WHY WE WRITE

The GHOST BLOGGERS return for a final haunt for the Holidays, and bring you some free surprises!

Yeah, it’s been a few months since the fearless GHOST BLOGGERS brought you through the realm of the ethereal…but we have some, erm, unfinished undertakings still at hand.  If you missed out on our original journey through the literary land of the dead, you can retrace our footsteps by visiting McKinney’s Grave, Giglio’s Grave, and Dudar’s Grave.  And once you’ve finished, dear friends, you are welcome to read on, and discover what in the world possesses us to write in the first place, and what keeps us lurking in the darkness.  We think you will enjoy this final glimpse, and the secret Christmas surprise we’ve been saving for you.  We think Yule just DIE for it!  

Why I Write the Dark Stuff (Blog Post for Library Journal)

By Joe McKinney

In my day job I’m a patrol supervisor for the San Antonio Police Department, working the west side of town.  The police officers who make the calls, who make the arrests, who keep the peace in the busiest part of the city, they work for me.  I’m the one they call when they have crime scenes that need managing, or when something just doesn’t look right.

What that means is that I have to see a lot of dead bodies.  And I mean a lot of them.

Like last week.  One of my officers called because he had a decomp (police parlance for a body that’s been rotting in place for a good long while) and he wasn’t sure if it was suicide or homicide.  So I showed up to the apartment and there was the dead guy, seated on the floor (oralmost on the floor; his butt was about two inches off the carpet).  He had a noose around his neck, though you could barely see it because his skin was so bloated and gummy with rot that it had sort of oozed over the rope.

“So, what do you think?” the officer asked.

“Suicide,” I told him.

“But he’s sitting down.  Wouldn’t he have rolled over or something when he started to choke?  That’s like an instinct or something, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said.  “What you’re looking at is an act of will power.  If you want to do something bad enough, you’ll see it through.”

He looked from me to the body and shook his head.

“Besides,” I added, “look at all that medication in there in his bathroom.  Those drugs are for hepatitis and cancer.  He did this because he was hurting pretty bad.  And look up there.”  I pointed to the ceiling where our dead guy had nailed the rope to the rafter.  “He did that because he didn’t want the rope to slip off.  And look at where he chose to do this, here in the bedroom, so his relatives coming in the front door wouldn’t have to see him.  I bet if you look around here you’ll find a note.  Probably in the other room, out of sight of the bedroom.”

The officer nodded.

We both stood there, staring at the body.  The apartment didn’t have air conditioning, and it felt like standing inside an oven, even though it was the middle of the night.  The smell was really bad.

The officer kind of chuckled and said, “So Sarge, I guess this is one for your next book, huh?”

I offered him a bland smile.  Cops develop their gallows humor long before they learn that it’s actually a defense mechanism against the horror of confronting your own mortality, and this officer was one of the young ones.  He still had a lot to learn.

“Go look for the note,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

When he was gone I found myself looking into that suicide’s face and sighing.  The suicides always get to me. Something about standing in the presence of someone so desperate to take control of their pain and their emotional devastation that they would resort to this makes me feel numb.

In the other room, the young officer was clumsily knocking around.  Something fell over and broke.  I almost called out to him to be careful, but held my tongue.  You see, my mind had drifted from my day job to my night job.  I was thinking about what he’d said about my next book.  So many people seem to have that opinion about horror, and about zombie fiction in particular.  To them, a book about shambling dead things eating the living must be nothing but gratuitous violence and gore.  What else could it be?

Well, I take exception to that.

I started writing because I was scared of the future.  My wife and I had just gotten married.  Then we had a daughter, and the world suddenly seemed so much more complex.  In the wink of an eye, I went from a carefree young cop – a lot like the one in the other room knocking stuff over – to a man with more responsibilities than he could count.  I had obligations and commitments coming at me from every angle.

I’d been writing stories for a good long while at that point, starting sometime in my early teens, but never with the intention of doing anything about them.  I would write them out on a yellow legal pad, staple the finished pages together, and leave them on the corner of my desk until the next idea came to me.

Never once did it occur to me to do something with what I’d written.  I just threw those stories away and forgot them.  But then came adulthood, and parenthood, and I found myself groping to put the world in order, to regain some of the control I felt I had lost.  I realized that writing could help me with that.  I realized that I could focus my anxieties and make something useful of them.

And so I started writing a science fiction novel.  It was a big space opera epic, and it was pure trash.  Every word of it was awful.

The reason?  Well, it wasn’t authentic.  It wasn’t me.

The real me, the kid who sat at his desk filling up yellow legal pads rather than going out bike riding with his friends, was a horror junkie.  I was crazy for the stuff.  Horror was my first literary love, and I figured seeing as love was what drove me to return to writing that I should write what I love. I was feeling like the world was rushing at me from every side, so I wrote a zombie story about characters who had the living dead rushing in at them from every side.  That’s when things started to click.  That’s when it all made sense.

But it wasn’t just that simple.  You see, I sincerely believe that fear is the most authentic, and the most useful, emotion available to the storyteller.  It is as vital as love, and indeed, gives love its profundity, for what makes love, and family, and everything we treasure so valuable but the fear that it could all be taken away in the blink of an eye.  For me, fear goes far beyond monsters.  It is the catalyst for my creative process, and without that creative process, I’m afraid I would wither up inside.  I’m not saying I’d end up like that suicide I just told you about if I couldn’t write anymore, nothing that melodramatic, but absence of that creative outlet would be a hole that nothing else could fill.

So that’s why I write the dark stuff.

Joe McKinney

San Antonio, Texas

September 11, 2012

To learn about Joe McKinney, Go Here!

 In The Name Of Love

By

Peter Giglio

“Why do you write horror?”

That’s a valid question, and one I’ve answered more times than I care to count. I’ve prattled on endlessly about how horror fiction lends itself to socially relevant metaphors, how being in tune with darkness can put one more in touch with light, how horror is the perfect canvas on which to establish conflict.

Blah, blah, blah…

What I’d rather explore (briefly, I promise) is why I write, and I’d also like to offer my perspective on the fine line between genre fiction and general fiction, that lauded non-brand that tells potential readers, “Hey, this work isn’t pulp; you can read this without guilt, and it will make you feel smarter.”

Okay, I’m probably projecting a bit. I don’t know if it really says all that, but it often feels like it. After all, Stephen King and Anne Rice and Dean Koontz, though they write great genre fiction, don’t have to languish in such confines. Their tomes aren’t branded horror; rather, they’re shelved as fiction despite the recognizable tropes within their worlds. People who routinely say, “I don’t read horror,” will frequently admit to reading King. That’s my experience, at least.

Writers like King are essentially their own brand, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Most of the time, they’ve earned the stature. King often tries to shake his literary credentials off, but he isn’t fooling me. He worked hard for his reputation, and I love his work deeply. Go, Steve! Go!

So I’m not here with sour grapes. In fact, I get pissed when people attack success. Regardless of what you or I may think of work from James Patterson or Stephanie Meyer, people read them, and any author who’s being honest will admit to envying the audience these icons have captured. Captured? Wow, that makes the whole thing sound nefarious. I like that. I also like that there are still examples of success in a crumbling market. Glimmers of hope.

That said, I can report with all honesty that I don’t write for fame. I laugh at friends and family members who call me famous. I’m not. Not even close. Most of my heroes, in fact—my mentors, the people I aspire to—aren’t even famous.

Strangers get this.

When I tell them I’m a writer, the first question is usually, “What do you write?” If I reply, “Horror,” they’ll often ask, “Like Stephen King?” and that just makes me want to test them a little. “No,” I might say, “like Richard Laymon.” Or I’ll throw out some other midlist name just to see if confusion sweeps their face.

And it does.

Fact is, midlist writers in any corner of genre fiction (though heroes to devotees of that particular brand) don’t mean shit to the average person at your local pub or bank or grocery store or…wherever you meet people. And if you, like me, aspire to those midlist heroes who write from the heart and gut, that realization can shatter your resolve.

Despite all that, I write because I respect the written word. I write because I want to articulate my feelings through stories. I write because I love the process of creation. I love what I learn about myself and the world around me.

And, most importantly, I love good stories and storytellers.

My advice: Aspire to be what you love.

If you love money, go into banking. If you love stories, write. If you make money writing, congratulations—you’re a professional. Just remember, professionals in most fields aren’t wealthy or well-known. If you happen to make big money doing it, you’re part of a rare and endangered breed: someone who has their calls returned by Stephen King.

As a reader, I don’t care if your story is horror or romance or a thriller or a literary coming-of-age tale; if it hooks me in the first page, I’ll read more. If it holds me in its grip, I’ll recommend it to anyone willing to pay attention. I don’t care if you have a contract with a Big Six publisher, a small press, or if you self-publish.

A good story is a good story, and I enjoy building them the same way, I assume, a skilled carpenter enjoys building a fine deck.

Genre is essentially a way of keeping all the shelves at a bookstore (and the Amazon website) organized. It’s also a way of marketing: “If you like this, you’ll enjoy this.” The business side of me gets this and respects it. But that’s only half of me.

The reader and writer in me browses every section of a bookstore and every corner of a website that sells books, ‘cause he just respects a good story.

That’s the side of me I love.

And that’s why I write.

To learn more about Peter Giglio, Go Here!

Drinking From The Poisoned Well

By

Peter N. Dudar

A brief anecdote; one that I often like to tell to illustrate the insanity of writing.

I began my writing career after I graduated from college and moved to Maine.  Those first few years were a period of great fecundity for me, regardless of the fact that most of the short stories I was producing were amateur at best, and at worst downright shoddy and formulaic.  And when that productive period ran out, I went through a horrible period of writer’s block, which left me all but crippled.  As time dragged by and nothing came out of me after countless hours of staring at a blank computer screen, I decided that I needed to do something.

I found a creative writing course through Portland’s Adult Education program, and even though I’d graduated from college a few years before with a bachelor’s degree, I felt that perhaps this would be the skeleton key to unlock my chained and hidden muse.  So I signed myself up and, just like that, I found myself in an elementary school classroom on Tuesday evenings with a bunch of other writers whom also yearned to express themselves with the written word.

I’ll never forget that first class for as long as I live.

I made my way in and examined the room.  All the desks inside had been rearranged to form this great big circle, with the teacher’s desk front-and-center astride the blackboard.  Many people had arrived before me and a lot of the desks were already filled, so I glanced about and found an empty spot.  As I sat down I noticed my neighbor to my immediate left; a woman with crazy hair subdued with colorful scarfs, a pair of eyeglasses with thick rims and leopard skin-colored tipples, and necklaces with beads and jewels that weighed her frame down like an anchor.  I knew even before I set my pen down and opened my notebook that sitting next to this person was a bad idea.  And I was right.

Our teacher came in and introduced herself, and then asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about why we enjoy writing.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?  Sure, you can!

I listen to all the people around the circle introduce themselves, each giving some informal speech about their craft; some telling of the joy of simple things like journaling for historical purposes, others finding delight in poetry or prose, or what have you.  One lady mentioned how she started writing by first making up bedtime stories for her kids, and then deciding to write them down so that her kids could one day share them with their children.  It’s cool.  But all the while, I’m looking at this psychotic broad beside me, who has been wriggling and itching and dying for it to be her turn.  I’m suddenly sure that I don’t want to follow this lady, that maybe I’ll just excuse myself and run to the bathroom…and maybe even NOT come back.  But I don’t.  I bide my time.

And then it’s the crazy lady’s turn.

This woman stands up and introduces herself, and then embarks on this long stream-of-consciousness tirade of how life has been so cruel to her, and that she “writes herself sane” to keep her poor brain for revolting against her.  We get to hear every little misery this woman has endured (who knows how many of them were fictitious?) and how writing has saved her life, and blah-blah-blee-blah.  By now half the class is wriggling and itching with awkwardness and discomfort, and that’s including myself.  I really don’t want to go next, and have to follow up after crazy lady and how her five cats died in a fire and her twin sister was raped by an orangutan in a freak zoo incident (okay, maybe I made that last part up, but only because I’ve mentally blocked out her real stories in my bid to rid her from my brain).

Finally, crazy lady sits down, and it’s my turn.

“My name is Peter,” I begin.  “I write because I enjoy making shit up.”  (The class chuckles) “I signed up for this class mostly because I’m trying to work through writer’s block.  I guess I just don’t have a lot of difficulties in my life, or inner demons I need to face, which is probably a good thing.  I have to believe, though, that if I did have a lot of problems, I would be better suited if I went to the doctor and got some medication.”

More laughter…except from crazy lady, who looks absolutely flabbergasted.  I can tell I’ve insulted her, but part of me really doesn’t care.  I’ve created conflict, and conflict is good.  It’s inspiring. For both of us.

Looking back now, I can see where I was wrong in my behavior.  I was young and cocky back then, and I didn’t really know shit about having anxiety or coping with the possibility of bad health or mental illness.  And, of course, I can see now where the notion of “writing oneself sane,” is possibly one of the sanest things a writer could do.  After all, writers deal with telling lies, but those lies spring forth from truths that we all know and experience.  You can’t write perfectly about a loved one dying until you stood next to their coffin and gazed at the waxy remains of them, and realizing that the lifeless thing you are saying goodbye to looks nothing like the person you knew when they were still alive.  You can’t write perfectly about love until you’ve had your heart broken, when you can still smell the scent of your lover on your pillow as you lay your head down to sleep at night, and then wake up sobbing in the morning because you know she isn’t coming back.  Then, when you put these experiences into words, someone who has also suffered can read them and find empathy.  They can make that connection.

Writers are haunted people.  We’re held prisoner by the voices of stories that want to be written.  We’re slaves to an inner thirst for information and experience just so we can find the right words to tell our stories.  And for the horror writer, this information and experience we thirst for is not glamorous or pretty, and by no means is it safe.   The well we drink from has poisoned water.  One needs to look no further than Edgar Allan Poe to see how his mastery at storytelling is precluded by his own personal miseries.

And what of the “ghost writer?”  What of those folks (present company included) who long to pen the perfect ghost story?  What are the experiences they seek out to gain knowledge and find the right words?

I think for each of us, it begins with the notion of an afterlife; what awaits us when we die?  Ghosts are the spiritual remnants of a human being whose body is no longer alive and whose soul no longer has a vessel to travel in.  Which begs next these three logical questions:  1) Where is the soul supposed to go?  2)  What is holding the soul captive, so that it can’t or won’t move on?  And 3) How are we, the living, to deal with the ghost when we encounter it?

The spiritual part of us (at least in our minds), looks to religion and philosophy to begin sorting these concepts out and come to our own unique belief system.  The rational part of us seeks books or articles or essays about the act of dying and how the body shuts down.  But the writer in us…how far are we willing to go?

Here’s the Bucket List for the ghost writer:

Attend a séance.  Be present at the death of a loved one.  Spend a night in a haunted house/hotel/mental institution.  Take photographs in a cemetery.  Take video/audio recordings of supernatural activities.  Leave flour/powder on the floor to capture ghost prints.  Play with a(n) Ouija board.  Take mind-altering substances to try and commune with the dead.  Dress in dead people’s clothing or procure their personal belongings.  Build a shrine or altar for the dead.  Have a Tarot or psychic reading performed.  Visit historical places where mass murders or suicides occurred. Visit the graves of horror authors.  Learn about local folklore and urban legends.  Place ourselves in instances of mortal danger.  And, above all, read more ghost stories.

As I’ve said, the well we drink from is poisoned.  We seek to fill our minds with dark thoughts and notions.  I think this is probably why horror writers are also some of the nicest, friendliest people you will ever meet.  It’s because we know how to value and celebrate life.  It’s because we know how to “write ourselves sane.”

To learn more about Peter N. Dudar, Go Here!

And now some gifts from our friends at Nightscape Press and Evil Jester Press:

Download Joe McKinney’s INHERITANCE Free!  Download Peter Giglio’s SUNFALL MANOR Free! Download Peter N. Dudar’s REQUIEM Free!

Enjoy! 

1)    What is the working title of your next book?

CANNIBAL CRUISE

2)    Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was out to dinner with my editor at Kensington and we started talking about the cruise I’d just taken.  I told him how gluttonous people could be on cruises, and the next thing you know we were talking about my next novel…a zombie story set on a cruise ship.

3)    What genre does your book fall under?

Horror, definitely.

4)    What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The two main leads are women, one a badass U.S. Secret Service agent and the other a female version of James Bond working for one of the Mexican cartels.  For the agent I’m imagining Dianna Agron or Amy Smart.  For the cartel assassin Naya Rivera.

5)    What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A Mexican drug cartel releases a flesh eating virus into a cruise ship’s food supply, turning the passengers into zombies.

6)    Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was written on spec for Kensington.  My agent, Jim Donovan, is my representation.

7)    How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About seven months.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

            My own Dead World series books or possibly Deck Z.

8)    Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A recent cruise I took with my family.

9)    What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

This is my first book to feature a sex scene!

Fortunately, I knew where to turn.  You see, one of my very good friends is Sanford Allen.  Sanford is a gifted writer and a musician, and happens to know just about everything there is to know about Bollywood.  (You can learn more about Sanford Allen here.) So I sent him the following email:

Hey Sanford,

I confess to being out of my depth on this song.  I like it, but I have no idea what it means.  I do get the impression that it’s about modern Indian movie-making, possibly even the whole Bollywood thing, but that’s as far as I can go with it.  Any words of wisdom?

Joe

I thought he’d send me a few lines of explanation, maybe even a link or two to some of his favorite Bollywood films.  I had no idea he would go all out and write me a full blown essay on the song.  (Really, it’s not even an essay; more like a loving tribute.) But I’m glad he did.  I was so impressed by his answer that I asked if he’d let me reprint here, on my website, and he agreed.

So with that I’m going to turn the reins over to my good friend and trusted authority on all things dealing with the Indian subcontinent and let him explain it all for you.

Enjoy!

Sanford Allen on Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha”

British alt-rock band Cornershop’s song “Brimful of Asha” is an earworm that’s wriggled across continents and decades.

The tune charted both in the U.S. and U.K. in the ‘90s. And, last October, Britain’s NME named a Fatboy Slim remix of “Brimful” one of its “150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years.”

It’s easy to see why. With its insistent rhythm guitar and hooky chorus, the song is plenty catchy.

Beyond that, though, “Brimful of Asha” continues to resonate as a powerful testimonial to music’s ability to connect us to our roots.

The song is a loving tribute to the Indian film music that Cornershop singer Tjinder Singh and countless other Brits of South Asian descent grew up hearing. Spinning 45-rpm records of those songs provided an aural connection to their ancestral homeland.

Bollywood films typically feature a half dozen or more song-and-dance numbers, and even today, most popular music played on the radio in India originates from the movies. With a handful of exceptions, actors just lip-sync the songs. The actual singing is supplied by “playback singers,” of whom Asha Bhosle — “Brimful’s” namesake — is the reigning queen.

The legendary Asha’s voice has adorned hundreds of film soundtracks since the early ’60s. By some estimates, she’s recorded more than 12,000 songs, although it’s hard to know the exact count. When Cornershop’s Singh dashes off lines about “dancing behind the movie scenes” and “keeping the dream alive,” he’s doubtless referring to Asha’s significant place in Indian cinema even though she’s seldom physically appeared on the silver screen.

Unlike the Bollywood actors and actresses, who are mostly youthful, svelte and stylish, playback singers can be any age and physical appearance. Although moviegoers hear Asha’s high, lilting voice emanating from the mouth of the film industry’s sexiest leading ladies, she’s anything but a sultry temptress. In reality, she’s a matronly woman now in her 70s.

It’s likely that “Brimful’s” repeated line that “everybody needs a bosom for a pillow” refers to Asha’s motherly appearance. Most likely, the line also refers to Mother India and the cultural comfort embodied by the spinning 45-rpm record of Asha’s songs.

Later, Singh namedrops two other Bollywood playback singers: Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar (the latter of which is Asha’s sister and quite famous in her own right). He also mentions several Western singers, including T-Rex’s glam rocking Marc Bolan, a reminder that the ears of many Indo-British music fans face both East and West.

“Brimful’s” lines about ignoring government warnings “about the simple life they’re promoting and new dams they are building” may seem out of place among its celebrations of both Eastern and Western music. But I believe Singh throws them in to remind us of music’s ability to help us escape from our hardships.

While some Indian filmmakers use the medium to make important social statements, the majority of moviegoers are looking to escape. Bollywood’s sweeping, colorful musicals are all about giving people a three-hour reprieve from their daily lives — which for a great number are hardscrabble beyond Western comprehension.

“Brimful of Asha” will continue to worm into our ears and psyches as long as South Asia’s far-flung diaspora seeks connections to its roots and Western music fans continue to explore the East for new sounds.

In the twilight of her career, Asha herself recently received her first Grammy nomination, collaborated with the Kronos Quartet and was sampled by the Blackeyed Peas.

One of the songs that best encompasses the singer’s straddling of exotic East and worldly West is “Dum Maro Dum,” a psychedelic rock-inspired ’60s tune which has been remade and remixed numerous times. Check out footage from the movie, where the indescribably gorgeous Zeenat Aman lip-syncs Asha’s song. This second clip is of Asha actually singing it live at a recent movie awards show. (Look for Zeenat in the audience, still a stunner after all these years.)

Brimful of Asha video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM7H0ooV_o8

Movie footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUqEPS6Mq8I&feature=fvsr

Asha live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spynZz_wMFI

Okay, Joe McKinney here again.

I should add that Sanford and I will be appearing together again sometime next year as part of the JournalStone Double Down Series. If you’re unfamiliar with that series, you can learn more about it here. In the meantime, you should check out Sanford’s website. This guy is a serious talent. I’m in a writer’s group with him called Drafthouse, and from the get go I knew that Sanford was a talent to watch. Just as my horror often touches upon police procedure, so does his upon music. In fact, he writes about music, and perhaps more importantly, the act of performing music, in such a way that his passion often transports the scene into something far more than horror. I urge you to check this guy out.

The loot gathering was good, because I grew up in a fairly affluent suburb, where the streets grow and spread in crystalline profusion, and where the soul of modern man grows numb in cookie cutter houses.

Fortunately, the little suburb where I grew up was on the edge of a vast cotton farm…or what had once been a cotton farm many years earlier.  By the time I came along, the fields had run to riot and a dense forest of trees grew where once there had been furrows.  My friends and I spent our summers roaming that empty landscape, our dogs by our sides, BB guns gripped by the breach in reasonable imitation of Marines on patrol in the jungle.  We boys were like gods then, carving empires of the imagination from the air on a daily basis.

But those fields weren’t entirely empty.  There was something else in there with us besides tall weeds and swamp trees.  Just a few hundred yards in from the fence that was supposed to keep us out, hidden behind a large copse of trees, was what I guess was an old cotton processing facility.  It was little more than three large, interconnected metal silos, nearly every inch of which was covered with graffiti.  But in its moldering, rusting decay it was resplendent.  I was drawn to it in much the same way as water finds its own level.  There was an irresistible gravity around that abandoned structure that both held me hostage and set my mind free.  It was like a flint for my imagination, for with the smallest of effort I found I could turn those silos into cities, the loose machine parts around them into a cemetery of dead cars.  That lonely collection of silos took me to dark and apocalyptic places.  And I loved every minute of it.

But that Halloween, as we wandered the neighborhood, collecting our loot, we happened by the new construction that would, within the coming year, spread our neighborhood into the empty fields we loved so much.  Cookie cutter houses would take the place of my beloved cotton processing silos, and another empty place on the map would get filled in with names like Spring Forest Lane and Oak Terrace and Verbena Drive.

But for that night, that magical last night of October, 1982, the palace of my imagination was still intact, sitting like a sentinel at the outskirts of my own October Country.

May that land forever live.

What that means is that I get to see a lot of dead bodies.  And I mean a lot of them.

Like last week.  One of my officers called because he had a decomp (police parlance for a body that’s been rotting in place for a good long while) and he wasn’t sure if it was suicide or homicide.  So I showed up to the apartment and there was the dead guy, seated on the floor (or almost on the floor; his butt was about two inches off the carpet).  He had a noose around his neck, though you could barely see it because his skin was so bloated and gummy with rot that it had sort of oozed over the rope.

“So, what do you think?” the officer asked.

“Suicide,” I told him.

“But he’s sitting down.  Wouldn’t he have rolled over or something when he started to choke?  That’s like an instinct or something, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said.  “What you’re looking at is an act of will power.  If you want to do something bad enough, you’ll see it through.”

He looked from me to the body and shook his head.

“Besides,” I added, “look at all that medication in there in his bathroom.  Those drugs are for hepatitis and cancer.  He did this because he was hurting pretty bad.  And look up there.”  I pointed to the ceiling where our dead guy had nailed the rope to the rafter.  “He did that because he didn’t want the rope to slip off.  And look at where he chose to do this, here in the bedroom, so his relatives coming in the front door wouldn’t have to see him.  I bet if you look around here you’ll find a note.  Probably in the other room, out of sight of the bedroom.”

The officer nodded.

We both stood there, staring at the body.  The apartment didn’t have air conditioning, and it felt like standing inside an oven, even though it was the middle of the night.  The smell was really bad.

The officer kind of chuckled and said, “So Sarge, I guess this is one for your next book, huh?”

I offered him a bland smile.  Cops develop their gallows humor long before they learn that it’s actually a defense mechanism against the horror of confronting your own mortality, and this officer was one of the young ones.  He still had a lot to learn.

“Go look for the note,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

When he was gone I found myself looking into that suicide’s face and sighing.  The suicides always get to me. Something about standing in the presence of someone so desperate to take control of their pain and their emotional devastation that they would resort to this makes me feel numb.

In the other room, the young officer was clumsily knocking around.  Something fell over and broke.  I almost called out to him to be careful, but held my tongue.  You see, my mind had drifted from my day job to my night job.  I was thinking about what he’d said about my next book.  So many people seem to have that opinion about horror, and about zombie fiction in particular.  To them, a book about shambling dead things eating the living must be nothing but gratuitous violence and gore.  What else could it be?

Well, I take exception to that.

I started writing because I was scared of the future.  My wife and I had just gotten married.  Then we had a daughter, and the world suddenly seemed so much more complex.  In the wink of an eye, I went from a carefree young cop – a lot like the one in the other room knocking stuff over – to a man with more responsibilities than he could count.  I had obligations and commitments coming at me from every angle.

I’d been writing stories for a good long while at that point, starting sometime in my early teens, but never with the intention of doing anything about them.  I would write them out on a yellow legal pad, staple the finished pages together, and leave them on the corner of my desk until the next idea came to me.

Never once did it occur to me to do something with what I’d written.  I just threw those stories away and forgot them.  But then came adulthood, and parenthood, and I found myself groping to put the world in order, to regain some of the control I felt I had lost.  I realized that writing could help me with that.  I realized that I could focus my anxieties and make something useful of them.

And so I started writing a science fiction novel.  It was a big space opera epic, and it was pure trash.  Every word of it was awful.

The reason?  Well, it wasn’t authentic.  It wasn’t me.

The real me, the kid who sat at his desk filling up yellow legal pads rather than going out bike riding with his friends, was a horror junkie.  I was crazy for the stuff.  Horror was my first literary love, and I figured seeing as love was what drove me to return to writing that I should write what I love. I was feeling like the world was rushing at me from every side, so I wrote a zombie story about characters who had the living dead rushing in at them from every side.  That’s when things started to click.  That’s when it all made sense.

But it wasn’t just that simple.  You see, I sincerely believe that fear is the most authentic, and the most useful, emotion available to the storyteller.  It is as vital as love, and indeed, gives love its profundity, for what makes love, and family, and everything we treasure so valuable but the fear that it could all be taken away in the blink of an eye.  For me, fear goes far beyond monsters.  It is the catalyst for my creative process, and without that creative process, I’m afraid I would wither up inside.  I’m not saying I’d end up like that suicide I just told you about if I couldn’t write anymore, nothing that melodramatic, but absence of that creative outlet would be a hole that nothing else could fill.

So that’s why I write the dark stuff.

Written and directed by brothers Howard J. Ford and Jon Ford, The Dead was filmed on location in Burkina Faso and Ghana, two regions that have, over the last few decades, seen plague and famine and countless acts of racial atrocity under the guise of civil war.  The setup feels perfect for a zombie film.  Plague makes for a logical cause for the outbreak.  Famine and starvation are mirrored in the population eating itself.  And death, as the great leveler, obfuscates the divisions of tribal and racial differences.  The Dead tries to address all of these points, but sabotages itself with a lackluster storyline.

Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) has just survived a plane crash and sets out across the sunbaked, unforgiving landscape of the Ivory Coast in the hopes of reaching safety and reuniting with his family back home.  At the same time, Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Osei) has broken away from his regiment to find his son.  These two very different men are forced to team up and help one another on their quests.

And therein lies the problem, I think.  In order to properly carry through on its promise of addressing West Africa’s many problems, the story needed more than a few token glimpses into village culture.  There were a few humanizing moments, especially between Sgt. Dembele and his grandmother, and between Murphy and the mother hoisting her newborn on him, but not even those scenes dug deep enough.  If a zombie is going to be effective as a metaphor it has to have established corollaries in the story.  Shawn of the Dead did this beautifully through a mirrored plot.  The first half of the film established the sense of aimless frustration and disenfranchisement of Britain’s youth, and then the second half of the film mirrored the events of the first half, but with zombies.  The point that we are all basically zombies already lands with perfect clarity.  The Dead could have been such a powerful statement on man’s cruelty to his fellow man, or a brilliant indictment of colonialism, or a call to arms against a continent starving to death, but it just didn’t reach that level of sophistication.

What we get instead is a rather pedestrian buddy/road trip story.  Perhaps that would have been enough of a frame to bring out the issues the film seems to want to tackle, but the script wasn’t even up to telling much of buddy movie.  Murphy and Dembele hardly speak at all during their time together, and when they do, the setups are obvious and clearly forced.

But the film, despite its weak storytelling, does have its positives.  The scenery, filmed in grainy 35 mm, seems to be on fire through most of the movie.  It’s stunningly beautiful, and goes further toward establishing Murphy’s exhaustion than Freeman’s acting.

Also, the zombies are truly frightening.  The faintly glowing eyes and legion of broken and mangled bodies make for some excellent scenes, and there are enough exploding heads and severed limbs and zombie feasting scenes to make most zombie fans feel right at home.

My score: 6 out of 10.

But enough from me.  Here’s Mark with some words about his new novel.  He was even kind enough to include an excerpt…

On Hollow Shell and why the Zombie Genre is Coming Back from the Dead

By: Mark C. Scioneaux

I cannot speak for all horror writers, but I think the first subject an aspiring writer tries to tackle is the zombie novel. There are a few reasons why the zombies are the popular choice, but mostly I believe it is due to the simplicity of the subject, and the way the story develops.

First, you have undead monsters. Scary, right? There is nothing more horrifying and heartbreaking than the thought of your mom, dad, sibling, child, etc. coming for you with no remembrance of who you were to them. All you are now is a meal. Second, it lets the writer craft a tale of survival, and doing what it takes to persevere during trying times of the walking dead. Third, and lastly, the aspiring writer can make a choice of where they want their novel to go. Gratuitous amounts of sex and gore? A cast of characters, ranging from your basic stereotypes to original and unlikely heroes? The writer is free to do what they want, for the world has ended and they are at the control panel. Writers are free to carve their own paths, and zombies help pave the way.

Why am I rambling about this? A few weeks ago, I received an email from a publisher. He was cancelling an anthology of which a story of mine had been submitted. His reasons were honest and understandable, but one didn’t sit well with me. He said the genre was flooded with bad zombie books. He wouldn’t make any return on his investment for the anthology he’d planned. The zombie genre was dead; a bullet put right between the eyes of the literary ghoul. To a point, I agreed. With the surge of self-publishing, it appears any and all aspiring authors, who don’t venture through traditional publishing venues for their work, have a zombie novel uploaded to Kindle. I’ve read more than my fair share. Some are great. Plenty are bad, often filled with poor editing and even worse writing. With the popularity of The Walking Dead leading the way, zombies have infiltrated every aspect of our pop culture. The public is burnt out, and who can really blame them? But I think they can be saved and restored back to the prominence and respect they deserve. It is my hope that my serial, Hollow Shell, assists in the revival of the zombie book.

When you start Hollow Shell, you’ll see I jammed my foot on the gas, and very rarely do I let up. The tale centers around one central character, Chris. He isn’t special, really; just an ordinary guy trying to do the right thing. He’s not a super soldier, or someone who can make headshots while sprinting through a field. He’s you. He’s me. I wanted to make him that way so you, the reader, would feel for him, think like him, and ultimately place yourself in his situation and contemplate over the choices you’d make if you were in his shoes. There is another character, Dawn, who joins Chris on a most epic journey. I won’t spoil it for you where they are going, or why, but it will be something pivotal that drives our main character forward, much to the dismay of the young woman accompanying him.

Chris and Dawn make a good pair, and I think they represent real people in a tragic situation. There is tension, violence, sex, and gore; all things one expects to happen when the laws and rules of society have been thrown out the window, but it’s kept in check. It’s balanced. It’s real. When I write, I try to put myself in my character’s shoes. How would I react? What would I say? How would I get out of this predicament? The result, I feel, is a story with realistic consequences to actions. I want to show the reader that yes, zombies are scary, but humans are so much worse. There will be times when you cheer for the zombies. Hopefully I’ve written enough moments that make your jaw drop and your fingers fumble your e-reader when you go to turn the page.

I plan to update the series every quarter. It will take time to not only write, but also go through the proper editing and proofreading channels. Self-publishing isn’t a bad thing. As a person who has been traditionally published and is co-owner of Nightscape Press, I feel this is what the Kindle was made for. But the key is you have to give the customer a professional product, and one you’d be happy to put your name on. I hope I have done this for you, the reader.

Hollow Shell is violent and tragic. It also has moments of humor and raw emotion. It is charged with a certain tension that I feel would exist in a situation like the one our two characters are thrust into. What I love the most about zombie literature isn’t so much the zombies, but the interaction of characters as the world falls apart. There are so many great opportunities for me as a writer to explore the human condition and psyche. That’s what draws me to post-apocalyptic books. The zombies are awesome. They give your characters a reason to act the way they do. But they’re only a part of the story. In Hollow Shell, you’ll care about the characters and realize that these are normal people trying to survive with the zombies as a backdrop. I hope you will keep up with Hollow Shell, because it’s going to be a wild ride.

In closing, I’d like to thank Joe McKinney for allowing me to share my thoughts on zombies. I hope you enjoy Hollow Shell and follow the series to the end, whenever that may be. Don’t abandon the zombie story. There are many good ones out there, and like the undead, they are going to just keep coming!

Aim for the head,

 Mark C. Scioneaux

To Buy Hollow Shell: Part 1 - http://www.amazon.com/Hollow-Shell-Zombie-Epic-ebook/dp/B009QRX20I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350429640&sr=8-1&keywords=hollow+shell+zombies

Talk about it on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HollowShellAZombieEpic

Friend the author: https://www.facebook.com/mscioneaux

A sample from Hollow Shell: Part 1

“What have I done?” Chris said as he slid down the living room wall. 

A faint trail of gray smoke rose from the gun, slowly dissipating into the atmosphere and stinging his running nose. His hands shook uncontrollably, so bad the gun almost fell from his limp grasp.

“Why, God? Jesus…Why?” he gasped, the tears starting to roll down his stubbly face.

With each passing moment, panic at the realization of what he had just done started to settle in. It was a sickening feeling developing deep in the pit of his stomach. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

Why am I calling out to God? he thought, as the idea of asking an all-mighty and benevolent creator for help had proved to be a waste of time. God didn’t seem to be present at the moment he put a bullet right between the eyes of his loving parents and once beautiful sister. Those same eyes that gazed down on him the day he was born. Eyes at one time filled with unconditional love, now glazed over in a pale aqua-blue glow. The look they once bore replaced with an insatiable hunger. Chris couldn’t let them live like that. His sister, so beautiful and caring; so young and full of dreams, had been turned into a deformed creature. There was nothing left of who she once was. The same sister Chris beat up a playground bully for. The same sister whose ice cream cone hit the floor and Chris readily gave her his. The thought of her pain made him tear up and the urge to scream rushed up through his throat like vomit.

She had come toward him with the same look as his parents, those hungry, lifeless eyes. His hand made steady by a surge of adrenalin gave him a brief moment of clarity and precision, though his vision had become blurry with tears. The sound of her moaning and shuffling feet became louder as she moved closer. He aimed, closing his eyes as he pulled the trigger, feeling the hammer kick back and the gun jolt in his hand. The abrupt discharge was followed by a soft thud. He opened his eyes and in that moment came to the sick realization that he was an only child and an orphan. All done by his own hands.  

One more bullet left in the chamber, he thought to himself, and that one is going to be for me.

The searing heat of the gun singed the inside of his mouth, but he didn’t care. One squeeze and everything would be all right. Just a loud noise, maybe a little pain and his troubles would cease to exist. Or maybe there wouldn’t be any pain at all. It would be a coward’s way out, but given the current events and his decaying mentality, it felt like the right thing to do. He closed his eyes tight as his finger slowly depressed the trigger. Just a little more, he thought. Just do it!

Well, JournalStone Publishing is bringing the concept back…and I get to be a part of it!

Today, JournalStone Publishing founder and Editor-in-Chief Christopher C. Payne made public the launch of JournalStone’s Double Down series.  These books will feature a short novel from an already established author paired with another short novel from a talented up and coming writer.  I’m going to be working with my good friend, Sanford Allen.  (You can learn more about Sanford here.)  Sanford and I belong to a writing group called Drafthouse, and over the years I have watched Sanford’s style develop and his voice become stronger and clearer.  Part rocker, part reporter, part poet of the weird, Sanford tells one hell of a good yarn, and he has a passion for music that rings through every word he writes.  When JournalStone approached me with the concept, and asked me if I had a talented undiscovered writer I’d be willing to work with, I immediately thought of Sanford.  I’m a huge fan of his stuff, and I think the rest of the world will be too after they see the novel he’s going to be publishing.

Our book will be coming out in the Summer of 2013, but there will be others in this ongoing series.  Right now, JournalStone has signed six teams, and more will follow in the next few months.  For now, here’s the lineup:

Gene O’Neill and Chris Mars

Gord Rollo and Rena Mason

Lisa Morton and Eric Guignard

Joe McKinney and Sanford Allen

Harry Shannon and Brett Talley

Jonathan Maberry and a writer yet to be determined

JournalStone Publishing is a small press company focusing on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, but they are large on quality and have a high level of commitment to putting out the best fiction available.  President and Editor-in-Chief Christopher C. Payne has led JS on a rapid climb to public recognition and respect within the professional writing community.  In fact, they were recently featured on the April issue of Publishers Weekly.  I’m excited to be working with them, and even more excited to be working with Sanford on what I think is going to be one of the best series in last two decades.  You can learn more about JournalStone here.

Right now, my new novella, THE DARK MAN, just came out! But before we get into that, I want to thank Joe McKinney for being so awesome as to let me commandeer his blog for a day. Thanks dude, you are freaking awesome.

In case you haven’t actually heard of the book, the following is the book’s short synopsis:

The human mind holds within its infinite reaches many of the greatest mysteries in the universe. Some are vast and wondrous, while others are chilling and nightmarish. Some mysteries are better left hidden in the dark corners of our minds, never breaking free of our subconscious.

Six high school students set out to explore these depths by sharing a mind altering substance on a night meant to be filled with both wild hallucinations and crazy antics. But the fun and games come to a shuddering halt when a strange man appears. This isn’t just any stranger. He is the Dark Man. Haunter of dreams and purveyor of nightmares. Dressed in a black suit and top hat, his pale skin and twisted grin promise a very deranged night of entertainment.

LINK:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Man-ebook/dp/B009DKCGAK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1348089055&sr=8-2&keywords=the+dark+man+p.+a.+douglas

I originally came up with the Dark Man when I was a stupid little teenager. Bet you couldn’t ever guess how. Either way, I know of a lot of people who have actually come into contact with this person while on such substances. Needless to say it had to be written about. The fact that more than a handful of people have seen the Dark Man in real life is creepy enough for me. Whether or not the content of the Dark Man stands true in this book is another thing entirely. So, to answer that age old question: what inspired the book; well there it is. I’ve been there and done that and don’t recommend ever going back.

If splatterpunk, grindhouse action is what you crave in a good horror read, then I would definitely recommend picking this one up. It’s a fast paced death to the finish. And with that, I think that covers it for me.

So what in the world is Blogging the Ghost?

Well, yes, it’s a version of the ever popular blog tour, that’s true.  But it is also the marriage of several happy accidents.

Here, I’ll explain.

You see, I recently sold a novel called Inheritance to Evil Jester Press.  (You can check out their website here.)  Inheritance, due out in November, 2012,  is a police procedural ghost tale.  It’s the story of Paul Henninger, a rookie cop trying to learn the ropes on the gang-infested streets of San Antonio’s east side.  It’s a challenging enough time in any cop’s career, but Paul has other problems.  The ghost of his father has returned, and he’s determined to use his black magic to bend Paul into an instrument of evil.  Soon Paul finds himself the number suspect in a series of grisly, cult-style murders, and as detectives close in, Paul finds himself torn between dark family secrets and his marriage and his oath as a cop.  He’s in for the fight of his life, one that threatens to destroy everything he’s ever cared about.

Now most of the people who read my books know me as a zombie writer, and there’s something to that.  I love zombies.  I love their rotten little hearts.  But my first love is the ghost story.  I have loved a good haunting since I was old enough to seek out books other than those my parents bought for me, and to this day, I can honestly say that ghost stories are the only stories that have ever truly frightened me.  So imagine my surprise and delight when I started working with Peter Giglio, my editor over at Evil Jester Press.  I had already read Peter’s novels Anon and A Spark in the Darkness (you can check out Peter Giglio’s Amazon page here), and loved them both.  But I had no idea Peter was such a student of the ghost story.  The man has an encylopedic knowledge of ghost fiction and movies and our conversations on the subject were a joy to me and highly educational.  I thought I knew a lot about ghosts, but Peter Giglio, he’s the man.  And he had just written a ghost story of his own, a wonderfully unique haunted house tale called Sunfall Manor.  Better still, he let me read it and extended me the honor of writing the introduction for it.  Needless to say I was thrilled.  Sunfall Manor instantly impressed me as an Existentialist nightmare of the first order.  It wasn’t just a horror tale existing to fill up space on Amazon’s already bloated shelves, but a book that had a reason for being.  Like the character of Jake La Motta from Raging Bull, the (for most of the story) nameless ghost in Giglio’s Sunfall Manor has a gut-wrenching need to understand who he is.  So, yeah, I read the book and was truly impressed.

But it gets better still, because at the same time all this was going on, I got an invitation to read another haunted house tale coming out very soon, this one called A Requiem for Dead Flies by Peter N. Dudar.  Peter Dudar’s work was new to me, though he is certainly not new to writing.  He’s published quite a few short stories in some high-powered anthologies, which I have sought out since reading A Requiem for Dead Flies.  Agreeing to read a book by an author you don’t know is a scary proposition.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve agreed to give something a read, only to find that the author can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag.  Having to tell some eager young writer that I can’t endorse a work is tough, so tough, in fact, that I’m about ready to give up the practice of blurbing books unless the author is already known to me.  I am happy to report that I didn’t have to deliver bad news to Peter N. Dudar, though.  You see, the man can freakin’ write!  His story of two brothers returning to their family farm to try to bring the place back to life by brewing bourbon stirs up some dark family memories, which in itself is a great setup, but it is the way that Dudar developed his story that really impressed me.  He establishes two narratives, one in the past, the other in the present, and weaves them into a perfectly realized conclusion.  It was the work of a real craftsman, and I was bowled over.

And then it occurred to us: we had all written ghost stories, and in each of those stories, family and the secrets that dwell within all families were at the core.  The three of us had tapped the same creative vein, each giving that initial impulse our own distinctive twist.

So we decided to pool our efforts for a good old fashioned blog tour…but with a twist.

We started out with a three-way podcast interview, hosted by Philip Perron of Dark Discussions.  You can check out that interview here.

What follows is the second installment of our Blogging the Ghost tour.  First up is Peter N. Dudar giving us the inside scoop on A Requiem for Dead Flies.  Immediately following is a list of my favorite ghost movies of all time.  And we round off the fun with a short story by Pete Giglio.  I hope you enjoy, and I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday, September 11, over at Peter Giglio’s blog for the second installment.

September is the month of the ghost, and Peter, Pete, and myself have got the scares well in hand.  Enjoy!

Peter N. Dudar Talks About A Requiem for Dead Flies

Like most good horror novels, REQUIEM began with a bad dream.  Or a series of bad dreams I’d had somewhere around five years ago.  My wife and I were in the process of adopting our daughter from China, which was a stressful life transition in itself, and at the same time my grandmother, Marguerite Wright, was in the process of dying.  Somewhere in that time frame I had a nightmare about my grandmother in her kitchen, talking with a collection of dead flies she had scattered across her tabletop.  When she saw me walk in, she immediately snatched up the flies and shoved them in her mouth, and began to eat them (as if that would erase what I’d just witnessed).  I woke up in a cold sweat, feeling quite shaken up, and made my way down to my computer, where I typed out exactly what happened in the dream.  The scene made it into the book, although when I wrote it, I had no context as to what caused it and where it would go from there.

In another dream, I was haunted by the RCA Victor radio (which my other grandmother had owned), that would turn on and off by itself.  It played a song I’d never heard, one about “Burning that old house down”, and when I awoke I immediately typed what I’d heard in my dream word-for-word, and that also made it into the story.  More nightmares ensued, and I borrowed unapologetically from them.

I had lots of time to kill.  The adoption was taking forever.  My grandmother’s decline felt about the same.  I spent a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring and wondering if it would be good news or bad news.  It became dreadful.  My stress relief came from sitting at the computer and working out this story that was now taking shape in my head.  We had picked out the name Vivian for our daughter-to-be, and when I needed a name for the old lady in my story, I plugged in Vivian just because it was all I could think about.  And the creepier the story became, the more flack I caught for naming the real monster of the story after my child.

I love ghost stories.  To my belief, there are two schools of ghost stories; the first is that the ghost is NEVER the antagonist, but merely serves as a catalyst for some deeper, more sinister conflict (i.e. Hamlet’s ghostly dad, begging to be avenged).  The second is that the ghost IS the antagonist, and the whole conflict is locked into man vs. supernatural.  I subscribe to the former, and worked very hard to shape REQUIEM into a tale of terrible family secrets, and how far we will go to cover them up.  I restricted the supernatural elements to simply setting tone and atmosphere, and I think it lends more credibility to the story.  We know the protagonist is an unreliable character (if I’ve done my job correctly), and that he is, indeed, haunted on a psychological level.  Having the ghostly visitings and supernatural occurrences are what drive the storyline and help develop character arcs for the MacAuley brothers while they stay in the house on Battle View Farm.

And the flies…don’t they make you feel all oogey?  I think there’s a psychological component about them I hadn’t anticipated.  Miners used to bring caged canaries down into the mines with them as an early warning detection.  If the bird dropped dead, it meant that there were toxic gases about and that they should leave and find safety immediately.  There’s a windowsill just above my kitchen sink, and now and then when I’m washing the dishes, I’ll see a dead fly on the sill, and it has that same effect on me.  Am I breathing in something lethal?  Should I drop what I’m doing and get out?  Once they die, they always seem to topple over, with two or three legs poking helplessly into the air.  It’s disgusting and unnatural to see.

Seeing one is bad enough.  What if there was a collection of them?  What if they spelled something out?  Their bodies arranged into words, perhaps by invisible hands.  What would you do?   (It’s a worthy experiment.  If you have enough dead flies in your house, why not pick them up and leave a loved one a message with them?)

My grandmother lived long enough to see a photograph of our daughter, but passed away the week before we were supposed to leave for China and bring her home.  The adoption phone call came first, and filled me with gladness.  Then came the call about grandma’s passing.  The novel was put on hold as we were busy with life and with family business.  A part of which was the future of our family farm, where my grandparents had lived all their lives.  My younger brother and I had long discussions about it.  Battle View Farm is a very real place, and we both dreamed of one day living in that house.  My brother thought it would be cool to grow our own corn and distill bourbon there.  This provided the basic seed of my novel.  That “what if?” was all I needed.  As in, “What if we moved back into the house on Battle View Farm?”  And “…what if it was haunted?”

The original title for the book was THE MADNESS OF GRANDMA VIVIAN.  When we came home from China, I went back to writing the manuscript full tilt.  As I wrote, I often asked my pal, L.L. Soares for input.  The first thing he told me was, “I hate the name.  You have to change the name.”  So I changed the title to A REQUIEM FOR DUST AND BONES.  By then, I was adding subplots and subtexts to direct the story.  I’d forged the story about the miscarriage and how it impacted the rest of the events.  I also began structuring the novel into a three-act play, and named each part after a musical movement, in keeping with the concept of the requiem.  I wrote to L.L. and asked him if he liked my new title better, to which he replied, “No, that still sucks.”  I was crushed.  Like a dead fly.

When I finished the rough draft, I sent it to L.L., and he did the first round of revisions.  I got back a document file filled with red lines and marks and marginal notes to where he felt the story needed adjusting.  There were a whole lot of red marks, and I felt like I was back in high school.  I did a whole lot of learning as I combed through each correction and deleted errata.  It was painful.  When I finished that round of revision, I felt deflated and very unsure that the story was any good at all.  So I left the file on my hard drive and did nothing with it for the better part of two years.

This past January, I found myself revisiting REQUIEM.  Enough time had passed that I felt I could be objective about it again, and time gave me a fresh perspective on it.  I started reading, and was shocked at how good it was.  It needed a lot of polishing…and some minor adjustments to correct continuity and make sure all questions were answered by the final page.  I added three new chapters, and then finally felt pleased enough to call it complete.  At the time, I had made acquaintances with Bob Wilson and Mark Scioneaux, who were in the process of editing HORROR FOR GOOD with R.J. Cavender of Cutting Block Press.  They had read a story I’d submitted and loved it, but weren’t able to use it for the anthology.  Bob and Mark were also busy putting together a publishing house of their own, so I asked them if they would look at my manuscript.  They agreed, so I sent the file.  In the meantime, I was preparing a package to send to Tor Books.  They required a 10-page synopsis of the manuscript, which was a drag.  I’d never written a synopsis of my own work before.  It’s like writing a book report on your own book.  It’s freakin’ homework!  I sat down and wrote it, and put the package together to mail the next morning when I got home from work.  Bob Wilson sent my acceptance email that very night.  When I came home from work that morning, I picked up the package and tossed it into the trashcan.

I’m extremely pleased with this book.  I was able to explore a lot of my own fears in it; the fear of abusive adults, the fear of basements, the fear of death, and of course, the fear of ghosts.  After all, every single one of us will die one day, and nobody really knows where our souls roam once our bodies return to the earth.  And nobody every escapes madness unscathed.

P.N.D.

For more information on Peter N. Dudar check out his Amazon Author’s page here.

Joe McKinney’s Favorite Ghost Movies…That Aren’t The Shining

The Innocents

This 1961 black and white classic, a Jack Clayton film version of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, is a great example of how you can scare the crap out of people with almost no special effects.  I’ve said before that Hollywood is just a bunch of kids with expensive toys, and the more toys you give them, the bigger mess they’ll make.  This is the kind of movie I hope filmmakers will return to, perhaps in some sort of reactionary way, abandoning the special effects and big bursts of scary music in favor of the far more subtle tricks of mood and tight dialogue to create terrifying pictures.

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Okay, this one may raise a few eyebrows.  Made in 2002, this film featured a great cast giving solid performances through and through, a claustrophobic setting, and a great murder mystery to impart some depth to the spooky occurrences.  Yet it got little or no love from audiences or critics, and is, today, largely forgotten I think.  Still, I loved this film, not only because it featured a solid ghost story, but because it takes place onboard a WWII American submarine…and here I’ll confess to a hobby of mine that I haven’t really made public.  I absolutely love submarines, especially WWII subs.  I remember reading a book called WAHOO! The War Patrols of America’s Most Successful Submarine during my early teens, and was forever hooked.  I now own a massive collection of books and movies concerning WWII subs, including some unpublished war patrol journals.  Seeing two of my great loves in the same movie sent me into ghost movie heaven!

Ringu

I think most ghost movie fans fell in love with the Asian movement that burst onto the scene with Ringu back in 1998.  What an amazing film.  Like most ghost tales, it uses a crime for its backstory, but the Kabuki theater-influenced ghost effects were something totally new for most American audiences, and I for one remember being genuinely creeped out in a way I hadn’t been since I was a kid.  This film had such an impact that it ushered in a whole flood of Asian-inspired ghost movies, from Dark Water to The Grudge and many others.   This one, though, was the source, and Hollywood is still going back to the well (Get it? Heh? Going back to the well?  Wink, wink.) for more J-Horror inspiration, as seen in the latest incarnation of Susan Hill’s wonderful Victorian-inspired haunted house tale, The Woman in Black.

The Others

Here we go again, revisiting Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.  Amazing how a book I found so incredibly boring could be adapted into so many wonderful films, but there you have it!  Plus, this one’s got Nicole Kidman, who’s pretty damn sexy, even when she’s acting bat shit crazy.  Great atmosphere, great acting, and a wonderful little twist make this film one of my all time favorites.  Plus, did I mention it’s got Nicole Kidman?  Cuz it does!

The Fog

I saw this one during my middle school years and never forgot it.  From John Houseman’s unsettling intro to the creeping terror of the fog rolling in to the pirates to the satisfying, if a little predictable, twist ending, this film hit all my buttons.  And of course it wouldn’t be a John Carpenter film without some amazingly frightening scenes, such as the scene where the corpse under the sheet sits up behind Jamie Lee Curtis to the pirate ghosts standing in waist deep fog in the church.  There was a remake to this one, but it lacked that certain eerie something that made the original so much fun.  Well worth a re-watching, if it’s been a while since you last checked this one out.

Stir of Echoes

This one was kind of a strange experience for me.  Ordinarily, I love the works of Richard Matheson, who ranks high in our pantheon of great horror writers.  But Stir of Echoes, as a book, felt lackluster to me.  It didn’t give me the willies the way some of Matheson’s other works have done.  But the movie, adapted from the novel by screenwriter David Koepp, was a first rate ghost story.  Here again we have a crime for a backstory, but the way in which the layers of that crime are revealed so impressed me that it has since become a major influence on my own writing.  Plus, I loved the bit about the orange juice!

The Changeling

Not the Angelina Jolie movie that came out a few years ago, but the George C. Scott masterpiece of low budget terror!  Yet another ghost story that uses a crime for its backstory, this one easily equals The Innocents in its ability to evoke pure terror with little or no special effects.  This one may very well be my favorite ghost story/haunted house tale of all time, and even after countless viewings, it still has the ability to make me look over my shoulder and wonder what’s going on at the top of the stairs.  Truly a masterpiece that deserves another viewing if you haven’t seen it in a while.

Peter Giglio’s “Tracking the Scent”

(Copyright © 2011 by Peter Giglio. Originally appeared in Big Book of New Short Horror (Pill Hill Press).)

Despite his dark actions moments earlier, Selim smiled as he slumped into the couch with Lucky, his dog and only friend. Laughing at something stupid on TV, he tossed the dog a treat. “Good boy,” he cooed.

Lacey stood in the dark hallway, staring at them. Anger boiled within, threatening to send her into a fit of rage.  But such an action, her voice of self-preservation warned, would make the night darker; would make him more violent.

There was a spasm in her stomach. Dull pain intensified, tightening into a burning knot of agony. Nauseous, she stumbled into the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

Dark blood…

Not ready to die, she thought.

Looking into the mirror, she inspected the bruise by her ear and the cut on her chin.

Payback, a voice inside cried.

Her reflection stared at her as she blocked out physical pain, thinking of ways to hurt Selim.

The solution hit her.

She splashed water on her face, spit strands of pink saliva into the bloody basin. Then she looked back at the mirror.

Her reflection was smiling.

***

Miles drained his fourth beer and gazed across the table at her. “Why do you push me away, Lace?”

“I don’t . . . mean to.” She looked down at her phone, pretended to read a text message, and hoped he would change the subject soon.

“You must see the way I look at you at work? You flirt with me, accept my invitations. But every time we go out, you seem, I don’t know . . . someplace else?”

Lacey put her phone in her purse, then, with a sigh, rested her chin in an upturned palm. “I’m not ready to trust.”

He nodded, flagging down a waitress. “What’ll you have?”

“No more for me,” she said. Hooking her purse strap on her shoulder, she met his eyes for the first time all night. “It’s getting late, and I’m feeling buzzed. I should get going.”

He stood, flashed a brief but warm smile, and gave her a hug she half-heartedly returned.

Walking to her car, she laughed. “I don’t need him,” she shouted. “I don’t need anyone.”

Fumbling in her purse for her keys, she noticed something wrong with her driver’s side door. “Christ,” she muttered. Crouching low for a closer look, she twisted the head of her keychain-flashlight, shined the beam across the damage. Four diagonal scratches, close together, ran from the mirror to the bottom of the door.

Despite the summer warmth, she felt a sudden chill. Trembling, she folded her arms and closed her eyes.

In the distance, a dog barked.

Her eyes shot open, gaze frantic.

It was late, only the middle of the week, downtown devoid of activity. Her breathing quickened, street lights closing in.

An icy hand gripped her shoulder.

Spinning around, she screamed, jabbing her car key forward.

“Ouch,” the stranger cried.

No. Not a stranger. It was Miles. “I’m so sorry.” She threw her arms around him. “Did I hurt you?” she asked, head nuzzled against his chest.

“No…uh, I’ll be all right,” he said, wincing. Gently wrapping his arms around her waist, he asked, “What happened?”

She gazed up with tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

***

It had been three years since she’d let a man touch her—really touch her. In that time, she hadn’t longed for companionship. She was happy alone. But lying in bed, strong arms around her, she listened to him breathe and felt safe.

Drifting to sleep, she was startled by a noise. It was faint at first. Something rattling in the hallway air vent, she reasoned. Maybe a tree branch scraping the side of the house, but the noise wasn’t coming from outside.

It was coming from inside, getting louder.

Something scratched at the bedroom door.

Quaking like a frightened child, she threw covers over her head. She tried to block out the scratching sound, but it followed her beneath the blankets.

A familiar whimper—Lucky’s whimper!—made her bolt upright.

She gasped, watching water seep in under the door.

The whimpering intensified, echoing through her head. Paws quickened. The water, dark by the light of the moon, spread in all directions.

“No,” she moaned, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Rivulets split off from the growing body of water, sluicing in rapid patterns until they spelled a word on the hardwood floor.

FOUND.

Unable to breathe, Lacey leapt from bed and ran to the door, bare feet splashing through the deepening puddle. She flipped on the light.

Squinting, Miles rose on one elbow.  “What’s going on, Lacey?”

The water was gone. The scratching had stopped. Slowly, she exhaled and crumpled to the floor.

Miles was at her side. Stroking her long black hair, he whispered assurances she couldn’t make out above the din of her frazzled psyche. She felt herself lifted, then placed gently on the bed.

When she opened her eyes, she met Miles’ concerned stare.  She wanted to trust him, wanted to tell him what she’d seen, but feared he would think she was insane.

Maybe I am insane, she thought with a shudder.

“I had a bad dream.” There was a hint of shame in her voice.

His embrace tightened. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”

***

“So how are things with Miles?” Dr. Stevenson asked.

Stunned, Lacey looked away, frowning.

“Did I hit a nerve?” A long pause, then, “We slept together.”

Dr. Stevenson pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, crossing her legs. Eyes compassionate, tone soothing, she said, “That can be a very difficult step for someone who has been through what you have. Are you upset? Do you regret—”

“No,” Lacey snapped. “It’s just that…other things have started to happen. Strange things.”

“Strange?”

“Do you believe a person can be haunted?”

Dr. Stevenson nodded. “I see it all the time. Whether caused by guilt, or—”

“No. Do you believe the dead can haunt us, actually haunt us?”

“Do I believe in ghosts?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you think is haunting you, Lacey?”

“Selim…or…I don’t know.”

“Is it possible you feel guilty for taking your new relationship to an intimate level? I don’t need to remind you, what happened to Selim isn’t your fault. Suicide is—”

“I know, but—”

“You left him because he was beating you. You did the right thing. I wish more women in your situation would do what you did. Think of it this way—when he no longer had you to abuse, he turned his anger inward.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she told Dr. Stevenson about the strange events of the previous night, leaving nothing out.

“So these occurrences didn’t start after you slept with Miles?”

“No. Well, some happened before, some after. But they started before.”

Dr. Stevenson nodded. “Interesting.”

“I wouldn’t have slept with him if I hadn’t been so vulnerable, so weak. It’s like…I don’t know…like the events pushed us together in a way.”

“Perhaps your subconscious was acting on need. You’ve told me that you like Miles, that you trust him.”

“I do. For three years, I didn’t talk to anyone, except to say hello or goodbye. Other than occasional calls from my ex-mother-in-law, each more horrifying than the last, I rarely spoke to anyone.

“Then last month, he started working in the office. I caught him staring at me, and was terrified at first, but there’s something different about him; something in his eyes.”

Dr. Stevenson flashed a bright smile, opening her hands wide. “Then this is a good thing, a step in the right direction?”

Lacey nodded.

***

Walking back to the office, Lacey’s was in a better mood. Then her cell phone vibrated against her leg. She snatched the phone from her pocket and looked at the display screen.

Iman.

She cringed at her ex-mother-in-law’s name and clutched the phone in a tightening grip, the call rolling to voicemail.

Back at her desk, she studied the blue Nokia readout. Voicemail received, the phone informed her, tempted her. Curious, she was about to listen to the message when—

“Hard at work, I see,” Tony Connolly said, straightening his tie.

Sheepishly looking up, she replied, “Hello, Mr. Connolly.”

“There’s someone new I’d like you to meet, if you’re not too busy.”

“Of course.” Standing, she tried to flatten the wrinkles in her slacks with a few frantic swipes. Forcing her smile to remain in place, she followed Connolly to Miles’ desk. But when she reached the desk, she felt a cold shiver. Miles wasn’t sitting at his desk. And his things were gone. In his place was a short, plump man.

“Lacey Christopher, I’d like you to meet Louis Dickenson.”

She shook the new guy’s hand. Then, with an expression of concern, she turned to Connolly. “What about Miles?”

“Miles?” Connolly’s smile dissolved. “Did we forget to reimburse your expense report?”

“No, he sits here, has sat here for the last month.”

“You must be mistaken. This desk has been empty for more than six months. And I don’t know a Miles who works here.”

Lacey staggered backward, smashing into the sharp edge of a cubicle wall. Pain radiated through her spine as she struggled for composure.

“Are you okay?” Louis asked, his voice a nasally whine.

Connolly reached out to her as she turned away.

She ran to her desk, grabbed her purse and phone, and dashed for the nearest exit. She collided with a man as he stepped off the elevator. “Excuse me,” she blurted, slipping past him.

“Is everything okay?” he asked, picking up his briefcase.

Repeatedly pushing the button for the main floor, she ignored the question. Mercifully, the doors started closing as Connolly reached the elevator.

“It’s an emergency,” she called out, doors snapping shut.

Breathing heavily, she winced from the pain in her back, watching digital numbers descend:  7…6…5…

The elevator stopped with a metallic clang and a jarring bob.

Heart pounding, eyes burning, she waited for the doors to open, or the car to move. “Please, please, please…”

When nothing happened, she screamed, “Help me!”

Faint scratching came from above.

She tried her cell phone. No signal.

She grabbed the handset of the emergency phone. The line was dead.

Crying and shaking, she crouched in a corner. “Help me!” she screamed again. But the only response was the screech of claws on metal.

She rushed into another corner. The elevator car bobbed again, and her stomach churned.

Florescent lights cut out with a faint buzz, leaving her in darkness.

She flipped open her cell, dimly illuminating the space around her.

Loud canine barks erupted from all sides.

She jerked back, her phone slipping from her grip.

Again in darkness, she ran her palms across the grungy floor. She found her phone, flipped it open, and turned the display screen into the gloom. Light reflected from narrow, predacious eyes: Lucky’s eyes. He growled, baring sharp teeth. Bathed in dim light, white fur looked blue. Backend high, head low, Lucky was ready to pounce.

She heard the sound of running water, felt the spray of it on her neck, face, and arms.

“Help me,” she cried.

Lucky lunged.

She fell back, water showering down, disorienting her. Front paws pressed into her chest, his rancid snout looming above her face.

“He tracked you,” Selim’s voice echoed through the small space. “He tracked your scent.”

She screamed.

Then everything went completely dark.

***

She opened her eyes and saw the hazy, upside-down outline of a police officer. Then, sight sharpening, she realized it wasn’t a cop. It was one of the building’s security guards.

“I think she had a panic attack,” someone said.

“Miss?” the security guard said.

“What?” Lacey asked. Sitting up, she felt dizzy. After a few deep breaths, relative normalcy returned.

The guard handed her a paper cup filled with water.  She drank as he shooed away a group of curious observers. He turned his attention back to her, flashing a warm smile. “Should I call someone for you?”

“No,” Lacey said. “I…I’ll be all right now. Thank you.”

She got up, grabbed her purse, and looked around for her phone.

“Looking for this?” He handed her the cell. “It was on the floor of the elevator beside you. Guess you were trying to make a call when you fainted, huh?”

“Something like that,” she muttered. She apologized for causing trouble and then fled into the bright, summer day.

A few blocks away from the office, she sat on a bus-stop bench and flipped open her phone. She accessed voicemail and listened to unheard message.

“I thought you might like to know that Selim’s beloved dog died last month.” Iman’s shrill voice cut to the quick. “That dog was never the same after Selim died; he was always so sick. When he got very sick, I took him to a doctor—a special doctor, one who works in the spirit world.”  Iman cackled. “And I took some of your things to the doctor, some of the things you left behind when you ran away from Portland, when you ran away from my Selim.

“When Lucky died, he was at peace, head resting on your sweater…tracking the scent of your foul, whorish odor. I didn’t want to call you today, but I’ve been advised by a higher authority that the circle will not be closed until I say goodbye. So goodbye, Lacey.”

Lacey went numb. She considered calling Iman, then decided she didn’t want to hear the woman’s crazy voice any more than she had to. Listlessly, she started for home.

Just short of her apartment, she stopped at The Mill, a cafe she frequented.

Staring at her reflection in a steaming cup of black coffee, her mind fell back into a dark moment.

Lucky thrashed in the bathtub, his claws raking her arms, drawing blood. Gripping the dog’s taught neck, she forced his head beneath the water. Climbing into the tub, she pinned the dog down, powerful limbs weakening as bubbles rose from his snout.

Overcome by the wretchedness of her actions, she let go.

The wet dog limped from the tub, staring up with betrayed eyes.

“I’m sorry, Lucky,” she said. 

She approached him with a towel. “It was just a bath, honey. Let me dry you off.”

But Lucky cowered in a corner.

She knew how the dog felt.

She couldn’t believe what she’d become.

Later that day, her car was packed and she was ready to leave for good. But before fleeing, she made one last effort to reconcile with the dog.

She found him in the corner of Selim’s closet, hiding behind a basket of dirty laundry, trembling. When she reached out, he growled, showing teeth.

Now, her dark reflection wept in the untouched mug.

Hands shaking, she selected Miles’ name from the contact list on her phone. She looked at the entry for a moment, five letters jumbling in her unfocused eyes.

Miles…

Selim…

How did I miss that? she thought. She had moved beyond shock, into the realm of acceptance.

She pressed SEND, put the phone to her ear.

“Hello, Lacey,” he answered.

“Hi, Selim,” she intoned.

“I know what you did.”

“I know.”

“Are you coming home now? Are you ready to pay?”

“Haven’t you done enough?”

“Yes, I have. But Lucky isn’t done with you yet.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she said, then snapped the phone shut.

This time, she knew she had it coming.

For more information on Peter Giglio check out his website and blog:

www.petergiglio.com

www.petergiglioauthor.blogspot.com