Tag PA Writers

Fiction Fragments: Ronald J. Murray

Michelle R. Lane 2 Comments

Last week, Girl Meets Monster had a delightful conversation about how music inspires the writing process with J. Edwin Buja. This week, I welcome fellow horror writer, Ronald J. Murray.

IMG_20190909_184650Ronald J. Murray lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His fiction has appeared in The Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror 2017 charity anthology, Bon Appetit: Stories and Recipes for Human Consumption cannibal-themed anthology and recipe book, and the forthcoming Lustcraftian Horrors: Erotic Stories Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft from Infernal Ink Books. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association. You can find him enjoying his umpteenth cup of coffee at some ungodly hour while a film he’s seen a million times before plays in the background.

Three Questions

GMM: Tell me a little bit about your fragment. You gave me just enough to be hooked. Is this a traditional ghost story, or can I expect to see something different than the expected horror tropes?

RJM: Without giving anything major away, I can tell you that this story contains a lot of psychological elements, as in psychological manifestations of memories, feelings, and the consequences of actions taken in the past by two protagonists. These characters will be put through a gauntlet of horrors specially designed for them as individuals with some elements that are objectively observable and experienced by both.

In short, yes, there will be ghosts, literally and figuratively. But would I feel comfortable calling this a traditional ghost story? Definitely not.

What I hope to accomplish with this first novel, From Out of the Black Fog, is an anthology series of novels with new characters experiencing something different in an alternate version of Monongahela, Pennsylvania.

GMM: Speaking of tropes, I see that you have a short story in a collection called Lustcraftian Horrors: Erotic Stories Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. What is the title of your story in this collection? Lovecraftian Horror is familiar to most people who read horror fiction, but the concept of Lovecraft meets erotica is intriguing. Have you written other horror erotica? What challenges did you face working within that subgenre?

RJM: The title of this short story is In the Labyrinth, about a sex-addict seeking extra-marital thrills that ends up wrapped up with a cult that worships the perverse fertility goddess Shub-Niggurath. I imagine that Lovecraft is rolling over in his grave at the creation of this anthology, considering his suspected aversion to sex and women.

I have had other horror erotica published, one of which was Cornelia in Bon Appetit. The biggest challenge I’ve faced working within the subgenre is weaving a sex plot in with a horror plot. I’ve reconciled the issue with the perspective that sex is one of the most intimate and vulnerable places a person can put themselves in. If something horrifying happens as a result, that subverts something that’s safe and pleasurable under normal circumstances. It’s a real Junji Ito solution!

GMM: Cannibalism is a taboo subject that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, which is probably why it is a recurring theme in horror fiction. One of my favorite fictional cannibals is Hannibal Lecter, because he is a complex character that blurs the line between the horror of murder and our fascination with the macabre. Which cannibals, real or fictional, inspired your short story in Bon Appetit: Stories and Recipes for Human Consumption?

RJM: I can’t say that I was inspired by a real or fictional cannibal to write this story. My inspiration for the cannibalistic antagonist in this story stemmed from the horrors of war. Doyle was a Vietnam War veteran who’d been separated from his unit during battle. He developed the taste for human flesh while surviving in the dense jungles of Vietnam until he was eventually rescued.

From Out of the Black Fog, A Novel by Ronald J. Murray

Lorne kept his eyes forward and high enough that he wouldn’t walk face-first into anything. He watched the glow and fade of streetlights illuminate the sidewalk, and he listened to the occasional whish of cars that rolled along Main Street beside him. He didn’t want to shift his vision elsewhere. He didn’t want to look up again and into any window that he’d passed. He just wanted to keep going forward, keep walking to his car, which he’d parked at the lot at the Aquatorium.

He looked up. His skin crawled. It’s like when your head knows there’s something you shouldn’t look at for too long or it’ll really screw you up, you just keep staring. You can’t help it.

He shut his eyes and turned his head. The snap motion was almost dizzying. He didn’t care. Then, he looked again. He swallowed hard. His eyes locked to it this time. He’d heard of people seeing their dead loved ones in their peripheral vision or in the faces of others while they grieved. It started like that, earlier in the day, but it devolved to this disturbing level.

In every window that he passed, he saw Amber’s face. Drained of color and cold, expressionless. Her empty eyes looked at him, unblinkingly. She followed him, seemingly crossed the alleyways he’d passed unseen, and appeared again in the dark windows of the next building. Over and over. When the window was large enough, he saw more than her face. He saw her hunched walk that kept pace with him. He saw her head kept turned nearly ninety-degrees to watch him.

No. He shut his eyes tight. He shook his head. No. He was cracking. That was it. That had to be it. He was having a psychotic break or something. You don’t see shit like this if you’re a normal person with a quiet normal life who loses a loved one just like everyone else in the world.

He turned his head. He opened his eyes. He began walking again. Someone passed him from behind, and he shoved his hands deeper into his jacket pockets. He drew his arms tighter against his body. The person went into Jim’s Bar just ahead. The scent of fried food and cigarette smoke poured onto the street for a second.

Something thudded loudly beside him. Lorne jumped. A hand smacked glass beside him. Amber’s face stared through the square window of a thick wooden door that led to the apartments above a shop. Her hand was still pressed against the pane. The doorknob began to rattle.

Adrenaline found his limbs. He jogged away. People, he thought. I need to get around other people. He tore the door to Jim’s Bar open. A few patrons glared at him through a cloud of smoke illuminated by television screens. He took a few steps further inside and shot his eyes back and forth. He sucked a breath deep into his chest, and he hoped he wouldn’t encounter anything to extraordinary here.

Next week, I’ll be talking to EV Knight, so get excited. Do you have a fiction fragment to share? Send it my way at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!

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Fiction Fragments: Jennifer Loring

Michelle R. Lane Leave a comment

JennLoringLast week I introduced a new blog series, Fiction Fragments, in which I will share abandoned writing projects. Each week, a different writer will be featured. You’ll learn a little bit about their writing process, you’ll learn a little bit about them, and get a chance to read some of their unfinished work.

This week, I welcome my good friend and fellow writer, Jennifer Loring. I met Jenn during my first MFA in Writing Popular Fiction residency at Seton Hill University. She was one of my first critique partners and I always looked forward to reading the pages she sent me. Since then, we’ve visited a haunted penitentiary, attended horror writing conventions, and talked about our shared love of vampires over many beers.

Jennifer Loring’s short fiction has been published widely both online and in print, including the anthologies Tales from the Lake vol. 1 and vol. 4 and Nightscript vol. 4. Longer work includes the novel Those of My Kind, published by Omnium Gatherum, and the novella Conduits from Lycan Valley Press. Jenn is a member of the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and the Horror Writers Association (HWA). She holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University with a concentration in horror fiction and teaches online in SNHU’s College of Continuing Education. Jenn lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband, where they are owned by a turtle and two basset hounds.

Three Questions

Girl Meets Monster: What inspired this fragment?

Jenn: It was a long time ago, but I believe it was inspired at least in part by a Velvet Acid Christ album cover. Music is always a huge inspiration for me. The general concept was, as you can probably tell from the title, a dying man’s dream. However, this particular man is about to be executed.

Girl Meets Monster: What kept you from continuing with the story?

Jenn: Mostly because I felt I couldn’t do justice to the idea in my head. Which is something we all deal with throughout our careers and something I’ve learned to work through, but I was still fairly young at this point—26 or so, I think—so I didn’t have the confidence in my writing that I’ve gradually built up since then.

Girl Meets Monster: Do you know how this story ends?

Jenn: Great question! I honestly have no idea. I’ve kept it for almost 15 years, so I guess I had the intention of finishing it at some point. His being executed would be too obvious, so maybe he would get a last-minute pardon?

Last Dream of a Dead Man, by Jennifer Loring
The mattress damp with fluids not his own huffed as he sat up and peered at the dirt-encrusted floor beneath him. A dim light came from somewhere, perhaps the same place as the voices that crawled through the walls and into his ears like hissing cockroaches. Liquid puddled in the corners of the room. Too dark to tell if it was water or blood.

Wake up, the voices screamed inside his head. He pinched himself. Awake. He did not know where he was, though the cell looked vaguely familiar.

The girl rolled into his room in a wheelchair, sewing a new leg onto the stump of her left thigh. Both arms and her right leg bore stitch marks made of heavy dark thread. She was the same as that night when he’d taken her, with the pink headband in her long blond hair. “Are little girls made of sugar and spice and everything nice?” she asked him, the needle diving in and out of the leg she held with her other hand. He wondered whose limbs they were or if, being a child, she even cared that they didn’t belong to her. “Or are they made of flesh and blood like everyone else?”

He looked down and found his arms and legs lying in a red pool, the remaining stumps spurting an alarming amount of blood. The girl laughed maliciously and he remembered. He had told her that he wanted to see what little girls were made of. No one ever found her arms and legs, and he never told. “Where am I?” he asked.

“The Needleman is coming. No one will weep for you.” She smiled with a cruelty particular to children, tucked the needle and thread into the pocket of her dress, and wheeled herself into the corridor.

He told himself to move his limbs and they, attached to him again, obeyed. He walked to the door to follow her, but she had vanished into the darkness. Flies coated the bloodstained walls, a living and moving black paint, an ever-shifting shadow. Metallic clanks of doors slamming shut echoed through the hallway. The voices whispered but he did not understand, or didn’t want to.

He felt the stares of invisible eyes upon him and ran to the end of the hall; he pushed open a set of double doors and stared up at the sky. All the stars were gone, and the moon’s huge infected eye spilled bloody light onto the dead grass, staining his clothes and hands. He turned back to the doors. They had become a brick wall.

Ahead of him, the little girl wheeled herself out of the shadows. Beside her, walking on the insides of her feet because he had fractured her ankles, was his favorite. She was the first, and he’d told her to be very quiet. Now a rusted zipper stretched across her mouth so she could not scream, but he imagined the little girl would do the talking for her. In her television eyes flickered images of her grieving parents, her suicidal fiancé, her two younger sisters robbed of their idol. Then flashing video loops of a snuff film worse than any fantasized by even the sickest mind. Each murder, there in her eyes, each moment captured by the camera lens of her pupils.

“Tell us why you did it. That’s all they ever wanted to hear. And if they believed you, they might have kept the Needleman away. Maybe they still can. Go on, you can tell me.” The girl leaned forward, feigning profound interest.

He stepped back, startled. Was that all they really wanted? Was that what could save him? No, he didn’t believe it. She was tricking him. He had no reason to trust her.

“Go on, tell me. Maybe the nightmares will go away. Maybe they’ll save you, and the nightmares will never come again.”

“You’re lying. What’s in it for you if I tell you?”

“Peace. It’s what you want, it’s what we all want. Hurry! The Needleman doesn’t like to be kept waiting!”

“Leave me alone!” He ran into the dark, with the disembodied little-girl voice chasing him.

“We’ll never leave! Not in this life and not in the next! We’re all yours now―you wanted it that way, remember? All yours now.”

He stopped running when both girls blocked his path, wherever it might lead. The tall girl who was once beautiful unzipped her mouth, and a swarm of maggots squirmed out, dropping onto the grass at her feet.

Next Friday, B. E. Burkhead will share some of his poetry fragments here at Girl Meets Monster. Would you like to submit your unfinished writing and talk about what stops you from finishing certain projects? Comment below or submit your fragment to me at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!