My Summer So Far

It’s been more than a month since my last blog post, so I think I’ve firmly established the fact that I am not a regular blogger.  Lately, I’ve been trying to put a dent in a pile of backed-up work, and I haven’t been popping my head out of the hole much.  Among other things, I’ve been researching the geological history of Washington state.  And my brain hurts.
 
People often make a mistaken assumption about writers.  Someone who can write books, the assumption goes, must be brilliant.  The people who make this assumption also seem to forget how many books have been written by Kardashians.

Granted, the chances that any of the Kardashians actually wrote any of the books that bear their names are pretty slim.  In fact, if I weren’t a writer and actually had a lot of money to wager, I’d bet heavily against those chances.  Maybe the Kardashians were a bad example, but you get my point.
 
My experience has been that writing often makes me feel pretty dumb because it’s always reminding me of how much I don't know.
 
While researching Washington state geology, I encountered what appeared to me to be a different language.  The jargon, the terminology — after a few paragraphs, my head felt ready to explode.  I was writing a prologue that didn’t need to be very long, but somehow I had to give the impression that I had a handle on the subject matter.  With zero knowledge of the field of geology, I found that impossible to do in the time I had.  The suggestion was made that I “fake it,” a notion that made me freeze up because I didn’t know how to fake something I didn’t understand.  I knew what I wanted that prologue to be, I knew what I wanted it to do.  But that would require a lot more reading and learning and I just didn’t have the time for that.  I didn’t write the prologue I had in mind, but I think I accomplished what I needed to do just the same.
 
If you think you’re pretty smart, maybe a little above average, try writing a novel.  It will make you aware of the oceans of things you don’t know, of the mountains of information that you may be able to access but not necessarily understand, of all the little day-to-day details of life you pay no attention to and about which you know so little.  In short, writing a novel can make you feel like an idiot.
 
This is the first time I’ve worked on multiple projects at once.  In the past, I’ve always worked on one at a time because each one so totally consumed my brain that I couldn’t even think about working on anything else.  Hell, sometimes I've gotten so wrapped up in a book, I have a hard time functioning without Dawn around to remind me to put on my pants.

One project at a time is no longer possible, so I’m training myself to rotate projects.  It hasn’t been quite as difficult as I expected because I’ve found that as I get older, I’m not as intensely focused as I used to be.  One drawback of that is that I’m more easily distracted, but a benefit is that I can move more easily between projects.  That has enabled me to write several short stories, work on an unfinished novel, and start a new one all in one summer.

Since my last blog post, I have not found a cure for my insomnia and still end up spending the wee hours staring at the TV with sleepy eyes.  I’ve seen some good movies.
 
I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Barney's Version, screenwriter Michael Konyves’s adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel, directed by Richard J. Lewis.  I wanted to see the movie immediately, but it was playing in selected theaters and none of the theaters in my area had been selected.  When we got a free weekend of HBO earlier this year, I recorded the movie, and it’s been on the DVR ever since.  I recently watched it late one night.
 
Paul Giamatti plays paunchy, balding, cigar-smoking TV producer Barney Panofsky, an unremarkable man who makes some remarkably bad decisions.  For example, he walks out of his own wedding reception to follow a beautiful woman, one of the guests he’s just met, all the way to the train station to tell her he’s madly in love with her.  But, to be fair, she does turn out to be the love of his life.  Ebert summed up the movie beautifully:  “Barney's Version tells the story of a man distinguished largely by his flaws and the beautiful woman who loves him in spite of them.”  It’s a funny, sad, infuriating movie that’s messy in the same way that life and people are messy.  Giamatti, as usual, is outstanding, and Dustin Hoffman is hilarious as Barney’s retired detective father.
 
Writer-director Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene from 2011 is a quietly disturbing story about a young woman, Martha (Elizabeth Wilson), who escapes the cult she’s been in to go live with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy).  She doesn’t tell them she’s been in a cult, and I’m not sure she knows she’s been in a cult.  I don’t think the word “cult” is ever spoken in the movie.  What we see is the damage done to Martha during the time she spent with the cult, the way the leader, Patrick (John Hawkes), stays with her even though she left him behind.  It’s a haunting movie about the effects of mind control, how it changes the way Martha sees herself, others, and the world.  Wilson gives a quietly convincing performance that will stay with you.
 
The best movie I’ve seen in some time is last year’s Prisoners, written by Aaron Guzikowski and directed by Denis Villeneuve.  When two little girls disappear, their parents are frantic and the police immediately begin following leads.  But when the girls are not found, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) caves under the pressure and kidnaps and tortures a young man he believes is either involved in the kidnaping himself or knows something about it.  Meanwhile, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is dealing with evidence, suspects, and the unstable and irrational Dover.
 
I don’t want to reveal any more than that about the story because I don’t want to deflate the experience for you.  Prisoners is best watched cold, knowing as little as possible about it, preferably nothing.  It’s the kind of movie that makes you forget you’re watching a movie.  It’s not a pleasant experience — it’s disturbing and painful and frightening, it's not light entertainment — but it is definitely a vivid and electric experience.  And a hell of a movie.
If you’re craving some political soap opera while you wait for the next season of House of Cards, you might want to check out Boss starring Kelsey Grammer as Chicago mayor Tom Kane, a man fighting to retain power while gradually being overtaken by a degenerative neurological disorder that is destroying his mind.  It’s a compelling series, but it was cancelled after the second season without resolving its storylines, which is rather frustrating.  Grammer was so good for so long in the role of Frasier Crane that it’s still difficult to adjust to him in a different role, but he’s equally good here playing a radically character.
Other than that, my summer so far has been pretty damned hot.  Yesterday, Dawn and I went out in the afternoon and the thermometer in her car read 113 degrees.  I’m ready for winter already.

Professional Wrestling with Monsters

 

I saw Godzilla recently.  Dawn and I don’t go to movies often these days for a few reasons.  The cost, for one.  Then there’s the audience, which usually includes a number of people who seem to believe themselves to be alone in their living rooms.  And there’s also the fact that we’re just not that interested in the movies Hollywood is turning out lately.  But Godzilla was different.

I wonder how many hours of my childhood I spent watching kaiju destroy Japan and each other.  Japanese monster movies were common on TV back then, especially on the weekends.  On Sunday morning, there was Johnny Sokko and His Giant Robot, and every weekday afternoon there was Ultraman.  The 1960s and 1970s were a TV paradise for monster-lovin’ kids.

You might remember those two Japanese series, but I’ve found that they weren’t syndicated in all areas because I’ve met a number of people my age who have never heard of them.  Ultraman was my favorite.  The original series from 1966-67 took place in the 1990s, a decade during which, as we all know now, gigantic monsters and nefarious space aliens were relentlessly screwing with humanity, especially in Japan.  With that kind of kaiju fuckery going on all the time, you need a well-equipped team to deal with it, and in Ultraman, that was the United Nations Scientific Investigation Agency (although in the Japanese language version, it was the Science Special Search Party, or SSSP), but I remember the group being referred to simply as the Science Patrol.  My favorite quirk of the show was that the members of the Science Patrol frequently would be seen wandering through a field looking for a giant monster, but behaving as if they were looking for a lost contact lens, until one of them suddenly looked up, pointed dramatically, and shouted, “Look!  A monstah!”

Johnny Sokko and His Giant Robot was similar in that it featured an organization that protected earth from annoying aliens and giant monsters, mechanical or living.  In the series, Earth is under constant threat by the Gargoyle Gang, led by the vaguely Cthulhu-like Emperor Guillotine, who issues commands from his undersea fortress.  They are constantly battling the force for good in this series, which is the organization known as Unicorn.  Johnny Sokko is a little boy who, through a series of outlandish events, winds up in control of a giant robot.  Johnny and his robot go to work for Unicorn, and lots of action and adventure result.

Both shows were primo entertainment for kids because they worked on kid logic.  They were brilliantly designed to appeal to children.  The daikaiju feature films had bigger budgets, though, and were the precursor to these television series.  But all of this really came from the fertile imagination of a man named Eiji Tsuburaya, who virtually invented the kaiju genre and, for decades, single-handedly protected earth from nasty aliens and giant monsters.  Tsuburaya was the special effects wizard behind Godzilla, Ultraman, and a host of giant monsters.  He was the godfather of kaiju.

I’d made my way through several Godzilla movies before I finally saw the U.S. cut of the 1954 original starring Perry Mason.  (Yes, I know it was Raymond Burr, but I’m sorry, back then, Raymond Burr in black-and-white had no other identity for me than Perry Mason.)  I had seen Godzilla only in color, and usually fighting with other monsters, so the grim black-and-white movie kind of caught me off guard.  I didn’t care for it.  The movie was uneven, choppy, and Perry Mason kept popping up to pontificate, which I found annoying, and it threw the whole thing off for me.  Years later, I saw the original Japanese cut (under the title GOJIRA) and thought it was a much better movie than the American release.  In that movie, of course, Godzilla was a metaphor for the nuclear nightmare that fell on Japan only ten years earlier.  I was a little kid.  Metaphors didn’t interest me.  Monster fights did.

I recognized that the movies were terribly silly and I enjoyed mocking the laughable English dubbing.  But there were so many things to love about them that it didn’t matter how bad they were.

When I watch them now, they look to me like some weird branch of professional wrestling, like the unholy offspring of the WWE and GWAR sent back to the ‘60s in a time machine.  The Japanese monster movies I saw most often when I was a kid were essentially professional-wrestling-style matches between guys in rubber suits on miniature sets with explosions and fire, hilarious English dubbing, and music that was overwrought, comical, or both.  But if you look a little closer, there’s a lot to admire.

I was crazy for puppets and puppetry when I was a kid and I think that had something to do with my attraction to those films, because there’s a lot of puppetry going on in most of them (something I recognized even as a small boy, so they weren’t terribly convincing — but no less engrossing).  There’s also a lot of artistry in the miniatures and cinematography, and in those imaginative monsters themselves, the rubber suits that became so colossal and fearsome with some sound effects, music, and a little visual tampering.  The visuals did not fool me for a second — I don’t think they fooled anyone — but that makes it all the more significant that I was mesmerized by them.  Young people watching those movies today probably would laugh their asses off at the effects.  But they would do so having no clue whatsoever as to how powerful and consuming those movies and TV series were to children forty years ago.

The thing I remember most vividly about them is that they fired up my imagination like nothing else.  They started the gears and cogs of my creativity turning when I was a boy.  In fact, they were so stimulating that, while watching them, I was usually drawing or writing.  They MADE me create.

Some were better than others, and some were absolute dreck, but even the bad ones had their charm.  I didn’t watch them for the drama or suspense because there really wasn’t any, and certainly not for the stories because who knew what those people on the screen were actually saying under all that dubbing?  I watched for the special effects.  Even back then, these were not state-of-the-art effects.  They were guys in rubber suits.  But somehow ... it all worked.  They suggested ... and we imagined the rest.

Even when I was laughing at them, mocking them, it didn’t take long for me to fall into those movies like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.  They created a goofy world that somehow made sense to a kid, and they were a hell of a lot of fun.  My dad, who responded to my taste in television viewing with derisive snorts and sneers, thought Japanese monster movies were absolutely the dumbest things EVER.  And yet, even he would fall down that hole with me and get involved if he was in the room when one was on TV.

I was especially fond of the movies that starred a whole cast of monsters, like Destroy All Monsters or Godzilla on Monster Island.  They were monster free-for-alls.  Ghidorah was a big favorite of mine because whenever he was in a movie, a buttload of monsters joined him.  And he had three heads on long snake-like necks — how fucking cool is THAT?

One of my favorites that did not include Godzilla was War of the Gargantuas.  I was fascinated by the tale of two giant, hairy monsters, the brown one docile and friendly, the green one violent and dangerous.  I haven’t seen that movie in about forty years, and I prefer it that way.  I’m sure I wouldn’t like it now, and I prefer to remember it as the movie I loved as a boy.  Decades later, I was shocked to learn that the movie was originally shot as a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World ... which is probably my LEAST favorite daikaiju movie.

A giant Frankenstein monster?  Really?  It seems like a bad idea now, but when I was nine ... it still seemed like a bad idea.  It conjured mental images of a colossal Boris Karloff in his Frank Pierce makeup bellowing “Fire bad!” as the oil refinery he just stepped on bursts into flaming explosions.  I still wince at the notion of combining Mary Shelly’s monster with guys in rubber suits and miniature sets, but I’ve met plenty of people who hold that as their favorite daikaiju (giant Japanese monster movie).  It just didn’t work for me.  Except as comedy.  But did I watch?  Are you out of your mind, of course I watched!

I have a difficult time making it all the way through one of those movies now.  That’s okay because they weren’t made for 51-year-old men, they were made for kids.  But after all that time spent in that goofy world, how could I not give the new Godzilla the full treatment by seeing it as it was meant to be seen — on the big screen in 3D?

I was kind of excited about seeing the Big Guy on the big screen for the first time, but I have to admit my expectations weren’t very high.  They were, however, significantly surpassed.  It was much better than Roland Emmerich’s 1998 movie in which an iguanadon, or whatever the hell it was, was foisted onto the public as Godzilla in an unfunny hoax that was appreciated by no one I know.

2014's Godzilla shows some respect and affection for the monster’s tradition.  It went to some lengths to include engrossing human interaction (although, to be honest, I think it could have tried a little harder, but that's just me being picky).  There are no guys in rubber suits, of course, because this is the digital age in which all special effects are small enough to be accomplished in a little computer.  I prefer the days when they were actually done in front of the camera by creative people who had to fold, spindle, or mutilate their imaginations to realize their vision.  But those in charge of the digital effects for Godzilla were fond enough of the monster’s history to give that CGI beast a look that suggested a guy in a rubber suit.  I cannot tell you how much I appreciated that little bone thrown to th
ose of us who grew up with the monster.  It was a big-budget blockbuster movie with familiar modern-day stars, but it managed to conjure the spirit of the daikaiju of my childhood.

Come on, admit it.  We need our giant monsters!  They’re far more threatening than terrorists, they’re much scarier than natural disasters ... but they’re not real.  They exist only in our imaginations ... like Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the invisible friends of our childhood.  We need those monsters, no matter what shape they take — on the screen or just in our heads — like we needed those childhood imaginary friends.  They help us to deal with life’s ugliness — the school shootings, the unemployment rate (the real one, not the one the government is reporting), and the enormous surplus of hatred and vitriol that exists in this country (and on our planet in general).

Go ahead, let your daikaiju freak flag fly!

Climbing Out of the Hole: Some Serious Advice for Writers

I feel like I’ve been living in a hole for the last year and a half.  In addition to having throat surgery to remove some precancerous tissue from a vocal cord, I’ve been sick with GI problems that have become, at times, quite severe.  I improved after cutting gluten from my diet — believe me, as sick as I was, I rolled my eyes while I was doing it because it has become such a fad.  But I have since been diagnosed with celiac disease, which forces me to maintain a gluten-free diet even at the risk of looking like an annoying hipster.  I still have some problems that need to be diagnosed, but I think the worst is over.  And the worst, for me, was not the GI distress.

For a year and a half, I had an increasingly difficult time concentrating.  At first, I thought it was simply because I felt so bad.  I can write through physical pain (as long as it’s not too intense), but nausea, vomiting, severe cramps, and frequent dashes to the bathroom make it difficult to be creative.  I soon realized it was more than that.  It wasn’t only disrupting my work, it was making it difficult to read anything or follow a movie or TV show or even hold a conversation.  My head was foggy in a way that went beyond merely feeling unwell.

I’m sure that was the result of having undiagnosed celiac disease for however long I had it, because it robs you of the nutrients you need to do things like finish a sentence or a thought.  Well after I struck gluten from my menu, lab work revealed that my sodium level was alarmingly low.  That can cause all kinds of problems, including a decrease in cognition that can range from not being able to concentrate to not being able to remember your name.

The result of this is that I have been unable to write.  And for someone who’s written every day of his life since he was a child, suddenly being unable to do it is terrifying.  Oh, I could type out a paragraph or two, but compared to my normal productivity, that was a joke, and I was unable to maintain the writing enough to tell a story.  I managed to write a couple of short stories during this time, but holy crap, was it difficult and it took a horrifyingly long time.

That has changed recently.  I’m writing again, trying to get back into a productive routine, and I’m ready to tackle projects that have been languishing while I’ve been sick, like the follow-up to Frankenstorm, finishing Poker Night for Kings Way Press, putting together a “Little Book” for Borderlands, and finishing a couple of short stories.  A lot of people have been extremely patient and supportive during this time, like Gary Goldstein at Kensington, Zach Powell at KWP, my agent Richard Curtis, Thom Monteleone at Borderlands, and my friends, who have so patiently listened to me gripe about all of this for so long.

I’ve managed to get at least one short story out of all this.  I’ve had a lot of lab work done lately, including a stool sample.  I’ve never done one of those before, and I found that it’s every bit as unpleasant as I always imagined.  A couple of days ago, I turned in a story to Jeani Rector, who’s editing a new anthology.  It’s called “The Sample” and it’s about the worst experience imaginable with a stool sample.  I may not have been able to write much lately, but life never stops providing material for stories.

I’ve learned something from this that I want to pass on to other writers, aspiring or otherwise.  This is advice commonly given to new writers by veterans, but it applies to all, no matter how much of a veteran you may think you are.  This is the advice:

WRITE EVERY SINGLE DAY AND DO NOT STOP FOR ANYTHING.
 
Create a writing regimen and stick to it.  I did for thirty years — until last year.  Each day, I felt a little worse and started putting off even attempting to write.  This was a colossal mistake.  I should have stuck to the routine, I should have kept writing even if all I wrote was “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again.

Once you stop, time begins to pass very quickly, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.  Next thing you know, six months have gone by ... eight months ... a year ... and you haven’t written a goddamned thing.  And then fear starts to set in.  What if I sit down and try and find that I can't?  What if it's all practice and once you stop practicing you lose it?  What if I've lost it?  Those are dangerous thoughts to have because they can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Writing is a weird and elusive thing.  One of the most common reasons people with an interest in writing never do it is that they lack the discipline to make themselves do it every day and stick with a story or book to the end.  But I’m here to tell you that even when you have that discipline and you’ve been exercising it every day of your life for a long time, it can so easily be lost.  When you have it for a long time and do it every day, you lose your awareness of it.  It becomes your life.  And if it stops, for whatever reason ... well, if you take your writing seriously (and especially if it’s your livelihood) it can be pretty damned scary.

I’m dealing with that right now, and I’ve been scared a lot lately.  I have crawled out of the hole to warn you about it.  Guard that writing regimen with your life.  If you have the discipline to write, know that it’s a rare thing and it’s not anchored in stone.  It can be lost.

Don’t lose it.

People at Christmas Time

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Albert said as he carried a hollow, plastic donkey through the snow  to the nativity display in front of the strip mall.  “There were no rabbits in the manger with the baby Jesus.”

Beside him, Ed’s right arm was wrapped around Joseph’s neck while he cradled the baby in the crook of his left elbow.

“Then how did a rabbit get involved in his resurrection?” Ed said.

Albert’s feet stopped sloshing through the melting snow in the parking lot and he turned to Ed, right arm wrapped over the donkey’s back, left hooked under its belly.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

Ed stopped walking a few steps beyond where Albert stood and turned to him.  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a dummy.  You’re the dummy.  The Easter Bunny, whatta you think I’m talkin’ about?”

Ed was five years older than Albert, but they’d gone to school together since the sixth grade because Ed had been held back a few times.  Now they were in their forties and both worked for the man who owned the strip mall, Harvey Keith.  He was the best boss either of them had ever had, although they worked for him in different capacities.

Albert’s shoulders drooped as he tilted his head back and rolled his eyes, then he started walking again.  “The Easter Bunny isn’t in the bible, you mook.”

“I never said it was in the bible!  I’m askin’, if there’s no rabbit involved in Jesus’s birth, then how come there’s one involved in him comin’ back from the dead?  I just figured, hey, maybe there was some bunnies in the manger, or somethin’, y’know, with the other animals.  And then later, maybe when he came out of his tomb, there was some bunnies hoppin’ around then, too.  That would make sense.”

Albert walked around the manger facing the street, stepped inside, and placed the donkey next to Mary so it seemed to be peering into the makeshift crib.  To Ed, he said, “Can you tell me how that would make sense?  Or why it would make sense?”

Ed plopped Joseph down on the other side of the crib from Mary, then leaned forward and gently placed the baby Jesus in its bed.  “I don’t know if it makes sense so much, but at least it’d be a bunny somewheres near Jesus in the manger and somewheres near Jesus on Easter.  And now, maybe, when we celebrate Easter, a bunny comes around and hands out candy to the kids.  You know, maybe so they won’t scream in church.”

Albert’s sigh became a frothy cloud of vapor in the cold.  “Then why isn’t there a Christmas Bunny?”

Ed frowned at him and narrowed one eye, suspicious of mockery.  “I dunno!  ‘Cause we got Santa Claus, I guess.  Santa helps Jesus out at Christmas time and the bunny helps him at Easter.”

Albert laughed quietly and shook his head.  “I don’t know if you’re being funny or if you were deprived of oxygen in the womb.”

A silver Hyundai Sonata Hybrid slowed to a stop at the curb in front of the nativity scene. The passenger’s window slid down to reveal a man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing tinted glasses.  A young woman of the same age sat behind the wheel.  The man said something, but they couldn’t hear him, so Albert and Ed crossed the sidewalk — Albert in his dark suit and overcoat, Ed in his jeans and down jacket — and leaned toward the window.

“Is this private property?” the man said, nodding toward the large holiday decorations.

“Are you kidding me?” Albert said, sounding at once weary and deeply annoyed.  “It’s a strip mall, not a courthouse.”  He pointed behind him at one of the storefronts.  “You see that?  You can’t get your nails done at City Hall.”  He aimed his finger at Stumpy’s Liquors, with its bright red-and-green greeting painted on the window:  HAPPY HOLIDAYS!  “And the government doesn’t run liquor stores, okay?  This is all privately owned property, none of it is taxpayer supported.  Okay?”

The man in the car waved a hand at the manger.  “So this is legal?”

“Legal?  What the hell is wrong with you?”  His voice grew gradually louder as he spoke.  “Who are you, Santa’s gestapo?  Of course it’s legal, it’s mid-November and this is America, you rocket scientist, it’s been the Christmas season since the first Halloween decorations went up at the beginning of September!”

“Hey, look, I was just wondering — ”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you were wondering!  Now why don’t you go donate some toys to an orphanage, or something, to make up for being an obnoxious douchebag?”

As the window slid back up, the car drove away, kicking up a few clumps of dirty slush.

“Jesus Christ,” Albert muttered as they headed back toward the mall.  “When did they change that damned song?”

“What song, Albert?”

“That fa-la-la song.  When did they change it to ‘’Tis the season to be an asshole, fa-la-la-la-la-fucking-la?’”

Ed chuckled.  “I don’t think they’ve changed it yet, but I know what you mean.  I didn’t think you believed in any of that stuff, though, Albert,” he added, hooking a gloved thumb over his shoulder at the nativity.

“No, I don’t.  All that Jesus stuff ... I mean, if there was a Jesus and even half of that stuff in the bible happened, I don’t believe he walked on water or did all those other magic tricks.  But, hey, he shook things up, spoke out for the poor and the sick, and he pissed off the people in charge, so that makes him okay in my book.  But it’s Christmas!  Does everybody have to agree on everything, now, before we can digest our fudge and fruitcake?  Yeah, I know, they can’t represent one religion on government ground unless they do it with all others, I get that.  That’s fine, I’m all for it, and it’s the law.  But why does it all have to be so ugly?  And come on, it’s a strip mall!  What the hell did that idiot think, that Palace Massage and Aromatherapy is a government operation?  Jesus!”

They stopped to wait while a pickup truck slowly backed out of its parking space.

“Remember when we were kids, Ed?  The whole idea at Christmas time was to at least make a little effort to be a better person, right?  Whatever you thought that was supposed to be.  Maybe you smiled and said hello to the postal carrier you never acknowledged the rest of the year, or you tried to be friendlier to your cranky neighbor, or you gave more to charity, or maybe it was the only time you gave to charity.  Or you went to church and maybe put a little extra money in the offering plate.  Things like that.”

“‘Member that time we decorated old lady Taggart’s front yard?” Ed said with a laugh.

A smile grew slowly on Albert’s face.  “Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding.  “I remember that.”

“We put Santa and his reindeer on the lawn and lights on her porch.”

“That’s right, she wouldn’t let us put them on the roof.”

“Yeah, ‘member?  She caught us climbin’ up on the roof and came after us with a broom.  Kept yellin’ ‘Your parents are gonna sue me!’”

Albert let out a full, throaty laugh.  “Yeah, see, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.  We knew she didn’t like us, we knew she didn’t want us around, but it was Christmas!”  He smiled again.  “She sure was a mean old woman.”

“‘Specially at Christmas time.  She hated Christmas.  She was a widow twice as long as she was married.  Last few years of her life, I’d go over and do some yard work for her.”  He shrugged one shoulder.  “You know, anything she needed doin’.  She was always mean about it, thought I was tryin’ to cheat her out of somethin’, always tried to chase me off.  Christmas come around, and she’d get even meaner.”

“Whatever happened to her?  I don’t remember hearing.”

“Blew her brains out with her husband’s shotgun.  Used her toe.  Did it on Christmas Eve about twelve years ago.”

The pickup truck pulled out of the parking lot and turned right on Convention Street.  It was starting to rain and the pickup’s windshield wipers came on as it merged into traffic.  Albert and Ed continued their walk toward the mall, slower now.

Albert shook his head back and forth slowly.  “What’s happened to people, Ed?  I know things are bad, everybody’s broke, jobs are scarce.  But things have been bad before.  And Christmas time brings a lot of pressures, I know that.  But wasn’t there a time when people tried to be nicer at Christmas?”

Ed squinted as he thought about the question.  “Maybe it just seemed that way when we was kids.”

“Maybe.  But people weren’t so ... angry.  Why the hell is everybody so angry?”

“I dunno, Albert.  Maybe everybody’s so angry ‘cause ... well, ‘cause everybody else is so angry.  But I’m pretty dumb, even for a janitor, so I dunno.”

Albert frowned and gave Ed a sidelong look with hooded eyes.  “You’re not dumb, Ed.  I keep telling you that.  Didn’t they have you tested for a bunch of stuff back in school?  You know, learning disabilities, stuff like that?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.  But I failed all the tests.”  He barked an abrupt laugh.

“But they were negative, right?  There was nothing wrong with you.  And what did everyone conclude was the problem?”

Grinning, Ed said, “I’m a lazy ass.  And I am.  Long as I got some beans and Mountain Dew, a place to sleep, and a bowling alley nearby, I’m happy.  I don’t need nothin’ more’n that.”

“That’s right.  But you’re not dumb.  Don’t talk about yourself that way.”

Ed looked at him briefly with a surprised smirk.

They stepped onto the canopied sidewalk that stretched along the front of the shops.  “Would you like a drink, Ed?  Some jerky, or something?  I think I’d like a cup of coffee.  Let’s go into Stumpy’s.  My treat.”

They turned right on the sidewalk and walked by one of the strip’s empty units, previously Captain Collectible.

“What are your plans for Christmas, Ed?” Albert said.

“Hell, I don’t even know if I’m doin’ anything for Thanksgiving yet.  Last Christmas, me’n some friends had a nice turkey dinner down to the bowling alley, and then we bowled our asses off.  Probably do the same thing again this Christmas.  How ‘bout you, Albert?”

“Oh, I’m doing the usual family thing.”

“That’s good.  It’s nice to have family at Christmas time.”

“Oh, yeah.  It’s all planned.  Last year, we drove upstate to see my wife’s family.  This year, we’ll have Christmas with my family here in town.  It’ll be a typical family gathering, I’m sure.  Dad will get drunk.  Mom will get hysterical.  My sister will get slapped by her husband, and the Children of the Corn will be screaming about how Santa screwed them.  Yeah, I can almost feel the warmth now.”

As they walked by Mia’s Nails, Albert’s phone vibrated in his pocket.  It was Mr. Keith.  Albert stopped to answer the phone.  While he talked to the boss, Ed stared idly at the traffic on Convention.  Neither one of them saw the young man in the denim jacket who, farther up the sidewalk, reached out to push the door of Stumpy’s open but stopped for a moment to look at the front window before going inside.

“I’m here with Ed,” Albert said.  “I helped him put up the nativity out front.  My meeting with Miss Lee at Palace Massage is in — ”  He checked his watch.  “ — twenty minutes.  Shouldn’t take long.  She’s a reasonable woman and she knew the rent increase was coming.  I’ll be back in the office after lunch, if that’s okay with you.”

After the conversation ended, they continued up the sidewalk.

“You gettin’ a massage?” Ed asked.

“Here?  God, no.  I have to meet with Miss Lee over a rent dispute.”

“What’s that title Mr. Keith gave you again?”

“Vice President of Field Operations.”

Ed grinned.  “Sounds important.”

“Half the time, it’s not much more than a glorified errand boy, but it’s a good job.”

They stepped out of the cold and into the warm stuffiness of Stumpy’s Liquors.  It was a cluttered store all year long, but during the holidays, it became even more cluttered with decorations and Christmas displays.  To their right stood a Santa Claus that looked bigger than it was because it stood on a three-foot-tall base wrapped in corrugated paper with a red-brick design.  He wore red velour coat and pants with the traditional fluffy, white cuffs and collar, with the traditional shiny black boots, and his shiny, white beard appeared to be made of spun glass.  He had a green bag slung over his right shoulder and held in his extended left hand a bottle of vodka.  Small toys were scattered all around his feet.  Just behind Santa’s bag stood a green Christmas tree covered with sparkling ornaments and lights.

To their immediate left was the register, behind which stood Stumpy himself, a stout, craggy Vietnam veteran in his early sixties with a prosthetic right leg from the knee down.  He had a droopy white goatee and long white hair that he pulled back in a ponytail.  He stood with his beefy, tattooed arms folded together across his chest, talking quietly with a tall, slender man in a denim jacket who had his hands cocked on his hips, elbows pointing outward.

“What’s your poison, Ed?” Albert said as he headed for the coffee station.  “You’re still guzzling that Mountain Dew stuff, aren’t you?”

There were four carafes lined up, each labeled to identify the kind of coffee it held.  Albert pulled a medium-size Styrofoam cup from the holder, held it under the nozzle of the carafe marked “REGULAR,” and pumped the top to fill the cup.

Ed chuckled as he passed Albert and opened one of the soft drink coolers.  “I ain’t ever drank nothin’ besides Mountain Dew since high school, I think.”

“If you’re not careful, you’ll spend the last years of your life drinking nothing but Mylanta and crapping into a bag.  Those sodas will eat up your guts after a while.”

“Yeah, that’s what Mom used to tell me.  Course, she was a drunk who died early of liver failure, so I guess nobody’s perfect.”

“Look!” Stumpy barked.

Startled by the shouted word, Albert and Ed turned toward the register in front.  Stumpy was leaning forward, both hands flat on the countertop beside the register as he glared at his young customer.

“I got Jews who come in here, Muslims, Shintos,” Stumpy said.  “There’s a family of Sikhs lives up the road and they buy their milk and eggs here like clockwork.  None of ‘em celebrate Christmas.  Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this city’s got diversity up the hoo-ha and my business depends on customers buying things.  So I put ‘happy holidays’ in the window this year to include everybody, okay?  And I’ll be doin’ it every year from now on, until people like you make me so fuckin’ crazy that my head explodes and they gotta close this place down.”

The guy in the denim jacket straightened his back.  He had shaggy blond hair and wore black jeans, black-and-red winter boots.  He dropped his arms at his sides and his bare hands looked pink and gnawed by the cold.  In his left, he held a wool cap that he crumpled in a fist as Stumpy finished his little impromptu speech.  “But you’re a Christian, Stumpy!”  He raised his right fist and brought it down hard on the countertop on the word “Christian.”

“I said I was raised a Christian, but I haven’t been to church since Christ was a corporal and I got no interest in goin’.  That’s got nothin’ to do with this!”

“But you know what they’re doing.  You know what they’re trying to do to the holiday, it’s just another way of squeezing Christianity out of America.  We’ve talked about this!”

“No.  You’ve talked about it, and I’ve stood right here being a congenial host in the hope that you’ll buy another Coke or Baby Ruth or, if I’m lucky, another round of both.”

“Oh, come on, Stumpy, I’ve been coming in here for three years!  I thought we were friends.”

Albert finally mustered the strength to walk back to the front, smiling and saying loudly enough to be heard, “Hey, Stumpy, you know, none of us want you to go exploding your head all over the place, or anything.”

Stumpy smiled and gave Albert a nod of recognition.  “It’s okay, Mr. Antonellis.  This guy’s a regular customer who’s complaining about my decorations.  He’s gonna change the subject or leave, right Chris?”

Chris’s head turned slowly from side to side.  “I can’t believe this.  What are we supposed to do?”

“About what?” Stumpy bellowed, spreading his arms.

“Come on, guys, it’s Christmas,” Albert said.

Standing just behind him, Ed popped open his can of Mountain Dew.

Stumpy’s body jerked once as he released a single laugh.  “No, it’s not, Mr. Antonellis.  We haven’t even gotten through Thanksgiving yet.  I used to love Christmas, but it’s like a tumor.  It just keeps getting bigger and pretty soon, it’ll metastasize and spread through the whole year.  The radio’ll be playing ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Silver Bells’ in May.  They’ll probably make Santa Claus president.  Tell you the truth, if I didn’t have the store, I’d punch anybody wished me merry Christmas before December first.  But people buy more,” he said with an exasperated shrug.  “Put up a Santa Claus, some snowmen, they spend more money.  Pavlov’s elves.  Even this year, with everything so bad, everybody so broke — that doesn’t stop ‘em!  It’s insane.”

“But it’s not Christmas,” Chris said.  His voice was low but had suppressed anger behind it.  “They’re taking Christ out of it.”  He pointed a finger at the store’s front window.  “You’re taking Christ out of it!”

Stumpy rolled his eyes.  “Oh, Jesus, here we go again.”

“Hey, nobody’s taking Christ out of anything!” Albert said.  “We just put up a nativity scene out front.  Jesus is right out there where everybody can see him!”

Chris jerked his head back and forth insistently.  “Not at the capitol building.  Not at City Hall.”

Albert said, “No, that’s not true.  There are Christmas displays there, but they include other religions, too.  This is still America, despite the best efforts of many, and religion is still a big part of it.  But Christianity isn’t the only religion!”

“It’s the American religion, the religion of our founders."

Stumpy tipped his head back and laughed.

"This country was built on biblical Judeo-Christian principals and — ”

“Don’t include the Jews!” Stumpy said with a cold laugh.  “They don’t celebrate Christmas and they got no problem with ‘happy holidays,’ so don’t drag them into this.”

“Christians are the only group it’s still acceptable to ridicule.  Gay marriage is making Christianity a crime!  Don’t you guys watch the news?”

“Just because it’s got the word ‘news’ in its name,” Stumpy said, “doesn’t mean it’s not feeding you a bowl of shit.  You ever think of that?  Haven’t you noticed that some will deliver news while others, I don’t know, looks like all they want to do is piss people off?  You ever notice that?  Wonder about it?”

Chris’s nostrils flared and when he spoke again, his voice trembled.  “Atheists are going around this country tearing down Christianity.”

“No, they’re not,” Albert said.  “They’re going around the country being annoying assholes, but what they’re doing is perfectly legal.  This is a free society and there are assholes everywhere, so you’ve just got to learn to deal with them, or ignore them, or something.  You don’t go to jail for being an asshole in this country, and if you did, everybody who gets pissed off about ‘happy holidays’ would be in jail with them.”

A sneering look moved across Chris’s face as he glared at Albert.  He nodded slightly, then said, “I suppose you’re a Jew.”

At the same moment, Albert and Stumpy let loose a loud “Ooohhhh!”

“I’m Italian, you dick.  I was raised Catholic.  Like that makes any fucking difference.”  He nodded toward Ed.  “He’s Jewish.”
 
“On my mother’s side,” Ed said.  “Personally, I lean more toward Buddhism.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s okay,” Chris said, his voice sounding more breathy and tremulous.  “All that’s okay.  But if you’re a Christian, you’re a target, you’re an outcast.  Pretty soon, they’re gonna start rounding us up and putting us in camps.  They’re already built, waiting for us.  Gay marriage will be legal in all fifty states soon and Christians will be criminals.”

“Jesus Christ, you know what you are?” Albert said.  “You think you’re some kinda patriot, some kinda warrior for Jesus, but all you are is angry and stupid, and all those two things do is feed each other.”  Albert clapped his hands together.  “Okay, you’ve worn out your welcome here.  Anything you want?  Some gum or a pack of cigarettes?  Get it and get the hell out, and if you come back, keep your goddamned opinions to yourself or you’re banned for life, you understand me?”

“You can’t do that.  Who the hell are you to do that?”

“Vice President of Field Operations for Harvey Keith Properties, that sound important enough for you?”  Albert stepped toward Chris, put a hand on his shoulder and gently turned him toward the door.

Chris pushed against Albert’s hand with his shoulder as he reached his right hand around his own back and slipped it under the denim jacket.

“Oh, shit,” Stumpy said, moving fast but not fast enough.

Chris’s pink-fingered right hand held a gun when it reappeared from behind him, and he raised that gun in Albert’s direction.  Stumpy bent down, reached beneath the counter and produced a sawed-off shotgun.

Chris fired his gun before he’d finished aiming it and the bullet entered the left side of Albert’s abdomen, just below his rib cage.

“Albert!” Ed screamed, his voice a shrill knife that sliced through the cluttered store.

Stumpy was racking the shotgun when Chris fired a second time, sending a bullet into the right side of Albert’s chest.

Since the first gunshot, all Albert could hear was a loud, unwavering ringing sound.  The first bullet hit him like a cannonball, making him bend at the waist with clenched eyes as he was punched backward, unable to breathe.  The second bullet kicked him in the chest and he straightened somewhat as he fell backward, arms flailing.  His back slammed into something and he began to slide into a sitting position against it, but his flailing arms hooked onto something and prevented him from hitting the floor.  He felt the rough surface of the corrugated paper under his hands.

There was another explosion when Stumpy fired his shotgun, but Albert did not hear it through the ringing.  He felt bits of Chris splatter onto him, though, warm and wet on his face and neck.

Chris hit the floor hard, a bloody mess.

Ed screamed Albert’s name again and again.

Albert opened his eyes as he tilted his head back.  Something had opened up deep inside him and all that came out was wrenching pain that rapidly spread through his whole body.  Overhead, he saw a face slowly falling toward him, its white beard tumbling over itself like foam, its left arm outstretched and held up, clutching the phony vodka bottle in its black-gloved hand.  Falling behind it was the green pyramid of dangling, twinkling ornaments and lights.  They engulfed his field of vision as he died, and Albert’s last thought was, Peace on earth, ho ho ho ...









© Copyright 2013 by Ray Garton

DARKLINGS: The Story Behind the Book

My first novel, Seductions, was part of a two-book deal with Pinnacle, so as soon as I was done with that book, I went to work on the next.  There had been a good deal of sex in Seductions and the book had a high school setting.  I wanted this novel to be as different from the first as possible, so sex would not be a priority and it would not be school-related.  But I had no idea what it would be about.  My thoughts turned to a recurring nightmare that had haunted my sleep for years.  I had been wanting to use it in a story or book for quite a while, and I thought this might be the time.

In the nightmare, I was being wheeled very fast down a hospital corridor on a gurney as pain exploded in the right side of my abdomen, just below my rib cage.  I was rushed into the operating room where doctors and nurses in surgical masks and gowns were waiting.  The sense of urgency was great and I wasn’t even transferred to an operating table, they just started working on me there on the gurney (dream logic).  Doctors began the surgery without bothering to anesthetize me.  I felt the scalpel slice through the skin of my abdomen, but it didn’t hurt.  The pain inside me, though, raged on.  Masked faces with intense eyes hovered over me as the doctors continued to work.

Then they froze and I saw all the eyes above the surgical masks widen in horror as they stared down at my open abdomen.  They didn’t move for a long time, and then some of them slowly backed away from me.  The doctor in charge looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for you.”  When I asked what was wrong, instead of explaining it to me, he showed it to me — for just a moment, I was able to see through his eyes as he looked into my abdomen. 

Clinging to the underside of my rib cage on the right side was a glistening black mass about the size of a man’s hand.  It was either pulsing rhythmically or breathing, I couldn’t tell which.

An instant later, I was looking at the doctor again.  When I asked him what it was, he said, “We’re not sure, but ... it’s evil.  If we take it out of you, it will kill us all.”  Then he silently went about the business of sewing me back up as the intense pain continued.  That’s where the dream always ended.

I wasn’t sure how, but I wanted to use that dream, or at least elements of it, and one of those elements was the hospital setting.  I knew from personal experience that few places can go from quiet boredom to frantic chaos faster than a hospital emergency room.

As a boy, I had some mysterious health problems that required me to spend a lot of time in the hospital while doctors tried to figure those problems out and fix me.  I would stay for weeks, sometimes months, at a time at the Clinical Research Study Center, which was located in Ward 18 at San Francisco General Hospital.  It’s tough for a little kid to be locked up in a hospital for such long periods of time and the doctors and staff at Ward 18 knew that, so I was allowed to wander around the hospital and sometimes even leave the hospital when I wasn’t undergoing some test or procedure.  On Friday and Saturday nights, the place to be if you wanted some quality entertainment was the San Francisco General Hospital emergency room.  With a paperback novel and a notebook and pen, I would wander down to the ER early so I could find a seat, and I’d sit in the waiting room and wait for things to get interesting.  They always did.

By nine o’clock, the ER was a crowded madhouse, usually with a bloodied floor.  Stabbings, shootings, car wrecks, overdoses, heart attacks, attempted suicides, battered wives and girlfriends and hookers, injured children, people with every imaginable wound and sickness, and always, without fail, at least one nasty fight broke out in that waiting room before midnight, usually more.  And that was just the waiting room!  I could only imagine what was going on in the back, beyond the pale green door where occasionally I could hear muffled shouting or screaming or miserable wailing.  I always had a book with me, but I never read it because I was too busy writing.  I wrote down descriptions of the people I saw, snatches of conversation, and tried to capture images, odors, behavior, people and atmosphere on the page.  It was probably one of the best writing exercises I’ve ever engaged in because I didn’t have time to think, I had to write fast to keep up with everything, so fast I was practically scribbling, trying to keep up with my thoughts and with all the frenzied — and often frightening — activity around me.  I didn’t think of it as a writing exercise at the time, of course.  I was just looking for something to do.

I’ve never given it much thought before, but looking back on it now, I suspect I learned more about writing from just a few of those emergency room visits than in a whole semester of creative writing classes.  It’s something you might want to try.  If you live in or near a big city — someplace where the hospital's ER is going to be a-hoppin’ on Friday and Saturday nights — take a notebook, sit in the waiting room, and do what I did.  Stay as long as you can and collect as many observations as possible.  Then come back here (or contact me on Facebook) and let me know if it was a useful exercise for you.

Having decided that my new book would open with an intense scene in a hospital emergency room, and keeping in mind my recurring nightmare, I sat down at my electric Brother typewriter and dove in headfirst.

No matter how much preparatory work I do on a book, no matter how much outlining (something I don’t waste my time on anymore unless a publisher absolutely must see an outline) or character sketching I do, I have no idea what the hell I’m working on until I’ve been writing it for a while.  That’s when I discover the story and characters, when I actually have my hands on the keyboard and I’m working on the manuscript.  I’ve tried everything else, all the preparation and outlining, and it just doesn’t work for me.  I can write a full outline and have a stack of notes and character sketches on my desk, and no matter how hard I try to stick to all that stuff, the book, when it’s done, will bear little or no resemblance to anything on those pages.

This book, I discovered, was about a physical manifestation of evil that takes the form of small, glistening, black creatures that can flatten out like crepes or roll up into worms that will do horrible things to anyone they enter.  The original title was Evilspawn, but the folks at Pinnacle didn’t do any backflips over that.  My editor, Michael Bradley, suggested Darklings, which I liked much better than my idea, and that became the novel’s title.

Whenever someone tells me he’s about to read Darklings, I always say, “Be sure to hold your nose.”  It always gets a laugh because people think I’m being self-deprecating by cutting my own book down a little.  But that’s not what I mean when I say that.  To find out what I do mean, you’ll have to read the book.

Now, more than thirty years later, Darklings is back, available for the first time for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and in paperback. To see all my other books and keep up with new releases, visit my website at RayGartonOnline.com.

SEDUCTIONS: The Story Behind the Book

Seductions was my first novel.  I couldn’t close my mouth the first time I saw the book and held it in my hands.  A half-naked woman dangled from the dripping, embossed letters of the title, which were written in glimmering blood-red foil.  It was lurid.  It was garish.  And I was thrilled.  That meant it would fit right in with all the other lurid, garish, blood-dripping paperback covers on the shelves in every book store, grocery store, convenience store, pharmacy, truck stop and airport in the country.  I was in!  The novel’s publication owed a great deal to luck.  I was in the right place at the right time.

It was published in 1984, a wonderful time to be a horror fan.  I think the roots of the horror genre’s enormous popularity at that time were in the success of Ira Levin’s terrifying 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, which became a huge bestseller, putting the modern horror novel on the publishing map.  It came along in a period when the country was beginning to go through startling changes, when the United States was involved in a controversial war that was eating up our young before our eyes on the evening news, when old traditions and ideas were being left behind by some and actively torn down by others.  The previous year, Time magazine had run a cover that asked the question “Is God Dead?” and Anton LaVey had established the Church of Satan in San Francisco.  Levin’s novel struck a cord with readers and sold over four million copies.  The following year saw the release of Roman Polanski’s movie adaptation, which was a huge success, and which remains, in my opinion, one of the greatest horror movies ever made.

As the 1970s got underway, Satan was big in America.  Levin’s book and Polanski’s movie had launched a Satanic trend that seemed to take over the genre in fiction and film.  Novels like Fred Mustard Stewart’s The Mephisto Waltz and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were turned into successful movies.  The Exorcist, in particular, was a blockbuster hit that had lines going around the block wherever it played and injected the trend with steroids.  Whether it was black-robed Satan worshipers in movies like The Brotherhood of Satan, Race with the Devil, or The Devil’s Rain, or the devil and his minions in The Omen, To the Devil, a Daughter, The Sentinal, The Legacy, and so many others, Satan was a big enough box office draw to compete with Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood.  There were made-for-TV movies like Satan’s Triangle and Satan’s School for Girls.  He possessed a baby on the network sitcom Soap.  I even remember an episode of Mannix in which the detective was up against a Satanic cult.  Satan was everywhere.

If Satan wasn’t your speed, there was the new guy who was blowing everybody away with one scary-as-hell novel after another, Stephen King.  His first novel, Carrie was a runaway hit, and Brian De Palma’s movie was iconic.  King brought the horror genre into the modern world, even into the mainstream.  He filled it with McDonalds and Burger Kings and familiar brands and products, and populated it with real people we recognized, people we cared for and wanted to follow.  That world was also occupied by real horrors like cancer and crib death and mental illness, so that the horror, no matter how wild and supernatural, always took place in the real world where we all lived.  He entertained us with excruciatingly terrifying stories while showing us ourselves and the world in which we lived.  And with those novels came a wave of Stephen King movie adaptations.  Each new King bestseller and movie adaptation fed the wave of popularity the genre was riding.

By the late 1970s, the horror boom was booming.  Genre novels were everywhere from writers like the astonishingly prolific Graham Masterton, who’s 1975 novel The Manitou was a bestseller and became a popular movie starring Tony Curtis, to former movie actor Thomas Tryon, whose elegantly written novels The Other and Harvest Home were bestsellers and adapted into a popular movie and TV miniseries respectively.  At least one horror movie, and often more, was opening every weekend, whether it was a glossy studio offering at the local movie house or a tacky exploitation movie at the drive-in.  Horror was everywhere.

It was into this stream that I dove when Seductions was published in 1984.  Publishers were buying up horror novels as fast as they could be written, and every book store had a sizeable horror section.  I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.  I agree with Woody Allen, who said, “People are afraid to acknowledge or to face what huge dependency they have on luck.”

An advance reading copy had been sent to Robert Bloch, among other writers.  Bloch replied to my editor with a letter explaining that he could not endorse Seductions because he was too disturbed by the close relationship between sex and violence in the book.  I was flabbergasted that I had “disturbed” the man who wrote Psycho.  In the late summer of 1984, a few months before Seductions was published, I met Bloch at a convention.  I introduced myself and mentioned his response to my book.  “Ah, yes,” he said, clamping his cigarette holder between his teeth.  “You’re unwell.”

I had found a literary agent by accident.  That, by the way, is the only reliable way to find one, because there’s never one around who’s interested when you’re actually looking.  He was a friend of an ex-girlfriend’s father, and once we connected, I sent him some short stories.  He said they were good, but he didn’t sell short stories.  Did I have a novel?  Of course, I said!  I was halfway through one and would send it to him as soon as it was finished.  That was ... less than factual.  I was not working on a novel.  But I decided to get to work on one fast.

I knew I wanted it to be erotic, but that was all I knew.  I thought sex and horror were a perfect match, because when are we more vulnerable, more naked, than when we’re engaged in sex?  I was barely twenty when I wrote Seductions, and keep in mind that I was a very sheltered and inexperienced twenty-year-old.  That may explain the book’s high school setting.  In fact, it may explain a lot.  I’d recently read an interview with Stephen King (I think it was in Playboy) in which he’d mentioned that he liked the idea of vagina dentata but had been unable to come up with a way to use it in a book.  I latched onto that, never giving a thought to how much it would endear me to feminists everywhere.


I was living with my parents for most of the time that I was writing Seductions.  One morning, I got up and went to the kitchen for some breakfast, where Mom was waiting for me.  My unfinished manuscript was on the kitchen table.  Mom had been unable to sleep the night before, so she read what I was writing, and now she wanted to talk about it.  Oh, goodie.  It’s important to note that my mother, a very religious woman, was, if possible, even more sheltered and naive than I at that point.  To this day, she thinks an orgasm is a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole.  Our conversation went something like this:

“I read your book last night.”
“What did you think?”
“Well, you know I don’t care for that kind of story.  It’s well written, but ... I know things have changed and it’s no big deal to write about things like sex, but ... well, they don’t really swallow it, do they?”
“Some do.”
“Oh.  And ... how do you know?”
“I read a lot.”
 
My first novel did not set the world on fire.  America was not seized by vagina dentata fever.  Best of all, there was no merchandising, which would have led to nothing good.  But the book put me on the map.  After that, I simply refused to go away.
 
Seductions is now available for Kindle at Amazon, and for Nook at Barnes and Noble.  For information about all my work and updates on new releases, please visit my website at RayGartonOnline.com.

BESTIAL: The Story Behind the Book

When I finished Ravenous, the story had not ended.  That’s clear to anyone who read the book, which has a rather bleak ending that leaves a whole lot of things unresolved.  Bestial picks up shortly after Ravenous ends, as the werewolves begin to organize an effort to take over the town of Big Rock.

In Ravenous, I introduced sex into the werewolf mythos.  That had always been the domain of the vampire, ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Vampires are sexy.  Werewolves ... not so much.  Rather than an erotic kind of sex, the focus was on the sex drive and how someone normally able to control him- or herself might react to it while in a lycanthropic state.  The most important thing about Bestial, or any sequel I write, the thing that I kept repeating to myself like a mantra as I began work on the book, was this:  IT CANNOT BE MORE OF THE SAME!

I’ve written far more sequels than I ever thought I’d write (for many years, I claimed I would never write one), and I’ve only written four.  I generally don’t like sequels because they tend to be nothing but more of the same.  In film, I think the best example of a bad sequel would be ... well ... just about all of them.  There are a few exceptions, though.  James Whale’s 1931 classic Frankenstein is grim, subversive, and bleak.  His 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, is quite upbeat and playful and even more subversive.  It strums a range of emotional strings and can take you from laughter to the edge of tears.  It tells more of the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his creation but does it in an entirely different way than the first movie.  The same can be said of Aliens.  While Alien is a dark, claustrophobic horror movie set in space, Aliens continues the story as a big, loud, testosterone-infused action picture that still manages to scare the hell out of us.  I’m of the opinion that, whether it’s a novel or a movie, if a sequel is just more of the same, then either it should not have been done, or it was done for the wrong reasons.

For Bestial, I decided to borrow another stock ingredient of the vampire tale and apply it to the werewolf tale:  Religion.  Ever since Dracula, vampires have been hissingly repulsed by the crucifix, the Christian symbol of redemption.  Dracula was a kind of stand-in for Satan — a demonic predator, perverse, unnatural, the embodiment of evil — and the church and its symbols — the crucifix, holy water, hallowed ground — stood for goodness and righteousness, god by proxy.  I would have to use religion in a different way.

Eons ago, I wrote a novella called Monsters, about a horror novelist who is harassed by members of the fanatical church in which he was raised, a church that does not approve of his work.  It was inspired by my own experience with the Seventh-day Adventist church.  It has been called a werewolf story, but technically, it’s not.  I’m pretty sure the word “werewolf” is never used in the story, and there is no description of a werewolf.  But the protagonist has been told for so long — since infancy, really — that he is a monster because of his interests and what he writes that he begins to turn into one.  It’s a nonspecific monster, but a monster nonetheless.

I liked that concept a lot, and I’d been meaning to return to it in one form or another for some time.  It seemed perfectly suited for Bestial.  Bob Berens, a character in the book, has been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church — write what you know! — and he’s been emotionally crippled by it.  He still lives with his mother and is pretty much afraid of life.  He’s been told for so long that he’s a filthy, sinning worm in the eyes of god that he has come to believe it.

I based Bob Berens on an old friend of mine from my Seventh-day Adventist school days.  In middle age, he still lives with his mother.  He has never had a relationship, doesn’t date and never has, he is socially crippled and paralyzed by fear of virtually everything.  I have great empathy for him because for some time early in my life, I was paralyzed by those same fears.  I managed to get out from under it.  He did not.  I know of many others like him within the church.  It is a controlling religion that instills terror in its children early on, and I’ve seen the long-term damage it does first hand.  My friend’s situation and state of mind are worse than Bob’s, but I had to water things down for the book or people would have found him hard to believe.  I know my friend has a bounty of repressed resentments, anger, and bitterness, to say nothing of all the desires and needs of any human being.  But they are repressed by the overwhelming fear that has been created in him, by the belief that he is simply a horrible sinner and will never be anything else.

The werewolf is an assault on society, on civilization.  “Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night,” — a good, decent man who follows all the rules and always takes the high road and is upright and moral — “may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”  When the change takes place, all that goodness and decency and upright moral crap go right out the window.  The crucifix and holy water are useless.  All the things that have been repressed — selfish desires and buried lusts — take over.  It seemed like the perfect place for religion in my story because nothing else represses so effectively and so fearfully.

My choice to insert religion into the story has been the focus of some criticism.  A number of reviewers accuse me of having some kind of personal vendetta against religion, of “Christian-bashing.”  This happens every time a religious character in one of my books or stories is a less than moral person, or when something unsavory is done in the name of a religion (except for the Satanic religions, nobody seems to mind dissing those).  If that were true, there would be no good Christians in my work and religion would never be portrayed in a positive light — and that simply isn’t the case.  My novels The New Neighbor, Dark Channel, and Shackled are perfect examples of this.

In Shackled, for instance, there’s the Walker family.  Ethan Walker is a pastor, a good guy, a family man, and a devoted Christian.  His son Samuel is kidnapped, and other horrible things happen to the family, but as devastating as all of it is, Pastor Walker’s faith gets him through it, gives him hope.  He refuses to blame god or let go of his religious beliefs.  He kind of stands out among the cynical characters who surround him — in a thoroughly positive way.  Those who accuse me of hating Christians or having some kind of search-and-destroy vendetta against religion based on my fiction either aren’t aware of my other work or are deliberately not taking it into consideration.

If I write a character who is a Christian and who does bad things, it doesn’t mean I’m bashing Christians any more than writing a female character who does bad things means I’m bashing women.  I chose to use religion in Bestial not so I would have a chance to portray it in a bad way, but because, in this case, it was a useful ingredient in my storytelling mix.  I chose an exceptionally repressive and fear-based cult — one with which I have close, personal experience and about which I wrote nothing inaccurate or untrue in the book — because the eventual result of all that repression and fear is always some kind of deviance or weirdness ... like turning into a fanged, hairy monster with no inhibitions, a monster driven only by its previously denied lusts and appetites.

Although it’s still quite dark, Bestial has a lighter tone than Ravenous because I think it’s a mistake to take something like werewolves too seriously for too long.  Personally, I think it’s a mistake take anything too seriously for too long, but that’s just me.  Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph had something to do with that, as well, I think.  They tend to lighten things up on their own.

Moffett and Keoph first appeared in Night Life, the sequel to Live Girls.  They are private investigators who work independently in different cities, but who are sometimes brought together on jobs for bestselling horror novelist Martin Burgess, who has a burning interest in the paranormal, conspiracy theories, UFOs and alien interaction with humans, and just about anything weird.  He’s wealthy and he can afford to hire Moffett and Keoph to investigate his unusual interests.  Burgess wants to see if any of the things he writes about in his horror fiction are real or have any equivalent in reality.  His network of computer geeks has alerted him to rumors of werewolves in a northern California coastal town and he sends Moffett and Keoph to investigate.

I like Martin Burgess.  In addition to writing, his great talent is enjoying being Martin Burgess.  Although he’s fully aware of his eccentricities and how others perceive him because of them, he doesn’t apologize for them.

I like Moffett and Keoph, too.  They’re smart, funny, and although they’re skeptical of everything Burgess wants them to look into, they’re not as skeptical as they were before they encountered vampires in Night Life.  Now their skepticism is mixed with some feelings of fear and dread for what they might encounter.  There is a spark of romantic interest between them, but they only see each other when they’re hired for a job by Burgess, so they haven’t pursued it.  Yet.

Come with Moffett and Keoph to Big Rock, smell the sea air and browse the shops.  But don’t be surprised by the weird vibe, the tension in the air.  There’s a new order in town, and a new baby has been born.  A baby that isn’t interested in milk.
 
Bestial is available as a trade paperback, for Kindle at Amazon, for Nook at Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook.  To keep up with news and new releases, visit my website at RayGartonOnline.com.