THE ABDUCTION DOOR
Writer and editor Mark Morris has been one of the champions of the non-themed anthology for years now. As an editor of anthologies myself, I know how difficult it has become to persuade a publisher to take a change on any anthology, and non-themed anthologies are even harder to sell. Mark has been persistent and skilled enough to become a regular purveyor of such treasures, and when an opportunity comes along to write for a non-themed anthology, it’s wise not to pass it up. For New Fears (2017), Mark Morris asked contributors for their best, and I like to think I gave him what he asked for. This is among my favorites of all the stories I’ve written. I remember the rush I felt as I wrote it and the satisfaction I felt upon completion. It’s so rare that I’ve written anything at all that leaves me with that feeling. I loved it, and I hope you did, too.
As for where it came from—who knows? I’ve seen those little doors in elevator walls from time to time, certainly some kind of access hatch for repairs or something. But I remember talking to someone, possibly Tom Sniegoski or Jim Moore, about that little door and saying “You know what that is? That’s the Abduction Door,” and the whole story just popped into my head. My family will tell you I’ve a bad habit of taking any mundane thing and twisting it by adding “And then (insert horrible thing here).” This is probably the best example of that bad habit, and it makes me very happy.
WENDY, DARLING
In 2014, Jonathan Maberry’s anthology OUT OF TUNE presented an array of very dark stories inspired by folk ballads. I chose a particularly nasty one entitled “The Cruel Mother,” about a woman who covers up her indiscretions by murdering her own children. The story combines elements of the story at the heart of the folk song and merges it with a new take on the characters and story in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a story also at the heart of my early novel, Straight on ‘til Morning. I read this one aloud at Boskone a few years ago with Joe Hill in the audience. Afterward, Joe complimented the story and there was something about the way he delivered it that suggested to me that he felt maybe I was better at this writing thing than he’d previously thought. If my interpretation of that exchange is wrong, I hope he never tells me, because it was a nice moment.
IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE
I’m being as open as I can be in this little write-ups, so here’s a confession. Years ago, when Tom Sniegoski was writing his Remy Chandler urban fantasy series, I suggested he do one set at Christmas and call it Hark! The Herald Angels Scream. Our dear friend and editor Ginjer Buchanan dismissed the idea and the title with typical razor-sharp derision, but I never stopped loving the title. So many of my projects have been born from offhand comments and jokes. Years later, Tom and I were on the phone and he just tossed out the suggestion that I take the title and edit a Christmas horror anthology and let him write a story for it. I loved the idea and immediately ran with it, and I think it even have been on that same phone call that I joked that I would write a story for the anthology called “It’s a Wonderful Knife.” (For the handful of you who may not realize it, this is a reference to the James Stewart-starring classic Christmas film It’s a Wonderful Life.)
I’d written a story years before called “The Hiss of Escaping Air,” which appeared as a chapbook from PS Publishing, timed with my appearance as a Guest of Honor at FantasyCon in the U.K. That story had its roots in a true experience, a meeting that Mike Mignola and I had in the Hollywood hills. My manager drove us up to the mansion of a legendary film producer whose self-absorption and bizarre behavior made him impossible to forget. He became my model for James Massarsky, the producer in these stories, who has a museum-worthy collection of Hollywood oddities and memorabilia, including some items with occult or supernatural folk tales around them. As soon as I came up with the title “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” this story—the second about The Massarsky Collection—practically wrote itself.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE HEART JUST STOPS
Jonathan Maberry had struck a deal with the Horror Writers Association for him to edit a Young Adult horror anthology, SCARY OUT THERE (2016), and he’d invited me to contribute. It had been a good few years since the last time I wrote YA, but I’d been toying with something for a while—a story about a dark future where the separations in our society had become even more explicit, where if you were one of the privileged you didn’t have to worry about your health at all, but if you were without that privilege, a simple heart attack would be a death sentence. But I’d also had this idea about a different sort of vampire, a monster I could see when I closed my eyes. I called them “Cloaks,” and I’ve been wanting to do something more with this story and with these monsters ever since. Maybe someday.
THE REVELERS
I start out this story with something like “We’ve all had that friend,” but maybe we haven’t. Maybe you’re lucky enough that you haven’t, but I’ll say it plainly—I sure as hell have. Up until the moment it turns really weird, supernaturally weird, “The Revelers” is more or less a true story. Most of us will have someone in our lives at some point or another who we really ought to leave behind. Like the theme of this collection’s title, there are people and places and imagined obligations that haunt us, too, and we’ve got to find the strength to leave those ghosts behind. It can be agonizingly difficult to break away from someone who claims to be your friend, even when they’ve proven again and again that they have zero idea what friendship means. But becoming a healthy, mature adult includes having the spin to set firm boundaries and to stop rewarding bad behavior with your attention. Sometimes you just have to leave the party. I tend to frown on editors who include their own stories in anthologies they’re editing. The second time I did it was so that I could write a story called “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” and that was a massive self-indulgence. With “The Revelers,” I had sold an anthology called DARK CITIES (2017) to Titan Books, and the publisher made it a condition of the deal that I write a new story for the book. I’m glad they did.
A HOLE IN THE WORLD
Australian horror publisher Geoff Brown has been putting together his SNAFU anthologies for years. They’re all military horror stories and can best be summed up by writing out the meaning of SNAFU—“situation normal, all fucked up.” Geoff had approached both Tim Lebbon and myself to write a story for his upcoming SNAFU anthology, UNNATURAL SELECTION (2016). Tim and I had already collaborated many times, and we decided to ask Geoff if we could join forces for this one and produce a novelette instead of two separate short stories. Geoff readily agreed, and Tim and I quickly brainstormed “A Hole in the World,” exactly the kind of creepy action horror story we’d be first in line to see if somebody made it a film. I love the monsters in this one and still think they’d look fantastic onscreen. I generally pick one collaboration to include in my solo collections, and as much as I love the friend and collaborators I’ve worked with on other such stories (most of them collected in my book Don’t Go Alone), there was no doubt in my mind that this would be the one to include here. It’s just so damn much fun!
THE CURIOUS ALLURE OF THE SEA
I’ve been fishing, but I’m not a fisherman. I’ve been on plenty of boats, but I don’t know how to sail. Even so, I feel connected to the ocean in a way that’s difficult to put into words. Just the sight of the waves will bring me a wonderful peace. I enjoy walking along the ocean in midwinter as much as—sometimes even more than—sitting on the beach and reading a book. Aside from an interest in erasing the toll the passing years have taken, if I could go back to my youth again one of the few things I would do differently is spend more time by the ocean, or at sea. In high school, I briefly considered joining the navy, but that lasted only a couple of hours before I remembered how I tend to respond to authority. If you’ve read more than a couple of my books or stories, you’re likely to have come across at least one that focuses on the mystery, danger, and fascination of the ocean. So when Ellen Datlow asked me to write a story for her anthology THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP, I jumped at the chance. “The Curious Allure of the Sea” takes the phenomenon implied by the title to a more extreme level. The story also features a tattoo with its own mysterious power, and not long after the story I went and got my first tattoo, which resembles the one in the story.
THE FACE IS A MASK
The third story about The Massarsky Collection, “The Face is a Mask” is the most straightforward of the three. It’s an homage to precisely the kinds of horror movies described in the story, and to various 1970’s films you’ll likely find on Shudder, including many Italian giallo horrors by the likes of Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento. In retrospect, I should have injected a more direct giallo influence and Italian origin to the film we’re revisiting in the story, but alas it’s too late for that.
While I was putting together the anthology Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, I attended World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio. One afternoon, having coffee with Ellen Datlow, I told her about that anthology and when I grinned and revealed the title, she groaned. Her facial expression was half scowl and half grin. “Oh, no. That’s awful!” she said. My response: “Wait until I tell you the name of the story I wrote for it!” The bad Christmas horror puns caused Ellen physical pain, but we were both laughing. You’d better believe that when I wrote this story for Ellen’s anthology FINAL CUTS (2020), I struggled to find the right title. I didn’t want to hurt her with any more bad puns. Fortunately, she liked both the title and the story of this one to include it in that anthology.
THE OPEN WINDOW
Jonathan Maberry put out a call for stories for an anthology that would eventually be called DON’T TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. While Jonathan’s book is an homage to the famous SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK books of horror stories for kids, I’d like to think “The Open Window” is scary for all ages. It’s one of the shortest stories I’ve ever written and also one of my absolute favorites. I’m not usually a “happy” writer, by which I mean that some writers really enjoy the process and others still love doing it but find it more like real work. I’m one of the latter, but not with this story. As with “The Abduction Door,” I loved every second of writing this story. I felt deliciously malevolent, thinking of the little kids I hoped to frighten with the story. If it creeps out grownups, too, all the better.
THE BAD HOUR
I wrote a great deal about “The Bad Hour” in my introduction to this book, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I should say something about the concept. I’ve always loved mythology and folklore and that love is woven all through the books and comics and stories I’ve written over the past three decades. While I’m doing research for one project, I’ll invariably stumble on a dozen other things that intrigue me enough to want to work them into something else down the line. I have printed articles in a pile on my desk, story concepts and idea bulbs in files on my computer. Books and books of folklore and monsters. The result of this is that I’m never at a loss for story ideas or at least for fascinating prompts that might become an interesting story if I can do something fun with it. The concept behind “The Bad Hour” is an existing bit of folklore, but the fun part is finding out just how devious you can be when you twist it for your own purposes.
PIPERS
I’m an excitable human. My bibliography is full of things that started with a conversation that included “wouldn’t it be cool if....” PIPERS had its origin in a chat I was having with Jonathan Maberry at one convention or another. I suspect it was at Necon, but I can’t be sure. We were discussing how frequently writers landed on the same themes or even basic plots, and how often we’d been working on something only to see a movie trailer or a book announcement for something similar. It’s easy to get discouraged when such a thing happens, but writers must remember that it’s your story, it’s you who is going to make the difference. Chances are that your spin on any basic concept is going to be vastly different from whatever else is out there—at least if you’re using your imagination, it will be. At some point, intrigued by the topic, I suggested an experiment—four writers would take the same basic concept, a single line, and write an original horror novella. We wanted it to be a familiar trope, all the better to explore. A stranger comes to town and offers to raise the townspeople’s dead loved ones from the grave—for a price. Jonathan and I enlisted Kelley Armstrong and David Liss and sold the book to Gallery, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, as Four Summoner’s Tales. For my story, I focused not on the how of the resurrections, but on the why. If you had the opportunity to bring a lost loved one back from the dead in exchange for the resurrectionist “borrowing” that person for a single task—after which it would be as if they’d never died—would you do it? I’m not going to lie, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I love a good pulpy tale of supernatural vengeance. Hopefully PIPERS fits the bill.