Someone recently told me that he’d attended a screening of Tim Burton’s new film Dark Shadows, which revives the popular supernatural daytime soap opera from the late 1960s. When he told me it was a parody, that Burton has played the whole thing for laughs, my heart sank. I had been looking forward to this movie with great anticipation. The TV series helped introduce me to the horror genre as a little boy and I was kind of fanatical about it back then. It used to scare the piss out of me. Over forty years later, I still vividly remember specific scenes from the show and how I used to cover my eyes in terror. Surely Tim Burton wouldn’t turn the terror of my childhood into a joke ... would he?
Then I saw the trailer and knew it was true. But after giving it a little thought, I began to realize that my disappointment wasn’t very logical and that Burton’s decision to make a comedy was not only sensible but the only viable option. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the arc of the old soap opera mirrors the arc of the horror genre in which I’ve worked for the better part of three decades.
Created and produced by Dan Curtis, the show aired weekday afternoons from 1966 to 1971. That’s not a terribly long run, but still, it racked up an impressive 1,225 episodes, more than any other English language genre series in history, including the long-running Dr. Who. Dark Shadows is one of the very few classic soaps that managed to keep all of its episodes intact except one. It went into syndication in 1975 and reruns were airing on the SyFy Channel as late as 2003. It got off to a slow start as a gothic soap, with no supernatural elements at all. Critics dubbed it a plodding bore. But that changed as things in Collinwood began to get weird, and when the vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid, was introduced a year into the series, its popularity skyrocketed.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember those bright childhood afternoons when merely hearing Robert Cobert’s creepy opening theme music would make me tense up with a happy kind of dread. It came on immediately after General Hospital, which my mother watched faithfully in those days. She did not like the fact that I watched Dark Shadows because it involved ghosts, witches, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and, most famously, Barnabas the vampire, and Mom knew that Jesus approved of none of those things. But she let me watch it out of guilt, I think, because she knew Jesus wouldn’t approve of General Hospital, either, what with so many doctors fucking so many nurses (off screen, of course), so she allowed me to have my guilty pleasure because she had hers. It was a kind of mutual sin agreement, I guess. I felt no guilt about watching Dark Shadows, though. I felt excitement and thrills and suspense, and thanks to Angelique the witch, played by the wickedly beautiful Lara Parker, I also felt some things in my shorts that I did not yet understand.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I think of the spooky seances, the curses, the time travel, the creepy music — the soundtrack album still ranks as one of the biggest selling TV soundtrack albums of all time, and the song “Quentin’s Theme,” which was first heard in Dan Curtis’s 1968 TV movie The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Top 100 chart, number three on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, and earned Cobert a Grammy nomination.
I had the complete collection of Dark Shadows bubblegum cards (which I valued almost as much as my collection of Batman bubblegum cards). I kept them in a graham cracker box and pored over them frequently. They always carried the pink smell of those rectangles of bubblegum with which they’d been packaged and were always slightly gritty with the corn starch that came off that gum. My mother expressed to our pastor her fear that both Dark Shadows and Batman were endangering my eternal soul, so he came over to the house one day, had a long talk with me about the importance of going to heaven, and scared me into burning all of them, along with an assortment of comic books.
It’s difficult to overstate how popular Dark Shadows was back then, especially with kids and teenagers. Well, let's be honest — primarily with kids and teenagers. Mention it in any group of people of a particular age, and they will immediately tell you how fast they rushed home from school to watch the show every afternoon. Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker were rock stars and sex symbols. When Frid made a guest appearance on The Merv Griffin Show in 1969, Griffin said in his introduction, “It has caught on so incredibly that there are the ‘Frid girls’ — I know the whole front of our theater is lined with girls who couldn’t get in tonight and they’re out there screaming and yelling.” Merchandising was rampant — there was even a Barnabas Collins board game, for crying out loud! Dark Shadows remains the only daytime soap opera to spawn two major motion pictures, 1970's House of Dark Shadows (“Come and see how the vampires do it!”) and 1971's Night of Dark Shadows (“Just another night of terror!”). I wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters (Jesus didn’t approve of those, either), but the TV trailers alone were enough to give me nightmares.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember how it used to set my imagination on fire. I would write Dark Shadows stories for my own amusement (long before I knew what fan fiction was) and carefully, meticulously draw picture after picture of the characters with colored pencils. I remember being genuinely terrified in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight.
One episode frightened me so much that I hid behind the rocking chair in our living room, and for a while, my mother stopped letting me watch the show. When my grandmother learned about this, she saw a chance to create conflict in our family, which was a hobby she cherished. She lived in a small trailer in our yard and informed me that I was welcome to come to her place to watch Dark Shadows with her every afternoon if my mother wasn’t going to let me watch it. My maternal grandmother was far scarier than Barnabas Collins ever came close to being and more evil than Angelique on her worst day, but because it meant I could watch the show, I got past that. When Mom learned that I was going to Grandma’s to watch Dark Shadows, much animosity ensued. She informed me that I would be watching Satan’s favorite soap opera in our living room from then on, not at Grandma’s.
But when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember the show I watched as a child. I remember how deeply immersed I would become in that world for thirty minutes every weekday afternoon, how emotionally involved I was in the lives of the Collins family. I remember Barnabas baring his fangs and the haunting tune played by Josette’s music box and the severed hand of the mysterious Count Petofi, which was supposed to cure Quentin of his lycanthropy, and so many other things. And I remember how delightfully, deliciously terrifying it all was. I seldom think of Dark Shadows as the adult I was when I watched reruns of the show decades later.
That’s a different memory. Very different.
Sets that wobbled or collapsed, props that broke or wouldn’t work, botched lines, flies buzzing around the actors’ faces, cameras and boom mics coming into view, stagehands creeping around in the background — those are the things I remember seeing in the reruns as an adult. Watching Dark Shadows now, my reaction is quite different than it was back in the late 1960s. Now I cringe and wonder how I ever could have been frightened by it.
None of those screw-ups happened because of incompetence. It was a daily show shot live-to-tape, meaning there were no retakes. The schedule was extremely tight and they had no time to do it over or polish it up. Everything was done once and then the production moved on to the next scene.
Now, it’s not scary ... it’s hilarious. But that did not matter to the show’s young audience at the time. They were hooked. It had the youngest audience of any daytime soap opera, and sadly, that helped kill the show. With the economy plunging, networks began to cut costs. The viewers of Dark Shadows were not appealing enough to advertisers at the time — they were too young to make household purchasing decisions. That, combined with dropping ratings, led ABC to pull the plug on the show and replace it with a new version of Password. Letters poured into the network and some viewers were so angry, they threatened to disrupt the taping of the game show that replaced their favorite soap opera, although that threat was never carried out.
In 1991, Dan Curtis tried to catch lightning in a bottle again with a much more polished version of Dark Shadows that aired in prime time on NBC. This time, the budget was big and the production was glossy. It attracted a large audience initially, but then the network repeatedly preempted the show to cover the Gulf War and ratings declined rapidly. It was cancelled after one season. Another attempt was made to revive the series in 2004 when a pilot was shot for the WB network, but it was never picked up.
And now it’s back. Tim Burton has directed what appears to be a lavish film starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, but the tone has changed. Now, Barnabas has been revived in 1972 and is a comical fish out of water. It’s funny, but this time, it’s intentionally funny.
I think chances are good that had Burton decided to do Dark Shadows with a straight face, it still would have been funny, because let’s face it, folks, it’s really hard to take vampires seriously these days. Or witches, or werewolves, or just about any of those old traditional horror icons.
When Boris Karloff appeared on movie screens in Jack Pierce’s groundbreaking makeup in the 1931 classic Frankenstein, people screamed. And they meant it! They were horrified. 35 years later, that same makeup was used on Fred Gwynne in the sitcom The Munsters. In that same sitcom, Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, was a vampire who was dressed much like Bela Lugosi in 1931's Dracula, a movie that had women fainting in theaters.
In the years since then, a lot has happened to the vampire. Anne Rice romanticized him starting in 1976, and even more in the years that followed as her Vampire Chronicles became more and more popular. And then in 2005, Stephenie Meyer infantilized and Mormonized the vampire — and, for that matter, the werewolf — in Twilight and the books and movies that followed.
How could we possibly be expected to take Barnabas Collins seriously at this point?
The vampire no longer works in the horror genre because he has been co-opted by the romance genre — along with the werewolf and the zombie and an assortment of other once frightening creatures. There was a time when the vampire was undead. Now, as far as the horror genre is concerned, he’s just dead. But he’s not alone.
A used bookstore I patronize recently removed its entire horror section. Remember, this is a used bookstore. This decision was made because no one was buying the books in the horror section. They were just sitting there collecting dust. The store’s owner decided to make room for books that would sell. You can still find books about vampires and werewolves in that store, but you’ll have to look in the romance section.
I don’t think there is a better example of the state of horror fiction than that.
But if you take a peek inside the small and insular community of horror writers and fans, you’ll see something different. Zombies are still looking for a snack, vampires are still baring their fangs and attempts are still being made to breathe life into the werewolf. While you’re there, cock an ear and listen. You’ll hear people wondering why horror doesn’t sell, why publishers aren’t interested in the genre and why nobody but those inside that small, insular community cares anymore. There are very good answers to those questions, but you won’t hear them in the horror community, where people are still taking seriously creatures and ideas that people have been laughing at for years now.
More than anything else, it was probably the success of Stephen King that launched the horror boom of the 1980s. King wrote about vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot and ghosts in The Shining, and he dealt with other traditional horror creatures and ideas, too. But contrary to what a lot of horror fans and even horror writers believe, they were not what made King’s work so popular. What made his novels work so well was everything else in them — the characters and their lives, their problems, their real-world fears. These were people dealing with real problems like domestic abuse and poverty and mental illness. And then, as if those problems and fears weren’t enough, he threw vampires and ghosts and other supernatural threats into their lives. Those supernatural threats worked because the people they threatened were recognizable people living familiar lives with problems that were real and timely. King’s books touched people and spoke to them because he reflected their lives, but with the added excitement of supernatural horror.
At some point, horror fiction stopped touching and speaking to people. It is not reflecting the world in which we live. In 2012, it’s hard to be threatened by vampires and zombies when you’re losing your job, or your home, or you have cancer but have no medical coverage, or when you turn on the news and hear some guy who wants to be president — and may very well succeed — say that things like contraception and abortion and certain sexual acts should be illegal or that people should be jailed for their sexuality alone. Right now, a glance at the skyrocketing price of groceries and gas is scarier than any werewolf. Zombies seem pretty lame when you’re wondering if your son or daughter will be shipped off to yet another war in the Middle East ... and whether or not that son or daughter will be coming home again.
So it’s not too surprising that Tim Burton decided to go for laughs with Dark Shadows, because he probably would have gotten them, anyway. A centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 1972? That’s not even a little creepy anymore. And setting it in 1972 was a good idea, too, because a centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 2012 probably would end up with his own reality TV show.
We live in a time when serial killers have become heroes, for Christ’s sake! Don’t get me wrong, I think Dexter is a fine series, but has anyone stopped to think that we have a hit show with a protagonist who’s a serial killer? NBC just greenlit a weekly primetime series about Hannibal Lecter! Hell, he was scary only 20 years ago, now we’re going to follow his exploits in a primetime series? What's next? Pedophile Crossing Guard on Fox? The Real Rapists of Beverly Hills on Bravo? Vampires don’t stand a chance of being menacing anymore!
My initial reaction to a Dark Shadows parody was wrong. Comedy was the only way it could go. Because it’s not horror anymore. Very few of the things we once considered horror hold any threat these days. The world has changed. The horror genre has a lot of catching up to do. But don't hold your breath.
That’s right, if you are a publisher, anthologist, or anyone else who frequently enters into business transactions with writers but often finds them problematic, I am going to tell you how to deal with writers effectively in just one easy lesson made up of two simple, single-syllable words.
PAY THEM.
There seems to be a great deal of confusion about writers. Some people seem to believe that a business transaction with a writer operates under entirely different rules than all the other business transactions they enter into every day of their lives. This can be cleared up very easily with two more simple words:
IT DOESN’T.
This is how business transactions work:
1.) Someone provides a service or product in exchange for a fee.
2.) You need that service or product.
3.) You pay the fee, you get the service or product.
That’s how it works. That’s how it works everywhere. That’s how it has always worked everywhere. If you can’t pay, there is a problem. The problem is that you can’t pay. The problem is NOT that the person who provides the service or product expects payment because, as I pointed out:
THAT’S HOW IT WORKS.
I’ve been a professional, full-time writer for 30 years. During that time, I have heard many brilliantly creative attempts to get around this fact. I’ve even been asked for work by people who have no intention of paying for it and don’t even offer a payment, people who seem incapable of understanding why a professional writer would find that insulting. After hearing all of these approaches enough times, they all begin to sound alike. They run together into a blur of toxic, squirming bullshit that amounts to something resembling this:
“But we’re giving you the chance to be published by us/appear in our anthology/be a part of our team/etc. We thought you would appreciate that. We’re giving you a tremendous opportunity here. We thought you would want to be a part of what we’re doing. We’d like you to be part of our family.”
First of all, I already have a family, and they fucked me up beyond repair. I don’t need another one. And if I decide to find one, I certainly won’t build it around a business transaction.
I’m not asking for any favors, so please don’t offer any, or worse, pretend that you’ve offered one when you haven’t.
No, you’re not giving me a tremendous opportunity if you expect me work for free. What you’re giving me is an unlubricated pineapple right up the anus. I don’t need one of those. I need to be paid for my work. That’s why I’m here.
There was a time in my life when I wrote constantly for my own pleasure. That was before I entered school and during the years I attended school. You’re a little late. You missed it. That time is over. Now I write for a different reason. I like to call that reason:
A LIVING.
There are a lot of writers who do not write for a living. They do other things in addition to writing. Some have entire careers separate from their writing. This does not change a single thing. That writer still provides a service/product and the business transaction is still a business transaction and SHOULD be carried out like any OTHER business transaction.
Let’s say you have a car problem. You take the car to an auto mechanic. The mechanic finds the problem and fixes it. Then the mechanic expects to be paid. But you say, “Look, I’ve had a lot of mechanics work on my car over the years, and now you’re one of them. I appreciate what you’ve done, but I thought you would appreciate being a part of that family of mechanics who also have worked on my car. I’ve done many wonderful things in my car and it’s taken me to many wonderful places, and I thought it would be enough for you simply to be a part of that.”
There is a spectrum of responses you might get that would fall between the mechanic chuckling and saying, “You’re shittin’ me, right?” and the mechanic introducing the business end of a tire iron to your forehead. Nowhere within that spectrum would you find the response, “Okay, sounds good to me. Have a nice day!”
No one is stupid enough to try that — not unless they’re affiliated with a hidden camera prank show on TV. No one is stupid enough to think that a mechanic — or any other professional, for that matter — would accept that kind of insulting bullshit in lieu of payment. No one.
And yet this happens quite frequently to writers. These and other equally insulting and skull-crackingly stupid things are often said in an effort to talk a writer out of being paid and after a while, it can get kind of demoralizing. But you know what?
SOMETIMES THEY WORK.
There’s a reason for this. A lot of people write. Among those people are many who have no self-respect, no confidence in their work, a streak of masochism, and no concern for things like quality, reputation or respect. They have one goal and one goal only, and that is to be published. They will do anything and accept any kind of treatment as long as it results in their name being printed on something somewhere that somebody might read. To them, the sensation of an unlubricated pineapple up the ass is the sound of opportunity knocking.
Those of us who think we’re pretty good at what we do and have some self-respect and would like to be shown some respect and even have a certain fondness for the idea of getting paid for our work have a message for those who fit that description:
KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF.
We are sane enough, however, to know that’s not going to happen. But we remind those interested in entering into business transactions with writers:
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
In 2005, Cemetery Dance published a chapbook featuring two of my short stories, "Where's Bobo" and "Glory Hole." It was limited to only 506 signed copies.
I've posted "Glory Hole" at my website, RayGartonOnline.com. It will be available for a limited time only, and there will be other stories in the future. While you're there, I hope you'll look around and register at the message board to participate in discussions and contests.
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 for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook. In addition to that, I'm selling mint-condition copies of the 2005 Subterranean Press signed edition of Night Life at a bargain price. To keep up with new releases and other information about my work, visit my website at RayGartonOnline.com.
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!
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 — an overheard conversation, 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? 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. Myron Foote, I decided, was a man who noticed things others didn’t and was 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 people trapped in the consequences of crimes. Sometimes they 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, the readers, 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.
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 in paperback, for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook from Audible Audio. You can read an excerpt of Murder Was My Alibi here. If you read and enjoy the book, I hope you'll post a review of it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your blog or website — or anywhere else you like!
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.
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.
