The Town Where Bad Things Happen

Here's a preview of my tale "Incarnadine," which will appear in Turn Down the Lights, the 25th anniversary anthology coming soon from Cemetery Dance. (Brief detour: Above is Steven C. Gilberts' illustration for the special Artist and Lettered editions of the book, which for my $$$$ is a spot-on dead-solid-perfect interpretation of the story. Thanks, Steven!)

So without further ado, here's a slice of Cemetery Dance-style darkness. In the tradition of the best Coming Attractions trailers, I'll give you a peek at the monster:


The creature’s glove is off now. Five sharp metal fingers gleam in the moonlight. Then the witch is gone for another moment. Unconscious. A flash fills her skull, like wild electricity, and her mind snaps back. Swollen eyes… blurry vision… but the witch sees the thing coming her way. Wiry gait. Clanking motion. Moonlight threading through its body like a sieve. A misplaced sculpture free of some mad museum… and a misplacer of time, too -- for several more moments have vanished.

And then it happens again. Now the shambler is carrying the witch… now they are away from the trees and the riverbed… now they are climbing together on a switchback path that rises through the darkness. Yes. The clock has skipped a serious beat. The witch blinks, tries to speak through bruised lips, but words won’t come. The thing moves forward, as if in a hurry. It wears both cops’ badges now, clipped to the gridwork of its chest. And it has a head. She sees that. A rusty bucket pockmarked with holes, and… blood. Blood spills over the edges of the bucket, leaks through the pockmarked holes. And the witch hears things slapping wetly within the bucket -- things the creature harvested from the dead cops down by the riverbed.

A brain, no doubt... and maybe a heart. Again, the witch fades. The wiry shambler inclines its bucket head, and blood spills on her face, and blood awakens her.

Drip drip drip, she thinks. This is how it starts. And then the dam begins to break, like dams always do. And then the river --

Turn Down the Lights

The good folks over at Cemetery Dance announced a special project today. Edited by Richard Chizmar himself, Turn Down the Lights is an anthology celebrating the 25th anniversary of CD Pubs. I'm doubly excited about it (i.e. proud to be a contributor, and looking forward to it as a reader, too), and I'm betting you will be to once you get a glance at the TOC:

"Turn Down the Lights..." an introduction by Richard Chizmar
"Summer Thunder" by Stephen King
"Incarnadine" by Norman Partridge
"The Western Dead" by Jack Ketchum
"An Instant Eternity" by Brian James Freeman
"In the Room" by Bentley Little
"Flying Solo" by Ed Gorman
"The Outhouse" by Ronald Kelly
"Lookie Loo" by Steve Rasnic Tem
"Dollie" by Clive Barker
"The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero" by Peter Straub
Afterword by Thomas F. Monteleone

Needless to say, I'm in very fine company here. Even better news -- the trade edition is already at the printer will be shipping next month. Right now you can grab a copy with free shipping over at the CD website. And since the book was just announced this morning and is already 50% sold out, you'd probably better do the job soon (especially if you want an extra-crunchy edition).

As Mr. Chizmar himself always writes in his "Words from the Editor," can't wait to "turn down the lights... and start the dance" with this one. I got my start over at Cemetery Dance, with Rich publishing my first short story and my first novel, so it's great to see things going so strong at CD all these years later... and, yep, I'm glad to be in on the action, too.

That's it for now. Stay tuned... later on in the week I'll post a little taste of "Incarnadine" for those of  you who like your sneak peeks.

The Jaggerstein Monster: A Writer's Tale

This anthology marked the first appearance of my story, "The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists." Back in the day, we all thought the cover boy looked a lot more like Mick Jagger than Boris Karloff... but, hey, it was the nineties, after all.

I remember going into Tower Books over in Concord and spotting Frankenstein: The Monster Wakes faced in a paperback dump (i.e. cover out in a cardboard display case) before I even knew the book had been published. Wow. A new anthology, and I had a story in it... and Tower Books had a ton of copies! That was a moment.

The next year I had another -- I was in the same Tower around the time the paperback edition of my first novel (Slippin' Into Darkness) came out, grabbing a couple anthologies. I gave the clerk my plastic, and (in return) he gave me a funny look. Like: kind of startled.

"Are you the Norman Partridge?" he asked.

The only answer I could think of was: "Do I owe you money?"

Anyway, writing about Shivers VII the other day made me nostalgic for anthologies like this one. Sure, there are still anthos out there, but how often do you discover them by wandering into a bookstore and spotting them in a paperback dump? That was fun. And I could multiply that particular pleasure by a couple dozen after I hit the point as a writer where I'd spot the bylines of writers I actually knew on the table of contents page. For example, check out this crew in Frankenstein: The Monster Wakes -- Peter Crowther (a whirlwind talent who soon added publishing to his game), Rex Miller (a very nice guy who wrote very mean books), Gary Braunbeck (like me, one of the "House" writers in the early days of Cemetery Dance), Larry Segriff (my Minnesota snow-blizzard World Fantasy Con roommate!), Brian Hodge (who'd often make me want to break my pencils)... and even Rich Chizmar (the Cemetery Dance honcho himself). Of course, envy might rear it's head if I didn't have a story in said antho, too -- What? A Dead Elvis book and they didn't ask me? I can't believe it! -- but as Elvis himself once said: That's the way the mop flops, son. You pays your money and you takes your chance... and besides, there was always another anthology opportunity right around the corner.

Apart from that, there was a genuine camaraderie among the writers who populated the TOCs of books like this one -- at least among the young guys -- even if we weren't connected by the net back in those days. Apart from a single boiled-down biographical paragraph that usually ran in an abbreviated About the Authors section at the tail-end of each anthology, we were pretty much anonymous. We certainly weren't the Mick Jaggers of horror, and there wasn't much showbiz in our games. We didn't have author platforms; no one was bothering to interview us; the only thing we had going for us were the stories themselves. So the stories did the talking, and odds were that you knew other writers by their work long before you knew anything about them personally.

But to tell the truth, that's a pretty fine way of knowing a writer.

In fact, maybe it's the best way.

Or, as someone once said: "It is the tale, not he who tells it."

Back then, it really was.

A Bucketful of Shivers

My contributor's copies of a new anthology hit the doorstep the other day. Shivers VII is edited by Richard Chizmar, longtime Cemetery Dance honcho. This one features stories from Stephen King, Ed Gorman, Al Sarrantonio, Clive Barker, Brian James Freeman, Roberta Lannes, Rio Youers... and right about now I'll save myself some typing and say you can check out the full TOC right here.

My contribution is "Red Rover, Red Rover," a slice of summertime gothic. Starts off this way: "Everyone says the lake is haunted, but the boys have been looking all summer and they haven't seen one ghost." I had a lot of fun writing the piece, especially channeling the 1969 setting from my own childhood memories. Here's hoping it provides a shiver or two... just watch out for Mr. Rose.

Me? I'm definitely enjoying the book. Of course, I'm not the most considerate reader in the world -- at least when it comes to editors -- as I tend to jump around in anthos rather than stick to the playlist. So far I've read the King piece ("Weeds," adapted for Creepshow way back when), which was a perfect little fifties sci-fi creeper out of The Blob school. Also checked out Norman Prentiss' "The Storybook Forest," a sharp chiller with an irresistible "I wish I'd thought of that" set-up -- three teenagers are on the prowl in an abandoned amusement park, and before the first Budweiser's drained one of them is trapped under a giant tea cup. This one's masterful, restrained, and sly -- and it'll leave you wanting more. And just when I thought I couldn't stand to read another zombie story, here comes a very sharp one from Tim Waggoner. Nice stuff.

Anyway, so far I'm three-for-three with Shivers VII. The hardcover edition is already sold out, but you can grab yourself a trade pb right here.

The Mummy's Heart

A new novella, "The Mummy's Heart," is out in Paula Guran's Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre. This one's camped out on the coffee table for the duration of the holiday season, as Ms. P has collected tales from some personal favorites (new and old): Stephen Graham Jones, the Tems, Jonathan Maberry, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, John Shirley, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Not to mention two gents who (quite often) make me want to bust my pencils -- Laird Barron and Brian Hodge. And for bonus points: there's a WWII werewolf tale; first thing I've read by Carrie Vaughn (I'm late to the dance as usual). It was a good one. When it comes to sub-genres, WWII/spookerific mashups are a long-standing weakness of mine.

Anyway, I'll have more about "The Mummy's Heart" (and fictive mummies in general) in my next post, but for now I'll leave you with a taste of the tale itself:

The trail I'm talking about was cut by a mummy.

He did the job on Halloween night in 1963. He was mad as a hatter, and he came out of a pyramid that was (mostly) his own making. And no, he wasn't really a mummy. But that night, he was definitely living the part. Even in the autopsy photos, that shambler from the darkside was a sight to behold.

His name was Charlie Steiner and he was nearly twenty-three years old -- too big to be trick-or-treating. And Charlie was big... football-lineman big. If you know your old Universal Studios creepers, he was definitely more a product of the Lon Chaney, Jr. engine of destruction school of mummidom than the Boris Karloff wicked esthete branch. But either camp you put him in, he was a long way from the cut-rate dime-store variety when it came to living dead Egyptians.

Because this mummy wasn't playing a role.

He was embodying one.

Which is another way of saying: He was living a dream.

Charlie's bandages were ripped Egyptian cotton, dredged in Nile river-bottom he'd ordered from some Rosicrucian mail-order outfit. He was wound and bound and wrapped tight for the ages, and he wasn't wearing a Don Post mask he'd bought from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. No. Charlie had gone full-on Jack Pierce with the makeup. Furrows and wrinkles cut deep trenches across his face like windblown Saharan dunes, and the patch of mortician's wax that covered one eye was as smooth as a jackal's footprint... add it all up and drop it in your treat sack, and just the sight of Charlie would have made Boris Karloff shiver.

And you can round that off to the lowest common denominator and say that Charlie Steiner would have scared just about anyone. Sure, you'd know he was a guy in a costume if you got a look at him. But even on first glance, you might believe this kid was twenty-three going on four thousand.

Look a little closer, you'd see the important part: Charlie Steiner was twenty-three going on insane. There was no dodging that if you got close enough to spot the mad gleam in his eye -- the one he hadn't covered with mortician's wax. Or maybe if you spotted his right hand, the one dripping blood... the one he'd shorn of a couple fingers with a butcher's cleaver. And then there was his tongue, half of it cut out of his mouth with a switchblade, its purple root bubbling blood.

Charlie wrapped those things in a jackal's hide he'd bought from the back pages of a big-game hunting magazine with Ernest Hemingway on the cover. Who knew if that hide was real but Charlie believed in it, same way he believed in the little statue of the cat-headed goddess he added to the stash, along with a dozen withered red roses, his own fingers and tongue, and a Hallmark Valentine's Day card....