Introduction
I write very few short stories that can be termed horror, ghost, supernatural, occult, or fantasy. In fact, in a career spanning twenty-five years I’ve written just eight (nine, if you include the novella A Writer’s Life) out of a total of around a hundred and twenty published stories. Most of those have been science fiction, a genre with which I feel more comfortable. The ideas I have just happen to be about the future, concerning the staple tropes of the genre: other worlds, space-flight, aliens, fantastical technologies, time-travel... I rarely get ideas that fit neatly into the horror genre or related sub-genres.
Now, why is this?
Perhaps it’s because my preferred reading, along with mainstream novels, is SF. I’ve been reading it since I was about fifteen and I know it inside out. I do occasionally read horror (or ghost or supernatural), and enjoy the likes of Robert Aickman, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, M.R. James, and more modern practitioners like Joe Hill, T.E.D. Klein, Adam Neville. And while I can appreciate the literary merits of the genre, I always have to work hard at suspending my disbelief. Fundamentally, I don’t believe in the occult, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, etc... Therefore when I come to write about them, I find it that much more difficult to do so.
Now I can hear you crying, “Why! That’s ridiculous! What makes ghosts, ghouls, vampires etc any less credible than little blue aliens, FTL travel and all the other fantastical trappings of SF?” And I admit that there is, perhaps, nothing more credible about the furniture of SF... other than a sneaking suspicion I have that the things I write about in SF might, just might, possibly, in some way, at some point in the future, come to pass. At any rate, the characters I write about in my science fiction tales believe implicitly in the scientific process and believe that the fantastical things in their world have a credible, rational, scientific basis.
When I do get ideas for horror tales, I find that they’re about the exploration of character. They’re gentle horror tales, often metaphorical, with little or no blood and guts, precious few ghosts, ghouls, and certainly no werewolves or vampires. I prefer to call them psychological horror stories.
Which brings me to the eight short tales of ‘horror’, for want of a better term, collected in this volume.
A few years ago the then editor of the horror magazine Cemetery Dance, Robert Morrish, contacted me saying that he’d very much enjoyed A Writer’s Life, and that if I wrote any further horror stories could he take a look at them. Never one to turn down an opportunity, I wrote “The Man Who Never Read Novels”. Now, what category does this tale fall into? It was published in a horror magazine, but the events in the story could be interpreted two ways. It might, after all, be termed a mainstream tale with dark psychological undertones and touches of the fantastic. Or it might be straight horror. I’ll leave the reader to decide.
“Beauregard” is one of my favourite stories in this collection. The eponymous central character of this tale is an amalgam of two friends, sharing characteristics of both. While Beauregard is not a very nice person, I make no such claims for my friends. And while they are both beset by demons, they are psychological demons, rather than the type which hound Beauregard. This story was first published in Dark Terrors 5 edited by Steve Jones and David Sutton.
I have very little recollection of writing “Li Ketsuwan”, or the ideas behind it. It’s set partly in Thailand, where I’ve lived for a time, and unlike most of my stories features a wholly unlikable central character, and is overtly supernatural. “Li Ketsuwan” saw light of day in Andy’s Cox’s magazine The Third Alternative.
“Ghostwriting” was the second story I wrote for Robert Morrish at Cemetery Dance. It’s based on an idea I’d had kicking around in my head for years, ever since a friend demonstrated to me his PC’s voice recognition program. “Now,” I thought, “what if he were to leave the room with the program still running, and he came back to discover words on the screen?” I don’t know why the idea took years to turn itself into a story, but it did. Again, this one is an ostensible horror story that just might be interpreted as a psychological mainstream tale.
“Taipusan” had an interesting genesis. I wrote a vastly different version of this story as a science fiction tale in my Fall of Tartarus story cycle, about the planet of Tartarus and its sun which was in the process of going nova. The story didn’t work as SF, and didn’t fit into the cycle. I left it out, filed it away, and resurrected it years later. Over a long period I cut it to pieces, rewrote, cut and rewrote, excising scenes and characters and even a sub-plot. I also stripped every SF element from it and set the story not on Tartarus but in India in the late 1940s. It was the third of my tales to be published in Cemetery Dance.
“The Memory of Joy” is a bleak story of loss and grieving or, in the case of the mother in the story, of not grieving. It’s certainly a science fiction story, but also very definitely horror, to my mind. After all, what can be more horrifying than the death of a child? It was first published in Christopher Teague’s anthology Choices.
“The Disciples of Apollo” is the earliest story in this collection, written way back in 1988. This could be seen as a mainstream story right up until the very last, twist-in-the-tail line, which very definitely turns it into a horror story. It’s not often that I get ideas for kicker endings like this one, more’s the pity. It appeared in Other Edens III, edited by Chris Evans and the late and sadly missed Robert Holdstock. It was only the sixth tale I’d sold, and I treasure Rob’s acceptance letter in which he wrote: “And when I reached the end I leapt out of my chair and punched the air!”
“The House”, by contrast, is my most recent horror tale, this time for Jonathan Oliver at Solaris, where it appeared in the anthology House of Fear. It concerns another writer (I like writing about writers), and something that has cursed him for years and years, and how, at last, he is exorcised of that curse. Horror or mainstream? Again, I’ll leave you to decide.
I hope you find these pieces entertaining – and I hope I can muster another collection of horror tales before another quarter century has passed.
Eric Brown
Dunbar
January, 2012