Author’s Notes

The League of Zeroes

This is the direction I thought reality TV was headed, and briefly, with the debut of “The Swan”—in which beauty contest competitors first underwent radical plastic surgery—I thought I might have been prescient. However, viewers found the concept repellent and eventually decided they were much happier watching rich people make whining noises at each other. Still, very happy that this story reached so many folks, finding publication in Colombia, Spain, Italy, and France (where someone plagiarized the thing and got it included in an anthology at the Sorbonne [although they changed SaladMan to CheeseMan, which is as French an edit as possible]). Rumor has it that someone adapted the story as a one-act play in Australia, too, though I’ve never seen evidence. Most of the characters in the story re-appear, some much worse for wear and some with far more malicious goals, in the novel Skullcrack City.

Persistence Hunting

It’s strange now, living in the same hills our narrator burglarizes in the story, especially since someone broke into my place a year back. If I found out our burglar used the old running-and-prowling gambit, I almost wouldn’t be mad anymore. Almost.

The Oarsman

There was a stretch of time where my wife would read books about Buddhism aloud, just before we’d pass out for the night. Some nights I’d find the ideas compelling and comforting. Other nights, when the focus would be ego death and universal oneness, I found myself sweating, tossing and turning, filled with existential dread. It led to me thinking about the idea of weaponized empathy, and what kind of people might be left once that weapon had worked.

The Gravity of Benham Falls

Stephen Gammell’s illustration of an eyeless, emaciated specter in the story “The Haunted House” (included in the original run of Alvin Schwartz’ Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark anthology) has a long echo. When I first received the book as a kid, I was so shocked by that illustration that I asked my mother to tape a thick piece of paper over the grim visage so I could continue enjoying the book. I have no doubt the image was somewhere in my mind when I decided I was going to try my hand at a traditional ghost story.

Dissociative Skills

There’s that hoary old joke: Alcoholism doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops! It’s the kind of thing you can laugh at because there aren’t a lot of other options that keep you sane. For a very long time I was that person in an addiction-prone family who managed to beat back his own troubles and then became angry and self-righteous about everyone else’s chronic fuck-ups. And so I’ve written about a decade’s-worth of stories like this, and that kept me from completely losing my mind. I think. I hope.

Snowfall

This story has been optioned for film three times now, and once made it quite a distance into pre-production, including a solid script, storyboards, and a classical cellist committed to the score. In that case the director broke up with his girlfriend, who also happened to be the producer/financier, and that was that. On a totally unrelated note, when this story appeared in Spanish the translator had to include an addendum explaining that Tootsie Rolls are a North American candy. Which is to say that next time you’re headed to South America, you’d be well-advised to bring your own Tootsie Rolls, if that’s your thing.

When Susurrus Stirs

If you would have told me a few years ago that this, out of everything I’ve written, would be the first story adapted for film, I’d have laughed. Nobody is crazy enough to try to put such a thing on film. That being said, an utterly faithful and disturbing film adaptation from Pandemic Pictures and Outpost 31 Productions premiers at FilmQuest next month. And yes, they retained the “meat sprout” sequence, because director Anthony Cousins and FX wizard Ryan Schaddelee are very troubled men.

Luminary

My mother told me that as a child she used to catch fireflies, twist them in half, and then use their leaking fluids to adhere the glowing remainder to her fingers. She’d wave her hands back and forth in the night air and pretend she was wearing beautiful diamond rings. Years later she gave birth to me in the high desert of central Oregon and there were no fireflies so I just ended up turning over rocks and dodging scorpions. Maybe whacking junebugs out of the air with a stick. It wasn’t as beautifully gruesome as my mother’s memory.

Trigger Variation

For a brief while, based on my personal interest in not driving myself into an early drug-addled grave, I got really into straight edge. I needed a very stern ideology and some compatriots around who’d help hold me to it. Plus I really liked Gorilla Biscuits. But after a while I noticed that some of these guys, sober though they may have been, were absolutely getting high on violence, whether that meant randomly rumbling at shows or actively hunting the streets of Olympia looking for Neo-Nazis to jump. It was an eye-opener. After that I understood: everybody’s looking for a way out of their day-to-day reality.

Cathedral Mother

Once, during a road trip to southern California, my mother decided we’d take the scenic route down and roll through the redwood forest. See some of the largest living things on earth, drive through a tree, all that. However, the majesty of the redwoods had some stern competition in the form of Skipp and Spector’s gonzo horror novel The Scream. I was so enraptured by the heavy metal insanity of it all, I barely glanced at the forest. Since then I’ve read Richard Preston’s wonderful non-fiction book about the region, The Wild Trees, and now I long to return. Maybe I’ll take my kid, give him a chance to ignore the miracle.

Swimming in the House of the Sea

A few years back there was a (now-famous) film director who wanted to expand this story into a feature film. He had an excellent young actor attached, a producer excited about the project, and some outstanding ideas about how to turn the tale into an indie take on Rain Man with some Midnight Cowboy grit in the mix. There was a possibility that one of my top three favorite cinematographers would shoot. Naturally, I was over the fucking moon about the whole venture. Then, two weeks out from the first production meeting, the director was given a shot at directing an adaptation of a New York Times bestseller. He took the gig, nailed it, and the film earned more than the GDP of several small countries. Now he’s attached to three different tentpole movies and has his own production company. I do not believe I own a computer powerful enough to calculate how small the odds of him ever returning to “Swimming” might be, but it’s fun to hold fast to hope.

Saturns Game

If you come from a family where addiction runs strong in both bloodlines (and so many of you do), then you understand that sense of hopelessness, when it feels as if no one has any control of anything. There’s something fascinating/terrifying about self-destructive behavior, and the way the mind can detach into that duality where it can both condemn whatever truly awful thing is about to happen and still send the signals to force its execution. I can barely imagine how much worse it is for people whose frontal cortex damage (or lack of proper development) prevents any sort of inhibition.

The Sharp-Dressed Man at the End of the Line

Or, When a Punchline Becomes a Story. When I was twelve I wrote a short story about a tribe of post-apocalyptic survivors crossing a wasteland to find sustenance, and in the end it turned out our protagonists were cockroaches travelling through a pantry to find the last Twinkie. I thought it was very Twilight Zone at the time. Fast forward a decade and GWB’s the president and my nuclear war paranoia is at its height and I feel a need to revisit the cockroach/Twinkie dynamic. Later, I found myself wondering what would happen to Dean and his fancy suit if they went on a post-nuclear road trip, and the novella Extinction Journals was born.

A Flood of Harriers

I didn’t hear of the CIA-coined term “blowback” until 2001, at which time it had gained a certain heavy significance. Since then— given our deeply troubled and oppressive history—I’ve been fascinated trying to quantify just how much blowback might be owed to the citizens of our country, and how I feel about the truth of that.

States of Glass

There’s a semi-curious phenomenon that occurs where, each time I stay at a hotel for work travel, I decide to allow myself the luxury of a long, hot shower, only to inevitably rush out mid-shower to jot down a new story idea on hotel stationery. “States of Glass” definitely found its genesis that way, as have many other stories. Someone postulated that it’s the travel aspect; that the new experiences and environments light up your brain’s alpha waves. Or maybe there’s something in that weird continental breakfast waffle batter. Could be both.

The Sleep of Judges

If you’ve ever been burglarized (or, say, robbed at gunpoint in a pizza restaurant parking lot) then you know the theft is just the very beginning of a long and unsettling road. I’m officially past my life quota for being stolen from, although I can still laugh about the guy who busted my car window to steal my backpack, since the only thing inside was a multi-year collection of Zoetrope literary magazines. Unless that guy figured out how to trade Mary Gaitskill stories for drugs, he must have been pretty disappointed. Also, a quick note for observant long-time readers: The activities of the residents of 17th (and Clem’s mission to stop them) might feel strangely familiar to you. And you might be right to feel that way . . .