Kadrey's Damn Blog

Subtitles for Non-Existent Films 2

2011-05-17T00:32:00.001-07:00

Subtitles for Non-Existent Films

2011-05-17T00:24:00.000-07:00

I love weird Euro horror and crime movies from 60s and 70s. Taken out of context still images from those films have a magic all their own. I don’t make movies, but that doesn’t have to stop me from creating images from imaginary films I’d like to make. Here are a few early images. I’ll post new ones from time to time.

Movies mentioned in the first three Sandman Slim books

2011-01-31T23:19:00.000-08:00

I get asked about this a lot so I put this list together. It's by no means comprehensive, but it's a good first pass. I can recommend everything here except for Herbie and To The Devil A Daughter. You have to be truly obsessive to sit through those.

Akira
And God Created Woman
Apocalypse Now
Badlands
Bamboo House of Dolls
Barbarella
Bedazzled
Black Sunday
Blue Velvet
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Cape Fear
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Danger: Diabolik
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Death Rides A Horse
The Devil in Miss Jones
Dracula Has Risen From The Grave
Dust Devil
Earth Girls are Easy
El Topo
Eraserhead
Evil Dead 1 & 2
Fitzcarraoldo
Four of the Apocalypse
The Getaway
The Great Silence
The Haunting (the 1963 version!)
Halloween
Herbie
High Plains Drifter
The Killers
L’Inferno
Le Samourai
Master of the Flying Guillotine
Miyuki-chan in Wonderland
My Darling Clementine
Once Upon A Time In The West
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Race with the Devil
Scarface
Shout at the Devil
Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombie
Suspiria
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
The Third Man
The Thomas Crown Affair
To The Devil A Daughter
Three-Penny Opera
Thunder Road
The Wild Bunch
The Wizard of Oz
Zardoz
Zombie

Shut up and Listen

2011-01-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

There’s something inherently pleasent in listening to someone tell you a story. I think it’s something hardwired into our brains. It’s a kind of surrender. First, you give up your time because listening to a story will probably take longer than you reading it yourself. Then you give up your mind and imagination to someone else’s voice, trusting that listening will take you someplace different from where you’d be if you’d read the story yourself.

I bet a lot of you were forced to read James Joyce in high school. I staggered through Ulysses, but couldn’t get more than two pages into Finnegan's Wake. It was like reading a deposition by a drunken Irish hare. Then a friend found an ancient LP recording of the book. A couple of minutes into it and everything started to make sense. We cold hear the words as a long monologue, with the Irish accent and all the poetic wordplay intact. The recording didn’t convince either of us to love the book, but what we learned is that sometimes you need to hear a writer to understand what the hell the writer is about. Between that and the basic pleasure of listening to stories I’m hooked on audiobooks.

If you’re a science fiction fan you’ve probably read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s easy (and almost reflexive) to read the book with the accentless friction-free voice of a modern DJ in your head. Now track down a copy of Gibson reading the book. The Carolina twang in his voice changes the story, rooting it in American soil and turning the nomadic internationalist text into a post-modern Huck Finn story of a young man on a strange and life-changing journey.

There are also the writers whose work reads well on the page but, like Joyce, makes more sense once you’ve heard their voice. Harlan Ellison is a good example. So is Bruce Sterling. You don’t need to hear Neil Gaiman read his work to understand it, but if you listen to him read something like Stardust you’ll find a new appreciation for both the book and Gaiman as a performer.

One of my favorite novels is Nabokov’s Lolita (Keep your damn jokes to yourself, thanks. I’ve heard them all). I can’t think of another English language book where the beauty of the words hits me the way they way they do in this book. Maybe it’s the contrast between the amazing language and the sleaziness of the story. I didn’t think it would ever happen, but there’s a beautiful audiobook of Lolita read by Jeremy Irons. He’s the prefect voice for Humbert who sees himself as a doomed romantic until the end.

There are also authors who are performers as much as they are writers. David Sedaris is a perfect example. He’s a born storyteller and given the choice, I’ll always pick up one of his audiobooks instead the text version. You can hear why is his reading the painful autobiographical tale of playing a department store elf in “Crumpet the Elf” from The Santaland Diaries. You can listen to it here for free. NPR

Sarah Vowell is another great performance author. Here she is reading and except from her quirky historical book, The Wordy Shipmates. Here she is on Youtube.

I started thinking about this after listening to Patton Oswalt’s recent autobiographical book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Oswalt is one of the best comedians around so there wasn’t any choice between getting the print or audiobook version. Listening to him rattle off the pretentious wine list mid-way into the book is worth the price alone. Here he is reading an excerpt from chapter one.

If you like audiobooks and have suggestions on other titles leave them in the Comments section.

Sampling vs Synthesizing

2011-01-17T03:27:00.001-08:00

It’s funny sometimes how what you do is often reflected in everything else you do. Back when I played in bands I didn’t care much about synthesizers. I like samplers. I liked taking existing sounds and twisting them around into something new and weird and interesting. I realized a few years ago that I do the same thing with my photos.

I gave up on natural skin tones years ago and only shoot them when models need them for their portfolio. But on my own I’ll always do something to skew the shot. Screw with the lights, the color temperature or the cropping. I don’t have any interest in naturalistic or pretty pictures. I like interesting pictures and they often come from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.

My writing is a lot like that. I like genre fiction. It gives you an armature from which you can hang anything. If you’re running a mystery or a thriller or a Gothic romance you know the rules and so do your readers. You know how to keep the engine running And as long as the motor is purring and you’re pointed in the right direction you can do anything you want. Twist the story. Subvert it. Tweak your readers’ expectations.

I knew that I was going to write at least three Sandman Slim novels because that’s what my contract said. When I started the series I wanted each book to be a little different so I wrote the first one as a crime novel while Kill The Dead is more of a mystery. Aloha From Hell will be a bent kind of fantasy quest. I know the rules and so do you. It all comes down to what you can do with them. What I can do with them. And like my photos a lot of that comes from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.

Wasteland Turistas

2011-01-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

Monsters is an unexpected little SF movie that deserves more attention than it’s received. However, there’s one aspect of it that might explain why some people have a problem with it. I’ll get to that shortly.

Monsters (That title alone probably doomed the movie, with its generic sound and symbolic weight) has been described as a low budget District 9. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it misses the point. Monsters is a road picture, a Heart of Darkness journey staring a clueless American tourist, Samantha, and a ne'er-do-well photojournalist, Andrew.

The premise of Monsters is simple. A probe sent out to look for organic life in the solar system came back crashed in Mexico some time before the movie begins. The American border is closed and half of Mexico is a virtual no man’s land as alien organisms take over the landscape in a slow, strange Ballardian transformation. Samantha is the daughter of a media magnate who twists Andrew’s arm to see his daughter to one of the entry points still open along the border. Of course things go wrong and they never make it, so they have to go overland through the infected zone.

Here is where the movie breaks down for some people. The journey is simply that. A long journey over unknown land and dangerous waters and the utter displacement you can feel along the way. There’s not much resembling a plot here. It’s Antonioni science fiction. Instead of hard SF what we see are glimpses of moments in the characters lives and relationships and their interactions with the locals they meet along the way. If you’re looking for action-packed James Cameron battle scenes you’ll be extremely disappointed.

Writer/director Gareth Edwards mostly keeps his aliens in the background. You hear them bellowing across the rainforest. You catch glimpses of them behind billboards and buildings when they wander into a town and are attacked by an occupation army. When the aliens do appear the encounters are brief, shifting between wonder and fast and utter brutality. In one scene we watch as down the river tentacles emerge and drag the wreckage of a jet fighter underwater. It’s a quiet sequence like something out of a Victorian ghost story. However, when a nighttime convoy encounters one the enormous cephalopod creatures it’s pure horror movie carnage—exactly the kind of thing I’m sure most audiences wanted but seldom received.

The real problem people seem to have with the movie is the shape of the overland journey. We watch Samantha and Andrew pay off local smugglers to take them north. Along the way they’re passed from smuggler to another. Neither of our protagonists has any clue who these people are or where they’re going as they move farther and farther away from civilization with locals who probably don’t give a damn about a couple of, to them, rich gringo assholes. Samantha and Andrew are utterly lost, at mercy of strangers and vicious aliens. Many people seem to find this part of the journey unbelievable. Why would Samantha and Andrew follow grungy strangers down a river to meet other more mysterious and heavily armed strangers? As someone who’s traveled in Central America and other countries in the developing world I can tell you that when you get onto the back roads trusting strangers and following them into towns that aren’t on any maps, full of locals who stare at you they whole time you’re there is exactly what you do. The alternative is to stand around forever at a dusty crossroad waiting for Godot in the form of a phantom American-friendly air-conditioned bus that will never come.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film. There are moments where the dialog about how the wall America has thrown up along the border has imprisoned itself feels a little stilted and obvious. But the good moments outweigh the bad and the final encounter with the aliens is both as frightening and strangely beautiful as any scene of its type in any movie I can remember.

Monsters represents a kind of movie making where the SF elements are at the service of a simple human story. But the SF isn’t tacked onto the film. It’s at the heart of, another part of the strange journey Samantha and Andrew have to make to find their way home.

Parallel Dimensions and A Flying Psycho with an Umbrella

2011-01-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

I always get sick at the end of the year, which makes the time between Christmas and New Years a bittersweet thing.

2010 was an interesting year. I finished Kill The Dead, the second Sandman Slim book and my first sequel. At the time it was the hardest book I’d ever written. I thought Sandman Slim three, Aloha From Hell, would be a breeze in comparison. Ha. It’s turned into it own kind of Jersey Devil. However, since I’ve already survived one sequel I’m not as panicky about this one. It’s just a process of working through the problems. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t and fixing it or at least scrawling Banksy wall art on top so no one will notice.

I also did my first book tour. I’d never done anything like it before. It was both odd and fun. It two weeks on the road by myself. See, I rated a tour promoting Kill The Dead, but I’m still a very small fish in an incredibly large pond, so I didn’t rate a handler. This means I was on my own 99% of the time (some kind locals helped me out from time to time when I truly lost). I get the feeling this being thrown into the touring fire is a common sort of publishing dues paying/hazing ritual. Can we send you out on your own and can you survive without getting arrest, killed, mauled or breaking any book reps legs by demonstrating the figure-four leg lock you saw on WrestleMania at your hotel?

One aspect of the tour that I hadn’t counted on was how easy it was to become displayed in the world and feel like you’re traveling in a parallel dimension. After four days on the road (I was gone for two weeks) I lost all sense of time and place. I didn’t know what day of the week it was or what time it should be in any given time zone. The weirdest part was going days not knowing what city I was in. I had both a paper schedule and digital itineraries on my phone and iPad. I lived by those times and addresses. It didn’t mater if I was in Minneapolis or Portland, Oregon, all I knew was that I had to catch a certain plane at a certain time, land and find the rental car, go to the hotel, check in and then hit bookstores or distributors. All that mattered were the times and locations on the list. I know I saw friends at the comic con in New York. I know I talked to a bookstore rep about Aqua Teen Hunger Force somewhere in the Midwest. I know some nice models gave me their zombie pin-up calendar and I know it was raining in Portland. I know that sometimes telling the car’s GPS system to show me the shortest route could lead me down back roads that reminded me way too much of Deliverance. On the other hand, on one of those random rural excursions, the nav system took me through a forest blazing in fall colors. I don’t know where that was, but it was a great drive. When I flew home from San Diego (I remember SD because it was my last stop) I remember thinking that I now understand why bands go insane and do outrageous things on the road. I felt utterly removed from normal daily life and I was only gone for two weeks. Going on the road for a year? You’d be a Martian by the time you were done.

In 2011 I want to get better at everything I do. Writing, taking pictures, everything. I want to travel more. Not in the disembodied way you travel on tour, but like an actual human being. I want to make it to Trinity site and the Creation Museum. I haven’t traveled abroad in years, so I’d like to get out of the country, even if it’s just a short trip to somewhere easy. The UK or Mexico. I hope I get to tour the south more when the next book comes out. I’d like to at least hit Houston. I don’t have many fond memories of the place and consider it the dullest big town I’ve ever spent time in, but I also have a strange connection to it that I can’t put into words. Each time I go back I hope that the connection becomes clearer, but that hasn’t happened yet.

2010 was full of learning experiences and I hate learning experiences. They’re just pains in the ass dressed up in Mary Poppins drag. Right, and fuck Mary Poppins too. She’s like a Freudian fever dream, the after effects of an opium and Vin Mariani binge. Chase the dragon, Mary. Right out the window and keep going.

You can find my Top 10 Books Read in 2010. They’re not all new books, just good ones I enjoyed.
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/12/kill-the-dead-richard-kadreys-top-10-books-read-in-2010.html

Here’s a list of my Top 10 SF and fantasy films. Some were produced in 2009, but not readily available until 2010. In no particular order:
Inception
Monsters (I think it helps to have traveled in the 3rd world to really appreciate this one.)
Human Centipede
Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl
Cinematic Titanic: Danger on Tiki Island
Metropolis Restored
Night Mayor (A Guy Maddin short. You can see it online
http://www.nfb.ca/film/night_mayor
[REC] 2
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 pre-VR take on reality morphing, unavailable until now.)

Ho Ho Ho

2010-12-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from San Francisco!

Happy Holidays, aka One Step Closer To The End Times

2010-12-20T17:09:00.000-08:00

It’s Christmas and I’m feverishly editing Sandman Slim 3, Aloha From Hell. By editing I mean I’m beating the first act to death with a claw hammer. Trust me, it deserves it. Funny, but I thought this would be the least painful book in the series to write. Turns out it’s the hardest because it has to encompass both of the previous books and twist them around in new ways.

I have some book projects brewing for the new year. Nothing solid yet because these things take a while to work their way through the system. The good news is that the book biz is a lot faster than movies. If it wasn’t we’d still waiting for the first printing of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I’m also working on an original screenplay, another project that has to be swallowed, digested and shit out by the beast so it can decide if it was tasty enough.

Between bouts of writing I’ve been taking photos. I’m shooting a lot of film these days, something I haven’t done in years. Mostly I’m working with Fuji instant because I’m using some odd shooting techniques and I like getting immediate feedback on whether the process is working. Plus, this line of Fuji instant gives me a negative. About half the time I’ll toss the photo and use the negative for scanning. For any camera geeks out there for digital I’m working with a Nikon D700, for film I’m using an ancient Holgaroid (A Holga body with a Polaroid back held in the place with big rubber bands) and an old instant camera mainly used by photojournalists in the 80s, a Polaroid Propack.

I promise to update here more often in the coming year. It’s so easy to get bogged down in other projects and feel your brain vaporlock when it comes to talking about simple work and life issues in a forum like this. I have to remind myself that writing these entries is, in fact, a good way to auger out the inside of my skull.

On that note, happy holidays to everyone. And remember, when you're on Santa’s lap at the mall that’s not whiskey on his breath. It’s Santa’s special medicine that keeps from getting a boner every time a stranger sits on him and begs for treats.

Amazon's Top Ten

2010-11-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

It looks like Kill The Dead made Amazon's Top Ten Science Fiction & Fantasy books for 2010. It was excellent news to wake up to this morning.

Here's the whole Top Ten list

Free Sandman Slim ebooks!

2010-10-21T14:17:00.001-07:00

A reminder: You can still get a free Kindle, Nook or Sony Sandman Slim ebook from these locations.

For Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/29kmtad

For Nook: http://tinyurl.com/386opu9

For Sony Reader: http://tinyurl.com/28rggx4

Remaining Tour Dates

2010-10-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Dates for the rest of this signing and yammering tour. There might be more. There might not. I go where my betters point me.

Oct 11 5pm, 7:00 PM, BORDERS, 3140 Lohr Rd, Ann Arbor, MI 48108

Oct 12, 7 pm, SCHULER BOOKS & MUSIC, 2820 Towne Center Blvd, Lansing, MI 48912

Oct 13, 5pm, UNCLE HUGO'S, 2864 Chicago Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55407

Oct 14, 7:00 PM, Powells, Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR 97005

Oct 15, 7PM, University Bookstore, 4326 University Way, Seattle, WA 98105

Oct 16 12:00 PM, JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, 5280 Pendelton Ave, Fort Lewis, WA 98433

Oct 17 2:00 PM, MYSTERIOUS GALAXY, STE #302, 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, San Diego, CA 92111

Oct 24 3:00 PM, BORDERLANDS BOOKS, 866 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Oct 27 7:00 PM, GREEN APPLE BOOKS, 506 Clement ST, San Francisco, CA 94118

Oct 29 7:00 PM, BOOKS INC, 301 Castro St., Mountain View, CA 94041

Nov 6 2:00 PM, DARK DELICACIES, 3512 W Magnolia Blvd, Burbank, CA 91505

The Little Engine Who Wants A Drink But Is On A Deadline

2010-09-08T00:12:00.001-07:00

I haven’t been updating for a while because I can finally see daylight at the end of the long and terrifying novel tunnel. I’ll put a bullet in the head of the third Sandman Slim, ALOHA FROM HELL, by the end of the month.

Writing a book is all about finishing the thing. Just get to the end. You can fix the shitty parts later. But doubts bubble up along the way and you‘ll want to quit. That happens to me with every novel I’ve ever written. I look at it and wonder, “Who wants this crap? Why did I agree to do it? Am I even writing in English anymore?”

Remember the Little Engine Who Could? Writing a book is kind of like him, only instead of going up a hill you’re pounding you’re head against the bulkhead of an aircraft carrier trying to get out the other side.

“I think I can. Ouch. I think I can. Goddamit. I think I can. Fuck. I think I can. There’s nothing good on. I might as well keep typing.”

Suspect Zero, Part 5

2010-08-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

<The final section of the story, serialized Monday-Friday the 13th. Feel free to share the url, link to the page, etc. RK>

Part 5
“If I’d of shot you back there, would I have become you?”

“You’d have become something. More than what you are, but no. You wouldn’t become me.”

Gabriel touched the sticky blood on his chest and legs.

“I don’t think I want to do this anymore. I want it to be over. Can you help me out?”

“Kill you? I’m afraid it doesn't work that way. You want to sacrifice yourself, go feed the homeless for Jesus. I’m not interested in those who want to be taken. There’s others for that kind of thing. There’s no nourishment for me in suicides. For me eating suicides is like trying to eat the fog hanging in the empty spaces between the stones on a mountainside. There’s nothing to sink your teeth into.”

“If you're not a ghost then what are you?”

They changed lanes several times. The killer turned the truck off the local freeway and onto the interstate.

“Please. I’ve got to know.”

Suspect Zero reached up and pulled a cord, letting loose two long blasts from his air horn. He whooped with the sound.

“I’m a road shaker and a heartbreaker.” They hit a straightaway and he looked at Gabriel. “But most of all, I’m the toll taker.”

“What toll?”

“You asked me before if I was a ghost. I’m not. But I wasn’t always such a grizzled bastard either. Hell, for the longest time I didn’t have any form at all. You people called me all sort of nonsense back then. Devil. Old Wolf. Ogoun. Soo-oop-wa. Our Lord of the Flayed One. I grew two legs, two arms and two eyes. I walked on the ground because that was what I needed to do to be near you.”

“Are you an angel?”

“Shut up and listen. Over ten thousand years you’ve been coming here. You walked here over ice bridges, marched up from the south and beached your ships on the coasts. You came to me. To the dirt. The mountains and the lightning. The rivers and the dust devils tearing up the Mojave. You wanted my blood and built your lives and homes on my flesh. Now I’m in your pavement and wires, your concrete, subways and sewers. I’ve always been here. I am this place. And you, every one of you, owes me a blood payment. Get it, boy? It’s like this truck. It’s my home. It’s me and no one rides for free.”

“You’re god.”

“Don’t be stupid. But you’re not the first who’s thought that. I’ve been worshipped and exorcised. I’ve buried you people in blizzards and earthquakes. Cooked you in brush fires burning all the way from Mexico to the Yukon. I’m the price you pay for being here.”

“You’re all that and you still can’t kill me?

“I told you. I’m not an angel or your god. I’m not here to ease your pain. You’re a nice kid. I wish I could help you out, but it’s not my place.”

Gabriel nodded thoughtfully, trying to absorb it all. His head was spinning. He only understood a little of what Suspect Zero said, but it was enough. Gabriel looked at the old man.

“You've been real nice to me tonight and I really appreciate it. I’ve been wandering around for so long. I’m glad I finally got to meet you. I hope you don’t think I’m rude.”

“Rude how, kid?”

“I’m going to go now.”

Gabriel pushed open the passenger door, stepped out and was gone.

The truck was doing 60 and the last thing the old man wanted to do was jackknife, so he eased on the airbrakes and slowed enough that he could pull onto the shoulder and stop. He checked his mirrors, but didn’t really expect to see the boy. He was probably a good half mile from where the kid had jumped. He got out of the truck and walked to the shoulder side. There was nothing to do now but wait. He lit a cigarette with the silver lighter. He finished one cigarette and was about to light a second when he saw Gabriel crest the nearby overpass. The boy had a slight limp where the bone stuck out of one of his left leg and his chest looked funny and puckered where the tires had run him over. His clothes were torn and he was covered in road rash. Other than that, the boy looked pretty presentable.

The killer put away the cigarette and lighter. When Gabriel reached him he l helped the boy into the truck and got in on the other side.

“I’m proud of you, son,” said Suspect Zero. “I couldn't help you, so you helped yourself. You doubted yourself night, but you came through in the end. You are the right kind of people.”

“Can help me now?”

“Absolutely. You smoke?”

“Yeah.”

He handed the boy his cigarettes and the silver lighter.

“Keep them. You earned them.”

They drove in silence. A few miles ahead, the old man took an exit Gabriel didn’t remember as having been there before. Out the widow, he watched as they pulled into an enormous truck stop. A bright sign stood over the parking lot. It read, END OF THE LINE. He’d never noticed it before. How could he have missed something that big in all the times he’d hitched up and down this stretch of freeway? But he’d been alive back then. Maybe that made a difference.

His door opened and the old man helped him down. The night felt light and slightly unreal. The leg with the bone sticking out didn’t hurt, but it wouldn’t work right so he was slow getting across the lot to the diner.

Inside, the place was longer than a football field, lined with rows of booths and Formica tables. Gabriel couldn’t even see the far end. The big parking lot hadn’t been more than a quarter full of trucks and their drivers and passengers were spread out over so much space that even occupied, the diner looked empty.

The old man scanned their faces, spotted one fifty rows ahead and they headed to where a pretty dark-haired young woman was sitting by herself nursing a cup of coffee and a plate of corn fritters. The young woman sat up as she saw Suspect Zero and Gabriel.

She smiled an easy smile and said, “Hello, you old vagrant. Long time no see. Sit down and take a load off.”

“Hello Crow, what do you know?” He and Gabriel sat down across from her in the booth. “I haven’t hauled any special cargo for a while, so I haven’t had a chance to stop in.”

Crow, the young woman, glanced at Gabriel. She was beautiful. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, but not scary dark like Suspect Zero’s eyes had been. Her’s were soft. When he looked back her, Gabriel felt something enter him. It was warm and curious and as strange as the feeling was, he wasn’t frightened. A moment later, it had passed.

“You must really be something for this bone picker to come out of his way like this,” she said to Gabriel.

“He's been very nice to me.”

She looked at Suspect Zero and cocked her head quizzically.

“Picking up strays? I never took you for sentimental.”

“Call it old age. Call it helping out a colleague,” he said.

“Those bones and crush marks don’t look like your work.”

“No. The boy did that himself. Straight up and out. Made the choice and did it like a man.”

She took a sip of her coffee and drew in a breath.

“Kid, if I give you a lift you know where I’m taking you, right? That old man next to you is special, but there's only one road for human killers. That includes suicides.”

Gabriel nodded.

“It's okay. Everything is okay now.”

Suspect Zero leaned over to Gabriel.

“Now’s when you pay her.”

Gabriel looked at him.

“She's a professional like me. ‘Psychopompos’ they used to call her. And she doesn't haul freight for free.”

Gabriel patted himself down, not sure what the old man expected of him. He still had the money from the convenience store in his pockets, but he was pretty sure money wasn’t worth much here. Then he felt it in his pocket. He took out the silver lighter, set it down flat on the table and slid it to Crow. She picked it up eagerly.

“Shiny. Very pretty,” she said.

“That enough to get the kid a ride?”

“First class. He can even ride up front with me like a big boy.”

“Time for me to go,” the old said. He slid out of the booth and looked down at Crow. “Thanks for all your help, chickadee.”

“Take care of yourself, road man.”

“That’s what I do.”

The old man squeezed Gabriel’s shoulder and said, “Try the peach pie before you go. It’s the best you’ll ever get.” Then he turned and walked away.

Suspect Zero bought a cup of black coffee and a jelly donut, which he devoured on the way back to the truck. Inside the cab, he set the coffee in a holder on the dashboard. He took the pistol from his jacket pocket, reloaded it, wrapped it in plastic and stashed it back in the cooler.

He reached down and pulled a flat bog iron box from under his seat. Inside were seven bone cups carved with runes. Inside each cup were slips of paper in a language only he could read. He pulled one slip of paper from each cup and set them on the dashboard. They read: MAN. 30s. BLONDE. BANK. INSIDE. BUSINESS HOURS. HAMMER.

The killer sighed. This was going to take a little doing, but it would be a banquet when he pulled it off. Not fun, though. He wished the boy had stuck around long enough to understand that. Not fun. Just the work. The work and the blood that feeds the land.

Copyright Richard Kadrey 2010

Suspect Zero, Part 4

2010-08-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

<I’ll be serializing the story from Monday-Friday this week. Feel free to share the url, link to the page, etc. RK>

Part 4
Suspect Zero parked the truck on the street next to an all-night convenience store. The parking lot was littered with broken beer bottles and strewn garbage from where someone had kicked over one of the cans. So many rocks had been thrown through the lighted sign over the door all Gabriel could read was “Nite Mart.”

Before the killer got out Gabriel said, “At least tell me something real. How long have you been doing this?”

“Drivin’ this truck?”

“You know what I mean.”

Suspect Zero looked thoughtful.

“I read somewhere that scientists reckon the first humans settled in North America somewhere between 20 and 13 thousand years ago.”

“So?”

The killer smiled. “I figure I was about 15 minutes behind them. Come on. Let’s get some grub.”

“You sure you're not a ghost?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. I’m just here like you, to take a walk on the wild side.”

Inside the store a boy behind the counter thumbed thorugh a motorcycle magazine. His acne was bad and he looked young. Gabriel wondered if it was legal for a kid like that to be selling liquor.

“Where do you keep the Bud?” asked Suspect Zero.

“Cooler in the back,” the boy without looking up from his magazine.

“Thanks.”

The killer pulled the boy over the counter like he weighed nothing. He held him with one hand while he pulled a knife from behind his back and jammed the blade into the side of the boy’s throat. When he removed it, blood fountained from his neck, out and onto the liquor bottles behind the counter.

The killer stepped back to the front door. In was the cheap aluminum kind with a lock on the inside. He turned the lock and tested the door. It held. Gabriel was surprised that no one in the store had notice the attack, but it had been so fast and quiet.

Off to their right, a couple was going through bags of potato chips. A lone man with his back to them was loading cans of soup into a plastic basket. Three teenage boys were huddled by the beer cooler, trying to block the open door with their bodies. It was the lamest attempt at shoplifting Gabriel had ever seen. Either they had no clue about what they were doing or they knew the counter man was scared enough not to stop them.

Suspect Zero’s voice came from right next to his ear.

“Good eye. I figured those boneheads by the beer would be good for you. Got your knife?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Here,” said the killer and pressed a pistol into the boy’s hand. “Always carry backup. I’ve got more. I think this a garrote situation for me. Happy hunting,” he said. He pulled two small pieces of wood wrapped in wire from his coat pocket and quietly went down the aisles, making his way to the man reading ingredients on soup labels.

The gun felt weird in Gabriel’s hand. He’d gone shooting with his dad, but he’d never shot anyone. He put it in his pocket and unsheathed the knife, heading for the back of the store. After all the bullshit and chatter in the truck, it felt good to move his legs again. He looked at the boys as they whispered and argued about who should carry the beer under his jacket.

But he’d never gone for anyone he never knew before, much less three. He didn’t even know if they were armed. He looked over his shoulder and caught the killer’s eye. The older man gave him a smile and mimed slipping the garrote around the man’s throat and pulling. A man in his element. Gabriel breathed evenly, trying to match the old man’s ease.

He caught the first boy in the right kidney, jamming the knife hilt deep into his back. The boy screamed and fell forward onto his face, beer bottles exploding under him. Gabriel looked at him. Guess he was the one that was going to carry. When he looked up the other boys were frozen in place. He knew that look. The boys’ minds still trying to understand what they’d just seen. One at a time they searched Gabriel’s face. They want to know if they know me and I’m someone they have a beef with. He stepped over the fallen boy’s body and the nearest boy, tallest, reached under his jacket for something. He had the gun halfway out when Gabriel swung the blade across his body, hitting hard at the boy’s wrist and cutting deep enough that the tendons and muscles stopped working. The boy dropped the gun. Gbriel lunged for him while he was still in shock, stuck his knife into the boy’s belly, twisting the blade slightly as he pulled up so the wound wouldn’t close.

He looked again. The third boy was running for the front door. Thinking he could push it open and escape, the boy bounced off the locked door. Screaming hysterically he shook the door’s aluminum handle and clawed at the glass. Gabriel didn’t rush. He knew the boy’s mind was too far gone to figure out that all he had to do was flip the lock right above his head.

It had taken Gabriel a long time to learn to throw the Ka-Bar accurately. It was heavier than most throwing knives and the technique was a little different. He gripped it by the blade and threw it hard. He’d never thrown a knife at anyone’s back before and for good reason. Just like he was afraid it would, the knife dug into the boy’s shoulder blade a couple of inches, hung there and fell to the floor. There was too much bone in the back. You’d have to be William Tell to make a kill throwing it there. Still the blow to the shoulder blade had sent the kid face down on his knees. He was crying and screaming something in Spanish, snot dripping from his nose. Gabriel rushed him, but at the last minute the boy spotted the knife, grabbed it and held it in front of him. Gabriel tried to stop, but he slipped on the boy’s blood and fell forward, landing an inch from the blade.

There was an explosion from behind Gabriel’s back and the boy’s body slammed against the door and slid down, a gaping hole in its chest. Gabriel looked over his shoulder and saw Suspect Zero leaning over the shelves a couple of rows back, his gun smoking. He nodded to Gabriel. Gabriel nodded back and headed to him.

When he got to the killer’s aisle, Gabriel found the soup man on the floor surrounded by dislodged cans. His head was almost severed from his body. The wire had cut clanly all the way through skin, cartalige and muscle. All that held the head attached was the vertebrae at the back on the man’s neck.

The killer had the couple cornered at the end of the aisle. He waited there for him.

When Gabriel reached him the killer said, “Good work with the boys. I know you would have finished the last one, but I had the shot, so what the hell.”

“It’s cool. Thanks,” Gabriel said.

“Glad you don’t mind some collaboration.”

Suspect Zero turned his attention back to the couple. They were a couple of Goth kids, pale and skinny, dressed in shades of black and red.

The killer said, “What are you in the mood for tonight?” He pointed his pistol at the girl. “White meat?” He pointed the gun at the boy. “Or dark?”

Gabriel stood where he was, breathing hard. His throat had gone dry. He looked at his bloody hands.

He looked at Suspect Zero

“I lost my knife.”

“That’s okay. I’ll choose for you,” he said and shot the boy between the eyes.

Gabriel said, “I thought we were supposed to mix up how we kill. Guns twice tonight?”

Suspect Zero showed him his pistol.

“Different gun. Different caliber. Sometimes you have to improvise. I decided to do a quick one for you. Help you get your sea legs back.”

The killer stepped aside, leaving Gabriel a clear view of the girl. He reached into his pocket for the gun the killer had given him. Gabriel took it out and leveled it at the girl’s face. She held up her hands in front of her, not whimpering, just making little animal noises. She might have peed herself, he thought. For just a second he was back at the reservoir looking into Penny’s shocked and staring eyes. She’d made noises like that when the first knife thrust hadn’t killed her and he’d had to go in for a second and third. Gabriel’s throat was dry. She didn’t look anything like Penny, but he could feel the breeze on his face, the wind cooling as it passed over the water. He let the gun drop a few inches. He felt the killer move up beside him.

“Is that how it is, boy? You're a true disappointment. I thought you were the right kind of people,” said Suspect Zero. “Guess I’ll take it from here.”

He moved past Gabriel with his knife out and grabbed a handful of the girl’s hair. There was a click as Gabriel pulled back the hammer on the gun. The killer stopped and turned to him. Gabriel pointed the gun at Suspect Zero. A slow grin spread across the killer’s face.

“You rascal you, playing possum this whole time. And here’s me starting to wonder if your heart was in the work. You planned to kill me this whole time and waited until you found your moment. That’s cold, son. Good for you.”

The killer spread his arms like wings and took a step forward.

“You want to take my truck? Want to be an eighteen-wheel nomad? Roam the country like a king taking lives and giving them to those you leave alive? You want to be me? Do it, boy. Do it. We both know it’s why you flagged me down and why I stopped.”

Gabriel looked at the floor where all the blood on his clothes had mixed with the rainwater to form a pinkish pool at his feet.

“That was before. I don’t know now,” said Gabriel. He glanced at the cowering girl. She slid down the wall the floor. Her boyfriend’s blood had spread across the linoleum and she was half-lying in it.

The killer made a sour face.

“You don’t know? Bullshit. People never mean it when they say that. What they really mean is they know exactly what they want, but they’re afraid to take it. Don’t be one of them. You got the drop on me. You beat me. Take the shot.”

Gabriel looked at the killer and then the girl. Gabriel put the pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. Nothing happened. It was empty.

Suspect Zero gently took the gun from Gabriel’s hand.

“I told you a killer knows another killer when he sees one. You never hand a killer a loaded gun.”

Without turning, keeping his eyes locked on Gabriel’s, Suspect Zero shot the girl. Gabriel watched as the man walked down the aisle, opened the locked door and stood there waiting. A few seconds later he followed.

The killer unlocked the door and said, “The kid behind the counter. Take his wallet and whatever’s in the till. This’ll just be a robbery gone sour.”

“What about the security camera?”

“It isn’t working. I can tell.”

Gabriel did what he was told, stuffing the wallet and cash into the pockets of his pea coat. Suspect Zero pushed open the door and shoved Gabriel out. He’d left the truck idling. They got in and they started moving almost immediately, driving in silence for a few minutes. When Suspect Zero took the onramp to the freeway out of town, Gabriel finally spoke.

Copyright Richard Kadrey 2010

Suspect Zero, Part 3

2010-08-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

<I’ll be serializing the story from Monday-Friday this week. Feel free to share the url, link to the page, etc. RK>

Part 3
The redhead said, “I’m Julia. Where are you men headed tonight?”

“It’s a work night for my young friend and me. No rest for the wicked. Say hello to the nice girls, boy.”

“Hi. I’m, uh, Gabriel,” he said. He could see some of Julia’s red hair out of his peripheral vision, but he didn’t want to turn his head in case he saw Penny.

“You’re cute, Gabe. You sure it’s a work night for you, too?”

“Definitely for him. He about screwed the pooch on our last job, so he’s going to make up for it on the next. Aren’t you?” The old man turned his wolf eyes on Gabriel. He slipped a hand into his hunting jacket and slid out the .45, tucking it under his leg with the grip out just a little.

Julia leaned back and whispered something to her friends. They all laughed, high-pitched and a little sloppy. Gabriel wondered if it was about him. He realized they were drunk. He set his hand on the knife.

“No fair keeping secrets in the cab,” said Suspect Zero. “First rule of trucking, ladies.”

The blonde spoke. Gabriel was relived that her voice wasn’t anything like Penny’s.

“Rachel thinks that maybe you’re, you know. I mean this is like a rolling bedroom. Maybe you two are a little Brokeback Mountain?”

The killer glanced back over his shoulder at the drunken girls. All three of them started laughing. He elbowed Gabriel in the ribs and the boy smiled nervously.

“You hear that, boy. The think we’re fruit salad. A couple of dandelions. Tell him.”

Gabriel half-turned in his seat.

“Uh no. It’s not. We’re not homosexuals.”

The girls burst into laughter.

The brunette repeated “Homosexuals,” in a low voice, mimicking him.

Gabriel slid the Ka-Bar out of its sheath.

Suspect Zero laughed along with the girls.

“Naw. It’s not like that, girls. We’re a couple of true blue all Americans and straight as apple pie.” He hooked a thumb at Gabriel.

“The quiet one here is my apprentice.”

“Why does a truck driver need an apprentice?”

“Cause the boy needs schooling. You think it’s easy reading a map and pissing in a jar while doing 60 down the interstate?”

Together the girls made an Ewww sound.

“I never tried,” said the blonde.

“Give it a go sometime. Expand your horizons.”

The brunette spoke up for the first time.

“You don’t have any of those jars back here, do you?”

“No, little lady. They get chucked out the window over bridges and at parked highway patrol cars.”

He grinned at the girls as they whispered to each other. Julia leaned back between their seats.

“Too bad we didn’t meet you two earlier. Maybe we could have walked on the wild side tonight.” The blonde and brunette fell on each other trying to stifle giggles.

“Never say never, girls.” The killer turned his nearly black eyes to Gabriel. “What do you think, son. Should we take these ripe young ladies on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride?”

“I…I don’t know,” he said, moving the knife from down his leg and up into his coat.

The killer shook his head in mock disdain.

“You see? It’s not so much that I need an apprentice as the boy needs a teacher. He can’t even recognize Heaven when it’s breathing over his shoulder.”

“You talk funny, mister. I like it,” said Julia. She rested her hand on Gabriel’s arm. His body stiffened and sat up straighter.

“Why thank you, Julie. I like how you smell,” said the killer.

The brunette leaned forward between the seats and pointed.

“Can you turn left up here?”

“Sure.”

The killer jerked the wheel right hard enough that Gabriel and the girls slid against in their seats and hit the wall. They were on a narrow pitch black block where the all streetlights had burned out. Gabriel saw the killer slip the pistol out from under his peg a little and pull back the hammer.

“Sorry, girls. Guess I heard wrong. The boy and me’ll get you sorted out in just a minute.”

“What’s with all the bags back here? They smell kind of funky,” said the blonde.

“I apologize for that,” the killer said. “Dirty laundry is part of the work and work has been messy lately. Leaks. Busted fan belts. A little blood, too. Everyone is skinning their knuckles and worse in his line of work. Isn’t that so, Gabriel?”

The boy nodded in reply, feeling Julia’s fingers flex on his shoulder.

“Why don’t you dig under your seat, son. Put on some music for the ladies.” He turned to Julia and flashed her a grin. “Something loud to cover up the sound of screams.”

Julia smiled back and slapped him arm playfully.

“Dirty old man.”

“When the wolf smells chicken he knows it’s dinner time.”

The killer made two more sudden turns.

“Here,” said the brunette.

“Here? Here seems downright impolite.”

Julia pointed at dim lights ahead. “Club Wasteland’s right up there by the corner.”

The killer squinted.

“Really? Well I’ll be damned. I’ve been driving these streets for days and never noticed. Looks like fun. Wish I’d known about it earlier.”

“It’s probably not your kind of place,” said the blonde.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover, girls. You never know who you’re going to meet on a night like this.” He let the hammer down on the gun and pushed it back under this leg.

“Open the door for the young ladies, Gabe.”

Gabriel leaned forward as the three girls slid out from behind him and stepped down into the street. Julia gave his thigh a squeeze as she left.

“Thanks, mister,” she called.

“My pleasure, girls. You have a nice time tonight. Take a walk on the wild side for me and the boy.”

“We’ll do our best,” Julia said.

“Hey Gabe,” called the blonde.

He looked at her. Penny stared back.

“Yeah?” he said.

She smiled at him. “Good luck with the pissing lessons.”

Girl laughs and the killer joined in. Gabriel pulled the door closed.

They pulled away and when Gabriel looked out the window the girls waved to him and blew kisses. He gave them a small wave back.

He turned to the killer.

“You let them go.”

Suspect Zero slid the gun from beneath his leg and put it back in his pocket.

“You noticed that, did you?”

“You had your gun out.”

“And you had your knife. You waiting for an engraved invitation?”

Gabriel stared ahead not knowing what to say.

Suspect Zero backhanded him gently on the arm.

“I was just messing with you,” said the killer. “I wasn’t going to hurt ‘em. Bunch of drunk girls? Too obvious. Too easy. We’re the random factor made flesh. What we do transcends regular people’s notions of reason which means some get to live and others die and no one but us knows why. Tonight those girls’ll run wild and tomorrow they’ll hear about what happened at the warehouse back yonder. They’ll tell their friends that they were stranded right by there. How they could have run into the killers if a couple of friendly fags hadn’t picked them up. See what I’m saying? Knowing how close they came, each of those girls carries a little piece of us with them and when they tell their friends about tonight they’ll pass it on to them. And then they’ll pass it on. That’s how legends start. That’s the beginning of immortality.”

Gabriel looked at the killer hard, like he’d never seen him before.

“Immortality? All these fucking rules? This isn’t fun. When does it get to be fun?”

“Fun? You think this is Pac Man? This is work. The work. We can take joy in it, try to make each kill as lively as possible, but fun and games aren’t why we’re here.”

It’s why I’m here, Gabriel thought. His stomach burned. This isn’t what he’d been looking for at all. Finding Suspect Zero, getting him at arms length from his blade wasn’t going to be like this. It was supposed to be perfect black madness. Racing engines, burning cars and the road boiling under their feet. Dice with devil heads and a landscape of pale skin with sticky red tracings like all the roads they would travel, crushing the weak, the stupid and the innocent under their wheels. And when he’d taken what he could from the man, there’d be the explosion of pleasure when he ripped dad’s Ka-Bar across the older man’s throat and took the truck as his prize. That’s how it was supposed to be. Instead, here I am with a scrawny fucked up old Ward Cleaver. I swear to god, one more piece of advice and the knife comes out. He didn’t need this Killing For Dummies bullshit.

Gabriel asked, “How do you choose them?”

“We can talk business later. You hungry? I could use a bite.”

copyright Richard Kadrey 2010

Suspect Zero, Part 2

2010-08-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

<I’ll be serializing the story from Monday-Friday this week. Feel free to share the url, link to the page, etc. RK>

Part 2
The driver pointed to the glove compartment.

“Open it,” he said.

Gabriel pushed the release and the door fell open. It was stuffed with purple Nitrile gloves. The driver leaned back and grabbed a clean t-shirt from reached behind Gabriel’s seat.

“Wear those next time,” he said, pulling the shirt over his head.

Gabriel glanced at the driver’s bare hands.

“You didn’t wear gloves.”

The driver held up his fingers in front of the boy’s face.

“Don’t need to. No prints,” he said.

“How’d that happen?”

The driver shrugged and put on his hunting jacket. He fired up the eighteen-wheeler’s big engine and they started to move.

“A gift of birth, I guess. I’m sort of special, but you already knew that, which is why you came looking for me.”

The driver released the brake and eased the truck forward, back onto the rainy street.

Gabriel’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

“Are you really him? I didn’t really think you were real. I’ve been traveling for such a long time. I was starting to think you were just a story.”

“I am a story, but not just a story.”

“Suspect Zero,” said Gabriel.

“I guess that’s what they call me these days. Kind of funny sounding if you ask me. Like a space satellite or some kind of oven cleaner.”

Gabriel stared at man wondering if he looked long and hard enough, would he be able to see though him.

“Are you a ghost?”

The driver shook his head, his eyes scanning the road ahead.

“Naw. I'm a man just like you, only different. Go ahead. Ask your questions, son. I know you have a million.”

Gabriel couldn’t talk right then. He looked out the windshield and then closed his eyes to the smeary wet light. He breathed in the scent of diesel fumes and pressed his back into his seat, letting the truck’s vibrations rattle his bones, trying to lock into his memory all the sensations and feelings of the moment he met Suspect Zero. He’d waited for this moment for so long. It was like meeting the Headless Horseman or riding along with Godzilla. Had anyone in history single handed taken as many human souls as this ragged-looking man with the gray ponytail? And he never left any real clue as to who he was, where he came from or why he did what he did. He was the only name attached to hundreds of unsolved murders all across North America, not because any normal person believed in him, but because there was nothing else to call all those unsolved murders.

Gabriel’s true crime book reading friends said Suspect Zero’s secret was he was a man in constant motion, keeping to the road. That he never slept or ate. Gabriel didn’t believe that shit before and he sure didn’t believe it now the he was with him. The old man in the driver’s seat was, no damn doubt about it, a man. But Gabriel knew he was something else, too.

“How did you know it was okay to take me with you back there? That I wouldn’t freak out and call the cops?” he asked.

“First off, if you’d gone for the phone I’d have gutted you and hung you upside down from the rafters like a hog being cleaned for Sunday dinner. And second, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I recognized you the same way you recognized me. A killer knows a killer when he sees one. That’s mostly why I picked you up. It’s nice to have some company where I can kick back and just be my own self, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Gabriel relaxed, knowing the man was right. It felt kind of good not to have to pretend anymore and hide what he really was.

“What kind of knife you got strapped to your leg? I noticed it when you first got it.”

Gabriel was almost embarrassed. How stupid was he to try and hide a weapon from the Super Bowl champ killer of killers?

“It’s a Ka-Bar. It was my dad’s in Nam. He was a Marine.”

The driver held out his hand.

“Can I see it?”

Gabriel slid the knife from its sheath, but held onto the it for a second, uncertain.

“Relax, kid. I told you. It’s nice to act normal with someone. Our special kind of normal.”

“The right kind of people normal.”

“Exactly.”

Gabriel handed Suspect Zero the knife. The killer hefted it in his hand, testing the weight of the thing. He twirled it between his fingers like a toy, like an extension of his body. Spun it like a top on the back of his hand. He flicked his wrist and the knife fell flat on his palm with a smack. He ran is once across his forearm and handed it back to Gabriel.

“Decent grip. Good weight and balance. Looks like it’s seen some use, too. Yours or your old man’s?”

“Mine, I guess. I don’t think he used it much in the war. He gave it to me when I was ten and never asked about it again.”

“You don’t sharpen it with one of those cheapass grocery store kitchen sharpeners do you?

“Never. Only by hand, slow and careful, with honing oil and a whetting stone.”

“Good boy. A sloppy workman does sloppy work. You’d never catch a world-class chef using one of those plastic housewife sharpeners and they use their knives a lot more than we do. Course, I don’t want to presume how you do your work. Maybe you’re out hunting every day.”

“No. I’m not looking to break any records.”

The killer turned the wheel and they rounded a corner. He chuckled quietly.

“Liar,” he said without malice. “You think about body counts all the time. You’re a young man and young men are ambitious. You want to outdo your elders. That’s good. Smart young men need goals.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“Truly, I have no idea. I gave up counting long ago. It’s like getting laid. You count the first few because it’s new and exciting, but after a few lays you’ve proved you can do it. After that, counting is kind of crude. Body count’s not the thing for me. It’s the work itself.”

“Want to know how many I’ve killed?”

“Sure. Tell me.”

“Ten. And I only started last Christmas.”

“Ten’s not too shabby. Ten puts you up there with Charlie Starkweather, but way behind that Green River fella. He got upwards of sixty. Chikatilo, that crazy Russian kid-killer, got fifty some odd. And ten’s not half as many as some folks say Billy the Kid got, and he was dead before he was twenty-three. You look a bit older than that, so you’re already way behind. See what I mean about body counts? Going for it’s never going to make you happy.”

They rode in silence for a minute, but Gabriel couldn’t help himself.

“Just a guess though. Not an exact number. How many?”

“No idea. Seriously.”

Gabriel looked out the buildings as the killer maneuvered the truck easily down unmarked service roads between the warehouses. He imagined he could hear the heartbeats of the workers beyond the wet walls. He was sure Suspect Zero could. He wondered if the man could read his thoughts. If he could, he was going to have to be quick, but now he wasn’t sure if the Ka-Bar was going to be enough.

“I like knives. You use a knife much?” Gabriel asked.

“I’ve used pretty much every weapon a man can use to kill another living thing. Knives. Guns. Garrotes. Spears. Arrows. A little strangulation here. A hammer to the back of the head there. Even poison a few times, though that’s pretty unsatisfying since you want to be gone by the time they keel over, so you don’t get to see the fruits of your labor. The important thing is to mix up your methods. Keeps Johnny Law on his toes.”

“It’s harder now then when you started, huh?”

The killer pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket of his jacket and lit it one-handed with the stolen silver lighter.

“Used to be I could roll into a town, eat half the citizens and roll out again when I was done. Bury my clothes and boots and that was that. Now it’s all DNA, chemical trace analysis and carpet fiber databases. They can track you through credit cards. Toll booths. Cell phones towers. There’s cameras everywhere and they have biometric facial recognition software.”

“Seems kind of unfair if you ask me,” Gabriel said. “I thought about throwing daddy’s knife away after the first couple of times I used, but I couldn’t.”

The killer nodded.

“Just keep moving. That’s best the way nowadays. You do your work and get over the state line before anyone knows what’s happened. The simplest methods are the best and moving’ll do for now.”

“Driving this truck must be a good job for you.”

“The best. And I get paid well, too.” He turned to Gabriel. “That thing back at the warehouse. Don’t sweat it. Everyone misses from time to time. We’ll get your body count up. You’ll see.”

The killer craned his neck at something ahead. Gabriel couldn’t see anything until they were just a few yards away. The old man must see in the dark like a goddam bat, Gabriel thought. The truck came to a stop on a street corner by an unlit bus stop. Three pretty girls in short dresses and high heels were huddled together holding damp newspapers over their heads so their hair wouldn’t get wet. The tallest of the girls, a heavyset redhead was still waving at them as they stopped. The killer nodded for Gabriel to open his door. He leaned across the boy.

“You ladies look like you’re in need of a lift.”

“Can you? We’ve been waiting a goddam hour for the bus.”

“You’ll have to squeeze in the back. There’s stuff there. It’ll be a wee bit tight.”

“That’s okay,” said the smallest and youngest of the three, a pretty blonde with hazel and eyes and freckles. Gabriel thought she looked a lot like Penny Clark, a girl who’d lived down the street from him all through grade school, junior high and high school. He’d loved her the whole time and of the ten he’d done, hers was the only kill it hurt to remember. She was his first. It was on a balmy summer night parked at the old reservoir. He hadn’t planned it and it wasn’t fun at all. It was too quick and clumsy. And wet. He hadn’t expected that much blood. In the end, after he weighed Penny down with rocks and dumped her in the reservoir, he had to burn everything, his bloody clothes and second-hand Camaro. He’d loved that car.

When the three girls had wedged themselves into the back behind their seats, the killer let off the air brake and the truck moved back into the street. He gave Gabriel a quick smile and nod. His eyes looked darker than before, like a wolf’s.

“Thanks a lot, mister. We’re just trying to get to Club Wasteland and this silly bitch’s car broke down,” said the blonde. The brunette next to her crossed her arms and pretended to pout.

Suspect Zero asked, “Didn’t your mamas tell you girls it’s dangerous to hitchhike?”

The redhead leaned forward between their seats.

“We’re dangerous girls,” she said.

“Uh oh,” said the killer looking at Gabriel. “I think we might be in trouble.”

The girls laughed.

copyright Richard Kadrey 2010

Suspect Zero, Part 1

2010-08-09T13:29:00.000-07:00

<I’ll be serializing the story from Monday-Friday this week. Feel free to share the url, link to the page, etc. RK>

Part 1
The rain that had been pissing down all afternoon turned cold when the sun set and it kept getting colder all night.

The boy waited on a corner among the nearly deserted warehouses. He waved at a passing eighteen-wheeler and it slowed to a halt, pulling over at the corner. The cab was taller than the boy expected. He had to climb up a couple of chrome steps to get inside. The drizzle made the metal slick and he slipped and almost fell, but the truck was warm and dry when he made it inside. The boy shivered and wrapped his arms around his old Navy pea coat trying to get warm, careful to keep his hand away from the pocket where he’d hidden the knife. For now, it was nice just to be out of the rain.

“What’s your name, son?” asked the driver.

“Gabriel.”

“Like the angel,” said the driver as they pulled away.

“I guess. Supposed to be for an old relative. He was a General in the Civil War.”

“I never heard of him.”

“He didn’t last long. I don’t think he was much good.”

The driver scanned the road ahead. Turned left, prowling the wet potholed streets. Water rolled down the gutters, miniature rapids.

The boy looked at the driver. He was wearing a heavy plaid hunting jacket. It made it hard to tell how big the guy was. His face was thin and covered with a couple of day’s worth of gray stubble. His lank hair was pulled into ponytail and held back with a grimy red Peterbilt baseball cap. A plastic eyeball tacked to the truck’s dashboard swung back and forth like a pendulum ticking out the time.

“What do you do, Gabriel?”

“Mostly travel these days. I move around a lot.’

The driver nodded.

“Some people are farmers and some are nomads. I’m a nomad. The Akkadians and Sumerians, they were nomads. They settled down, built up the first civilizations. The Mongols and Huns were nomads. They came along later and kicked those civilizations down.” The driver laughed. “It's a good life for the right kind of people. Are you the right people, Gabriel?”

“I sure as Hell am tonight. Anything that’ll get me out of the rain,” he said, hugging himself tighter, feeling the reassuring press of the knife against his leg.

The driver grinned.

“Don’t sell yourself short, son. I have a feeling you’re more than that.”

“How can you tell?”

“I’ve been around for a while. You can’t help but learn to read people.”

“What’s your name?” asked Gabriel.

The driver hunched his shoulders and peered out the windshield, straining to read street signs through the rain-streaked glass.

“Damn it. I know you’re around here somewheres.”

Gabriel didn’t talk while the driver hunted for the destination. As he grew warmer. Gabriel relaxed.

The driver asked, “You know, I just realized I’m so wrapped in these streets I never asked where you’re headed.”

“Far as you can take me, sir. Anywhere that’s drier than here.”

“Good answer. I could use a little company. I’m heading out of town tonight, but I’ve got part of a load left and work to do. Hope you don’t mind a few stops along the way.”

“No, sir.

“And if you get bored or what you see looks interesting, jump on in. But no pressure. Good work is its own reward, but you being the right kind of people probably already know that.”

“I suppose. Yeah.” He didn’t know what else to say. What was with the “right kind of people” thing? Had he let something slip? Did the old man know what he was there for? This time he let his hand brush the hilt of the knife, the one thing he still had from home.

“Grab me a pop out of that cooler by your feet, will you?” said the driver.

Gabriel leaned down to where a red and white plastic picnic cooler rested on the floor. It was the kind where lid swiveled back on a hinge and the top opened like a trapdoor. When he popped open the top a plastic-wrapped .45 automatic fell out onto the floor.

“I was wondering where that’d got to. Thanks, son.”

Keeping one hand on the wheel, the driver bent over, grabbed the gun, pulled the plastic off with his teeth and stuffed the gun into his jacket pocket.

A second later he looked to his left and said, “Thank you, Jesus and all the little baby Jesuses in Jesustown.” He turned the wheel hard, swinging the big truck around and backing it against the loading dock of an old brick warehouse. It was too dark and wet for Gabriel to read the name of the place.

The driver climbed down from the cab the moment the truck stopped moving and disappeared around the side. Gabriel listened to the sound of the trailer door opening and boxes sliding out. The driver appeared by his window a moment later, pushing a dolly loaded with boxes and gesturing for Gabriel to follow him in.

“Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

He didn’t want to get out of the truck and back into the rain, but Gabriel climbed out and followed the driver. After a few steps the old man stopped.

“Grab this for me, will you?” he said nodding to the dolly piled with boxes. “I got to find the damn paperwork.”

Gabriel tipped the dolly back, letting the load settle onto his body. It was surprisingly heavy. The old man was stronger than he looked. He’d have to remember that.

As they reached the door, the driver gave a loud “Aha!” and pulled a pink packing slip from his right rear pocket. He held the warehouse door open for Gabriel and followed him in.

A balding man with a beer gut and ballpoint pen behind his ear was counting boxes on a loading pallet and ticking off boxes on a piece of paper on a clipboard.

The driver called out, “What’s the good word, Sonny?”

The balding man looked up and his face broke into an easy smile.

“How are you doing, ramblin’ man? Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

Gabriel watched them shake hands and talk bullshit. Annoyed, he stood the dolly upright, tired of holding the weight.

“Who’s the sprog?” asked Sonny, glancing at the boy.

The driver held out his hand in Gabriel’s direction.

“This is Gabriel. He’s helping me out tonight.”

Sonny held out his hand and Gabriel shook it.

“Any friend of this road hog is welcome around here.” He turned back to the driver. “What’ve you got for me tonight, good sir?”

The driver handed Sonny the paper he’d fished from his back pocket. Sonny attached it to his clipboard, glanced at the dolly and nodded. He pointed to an open area near the pallet he’d been counting earlier.

“You can drop those right over there, son.”

I’m not a goddam pack mule, thought Gabriel, but he kept quiet, not wanting to end up back in the rain. He leaned the dolly back, rolled it to where Sony had indicated and began unloading boxes. It was late in the week, Gabriel knew. Friday night or maybe even Saturday. There was only a skeleton crew working. Just five other men spread out through the warehouse. As he unloaded the boxes, he listened to Sonny and the driver talking in low voices, laughing occasionally. He wondered if they were laughing at him. They wouldn’t be laughing if he pulled the knife. He could have it out in less than a second if he wanted. He’d had plenty of practice and knew all the places you could pig stick a man without hitting bone.

He walked back to where Sonny was examining the paperwork. The bald man nodded to him.

“This feller’s been telling me you might go out on the road with him. Looking for somewhere sunnier. I don’t blame you. Me, I like the cold, but everyone’s go to find their place in the world.”

“Amen to that,” said the driver.

Sonny ticked off a couple of boxes on the delivery slip, signed at the bottom and tore off a carbon. The driver folded it up and slid it into the same pocket from which he’d pulled the original.

He started to turn away, but stopped.

“I forgot the other thing, Sonny.”

“What was that?”

The driver pulled the gun from his pocket so fast that Gabriel didn’t know what was happening until he heard it go off. Sonny dropped the clipboard and fell to his knees, clutching his beer belly. He stayed kneeling and swaying until the driver lowered the .45 and shot him in the back of the head. Sonny went down hard. For a second, Gabriel couldn’t breathe. He wanted to look up at the driver, but it felt like his eyes were stuck on Sonny’s body by a powerful magnetic force. He didn’t move until he heard the driver’s voice.

“Hey. You just going to stand there? This is a work night. Come on.”

The rest of the crew had scattered all over the warehouse at the sound of the first shot. It didn’t seem to faze the driver. Gabriel watched in a kind of cold awe as he calmly walked the warehouse aisles shooting each man in turn. Like he knows exactly where they are, he thought.

The driver went into the enclosed dispatcher’s office and Gabriel followed him. The driver had the gun pointed at something behind a battered wooden desk piled high with pink, yellow and green forms. When Gabriel got closer he saw the fifth warehouse worker in a fetal position on the floor. The man was in gray overalls and worn work boots. He shook like a child lost in a blizzard. When Gabriel was close enough to lean over the desk, the driver handed him the pistol.

“I saved this one for you. It’s why you’re here, ain’t it? Why you got in my truck.”

The driver kept the gun outstretched towards Gabriel. The boy stared at it, feeling his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest. He breathed and stared. He knew he was staring for a long time. It felt like years. The knife against his leg had gone cold, like it was strange and no longer a part of him. No, this isn’t exactly what he’d gotten into the truck for, but like before, he didn’t want to end up back in the rain.

Gabriel reached out and took the gun. Pointed it at the man on the floor and pulled the trigger. He flinched at the deafening explosion. Gabriel looked at the driver who had both hands clamped over his ears.

“Small rooms,” the driver said and laughed. “Ain't they a bitch?”

The man on the floor moaned. They both looked at him.

“I think you missed, champ. Give her another go.”

The man on the floor whimpered loudly.

“Shut up!” the driver shouted. “Can’t you see the boy’s trying to concentrate?”

Gabriel didn’t hesitate this time. Bringing the gun up fast into firing position, he pulled the trigger. The man on the floor twitched, but there wasn’t any blood. He’d missed again.

The driver came over and patted him on the shoulder.

“Don’t feel bad. You’re cold and tired. You’ll get the next one.”

The driver went to the warehouseman and kicked the sole of one of his shoes. He began to sing.

“When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”

The man lowered his hands a little and looked up. The driver shot him through the right eye.

“We’re done here, I think. You didn’t spot anyone I missed did you?”

Gabriel looked up from the body. It took him a second to register the driver’s question. He shook his head.

“No. He’s the last.”

“Let’s do like that singer with the funny nose said and ease on down the road.”

He took Gabriel’s arm and led him out of the office, pausing only to steal a silver cigarette lighter off the dispatcher’s desk. As they passed Sonny’s body on the way out, the driver grabbed the dolly and took the signed delivery form off of the clipboard. He wadded it up and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt. Outside, he loaded the dolly back into the trailer while Gabriel got back into the truck cab.

A second later the driver climbed in and pulled the door shut. He reached behind Gabriel’s seat and pulled out a green plastic trash bag. Slipping off his hunting jacket, he unbuttoned his shirt. Gabriel looked at him, at the man’s calm, efficient movement. He took off the blood-splattered shirt, rolled it and the delivery form up and stuffed them into the plastic bag before tying the top and stuffing it back behind his own seat. Gabriel marveled at how the man had managed to shoot five men at close range without getting any blood on his coat. It must be his favorite, thought Gabriel, and he doesn’t want to have to bag it.

Copyright Richard Kadrey 2010

Next Week: A New Story In Five Parts

2010-08-07T02:07:00.000-07:00

I'll be serializing a new story, Suspect Zero, Monday through Friday next week.

Synopsis: Two serial killers. One truck. And one long night to learn if it’s the body count that matters or what comes after.

A Dream About New Orleans

2010-07-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

I had a dream about New Orleans, back before the residents understood that the water table encouraged caskets to sink into the underground channels and be swept away, only to re-emerge at some random location downstream. In my dream, thousands of caskets were drifting out to sea in a long sinuous line, a flotilla of the dead. Cracked, ancient coffins were swelling and resealing themselves. Desiccated bodies bloated with salt water and blew up like inflatable rafts. Animals spotted the line of floating boxes and soon seagulls, albatrosses, crabs and seals rode the coffins out to sea. Far from shore, a ship was on fire. The passengers and crew, some of them also on fire, dove into the water. None of them had life preservers, but they found the coffins and climbed aboard. In the middle of nowhere, the formation hit the doldrums or a freak outcropping of corral and stalled, massing together, forming a casket island populated by corpses (recent and old), boat passengers and dozens of species of sea life. They floated together in silence, bobbing up and down in the black water and watched a gigantic moon rise over the horizon.

Zen and the Art of Vehicular Arson

2010-06-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the beginning of a new book is like the event horizon of a black hole. You resist the pull, but you know you’re going to get sucked inside.

The first few pages of a new book are the hardest part for me. A book doesn’t exist until I’m 50 pages in and it’s not a real book until I’ve written 100 pages. I think it will always be that way for me. We all need markers to let us know how our work is progressing and page counts of 50 and 100 are mine. I use those same numbers when I’m driving. If I’m going 500 miles, I count off 50 miles at a time because going 50 miles is easier than going 500.

That’s my life right now. Working on the book and trying to finish a story for a friend’s anthology. I’m also waiting for more Hollywood news. There’s nothing worse than waiting and waiting for something potentially exciting is worse. I need to start a Zen garden and learn to contemplate nothingness and letting go of desire. Or I could just burn that car around the corner. The one that always takes up two spaces. Maybe I can build a Zen garden around the car and burn that. It might not be exactly what Buddha intended, but the glass from the exploding windows and the melting tires dripping into the manicured pebbles would sure be pretty.

PS. I also killed my old photography site and created a new and better one. There’s a section of fetish photography that is extremely NSFW. View at your own peril here:

http://kaosbeautyklinik.carbonmade.com/

Losing Jack, getting Sam and Alex

2010-06-17T04:48:00.000-07:00

I know I’m late to the game when it comes to commenting on Lost’s last season, but I’ve finished watching two BBC series, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, and I can’t help but think again about Lost’s sign-off.

For those who haven’t seen Life on Mars, it’s a police procedural on the surface, but something very different underneath. Detective Sam Tyler is in a car accident in contemporary London and when he wakes from a coma he finds himself in Manchester in 1973. The show revolves around Sam’s arrival in this strange place and time, the mystery of how he might get home and the ultimate meaning of the journey. I don’t want to give too much away for those who haven’t seen it. Life on Mars is a cop show, a celebration of 70s Brit pop culture and a metaphysical puzzle about the nature of life, death and identity. Ashes to Ashes carries on where Life on Mars left off, this time with a female detective, Alex Drake. It digs even deeper into the questions raised by Life on Mars, becoming more frightening and dreamlike as it reaches its conclusion.

These shows explore a lot of the same ground as the final season of Lost and, unfortunately for us Lost fans, they do it better. It’s not because the characters, settings or ideas are superior, it’s about how Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes delivered what they promised—a conclusion that both stayed true to the meaning of the series’ and answered just enough questions that the puzzles and red herrings felt resolved.

Lost, on the other hand, only delivered half of what it promised and I think I know why. I’m not one of those fans who hates his final season, but I don’t think it was a brilliant Sopranos-style gothcha surprise ending that had been planned from the beginning of the show. I think it was more about a condition that affects all writers working on a big project: sheer goddam panic.

When you’re about to finish writing a novel, especially one that has any type of mystery to it, there’s a moment of fear when you don’t know if you can pull all the threads together. You’ve been doing sleight-of-hand, distracting little dances and juggling a fair amount of bullshit for 100,000+ words and there you are at the end of your story and you have to have it all make sense. And you have to do it without being boring, not always an easy trick.

I think that’s what happened to Lost. A bunch of writers and producers realized that they had no idea how to resolve the ideas and mysteries the show had thrown out into those last few episodes. Their solution? They just ignored them. They went for the emotional gut punch and jettisoned the whole story infrastructure they had carefully built up over the five previous seasons. A lot of critics took this to mean that Lost really was making it up as they went along. I don’t believe that. I believe that when they were planning out season six they just threw up their hands, realized what a mess they were in and said, “Fuck it.”

You couldn’t get away with that in a novel. Your editor would laugh and send the book back however many times it took for you to weave the emotions and the story together. The problem with Lost was that the top creative people and producers didn’t have that one other person who would stand back, look at the pages and say, “Bullshit.” It’s like The Good, The Bad And The Ugly stopping before the final gunfight in the graveyard. Or Harry Potter ending without a final confrontation with Valdemort. You might be able to engineer an emotional conclusion to those stories, maybe even good ones, but you would have failed the story. That’s what Lost did and Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes didn’t, and that makes me a little sad.

I don’t hate the ending of Lost because for all its clumsiness there was a genuine emotional payoff. But it could have been so much more if the creative team had to go back one more time and figure out how to collect all the ideas and themes into a big, messy, Rauchenberg-like found art sculpture. I think we could have lived with a bit of messiness if they had tried just a little harder.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a Lost fan and have the box set of the whole series on order. Sometimes you just have to live with what you get, even if it’s not everything you were hoping for. But if you’ve never seen Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes I’d recommend buying those series first and waiting for the Lost set to go on sale. Neither of those Brit series attempt anything on as grand a scale as Lost, but what they do they do beautifully, and without any glowing pools or stained glass windows getting in the way.

LA Report 6/10

2010-06-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

I’m back home after a series of meetings with the guys at Dino De Laurentiis’s production company, who own the film rights to Sandman Slim. Right now it looks as if the movie will happen. They have a hot young writer on the script and are shopping around for a director. Of course, this is Hollywood so nothing means anything until the cameras are running and everyone has cashed their checks. And things move slowly in LA. Glacial is a better word. It’s a series of snail-paced moves with long pauses in between. A hundred million dollar stutter fit. Interesting things could be happening in the next few weeks. If/when they do and I’m allowed to talk about them I’ll report back here.

All of this reminds me of one of the unspoken rules of the book biz: Having a bestseller is a good thing, but you’re not really a success until you have a movie deal. And, considering the number of books that are optioned each year, it's not really that big of a deal until someone actually makes the movie. It's a little funny that book success is measured in terms of non-book interest, but that's just how the world works.

I’m having fun watching the movie gears start to grind on Sandman Slim. My weird little novel is now being studied the way Allied commanders studied the beaches before the Normandy invasion. If the movie happens, it will turn into a full-scale military operation. And I want it to happen, partly to get my name out there, partly for the money and partly, for the geek in me, so I can steal a prop version of a na’at, a weapon I invented for the book. And I want to drink a shot of Jack Daniels in the Bamboo House of Dolls. Who knows if that will happen, but I’m happy to embrace the utter weirdness of watching the thing happen, or almost happen, or whatever the hell it all comes to in the end.

William Faulkner's Nobel Acceptance Speech

2010-05-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

 Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

 He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

 Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

* The speech was apparently revised by the author for publication in The Faulkner Reader. These minor changes, all of which improve the address stylistically have been incorporated here.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

I Don’t Care Who Shot Miles Archer

2010-05-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

A mystery is always more interesting than the solution. Chandler once described a good mystery as one that readers would enjoy even if the mystery were never solved. That was Lynch’s original intention with Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer’s murder would never be solved and simply hang in space behind the scenes, coloring all the foreground events. I often find myself bored with mystery novels two-thirds of the way through. I’m more interested in watching people lie, evade, manipulate and, occasionally, act heroically. I’m perfectly happy that The Maltese Falcon was just a black metal bird. The lunatics spinning around the bird were much more interesting than what the bird was or who had the damned thing. We need a new mystery genre where readers know up front that the mystery won’t ever be fully solved, but that the journey will be exciting, fun, weird, frightening and worth the trip. The Red Riding Trilogy that played on British TV played with this idea. There was a mystery in each episode, but it was solved in an offhanded way that told you that it was never the point of the movie. The journey through the corrupt Yorkshire police and political world was what the movies were really about. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ll take brittle beauty of mystery over rational solutions any day.

Music, Buildings and the Future

2010-05-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

"What the future cathedrals of Chartres will be, I have no way of knowing, but I imagine someone playing a musical instrument and expressing with it certain images in algebra and topology; as the instrument is played, the physical form of the building is created. Perhaps my fantasy is simply one of a Bach-like God sitting at the keyboard of the universe, but I imagine a future architecture in which you turn on a building the way we now turn on the lights. These buildings will be temporary like concerts, and not enduring like the pyramids; and so when the use of the building is finished, the people can move on. The culture will be similar to the nomadic way of life of the old paleolithic hunters and gatherers; the people will carry their cultures in their souls, and so familiar will they be with earth, wind, and stars that civilization will be unnecessary .”

from Darkness and Scattered Light: Four Talks on the Future: William Irwin Thompson

When Things Changed

2010-05-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Climatologists look at the rings in ancient trees to find significant changes in the weather over time. What would it be like if we could slice open our brains and see the large and small moments that changed us?

The first shaping event I can remember is my father's death. We were in a car accident in which he was killed and I walked away with nothing but a few lumps and bruises. My father didn't have any visible injuries, so I didn't understand why I couldn't wake him up. That whole day had a surreal, slow motion quality that I think left me permanently skeptical about the nature of reality.

We lived in Brooklyn when until I was ten. I have a distinct memory of walking through Flatbush on a Saturday afternoon and seeing a can of chocolate covered grasshoppers in a deli window. The label on the can was black and had a very realistic image of a grasshopper over a red logo. This was my first clue that there were people walking the Earth who led lives very different from mine.

We were broke and museums were free, so my mother took me to a lot of them when I was a kid. I remember staring at a Dali the first time I saw one of his limp clocks. I also saw Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase." My family laughed at me when I asked where the nude was. I don't know if the question embarrassed them or if they thought I was funny for not understanding what I was looking at. I'm glad they let me figure it out myself because it got me to read a lot about the early 20th century art.

I read all the time as a kid, but I didn't have any method, so I don't know if any particular books affected me more than another. I'd read anything fantastic, especially SF and horror. I liked Poe, but Lovecraft was a revelation. He was the first writer I stumbled on who didn't simply write about horrible things being horrible, but wrote about the utter weirdness of the horrible. Lovecraft taught me that horror wasn't all masked killers, ghosts and vampires, but was something deeper, darker and probably not something you could fully understand with the rational mind. I don't think any other writers affected me the way Lovecraft did until I read Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers.

Punk music changed me. I still love the first Sex Pistols album, but Iggy Pop's Raw Power was the record that rewired my brain. When the distorted, slightly sloppy guitar and Iggy's voice hit me from the speakers, I felt like I'd found my way home. This was the music I'd been looking for my whole life and now I'd found it. And I needed to find more.

Seeing Eraserhead was a turning point for me in the same way that Iggy had been. In Lynch's movie I finally found someone who saw the world the way I did. Dirty, brutal, crazy, scary and weirdly beautiful because of those things.

Because I would read anything and everything when I was young, no writers until Poe and Lovecraft stood out so monster and Sf movies probably had a more profound affect on my developing brain. I remember clearly the first time I saw Robert Wise's ghost story, The Haunting. Nothing had ever frightened me like that and I still think it's one of the best horror films of all time. George Romero's original Night Of The Living Dead had a similar effect and so did the odd German SF movie, First Spaceship on Venus. For years I was haunted by images of those blasted and half-melted Venusian cities. Plus, of course, the sentient black lava attack (If you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about).

I met the writer Jerzy Kosinski when I was working at a bookstore in LA. He was charming and friendly to the staff and told us a funny story about his early days in New York after he'd escaped from Poland. At some point I realized that he was lying, but I also knew that Kosinski had a habit of trying out parts of new books on unsuspecting people. If listeners seemed to enjoy and believe whatever outlandish tale he was telling, then he felt he could incorporate that section into the book. He kept the lie interesting and wild and just believable enough that we could go along with it. Most of all, he kept it entertaining. That's what got my attention. Listening to him talk was the first time I was ever aware of enjoying being lied to.

If we could saw your brain open, what would the tree rings show that shaped you?

How to Write a Book in Three Days by Michael Moorcock

2010-05-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

I respect the hell out of prolific pulp writers. There's plenty to learn from writers who cranked out millions of words for mass market appeal. This is Moorcock on his early Elric-era writing process. It ain't art, but it's good, no bullshit advice on how to produce good, no bullshit pages. (The article was found here WetAsphalt )

"If you're going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared."
"[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it's a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D'Arthur it's also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That's the formula for Westerns too: everybody's after the gold of El Dorado or whatever." (Cf the MacGuffin.)
"The formula depends on that sense of a human being up against superhuman forces, whether it's Big Business, or politics, or supernatural Evil, or whatever. The hero is fallible in their terms, and doesn't really want to be mixed up with them. He's always just about to walk out when something else comes along that involves him on a personal level." (An example of this is when Elric's wife gets kidnapped.)
"There is an event every four pages, for example -- and notes. Lists of things you're going to use. Lists of coherent images; coherent to you or generically coherent. You think: 'Right, Stormbringer [a novel in theElric series]: swords; shields; horns", and so on."
"[I prepared] A complete structure. Not a plot, exactly, but a structure where the demands were clear. I knew what narrative problems I had to solve at every point. I then wrote them at white heat; and a lot of it was inspiration: the image I needed would come immediately [when] I needed it. Really, it's just looking around the room, looking at ordinary objects and turning them into what you need. A mirror: a mirror that absorbs the souls of the damned."
"You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other."
"The imagery comes before the action, because the action's actually unimportant. An object to be obtained -- limited time to obtain it. It's easily developed, once you work the structure out."
"Time is the important element in any action adventure story. In fact, you get the action and adventure out of the element of time. It's a classic formula: "We've only got six days to save the world!" Immediately you've set the reader up with a structure: there are only six days, then five, then four and finally, in the classic formula anyway, there's only 26 seconds to save the world! Will they make it in time?"
"Once you've started, you keep it rolling. You can't afford to have anything stop it."
"The whole reason you plan everything beforehand is so that when you hit a snag, a desperate moment, you've actually got something there on your desk that tells you what to do."
"I was also planting mysteries that I hadn't explained to myself. The point is, you put in the mystery, it doesn't matter what it is. It may not be the great truth that you're going to reveal at the end of the book. You just think, I'll put this in here because I might need it later."
"You start off with a mystery. Every time you reveal a bit of it, you have to do something else to increase it. A good detective story will have the same thing. "My God, so that's why Lady Carruthers's butler Jenkins was peering at the keyhole that evening. But where was Mrs. Jenkins?"
"What I do is divide my total 60,000 words into four sections, 15,000 words apiece, say; then divide each into six chapters. ... In section one the hero will say, "There's no way I can save the world in six days unless I start by getting the first object of power". That gives you an immediate goal, and an immediate time element, as well as an overriding time element. With each section divided into six chapters, each chapter must then contain something which will move the action forward and contribute to that immediate goal.

"Very often it's something like: attack of the bandits -- defeat of the bandits -- nothing particularly complex, but it's another way you can achieve recognition: by making the structure of a chapter a miniature of the overall structure of the book, so everything feels coherent. The more you're dealing with incoherence, with chaos, the more you need to underpin everything with simple logic and basic forms that will keep everything tight. Otherwise the thing just starts to spread out into muddle and abstraction.
"So you don't have any encounter without information coming out of it. In the simplest form, Elric has a fight and kills somebody, but as they die they tell him who kidnapped his wife. Again, it's a question of economy. Everything has to have a narrative function."
[On "The Lester Dent Master Plot Formula"]¹ "First, he says, split your six-thousand-word story up into four fifteen hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two, double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there's no way he could ever possibly get out of it. Then -- now this could be Lester Dent or it could be what I learnt when I was on Sexton Blake Library, I forget -- you must never have a revelation of something that wasn't already established; so, you couldn't unmask a murderer who wasn't a character established already. All your main characters have to be in the first third. All you main themes and everything else has to be established in the first third, devloped in the second third, and resolved in the last third." (Note: this last sentence is reminiscent of the classic three-act structure.) (Note 2: Lester Dent's Master Plot Formula is actually a bit more complex and specific than this. Here it is in its entirety.)
"There's always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn't allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero's morbid speeches, and so on.
...
The hero has to supply the narrative dynamic, and therefore can't have any common-sense. Any one of us in those circumstances would say, 'What? Dragons? Demons? You've got to be joking!' The hero has to be driven, and when people are driven, common sense disappears. You don't want your reader to make common sense objections, you want them to go with the drive; but you've got to have somebody around who'll act as a sort of chorus."
"'When in doubt, descend into a minor character.' So when you've reached an impasse, and you can't move the action any further with your major character, switch to a minor character 's viewpoint which will allow you to keep the narrative moving and give you time to think."

One last note: later in the book, Moorcock talks about how he is also fond of using stock characters, especially those from the Commedia Dell'Arte.

More information about Michael Moorcock can be found at his official website Moorcock's Miscellany, which includes articles, blog, forums and a wiki.

The Other End of the World

2010-05-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

(I just finished this. Please pardon any typos.)

Lucy Rose had been on the road for days. She started out hitching from Boston and ended up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she won a powder blue pickup truck off a lanky cowboy in three straight games of nine ball. She left the sullen cowboy at the bar and drove off before he could convince himself that no girl played like that and tried to take his keys back. She gunned the blue truck west. That's all Lucy was certain about her destination. West, followed by a tricky turn-off that most people missed.

She blew all the way to LA along I-10. When she reached the ocean she turned south. Lucy knew that what she was looking for would be that way.

The truck's AM radio only worked when it felt like it and was stuck on a Jesus station broadcasting out of Oklahoma. The signal was ghostly and the preacher’s sermon came in bursts of word clusters, like what schizophrenics must hear in their head, Lucy thought. "…us loves you!" "Repent!" "…can’t lie. God knows who you are when the lights go out…" Hell, that’s more than I know, she thought.

In the silences when the ghost preacher disappeared, Lucy wondered if he was right. The idea that someone out there knew more about her than she did made her feel used or cheated, like the way she’d hustled that shitkicker out of his truck.

All the bullshit she’d piled up around her, it was like the Great goddam Wall of China. Bullshit drugs, bullshit jobs, bullshit boyfriends who loved you with their fists. The times when she ran it through her mind it was like watching an old black and white movie in some foreign language she didn’t understand. She couldn’t be that girl, cutting herself up like that. A person like that would have to be crazy, like maybe there was some broken part of her brain working against her. Like her mind had a mind of its own. Was this cross-country tear ass just one more kind of bullshit?

“Here lies Lucy Rose, four bald tires and an AM radio. Amen”

South of San Diego, when she was close enough to the border that she was worried about having to show ID crossing into Mexico, Lucy Rose spotted a blind turn off the road between two tall saguaro cacti. She looked for a sign, but there wasn’t one, not even broken uprights that would mean a sign used to be there. She was going to pass it in a few seconds. Maybe it wasn’t a road after all. But she saw tire tracks between the saguaros.

Lucy cranked the wheel hard and the blue truck fishtailed when the front wheels hit the soft dirt of the road while the back wheels were still on the highway. She caught the truck before it flipped, but had to crank the wheel a second later when she came up on a blind hairpin turn.

Lucy drove deep into the San Gabriels, along unmarked one-lane roads. There were no guardrails this far off the highway, not even on the narrow bridge across a rocky chasm whose bottom she couldn’t see. This was the first time since she left Boston that she was really scared. There was nowhere to turn around on the tiny road. No rest stops and no phones. Nothing to do but keep driving. At dawn, she saw it.

At first, Lucy thought the weird drop off ahead was a trick of the light. Then she heard the roar of falling water. A few other cars were parked along a wide shoulder at the base of the mountains. Lucy left the truck and walked to where the water was falling. Some of the other travelers nodded to her as she past. Lucy went to the very edge and sat down. Before her, a great river poured itself over the rocky edge of the world.

Mist from the falling water settled on her hair and clothes. Overhead it was blue skies and wheeling gulls. Below was the world’s jagged edge and water falling into black space and stars. It reminded her of the champagne fountain they'd rented for her cousin's wedding. It sucked champagne up from the bottom and squirted it out the top where it fell back down and got sucked up again. She wondered if that was how this worked.

Lucy dangled her feet over the world’s edge and lit up one of the cigarettes she’d found in the glove compartment of the truck. She leaned back and looked up at the gulls.
“Guess I’ve come about as far as I can this way.”

People came and went behind her. Some sat at the edge like her. Others came, stood for a few minutes and left. No one said anything. Lucy turned and glanced at the road leading back to the highway. She knew she’d have to take it sometime, when she figured out where she should go from here. But not right now. For now she could sit and watch the rushing water. She flicked her cigarette butt out over the mist and watched it tumble down into space until it was just one more white dot in the endless field of stars.

Not All Rip-Offs Are Equal

2010-05-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

This very strange Die Antwoord remix features a photo I shot with model Nicotine a couple of years ago. Fortunately, we both like the tune. This happens to online images all the time. People are so used to seeing them online that they steal them for posters, flyers, even album covers and books without thinking about it. At this point I don’t get upset about it. I just hope that I get a photo credit and that whatever it’s advertising doesn’t suck.

Of course, this happens to writers, too. I know that I’ve been bootlegged in Japan, Russian, Poland and Romania. And probably in places I don’t know about yet. Fuck it. At least text bootleggers give you credit for the story or book. It’s cheap advertising.

Here’s the aforementioned video:

Die Antwoord remixvideo

My Most Goth Moment Was Gother Than Yours And In Broad Daylight

2010-05-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

It was just after dawn on the main street of a medium-size Texas city. I was trying to find the restaurant where I was meeting a friend for breakfast. I squinted, slightly hungover, at dark stores and shuttered bars looking for the address. Up the street a large raven was walking toward me. It had a cigarette in its mouth. When the bird was a couple of feet from me it set the cigarette on the pavement and said, "Hi. How you doing?" Then it picked up the butt and walked past me down the street.

I know in my heart of hearts that the bird must have belonged to a bartender who taught it tricks to bring in the part-time drinkers (you don't need tricks for the regulars), but seeing something like that sober and in broad daylight can make the rest of your day a little ephemeral.

Why I Don’t Say “Science Fiction” Or “Fantasy” To Regular People

2010-05-02T02:11:00.001-07:00

Talking about my work used to be easy. When people asked what I did for a living and I said “I’m a writer” I could truthfully say that “I write about art and technology for non-technical people.” Later I told people I wrote ad copy, which was also true. Now I make most of my living through books, mostly fantasy novels. These days when people ask what I write I usually tell them “horror” or “crime stories with a supernatural twist.” I don’t want to try and explain urban fantasy to people who don’t read it.

The moment you tell regular people that you write fantasy or science fiction they look at you like you just said you’d had a lobotomy and that your favorite color is “fish.” This condescending attitude strikes me as strange. “Avatar,” the most successful movie of all time, while dumb science fiction, is pretty damned science fictiony. If you ask many people their favorite movie you’re going to hear “Star Wars” or “Lord Of The Rings.” Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings are also two of the most popular book series in history. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book was just awarded the Newberry medal. But something funny happens when you say that you write these kinds of books. People’s eyes glaze over. You’re suddenly one of those funny guys they tell jokes about, socially retarded weirdos who play dungeons and dragons all day and live in their mom’s basement.

On the other hand, horror is a respectable genre. Stephen King and Peter Straub write horror and they’re on the bestseller list. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is taught in school, so horror must be all right. Mysteries and crime stories are also respectable, but I don’t think there ever really was a Dr. Moriarty or that Thomas Harris was an FBI agent who palled around with a brilliant psychiatrist who was also an unrepentant cannibal.

There is a funny disconnect in non-genre readers brains. They love imaginative stories and books, but they’re a little ashamed of it. Imagination is something for children or middle-aged housewives who hide their romance novels under their knitting. I have a feeling that this is a permanent fixture in our culture so when people ask me what kind of books I write I say “horror” or “crime stories with a supernatural twist.” It’s a white lie because my books do have all those elements, but it’s still a lie. When I talk about my work with civilians I subscribe to the old saying, “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and makes you look stupid.”

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

2010-04-29T04:33:00.000-07:00

(Every writer should know and think about these rules. I don't agree with them 100%, but I'm probably in the 95% percent camp. It couldn't hurt readers to think about these rules, too. I especially agree with rule 4, "Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue." This is an annoying habit in genre fiction, a holdover from pulp writing. I propose an adverb jihad.)

ELMORE'S RULES
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Word Mashups, Cut-ups and Plagiarism

2010-04-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

The young German writer, Helene Hegemann, made the news recently because of her popular and largely plagiarized novel, "Axolotl Roadkill." Hegemann admits to using other writers’ words, but argues that by putting “all the material into a completely different and unique context” that the book is a legitimate work of art. In a way, she’s arguing that her technique is similar to what musicians do with remixes and mashups of other musician’s songs.

The arguments surrounding Hegemann’s novel aren’t new. One of the great mashup writers (right up there with Burroughs in my opinion) was my friend, Kathy Acker.

Kathy once told me that her early writing began with rewriting the stories of Victorian murderesses, but telling their stories the first person. By turning dark Victoriana into modern “autobiography,” complete with the art and personal politics of our time, she charged the stories with a new power, taking them out of the safe realm of history and putting the killers and their miserable lives in the seat right next to readers in their college dorms, hipster cafes and bars. She also mixed sections of real autobiography with her literary cut-ups, further blurring the line between pure art technique and genuine confessional.

William Burroughs is probably the most famous writer to mashup other writers’ texts by incorporating their words into his novels using what he called “cut-ups.” I won’t describe the technique, but let Burroughs tell you himself in a scene from a British documentary about his life. You can find the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NU3dIdqIBw

Two of my favorite Acker books are Great Expectations and Blood And Guts In High School. In the books she mixes autobiography and sexual politics with texts by and rewrites of Dickens, Melville and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

You might also like her science fiction novel, Empire of the Senseless. Even the title is Kathy’s brand of twisted “plagiarism,” a play on the title of the book Empire Of The Senses by Octave Mirbeau, best known for his novel, The Torture Garden. Mirbeau’s political satire and mix of violence, beauty and sexuality sets the tone for Empire of the Senseless, which take place in an ultra-violent post-apocalyptic Paris. Empire of the Senseless is part a twisted take on Huckleberry Finn and part Neuromancer. Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel is the source of many of the ideas and attitudes for Empire of the Senseless. One of the novel’s two major voices is Abhor, a heavily modified woman, and the same mix of tech and female biology as Neuromancer’s Molly.

Kathy Acker’s work (and even Neuromancer, with its remixes of action movies, music, pulp literature and high art) is proof of the Ecclesiastes quote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” All the stories have already been told. All the words you’ll use have been used before. The value in the words Acker appropriated lies in what she did with them. Of course, not all literary mashups are equal, but neither are all novels. If you read science fiction and/or fantasy you might want to read the books and see a very different take on the material. If you want to be a writer in the twenty-first century, you need to read Kathy Acker. Even if you hate her work and reject her methods, you still need to read her. However much you like or dislike her novels, she will make you think differently about how books and words work.

Remembering to Forget

2010-04-14T14:05:00.001-07:00

I found out that an old friend, someone I went to high school with in Houston, won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism last week. I haven’t thought about the guy in years. Hearing about him brought back a lot of memories of school and the years I lived in Texas, a place that exists for me mostly as snapshots, old Polaroids scattered across a bar room floor. In fact, a lot of my Texas memories are about bars. And the winding road through Memorial Park. Downtown late at night. Back then, the streets were so deserted they could have filmed the outdoor scenes from I am Legend there and no one would have noticed. The few longer and moving memories, the ones more like old home movies than still photos, are mostly of simple things. A long bike ride through the backcountry on a scorching summer afternoon with friends. We poured the last of the water from our canteens onto our shirts so the water would cool us as we rode. I remember walking through a frozen forest of spindly gray trees at dawn with my friend Andy and his father. My father was long dead so his dad would occasionally invite me along on father and son trips. That morning we were deer hunting or as I thought of it, “Wandering lost and freezing in the woods until I wanted to put the rifle in my mouth and blow some sunshine out the back of my head.”

For some reason, most of my memories of New York are in winter. I was born in Brooklyn and when I think about the place it’s always covered in white and usually in the early morning before most of the neighborhood is awake and the snow is an unbroken undulating slice of Antarctica dropped down on Sixth Avenue. One year a blizzard hit and the snow obliterated the cars and the first floors of all the brownstones in the neighborhood. You couldn’t leave your house unless you had access to the outside steps from the second floor. I remember a summer when the street was choked with floating bottles, paper and broken pieces of lumber as they were swept into the storm drains when freak monsoon rains hit. I seem to remember New York only in terms of mini-catastrophes that I could see from my bedroom window.

Texas was always a slightly alien place to me so when I think of it, it’s more like remembering Nepal or Thailand. Memories of New York feel like home, but they’re much older and I was much younger and I’m certain they have much less to do with who I am as an adult than my years in Texas.

Sometimes I wish that I could sort and categorize my memories for easy access with a chip implant on the back of my skull. A hardwired Excel spreadsheet that would allow me easy access to the exact the memory I wanted when I wanted it. Of course, having easy instant access to all of memories is probably the best way strip them of all meaning. Maybe our memories are most important because of their capacity to surprise us. I remember standing on the street in front of my mother’s house in Houston when a certain breeze carrying a certain floral scent hit me and I swear that for a split second I had been transported back in Chinatown in New York when I was six. My mother and I were going to a friend’s house. The streets were long and crowded and a lot of the stores in the neighborhood were out of business and covered in graffiti. What I remember most vividly were the old phone booths. They were bright red and, this being Chinatown, shaped like pagodas with curled dragon tails extending from the corners of their roofs. Then the breeze shifted and I was back in Houston.

If, in the end, we’re really the sum total of our memories I think it might be better if we didn’t hang on to them too tightly, but let them wander in and out of our consciousness the way cats will wander up to you, brush against your leg for a minute and then walk away. Later, the cat will return, sit on your lap and stay there all afternoon. Then it will disappear for hours, asleep in one of those secret places that only cats know about. If you try to hold a cat too tightly it will squirm way, so it’s best to let them come and go on their own, knowing that they’ll always return. In the long run, it's probably better to have memory cats in our heads rather than memory chips. The chips are more convenient, but cats are more elusive and surprising and I think that the more we know and learn, the more important it is that we can surprise ourselves with memories that remind us of who we really are.

Critics aka Write Your Own Damn Book

2010-04-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

I have a crank theory that goes like this: If you’re going to be a book critic, you have to write and publish at least one book. I believe this for a simple reason: If you’re going to devote a hillock of your precious brain cells to giving thumbs up or down to other people’s work, you should have the balls to put yourself on the line.

It’s a special moment in a writer’s life the first time you read a carefully crafted review explaining how you, your book, all your previous and future books, your pets, your girlfriend and/or wife, your pickled punk collection, the shank you carved from grandma’s femur and your Jack Ruby novelty cheese grater are worthless shit and should be scraped off the planet with a white hot trowel. You forget good reviews in 10 minutes, but the rotten ones stick with you for years. Every critic should know the special joy of that feeling.

I admit I’m prejudiced. I’m a writer. It’s how I make my living. I’m on the writer’s side. And that doesn’t go just for writers I like. I’m on the side of writers whose work I hate. I’m on the side of writers I hate personally. I’m on the side of the most venial, money-grubbing bastard writers alive. I’m pretty much always on the writer’s side. Maybe not Hitler. He wrote one crappy book and then killed a lot of people. Fuck him.

These days I try to avoid reading most of my reviews, but when I stumble across a crap one I tend have the same response: Write your own damn book. And make it a good one. That's the best way to put any writer in his or her place.

The Wunderkammer Kiss Off

2010-04-06T16:18:00.001-07:00

I think I’m a hoarder, though I like to think of it as compulsive archiving. Back in the 90s, before the web was a one-stop strip mall for the planet’s collective memory (and Id) I wrote two editions of The Covert Culture Sourcebook. They were catalogs to underground and hard-to-find books, music, movies, zines, sex toys, weapons, tech gear, etc. When each book was done, my office would be jammed floor to ceiling with boxes of this stuff. I kept most of it for years. I felt like the curator of a kind of PT Barnum wing of the Smithsonian. Even after two books, I still held on to the most interesting material and kept dozens of boxes in storage. However, after moving house a couple of times it became too much to cart around. Ninety-nine percent of it had to go. What hurt the most were the old print zines and obscure music, back in the days of what was known as Xerox Culture and Cassette Culture. All those old bands no one has ever heard of or will ever hear of. All the stories, art and batshit ravings of people so obsessed with sharing their worldview that they assembled the material, laid it out (sometimes with ancient Mac paste-up software and sometimes scotch taping post-it size scraps of paper to larger sheets) and hauled it down to Kinkos to run off a few dozen or few hundred copies.

Of course, there’s plenty of indy and underground culture spread out across the web, and there’s a thousand times the volume of material compared to the bearskin and obsidian knives world of the 80s and early 90s. But there was something sad and beautiful in all those print zines and plastic cassette. Someone had to run them off, pack them in Jiffy bags and haul them to the post office, pounds of them at a time. I’m still sorry that I let that stuff go. I’ll always feel like I lost a little piece of our pre-digital crazy ass collective unconscious.

Goddam Novel Bullshit

2010-04-04T23:24:00.000-07:00

I have Sandman Slim 3 worked out in my head and basically ready to go, but I can’t start writing yet. I don’t have a title or an opening paragraph. I don’t know why, but I can’t start writing a book without a title, even if I know I’ll change it at the end. And I can’t get past the title until I find the first paragraph. The voice and rhythm of those first hundred or so words sets the tone for the next hundred thousand. I’m stuck and will be able to find me beating my head against the wall for the next couple of days.

I might go with Aloha From Hell for a temp title. It’s an old Cramps song and has the right feel for what I want to do. Now all I need is an opening. I was thinking of “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” but I don’t know who Buck Mulligan is and what the hell is a “stairhead”? Fingers crossed that “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch” isn’t taken.

Vanishing Point

2010-04-02T06:19:00.001-07:00

I suffer from chronic insomnia, which seems pretty common for writers and other manic-depressives. It’s not the worst ailment imaginable. My arms and hands work. My eyes work most of the time, though when the insomnia kicks into Perfect Storm mode, it can be hard to focus on individual words on the screen. The upside is that I get a lot of work done at night, when there are few distractions. The downside is that I’m out of sync with the world. This sometimes makes everyday human chores like grocery shopping or getting to the PO box to pick up packages more of an adventure than they should be.

I’ve always been a night person. As far back as I can remember, the strange solitude of night has always been where I’m most comfortable. In the dark, the edges of objects soften and merge into each other. Everything is possible. Night is one long all you can eat liminal buffet. Even dawn and the early morning are pleasant when they’re the end of your day instead of the beginning. I remember bright and transparent dawns driving along I-10 through New Mexico and Texas. Reverse Wizard of Oz moments, the world moving from back and white to brilliant colors.

In the desert, you can’t help but wonder about the few other cars you pass at those odd hours. Why have those people been driving all night through the heart of fuck-all? It feels like you’re all going somewhere and you’re all lost at the same time. Normal people don’t travel like this. They stay in motels, set alarms clocks and get wake-up calls. They don’t drive twelve, fifteen hours straight through two or three states. I’ve been known to drive thirty hours straight, popping pills and mainlining coffee. I don’t recommend this. When you finally get where you’re going, you’re a little crazy and completely disconnected from your body, what I call the Roadtrip Lobotomy. You walk funny and can’t feel theg round beneath your feet. Your back and eyes ache. You can understand the radio, but when people try to talk to you their words come out like a Burroughs cut-up. It’s not the worst feeling if your destination is somewhere dark and quiet, where you can lie down and remember how to be a person again.

Dawn driving isn’t as interesting these days. In San Francisco, half the goddam county is up before dawn and racing off to their terribly important jobs. The road to Silicon Valley is full of giants. The billionaire geniuses that built the 21st century. You can’t help but feel the weight of their importance, wealth and self-assurance when all you want is to feel the road, listen to the hum of your tires and see not nothing, just less. I need to get back to the desert. Not to camp, but to drive fast and straight and to not stop. I missed going to Trinity Site this month. I’ll try to get there in the Fall. Driving all night to wander across a blasted landscape of green-black radioactive glass sounds like the perfect vacation to me.

Raymond Chandler Talks about Grammar

2010-03-30T05:09:00.000-07:00

Every writer who writes in first person and/or in fractured English (ahem) has felt Chandler's frustration, but none have expressed it as perfectly as he did in a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

"By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have."

Formspringed

2010-03-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the Sandman Slim paperback on April 27th, I've opened a Formspring account. Ask me anything.

Question me here

Clandestine Angel

2010-03-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Fierce, a Bay Area model, and I did a guerilla photoshoot at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a few years ago. I had no idea it was Easter weekend (You tend to lose track of holidays when you're a freelancer.). The church and the grounds were packed, but no one bothered us. Happy Zombie Jesus day or Eostur-monath, if you happen to be an Ostrogoth.

What do you know and when do you know it?

2010-03-28T02:02:00.001-07:00

When I finish a 1st draft, it's always just as much
of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same
mistakes every time.--MICHAEL CHABON

People always ask me about how much of my books I know in advance and do I outline them? The answer is yes, but only as much as I need to.

No matter how many books I write or how excited I am to start a book, I'm always a little insecure at the beginning of a new one. I don’t have any faith in a book until I’ve finished 50 pages and the book still doesn’t breathe until I have 100. Don’t get the idea that I’m winging the first bit. I’m not. It’s that a book is a lot like an oil painting. First there’s a sketch and then a layer of paint goes on. And another and another. At a certain point, the canvas looks like it smeared and scratched with 50 pounds multicolored baboon shit. But if you push past the shit storm, a picture starts to emerge. A few more layers and you have a painting. It might not be a great or even a good painting, but it’s there and now that it exists you can refine it, tweak it or scrape down the layers and build the thing back up again knowing what you did wrong. Every writer I know hits a point in a novel (sometimes even in a long story) where it looks and feels like a complete disaster. The difference between a real writer and a bullshit artist is that the real writer keeps going, keep hacking at it, kicking, cursing and beating it with an axe handle until the wall of the story cracks open and he or she can get inside.

I go through this with books even when they have long nicely-formatted outlines. The map isn’t the territory and damned outline isn’t the damned book, which is the problem. And even if I have a detailed outline, it’s not going to have a lot of the details that I like writing and readers enjoy reading.

None of my outlines really describe the book I’m going to write. This is deliberate. I need constraints when I write, but not so many that I can’t let the details run a little wild. As long as I know the basic shape of the story, the sort of territory it has to travel and kind of, sort of know where it’s going to end, I can do what the hell I want in the spaces between the story beats I know I need to hit. It’s a like a long Charlie Parker improv in the middle of a famous old song, say, I Got Rhythm. Everyone in the band knows the tune, the chord progression and the resolution, so as long as Parker stays pretty close to those boundaries, he can play, scream, have a nervous breakdown, OD or give birth to a pterodactyl as long as he does it in the key of E.

My books are a lot like that. They have plot and plenty of story, but there’s a lot of improv and discovery along the way, which means they also tend to have a kind of garage band messiness, but I’ve always been a fan of the raw and the clumsy. It’s like what Iggy Pop said about The Stooges’ music, “It’s dumb, but it’s smart dumb.”

Really, I’d rather not stumble bum my way through books, but it seems to be my modus operandi. The most interesting stuff happens when I crack my head on a wall that shouldn’t be there or fall off a staircase that no one ever finished. That’s when I discover the weird connections between characters, the plot and themes that I didn’t even know I was playing with, all the high weirdness of the story that my unconscious has been hiding from me until that moment. These discoveries aren’t always convenient. Sometimes they mean that I have to go back to the beginning and change an incident, move a plot point back 50 pages or reshape the end of the book. But for me, those instant crack-to-the-head revelations are always the most important parts of the writing process. No matter how much I plot and plan a book, I can still be dead wrong about how to make it work. On the other hand, my head crack revelations are almost always right. I had one just the other day.

I’m about to start writing Sandman Slim 3, aka The Book That Refuses To Be Titled, and while making notes about a manhunt that occurs early in book three, I realized that the search went back to ideas in book one that seemed like throwaways at the time. Now, they came back to me with a meaning I didn’t realize when I first wrote them. It’s a good example of your unconscious working with you. A friendly and well-trained unconscious can present you with clever ideas that you didn’t even know you had. Ideas probably a lot cleverer than the conscious part of your brain. And you better write them down fast. When you unconscious starts talking it usually doesn’t last long, so you better grab as much of it as you can while you can. William Burroughs talked about this feeling as the book opening up in front of him, as if it had already been written in some meta-brain and that his job was to transcribe it as quickly and accurately as possible. I suppose writers are lucky that not everyone gets to peek at the big meta-book hidden under the counter or we’d all be back dusting bookstore shelves, driving forklifts or tarring roofs (I’ve done those last two. Driving forklifts can be fun, but trust me, you never want to tar roofs. Be a stripper, set yourself up as a fake psychic or stick up liquor stores if you have to, but never tar roofs.).

For me writing is a weird combination of disciplined forethought and playing Smoke On The Water on an untuned guitar with the original WalMart strings and pickups that buzz like short-circuiting vacuum cleaners. I’m not an artist. James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor were artists. I do card tricks. Really long card tricks with violence, magic and a lot of bad words. It beats tarring roofs any day.

Why Write?

2010-03-25T00:09:00.000-07:00

Because you want to make people feel like this.

"And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlessly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness."
-- Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

My stories (and a couple of books) free online

2010-03-24T19:38:00.001-07:00

A lot of my stories and some of my novels are available online for free. Here are some links.

Browse Inside Sandman Slim
A long excerpt from my current novel Eos. Book Two, Kill The Dead, will be out in October.
Sandman Slim excerpt

Feedbooks.com
Some of my novels and stories in Stanza format.
Stanza Format Books & Stories

InfiniteMatrix
Fifty flash fictions on this very cool online magazine
Scroll down to my name

Flurb
My stories in Rudy Rucker’s online fiction zine.
The Arcades of Allah
Singing The Dead to Sleep
Trembling Blue Stars

Metrophage
The wntire novel in plain text format
Plain text Metrophage

Butcher Bird
The full text of Butcher Bird and other excellent NightShade books.
NightShade Downloads

What Scares Me

2010-03-24T02:17:00.001-07:00

I’ve read the most hardcore horror and see the most appallingly violent movies and didn’t flinch. I’ve read medical books about foul diseases and every kind of wound, from gunshots to bed sores. I’ve seen an autopsy and ordered cow eyes from Carolina Biological (for a photo shoot, not snacks). A tiger once pissed on me and I went into that old haunted house down the street alone (You know the one. Every neighborhood has one.). Do you know what scares me? The Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve never finished the book and couldn’t watch the movie. Group think. Religious fruitbats. A population of sheep dying to be led by anyone ballsy or ruthless enough to slip on the bridle and ride them like a five-dollar mule. The Handmaid’s Tale. Never read it. Never will. There. Now you know.

Oh, and spiders, most cooked vegetables and Nancy Grace.

Photography and the Spoon from Hell

2010-03-20T21:13:00.001-07:00

When I’m writing books I take pictures. When I’m between books I take a LOT of pictures. I like photography and have played with it on and since I could point a camera. When I was ten, I used to set up weird still lifes from toys and junk around the house—Buddhas, plastic skulls, palm trees, barbed wire, broken glass, etc.—and shoot them with my cheap piece of shit Kodak Instamatic. When I became more serious about taking pictures I bought my first digital Nikon. Later, after trying some friends’ cameras, I ditched Nikons and started shooting with different Canon models. A year or so ago, I switched back to Nikons because they’re better for low light photography.

I use digital and film cameras, depending on the subject and the feel I want. Mostly I shoot deserted spaces and people, often naked people. It’s fun and doesn’t hurt my fingers as much as smoking crack. I’ve had some gallery shows. I’ve shot for Suicide Girls, Blue Blood and a pile of long-dead erotica (okay, porn) sites. I’ve also written about Photoshop manipulation and infrared photography for Make magazine. Six of my smuttier photos will be featured in the Mammoth Book of New Erotic Photography coming out in September. I’ve even done headshots for other writers and often let them keep their clothes on. I’m not the most versatile photographer on the planet, but I’m pretty good at what I do.

Why do I like taking pictures? It’s simple. Images are the cure for words. Words are the cure for images.

I like writing and I like shooting, but at a certain point each of those things drives me out of my fucking mind and makes me want to stab, stab, stab you with the sharpened soup spoon I won from John Wayne Gacy in a blood-soaked Ranch dressing wrestling match in the crawl space under his house. That’s right. I was one of the few who got away and I have the quicklime burns to prove it. But that’s another story for another day. What I really wanted to say was that taking pictures and writing books are a kind of yin and yang thing for me, a way to keep myself balanced in this topsy turvy world. And you want me to be balanced. These pills aren’t going to last forever and when they wear off you don’t want me on your roof, hacking through the shingles and insulation with dead John’s chicken noodle shovel. This spoon is sharp enough to crack through a human skull. I’m not saying I’ve tried it, but I am saying that when UPS brings me a package, they goddam well wait for me until I get home. No notes on my door saying they tried to deliver and will try again tomorrow. No. When I get a package it’s hand delivered by a living, breathing, trembling human being in soiled pants, who leaves a urine-stained trail from the truck to my door and back again. Sure, it’s a messy way to get packages, but the smell of fear keeps the neighborhood dogs away. I don’t photograph dogs, so what good are they other than to feed to the bad UPS drivers tied up in the Arkham Asylum Naked Time Out pit in my basement until they learn their lesson?

So, to sum up, I like taking pictures because they balance out the words in my life. Someday I hope to win a Pulitzer Prize for my writing or my photos. The voices in my head tell me I will. So does the demon soup spoon and you don’t want to disappoint the spoon.

Six Word Stories

2010-03-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

I read Wired’s “six word SF story” article tonight, went nuts and decided to try some of my own.

Drunk assistant. Time machine. Oops! Dinosaurs.

Machines awaken. Take over. Same bullshit.

“Just wine,” said the unconvincing vampire.

Aliens bury dinosaur bones. Giggle. Leave.

Clones revolt. Easily found. No nipples.

Lunar ice chills first settlers’ beers.

Rover disappears. Suddenly Martians have hotrods.

We become the devices we love.

My uploaded baby gives phosphor kisses.

Sun fails. Earth freezes. Penguins win.

Nano machines dismantle civilization for laughs.

Deep inside fractals, things watch us.

Book Krieg!

2010-03-18T23:38:00.000-07:00

The deadly BSCreview book tournament has started. Books go up against other books mono e mono, Ali vs Fraiser-style. The first book I'm up against is Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker. I'm sure Sanderson is a nice guy and Warbreaker is a fine book, but they must both be crushed like a taco salad left on a fat guy's Barcalounger. Please log on and vote for Sandman Slim early and often or I'll haunt your children's (or alternately, your pets') dreams.

The BSCreview link:
http://bit.ly/bmtLeB

Lying For A Living

2010-03-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

Writing fantasy is still strange thing for me

Even though my last three books have been pure fantasy, it’s still a strange form for me. I grew up reading science fiction and thought that was all I was ever going to write. But I hit a wall with SF and felt like I needed to make a massive change. I could never quite break out of the glum school of SF, which felt fine for cyberpunk but it was also a trap. I didn’t want to keep writing the same book over and over and it felt like I might end up doing that if I continued to write SF. When you suddenly reach the end of a road you thought would go on forever, sometimes there’s nothing left to do but put a gun to your head, pull the trigger and see what’s on the other side.

For me it was fantasy. I suppose I could’ve moved to mysteries or thrillers, but I couldn’t walk away from the more absurd parts of my imagination. In my world there always monsters in the shadows and killers under the bed. Things watch us that we can only glimpse outof the corners of our eyes.

I didn’t know much about urban fantasy when I start writing it, so I came to it pretty innocently Imagine my surprise when I got there and discovered that it was pretty crowded terrain. This wasn’t a bad thing. It’s exactly how it was for me with cyberpunk. By the time I walked into the bar, it was smoky as hell, the jukebox was shaking the windows and the crowd was spilling out the back door and dealing vasopressin in the alley.

Walking into what’s already a well-formed literary scene can be intimidating walking, but it can also give you courage. If enough interesting people got there ahead of you it means you were on the right track the whole time. After that, the trick is finding your own voice and figuring out what you have anything to contribute to that book scene. I'm still working on that one, but Sandman Slim and, to a lesser extent, Butcher Bird seem to have found a following.

I like writing fantasy on another level, too. It’s a big fuck you to everyone who lied to us and taught us that having an imagination was just for kids. That being too imaginative as an adult was irresponsible, dangerous and, above all (for guys) unmanly. This is, of course, the stupidest idea since phlogiston. Our brains aren’t what separates us from animals. There are a lot of big-brained mammals wandering the planet. What separates us from the animals is that we can make shit up. I lie for a living and I’m proud of it and any stiff upper lip grownup who can’t appreciate that can pucker up and kiss my ass. And Stephen King’s. In George Lucas’. And Spielberg’s. And JK Rowling’s. And Tolkien’s. And Gaiman’s. And on and on. Every one of these writers and filmmakers move an assload product and it ain’t just to kids. You see, regular people haven’t lost their imaginations, they’re just afraid to use the word. Cool. I can live with that. Forget the urban fantasy thing. Call me Dark Noir or Mystery Plus. Hell, call me the Partridge Family goes Texas Chainsaw Massacre for all I care. All that's important is that everybody keeps cranking out the strange stuff. All that's important is to keep making shit up.

A Little About Sandman Slim

2010-03-17T02:55:00.001-07:00

A book can come from anything. Sandman Slim came from a sentence in an old notebook, "A hitman from Hell." That's it. He wasn't named Stark back then and he wasn't alive. He was just another damned soul, but one who found a way out of the Abyss. When that felt like something we'd seen too many times before, I decided to torture Stark by sending him to Hell alive, keeping him alive and sending him home alive, but ratfuck crazy. Everything else came out of that basic premise. Before writing the book, I ended up with a fat spiral bound book and piles of Post Its describing Stark's world and the people in it. It's what TV and movie people call a Bible. I’ll post a picture of the notebook when I get a chance.

I knew the opening of Sandman Slim long before I wrote it. The first time I tried to write it, it didn’t work. The words, Stark and the story just lay there on the page like dead fish in a meat market window. Those first few experimental openings were all third person and past tense. Even though I generally don't trust first person, I tried it and the story started to work. But it was still limp and boneless. Purely out of frustration, I rewrote the opening in present tense. Suddenly, the gears started spinning and everything worked. What was missing from those first tries was Stark's voice. I realized that the books weren't novels so much as shaggy dog stories, all narrated in real time by Stark himself.

In the movie version of this story, we'd cut to me pounding out the novel in record time with Eye of the Tiger blasting in the background. In fact, the book was hard to write and the second Sandman Slim book, Kill The Dead, was even harder. Each book was a new experiment and that made each one difficult in a whole new way. Fortunately, I have a terrific editor, Diana Gill, who made great suggestions and kept me sane through both books, and I expect that she'll have to do the same when I start the third book soon.

One thing that's made the books difficult but, I hope, interesting, is that each one is a different form. Sandman Slim is deliberately an old school American crime novel, the kind that you could see in paperbacks from the Fifties through the Seventies. I always think of Sandman Slim as my Jim Thompson/Richard Stark novel (Yes, Stark is named after Donald Westlake's most famous pen name.). Sandman Slim isn't a mystery, no matter how many times people compare it to Raymond Chandler. How do I know? Because Kill The Dead is a mystery novel. There's murder, clues and a search for a killer. The whole hot buffet lunch of old detective novels, but with angels, evisceration, the devil, porn and zombies. Basically, everything that makes LA fun.

The third Sandman Slim book, currently titled I Have No Goddam Idea What To Call This One, will be more of a traditional fantasy quest. It will take place in this world and at least one other. I don't want to say much about it because Kill The Dead isn’t even out and because the story needs to get water boarded a couple of more times before it cooperates. That's right, the Jack Bauer school of editing. If your story refuses to keep moving, you just attach a car battery to its jewel pouch and order some KFC. By the time your extra crispy wings arrive, the story will be crying and puking Pulitzer Prizes all over your office floor. Trust me. That's how JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books and I heard that they've done pretty well.

AN IMPROVISED AND HIGHLY RANDOM INTRODUCTION

2010-03-15T23:21:00.000-07:00

I’m a writer. I’m a photographer. I want to be better at both.

I wear glasses. I’m 5’ 11” and gained weight while writing my last two books. I’m planning on doing something about that.

I was born in New York. I still think that it’s the greatest city in the world. I’ve also lived in Houston, LA, Oakland and San Francisco.

I don’t own any regular shoes, just sneakers and boots. Sometimes I forget that I have all these tattoos and am startled when I see my reflection while stepping out of the shower.

My neck and left hand are twitchy from an old motorcycle accident. My left knee is screwed up from kenpo.

My knuckles are tattooed but it’s with white ink, so you’ll never notice.

Some of my blood is Arab. Some is Persian. Most of it is bootlegging white trash.

I’ve seen rats carpeting the streets of Kathmandu, a sloth shitting from a branch over my head in Costa Rica and a goat walking a tightrope in a little town south of Bangkok. A guy stuck a cobra in my face in Marrakech. I gave him $5 to take it away. Money well spent.

I believe in god and the devil and I don’t believe in anything.

I hope I get to fly in space before I die, but I doubt I will.

I like cats better than dogs. I don’t understand why people have spiders or snakes as pets. I think it might be like living with an alien, which could be interesting but is probably tedious.

I think that guys are basically idiots, so it's our job to at least try to amuse women.

I think that complexity/chaos theory is prettier than any poem.

I’d like to write more comics. I’d like to write an original movie and have the finished product not suck.

I once punched a horse that was trying to buck off my then girlfriend and her niece. The horse didn’t go down like the one in Blazing Saddles, but it didn’t try to buck off anyone else that day.

Yes, I’ve seen an autopsy.

I hate spiders, small spaces and asparagus.

I’ve learned that if someone asks if you want to ride in the ox cart to town, tell them no. You can walk faster than any damn ox cart.

I miss smoking.

I like guns. I like shooting them and owning them. I like my friends’ guns and am happy they have them. But I don’t want you to have guns because you might be an asshole. I’m a hypocrite.

I'm friends with a lot of my exes and I like it that way.

My brain was broken at a young age by seeing Duchamp and Dali paintings and hearing Ussachevsky’s electronic music. My mother and I didn’t always get along, but I thank her for exposing me to those things.

I think it should be legal to punch anyone wearing a watch that costs more than a used car.

I used to think that good music was the greatest thing in the world, but now I think it’s movies.

I believe that anesthetics and V8 engines are humanity’s greatest inventions.

Frankenstein is very scary. Dracula is pretty scary. The Wolf Man is a whiny little bitch who can kiss my ass.

I believe in the power of imagination. I’d rather tell a good story than the absolute truth. Save the truth for depositions.

Even if you don’t believe everything I’ve told you here, trust me, I did punch the horse.