The Forest of Waiting Souls: A True Story

When I was very young, too young to really understand the concept of death (much less reincarnation), I had a dream.  In this dream, my sister, my aunt Connie, and I were camping in a damp cave. We'd laid out our sleeping bags near the mouth of the cave and I remember looking out upon the tops of mountains rolling as far as the eye could see.  Since we were pretty much level with all these mountains, I knew the cave we were camping in was high above the earth.  Our fire cracked and popped as shadows danced over the rock formations and somewhere way back in the darkness the plinking of condensation echoed.  The fire turned to glowing embers and my aunt and sister slept soundly while I laid awake, gazing out through the mouth of the cave at a sky brimming with stars.  As I watched, a large shadow passed, momentarily blacking out the entire view and a shiver coursed through my tiny body.  I knew whatever had blocked the entrance of the cave must have been massive and fear squeezed the breath from my body.  I pretended to sleep within this dream and, at some point, must have.

The dream, however, immediately cut to the next night.  Again the fire had all but burnt out. Again my sister and aunt were sleeping while I watched the mouth of the cave, wide awake.  Again the monstrous shadow passed and again I was paralyzed with fear.  But again the dream fast-forwarded to the next night and all of the details were the same.  Only this time my curiosity got the better of me (as it often does) and when the shadow passed I somehow mustered the courage to crawl out of my sleeping bag and approach the mouth of the cave.

My heart raced as I left the safety of our campsite behind and I felt as if I were about to throw up.  But I had to know.  I had to see what it was that had passed the mouth of our cave for three nights running.

Stepping out onto a ledge, I saw the world's largest T-Rex yards away.  As soon as I was exposed, its massive head whipped toward me as its gigantic mouth opened, revealing rows of sharp teeth that were as large as trees.  It roared and its rancid breath blew like a hot, mighty wind.  The force of the wind, coupled with panic, caused me to stumble backward and the next thing I know the edge of the cliff crumbled beneath my feet and I found myself falling, plummeting toward the hard, unforgiving earth below as wind whistled in my ears.

I knew there was no way I could survive. I knew, somehow, that I was going to die.

There was a flash of brilliant light and suddenly I was walking through a lush forest.  Birds twittered and chirped overhead and the air was scented with the most delicate and beautiful fragrance I'd ever smelled. Alabaster statues were scattered among wildflowers and fountains gurgled streams of water so clear it sparkled in the dappled sunlight.

I followed a path of crushed gravel through this forest until I came to a clearing.  In the center of the clearing was a semi-circle of concrete benches and seated upon these benches were people of every imaginable race and age.  I sat in the only open spot and listened as each person told the story of how they had died, patiently awaiting my turn.  After telling my tale, the beautiful brunette sitting beside me took my small hand in hers and smiled.  She told me I could stay in the forest for as long as I wanted, but when I was ready I would have to return to the living as a new baby.  But I would return, she said, I would always return....

True story.

What's in a name?

When I wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People, I thought I'd come up with a pretty good title. My wife, however, never cared much forit. Don't get me wrong; she loves that book and it is by far her favorite thing I've written to date. But she's never cared for the title. In retrospect, I think I should have listened to her. It never occurred to me that people might get the wrong impression. It's. Not a parody of a self help book; it's not a mash up of zombies and the book from which its title was inspired. It's a dark and gritty tale with themes ranging from matricide to unspeakable acts committed in the name of survival. There's drug addiction, premeditated stalking and homicide, and a lot of moral ambiguity going down within those pages. If I had it all to do over again, I think I would name it something else. I've been told the title is clever and maybe it is. But it's not really a good indication of what lays in store once you begin reading it. What would I change the title to? That's a good question. Perhaps The Tides of Time since that's what I plan on calling the series. Perhaps something different. So here's a question: if you were to rename this book, what would. You call it?

Zombiepalooza!!!

On Sunday, October 7th from 9:00 to 11:00 PM, Jackie Chin will be hosting Zombiepalooza over on ztalkradio.com. The show will feature a live roundtable discussion with Permuted Press authors Scot Thomas, R. Thomas Riley, Scott M Baker, myself, and others. Tune in, call in, and join the party! More information can be found at the following link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Zombiepalooza-Dead-Again/437569786279838

Character Studies

It’s no secret how fond I am of Ocean and Bosley, my protagonists in The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People;  however, there are lesser known characters I’ve written about who also tend to provoke a strong emotional reaction in me.  So I thought I’d just take a moment to recognize these imaginary friends of mine … though some of them I would be hard pressed to actually call friends.

Owen from “Tiffany Shepis and the Fanboy of the Apocalypse”:  I’m intrigued with Owen simply because he’s bat-shit crazy.  What’s not really told in the story is that before the undead apocalypse went down, he was a pretty normal guy.  He went to work, paid his bills, had meaningful relationships, and really loved horror movies.  The stress of witnessing this shock-and-awe campaign of the living dead, however, caused him to snap.  He’d seen so many atrocities and felt such desolate pain that he grabbed onto one thing like a drowning man struggling for a life preserver.  That thing was his autographed picture of Tiffany Shepis.  It was the last link to a normal world and simpler time.  He just happened to turn to that defense mechanism more and more until his desperation grew into psychotic obsession.  His issues ran so deep that he even peppered his conversations with her movie titles without realizing he was doing so.  Not just throwing the names out there, but subconsciously working them into the context of what he was saying.  The sentence still made sense.  But here was this movie title that had worked its way in.  One more little connecting line to the way life had been.  Which is why I really see him as a somewhat tragic character.

xxxBuTcHeRxxx from “Cooking with Grace”:  I find this guy genuinely creepy.  People sometimes ask dark fiction authors if they’ve ever written anything that’s scared even them; for me, the answer to that question is xxxBuTcHeRxxx.  I’ve thought a lot about this guy as, for a while there, I’d considered expanding this short story into a novel.  But even without that additional information, the last two lines of the story really disturb me.  There’s nothing tragic about this son of a bitch.

Chase McGowan from an untitled novel idea I haven’t entirely given up on:  In his youth, Chase thought he was a serial killer.  The dude would see attractive women on the street and would think of them as good victims instead of sexy or pretty.  He had some pretty serious anger issues going on inside him and spontaneously had some pretty fucked up fantasies.  After picking up a hitchhiker one night, he made that leap from fantasy to reality.  Once the woman was dead, however, he was torn apart by guilt and remorse and realized that he couldn’t just callously take a life.  But he’s still a bit of a sociopath, so turning himself in was not an option.  Instead, he takes her into the woods and buries her in a clearing, near a small stream.  Twenty years later, he still visits that spot in the woods.  He lays on the ground with his ear pressed to the gravesite and talks with her.  He hears her replies, but I’m not really sure if it’s actually her spirit or simply Chase’s own guilt trying to convince his apathetic side to do the right thing after all these years.

Memory Wilkes from a novel entitled Nowhere Fast that I haven’t entirely given up on:  Memory grew up in a poor, backwoods town in West Virginia.  Her father is the town drunkard and spends more time at the local bar, The Smoke Shop, than he does at home.  Her mother suffers from schizophrenia but has never been treated or institutionalized for it.  She stays at home and her disability checks are the only real income the family has.  However, this also means that 17 year old Memory is stuck with caring for her little brother and sister and running the household.  In a town where pretty much everyone is poor, her family is considered trash.  Parents warn their kids not to befriend the Wilkes children and any time a petty crime is committed, the suspicion automatically falls on them.  Though she’s still a virgin, she has the reputation of being a little whore who will put out to anyone, anytime.  All Memory wants is to fix the old pickup truck her uncle left for her in his will and leave all of it behind.  She longs to move to Charlotte, NC where she can be just another face in a teeming crowd, anonymous and nondescript. In an attempt to earn the money needed to make her fantasy a reality, Memory makes a very bad decision, leading to a chain of events that only get worse with every turn.

Agent Meat:  Named after on online buddy from the early nineties, Agent Meat is an interdimensional creature who is part of the ruling elite on a conquered Earth.  He’s humanoid, but his lipless mouth is lined with needle like teeth and he has a bifurcated tongue.  His ears lay flat against his head and his nose resembles a head of cauliflower.  He favors dark, expensive suits which contrast with his ashy-gray skin and felt fedoras.  He comes from a caste-driven society, with the true upper echelon being those in the Guru class. He was born into the Agent class and is a couple rungs lower on the social ladder than a Guru.  But, as an Agent, he is as feared as he is ruthless.  When an Agent dies, their “soul” must spend an indeterminate amount of time in a type of limbo as they prepare themselves for the transition. During this period, they continue to work for the agency in various forms.  Agent Meat’s partner, for example, is Agent Brass, who only appears in reflective surfaces.  Together, these two agents root out dissidence among the enslaved, human drones who are forced to manufacture a drug the overlords’ society depends upon.  A drug in which humans are also the main ingredient.  While definitely a hard ass, Meat considers himself to be more liberal than Brass in that he has no quandaries about members of his species, called The Party, using humans to satisfy their sexual desires, even though it is forbidden.

Hey, you got your sci-fi in my horror...

This probably won’t interest anyone other than me, but I’ve been thinking lately about how much of my work blends my two most-beloved genres:  science fiction and horror.  There is, of course, the time travel element in The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People, and that’s probably the most obvious example.  But below are some of my shorter works that readers may not be familiar with:

Our Last Hope - Published in Zombonauts: Zombies in Space from Library of the Living Dead Press.  A very short tale told from the POV of a maintenance worker aboard a starship  whose sole purpose is to scour the universe for a cure to the zombie pandemic sweeping the world.

The Winter Experiment -  Originally appeared in Macabre Cadaver Magazine and reprinted in Ghosts and Demons from Static Movement.  In this story, an obsessed researcher kidnaps and tortures young women in a desolate, mountaintop cabin as part of an experiment in scientifically documenting the manifestation of the mythical, Japanese snow woman, Yuki-onna.

I Eat The Dead -  Published in The Book of Horror 2 from Living Dead Press.  This tale centers around a machine called a Richter Cone, which captures an expelled soul at the moment of death and extrudes it into a physical form.  This device results in a subculture of the feeder/gainer fetish whose food of choice is the human soul.  The story follows a couple who begin with a tender, if not unique, relationship and follows its deterioration as their fame within this particular community skyrockets.  I really like the concept a lot but, to be perfectly honest, I’ve felt for quite some time that I could have given it a stronger ending.

Mental Man - Published in Corrupts Absolutely? from Damnation Books.  This story follows a PTSD afflicted detective imbued with super powers as he tries to get into the head of the Suburb Slayer, a serial killer who slaughters entire families and leaves taunting messages scrawled in blood.

Losing Control - to be published in Bloody Ghost Stories from Static Movement.  I really like the universe I’ve created in this one.  It’s about a man who works for a covert organization as a metaphysical janitor, of sorts.  The premise is that there are dead spots between dimensions called Cut Scenes where passing souls can sometimes become entangled.  Utilizing a person who’s in a medically induced, persistent vegetative state as an eavesdropping device into the afterlife, our protagonist uses astral projection to help move them along.  When sadistic serial killer Albert Lewis is executed, his soul latches onto one of these Cut Scenes and constructs his own hellish reality.  Passing souls are captured  like flies in a spider web and their belief in their own perceptions integrates them into Lewis’ deranged fantasies.  It’s our narrator’s job to journey into this nightmare world and set things right.  I can almost see myself expanding this one into novel length at some point in the future.

I’ve also got a couple of new ideas kicking around an am thinking once I’m clear of all contractual obligations that I might release a short collection of my scifi/horror creations.  I figure why the hell not?  You see a lot of crossovers in film (think Alien, The Thing, etc);  but in the realm of the printed word there’s a distinct lack of these tales, I think

Tales from The House of Hot Beverage

At The House of Hot Beverage, my roommate Larry and I had a room in the back wherewe'd entirely covered the walls with butcher paper.  There were two small, mismatched couches sitting in the shape of an L and by the legs of one of them was a basket. In this basket were an assortment of chalks, crayons, colored pencils, and every type of marker conceivable:  standard office supply black markers, highlighters, a rainbow of Sharpies, black light markers… we even had 3D markers and the glasses with which to view them.  I stood against one wall with my arms spread wide and had Larry trace around my body.  Then I used the outline to create a lifesize self portrait of me crucified upon a cross.  Above the door I’d done a landscape with gently rolling hills rising above a forest;  a mushroom cloud billowed in the background with it’s fireball streaked with 3D oranges, yellows, and reds.  Toy soldiers were lined atop the door frame and with the 3D glasses and strobe light on, it actually looked as though the entire scene was flickering with distant fires.  The rest of the room was covered with jotted bits of prose, scraps of poetry, drawings, scientific formulas, spiritual symbols, and just about anything else you can think of.  If it was your first time visiting what we referred to as The Drawing Room, you were expected and encouraged  to add something to these walls.

It was in this room that Larry, his girlfriend Erin, and I dropped acid.  We added to the wall for a bit, but after awhile it all became a bit too much.  My crucified self seemed to accuse with his unblinking stare and I could have sworn some snippets of rogue poetry were shifting positions when I wasn’t looking.  So we took the chalk and went elsewhere.  Of the nine couches within The House of Hot Beverage, two of them were positioned on the front porch.  Sometimes we’d sit there and watch speeding cars approach a curve that was as deceiving as it was dangerously sharp.  We’d then rate them on scorecards like a pair of Olympic judges as condensation beaded on our beers.  On this night however, we began drawing on the porch with the aforementioned chalk.  The screen door suddenly had a decorative border and the banisters were coiled with two dimensional serpents which bled over onto the sidewalk,  Drawing out way up the walkway, we hit the main road and scribbled all the way to Sean and Mary’s house.  They’d already settled down for the evening and declined the offer of joining our chalk festival, so we sketched our way back to our place.

At some point, Larry and Erin went inside, leaving me to my own devices.   Finding an unmolested patch of floor, I sat down on the porch and began drawing a Tibetan mandala.  I took my time with it, ensuring that every line was as precise as it could be when drawn with chunky, colored chalk;  concentric circles and squares, interlocking geometric patterns which seemed to grow ever smaller, eventually disappearing in the corridors of infinity.   It felt like I spent hours pouring my soul into this ridiculously complex drawing and during that time, thunderstorms had rolled across the valley.  As I stood, admiring my handiwork, the first fat drops of rain began splattering on the roof and ground.  Within minutes the tentative rain grew confident and gathered muster while booming thunder echoed back and forth between the hills like a battle roar.  The darkened sky flickered electric blue and sheets of rain cut through the night with diagonal slashes.  Water quickly pooled on the porch floor and I saw this drawing I’d worked so hard on washed away by forces of nature.

"There’s gotta be a lesson there somewhere."  I thought.  Then I went back inside The House of Hot Beverage, nodded at the Dead Kennedys poster in our living room, and sat down at my word processor to write.  That’s kind of the way it was there.

Undead Press & Anthony G: My take

A few years back, I released a collection of short stories called Sex in the Time of Zombies as a free download to help promote my other work.  Overall, the collection was a success:  it drove people to my website, garnered favorable reviews, increased sales, and introduced me to thousands of readers around the globe.  Around the time when downloads of the collection had died down a bit, I was contacted by Anthony Giagregorio who wanted to publish a print version through Living Dead Press.  Yes, that Anthony Giagregorio.  If you don’t understand what I mean by that statement, then you’ve obviously been sequestered from the firestorm burning through the indie author community over the last couple days.  It’s not my intent to rehash everything that’s transpired, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google Tony’s name and/or Undead Press to get brought up to speed.

Like the other authors coming forward, I also never received galleys for the finished product.  There were changes made to the stories in the collection that I would have argued against until I was blue in the face, but they weren’t nearly as dramatic as the incidents being reported by other authors.  Most of the changes may have seemed inconsequential to most:  changing a whispered bit of dialogue to something that was shouted, replacing the word courage with strength … that sort of thing.  But to me, those words were important.  They were stylistic decisions I’d made when drafting the stories, specifically chosen to add a little something to the atmosphere and character development.  While I was less than thrilled with the revisions, I chalked it up as a learning experience.  After all, I had signed a contract giving them the right to edit the collection. (In the spirit of fairness, however, I should mention that there were a few changes that I actually did agree with and which we’d discussed over the phone.  Tony, for example, was the first person to point out I overused the word that.    Now, every time I write I reread the sentence to see if it still makes sense with that taken out.  If it does, I strike it and move on.)

That being said, I want to go on record as stating that Mandy DeGeit and the other authors have my full support in this controversy.  Regardless of whether Tony was within his legal rights to do what he did to their stories, there is no excuse for the way he treated them in the resulting fallout.  If he truly believed he did no wrong, he could have made the exact same points in a tactful manner instead of belittling and mocking someone who was simply trying to get her story published.  

While I deeply love the stories and characters contained within Sex in the Time of Zombies, I am just as deeply embarrassed to have them represented by a press which has so little regard for professionalism and common decency.   What Tony needs to remember is that authors are just as important to the success of a press as readers;  regardless of whether that author is submitting a novel or a short story for inclusion in an anthology, they thought enough of that imprint to want their work placed there.  To degrade and humiliate them when concerns are expressed is not only unconscionable, but also the height of arrogance.  Show a little appreciation.  Show a little modesty.