Tag fear

Fiction Fragments: Gemma Files

Michelle R. Lane 1 Comment

Last week I wrapped up my month-long celebration of black women horror writers for Women in Horror Month/Black History Month with an interview with Zin E. Rocklyn, a.k.a. Teri Clarke. If you haven’t had a chance to read all of the interviews I did last month, take some time and and get caught up now. These women have a lot to say about writing horror while black and female and how their personal experiences and intersectionalities have an impact on what they write about.

This week, Girl Meets Monster is back to business as usual, with a fragment and an interview with Gemma Files.

Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published four collections of short work, three collections of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Adult Novel). She has a new story collection just out from Grimscribe Press (In This Endlessness, Our End), and another upcoming.

Three Questions

GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Gemma. Thank you for taking time to chat with me a bit. Tell me about your newest collection of stories, In This Endlessness, Our End. Is there an overarching theme, or threads that connect the stories? Are all of the stories new, or are there some reprints? How do you decide which stories to include? Did you have a plan in mind when you started the collection?

GF: So, the funny thing is that as it turned out, all the stories in this collection were essentially written—finished, at any rate—within the time-period from about a year before Trump’s election to almost the end of his (hopefully only) term in office. The fact that they were originally intended to be published by my former home imprint, ChiZine Publications, which suddenly and acrimoniously collapsed in November of 2019, is also interesting, in hindsight; so is the fact that Jon Padgett at Grimscribe chose to pick the book up during a global pandemic. Which means that the overarching theme of all these stories is the sort of fear you feel when the world you think you know tilts on you in a way which only seems “sudden” at the moment it happens, as well as the guilt and grief which come when you realize you saw [this, whatever “this” is] coming from miles away, and simply chose to ignore those warning signs as they mounted because…well, because you wanted to. Because you liked your life, and the illusions it was rooted in. Because you hoped things had gotten better, and you forgot that every ten years, a generation comes of age who haven’t lived through the same things you have, so they have to have experiences which will prove the same basic facts about human nature over and over and over again. Etc.

It’s easy to say, of course, that the theme of every horror collection is fear. But I do find it oddly significant that the first story in the TOC—“This Is How It Goes”—happens to be set during the aftermath of a body horror plague that rips around the world like a creepypasta come true, moving from urban myth/internet rumour to immediate reality within forty-eight hours at the most. When I read it on The Outer Dark Podcast recently, I called it a “pre-pandemic post-pandemic tale.” So, these particular stories ring with a very current sort of fear, for me. Whether other people will see it that way as well is up to them, I guess.

The stories are all reprints, basically, though because I often get published in fairly obscure places, I expect that a lot of them will be new to most readers aside from those solicited by people like Ellen Datlow (“Cut Frame,” from her Hollywood Horror anthology Final Cuts; “The Puppet Motel,” from Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories). And no, I didn’t have this in mind when I put the book together, it just shook out that way. The one thing I have in common with the Joker is I’m not much of a planner.

GMM: So, you mention that you’ve written a story-cycle and a Weird Western series. What is the difference between a story-cycle and a series, and how does your process change from project to project–short stories versus stand-alone novels versus a series, etc.? Do you decide on what shape your stories will take before you write them, or do the stories evolve into the appropriate length to fit the story as you write them?

GF: The Weird Western series—my Hexslinger books—basically filled in a three-act, chapter-driven narrative over three separate novels. I’d made an outline at the very beginning for what I thought would be one book (A Book of Tongues), only to find that by the time I’d written 100,000 words I’d only gotten to what was fairly obviously the first break-point; I kept to that outline throughout, moving through it linearly, as if I was writing a trilogy of screenplays. The story-cycle, on the other hand—We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven—was built around a base of stories reprinted and slightly polished from earlier in my career, ones which inhabited an urban paranormal universe I only slowly realized was anchored by the same cast of characters, all of whom were literally related to each other. I sprinkled them through in non-linear order, introducing those characters and the five families they belonged to as I went, while also writing/finishing four new novellas that made these connections clear and brought the overall story to a climax. I like to call it my Alice Munro book, except with evil angels, witches, monster-killing nuns and the Fae.

As for whether I made either of those decisions strategically…yeah, not really. Sometimes I think the only method I have for knowing if a story is finished is: “Does it feel ‘right?’ Okay, then.” I do know that with the Five-Family Coven stuff, I essentially wanted to prove to myself that polite, clean Toronto, Canada could be just as dark, weird and potentially awful as any other city written about from that angle by one of its citizens. It started out as what I called my Toronto Dark phase, then got more and more complicated, like a bunch of in-jokes which grew legs and started to walk on their own. And even now, I still continue to use that universe as the back-story of a lot of my more recent tales; a minor character from We Will All Go Down Together plays a main role in “Cut Frame,” for example, plus a minor role in “The Puppet Motel.” It’s there if you look for it. 

Otherwise, the shape of a story is usually dictated by the voice of the person who’s telling it, or the perspective of the person who’s living it. My plots are often a little more complicated than they need to be, but I don’t believe that plot and character can be completely separated. It’s not just “this happened,” it’s “this happened, because someone did something.” As Bill Duke says in Menace 2 Society, speaking for/to almost all my protagonists, “You know you fucked up, right?”

GMM: Why horror? What draws you to the genre? Have you written in other genres? What do you like most about horror as a writer? As a reader? After winning the Shirley Jackson Award, did you automatically feel like a bonafide horror writer, or do you still struggle with impostor syndrome? Has winning awards changed you as a writer?

GF: A deep and sparkling darkness has always been what draws me towards the things I love, at least in terms of art. I mean, I started out ostensibly liking science fiction, but soon figured out A) what I liked was actually space opera, because B) I’m really not that great with science, outside the purely biological. Also, my formative life was full of fear, so horror seemed like “home” to me…normal, natural, understandable.

Part of my journey after my son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder was coming to realize that if a diagnosis of Asperger’s had been something people were looking for (in girls, or at all) back when I was at my worst as a kid, I might well have gotten one. I’m 52 now, so I’ve worked very hard to pass as neurotypical, but most of my life has been spent second-guessing my own instincts and berating myself for being born somehow “wrong.” The fact that that alone doesn’t make me super-different from a lot of other similarly diverse people isn’t lost on me, either; I’ve gotten away with a lot over the years, on account of reading as a typical cishet white lady. But again, I think it still has a lot to do with me feeling as if horror is the place where all the non-default people can meet, a place where becoming or realizing you’ve always been what most people see as “a monster” might not be such a bad thing.

“…horror is the place where all the non-default people can meet, a place where becoming or realizing you’ve always been what most people see as “a monster” might not be such a bad thing.”

I spent my high school years reading Tanith Lee, Peter Straub and Clive Barker, my university years reading Caitlin R. Kiernan, Billy Martin (then Poppy Z. Brite) and Kathe Koja. My favourite movies were things like Nightbreed and Near Dark, stuff about found families bound together by hunger rather than affinity. And all of this stuff came together in my writing, which from the very beginning was dictated by the old adage that if you can’t find what you want in the world, you may well be forced to make some. One of the things I’ve become very proud of, over the years, is the idea that I’ve somehow indulged or inspired other people doing the same thing, giving way to their own ids/needs and letting the devil drive. Someone told me once that my story “Kissing Carrion” told her it was okay for women to do that, and I was like: “Oh, the story about a woman who makes a puppets out of a human corpse so she can fuck her necrophile boyfriend with it, while the ghost that used to be the corpse hovers nearby invisibly going WHAAAATTTT?!? Cool!” I’m down for monster pride in any and every form.

Winning the Shirley Jackson Award for Experimental Film was a huge surprise, but that was also absolutely the award I knew I’d be happiest winning, because I’ve never pretended to be anything but a horror writer. Even my fantasy is always “dark”; even my nonfiction is always Weird. As Yukio Mishima put it, my heart’s yearning has always been to night, and death, and blood. But yeah, imposter syndrome truly doesn’t go away. I fight it by writing to a deadline, writing like it’s a job, and never fooling myself into thinking that the stuff which comes out of me is somehow so pure and beautiful it doesn’t need to be cut, tweaked or otherwise rewritten. Things can always get better, and an outside eye is a gift.

500+ WORDS OF SOMETHING NEW

Gemma Files

One thing a job like mine teaches is that people will say all sorts of things when they’re dying. It’s like the process breaks something open inside them, some long-buried infectious reservoir, a quick-draining sick-pocket. They don’t even have to know what’s happening, let alone accept it; they might still be entirely convinced they’ll survive, but it doesn’t matter. A sort of punch-drunkenness takes over, an irrepressible urge to confess.

 “I put my hand under the pillow, and that’s where I found it,” Mrs Camp told me, one morning, as I stripped her mattress so I could check it for night-sweat and all sorts of other fluids. “Then it bit down, so I couldn’t get it out again.”

“Found what, ma’am?” I asked, only half-listening. Wet bedsheets I could deal with; did, almost every day, and hardly just with her. It was sponging down the rubber mattress covers that always took up the most time, because we had to move the clients while they dried; bleach on urine never is the best smell, and it does tend to stick around. Some of (the bulk of) the lazy fools I worked with would just stick whoever they’d cleaned up for back in bed immediately, ignoring the fact that bedsores don’t react any better when crossed with cleaning product than feeble lungs do when exposed to corrosive funk. But screw it—no matter how much I longed to get shed of this job, I was determined to at least be a little better at it than those assholes.

“A mouth, wide open, like I said already. With teeth.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” I told her, to which she smiled, revealing her own teeth.They looked like a busted-up china doll’s.

“No, it does not. Are you married, Kevin?”

“KeVon, ma’am. And no.”

“Oh, that’s a shame, then—big, good-looking fellow like you. I bet you’ve made a fair deal of women cry, in your time.”

Probably, I thought, the faces of all those poor girls I’d “dated” in high school suddenly coming back to me in a weird sort of flip-book flash, fluttering across my inner eye before breaking apart against the hard bone bell of my skull, disappearing into darkness. But not ’cause I wanted to, no, ma’am. Only ’cause I wasn’t strong enough yet to know who I really was, let alone to say it. 

“I do try not to, ma’am,” I told her, angling her wheelchair next to the flower-pots where I knew she liked it best. Those gardenias, heads bent over and dripping, plumped up fulsome on the very edge of decay. You could just see her faded eyes light up at the sight of them.

“Beautiful,” she told me. “Oh, Kevin. There’s still a whole lot to love in this world, isn’t there? Even now. Even here.”

“Yes, ma’am, there sure is.”

She nodded, sunk in thought. Then whispered, almost to herself, as I was turning back to see what might or might not yet be on offer from the kitchen: “But then the sun goes down and the lights go out. Then I go out, and they come in.”

At that last part, my heart gave a strange little leap, tapping itself against my breastbone like it was knocking on some door hid inside my chest. “Who’s that, ma’am?” I asked her, standing there with my hip thrown out so awkward it hurt, but not quite able to go on to my next step ’til she replied.

(God only knew, the membrane between sleep and death certainly did seem to stretch thin enough to see things through, sometimes, in life’s very last stages. Things you shouldn’t be able to see, under more normal circumstances.)

Mrs Camp just kept on staring at those damn flowers, though, like she was waiting for them to speak instead. “Oh, nothing at all, I’m sure, Kevin,” was all she said, at last. “Must be I’m being silly—mixing stuff up. Old people do that, you know.”

“Yes ma’am,” I agreed. “And young people too, on occasion.”

She nodded and lowered what she had left for lashes, then threw me a glance I’d’ve surely called flirty if she weren’t terminal, and knew herself to be so.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “That’s surely true.”

Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!

Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.

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Fiction Fragments: Todd Keisling

Michelle R. Lane 1 Comment

Last week I had a great chat about comics and writing inspiration with writer and illustrator, Cat Scully. This week, Girl Meets Monster is thrilled to welcome horror writer Todd Keisling.

todd 1 bw KodaKrome

Todd Keisling is a writer and designer of the horrific and strange. He is an author of several books, including Devil’s Creek, The Final Reconciliation, and Ugly Little Things: Collected Horrors, among other shorter works.

A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was a finalist for the Indie Book Award in Horror & Suspense (2013).

He is a former editor for The Self-Publishing Review, hosted Crystal Lake Publishing’s Beneath the Lake interview series, and co-hosted the popular live YouTube series Awkward Conversations with Geeky Writers alongside Mercedes M. Yardley, Anthony J. Rapino, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, Eryk Pruitt, and Amelia Bennett.

He dabbles in graphic design under the moniker of Dullington Design Co., and his work has graced the covers of titles published by Silver Shamrock Publishing, Flame Tree Press, Third Crow Press, Crystal Lake Publishing, Precipice Books, and Nightscape Publishing.

His written work has been praised by Cemetery Dance, This Is Horror, Night Worms, The Eyes of Madness, Hellnotes, and Horror Novel Reviews.

A former Kentucky resident, Keisling now lives somewhere in the wilds of Pennsylvania with his family where he is at work on his next novel.

Share his dread:
Twitter: @todd_keisling
Instagram: @toddkeisling
www.toddkeisling.com

Three Questions

GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Todd. I’m so excited to have this chance to ask you some questions and learn more about you. I’ve enjoyed reading your short fiction and you seem to be publishing quite a lot lately, both short fiction and novels. During this very strange time of social distancing and the fears associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, some writers, including myself, have been struggling to get words on the page. How are you staying motivated to keep writing? What obstacles have you experienced? What does your process look like at the moment?

TK: Thanks for inviting me! Honestly, I wish I had a good answer to this, but I’m afraid I don’t. Truth is, I’m in the same boat as you and all the other writers out there who are struggling to make the magic happen on the page. I was talking to a writer pal of mine earlier today, expressing my concerns about my complete lack of focus on…well, anything, really. My productivity has nearly dropped to zero, and what little writing I have done over the last several weeks has been in small bites. On a good day, I used to average anywhere between 500 to 1K words. Lately, I think I’ve written maybe 2K words in the last three weeks.

I’ve made it no secret that I deal with anxiety and depression on a daily basis, but with the threat of COVID, the monotony of quarantine, and how uncertain our futures are, everything’s been turned up to eleven. At times it feels like we’re living with a real-life version of Delillo’s “airborne toxic event,” with the concept of our mortality much more upfront and in focus than usual. Working on my next novel just seems kind of minuscule right now in the scheme of things, you know?

That said, in the times when I’ve managed to plant my ass in front of the manuscript, I’ve constantly reminded myself that what I’m writing isn’t permanent. It’s a first draft. It’s okay for it to be shit. And it’s okay not to write every day.

I know that’s all very basic Writer 101 stuff, but I’ve found that’s what works for me in times when my mental health isn’t at its best. And, really, I think that’s what might be best for all of us right now: take things a day at a time, remind yourself that it’s okay not to be perfect, and do what you can. We’re all in panic mode right now, whether we want to admit it or not, and I think it’s imperative we be kind to ourselves above all else.

GMM: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were plenty of scary things happening in the world — politically, environmentally, economically, socially. How have current events shaped your writing? Is it easier to write horror during times characterized by fear and uncertainty? What scares you the most?

TK: I think those things are always in the back of my head one way or another, and they usually inform my characters or their motivations. Writing horror has always been an outlet for me, a way of exorcising my demons and dealing with those issues by way of writing them down. So, when it comes to facing the socio-economic uncertainty of our times, I tend to do so through my characters.

For example, I’ve been working on revising and expanding my first two novels while also writing the final novel in that trilogy. The main character and his wife are Millennials, he’s had to take on a crappy job in order to provide for her since she has health issues that prevent her from working, and the issue of money is a constant source of friction between them.

Over the course of the series, the protagonist’s job, life choices, and his inability to escape this box he’s built for himself serve as a subtext for the horror that unfolds. There’s a kind of unspoken economic anxiety that manifests in certain situations throughout the story—the idea of being sold an education that doesn’t live up to its promise, the debilitating cost of healthcare, the way we’re forced to compromise our goals in order to scrape by every day, and so on.

I’m a Millennial. I worked in a single income household for half a decade. I’ve experienced those hardships, lost sleep over hating my job, put off doctor visits because of the expense (even with insurance), felt completely lost and trapped, and had ridiculous arguments with my spouse over money. Losing my home, losing my family, losing myself—those things are what scare me, and all those situations, fears, and anxieties usually manifest in my fiction. Often in horrific ways. It’s the only way I know how to deal with them.

GMM: After reading your excerpt, I started thinking about the role religion often plays in horror fiction. You describe what I assume was a religious community with cult-like followers that ended in tragedy, as they are often wont to do. I sometimes joke about the fact that most of my knowledge of religion comes from horror fiction and movies. How much of an impact has religion had on your writing? Is it a recurring theme in your horror fiction?

TK: “I sometimes joke about the fact that most of my knowledge of religion comes from horror fiction and movies.”

It’s funny you said this, Michelle, because I’m the opposite. Almost everything I know about horror comes from a religious background.

I grew up in southeastern Kentucky, in a Southern Baptist household. When I was a kid, I was indoctrinated in that way of thinking, so everything I did was overshadowed with this impending doom of eternal damnation if I didn’t live the way I was told. I had a very clear picture of Hell from a young age, and now that I think about it, it probably had something to do with the anxiety issues I deal with now. There’s always this fear of not measuring up, of always falling short, and so on.

Anyway, when it comes to horror, religion is always going to be a place to find the darkest aspects of mankind. So much has been done in the name of a god, be it one with a capital G or otherwise, and all for the purpose of manipulating minds, curating division, or justifying bloodshed. I’m reminded of the song “Mist and Shadow” by The Sword: Why do people wonder if there is evil in the world? / If it’s lurking in the darkness until its plans can unfurl / When it’s standing before you in the clear light of day / In a finely tailored suit with a smile on its face.

All of that is my long-winded way of saying “Yes” to your question. Religion tends to be a recurring theme in my fiction, especially over the last few years. In relation to my forthcoming novel, Devil’s Creek, religion is a means of revealing the worst in people. If I had to sum up the book, it’s about how an infectious religion—and the resulting zealotry—can destroy a community.

DEVIL’S CREEK – Excerpt

Silver Shamrock Publishing – Release Date 6/16/20

His mind wandered into the dark, and his imagination had its way with him again. Being alone in this ghost town unsettled him, put him on edge like he’d never felt before. He felt like a trespasser in a graveyard. The folks who’d pulled up stakes, sold all their belongings, and given it to his father’s church for the sake of building a utopia in the forest all died here. Their spirits would roam here for the rest of eternity, walking hand in hand, replaying the final moments of their lives.

“Stop it,” he said, ignoring the chattering of his teeth. “You’re scaring yourself.”

Maybe it was the dark. Maybe it was the empty village of the dead. Maybe it was the fact his friend hadn’t come back.

Oh shit.

Zeke stood and crept to the edge of the doorway. He peered out. Moonlight filtered through the trees, illuminating a path through the remains of the holy compound.

“Waylon?” The forest rustled and breathed around him. He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “Waylon, stop fuckin’ around, man.”

The forest said nothing, and neither did his friend. Another chill swept over him, racking his body with shivers for a full minute until he got a grip on himself.

This is stupid, he thought. You’re freaking yourself out for nothing. That dipshit is out there laughing his ass off at you. He knew all along what this place meant to you, and he brought you here just to fuck with you.

“And it’s working,” he mumbled. The forest absorbed his voice, masking it with the primitive sounds of nature, of crickets and rodents in the brush and brambles, of rustling leaves in a wind far too cold for this time of year. He called out to Waylon again and waited, listening to his heart thud heavily in his chest.

One-one-thousand.

Two-one-thousand.

Three-one-thousand.

Four-one—

A guttural scream tore through the night, shredding any hope of this being a joke. Heart racing, his legs like jelly, Zeke scrambled out of the shack and into the fractured moonlight. He called to Waylon once more, but his friend was silent. The forest swallowed his cries as easily as it swallowed his mind, projecting phantoms through the undergrowth, shadow puppets in the dim glow of the moon. Everything moved around him, driven by the wind, and the constant hiss of rustling leaves filled his head with serpents.

Confused, his heart in the grip of an icy terror he’d not felt since he was a child, Zeke Billings pumped his legs and forced himself forward into the dark. He followed the dim outline of a trail through the center of the village, past a dozen overgrown structures, their slipshod windows filled with the faces of the dead. He saw them from the corner of his eye as he ran, and he told himself they weren’t there, they were tricks of moonlight, broken by the limbs and leaves and reassembled by his feral imagination.

His drive to find Waylon was fueled by a desire to leave this place, to leave its silent memory of servitude and damnation behind forever, cast back into the darkened halls of his nightmares.

So he ran. He ran until a phantom fist clenched at his ribs, tugging with each step he took. He ran until his heart pumped steam and his lungs burst with fire. Tears streamed down his face as he shot forward to the clearing ahead, each step more laborious than the last, and when his feet caught the rotted husk of a fallen log, he welcomed the sweet collapse. The hard, musty earth and soft grass of an open field met his face.

Zeke pushed himself from the ground and rose to his knees. He wiped his eyes, and when his vision finally cleared, his heart sank deep into his gut.

“No, no, no, not here, anywhere but here…”

Calvary Hill rose in the center of the clearing, the old stony pathway up its face overgrown with weeds. The church was long gone, of course, burned to cinders and ash decades before, but its ghost remained in the window of his imagination.

A full moon hung overhead, aligned perfectly over the hill like the unblinking eye of God. Susan’s words filled his head, a memory from earlier when the world still made some semblance of sense to him. It’s a full moon tonight.

Zeke stood on his knees, staring up at the silent monument of his childhood, watching incredulously as the earth breathed in the moonlit glow. He was so enraptured by the sight, he didn’t register movement from the corner of his eye.

There were sucking sounds coming from behind him. Slurping, cracking, crunching sounds. A spike of fear wedged itself into his belly, filling him with a numbing cold leeching his last ounce of resolve. Slowly, Zeke turned his head toward the sounds, his heart shooting back into high gear when he saw the hulking shadow leaning over the dead log.

The shadow moved, allowing the moonlight to wash over the log, and Zeke froze in horror.

Waylon lay sprawled on the grass, one leg twisted back at an impossible angle, his glassy eyes locked on the indifferent sky above, and a grotesque sneer of agony frozen to his face. His shirt was ripped open, his chest nothing more than a cavity of exposed meat and gore. A light tendril of steam rose from the warmth of his entrails.

The shadow reached into the hole of Waylon’s chest, snapped off one of his ribs, and began sucking on the marrow.

“Oh God,” Zeke mumbled, the words barely more than a rasp, and the shadow heard him. It raised its head and turned toward him, revealing a face coated in mud and blood. Worms writhed through the thing’s greasy hair, feeling their way along the curve of its forehead and around the dried “o” of an old gunshot wound. The shadow crunched down on Waylon’s broken rib and cast its gaze upon him. Its eyes glowed, two sapphire orbs floating in the dark.

Zeke Billings met the living face of his nightmare and began to scream.

Jacob Masters flashed a grim smile. “My little lamb,” he rasped.

Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!

Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.

Fiction Fragments: Glenn Rolfe

Michelle R. Lane 1 Comment

Ron Gavalik joined Girl Meets Monster for Fiction Fragments Friday on November 30. Things have been a little crazy for me, so the schedule is a little out of whack. Today is obviously not Friday, but I wanted you all to have a chance to read this writer’s submission, and schedules be damned. So, without further ado, please welcome Glenn Rolfe.

37623541_10217464806718996_9108904857699352576_nGlenn Rolfe is an author/singer/songwriter from the haunted woods of New England. He and his wife, Meghan, have three children, Ruby, Ramona, and Axl. He is grateful to be loved despite his weirdness.

He is a Splatterpunk Award nominee and the author of Becoming, Blood and Rain, The Haunted Halls, Chasing Ghosts, Abram’s Bridge, Things We Fear, and the collections, A Box Full of Monsters, Out of Range, Slush, and Land of Bones.

Check out his latest novel, The Window.

He is hard at work on many more. Stay tuned! And, in the meantime, visit his website.

Three Questions

GMM: When I was a teenager many moons ago, I was hell-bent on reading every vampire novel I could get hands on. And, my introduction to Splatterpunk  was John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Light at the End. What was your introduction to the genre? What do you believe defines a work as Splatterpunk? What do you enjoy most about the genre?

GR: My intro to Splatterpunk was Off Season by Jack Ketchum. My jaw dropped time and time again turning those pages. It was so brutal. But like with all great books in the genre, and any good book, he made you care about the characters first.

Splatterpunk is a story that pushes the writer and the reader. A story that is brutal and no holds barred. The best of the genre keep your eyes glued to the page, even though part of you wants to put it down and shove it away.

What I like is the freedom it gives you as a horror writer. It also pushes you as a writer. How brave are you? How far are you willing to go and how much are you willing to show? It’s a challenge to walk the line between outrageous and realistic, but when you get the balance right, the result is powerful.

GMM: I have a pretty high threshold for the creepy, weird, and gross, but I have to admit, your slug creatures grossed me out. Actually, to be fair, the slugs weren’t the problem. The act of Craig cleaning out the bottles and allowing his curiosity get the better of him while doing a disgusting chore at a minimum wage job. I’ve had my share of gross tasks, what inspired this opening scene from Becoming?

GR: I worked at a movie theater a while back. Tuesday nights we did extra cleaning projects. It was the slowest night of the week. I was lucky enough to get bottle duty. It seemed like a perfectly harmless gig,right? But my manager told me I’d want to wear gloves while handling the bottles. I didn’t get it, but put them on anyway.

It was all great until I found the first of the spit bottles. People that used chewing tobacco would use them while watching movies. It was nasty. And when I opened one bottle to empty it, it let out a wild hiss and a spray. I almost puked. It was only after I’d done two of these gross things that my manager told me I could just throw away the ones with spit in them. When i got home, I started thinking of those bottles and imagining the nasty juice as a living thing. So, pretty much, that opening scene was mostly a true story.

GMM: I love the horror genre, but I often wonder if it is a prerequisite for characters to be a little dumb in order for certain plot development to happen. I mean, most horror movies wouldn’t work if the characters didn’t willingly do stupid things like go down in the basement or read Latin from a book bound in human flesh, but I wonder if making characters do dumb things is just expected within the genre. Is it possible to have a good horror story without people making terrible mistakes even though they should know better?

GR: I think all the good to great horror stories have realistic characters acting and talking in realistic ways. That’s totally where a lot of books in the genre fail or make the ride less enjoyable. For me, it’s all about the characters. You’ve got to bring these people to life and you’ve got to give the reader a reason to care. You also have to make the characters’ motivations realistic.

I don’t write Splatterpunk all the time. Of my ten works, I think maybe a quarter of them could be counted as Splatterpunk. I enjoy the challenge and the craziness of the sub-genre. It’s not an easy type of horror to write well. Making real characters and then putting them through a hell most writers don’t dare to. Some stories demand characters to be ridiculous, but I prefer to write the ones like Off Season. Ones that, as horrible as they seem, leave you thinking this could actually happen. And that’s freaking scary.

Fragment: Becoming (original version), by Glenn Rolfe

CHAPTER 1
“Where do you want me to do this?” Craig Hickey said, hauling a thirty gallon bag of empty bottles over his shoulder.

“Take ‘em in the sink. You’re gonna want to dump some of that stuff out, trust me,” Hunter said. Hunter Hanley was Craig’s boss at the Hollis Oaks Cineplex. The man was only in his late thirties and already had his own successful chain of theaters. Sure, they were all placed in Maine, but it was still an admirable accomplishment. Compared to a twenty eight year old high school dropout, shoveling popcorn next to a bunch of teenagers on a Friday night, Hunter Hanley looked like the CEO of GE.

He watched Hunter walk over to handle a guest complaining about her movie being too loud. Craig lugged the giant bag of bottles into the little sink and storage area of the theater. He placed the bag down, singing a Taylor Swift song as he undid the knot at the top of the large black sack.

“Hey Craig?” It was Evan, the concessions manager.

“What’s up, Evan.” Craig said.

“You’re going to want to use those plastic gloves,” he pointed up to the little rack above the sink.

Craig spied the box of latex gloves to the far right, next to a bucket of scrub pads.
“Yeah, thanks, but I think I’ll be all right.” He had to laugh to himself- these guys sure are worried about these bottles.

“No, really, you are going to want to use them. I’ve done this job for the last five years, and have been stuck doing bottle duty more times than I care to remember, take my word for it.”

Craig acquiesced, reaching up and grabbing a pair of the little clear gloves and tugging them on. “Happy?”

“Have fun,” Evan smiled as he disappeared back to the front.

It was a Tuesday night at the theater, usually the slowest night of the week. Unfortunately, this meant that it was chore night. Last week Evan had Craig scrape this black stuff off from the old popcorn warmer. Craig thought it looked like some sort of devil mold, but Evan had said it was just burnt residue from years of running the warmers too hot, for too long. Tonight, he got the bottles. There were six of the huge recycling containers, one in front of each theater, and each one was overflowing with empties. Craig had figured it would take about an hour to get the job done.

The first bag had gone quick and easy. Craig managed to sing his way through half of the Speak Now album without so much as running into one of these horrors that everyone seemed so worked up about. It wasn’t until he reached the halfway point that he came up against his first gag-worthy container. There had been a couple of Coke bottles filled with spit from people using chewing tobacco in the theater, but as he got to the bottom of the fourth bag, his bare hand (he’d abandoned the latex gloves after the uneventful second bag) made contact with something wet and slimy. An overwhelming smell nearly knocked him on his ass. It was like a mix of vomit, soda, and putrefied flesh, not that he knew what the latter smelled like, but he’d seen enough movies to imagine the scent- and this was it. After three dry heaves, Craig’s esophagus opened up to deliver his stomach contents to the sink.

“You all right, man?” Evan had come rushing to the doorway to check on him. “Hey, where are your gloves?”

After another mouthful of upchuck, Craig wiped his lips and chin with the back of his hand, and felt something greasy on his lips. A taste that matched the overpowering scent from the bag, exploded in his mouth. He pulled his hand away and saw the disgusting brown slime he’d bumped into at the bottom of the bag. He spat into the sink, trying to rid his mouth of the contaminant. Contaminant? He wasn’t sure why he’d thought of it as such, but wasn’t taking any chances.

“Do we have any mouthwash around here?” he said, still hunched over, spitting in the sink.

Evan looked a few extra shades of white standing in the doorway. “Uh, maybe Kathy has some,” he said. “I’ll go ask her.”

Craig watched him scurry off and heard crinkling; the bag behind him was moving. He turned to see the bottom of the sack protrude and retract, like something was trying to find its way out. Washing his hands in the sink, he donned another pair of the latex gloves and opened the foul smelling sack; the movement ceased.

“Here, man,” Evan returned to his perch at the entrance holding the mini-bottle of Scope out to him as if he were afraid to enter the room.

“Evan, come check this out.”

“Don’t worry about the bottom ones, man. Just throw them away with the bag. That’s what we always do.”

Craig, as if not hearing Evan, reached into the large bag. He had to put his head inside to reach the bottom. “There’s something down here.”

“Craig, don’t-”

“Whoa!” Craig yanked his hand out as if it had been stung by a bee. “Evan, come look at this.”

Evan looked back out at the empty lobby, praying for a customer; the next movie didn’t start for another forty-five minutes. “Hunter wants me, I’ll be right back,” he lied. He had seen the strange slug things at the bottom of the bags before. He didn’t plan on messing with them again. Hell, he’d had nightmares about the fat little slimy things for months. He was glad to have a new guy at work to do the true dirty work. He decided to focus on Kathy’s great ass instead, leaving Craig to tend with the nastiness in the sink room alone.

Craig picked the bottle bag up out of the barrel and holding one corner, brought up the end to dump the mix of loose juices and old soda out into the sink, and with it, the slimy thing at the bottom. He watched the dark, chunk filled fluids pour out into the sink; bits of candies, popcorn and discarded chew pouches gathered around the drain. After he was certain that the bag was empty, he gave it a good shake and then fingered through the collection of crap clogging the drain. He couldn’t find slug thing anywhere. “Where did you go?” Craig said as he tried shaking the bag out again. After another few seconds of searching and coming up empty, he gave up. “Hmm.”

An hour and a half later, Craig managed to reach the final bottle of the last bag. He wrapped his latex gloved hand around the one liter bottle and brought it out from the dark and rancid smelling bag. At the sight of the murky brown slime inside the bottle, Craig’s stomach threatened to purge again, but this time, he kept it down. Holding the bottle up to the fluorescent light above the sink, he tried to get a better look at its contents. On first glance, it appeared to be another bottle of chew-spit, but as he tilted the plastic bottle, observing the way the brown sludge seemed to cling to the plastic container, he wasn’t sure what it could be. Not wanting to look at the nasty concoction any longer, he decided to drain it in the sink like he had the rest. The cap was tight, but after a few good yanks, he managed to get it to turn-

Swoosh

“Arrgh.” The unleashed carbonation exploded a sour mist all over him. As he inhaled the nasty particles, he dropped the bottle in the sink. He didn’t notice the brown sludge ooze free of its prison, and slip down into the drain.

Cough-cough-cough

“Uhhh…” Craig’s Cineplex work shirt was covered in the little bits of slime that sprayed out at him. The brown mess was also present on his exposed forearms, neck, and chin and even on his teeth. “Uhhh…” Craig stumbled past the sink and towards the lobby.

“Oh shit, Craig,” Kathy said, “What the hell’s all over you.” She plugged her nose, taking a step back.

Craig’s breath was coming in gravelly wheezes as he stumbled across the still empty lobby, and toward the restrooms. Holding his gloved hands out before him, he smashed through the men’s room door and rushed to the sink. As he vomited (his second round tonight) in the much smaller, much cleaner basin, getting nearly as much spew on the cool grey counter top as he was inside the white porcelain enclave, he missed the little brown specks that slipped their way into the corners of his eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, cleaned up, and sipping a bottle of water, Craig sat recovering from his little incident in the employee break room.

“Hey man, you feeling any better?” Evan took a seat across from him at the little square card table.

Craig forced a smile, “I’m hungry. Does that say anything?”

“Yeah- that you’re gross.” They both laughed as Evan stood back up. “Just call it a night. I already sent Kathy home. I thought for sure she was going to blow chucks after she heard you in the bathroom. Besides, it’s pretty dead out there. No one wants to see the new Kevin Hart movie. Go figure.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll take you up on that.” Craig rose up, grabbed his sweatshirt from the coat hanger behind him, and followed Evan back out to the front.

“Hope you feel better,” Heath called out as Craig reached the front doors.

Craig waved back to his boss and pushed out into the cool night. He placed a finger to his nose and blew a snot rocket to the sidewalk as he made his way to his car. He was starting to feel queasy again. His hunger had slipped away.

On the sidewalk behind him, the brown glob of mucus he’d launched began to wiggle, and breathe.

Next week, Rhonda Jackson Garcia joins Girl Meets Monster. Do you have a fragment you’d like to dust off and send my way? If so, send it to chellane@gmail.com. See you soon!

Fiction Fragments: Ryan DeMoss

Michelle R. Lane 1 Comment

44177254_1912898445465481_749535689380462592_nLast week, David X. Wiggin joined Girl Meets Monster and shared a fragment about an alternate dimension where birds are our overlords. This week, my friend and fellow SHU alum, Ryan DeMoss joins me to talk about the trap of genre and what really scares him.

R.D. DeMoss has an MA in English and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. He has won awards for his short fiction and is continually working on his long fiction. He also teaches college-level composition in Washington and lives with a wonderful dog.

Three Questions

GMM: The scene you shared is a little scary. Is this a horror story or fantasy? A little of both? Which genre do you prefer? Why?

RDD: I usually get lumped into horror, but my favorite stories are usually not defined by a single genre. Those are the stories I want to write. I’ve also found that the scariest horror books often have more hope to them than we assume, and cheerful books often have more chills than we want to admit. In other words, I see this scene as part of a coming-of-age tale, but it has its share of darkness. Then again, doesn’t life?

GMM: I know that you like to spend time outdoors. Living in Washington State must give you plenty of opportunities to get out into Nature. What was the weirdest or scariest thing you ever saw while hiking in the woods?

RDD: I am certainly no mountain man, and I don’t think I have any experiences people would consider scary in the typical sense of a horror story. However, in my experience, the real terror of the outdoors is how easily and quickly situations change. I once did a hike in Hawaii that had a stone with dozens of etchings—a counter of deaths the trail had seen. On that same hike, in a muddy area, my friend slipped and started over the edge of a cliff. We laughed and called it a close call, but that fine line between a close call and tragedy terrifies me.

GMM: What made you stop writing this story? Do you plan to finish it? Without revealing too much, what happens next?

RDD: I do actually have an ending to this story. I’m not sure if it’s the right ending, but it’s an ending. As I mentioned, I see this as a coming-of-age story, and when Finch finishes his plan, Tyler learns that not everything in life can be explained. The fine line between rationality and chaos is thinner than kids are led to believe, and adults spend their whole lives trying to understand the events that blur the borders. In the ending I have, Tyler spends his whole life waiting for the next time the chaos will cross into his rational world.

Excerpt from “Tell Me a Lie”, by R.D. DeMoss

Finch’s house bordered a green space that stretched on for half a mile before breaking at the highway. We’d explored the area a few times before but always with full daylight, which must have been why the woods seemed different that evening. Orange rays of the setting sun trickled and fell over the tips of the evergreens. Under their branches, shadows stretched onto the lawn, and an unseasonably cool breeze swirled through the leaves and swept over me, chilling the bare skin of my arms and legs. Somewhere, in a distant subdivision, a lawnmower buzzed.

The sun’s light seemed to almost vanish as we stepped under the boughs of the trees. Finch’s figure became a lean silhouette as I hurried to keep up with him. Fallen branches scraped my ankles, and a few times, I almost fell face first into the muddy trail. Each time I gathered my balance, Finch’s shape blurred a little more until he vanished, leaving only the sharp dark arcs of brush behind.

“Finch?” I called, but received no answer. A bird cooed somewhere high above me. The ground seemed to exhale a frigid gust of damp earthy smells, and I shivered. “Finch?”

In the darkness, someone whispered.

I said, “Finch, it’s getting cold. We need to go back.”

Another whisper.

My voice hid in my chest, but as I stepped closer, I forced out faint words. “Is that you?”

Finch grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a tree. “It’s behind you.” He pushed his finger to his lips, telling me to be quiet.

Out of the brush stepped a figure my mind couldn’t process at first. Maybe it was just a trick of the dim lighting, but next to me stood Finch and searching the trail was also the unmistakably tall, thin profile of Finch. There were two of him.

“Tyler,” the figure on the path called.

“Don’t answer it. It’s poisonous,” the Finch beside me whispered.

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me I was in any real danger. I was nervous, sure, but I hadn’t felt threatened.

The Finch next to me twisted something clear and round in his hands. The top popped off with a soft sucking sound.

The creature on the path straightened. Its eyes darted toward where we hid. I held my breath. I was sure it saw us, but then it turned. When it did, its frame folded into the shadows and exposed what might have been its true form. It was a fraction of a fraction of Finch’s size, the size of a bug, a lighting bug. Its light shimmered with streaks of blue and magenta. It hovered in the air, bobbing as if it considering what to do next.

Finch sprung out from hiding. He swung the object in his hand over the creature that had looked just like him. By the time I understood the object he held was a mason jar, he had already screwed the cap tight. “Ain’t getting out, now,” he said.

The contents of the jar pulsed harsh shades of crimson, the colors of anger and warning. It wanted to hurt us. But, after a few moments the luminescence dimmed to a gentle pink.

“What is it? How did it look like you? Why?” The questions poured out of me as we walked back.

“It’s a wisp. You know, a wil-o’-the-wisp.”

I didn’t really know, but nodded just the same. “Why was it out there? Why did you catch it?”

“I baited it. Last night, I put a few of my journals out there. Wisp’s are really nosy, can’t keep themselves from invading someone’s privacy.”

Next week, Girl Meets Monster gets a visit from Elsa Carruthers. I’m so excited! Do you have a story to share? Send it my way at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!

Fear Is the Mind-Killer: Barriers to Love

Michelle R. Lane Leave a comment

pain

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi

I stumbled across this quote attributed to Rumi this morning, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just a coincidence. Last night I had a moment of clarity while lying in bed waiting for the chorus of “what if” to quiet down. I realized that I had never given 100% of myself in any of my romantic relationships. There are pieces of myself I keep hidden, because my fear of rejection usually outweighs my desire and willingness to give someone my love. I have given some people – the anointed few – a peek behind the curtain. Most of those people know who they are, because they have bared their souls to me too. These glorious and often unholy alliances mean more to me than all the professions of love from people who have fallen out of my heart and been buried in the graveyard where I hold imaginary funerals in a dark corner of my mind. People who have hurt me beyond the point of redemption and still hoped to keep me on a shelf for emergency purposes. However, I’m not an object or a “someday” placeholder. I’m a living, breathing human being full of passion, dark humor, rage, intelligence, curiosity, fear, hope, aspirations, goals, childhood dreams, nightmarish memories, and yes, love.

graveyard

Regardless of what you may think of me, if you know me at all, I am full of love. My close friends, people who have touched me in some meaningful way, and my family will tell you that. I believe some people are able to see that the moment they meet me. I’ve actually had people tell me that I glow. And sometimes, I see it reflected back to me. But in several of my romantic relationships, people have seen that as a sign of weakness and exploited it until they broke me. The ability to love after be broken time and time again is not weakness. Each time I have fought my way back out of a deep depression to resurface as a reconstructed version of myself, I have learned to love my stitched-together parts a little bit more.

bride-2

Typically, when people have broken my heart or been so unspeakably shitty to me in a relationship I choose to end, I make a point of never speaking to them again. Of course, there are exceptions, but those relationships are still tainted in some way. When I was younger and naïve enough to believe that if you keep showing people kindness they’ll treat you the same way, I attempted to remain in the lives of my exes. And, almost 100% of the time, all that did for me was keep a wound open for continual doses of pain and grief. Yet, I am ever hopeful that someday I will be able to maintain a friendship with someone even after I have handed them my heart and they decided to keep the receipt in order to return it. Time will tell, but my ability to confront my fears is the key.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

Right now, I’m more concerned about the realization that I have never felt safe enough to give myself completely to someone. Maybe we’re not really meant to do that. Maybe the fear of losing myself, not just simply of being rejected, keeps me from opening myself up to being loved as a whole and wonderfully flawed person. Intellectually, I know that fear should never be stronger than love, but nothing is ever that simple. Like physical injuries, emotional and psychological scars teach us to fear being hurt again. Today I wrote the following words in my journal:

I want to meet someone who allows me to feel safe enough to give 100% or more.

I’m not sure that person exists, and each year I doubt it more and more. But, even if that person does exist, it’s up to me to trust them enough, to trust myself, to give them all of myself. Or at least, all that is left of me after years of being disappointed and broken. Whatever I have to give that I’m not giving to my son. My friends know and love me enough that they’re often willing to spare a little of the love I give them to share with the new people who come into my life. I try to do the same for them. I’d like to think that love is a renewable resource that we can all accept and give without end. I hope that’s true.

fire

Whether or not I meet someone worthy of all my love, and give them an all-access pass to my soul, I still have to work on what is preventing me from being open to that possibility. I need to gain a better understanding of my fears. Heal the wounds left by the people who weren’t worthy. Love is a fire burning inside me, and like a phoenix, I will rise from the ashes.