On Silence

When I started posting on websites and forums relating to writing, on a whim I set my avatar on most sites to this image:

For the last couple of years I've been waiting for someone to ask me what it is, or why I've used it, but none of you bastards have. But sod you, I'm going to explain anyway.

Some of you may know it's a close up of a 1615 painting by Salvator Rosa called Self Portrait. I've made sporadic and lacklustre attempts throughout my life to learn more about art, and this is one of the few paintings that's ever really struck me in the same way books or poems or songs do. Typically for me, it's not just the visual side that made an impact, but the words. 'AVT TACE AVT LOQVERE MELIORA SILENTIO.'

'Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence'

To me, silence is a blank page.

I think we can all admit there's too much noise in the world. And we all contribute to it: the emails, the Tweets, these godamn blog posts. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, someone is talking, someone has written something down, usually in an attempt to sell you something. And I'm as guilty of it as the next person; more so, probably. "Buy my book, buy my book" a thousand times a week, each time in some cunning and eloquent new disguise.

But when you sit down in front of a blank piece of paper to write, that blankness is silence, that whiteness is silence. And I always think a writer should make sure that what they are about to write is better than that whiteness. That it's not just noise, that it's not just another cynical attempt to, ultimately, get money from people. That it stands with those other words that have broken the silence and have been better than it. That you're breaking the silence for love, not money.

Some Silence, yesterday.

This is a hypocritical blog posting, no doubt about it, and I deserve to be pilloried for attempting to make myself out to be all high-faluting and concerned with better things than everyone else, when really, really, all I'm saying here is "buy my book, buy my book" and wondering why the new words I'm typing feel so weary and familiar for all their newness. 

But hypocrisy doesn't stop us knowing what's right and wrong, and failing to stick to our own values doesn't remove the obligation from trying again the next time. We're all trying to scrape together money; we're all selling something. And that's the world we live in and that's the world we've created, and who are we to judge?

But when you sit down to write - not sell, not promote, not market, but write - take a long look at that blank white space; take a long listen to that silence. And write something better than it. If it helps, imagine this stern gaze upon you as you do so:

Self Portrait

Oh, and if anyone's still reading and wonders what I really look like, then here I am. Hello.

In Defence Of Short Stories #7: Jim Breslin

Before we dive in today, I'd just like to say to any new readers that I'm still on the look out for 'In Defence of Short Story' guest blog posts; I'd particularly be interested in posts covering different aspects of the short story than those so far: maybe discussions of a particularly story, or reflections on reading short stories live to an audience.

But onto the main event - today's guest is Jim Breslin, author of the literary short story collection 'Elephant' (Kindle UK | US | Nook); you can also sample two of the stories in 'We're Not Dog People' (Kindle UK | US). His short stories have been published in Think Journal and Metazen and he is also founder of the West Chester Story Slam. 

For lovers of short stories I can also heartily recommend paying a visit to Jim's blog, where he has set himself the challenge of reading and reviewing the thirty-six short stories long-listed by One Story - some great stories featured, and Jim's comments always make me want to read the stories, or read them again if I've read them before. Oh, and he also Twitters as @jimbrez

Take it away Jim...

Savoring the Short Story

The short story is the greatest of all art forms, but each one should be handled with the greatest of care. A short story is meant to be savored in quiet, read carefully in one sitting. It’s important not to rush through stories as though they are chapters of a novel. One story at a time. Take a break and refill your wine glass. Reflect. Contemplate. A short story provides a glimpse into every day life. They are often sketches of smaller moments, though some portray lengthier spans, even generations. But the ones I believe work best cover the smallest of moments, such as tracing the stretch marks on a wife's legs or eating crusty rolls in the back of a bakery while in mourning.

In the digital age we have so much information pecking at our brain. We are trained to read shorter bits of information. We spend our days scanning blurbs on the internet, tweets and Facebook posts. Last summer, we asked my 16-year-old son how his summer reading assignments were going. His response? “I don’t have time to read. I have to keep on top of my text messages.” This is a statement of our times.

We have moved from the information age to the digital age. Shorter is better. And you want to talk short form? The first place I was published was in David Pogue’s anthology The World According to
Twitter. I believe the short story is making a comeback because. Compared to reading one-line news blurbs on the Huffpo or Drudge, Facebook posts, text messages and tweets, the short story is the new novel. The world can be, should be, held at bay for fifteen or twenty minutes to escape in fiction, to be swept away by a tight and complete story.

For those that say they prefer a novel, I would like to suggest a new approach. Keep a collection of short stories on your nightstand. Read one story a night before bed, then flip off the light and mull the story over. Think of the symbolism and the themes. What the author was trying to stay? Does it resonate? Swish it around as if at a wine tasting. Smell the oak and the tannins? I think this analogy is very appropriate actually. Although I’m not a wine connoisseur, I can recall five or six wines that, for some reason, were perfect for my taste buds in that moment. A great short story also hits you in the moment. I first read Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing,” while sitting in the back of a van with my brothers and sisters. Nearly thirty years later, I still vividly recall finishing the story, placing the book on my lap, and looking out the window. I didn’t want anyone catching me in tears after reading something so sad and beautiful.

Not many people forget reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” or the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” In recent years, I felt my heart stop for a moment at the end of Donald Ray Pollock’s
“Real Life,” and I gasped at Boomer Pinche’s “Bethlehem is Full.” Reading the short story is like pursuing the perfect glass of wine. It can be enjoyed in one sitting, it doesn’t take hours, days or weeks to
get through, yet it resonates within you for a long time. And for this I am grateful.

 

"Alien Beings Who Float to Mischief"

I've been feeling good about my writing recently, so naturally I was cruising for a fall.

I've had a number of good reviews of The Other Room, and more excitingly, living, breathing, real-life readers contacting me to ask when my next book is due out. My initial thought is obviously they are taking the piss, but they were actually serious. Sometimes all you can say is 'wow'. Maybe, I thought, maybe, I'm not bad at this writing lark after all...

So obviously the next book I had to read was so startlingly original and brilliant it made me feel like a rank amateur again, and brought all the old insecurities back, re-energised after their holiday away. Say hello to Cate Gardner and her book 'Strange Men In Pinstripe Suits'.

In all seriousness this is a fantastic book, and one to make every lover of strange short fiction shout about it from the rooftops with excitement (or just, you know, blog about it). It's very hard to describe, but suffice to say if you like fifty percent or more of the things on the list below I think you'll love it:

• Neil Gaiman
• The League of Gentlemen
• The original versions of those classic fairy tales
• The Halls of Mirrors at the fair
• Stanley Domwood
• Deja Vu
• Bagpuss
• The weird bits in Dickens no one talks about
• Pinstripe Suits
• Kafka
• Overdosing on popping candy so much you can hear it in your head
• Deja Vu
• Roald Dahl
• Tim Burton

So check Cate Gardner out; some of you who click on the link are about to find your new favourite author.

p.s. the title of this post is how Google Translate renders a line from my first ever German review. I just love the phrase and have been saying it to myself ever since I read it.

A Scattershot Posting #4

I've been interviewed over at Iain Rowan's excellent blog as part of his 'Writers Talk About Writing' series. Some great questions on Iain's part - he's not afraid to tackle controversial topic such as whether tigers or gibbons are better. Find out my view on that vexed question, plus books and writing stuff here.

I'd certainly suggest checking out the rest of his blog while you're there - there's some flash fiction fun, and today the news that his short story Lilies is free on Smashwords. By coincidence I've updated my 'Other Indie Author Are Available' page to include Lilies today, plus a number of others. The mini-reviews are below in case you can't be bothered to click up there. Easiest to start with Iains since we were just talking about him:

Iain Rowan

Lilies: reduced me to an inarticulate 'wow' on first reading. Brilliant short story about war, youth and death, with a dark, haunting supernatural element. I'll say it again: wow.

Belinda Frisch

Crisis Hospital: short story collection of horror and thriller fiction, by an author who seems to know exactly what she's doing. Maybe a bit mainstream for my tastes, these stories concentrate on plot over style; but they're good plots.

Tim C Taylor

No More Than Human: interesting science fiction story about the conflicts between humans and post-humans, and the ethical dilemmas on both sides.

Dan Holloway

The Company of Fellows: murder mystery set in Oxford, and certainly better written than any Morse book I've read. Great evocation of my old home town, twists aplenty, and some darkness... what more could I want?

In Defence Of Short Stories #6: Peter Salisbury

Today's defence is mounted by Peter Salisbury, a science fiction writer from the UK. He writes both serious, intelligent sci-fi, such as Passengers to Sentience, and has also published a book of robot limericks. He's the only person I've come across to say the original version of Bladerunner is the best version of the film, but he defends this viewpoint strongly on his blog...

Take it away Peter:

In my teens, twenties and thirties I tended to avoid short stories. However when I was around twelve, I recall having a short story anthology which made a particularly strong impression. Those were also the days I read Marvel comics and Dan Dare, all of which effectively were short stories and cracking good adventures they were too. I think many of us enjoy short stories without realising it. Tin Tin, Captain Pugwash - all short story favourites. How many popular magazines today don't have at least one short story per issue? Very few, I would guess.

We are all surrounded by short stories. When we meet a friend and ask how they're doing, we don't expect a detailed report of the last six months, we expect, effectively, a short story. Here's another: the TV news anchor person Ms Reids-Knightly speaks in a series of headlines before announcing, 'And here's Brian with the story.' Again, it's a short story. Then we have podcasts, newsfeeds and newspapers themselves. Does a newspaper consist of a stack of book-length treatises on a range of subjects? No, it's full of short stories!

'Ah,' you say, 'but these are not fiction.' Oh, really? Change channel, chose a different newspaper and you'll get a different version of the same thing: 'The country is going down the tubes.' or 'The country is on the up.'. Who was it said 'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.'? There's that word again.

In the past, many Science Fiction writers began with short stories which were published in magazines or collections. Later they developed the ideas further and from them grew full-length novels. In that sense the short story had a purpose as a developmental tool. Another way in which short stories can be very effective, is to set a scene involving a set of conflicting personalities and/or events, then leave the characters hanging, with a problem to solve. I like those sort of short stories as much as the ones that come to a neat or unexpected conclusion. With the short story which has ended with everything still up in the air, the ideas linger and go around in your head. Then you have the additional pleasure of examining the different possibilities of how things finally played out.


Check out Peter's stories via his Amazon author page, or his blog.

Why Indie Authors Encourage Axe Murderers

I posted earlier about mutual back slapping (MBS) among the self-published community. But of course it existed long before the recent self-publishing boom, and I came across this anecdote the other day...

The author Shirley Jackson had just published her story The Lottery in the New Yorker, and caused a storm of controversy (which she describes in her essay 'Biography of a Short Story'). In amid the ton of hate mail, and the hundreds of letters asking where in the US this tradition happened (no, really) was a rare letter of praise.

Jackson knew she recognised the name, but she had no idea where from. After trying to remember without success for a few days, she wrote a "complimentary but non-committal" (MBS alert...!) reply and posted it. A few days later she was talking to some friends from California (where the letter from the mystery correspondent had come from) and mentioned the name. Really they said, you had a letter from him? His name had been all over the press for weeks; he had been been acquitted on a technicality of murdering his family with an axe. With a horrible sense of realisation, Jackson went and looked at the carbon of the letter she had written; the last line was:

"Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story. I admire your work, too."

In Defence Of Short Stories #5: Edd Voss & Alec Bryan

Okay, I might have screwed up.

It's just possible that I might not have made it clear when I was asking for guest blogs that I wasn't after short stories themselves... Which may have caused Alec Bryann to send me one. So I was going to sorrowfully reply that no, sorry, not what I'm after. But then I saw the title: "Rats". Good title, no? So I started reading it...


Sod it, sometimes the best form of defence is attack.  By which I mean, what better way to defend short stories than posting a good one? I still wanted some of the theoretical stuff too, so today's post starts with Edd Voss's defence, then moves to Alec's story. (There's no connection I know of between the two authors, and I can only apologise to both of them for having mucked things up...)



Take it away Edd...

Where would we be without the short story? Would we even know who Walter Mittey is? The short story has added so much to our culture from entertaining us to teaching us life lessons when we aren’t looking. O’Henry’s  “Gift of the Magi” is a classic example of an entertaining story that teaches us about the true meaning of giving.  Phillip K Dick through his many short stories that have been turned into movies has entertained us while pointing out the possible pitfalls of relying too much on technology. Whether it is warning readers about the pitfalls of preventing a crime before it happens as in Minority Report”.  Or pointing out the dangers of living vicariously through implanted memories ala Total Recall.  These are just a few of the great short stories that have made life great for their readers. They have also been fodder for the entertainment industry to keep us entertained. Some of the better movies made from the works of Stephen King in my opinion were the ones made from his novellas: like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Now we have the ease of using an ereader and the opportunity to create our own short story collections giving the reader even more choice. Like many music albums there are one or two songs that sell the CD while the rest are more fillers that the listener may or may not want, so too are many short story collections filled with stories to fill out the word count. Now with technology the reader can pick and chose the stories they want to read as part of a collection. So with the concept of freedom to choose the stories want to read and the idea of all the great concepts revealed in the concise language of the short story I say Long Live the Short Story!!!

Edd describes himself as "a modern day drifter living most of my life on the road learning about the places and  people I see. Over the years my curiosity has been aroused by things that I have seen and stories that I have heard. My interests follow a winding path through science fiction, westerns and just plain stories of people who are faced with challenges that they must deal with." 

Check out his short stories collected in Rambling - Kindle  and Paperback.

And take it away Alec....

Rats by Alec Byran

Find the species most abundant in the area and capture it.

“Something underneath,” Geoff said, running his index finger along the red worn skin of his nasal spine while staring at the box of cereal in front of him. He talked in code. Mamma said it wasn’t because he was stupid, just unable to put in words the thoughts worming around the cramped space of his cerebral cortex. Geoff was like that though. At six year’s old, he would study the bark of the tree in our backyard for hours then without a word of explanation he would strip the bark off precisely where the sapwood secreted the sap out of a wound, holding his sticky finger up, covered with the golden hormones and mineral elements of the phloem. Not stupid, but also not normal.

“Katie, would you get him the Captain Crunch decoder?” mamma asked. Even though I fetched it out, running my hand down the side of the box, scrunching the little yellow squares near the bottom into powder until I located the prize and extracted it, I knew the “Something underneath,” referred to a living organism, maybe even Geoff himself, or the other inside him.

Pin the rat carcass down. Place the pins through the soles of the feet and in between the tibia and hamstring on the hind legs. Incise through the skin, being careful not to puncture the subcutaneous tissue, and run the blade from the chin to the tail, to the elbow and to the knee. Pin back the skin and expose the mammary tissue if the rat is a female.

I found the dead rat in the aluminum shed daddy built before he left us, its spinal cord crushed under the weight of the metal trap, fluid and blood oozing out of its mouth, harderian and lachrymal glands. The shed smelt of a compound of oil, gas and grass all overcome by dirt. I went in the shed to retrieve the lawnmower and saw the rat posed inert, full of rigor mortis, with the trap sprung to the side. I called Geoff. I didn’t know what his reaction would be, but I knew I wasn’t going to pick it up and throw it in the trashcan. Geoff entered the shed with caution. He never liked cramped and dark places. “No sun,” he said as he crept into the shed and near me. He saw what I had been staring at and took a step back and pointed at the rat, “Dead.”

“I know it’s dead, but do you dare remove it?” Sometimes using the word dare would trigger an intrepid response from Geoff, same with the key phrase, “I’ll time you.” Geoff picked the rat up by the tail and placed it on the workbench. He pulled the metal bar back on the Victor snap trap, releasing the pressure placed upon the rat, and let it fall to the table. The rat rolled onto its stomach, stiff. Geoff continued staring at the dead rat, entranced, until I scalded him, “Geoff, don’t put the rat on the table. Throw it away.” He walked out of the shed and into the house only to reappear moments later with pins and the rusty X-acto knife we kept in the main drawer of the kitchen. “What are you doing Geoff? Rats have diseases.” He placed the pins through the soles of the feet, and began a dissection of the rat.

Examine the lymph nodes and salivary glands then peel the skin from the face and examine the structural makeup. Dissect the glands; dissect the muscles and expose the thyroid along with the trachea and larynx. Cut through the peritoneum then cut on each side of the muscle wall making sure to cut behind the posterior edge of the ribcage then fold back the flaps of skin and pin them. Examine the organs.

Geoff pulled the skin back from the rat, pinned it and stared at the innards, which, I am still not sure, might have made a gaseous noise. Geoff smiled. He removed the pins then threw the rat in the trash and walked back into the house to clean up and put the knife away. I stayed in the shed and gazed into the garbage can. The rat, sliding off the old newspaper, leaving bloody streaks in its sloughing path, inched towards a discarded quart of motor oil. Its left hind leg first made contact with the quart, and as it came to rest upon it, more and more of the inert weight shifted from the newspaper to the empty quart of oil, until finally the rat fell limply off of the newspaper which rose up without the weight and illustrated the final trajectory of the rat’s fall through a red streak of viscera and kidney blood. “Did the rat make a noise?” I said to myself. I thought I heard a wisp of trapped air. I covered the dead rat, its innards now spilling from the incision but held intact by the muscle and other walls of tissue which disallowed it from detachment. I followed Geoff into the house.

Over the next few weeks, the amount of rat traps tripled. The aluminum walls of our shed were lined with them, in our kitchen each cabinet had one placed at the back and all of our closets now contained a trap. I heard mamma scream from her room. I knew she had stepped on one of Geoff’s new rat traps. She exited the room, and her face as much as her proximal phalanges appeared swollen and hurt. It’s weird how pain can transfer to the face of the bearer. “What is this?” she berated me with her question. “It looks like a rat trap,” mamma. “I know what it is darling, but how did it get in my closet?” I told her we had found some dead rats and to make sure they didn’t parade around our house, Geoff had installed measures to keep them out—traps. “Would these measures include breaking my two toes?” mamma said. I lied to protect Geoff, who by now was watching us from the balcony, and had a slunk and retreating look about his shoulders and eyes, and yet, his curiosity would not let him leave. ‘It’s my fault, mamma. I told him to put one in each closet. I will remove them right away.”

Move the large intestines and the small intestines to the right. Identify and examine the abdominal viscera. Remove the stomach, omentum and spleen. Identify the kidneys and blood vessels. Next examine the solar plexus (if the rat is lean) and the surface abdominal area of the diaphragm. Dissect the diaphragm along the xiphoid cartilage. Continue to cut through the ribs and remove the thorax. Examine the heart, pin it aside, and examine major blood vessels in the area.

Geoff grew enamored by the amount of rodents our small plot of land contained. He had found a hobby that required action. I aided Geoff in his newfound zeal. We would check the traps after school and before mamma got home from work. Our initial inquiry, or Geoff’s astute knowledge of where rodents would take up residency, a knowledge which he came to I can only conclude by previous investigations into the neighbors cats’ behavior, found that most the colony of nocturnal rats scurried from our garden into the weed bed to burrow. We had five confirmed kills that first day. We took the brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) into our aluminum laboratory and placed them on the wooden work table. With our newly procured sets of scissors, forceps, scalpels, and other instruments, we began incising. Geoff’s proclivity to such a field of work had me falling behind early. He had already pinned the skin back and was examining the subcutaneous skin before I had cut halfway down the breast. The further he moved along with the dissection, the more animated he became. He would extract the heart of the rat and holding it up to what little light we had, would squeeze the heart until it burst then he would watch the dead air above the heart, not the space beneath where the blood trickled down and spattered on the dirt. We were interrupted by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. We put our instruments, some crusted with blood, back in their vinyl cases and threw them under the workbench. We hurried into the house and washed our hands then sat at the kitchen table.

When mamma entered the front door, she noticed nothing unusual and asked me to get the rest of the groceries while she tossed her keys onto the table and set down the one bag. “What are you reading Geoff,” she asked in her usual baby talk voice and patted him on the head. As I left the table and headed for the car, I heard Geoff say, “A color atlas.” Mamma must not have looked at the book or she would have seen that it was a color atlas on how to dissect a rat. By the time I came back inside with both hands full of groceries, mamma was fast at work, peeling potatoes. “Katie dear, would you start cutting the meat and set a pot of water on the burner?” I answered the way I always answered mamma, with a chambermaids stoicism, and set to work. Geoff continued reading until mamma demanded he put the book away and go wash his hands before dinner. As we ate dinner mamma kept saying to me and Geoff how nice it was that Geoff had begun to read again. “That teacher’s conference we had must have really rattled you Geoff,” she said then dipped her spoon into the beef stew and blew on the steaming contents.

Cut the masseters, turn the lower jaw and examine the buccal cavity. Remove only the lower jaw, removing with it the entire alimentary tract: esophagus, trachea, larynx, liver, pancreas, and spleen. Examine the carcass and note the stump of the rectum, and the entire urinogenital system. Note the differences of male genitalia and the female Fallopian tube surrounding the ovary. On the pregnant female carefully remove the fetuses and examine them as well as the membranes.

Next day we returned to the rats. Stiff, and emitting a putrid odor, we took them in a plastic bag and buried them in the weed bed. “To Mother” Geoff said, wiping his gnarled hands on his pants. I scanned the driveway and the road leading up to it thinking Geoff had spotted mother, but he was just muttering more of his code. Our traps had us three fresh victims. We took them to the shed and began our routine. By now, I had gained some speed and kept pace with Geoff, or kept just one step behind him, following his incisions, and removals. Geoff squeezed the heart, something I couldn’t quite do, and then we cut the skin, muscle and cranium to expose the brain. The brain, a cross between fuchsia and rose colors, appeared quite small. I still took to examining the brain while in the meantime Geoff had extracted the brain of his rat and set it on the table next to all the other parts of the rodent. Geoff had placed the insides of his rat in the exact location they would sit if they rested inside the body of the rodent. I looked at my scrap pile of innards and then at his again. How precise he was at such tasks. We threw our dissected rodents along with the dead but uncut rodent into a bag and buried them far away from yesterday’s site.

Over the next few months, Geoff, alone, continued to dissect rats. Our weed patch had pock marks of raised dirt where Geoff had buried the victims. It seemed odd to bury them in such proximity to the living rats. When winter decimated the remaining rotten tomatoes and covered them with a five inch blanket of white, Geoff had to settle for an occasional rat from the shed or house. He often seemed dismayed and wandered the house as lost and as frightened as a bird is when it accidentally enters a house and finds its egress hindered by obstacle after obstacle, and Geoff’s insides seemed to run into walls and windows even more so than the outer demonstrations indicated. He had fits, as mamma called them, when his eyes rolled back into his head and his head kept twirling and twirling while his body spazzed out and his legs fluttered against the ground and his arms crossed inwards and beat against his breast. Mamma and I just had to watch him suffer and maybe put a little bit of restraint upon him to keep him from banging his head against the linoleum.

Skin the carcass and place in alcohol: this will harden the nervous tissue. Remove the cranium and hold the skull upside down to release the brain. Examine the brain, cut it laterally and examine the inside nervous system. Examine a skeleton or use x-rays to examine the skeletal structure of the rat.

I wasn’t mamma’s, more like baggage daddy carried over from his first marriage, and Geoff wasn’t daddy’s. He was the illegitimate son, fathered by who knows who when daddy worked out in the oilfields for weeks on end, so there really wasn’t much of a tie between mamma and me, genealogically speaking. Nor should daddy have raised a bastard, let alone one like Geoff. I thought about this when Geoff came in from the back porch. His boots were covered in snow, and his pants were deep blue where water had wetted them almost up to the knee. When he got excited his tongue turned into the most tormented of creatures. I followed an excited Geoff to the aluminum shed. Inside he revealed the cause of his anxiety. “Geoff,” I said. “That’s a live cat. How did you catch it?” Geoff muttered and lifted the cat, nailed to a small plywood board. The cat attempted to bite Geoff then hissed at its captor. “Geoff” I moaned in bewilderment. He showed the marks up and down both hands where the cat had bitten him. The cat continued to hiss and its raised back hair, for its spine was constricted of movement by the plywood, jutted out on its sides. As nonchalant as one can be, Geoff put on a leather gardening glove, and lunged for the cat’s neck. The cat attempted to bite Geoff but didn’t make it through the leather. Geoff let his grip slide up to cover the cat’s face and keep its mouth closed. With his other hand he grabbed a nail and placed it so it would not ram through and fracture the axis or atlas bones, nor sever any of the main arteries running up and down the neck region, then he looked at the hammer then at me.

I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t hit Geoff’s hand as I drove the nail through the cat’s flesh, throat and flesh again with four swings. A stream of blood poured out of the wound. It could hardly hiss anymore. Geoff quickly grabbed his scalpel and cut through to the scapula and followed in a straight line down to the pelvis. The cat began to purr as the life finally ebbed out of it. Barring some differences but not much from the rat, the cat’s dissection went quick and Geoff easily managed to overcome the areas where a feline differed from a rodent. He placed all organs where they belonged on the table, then burst the heart in the air, and waited and watched for a moment before placing the heart in its proper anatomical location. The cat’s brain, 5 centimeters and about thirty grams, seemed far superior to the small rat brain. The sagittal view of the brain exposed more optimal analysis. In all, the cat brain appeared like a shrunken human brain. “Never again Geoff,” I shouted and shook him. His innocence functioned like a shield at such moments. I had to really shake him to let him know he had gone too far this time. “Understand me!? Never again!” Geoff ran to the house crying, leaving me to discard of his mess. I had nowhere to dispose of the cat but in the vacant lot behind the shed. For days I watched as magpies and ravens sat on the fence posts. No one ever noticed the dead cat. I did happen to see a sign on a light post.

When dissection of the rat has been mastered, move on to larger species, perhaps even a human. Very few differences exist between mammals.

Mamma woke up from the chloroform only to find nails driven through her hands and feet and through the plywood board placed on her bed. Her neck was tied down, more humanely, and she had been muzzled with a handkerchief and a leather strap. No words were spoken between the three of us. She tried to turn her head but had to stare straight into the eyes of a scalpel. You could still hear her muffled yell even though she was gagged, especially when the scalpel nicked her thyroid gland as it began its long descent down towards her uterus. I could see her chest still moving up and down, still breathing, but it was rather faint. She screamed some more when the skin flaps were pulled and nailed down. Her exposed chest and innards, covered by her sternum and mammary tissue and ribs, stopped moving. From where I was, I heard no gasp of air, like the rats sometime made when they were cut into. The dissection of mamma went rather quick. The bones were severed with a hatchet or cut with a hacksaw and placed on a twelve by twelve blue tarp that had been laid out. The tarp was rolled up and moved to the basement where a hole had been dug through the foundation, or rather chipped then dug, and loose dirt could be placed over the body. The hole left room for one more body.

Geoff’s eyes met with mine. I saw my own fear reflected in his innocent and vacant eyes. I screamed at him, “Stop Geoff. Make it stop,” but Geoff rarely spoke, even though he wasn’t gagged, he didn’t say a word as I lowered the scalpel and dug it into his trachea. The blade glided along smoothly until I reached his scrotum. I cut off his testicles and pushed his penis to the side. Geoff smiled. He breathed deep, his throat somewhat slit and blood oozing into it caused him to cough, then he died as the blood gurgled in his throat. No other noise could be heard. After I had cut Geoff’s heart out, I squeezed it until it burst, or until the blood emptied from it. I watched the air above the heart but saw nothing. Poor Geoff, I thought, “nothing underneath.” A mouse scurried from under his bed, a bed of which it was not easy to move into mamma’s room and had required Geoff’s help. The light burst through the red shades and caught the mouse’s back, making it look like a red mouse. I wondered how a mouse could have avoided all the traps Geoff had set. I discarded of Geoff the same way, filling the hole in the basement with his body then I piled the loose dirt on the two of them and once the dirt reached the foundation level, I cemented the two together—the mamma who wasn’t my mamma and the brother who wasn’t my brother. I made my way for daddy. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew I would find him.

When finding one’s father, one must decide early on whether to reconcile the relationship or kill him. It would be best to kill him.

Now that's a defence.
Contact Alec at his blog or check out his publications at Aqueous Books.

The Horror Genre and Cardamom Ice Cream

As I mentioned in my last post, Alan Ryker posted a pretty interesting piece about the horror genre the other day. Which got me thinking about the whole 'genre' concept in general. Some people have really strict definitions of horror, of sci-fi, etcetera, sometimes subdividing to a lunatic degree. It's essentially a book seller's view of genre, as opposed to a book writer's one.

Me I think of genre as more like food flavourings and spices. True, you get some books that are like, say, a curry. One flavour dominates. These are your true genre novels, if we have to call them that. But some of the most interesting cooks are those that use flavours and ingredients in new and exciting ways. Which is why we have cardamom ice cream nowadays, as well as curries.

The books below are all ones that I think of as being like cardamom ice-cream; they might not say 'horror' on the back, but they sure as hell have some of the tang of a horror story, at least to my palate. I've started with one where the flavour is strong and the case obvious to me, and moved on to some where there's a merest after-taste and you may disagree with me entirely; let me know in the comments.

Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Now if you don't agree this tastes somewhat of turmeric, garam masala and cardamom, then you should probably stop reading now. While this is, from one angle, the surreal, modernist classic it's always talked up to be, stories like Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony and The Judgement have had an obvious impact on horror writers since they became well known. The obvious literary successor to Kafka would seem to me Robert Aickman more than anyone - The Swords or The Trains being blinding examples.


Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child



I studied this one at university. There was a lot of talk in the lecture halls and seminars about how it comments on modern nuclear families, on the media's obsession with either protecting or demonising young people, about autism maybe. And I agreed. And I said it was also a horror novel.

Notice the "also". I wasn't disagreeing with them that what they saw in the book was there, just that, look, here's something else too. Some cardamom, if you will. I mean, 'evil' children are a cliché in horror fiction and films, probably more so at the time the book was written than now. And it seemed a textbook example of how to get round the 'reveal' - that sometimes dreadfully clumsy moment where an author undoes pages and pages of suspense to reveal just what his or her monster is. Lessing doesn't do a reveal, the book seems to deliberately play with that expectation and then not satisfy it, in a way that I thought was interesting if not, well, fully satisfying.

I didn't think any of this was controversial or unjustified by "the text" as the lecturer insisted we call it, but you should have seen some of the looks I got. Some of the self appointed guardians of literature really don't like you sullying their word-view with genre fiction. Fortunately Lessing, with this book and the sci-fi of some of her others, ignores such philistines.

Philip K Dick - Time Out Of Joint

But of course, science-fiction readers don't always like it when you suggest there's an overlap between sci-fi and horror, either. I mean they'll accept Alien, which is basically Lovecraft in space, but not some of the genre's more intellectual output like that of Philip K Dick. I mean there's no monsters here, like there (arguably) are in The Fifth Child. And that's what horror is, right? Monsters?

No. Horror is an emotion, a spice... And often what it tastes like is this: the nagging, persistent feeling that although the world seems okay, something, somewhere, is horribly wrong. You can taste it in The Haunting of Hill House, you can taste it in The Shinning, and you sure can taste it in Philip K Dick's books. Again, I'm not arguing Time Out of Joint isn't sci-fi, it absolutely is. I just argue that doesn't mean it hasn't also got a tang and whiff of horror to it.

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

I suspect a few of you who were with me up until this point may be doubting me now. For a start, this is a play, not horror's most natural medium. And it's a play about plays, more specifically Hamlet, and two little people caught up in the action without understanding why. It's very funny, full of slapstick and philosophical humour, but also poignant too - the ending has always stuck with me. It's very British and a bravura display of word power and stagecraft. 

Horror?

Or, to describe R&GAD another way, it's about two people who begin to suspect that something, somewhere, is not quite right in their world... Sound familiar? Taste familiar? 

Seriously, read it again (or read it, if you haven't - it's a play that works well on the page too). Aren't the initial signs a little bit, well, unnerving (those coin tosses)? When the characters try and reassure each other and themselves all is well, isn't that sinking feeling that they're wrong familiar? 

And they all die at the end, which must count for something.

Now, after that post, I really fancy a curry...

A Scattershot Posting #3

Just a quickie posting today, before the main event tomorrow.

Firstly, I'm proud to say that The Other Room has been favourably review at Red Adept Reviews - I posted recently about MBS in the self-publishing scene, and Red Adept is one of the antidotes to that: objective, independent reviewers, who aren't afraid to put the boot in and forensically list all of a books faults if they think it's bad. Fortunately they gave The Other Room four stars, and it's a really perceptive and comprehensive review. It even made me think afresh about my book. You can check it out here.

Secondly, some other bloggage for you to check out:

Really interesting post and discussion on 'Bringing Horror Back' over at Alan Ryker's place. My post tomorrow will be expanding on some comments I posted over there.

And Iain Rowan has started some interesting 'Writers Talk About Writing' interviews over on his site, the most recent being with horror supremo Gary McMahon.

Laters.

In Defence Of Short Stories #4: Iain Rowan

This week's guest blog comes courtesy of Iain Rowan, who writes crime and horror short stories, amongst others. One of his stories, Lilies, has been featured in the Mammoth Best Of Horror Anthologies edited by Stephen Jones. Those of you with any interest in literate and intelligent weird fiction will already know what a big deal this is; to those who don't, I will just say that unlike most things that say "Best Of" on them, Stephen Jones anthologies actually are. And Lilies, also available as a standalone e-book, fully justifies its inclusion.

You'd expect such an author to write a great blog post defending short stories wouldn't you? You betcha.

Take it away Iain...

There are two ways to defend the short story, an easy way and a harder way.

The easy way is this. I say: read Chekhov and Carver, Joyce and  Kafka, Gogol and Murakami. Or I say: read Aickman and Machen, Ballard and Gilman, Bradbury and King. Or better still, read all of them, and more.

Job done, time for tea. 

That makes a dull blog post though, so I will try the harder way, and explain why I love reading and writing short fiction.  There are people who would never choose to read a short story, who don’t see the point of short stories, who don’t like short stories – you may be friends with these people, you may work with them, or you may see them on the street. Don’t be frightened by them – they mean no harm, but they do need your help, so please give generously. Anthologies, collections, whatever you can spare.

You may be one of these people. Don’t feel bad. Well, feel a little bad, because you are weird and more than a little wrong. But you can fight this thing. We’re with you. Well, a few apprehensive steps to the side, because of the whole weirdness thing, but with you in spirit.

I want to start with my defence of short stories by pointing out a way in which novels are better than them. With a good novel, you can lose yourself for hours, days, in a world of someone else’s imagination, that total immersion when the world of the book starts to feel as real as the one that you live in. You don’t get that with short stories. But that’s not a failing, because that’s not what they do. 

Short stories do something different. They are not little novels. They are not novels with lots of words left out. You don’t get immersion, you get a glass of icy water thrown in your face.  Bear with me, it’s more attractive than it sounds. While one of the charms of the novel is the room for digression and expansion, the beauty of the short story is the merciless concision it imposes. The short story ditches all that is dressing, it strips back all that is luxury, and it pares everything down to the single purpose of the story that is being told. It excludes most things, but in doing so attempts to capture one really important thing, whether that is an essential, startling revelation about what it means to be human, or scaring the living shit out of the reader when they turn the lights out later that night. 

One of the reasons why I think some genres work so well in the short form is that they can be read at one sitting. That kind of immersion in the story works well where the atmosphere that the writer builds is critical to the genre, and that’s why for me there will never be a novel of the supernatural that is as great as the best short stories.

Not only can short stories be read at one sitting, but they can be written in one too. Not all of my own stories have been written in this way (for that I’d need a better attention sp—hey look, a pony) but I like the continuity of tone and thought that you get writing the entire piece in one go, or over just a couple of sessions.

I have seen advice to writers which suggests starting with short stories, as if they are children’s bikes that you wobble along on until you are big enough and brave enough to take the stabilisers off and ride your way to a fat 120,000 word novel with as many characters as pages. This is bad advice. If you want to write a novel, you should write a novel. If you want to write a short story though, write a short story.  

Precision, concision, graceful economy. A novel can bring the cumulative weight of the development of plot and character to create an emotional response in the reader, but a good short story has to have the magic to do so in a instant.  One line, one paragraph, one moment of terror or surprise, beauty or revelation. There’s skill, and craft, and art in that.

The novel is an album (some novels, like some albums, are sprawling three-disc concept albums with gatefold sleeves). The short story is the killer three minute single. It starts, hooks you, smacks you around the face, and then when it’s just got started, it stops, leaving you wanting more. But once you’ve heard it, it’s there in your head for years. 

So there you have it. My defence of the short story and a tortured analogy which, possibly for the first time, allows the direct comparison of Justin Bieber to Ernest Hemingway. Thanks for reading it.

 

Lilies, mentioned above, is available on Amazon (UK | US).

Nowhere To Go is a collection of Iain’s previously published short crime fiction. (Amazon UK | US | Smashwords). Read more at his website.

Indie Publishing & Mutual Backslapping...

The first stories I ever put online were on a site called Authonomy - I was lucky enough to be in from the start and involved in the beta version of it. Initially I thought it was great: I got some feedback from readers on some of my stories (many of which ended up being published in The Other Room) and while it wasn't all good feedback they was all serious comments on my work; people had obviously read the stories and thought about them... The quality of the final version of some of those stories that I have published owes a lot to those initial unknown readers and their feedback, and I offer them honest thanks.

But then... Authonomy started to change. You see, there was an overall 'prize' - to get your manuscript seen by a real-life-honest-to-god editor from the Harper Collins! They'd read, comment on, and maybe even publish, books that got the most 'votes'. Now, I was never really interested in all that - I'm self aware enough to know my stories are unlikely to be favourites for anyone other than a small cult audience. I just wanted to see if some people liked them or not. But as more and more people joined the site, and more and more books were added, the quality of the feedback declined. There was less and less constructive criticism, and more and more of what basically amounted to 'vote my book up and I'll vote yours...'

I gave up on the site and removed my work.

Later, I self-published. I started a blog because of that, and wanted 'followers'. I joined Twitter and wanted even more of them, but....

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Two self pub authors, yesterday.

You see, I just can't do mutual back-slapping, or MBS as I'll call it, to make it sound more like some frightful disease. Not just for moral reasons, but because I'm not actually very good at it. I can't fake enthusiasm, and in my head I know that books aretoo important to do so. Maybe not important to the wider world, but important to me. So I was extremely worried about the self publishing world - would it be like Authonomy all over again?

To an extent yes, but honestly less than I feared (I've mentioned before, I spend half my time worrying about things that never happen...) That is, it goes on, but I haven't had to sully my fingers with it. Fortunately, if you look there's a load of great indie writers out there, so there's no need to fake praise for the rubbish ones. I can just talk about the good ones, many of whom I've mentioned before: Alan Ryker; Zabrina Way; Dan Holloway; Neil Schiller. Iain Rowan who I haven't mentioned yet but is doing the next guest blog spot for me, which I'm thrilled about because his story Lilies is fantastic. And all the others I've mentioned, and those fine writers I've yet to discover.

But one worry, for me and this whole self-publishing lark as a whole, is that it can still look like MBS... Someone puts a review of your book on their blog, so you have a look and say thanks and realise they're a writer too, and you see they have the same tastes as you - of course they have, that's why they liked your book. So they're book appeals and you buy it and like it - of course you do, you share the same tastes! So you review it on your blog... Each step perfectly innocent and above board, but the end result sure looks like MBS doesn't it?

But the alternative, not reviewing and not supporting fellow authors whose work you genuinely admire, seems even more unpalatable. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if your see me praise an author on here, I genuinely mean it.

Honest Guv.

And keeping that spirit in mind, I'd like to say a genuine thank you to Iain Rowan for his review of The Other Room on his blog here.

Also, a sample story from The Other Room is available to read on the ace SelfScribes blog; interspersed with the main stories in the book is some flash fiction under the heading Some Stories For Escapists. This one is the third and subtitled The Haunted House.