Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "So Long, the Dark"

So Long, the Dark

           Dreams can sometimes provide excellent fodder for stories, as the one that led me to writing this tale will attest. In my original dream, I found myself escaping imprisonment from an old, abandoned church, only to be met with a horrid, albino cat/vampire monstrosity right as I thought I had just gotten away. The story came pretty naturally after that, and also became an excellent vehicle to tackle bloodsuckers in an interesting way without actually using the V-word.

            Most of my life I felt like I’ve been awaiting some great and anxiety-ridden event or another, so I poured all of that into the character of Mason and his situation--so much so that I find the story oddly personal in ways that still surprise me each time I revisit it. My original dream had me unable to escape from the vampire cat-man, and so too was the story to originally to end that way. Personal reasons led me to eventually decide to change that into something that maybe wasn’t a happy ending, but certainly allowed for more possibilities than the singular and final fate of being unable to escape a not-ideal situation.

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Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "A Haunting of Hill Creek"

A Haunting of Hill Creek

           You can trace the roots of this story all the way back to me viewing the In Search Of… episode on the Amityville incident one summer morning at the ripe age of seven, which was the subject of just about all my nightmares thereafter. I combined aspects of all those nightmares with little tidbits from other ghost stories that especially freaked me out, and put them all into this one story in the hopes of freaking the reader out just as much.

            The framing story of the old man and the interviewer was added in later drafts, in attempt to give the story more character and try to tie all that rambling ghost nonsense into a nice, thematic bow. If you also see the old man telling the tale as Vincent Price in From a Whisper to a Scream, then I want to be your best friend.

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Mares in the NIght Author's Notes: "The Liar, the Thief and the Bastard"

The Liar, the Thief and the Bastard

            Mordecai Jefferson is a bounty hunter character of mine who has shown up a few different times now, but was originally introduced in a western story called “A Noose of Barbed Wire.” I don’t know what it is about westerns, but I never have any problems putting them down on the page. For whatever reason, the genre comes naturally to me, and the bounty killer Mordecai is alarmingly easy to write. This story itself took only a handful of days, and mostly accomplished what I set out to do with it; namely, a tense, sort of “bottle episode”-style mystery in which each character is hiding their own secrets, also in turn playing off of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with my own little mythology of archetypes to have fun with. I’ll admit that having Mordecai give a large info-dump at the end is not exactly the height of drama, but I do like the idea of him talking the others into shooting themselves because he’s out of ammunition. The most dangerous weapons Mordecai has are his own words.

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Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "The Sweetest Meat"

The Sweetest Meat

             Sometimes a story can come out of nowhere and surprise its writer just as much as the eventual reader, as this pitch-black tale will attest. I don’t know what dark pit this one sprung out of, but I was equally delighted and horrified with how disturbing it wound up being. I suppose its origins can be traced back to my reading of "The Cask of Amontillado," that famous Poe story about a man being entombed while still alive. But to me, the more interesting story comes after Montressor has walled up his victim and Fortunato must spend the rest of his very short life chained to a wall in a tiny little room. Throw another victim into the mix, and things are bound to get downright anthropophagical in no time. The truth is there is little that frightens me more than being locked up with another human being in a small room with no light, water or food. Hopefully this story will paint a thorough picture as to why.

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Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "Scarecrows"

Scarecrows

            If you ask me, scarecrows have been wildly under-loved as monsters. There is something inherently creepy about a straw-man who stands motionless in an empty field day-in and day-out, and yet the best the horror world has come up with amounts to a handful of cheapie, DTV movies that are hardly worthy of the scarecrow’s iconic stature. I’ve always had a fondness for those bag-headed straw-men, and have been coming up with scary stories about scarecrows come-to-life for nearly as long as I can remember, so it seemed only appropriate my first collection should have one such tale included.

             But the real inspiration behind this story originates from one night of my childhood, when I was sick with the flu. I remember lying on our living room couch, feeling miserable, when all of a sudden my mother (who I should take a moment here to point out is in fact the sweetest woman on the face of the planet) walked into the room carrying a knife, asking, “Are you ready for your medicine, Nathan?” In my fever-addled mind, I thought for sure that she was going to gut me then and there as I was lying helplessly on the couch. The moment passed just as soon as it had arrived, however, when I saw that she had the knife to cut some pills out of those little plastic trays they’re stored in. But those brief few seconds were some of the most terrifying moments of my young life, and went on to shape the direction of this particular story.

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Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "The Deep South"

The Deep South 
 
             When I was in college taking film and video production classes, we were frequently assigned little short films as projects, 5-10 minute stories that had to adhere to some basic theme, but were otherwise free to do whatever with. Pressed for time and money, I was very quickly trained to come up with small stories on the fly. High-concept pieces that took place all in one setting with no more than 2-3 characters, focusing on ideas that had a big impact, with little room for anything more elaborate than that. It was kind of wonderful.

            The idea of an escaped slave coming across the Devil during his flight through the woods was one such story that I never got around to filming, and so I decided to turn it into a prose story instead. It was one of those ideas that come along every once and a while and just refuse to let you go, when it occurred to me that the Devil himself is a southerner--the ultimate Southerner, really--and the rest of it flowed out of that.

            There’s something about the American South… an unquantifiable, undeniable creepiness that seems to hover over everything like a fog, making the place a haunted region in the truest sense of the word. A land forever scarred by the sins of the past.

            In other words, it is entirely plausible to stumble upon the Devil whilst roaming the southern woods on a quiet evening.

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Mares in the Night Now in Print

            It took a little longer than expected, but my short story collection Mares in the Night is now available in print. As wonderful as it is to be able to carry around an entire library tucked underneath your arm wherever you go, I will always prefer to read an actual book whenever I can, so having the option of an actual printed book of my first collection is a special treat.

            And while we're talking of special treats, I'll take the moment to announce that for the next thirteen days, I'll be releasing little "Author's Notes" for each of the stories contained within Mares of the Night. I love it when authors do that in their collections, getting to read what their influences were and what was going through their heads at the time, and I even toyed with putting them into my own, but ultimately decided against it. But I'm proud to present them here for your enjoyment, and to hopefully pique your curiosity as to what exactly you'll find within. Look below for my notes on the first story in the collection, and check back here all week to find more!

Zombie: A Love Story

            The original draft of this story featured a husband frantically trying to get back to his wife during a zombie apocalypse, only to realize at the very end that he himself had become one of the walking dead. Coming back to it a few years later and completely and utterly sick of everything "zombie" at that point, I found it thoroughly unremarkable, and proceeded to scrap everything save the title.

            The chief inspiration for the new draft came whilst watching the latest, colorless zombie film (and yes, I know I already said I was sick of them--what do you want from me? I’m a masochist). While the hapless hero ran away from the undead horde, it occurred to me how hilarious it would be if all the zombies suddenly got together in a chorus line and broke out in a little song-and-dance routine. The rest of the story formed itself rather easily around that simple idea, not the least because the act of falling in love seems to go rather well with flesh-ripping.

            Or maybe that’s just me.

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