Posts from — May 2009

(Male, 40′s) I had this nightmare earlier this week and I’ve been telling everyone about it. It’s sounds so funny but trust me I was simply terrified in the middle of it.

“…I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice….”

In the nightmare, I was a science teacher and this was my first day at work. I had the dim sense that I’d quit my current job and that I was finally doing something I really wanted to do. (And this sort of touches with reality. I’ve been giving a series of presentations at work recently. “Teaching” sort of, and I really enjoy it. I do wish I could do that full time.) So I’m a science teacher and this is my first day teaching… and I’m teaching in the exact same classroom where my Dad taught. He was a middle school science teacher. I loved his room when I was a kid. All those weird displays like a human skeleton, animals preserved in jars, oversized models of the human heart… So I was teaching in that very same room.

And just to make sure I did well on my first day, along had come my Mother who sat behind me off to the left. And my wife, who sat behind me off to the right. They periodically said vaguely encouraging things as I prepared for class.

The bell rang and students started to shuffle in. Up until this point I had felt relatively good in the dream, despite the presence of my watchers. I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice. I busied myself passing out handouts all the while desperately hoping that my voice would return before I had to speak.

And they say print media is dead! A new nine chapter novella by Koji Suzuki (author of Ring) has recently been published… on rolls of toilet paper. The novella is titled Drop and allegedly takes up about three feet of toilet paper in its entirety. What I found particularly interesting is that the AP story alleges that ghost in Japan traditionally hide in bathrooms.

Japanese Novella printed on Toilet Paper http://news.aol.com/article/scary-toilet-paper/496694#Comments

“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”

(Male, 50′s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.

We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”

“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”

The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.

“We knew not a soul and frankly, didn’t know what to expect from such a convention but the other attendees made us feel right at home”

James Frederick Leach (the Grim Gnome’s alter-ego) says: Mrs Gnome and I are just back from MoConIV in Indianapolis. It was a friendly horror writer’s convention held in a church basement, jointly sponsored by the Indiana Horror Writers and The Dwelling Place, a local church. We knew not a soul and frankly, didn’t know what to expect from such a convention but the other attendees made us feel right at home. “Google-goggle one of us. We accept you. We accept you. One of us!” I read some of my shorter pieces at the Friday night poetry reading and no one booed me off the stage. I also got a chance to sip absinthe… from a Spongebob dixie cup! I left with an armful of books and a lot of good memories.

I wrote a 550-word article about the convention that appears over at Read The Spirit today if you’re curious.

These are the sites of as many of the folks I met at MoCon as I can remember:

• Tom Piccirilli (http://www.tompiccirilli.com/)
Tom’s work has been nominated for several Stoker awards and an Edgar. My favorite line from him this weekend was “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Amen to that, brother. He inscribed my copy Welcome to Hell: A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer (Fairwood Press, 200) – his friendly but candid introduction to the writing life – with the immensely encouraging note “Your stories kick ass.” Another good book by him, this one fiction, is A Choir of Ill Children (Bantam, 2004)
Welcome to Hell : A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer
A Choir of Ill Children

• Linda Addison (http://www.cith.org/linda/)
Linda organized the poetry reading on Friday night and she most recently published Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (Space and Time, 2007) Her work has won the Stoker award.
Being Full of Light, Insubstantial

• Gerard Houarner (http://www.cith.org/gerard/)
In addition to being an accomplished fiction writer, Gerard also is the fiction editor for Space and Time Magazine (http://spaceandtimemagazine.com/wp/)

• Wrath James White (http://wordsofwrath.blogspot.com/)
Wrath is an unforgettable person from both his magnetic personality and formidable physical presence. Oh, and he’s quite a writer too. His most recent work Succulent Prey (Leisure, 2008) marks his mass market debut. Succulent Prey (Leisure Fiction)

• Maurice Broaddus (http://mauricebroaddus.com/)
Maurice put the “Mo” in MoCon. His most recent novella, The Devil’s Marionette (Shroud, 2009) debuted at the convention
Devil’s Marionette

• Steven Gilberts (http://stevengilberts.com/)
For a couple decades, Steven’s illustrations have graced the covers of various works of speculative fiction. I bought a very reasonably priced print of his that depicts a slightly open door with a mob of sharp toothed, swollen headed beasties swarming out. Seemed like a good metaphor for artistic inspiration cause when one of those little buggers bit into you, there’d be no getting it off until it’s finished.

Other folks I met include:
• Jason Sizemore (http://www.apexbookcompany.com/)

• Alethea Kontis (http://aletheakontis.com/)

• Kelli Dunlap (http://kellidunlap.com/)

• Bob Freeman (http://authorbobfreeman.wordpress.com/)

And wow, lots of other folks whose names are eluding me at this moment. Good times. Good people.

(Male, 30′s) Only part of the dream was a nightmare but it occurred at the end of a longer dream that was just disorienting, probably not exactly a nightmare, where I was wandering lost through a college campus trying to find something to eat. I knew there was an excellent restaurant around someplace but when I found it, it was closed for some holiday. I looked in the windows. There were huge steaming trays of food. They were prepared for a celebration and I wasn’t included or invited.

“… It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread…”

The nightmare stared when I stumbled into a hospital. It looked like any of the other college buildings – dark red brick with ornate stone insets. The hospital was dedicated to treat people suffering from some very dangerous illness. It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread. I was on the nursery ward. There were only a couple real nurses, people who knew what they were doing but there were several volunteers who more or less just kept getting in the way. I was a volunteer. The first task was to carry these infants in and place them on these high folding beds where the intake nurse could assess them. The intake nurse was very beautiful but very mean and she looked sort of like someone I work with. She yelled at everyone constantly.

None of these babies looked very good: they were waxy, barely breathing if they were breathing at all. They were all tightly wrapped in white blankets. One of the babies I carried in was black and I don’t mean African-American. The child was black like it was carved out of black wax. The intake nurse started yelling at me. Wasn’t it obvious that this child was dead? And worse, wasn’t it obvious that this child was a fruiting body for the infection. She started scrubbing down the area, though it’s strange to call it that because nothing she did involved water. The intake nurse wrapped the baby in the blankets. Then she used a flat thin piece of metal to scrape the top layer of wax off the floor. She yelled for assistance from another nurse. The other nurse was extremely ugly in the sense that she was physically deformed. She was bald and her face had huge round growths on the forehead, some the size of a softball. But she was patient with the intake nurse’s abuse and understanding with the volunteers who were all doing as best as we could, as best as we knew how. As soon as this second nurse was in the room, the intake nurse scooped up the dead infected baby and started to leave the room. But I seemed to be standing exactly in the place where she wanted to move. So she kept yelling at me and swearing over and over again, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!”

It was possible that we all had been infected and would die

James Frederick Leach (The Grim Gnome’s alter-ego) reports: I received word last night that Necrotic Tissue accepted my 100 word story “Pisser.” It will appear in the October 2009 issue. Necrotic Tissue also published my piece “A Public Relations Nightmare” in January of this year, which testifies to the good taste and sensible judgment of their editorial staff.

Check out Necrotic Tissue at: http://www.necrotictissue.com/ Their tagline is “Dark is not enough” which also happens to sum up my own personal perspective on the genre quite nicely. For me, even the most preposterously speculative piece has to tell me something about the human condition, even if there are no humans involved in the story at all. But I digress. Necrotic Tissue is becoming a print publication with the July issue after a six issues of publishing as a downloadable .pdf. What this means is that, for the moment at least, a year’s worth of reading is online and available. Check it out. And if you like what you read, consider supporting the magazine through a subscription.