints of how this horror affects the characters. There is a scene near the end of the story where Ryan has a meal of cookies and juice with his drug-addict mother that is one of the most heartbreaking things you're likely to read this year, simmering as it is with a palpable sense of desperation, loneliness, terror, and tragic inevitability. ... (T)hose readers like myself who look to Garton to always challenge himself as a storyteller and us as readers are going to come away feeling like we've just left a feast."

Originally published in 2004 by Subterranean Press, this is the first time The Girl in the Basement has been available in a mass market edition. Like Murder Was My Alibi, it is available as a paperback and an ebook.

To read an excerpt from Murder Was My Alibi or The Girl in the Basement, please follow the links.

You can order Murder Was My Alibi and The Girl in the Basement at these links. E-Reads also has several other titles of mine available to order as paperbacks and ebooks. To find out more, go to my E-Reads page.

E-Reads will be releasing more of my books in the coming months, including The New Neighbor, Biofire, 'Nids, Crawlers, Ravenous, Bestial, Shackled, Dark Channel and two brand new never-before-published suspense novels, Meds and Trailer Park Noir, among others.

Remember ... every time you give the gift of a book, an angel gets its library card. Merry Christmas and have a wonderful 2011!