Where We Live and Die Read online

  LAZY FASCIST PRESS

  P.O. BOX 10065

  PORTLAND, OR 97296

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-191-6

  Copyright © 2015 by Brian Keene

  Cover art copyright © 2015 Matthew Revert

  “Writing About Writing: An Introduction” is original to this collection.

  “The Girl on the Glider” first published as The Girl on the Glider, Cemetery Dance, 2010.

  “Musings” first published in 4 Killers, Cemetery Dance, 2013.

  “Golden Boy” first published in The Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories, Borderlands Press, 2008.

  “The Eleventh Muse” first published in Carpe Noctem, 2015.

  “The House of Ushers” first published in Infernally Yours, Necro Publications, 2009.

  “The Revolution Happened While You Were Sleeping (A Summoning Spell) – Remixed” is original to this collection. An alternate audio version first appeared on Talking Smack, Medium Rare Books, 2002.

  “Things They Don’t Teach You In Writing Class” first published in Trigger Warnings, 2015.

  “Notes About Writing About Writing” is original to this collection.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Writing About Writing: An Introduction

  The Girl on the Glider

  Musings

  Golden Boy

  The Eleventh Muse

  The House of Ushers

  The Revolution Happened While You Were Sleeping (A Summoning Spell) – Remixed

  Things They Don’t Teach You In Writing Class

  Notes About Writing About Writing

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Cameron Pierce, Jeff Burk, and everyone else at Lazy Fascist, Deadite, and Eraserhead; the editors who originally published these works in other forms; and my sons.

  This one is for John Skipp and Alan M. Clark…

  “All houses wherein men have lived and died

  Are haunted houses.”

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Haunted Houses

  The number one bit of advice given to all would-be writers is to “write what you know.” This line of wisdom can be interpreted in many different ways. Maybe you recently suffered a terrible heartbreak—the end of a romantic relationship or the loss of a loved one. The emotions stemming from something so painful can be mined for fiction, i.e. writing what you know. The flip side is also true. Maybe you just fell in love or held a sleeping baby. The joy those situations bring can also be used in fiction. Writing what you know can also involve your circumstances, situation, or station in life. When I first started writing with professional publication in mind, most of my characters were blue-collar young males stuck in dead end factory jobs in dead end towns. That’s because I was writing what I knew. I was a blue-collar young male stuck in a series of dead end factory jobs in a dead end town.

  This is why, eventually, every writer of literary or popular fiction inevitably ends up writing about writing at some point in their career. It doesn’t matter what genre, or what style. Horror, bizarro, romance, mystery, thriller, science-fiction, graphic novels…even those seemingly plotless bestselling literary darlings that eschew genre classification and used to get cooed about on Oprah. Read enough of them, and you’ll encounter a story about a writer.

  That’s because the writers are writing about what they know. They’re writing about writing, and what it is to be a writer.

  I’ve done the same thing a few times in my career. In the novels Dark Hollow and The Complex, the novella Sundancing, and in the stories collected in this book. And because my muse tends to lean toward things horrific and bizarre, it should come as no surprise that the elements of writing for a living I’ve chronicled over the years are equally horrific and bizarre. All of these stories are about writing, and all of them fall under either the horror or bizarro genre labels. Two of them—“The Girl on the Glider” and “Musings”—are meta-fiction, in which I, the writer, become a character in the tale—which is just an even deeper level of writing what you know.

  This collection’s origins were sort of a happy accident. Cameron Pierce of Lazy Fascist approached me about reprinting “The Girl on the Glider” in paperback. I was hesitant about that idea for a couple reasons. First of all, it had been published in hardcover, and was also available in a paperback short story collection as well as in various digital platforms (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc.). I felt it would be unfair to readers to release it as a stand-alone paperback when they could already get it elsewhere. Secondly, while the story’s length is fine for a collectible hardcover, it would have made for a slim paperback volume. So, I emailed Cameron back and politely declined. But Cameron, persistent and two-fisted editor that he is, then threw a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quote at me (the same quote that is used as this book’s epigraph) and asked, “What if we collected all of your stories about writing, instead?”

  And so we did.

  Enjoy!

  Brian Keene

  May 2015

  “Very nearly all the ghost stories of old times claim to be true narratives of remarkable occurrences.”

  —M. R. James, Some Remarks on Ghost Stories

  “Everything dies, but not everything has an ending.”

  —Brian Keene, City of the Dead

  “Chugga chugga, choo choo, spin around. Every letter has a sound…”

  —Children’s Toy

  ENTRY 1:

  I dreamed about her again last night—the girl on the glider. Apparently, I was kicking and thrashing so hard in my sleep that I woke up my wife. She wasn’t very happy about it, either. The baby has been getting up between 4am and 5am every morning, and Cassi didn’t appreciate me waking her a few hours before that.

  This morning, while we were giving the baby his breakfast, Cassi asked me if I remembered what I was dreaming about. I lied and told her that I didn’t.

  Anyway, it’s clear that this shit isn’t going away on its own. If anything, it’s getting worse. I’m not one-hundred percent positive that I know who the girl is, or why she’s hanging out on our porch glider, or why I’m dreaming about her, but I have some ideas. The only problem is that my ideas all point to one solution. One answer.

  And the answer is that I’m losing my fucking mind.

  That scares me. That scares me in ways I can’t even put into words (which is frustrating for a writer). I mean, at forty-one—or am I forty-two? I can’t remember. Isn’t it funny how you stop keeping track of that shit after a certain age? Let’s see. Dad came back from Vietnam in 1967 and I came along nine months later, so that makes me…forty-one. I think. Math was never my strong suit. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m forty-one, which sucks, but doesn’t suck nearly as bad as being forty-two.

  But I digress, new diary. As I was saying, at forty-one, I’ve thought about my own mortality a little bit. I don’t like to, but I really don’t have any choice, do I? After my Dad’s cancer battle and the fact that I’m a father again—it makes a guy think long and hard about things. I’ve led a pretty hardcore lifestyle. That shit takes a toll on you after a while. Sooner or later, it catches up with you.

  In truth, I always figured it would be my past that killed me—the booze or the tobacco or the era of loose sex all seemed to be likely candidates. Or maybe a slick road combined with a high rate of speed and some heavy metal blasting from the speakers. Or maybe I’d go out like Dick Lay
mon and my Grandma Lena did—a quick and sudden heart attack. Or maybe I’d get gunned down at a book signing by some crazed fan. “Here ya go, zombie guy! Let’s see you come back from the dead!”

  Click click, bang. Curtains close, and…scene. Type ‘The End.’

  None of those would be pleasant. Especially cancer. I’m scared to fucking death of cancer. I can’t think of anything more horrifying than dying of cancer. I’d rather drown or burn to death than die of cancer. But losing my mind terrifies me even more than cancer does, because if I lost my mind, I wouldn’t be able to write anymore. Losing my voice wouldn’t impact my writing. Neither would losing my legs or my sight or my hearing. Even if I lost my hands, I’d still be able to write. There’s voice recognition software and other methods I could use. The only part of my body I couldn’t write without is my brain, and apparently, my brain has decided to declare war on me.

  That’s why I’ve started writing this manuscript. Diary. Whatever the fuck it is. I’m writing it to help me work out this shit on my own. I mean, let’s be realistic. It’s not like I can Blog about it. They make fun of Whitley Strieber for saying he was abducted by grey aliens possessed with a disturbing fascination for his bunghole. Imagine what they’d do to me if I said in public that I was being haunted by a teenaged girl who likes to hang out on my porch and send text messages on her cell phone and talk to my nineteen-month-old son and occasionally scare the shit out of my dog—even if she’s not probing my ass the way Whitley’s aliens do.

  I can’t talk about it online, and I can’t tell my friends about it, either. It’s hard times right now, especially for writers. Tough financial straits. You’d think that people would buy more books during a recession, but apparently, it’s quite the opposite. J. F. (Jesus) Gonzalez and Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli and Jim Moore and everybody else I know are in the same financial situation that I’m in, and I don’t foresee the President or Congress giving us a corporate bailout anytime soon. My peers have problems of their own. They’ve got enough on their minds. They don’t need one of their best writer-friends confiding in them that he might very well be going crazy. And if I told my inner circle—John Urbancik, Geoff “Coop” Cooper, Mike Oliveri and Michael “Mikey” Huyck—I’m pretty sure they would try to set up some kind of intervention for me, and who needs that shit, right? I’m still pissed about the last time they tried to do that to me.

  I could tell Cassi, I guess. I mean, she’s my wife. I’m supposed to tell her everything, but for some reason, I haven’t told her about this. To be honest, I think she already suspects. She’s commented a few times over the last couple of weeks that I seem out of it. And she’s right. I am a bit out of it. But I can’t tell her everything yet, because I don’t want to scare her. If I start crying or something—if I break down—it will really frighten her, and right now, with everything else that’s going on, I have to be the strong one. For her. The baby. Our friends and families. All of us.

  So I’m telling you.

  Dear new manuscript that I’m typing on my laptop:

  My name is Brian Keene and I am either losing my mind or I am being haunted.

  Or both.

  That’s a start. Feels good to type it, though. This can be like my own little private blog. I’ll break the entries up into chapters. Maybe include a few footnotes. It will feel just like any other manuscript. Maybe then I can get at the truth. We’ll call it meta-fiction or gonzo—the blending of fact and fiction, the inserting of the author into the narrative. If it’s good enough for Hunter S. Thompson and Tim Powers and Stephen King (who inserted himself as a character into the Dark Tower series) then I reckon it’s good enough for me, too.

  More tomorrow. Got up at 5:30am this morning. It’s now 11:07pm and I’m frigging exhausted. Been working on that novella for Cemetery Dance all day (the weird western novella that I still don’t have a working title for—I’m considering calling it An Occurrence in Crazy Bear Valley). Joe Lansdale, who is the man I’d most like to be when I grow up, once told me that he writes two to four hours a day. That’s what I aspire to. That’s what I hope I’m doing when I’m his age. But I’m not. And to pay the bills, I put in long hours at the keyboard every fucking day, writing about zombies and ghouls and satyrs and giant carnivorous worms. Anyway, my point is that I’m tired (you can tell, because I have a tendency to ramble when I’m tired). I’m gonna finish this cigar, have a glass of Basil Hayden’s while I walk the dog, and then I’m going to bed.

  Hopefully, I won’t dream about her tonight.

  ENTRY 2:

  No dreams last night, at least, none that I remember. Cassi didn’t mention that I’d woke her up by having nightmares either. There was one weird thing last night, though. I’d gone to bed after typing that first entry, and I was just starting to drift off—in that weird state where I wasn’t quite asleep but not quite fully awake either—and then I heard an electronic beeping noise, like somebody was typing a text message on a cell phone. It was coming from the bathroom that’s adjacent to our bedroom. Do you know what’s on the other side of that bathroom wall?

  The outside of our house. Specifically, our deck and the porch glider.

  I’d like to think it was my imagination. I’d like to chalk it up to the fact that I’ve been thinking about all the weird shit too much, and now I’m starting to conjure up strangeness myself when nothing else is happening.

  Except that this wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it.

  Okay, back to work. Finished this week’s free internet serial installment of Earthworm Gods II: Deluge but need to spend the rest of the night working on this frigging Bigfoot novella. Damn thing is kicking my ass, which pisses me off, because otherwise, it’s been a lot of fun to write.

  ENTRY 3:

  It’s been a while since I worked on this. Ended up buried in deadlines—finishing the Bigfoot story and working on A Gathering of Crows, a Superman Halloween story script for DC comics, and a bunch of other stuff. Some of it will bring us money, which is good because we could really use it right now. The economy has gotten worse and the apocalypse is now upon us, at least as far as the small press goes. Once-reliable publishers are now either late with the royalty payments or simply ducking my calls and emails (and the calls and emails from others whom they owe). Thank God or Cthulhu that my mass-market checks are still arriving on time and that I’ve got comic book work and my temporary gig as an adjunct professor at York College to round out my income, because I suspect the days of the mid-list, working writer are coming to a close. We are a dying breed.

  Dying. Death. Christ, I’m a cheery little fucker, huh? That’s me. I’m Mr. Sunshine. I’m all about shiny happy people holding fucking hands and singing “Kumbaya.”

  It’s not lost on me that I seem preoccupied with death and dying lately. I don’t know why. Like I said earlier, maybe it’s because of all the recent health scares in my family. But we’ve had health scares before and they didn’t impact me this way. I don’t know. I have to wonder if this is some sort of mid-life crisis type of mind-fuck. Certainly, I’m no stranger to death. I’ve known people who died. One set of grandparents, my great-uncle Hobie, several extended family members, Navy buddies, friends from high school, homeys from my days living on the streets, co-workers, Dick Laymon.

  The three babies Cassi and I lost…

  But I wrote about the babies already. I’ve been known to tell reporters that “writing is cheaper than therapy” and I always grin when I say it, to show that I’m just joking around, but the fact is I’m not fucking joking. Let me tell you something. There are many reasons why I identify with the fictional character of Tony Soprano—enough that I could write an entire book about it. One of the reasons is we have similar views on therapy. I’ve been to therapy, and therapy is bullshit. Yes, it works for other people, and I’m not belittling its overall value—but I’m telling you that it doesn’t work for me. What works for me is to write about what’s on my mind. Write about the shit going on in my life. Dark Hollow
was me writing about me and Cassi’s loss. Readers don’t know that, but I do. Readers think it was just a fun little book about a satyr in suburbia, but I know that chapter two was the closest fucking thing to an autobiography I’ve ever written. Hell, the whole book was autobiographical. Adam Senft = Brian Keene. His doubts about his manhood and feelings of inadequacy because of his inability to save his loved ones was something I was intimately familiar with at the time. It was a hard novel to write. No, wait. Scratch that. It was an emotionally harrowing and utterly brutalizing novel to write. I went to a very dark place for that book, and I didn’t come out again until I’d dredged up everything and vomited it out onto the page and bared my soul and almost killed myself in the process. Writing books like that one—pouring your personal shit into a novel or a short story—that’s like confession and an exorcism and six months of therapy all rolled into one. I don’t need Prozac or Lithium. I have a laptop and a publishing contract.

  Shit. Now I’m rambling again. My point is this: I’m no stranger to death. We’re old friends, he and I. At the very least, we’re acquaintances. We recognize each other at the party and perhaps we nod in passing. I’ve watched people die. I’ve held them in my arms and had my hands turn sticky from their blood and felt the warmth drain out of them.