INTRODUCTION

Brooke Bolander

 

When I was a kid, the land was alive and it had a bad attitude.

I don’t mean that it was alive in some sort of woo-woo, Grandmother Willow kind of way. It didn’t talk or sing, and the loblollies didn’t shape themselves into special messages just for me. It made itself known in different ways. Horses, for example, it was not particularly fond of. The total number of horses struck by lightning on that parcel of acreage was a little ridiculous, and the ones not zapped by the sky went on to broken legs and god knows what other manners of gruesome fate. Or maybe it just didn’t like anything with hooves. At least one cow fell down a sinkhole (A deep, round ravine in the woods, tree roots jutting out all the way down like those hands in Labyrinth) and had to be winched back out by my grandfather, who dutifully tried to nurse the broken thing back to health with limited success. When she finally went to wherever cattle go when they shuffle off this mortal coil, he hitched her corpse to a tractor and dragged it to the back forty boneyard, a skull-studded expanse of pasture that served as a sky burial place for all our dearly departed livestock.

Or maybe it just didn’t like anything. My mother swore she heard someone (something) whispering our names outside her bedroom window late one night, which was a good six feet off the ground and at least five miles from the nearest neighbor. One of my earliest memories is of a low, rhythmic drumming noise coming from the woods around our place. My folks said it was probably an oil derrick, and for all I know they were entirely correct, but I’ve never heard anything like it since, and it seemed to fade the older I got. An inebriated joyrider wrecked his car a few miles up the blacktop at 3 AM one night and somehow managed to stagger all the way to our porch, where he briefly pounded on the door, then wandered on. The bloodstains stayed in the wood until we moved and the porch was torn down.

And then there was my much more recent encounter with The Thing That Laughed. It was 2 in the morning deep in the piney woods hinterland, a cold and rainy September. Something laughed below my open second-story window. I say something because it was guttural and unhinged and not a coyote or owl or loon or cougar or fox or any other animal native to the Southeastern United States. I promptly got up and closed the damned window.

Most of this stuff is weird, but not unexplainable. People wreck their cars all the time. Horses and cows break their legs without any help from malevolent forest spirits pretty regularly, and oil derricks make weird noises that a six-year old could totally misinterpret as distant drums. My internal Scully understands these things. My internal Mulder knows how the land there felt and feels, how many graves are in those woods, how many headstones and abandoned homesteads and tumbledown shacks and Caddo burial mounds you stumble across if you hack your way through the blackberry brambles and vines. Loblolly pines grow fast. They cluster around the little one-horse road ruts of Eastern Texas like coyotes waiting for a mule to die, itching to pull down the sad Walmarts and empty courthouse squares and dying local businesses. This is True Detective territory, Joe Lansdale country, the place Leadbelly sang about going where the sun never shines. Cue swelling cicadas and the sound of a glass slide moaning down makeshift guitar strings. The South is constantly rotting down ‘round your ears, damp and sweaty. How could that sort of omnipresent decay NOT inspire a gothic tradition? There was no way in all the humid, Spanish moss-encrusted hells I could grow up there and not escape carrying at least a little bit of superstitious dread.

All places have their own special personalities. The primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest don’t feel the same as the ancient redwood groves of Northern California. Boston isn’t New York isn’t DC. Take a train from England into Scotland and you sense the landscape’s mood changing almost as soon as you cross from Northumberland into Berwickshire. Some of this is geographical and environmental, obviously, but that doesn’t always take into account the effect those shifting tones, that watchful feeling. Whether it’s our innate desire as primates to put a face on everything or something other that can’t be quantified, the way it moves us is very real, and calling it the ‘spirit’ of the place is as good a way to classify that unclassifiable feeling as any. The Romans knew it. The genius loci was the protector of an area, the spirit of the land that kept an eye on the land. You laid out offerings for your local forest god, or built a shrine dedicated to them, or splashed some wine or blood, because respecting the place you live is always a damned fine idea (you don’t want to be on the bad side of a swamp or a city). More recently, there’s a fine tradition of fanciful media devoted to the idea, from the Haunting of Hill House to Mononoke Hime to the book you’re holding in your hands.

This anthology is our contribution to that tradition and our libation, collected and spilled in honour of all the places we’ve interacted with and been affected by. Long may they haunt our memories and hearts and the hairs on the back of our necks, rusted and gnarled and old as stone and the sky.