The Sign in the Moonlight: The Door Beyond the Water

The Door Beyond the Water is at its core another early tale, from the period when I was very much in the thrall of Lovecraft and Poe and Machen and weird tales in general - a time that provided the backbone and impetus for what would eventually end up being The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  Like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, it first appeared in a brief-lived and little-read market called The Willows way back when, and like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma it got something of an overhaul before I felt it was ready to stand alongside more recent work.

In the case of The Door Beyond the Water, however, that work had already been done beforehand, and had been a whole lot more comprehensive.  I originally rewrote it when I was approached by editor Eric Guignard to provide a story for his anthology Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations.  (Eric, incidentally, would publish another story from the collection, Prisoner of Peace, in his next anthology.)  I had nothing new to offer him, and as a compromise I offered to revise an older piece under a new title, with the understanding that it would be a substantial enough revision to actually warrant the change of name.  Eric was okay with that, so I went back to the story - it was The Gate in the Jungle at that point - with an excuse to really set about tearing it down and building it back up again, and the goal of having something by the end that I'd feel comfortable setting alongside the kind of stuff I was producing then.

It worked out well, all told.  I was fond of the original, but I think the revision brought the things I liked about it into much sharper perspective.  I said in an earlier one of these posts that the impetus for a lot of these stories to was to write slantwise homages, pieces that stayed true to the weird tales of the early decades of the twentieth century whilst finding new ways into them, in some cases ones that maybe weren't quite so alienating to a modern sensibility.  In that sense, The Door Beyond the Water was me locking horns with the assumptions about race, and about civilization, that are prevalent in so much work from the period.  It's a tale of that classic Victorian educated white chap coming into a situation he doesn't even slightly understand and making one unholy mess of things, basically - and also, now that I think, an excuse for my to play around with some of the shamanism stuff that came out of studying Elizabethan witchcraft for my post-grad degree.

Here, anyway, is an extract:

The message came to him in dreams, before the second moon of the season: A man comes to free the imprisoned one. Nothing more than that.

But for Cha Né - who was shaman, who saw beneath the mystery of things - that sentence was enough to darken his heart with fear such as he'd never known.

The next night he confronted his spirit-guide with the inevitable questions.  "Who is this man who comes? Is he of the mountain people? Is he from the hollow tribe?"  It hardly seemed possible, unless the ancient truces had been somehow corrupted.  "I must know, Shanoctoc."

The feathered guide had hesitated long before answering.  "He is Montague Evans.  He is not of the three tribes, nor of the lands between the water and the mountains.  He is a white man, of the tribe of Henry Johnson.  He will arrive before the third moon."

Then Cha Né’s guide, his one companion in the Otherworld, sank into the waters of the lake - was swallowed amidst shivering liquid tendrils.

Cha Né knew, without knowing how, that it was the last time they would ever meet.

Lost Civilisations Doing Well For Itself

Dark Tales: Now Kindley.

With plenty going on and absolutely nothing at a stage I can say anything useful about, I thought I'd spend one last post plugging the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology that I had a story, The Door Beyond the Water, in a couple of months back.

Firstly, because I've actually managed to read it, and enjoyed it rather a lot.  (For what it's worth, my personal favourite tales were Mark Lee Pearson's To Run a Stick Through a Fish, Jackson Kuhl's Quivira, Caw Miller's The Small Black God and Joe Lansdale's The Tall Grass, but there's plenty of other good stuff in there.)

Secondly, because I owe Eric Guignard one for helping me nail down the ending of another story, Prisoner of Peace; possibly the best horror story I've written, probably my personal favourite, and that bit better for Eric's contribution.

And thirdly, because Dark Tales has been running around like that kid in every school class whose parents feed him nothing but sugar and haven't even heard of ritalin, getting lots of attention and starting fights with the big kids and biting the dinner lady's bosom. 

What does all that mean?  I don't know, my analogy got out from under me.  What I do know is that Eric sent my an e-mail telling me lots of neat stuff.  Like ... Dark Tales is now out in e-book, here at Amazon and here at Barnes & Noble.  Like, it's been picking up nominations for a Stoker, which is pretty respectable for a small press collection from a debut editor.  Like, Goodreads are running a best horror anthology contest and it's currently at number 3, beating out some astonishingly tough competition ... not least that little Living Dead anthology thing I was in a couple of years back.  Like, it's been picking up some excellent reviews for itself. 

(And then, just as I was about to finish this post, I got a membership offer from the Horror Writers Association, who'd read The Door Beyond the Water and liked it enough to see if I'd be up for joining their gang.)

So all in all, hats off to Eric ... firstly for putting so much thought and care into creating such a strong collection, and secondly for managing to get so many of the right people to notice it.

New Fiction Out

Or should that be Old Fiction Out?

After all, The Door Beyond the Water, just out in the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology from Dark Moon Books, is a complete and utter overhaul of a story written maybe ten years ago, previously published (and read by exactly no one) in a magazine called The Willows.

I'm not going to talk about it too much about that one, though, since I'm holding out for my contributor copy and a proper look inside.  I've had a good vibe with this one from the beginning though, mainly because editor Eric Guignard's been such a treat to work with, so hey, finger's crossed.

Also out this week, though, and even older in its original version, is a story called Hand That Feeds, podcast last Sunday by Nil Desperandum.  I've gone on before about the genesis of this one, how I originally wrote it a zillion or so years ago as some kind of wacky, polemical  pit-fight of art versus the state, with art winning by a clear knockout, and then chipped and chipped away over the intervening millennia, until it was hard to say just who was right, the artist who can't help but point out how much he doesn't fit in or the bureaucrat who has to deal with him, regardless of his own feelings on the matter.  At which point I fell back in love with it a little and started sending it out - because if there's one thing I enjoy, it's writing stories that thrust big questions at the reader and then completely fail to come down on either side.

Listening to it, as wonderfully read by Scott Danielson of A Good Story is Hard to Find - who, by the way, captures the character of LeGris to a rather scary degree - I can't help but wonder at how things would have worked out if I hadn't walked away from struggling to write so-called literary fiction, abandoned the befuddling lessons of my English degrees and my weird desire to write like some impossible combination of Kafka, Dostoevsky and Conrad.  Would I be a better writer today?  Or would I be drinking absinth and eating cockroaches in a garrett flat somewhere, struggling to nail that impossible first word of that impossible first novel?  Would I be sitting here blogging about a story I wrote ten or more years ago about a misunderstood (or maybe, too-well understood) artist or would I be in some Soho coffee shop bitching about how nobody understands my art?  Are Soho coffee shops even open this late?  I mean, who drinks coffee at this time on a Sunday night?

Like the characters in Hand That Feeds, I have no answers.  But for a story I wrote whole aeons ago, I'm pretty pleased with how this one's turned out.

Second Commission, Now With Added Brains

I mentioned a few posts back that I had my first story commission recently, when editor Eric Guignard approached me about his forthcoming Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology.  In that post, I also kind of hinted at the fact that, almost straight away afterwards, I was approached by another editor with a whole 'nother request for my work.  Then I left the whole thing hanging on bit of an artificial cliffhanger, maybe striving for a sense of tension that wasn't entirely there or just bemusedly trying to draw a lengthy post to some sort of close.  Who can say?

Well ... me, obviously.  The truth is, I was being deliberately vague because, although said publisher had asked me for a contribution, they hadn't actually seen what I'd come up with.  And it was entirely possible that I'd send them my story and they'd never, ever, ever be in touch again, perhaps blocking my e-mail address just to be on the safe side.  Or else write back blaming me for the break-up of their marriage.  Or reveal that the whole thing had been some vicious and spectacularly mistimed April Fools joke.

In a pleasantly surprising fashion, none of those things have happened.  So here, belatedly, are the details I held back (or didn't know because they were about to happen in the future) in that last post.

Almost literally straight after me and Eric hashed out the last details for The Door Beyond the Water, and just after Eric let me know that the collection had been picked up by indie horror press Dark Moon Books, I got another e-mail - this one from Stan Swanson, editor and publisher at Dark Moon.  Coincidence?  Whatever the opposite is of a coincidence?  I have no idea.  All I know is, Stan was writing to know if I might be interested in putting forward a story for Dark Moon's forthcoming Slices of Flesh anthology.

You just know that's not going to be a compilation of soul-searching romantic novellas, don't you? And that's probably a good thing, because I have absolutely none of those lying around.  (Well, okay, one.  But I'm saving that for the day Mills and Boon come knocking.)  No, what Stan was after was horror flash fiction.

Only, it was a little more interesting than that.  First of all, Stan happened to mention in that initial e-mail is that he'd already picked up a bunch of very big names.  I'm not sure how many of these are meant to be public knowledge yet, so I'll hold fire on the full compendium of famousness - but even at that early point, some true celebrities of horror had thrown their hats in with Stan. Reason being?  Well, aside from the fact that horror flash fiction is a basically good thing, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that all proceeds from Slices of Flesh will be going to charity - with, the last I heard, the main beneficiary being the Literary Project of America.

But there's one more thing.  And it's a thing that would have sold me on the project all by itself.  The cover artist for this prospective anthology?  It's Mike Mignola.  Now, normally when I namecheck someone, I'd give a bit of a bio for those who've somehow missed their work.  But honestly, if you don't know who Mike Mignola is then you just plain should.  Click on the link.  Seriously.  I'm not even asking here.

Oh, and my story?  It's the (maybe a bit too) provocatively named Wetback.  It has zombies.  If you've been following my work even slightly over the last few years, you've probably noticed I have a soft spot for writing the walking dead.  I think this one's a little different though, what with the zombie being the main protagonist and all.  Not a new idea I know, but I'm still hoping this is a take that hasn't exactly been seen before.

And it's going to be behind a Mike Mignola cover.

Squee.

My First Commission. Or, Is That a Gate? No, It's Clearly a Door

Of the many neat writer things I always assumed would only happen to other people - presumably people who either were or were closely akin to Stephen King - getting a story commissioned was always pretty high on the list.  I mean, it's hard enough trying to sell one at the best of times, so the idea that someone would just come straight to me and cut all the pain and trauma out of the process was a bit like the idea of a dayjob where my boss would slap me on the back one day and say, "Hey, Dave, why don't you just stop wasting your time here and we'll just pay you for sucking up air?"  And, you know, it not just be a sarcastic way of firing me.

So you can imagine how I was coloured the exact colour of surprised when writer / editor-to-be Eric Guignard dropped me a very polite e-mail to say that he'd enjoyed Stockholm Syndrome in the Living Dead anthology, and was there any chance that I might be able to put something together for his forthcoming collection Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations?  Not only a comission, but a polite and complimentary comission to an anthology with the kind of title that would make my fingers get itchy just thinking about it!  I mean, dark Tales?  Lost civilisations?  That's got to mean Lovecraftian goings-on in abandoned, antedeluvian burgs, exactly the kind of stuff I write about with no incentive whatsoever.  I doesn't take much imagination to guess what my answer was.

I said no.

Well, I kind of did.  Actually, what I said was, "I'm completely snowed under with writing my new novel and a kerzillion other things and sadly the hopes of me being able to write a new story in time are roughly equivalent to the hopes of hell getting its own all-star ice hockey team.  But I do have this very nice (though already slightly published) story that I think would be a heck of good fit.  It's called The Gate in the Jungle and it's been read by precisely seven people, including the editor and my mum.  How's about I polish that up?"

A relatively logical solution, I hope you'll agree.  Only problem was, Eric was in the midst of trying to find a publisher for his burgeoning anthology, and one of the selling points was that it was a collection of all-new fiction.  However, he did really like Gate.  How much polishing was I talking about exactly, he asked?  Could it be sufficient polishing that the end result might reasonably be considered a fresh story?  Were we looking at the kind of polish that could warrant a new title here?

I thought it over.  And that time, I said yes.

The end result is The Door Beyond the Lake.  Is it a polish?  A rewrite?  A new story?  I'm hopeful it's a bit of all of those.  I know I put a lot of man-hours into it, and was more pleased than I'd hoped I could be with the results - something kind of like a story I wrote many years ago, except far better and much creepier and - well, new.  Maybe more importantly, Eric feels the same, meaning that The Door Beyond the Lake is now forthcoming in Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations.  And while I was labouring away on my "reimagining", Eric was busy finding a publisher, in the shape of Dark Moon Books.  Who are planning to premier it at next year's Horrorcon.  So that worked out pretty well, all told.

And then, a couple of days later, I got my second ever commission.  But it's probably a little too early to talk about that one.