GREAT BEYOND HALLOWEEN BLOGHOP

 

"Dang dab it, Roland!" the ghost of Mark Twain grouched as he sat at my table.  "What's this I hear about you doing a seance?"

 

The shadows of Meilori's, the haunted French Quarter jazz club, seemed to close in as if to eavedrop.  I shook my head.

 

"You know I don't do seances, Mark.  I don't have to what with writing here at my table."

 

The ghost of H P Lovecraft gloomily sat down beside me.  "As well you shouldn't."

 

His long face grew longer. "What do you living know of the world and the universe about you?

 

Your means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and your notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow.

 

You see things only as you are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses you pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos,

 

yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things you see,

 

 but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses you have."

 

Mark Twain grumbled, "Excuse me for a decade, H P, while I break out a thesaurus and riddle out what you just said."

 

"Wait, guys," I said.  "I'm just participating in the GREAT BEYOND HALLOWEEN BLOGHOP."

 

Lovecraft intoned, "Which is?"

 

" Well, the rules are simple -

 

participants should write a post for October 30 that talks about a famous deceased author (or celebrity?) they would like to contact in a seance.

Then TaraTyler, Angela Brown, and Gwen Gardner will randomly choose winners for their prizes."

 

Mark's eyes sparkled.  "What are they offering? "

 

"Tara will be giving away a printed, signed copy of Pop Travel, and I will be giving away autographs of Mark Ruffalo and Cobie Smulders of THE AVENGERS."

 

 

His face fell.  "No date with Megan Fox?"

 

"Mark!  She's married."

 

"I ain't the jealous type."

 

Lovecraft just sighed, shaking his head.

FRIDAY THE 13TH Buccaneer Blogfest Interview

Marisa Cleveland is interviewing me at her lovely blog this Friday the 13th

at the haunted jazz club, Meilori's. Don't miss it!

http://www.marisacleveland.com/



That interview is done so what am I still doing sitting at Meilori's at this empty table?

I invited two fellow buccaneers to be interviewed here. Neither lady has shown up.

A sonorous voice in a New England accent said, "I, too, was spurned by the fairer sex, Roland."

I looked up to see the gaunt, hollow-eyed form of H P Lovecraft and smiled sadly, "There was one for you."

"And for you as well."

I shrugged, "Perhaps our hearts had room for only one love."

He nodded glumly and sat down opposite me. "I will allow you to interview me, Roland."

I looked past him to the club beyond his body. Only an endless array of tables whose candles pushed back the darkness only a little.

In this dark cavern of a saloon, things vast, blind, and monstrous took shape in the bronze-hued mists that billowed all through the place.

They lumbered without notice of us. They became almost solid, fuzzed, then drifted apart only to re-form feet from where they had been.

Past them was the entrance where customers entered and placed silver coins in the eyes of the polished skull in the center of a black marble table: a Friday the 13th tradition.

"It is my skull, Roland."

I said, "I hope you don't mind that I put in no coins."

"You placed three polished stones beside my skull. Why?"

"The Lakota paid tribute to forgotten gods by placing a pebble onto a pile of stones each time they used an ancient trail.

They did this to ensure that even though these gods may be forgotten, they would still be honored in some small way.

As the piles of stones grew, they eventually served the trail’s users as a system of 'road signs' used to navigate by and to give directions to other travelers."

I shrugged. "The Great Mystery, or Elohim as the White Man calls Him, has become largely forgotten these days. The stones are my prayer in stone that the travelers here find their way back to Him."

Lovecraft nodded seeing more than his tongue said. "Ask me a question for this lost interview, Roland."

"Why did you come here tonight, sir?"

He closed those haunted eyes. "I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates
into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."

I grimaced. Like much of his writing, I would have to ponder his answer later to make sense of it. I asked him another question.

"Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you, sir?"

He opened his eyes, no longer seeing me.

"My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the
fragmentary impressions of wonder

which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being

to achieve the illusion

of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear."

He paused and said in tones like the tolling of ghost bells in ruined temples.

"I fear for you, Roland."

"Me?"

Lovecraft shivered, "Tell your readers that if by chance they pray, pray for you."

"W-Why for me?"

He intoned, "For what both the Druid priests and the Louisiana shamans

had chanted to their kindred idols.

It was something very like this:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ...

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

He drew back his lips, making his face look eerily like his skull on the black marble table. "In 2012, the cosmic conjunctions allign.

And dread Cthulhu rises,

rises from the dark swamp called Contraband --

the swamp but miles from your dwelling, Roland.

I hear the portents even now in the blackness of Meilori's.

The moon is dark, and the spirits dance in the night;

there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse

foretold in no books of men or of earth's myths.

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,

and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

So should your readers have breath left over from their prayers for you, Roland --

ask them to sing a canticle for me."

REFUGE IN THE NIGHT_A HALLOWEEN TALE

The six other stranded bus passengers hugged the heat of the room's roaring fireplace.

Odd.

It should have been roasting in here. But I was still shivering.

Of course, I was also standing in the far corner. Even the shadows around me seemed cold and unfriendly. I might have only been 12 years old, but I hadn't survived years on the mean streets of four cities by being trusting.

So here I stood.

Our host at the far end of the table called out to me, "Come, boy, warm yourself at my fire. It was a long walk from your broken down bus to my estate."

"Name's Victor Standish, sir. And I'm just fine right here."

I strained to make out his features but the shadows that shouldn't have been masking his whole body stopped me from seeing him clear. "Where's our bus driver?"

"He asked me where the phone was. I told him. He seemed in a hurry to contact his superiors."

I smirked, "He had that many quarters?"

He said, "Show respect to your elders, boy."

"Respect is earned. And the name's Victor Standish."

He shifted in his chair angrily. I went cold. His body ... squished. I realized he was in a wheelchair ... and it blocked the door out of here.

"Tonight is a rare night ... Standish."

His words were spoken oddly ... as if human speech itself was a foreign thing to him.

"It is Samhain, summer's end. The Celtic New Year began this nightfall.

In your ancient Welsh tradition, this evening was called The Three Spirit Night, when all kinds of beings could roam between realities."

I went colder at his use of "your" as if he did not belong to the human race.

He wheeled his chair towards me by only inches but it seemed far, far too close.

"You really should have sat with your fellow passengers. It was over so quickly for them."

I flicked my eyes to them. Oh, crap. Some were slumped on the floor. Some across the tables. Some sat bonelessly in their chairs.

Their eyes were ... melted, flowing like mucus down their withered cheeks. And their shadows were gone ... as if their very souls had been eaten.

"You hold in your fear well ... human."

The fingers of both hands in my pockets plucked up a ball bearing each. "T-The bus driver's dead, too?"

"Oh, yes. You I picked to play with."

"It's been a long day, sir. I'm all played out."

"I think I'll eat your sharp tongue last."

There was nothing in that for me but pain so I said, "H-How did you get here?'

He laughed wetly. "You think me some space creature?"

He turned for a moment to stare into the fires with eyes I could not see nor was unhappy over that fact. "In a way I am from beyond the stars."

He turned back to me, and for a moment, I saw a wet, scaled face that looked more insect than fish. And eyes rhuemy and totally empty of anything human or merciful.

I fought back a shiver. He chuckled in a squishy gurgle.

"It began with the meteorite. The black seed of my birth fell in the back of this estate on the night of Samhain in 1843. Men could not approach the site for weeks because of the heat."

Again that terrible laughter. "And by then, the trees and wildlife were taking on strange shapes."

He wheeled closer still. "Men of your so-called science came finally to investigate. Those that managed to overcome their sudden illness and go back to their homes and beds died in them."

Closer came the wheelchair, and I saw that tentacles, not fingers, grasped the wheels. "The lovely wife of this estate's owner was pregnant."

The wheels squeaked as the chair came right up to me. "She did not survive my birth. As you will not survive this night."

I whipped both hands out of my pockets and shot two ball bearings with all my strength into his gaping maw of a slavering mouth. "Eat this!"

He choked in wet husks. I darted around his chair, twisting aside to dodge the tentacles that suddenly shot from his middle. I saw razored teeth in a second snarling mouth in his damn stomach.

I grasped the back of the chair with both shaking hands. I shoved the nightmare creature along the wooden floor, ducking the tentacles that clutched for my head.

You don't outrun the addicts and perverts on the street by being slow.

I whizzed past the dead passengers and shoved the squirming mockery of a man into the blazing fire. His screams were ... beyond my ability to describe. I hear them in my nightmares still.

I raced out of the room, yelling over my shoulder. "And by the way, Trick or Treat!"
***

WHY HORROR?_A HALLOWEEN REFLECTION

Wendy Ewurum has done a great post on Victor :

http://fabulositynouveau.blogspot.com/2011/10/celebrating-legend-of-victor-standish.html

Why are we drawn to horror? Why are good girls drawn to bad boys?

1.) The allure of the forbidden.

That is one of the reasons horror beckons to us from out of the shadows.

Why is that boy, that deserted mansion, forbidden?

It is as old as the blood which pulsed cold and tingling through Eve's veins as she reached for that forbidden fruit on that hauntingly lovely tree.

2.) Curiosity.

It is human nature to want to know what lies over the horizon. It's what drove the pioneers across wild, hostile lands.

What does that locked door conceal? That chained chest. Why those heavy links, that rusted lock?

Is this all there is? Or is there more beyond mere line of sight? We know there is more.

Science tells of us of dark matter piercing the cosmos with light-years long strands of matter invisible to the human eye. We are likewise blind to the world of germs. What other worlds are we blind to?

Give a nugget of uranium, a tiny stone really, to an aborigine. Tell him it is a good luck charm. Tell him to drop it in the village well.

What harm could one tiny stone do? Visit his village two months later. View the many corpses laying strewn like dead dreams all across the ground.

3.) Identification.

We watch and imagine what we would do in like situations. The world dissolves into chaos as random individuals descend slowly into madness.

You are picked up by the local sheriff as you are doing your morning walk with your dog. He orders you and your dog into the back of the car. He presses his gun to your dog's head and rambles on about brains looking like wet oysters. Do you want to see?

What would you do? What could you do?

Life is frightening. Global warming. Diseases that eat the very flesh of your body. We watch horor on the screen to encapsulate the horror of real life. It is not us up there.

We would be smarter, faster, more in control of our emotions.

We like the adrenaline rush sudden scares give us. Safer than driving fast, dating inappropriate guys or gals, and with the thrill of saying mentally, "It's not real; I'm still safe."

4.) The Darkness Within.

Terror versus Horror. Is one more physical; the other more mental? Does revulsion and squriming terror pierce through our mental barriers to stab deep into our unconscious fears ... and desires?

(Take the public fascination with the trilogy of the girl with the dragon tattoo :

she is repeatedly brutalized, raped, shot, and beaten. The books and movies are bestsellers. Is there a darkness in us that wants to roll around in sadism like a cat does catnip?)

You are horrified by the news of the floods in Pakistan. You are terrorized when you wake up one New Orleans morning to the news that the dams have burst, and you look out your front door to see rushing waters swallow your neighbor's home ... then your very own.

Horror is realizing the monsters are real and are out there to get you. Terror is looking into the mirror, seeing yourself becoming one -- but still enough you to scream silently at the sight.

Stephen King said horror literature is a means for us to take out the monster, play with it for a while, and put it back.

But who is the monster?

Is he some squirming presence waiting on the other side of the dimensional wall waiting for a crack to appear? Is he the beloved president whose wife is slowly going insane at the awful reality of who he truly is?

Or does his/her eyes stare back at you from the mirror?

Carl Jung :

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions."

Why do you think we read horror? Why are we so drawn to dressing up as monsters or as our secret identities? Why do you write the genres you do? And what role does "control" or "lack of control" play in horror/scary movies and literature?
***

TO BE REBORN...FIRST YOU MUST DIE_2ND RULE OF 3 entry

The iron tongue of midnight tolls. It is Renaissance time :

http://stuartnager.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/second-set-of-prompts-ren3-and-a-renaissance-story-too/

The murky waters of the bayou bordering my apartment know. The veil is unraveling. Soon THEY who once ruled this world will slip through. One portal is in the nexus called Renaissance.

Three heroes stand in the breach. Captain Samuel McCord, the Texas Ranger with the blood of Death in his veins. Victor Standish, the young Ulysses of the French Quarter. And his Victorian ghoul friend, Alice Wentworth.

Tonight, the shadows will listen to the 600 words of Victor Standish as the three face the mysterious Maija under the sneering eyes of Renaissance's mayor :


There were echoes of hurt to Captain Sam’s eyes as he studied Maija. I knew he wasn’t seeing her but her twin, his wife, who was seven years gone.

Was he looking for some trace of Meilori in the dead-soul eyes of her sister?

“You said you needed my help with a murder.”

Maija, despite her sneer, somehow looked like a jilted girl. “Yes. Yours.”

I forced a laugh to perk Sam up. “He and I knew that.”

Alice went stiff. “You knew and yet you came? Is your hubris truly that great?”

I shushed her. “Don’t talk about my anatomy in front of Maija.”

Alice slapped her sides. “Idiot, dolt, knave! Hubris means pride.”

I winked. “I just love it when you talk dirty.”

Maija fought a smile. She had a sense of humor? It must be the end of the world.

Sam said, “She is better than she believes.”

Maija’s face softened, creeping me out more than her usual razor eyes. “No, Samuel, I am far worse than you could possibly imagine.”

Aw, man, her eyes were wet as she murmured,

“I shall feel the emptier tonight after you are … gone. Yours is a face I shall miss, strong without the cruelty of toughness, kind without the bruise of weakness. When I have rid the world of that face, I shall have earned the hatred of Meilori -- and of myself.”

Suddenly, I saw Maija for what she was. A haunted woman, withered by countless wrong choices that had swept her far beyond her beginnings, beyond betrayed friends, long lost from the lands of her youth, the dreams of her childhood,

beyond being the kind of woman the man she loved could ever love back.

I didn’t think even she knew where she was coming from … or where she was really going.

There are no round-trips across the Rubicon.

I looked at the mayor, things rippling under his cummerbund like knotted ropes,

at the partiers turning as one towards Maija’s unsuspecting back,

at Captain Sam’s gloved hand, suddenly holding a Colt the size of the National debt.

I said, “To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing, and that’s real power.”

The old Maija returned, “You read Ayn Rand?”

“She’s a pain, but suffering builds character. You know me, a real character.”

The mayor rumbled in a voice, that had it been a face, I would have slapped, “Nonsense words.”

Alice eyed the partiers whose faces suddenly had fanged mouths literally from ear to ear. “It means, scion of an Old One, that you two should mind your surroundings.”

“I know my surroundings, ghoul. I know that the murderer of my cousin stands before me!”

Maija raised an eyebrow. “You killed a half-breed Elder?”

“He was trying to make Victor tartar out of me. I took it personal.”

The mayor turned his shadowed face to me. “And I will personally take your life.”

Sam’s eyes became windows into Hell. “You try. You die.”

“No weapon made by Man can hurt me.”

Sam smiled like a wolf. “Lucky thing that Hephaetus made this just for you.”

The mayor edged forward. “You lie!”

Sam cocked the Colt. “You’ll have to pay to find out.”

Alice grimly eyed the flowing bodies of the partiers getting ever closer, unseen by Maija or the mayor, then turned to Sam.

“This region of Renaissance is still a ghost town, is it not, Captain?”

Sam nodded his Stetson at Alice. “Afraid so, princess.”

Maija turned in a whirl. “No!”

“Yes!,” laughed the partiers as they rushed us.
***
All 4 prompts were utilized :

1.Someone is killed or almost killed.
2.One of the characters is revealed to be not who he or she is.
3.A relationship becomes complicated.
4.A character lies to another on an important matter

FIRST WINNERS in the
FRIENDS OF VICTOR STANDISH CONTEST!

{Please email me your addresses to receive your prizes!}

1.) Wendy Morrell won :

Alexander Skarsgard's autograph!

2.) Francine Howarth won :

Megan Fox's autograph!

3.) Hart Johnson won :

Brad Pitt's photograph.

(These 3 got entries because they put up posts about me BEFORE they even knew the rules!)


Please, guys, write a review of THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH so you, too, can be eligible to win. WRITING A REVIEW is the FIRST STEP in entering his contest!

***

H P LOVECRAFT_IMAGO OF HORROR_SECOND CAMPAIGNER CHALLENGE

{Another advanced post ... 200 words exactly.}

Ghost of Lovecraft here.

Did my prose mirror truth?

I dare not say.

My imagination was too stunted to paint what lies beyond.

I believe that this less material life is our truer one,

and that our vain presence on this transitory globe is

the secondary phenomenon.

I was wandering Thalarion, a synchroni city,

where none return,

where walk only daemons that are no longer sane, who stumble from gaps in reality that oscitate eerily.

These ruins project a diseased miasma as if the very stones are cursed.

The ghost of Samuel Clemens

made his cautious way to me.

Wise he was to be careful, for I am no longer ... human.

Bemused, I watched from the shadows.

He, though ghost, was human still, self-centered in opinion, with lacunae of astounding ignorance.

Clemens said, "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip. But Roland is ill. He needs your help."

"Of course I will help."

{I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,

so that the skies of spring must forever be poison to me.

So should you have breath left over from your prayers for Roland --

sing a canticle for me.}
***

COMING HOME_NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE

It is time for another Friday ROMANTIC CHALLENGE given by the always fascinating Francine Howarth and Denise Covey.

Today's theme is COMING HOME.

My 400 word entry is from the sequel to my CREOLE KNIGHTS : NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE (in the process of being written.)

The cosmic conjunctions have aligned. The Nameless Ones strain at the unraveling barrier between them and our world.

After 7 years, Maija has released her sister, Meilori, from the bubble of frozen time in which she encased her in a trap of deceit.

Why?

To see her face when she tells Meilori that her beloved Samuel McCord lies dead by the tentacles of an exiled Nameless One he killed before dying.

The undead rabbi, Ben Teradion, is comforting the devastated Ningyo. He is Death’s measure to stop the invasion of The Nameless Ones.

Maija turns to mock the rabbi with the truth of his role, not realizing you simply cannot kill a man whom Death will not take. Shrouded in the Threads of Night, Samuel McCord, bleeding and battered, stands invisible beside her :



Maija laughed. “Death saved you for tonight, rabbi, to speak the name God gave Himself, that when uttered outside the Holy Temple would rend the very universe.”

Ben Teradion said, “No!”

Meilori whispered, “Death has come to revel in the end of life. For her, the death of the entire universe would be ecstasy.”

Ben Teradion husked, “But then --”

Maija nodded. “Nothing stands in the way of the Ningyo Empire to re-enter our home plane.”

The rabbi cried, “No! The Nameless Ones would return to our world!”

“Who cares?”

Meilori gestured, black energy hissing at the ends of her fingertips. “Samuel would have cared.”

The other Ningyo’s circled her as Maija husked, “Now, you die.”

I dropped the Threads of Night. “Don’t make me spank you.”

Maija yelped, “McCord!”

Meilori took a half-step back. “Samuel!”

“Do I know you?”

She looked as if I’d knifed her, and I regretted my joke. “For seven years, the hope of seeing you again got me up each morning.”

She mewed like a kitten and rushed into my arms, her lips hungrily seeking mine. An electric connection completed deep inside me. The world made sense again.

I was home.

A trilling vibrated around us. Maija’s portal was opening.

I heard feet. The Ningyo’s were about to jump us.

“Padre, trust me. Say God’s name!”

Maija leapt forward. The rabbi bellowed.

His lips worked as if he shouted one word, but I heard the sentence he said two thousand years before as he burned before the Roman emperor.

“The parchment burns, but the words fly free!”

The sound flowed into nothing human --

as if Life had come to know itself by the simple act of hearing it.

It came from all directions. The lower notes rumbled as if from the depths of the earth. Higher vibrations trilled as if from the stars in heaven.

I was a human tuning fork, the marrow of my bones trembling. The vibrations cascaded around me and Meilori in a waterfall of sound.

Her jade eyes, first wild with fear, soon grew as deep as the love I felt for her and she for me. A sunburst exploded with us in its burning honey center.

For the first time in two hundred years, I felt warm. Meilori smiled, then kissed me.

The universe might be ending. I didn’t mind. In her arms, I was finally home.
***

DEATH and MADNESS

{"Men of broader intellect know
that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal."

- H. P. Lovecraft.}


Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this : my imagination was too stunted,

my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself

the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.


Then, what brings me to Roland's blog?


I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens, Raymond Chandler, Will Rogers, and Ernest Hemingway (all heavily armed) made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful,

for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, ghost."
***
So I am here. Why did I come? I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates

into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the

fragmentary impressions of wonder which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

As to how I write a story - there is no one way. The following set of rules might be deduced from my average procedure :

1.) Prepare a chronological order of events.

2.) Prepare the narrative order of those events if you are beginning in the middle or the end.

3.) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically.

4.) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties, and convincingness of transitions.

5.) One last note : Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion.

Imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail

which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion
of the strange reality of the unreal.

Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning

apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

**And so now I ask you again :

Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you?

Why has this genre captured you?

Do you have a blueprint you follow when you write your story or novel? Let me know. The remnant of humanity still clinging to me is interested.

And remember :

"Pleasure is wonder —

the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral;

the past in the present; the infinite in the finite;

these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
***
Now, Clemens would have me insert this photo to keep a pledge to Laila Knight. Since, I, in my own way, am an old world gentleman. Here it is :

***

LOVECRAFT HERE_A HALLOWEEN NIGHT TALE

"West of reason the hills rise wild,

and there are valleys with deep woods that no ax has ever cut or ever will."

- H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft here. Or rather his ghost.

It is Samhain, the Three Spirit Night, and I have chosen to write an article for DreamSinger.

Or rather should I say I was chosen and accepted?

Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this :

my imagination was too stunted,
my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer one,

and that our vain presence on this transitory globe is itself
the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Then, what brings me to Roland's apartment in these midnight hours?

I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens and Marlene Dietrich, both heavily armed, (one with wit, the other with her icy beauty)

made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful, for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, Clemens."

So I am here.

Why did I come?

I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates
into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the
fragmentary impressions of wonder

which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being

to achieve the illusion

of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

And fear for Roland.

And if by chance you pray, pray for him,

for what both the Druid priests and the Louisiana shamans

had chanted to their kindred idols

was something very like this:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ...

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

In 2012, the cosmic conjunctions allign.

And dread Cthulhu rises,

rises from the dark swamp called Contraband --

the swamp but miles from Roland's dwelling.

I hear the portents even now in the blackness of Roland's apartment.

The moon is dark, and the spirits dance in the night;

there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse

foretold in no books of men or of earth's myths.

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,

and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

So should you have breath left over from your prayers for Roland --

sing a canticle for me.
***

WHY HORROR?_A HALLOWEEN REFLECTION

Why are we drawn to horror? Why are good girls drawn to bad boys?

1.) The allure of the forbidden.

That is one of the reasons horror beckons to us from out of the shadows.

Why is that boy, that deserted mansion, forbidden?

It is as old as the blood which pulsed cold and tingling through Eve's veins as she reached for that forbidden fruit on that hauntingly lovely tree.

2.) Curiosity.

It is human nature to want to know what lies over the horizon. It's what drove the pioneers across wild, hostile lands.

What does that locked door conceal? That chained chest. Why those heavy links, that rusted lock?

Is this all there is? Or is there more beyond mere line of sight? We know there is more.

Science tells of us of dark matter piercing the cosmos with light-years long strands of matter invisible to the human eye. We are likewise blind to the world of germs. What other worlds are we blind to?

Give a nugget of uranium, a tiny stone really, to an aborigine. Tell him it is a good luck charm. Tell him to drop it in the village well.

What harm could one tiny stone do? Visit his village two months later. View the many corpses laying strewn like dead dreams all across the ground.

3.) Identification.

We watch and imagine what we would do in like situations. The world dissolves into chaos as random individuals descend slowly into madness.

You are picked up by the local sheriff as you are doing your morning walk with your dog. He orders you and your dog into the back of the car. He presses his gun to your dog's head and rambles on about brains looking like wet oysters. Do you want to see?

What would you do? What could you do?

Life is frightening. Global warming. Diseases that eat the very flesh of your body. We watch horor on the screen to encapsulate the horror of real life. It is not us up there.

We would be smarter, faster, more in control of our emotions.

We like the adrenaline rush sudden scares give us. Safer than driving fast, dating inappropriate guys or gals, and with the thrill of saying mentally, "It's not real; I'm still safe."

4.) The Darkness Within.

Terror versus Horror. Is one more physical; the other more mental? Does revulsion and squriming terror pierce through our mental barriers to stab deep into our unconscious fears ... and desires?

(Take the public fascination with the trilogy of the girl with the dragon tattoo :

she is repeatedly brutalized, raped, shot, and beaten. The books and movies are bestsellers. Is there a darkness in us that wants to roll around in sadism like a cat does catnip?)

You are horrified by the news of the floods in Pakistan. You are terrorized when you wake up one New Orleans morning to the news that the dams have burst, and you look out your front door to see rushing waters swallow your neighbor's home ... then your very own.

Horror is realizing the monsters are real and are out there to get you. Terror is looking into the mirror, seeing yourself becoming one -- but still enough you to scream silently at the sight.

Stephen King said horror literature is a means for us to take out the monster, play with it for a while, and put it back.

But who is the monster?

Is he some squirming presence waiting on the other side of the dimensional wall waiting for a crack to appear? Is he the beloved president whose wife is slowly going insane at the awful reality of who he truly is?

Or does his/her eyes stare back at you from the mirror?

Carl Jung :

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions."

Why do you think we read horror? Why are we so drawn to dressing up as monsters or as our secret identities? Why do you write the genres you do? And what role does "control" or "lack of control" play in horror/scary movies and literature?
***

REFUGE IN THE NIGHT_A HALLOWEEN TALE

The six other stranded bus passengers hugged the heat of the room's roaring fireplace.

Odd.

It should have been roasting in here. But I was still shivering.

Of course, I was also standing in the far corner. Even the shadows around me seemed cold and unfriendly. I might have only been 12 years old, but I hadn't survived years on the mean streets of four cities by being trusting.

So here I stood.

Our host at the far end of the table called out to me, "Come, boy, warm yourself at my fire. It was a long walk from your broken down bus to my estate."

"Name's Victor Standish, sir. And I'm just fine right here."

I strained to make out his features but the shadows that shouldn't have been masking his whole body stopped me from seeing him clear. "Where's our bus driver?"

"He asked me where the phone was. I told him. He seemed in a hurry to contact his superiors."

I smirked, "He had that many quarters?"

He said, "Show respect to your elders, boy."

"Respect is earned. And the name's Victor Standish."

He shifted in his chair angrily. I went cold. His body ... squished. I realized he was in a wheelchair ... and it blocked the door out of here.

"Tonight is a rare night ... Standish."

His words were spoken oddly ... as if human speech itself was a foreign thing to him.

"It is Samhain, summer's end. The Celtic New Year began this nightfall.

In your ancient Welsh tradition, this evening was called The Three Spirit Night, when all kinds of beings could roam between realities."

I went colder at his use of "your" as if he did not belong to the human race.

He wheeled his chair towards me by only inches but it seemed far, far too close.

"You really should have sat with your fellow passengers. It was over so quickly for them."

I flicked my eyes to them. Oh, crap. Some were slumped on the floor. Some across the tables. Some sat bonelessly in their chairs.

Their eyes were ... melted, flowing like mucus down their withered cheeks. And their shadows were gone ... as if their very souls had been eaten.

"You hold in your fear well ... human."

The fingers of both hands in my pockets plucked up a ball bearing each. "T-The bus driver's dead, too?"

"Oh, yes. You I picked to play with."

"It's been a long day, sir. I'm all played out."

"I think I'll eat your sharp tongue last."

There was nothing in that for me but pain so I said, "H-How did you get here?'

He laughed wetly. "You think me some space creature?"

He turned for a moment to stare into the fires with eyes I could not see nor was unhappy over that fact. "In a way I am from beyond the stars."

He turned back to me, and for a moment, I saw a wet, scaled face that looked more insect than fish. And eyes rhuemy and totally empty of anything human or merciful.

I fought back a shiver. He chuckled in a squishy gurgle.

"It began with the meteorite. The black seed of my birth fell in the back of this estate on the night of Samhain in 1843. Men could not approach the site for weeks because of the heat."

Again that terrible laughter. "And by then, the trees and wildlife were taking on strange shapes."

He wheeled closer still. "Men of your so-called science came finally to investigate. Those that managed to overcome their sudden illness and go back to their homes and beds died in them."

Closer came the wheelchair, and I saw that tentacles, not fingers, grasped the wheels. "The lovely wife of this estate's owner was pregnant."

The wheels squeaked as the chair came right up to me. "She did not survive my birth. As you will not survive this night."

I whipped both hands out of my pockets and shot two ball bearings with all my strength into his gaping maw of a slavering mouth. "Eat this!"

He choked in wet husks. I darted around his chair, twisting aside to dodge the tentacles that suddenly shot from his middle. I saw razored teeth in a second snarling mouth in his damn stomach.

I grasped the back of the chair with both shaking hands. I shoved the nightmare creature along the wooden floor, ducking the tentacles that clutched for my head.

You don't outrun the addicts and perverts on the street by being slow.

I whizzed past the dead passengers and shoved the squirming mockery of a man into the blazing fire. His screams were ... beyond my ability to describe. I hear them in my nightmares still.

I raced out of the room, yelling over my shoulder. "And by the way, Trick or Treat!"
***

IN THE LIGHT EAR OF REASON, SOFT MADNESS SINGS

Where do we go from here?


As a species? As a culture? As storytellers?


Where does the answer lie? In words. The words that drive us or haunt us or both.


I just finished watching the disturbing horror DVD, PONTYPOOL :


Shut up or die Shock jock, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), has been kicked-off the airwaves and now works at a small-town morning show.



Another mundane day on the job quickly turns deadly when reports pile in of people developing strange speech patterns and evoking brutal acts of violence.



Before long, Mazzy discovers that the behavior is actually a deadly virus being spread through language. Does he stay on the air in hopes of being rescued, or is he providing the virus with its ultimate leap over the airwaves and into the world?



It got me to thinking ... as all good science fiction and fantasy does.



When the last raven has taken flight from the final corpses of humanity, will the word be to blame? Short answer? Yes.



The deadly words flashing over the computer screen in dark missile silos : commence launch sequence.



The whispered words of Moslem extremists urging their volunteer warriors to expose themselves to deadly viruses and then stroll through the world's airports.



The false assurances to the United States President that the budget to scan the stars for incoming asteroids is much too high to continue.



Most likely, the words will be something entirely different ... but altogether just as lethal.



As a science fantasy writer, my view is much more provincial :



Where will my genre go next? THE PASSAGE suggests it will go in the expected direction : after the dollar.



LORD OF THE RINGS, the three that was really only one, took us back to the mythic beginnings of literature. The ghost of blind Homer probably stood at Toilken's shoulder as he wrote.



It was the time of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. An era of legend and dark threat from beyond the ken of Man. The wave of those tales broke upon the cold, uncompromising atomic age.



Then, with the advent of Einstein, the hard science tale took over. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein wrote tales where the scientific idea overshadowed the narrative.



Freud, Jung, and B. F. Skinner finally had their due. And other ideas of science took prominence : psychology and sociology. Philip Jose Farmer, Clifford D. Simak, and Ray Bradbury. Mankind was no longer sure of who was heroic anymore.



The fifties brought us THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Who could we trust?



The sixties brought us Philip K. Dick who suggested we couldn't even trust ourselves or what we viewed as "reality."



Dick's famous statement overshadows that period and its darkness even reaches up through our times : "Reality is that which refuses to go away when I no longer believe in it."



And now fantasy's mist enshrouds us : TWILIGHT, HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY DRESDEN, ANITA BLAKE. Darkness has encircled us, murmuring it was always there in the shadows of our souls.



Which leads us back to my original question : where do we go from here?



Hollywood seems to think it is the time of the adventure story, gilded with fantastic trappings. Do we do a H.G. Wells and go to an unsure near-future as in INCEPTION?



I choose to do a synthesis, involving solid storytelling with an understanding of technology's affect upon Man with psychological probing of what it means to be human in an uncertain present.



Fantasy appears real when there are firm rules, where darkness dwells in the corner of every soul, and the heroic protagonist finds the greatest battle is within.



It is opposition which sculpts the best fiction : the heart pitted against the mind, the spirit struggling against the flesh, and fragile hope outmatched by overwhelming hate.



The best stories are the ones that are concerned least with what I've been talking about. Their main goal is to touch the heart and to haunt the soul. In essence, their authors just want to tell a good story.



What do you think fiction is heading? What do you want to do with your stories? And for whom do you write? All of us reading these words would like to know.



Words. Careful. They worm their way into your consciousness like an antibody ... or a virus.
************************
Speaking of which :