My third grade teacher meant well when he read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to our class as a Halloween treat.
As a grown up, I acquired a beat up old copy of the book he read from, The Gold Bug and Other Tales of Mystery by Edgar Allan Poe, part of the “Educator Classic Library.” It contains what even now I’d profess to be a harrowing illustration of the old man with the pale blue vulture eye getting smothered with a pillow as he repeats “It’s nothing but the wind in the chimney—it is nothing but the wind in the chimney …”
My fellow pupils reacted to the reading with appreciative campfire-tale chuckles. For me, the exposure to death, murder and obsessive insanity opened my mind’s eye to terrifying vistas. The experience was a watershed moment, at first delivering endless night terrors, some of them described in “Six Waking Nightmares Poe Gave Me in Third Grade.”
Eventually, years of grappling with the push-pull of morbid curiosity and fear led me to an embrace of most all things horror. (Any fan of written horror who has read more than one of my stabs at the genre might correctly conclude that the stories of Clive Barker catalyzed that acceptance.)
Along that path, and afterward, I was subject to astonishingly vivid nightmares. Quite a few of them are cataloged in “The Night Watchman Dreams His Rounds at the REM Sleep Factory,” providing me with material to mine for story fodder. (In that poem, you’ll find quick sketches of dreams that ultimately provided seeds for published stories, including “The Sun Saw” and the tale that gives this book its title.)
In a sign that my immersion therapy worked, I almost never have dreams like that any more. To be honest, I miss them.
Occasionally, a nightmare comes close to the intensity I experienced as a yung’un, sprouting into stories like “A Deaf Policeman Heard the Noise” and “Blue Evolution” in this book, or like “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” in my previous collection of horror tales, Unseaming.
Speaking of Unseaming, I want to thank everyone who made that book (on the scale at which I work) a shocking success: the readers who bought it and posted praise, the reviewers who encouraged those readers, the Shirley Jackson Award and This Is Horror Award judges. It got me thinking, early on, what a companion volume might look like.
I hope that if anything signifies “companion volume,” it’s the participation of amazing artist Danielle Tunstall and her model Alexandra Johnson, who provided the Chesley Award-nominated cover for Unseaming and are back for Aftermath. I’m so grateful to them for taking part.
Many thanks, too, to my “intern,” designer Brett Massé, who provided invaluable help with the visual elements of Aftermath and other Mythic Delirium Books projects. Thanks as well to my colleague Patty Templeton, who introduced Brett to me. (If you’d like to consider Brett for a project of your own, by all means visit brettmasseworks.com. Consider this my recommendation.)
There’s another way this book connects to Unseaming: continuity among stories. I’ll spell such things out here, assuming that if you, blessed reader, have gotten this far I won’t be spoiling anything.
“Follow the Wounded One” is a direct sequel to “The Hiker’s Tale” from Unseaming, and “The Cruelest Team Will Win” happens in the same setting. (The latter even features a cameo from the main players in “Follow.”) “Nolens Volens” ties not only to “The Sun Saw” but to “Gutter” from Unseaming. The poem “The Paper Boy” also ties in with that set. For a tale that loops in (loosely in some cases) all of these works, and draws in “The Button Bin” and “The Quiltmaker” from Unseaming on top of that, seek out my novella “The Comforter” in the anthology A Sinister Quartet.
Obviously, “Longsleeves” and “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade” take place during different eras in the centuries-old, unchanging city of Calcharra. A third Calcharra story, “The Butcher, the Baker,” can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more are on the way.
My eternal gratitude to my wife Anita Allen, who took her skills for arranging stories honed by years working on Clockwork Phoenix anthologies and Mythic Delirium issues and applied them to the wildly diverse pieces gathered in this volume. Thanks, too, to dear friends C. S. E. Cooney and Christina Sng for allowing me to include our collaborative poems.
Even more thanks to early readers Nathan Ballingrud, R. S. Belcher, A. C. Wise, Craig Laurance Gidney and (again) Christina Sng, for looking over the rough-hewn manuscript and finding it worthy. Thanks as well to Laird Barron for his generosity and his standing endorsement.
I would be remiss not to thank all the friends, colleagues and editors who gave these stories their original (and sometimes subsequent) homes and otherwise inspired their existence: Elizabeth Campbell; Paul St. John Mackintosh; Stephen H. Segal and Ann VanderMeer; Joseph S. Pulver Sr. and James Lowder; Romie Stott; Nathaniel Lee; Rhonda Parrish; Graeme Dunlop and Jen R. Albert; Marvin Kaye; Jason V. Brock; Sean Moreland; John Benson; S. T. Joshi; C. S. E. Cooney for prompting the “Claire-dare” poems; Scott H. Andrews and the Hexagon retreats; Scott Dwyer; Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski; Allen L. Wold; Carlos Hernandez; Stephanie Berkeley De La Fuente and Martha Simmons De La Fuente; Tina Ayres; Scott Silk; Sonya Taaffe; David C. Kopaska-Merkel and the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association; Brian M. Sammons; Shalon Hurlbert; Nicole Kornher-Stace; Anya Martin and Scott Nicolay. As the stories in this book span decades, there are many deserving others I have surely left out—to them I apologize!
A double dose of thanks to Scott Nicolay (I seem to have good luck with Scotts) for introducing me to Jeffrey Thomas, who allowed me to play in his delightful Punktown universe and spurred the creation of the story that gives this book its title. Not only that: Jeff applied his keen proofreader’s eye to these stories and poems, and wrote a rip-roaring introduction that ties all this chaos together with kind words that I find humbling. Thank you so much, Jeff; my hat’s off to you!
Lastly, who could have know this project spanning years and years would come to fruition during a worldwide pandemic? To anyone reading this, thank you, best wishes and stay safe! May these horrors you can control grant you some respite from those you can’t.
—Mike Allen, Roanoke, Va., April 2020