FOREWORD

by Duncan Ralston

Let’s get this out of the way before we go any further: I’m one of those weird people who believes a foreword belongs in the back of a book. Yes, I’m aware there is a thing called an “afterword,” and that “fore” and “after” tend to mean opposite things, but hear me out.

Afterwords are a summation or an explanation, meant to offer you, the reader, a deeper understanding of what you’ve just read. They are most often written by the author, but sometimes written by someone else. A scholar or biographer, for instance.

Forewords are most often written by other writers, typically containing hyperbole and buildup to prepare you for the story or stories you’re about to read. They’re the carnival barker outside the circus attraction. Or the Flava Flav to the book’s Chuck D. A good book doesn’t need hype, just like a skilled rapper or an exciting sideshow doesn’t need a hype man. But many good books (and carnivals and rappers) have them, regardless.

This book is no exception.

I’ll return to this argument in a bit, but the comparison between lyricists or carnival barkers and good writing is worth exploring, if you’ll indulge me. A skilled lyricist uses metaphor, simile, alliteration, etc—all of the literary devices in their “author’s toolbox”—to tell the listener a story in the most interesting way they’re able.

A skilled author or novelist or whatever term you prefer dips into this bag of tricks far less often, in my opinion. Prose littered with figurative language, piled on top of the narrative like appetizers at an all-you-can-eat buffet, feels… well, heavy. A story needs to have flow to it. There are writers who can get away with too much alliteration—James Ellroy, for instance—or metaphor, like Douglas Adams. For most of us, it’s best used sparingly. It’s a seasoning, not the dish itself.

“Panic and pain were having an orgy inside his skull.”

“It could have been called a cul de sac, he supposed, but there were no other houses in the sac.”

These colorful phrases, both somewhat sexually suggestive metaphors for the mundane, are from the first short story in this collection, “Taken,” about a long-haul trucker who kidnaps a diner waitress to bring back to his “Goddess,” a woman named Dianne. Even out of context, there’s a wry humor and natural flow to the phrasing, just a slight tweak of the real to the surreal, the utilitarian prose to the poetic.

Consider this line from his novella, Panacea: “He puffed out a cloud of dense pipe fog. It billowed up to join the other swirling eddies that drooped and swayed below the ceiling like cobwebs in a dusty room.”

I bet you could see that room just from reading that paragraph. You could likely even smell it. But it’s not overly flowery. It’s not purple, as they used to say. Adam Light understands the seasoning is not the meal, in other words. It just makes the meal more palatable.

I first discovered Adam’s writing in 2015 via the massive, macabre collection Harmlessly Insane, a collaboration with his brother, Evans. I bought the collection flat-signed from Evans, knowing very little about either of the self-styled Light Brothers at the time. I admit to mostly being aware of King, Barker, Matheson and a handful of other big “names” in the industry, and shamefully unaware of lesser-known authors from small press and mid-sized publishers. Writers like myself, in other words. I was new to the horror scene, just then meeting fellow writers on social media for the first time. My knowledge of the genre came mostly from library books and local bookstores, which tend to have very little stock from authors not listed above.

In the years between, I’ve met many writers in the genre. Some of them are very good. Many of them shouldn’t quit their day jobs just yet. (For the record, I enjoy my day job. Though not quite as much as I enjoy writing.) Storytelling isn’t an easy thing, but it’s also not quantum mechanics or working on an oil rig or doing quantum mechanics on an oil rig. We do it because it’s often the only thing we’re any good at, although a good number of male writers seem to also be lead singers and/or guitarists in bands. I won’t speculate about the connection.

Many people expect horror authors to be strange—thank you, Edgar Allen and Howard Phillips!—but Adam is a family man. He has daughters and dogs. He’s kind and creative and humble. A normal guy, in other words. He straps on his leather harness the same way we all do: one leg at a time. And maybe he has a morbid fascination with the macabre, but I have a theory that people who write with empathy, which Adam does, are often equally attracted to darkness as to light—geddit?—in their writing.

There’s a fair amount of darkness in these stories. Adam excels at writing body horror, and this book is chock full of it. And like myself, he wears his influences—from Stephen King to The Twilight Zone—on his sleeve. I have this pet theory that a lot of horror writers, maybe even the majority, are kids at heart. Robert Bloch once said “I may write disturbing stuff, but really I have the heart of a small boy... I keep it in a jar on my desk.” It’s often misattributed to King, who’d only quoted it.

My theory is pretty simple. Children are both attracted and repelled by the darkness. They always have to look behind the door, through the keyhole, under the bed, over the edge, between the stairs. Curiosity killed the kid more often than the cat, I’d bet. Personally, I can’t leave my basement without looking behind myself to make sure nothing is following me, especially at night. It’s that fear and curiosity of the unknown that sticks with us, that makes us want to continue to explore it as adults. Kids also tend to love Halloween. Adam’s appreciation for the holiday presents itself in stories like “Tommy Rotten” and “Ghost Light Road.” Does he too have the heart of a boy in a jar on his desk? I won’t speculate, but I doubt his wife would approve.

Maybe I feel like forewords should be at the end instead of the beginning because I always read them last. For me, a foreword is free breadsticks when I came in for dinner. I could fill up on breadsticks, or I could go straight to the meal. I prefer to pick and nibble at the breadsticks (the forewords and afterwords, the author notes and what have you) while digesting what I’ve just read. But I won’t tell you how to eat your meal.

Even the best foreword is often just hype. The best books can take you places you weren’t meant to go, into the dark, dangerous recesses of deranged minds. Dreams for the Dying is that type of book.

Bon appetit.

—Duncan Ralston,

author of Ghostland and Salvage

April 2021