So , while I get this novel ready for publication, I’ll be posting my agonizing rewrites of the Billson Saga (tentatively titled Billson Can Eat a Bag of Dicks). I love the character, but he can be annoying at times… he’s not just acting like that in the stories.

In the meantime, I’ve had the title story stuck in my head. The idea of something that you thought long buried from a horrible incident as a child coming back to destroy your life as an adult has a lot of resonance. I think my current writing falls somewhere between that and some of Robert Cormier’s darker work. At least I hope that’s where it’s falling.

But what if we never find out?

What if, as in the original French/ Dutch version of The Vanishing (which is better in every way except for not having Jeff Bridges in it), the hero finds out but no one else does?

What if, as in From a Buick 8, the phenomena eventually stop but there is still no explanation for what they were or what was causing it?

What if our protagonists manage to escape, but still never find out why they were being stalked? Or what would prevent it from happening again?

Two of my favourite horror stories are both by Robert Aickman and found in the collection Cold Hand in Mine. Both of them, “The Swords” and “The Hospice,” have a POV character plunged into an eerie situation. By the end of the story, we’ve seen hints of more details behind the scenes, knowledge and information that perhaps we’re not ready for, but we never completely learn what caused everything to happen the way that it did. And both stories are still horribly stuck with me, years later.

Many writers talk about the moment where they have to unmask the monster. But sometimes the hero can’t do that. Or, maybe, is just too frightened to.

I’m not completely sure how I missed this story in the years that I’ve been reading short horror fiction. This is especially embarrassing to me as I much prefer horror and gothic and creepy stories over their novel-length versions. True, I went through a phase in the 80s where I read everything with a foil-embossed cover and a frightened child and a blurb from an author who may once had been told the plot by an agent. And when I grew out of that, short horror fiction, especially the stories of Poe and Lovecraft, Borges, Dick, and holy-crap-Robert Aickman… every minute that you spend trying to find one of his out-of-print books or working to buy a reprint is a minute well-spent. This goes double for Cold Hand in Mine. I used to feel bad about this, but sometimes, when people ask me what Stephen King piece I like the most, I answer “The piece where he recommended Peter Straub and Robert Aickman. If nothing else, “The Swords” is the most disturbing story about a man losing his virginity (in a couple of ways, not just physically) and is one of the books my Muse likes to pull out when trying to tell me what I could be writing.

And I am writing. I have two chapters more of Witness to put up, and I’m re-re-revising a novella (after having it thoroughly shat on, then rinsed off, then set on fire, by my fellow editors at “Empyrean Press”) and another story finally crawled out of my noggin. I may actually put the new story up today… I could use input, and I’m worried that it’s too obvious and cheesy. For now, here’s one of the few poems that I’ve written this year:

Fragment from a poem about death

across the field

And still he ran, shouting, after
the birds that had left

Screaming for them to come back

Though he didn’t know what
he would do
if they
did

except

join them sooner
than later

Also, I wanted to talk about The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. That is one of the two books I’m reading right now, and it’s one that I’d actually read parts of, years and years ago. I have a love-hate relationship with Dostoyevsky (hmm… spell-check keeps flagging that) and it’s still something that I haven’t quite come to terms, though I think my biggest problem with him, back when I first went to college in California, wasn’t so much Crime and Punishment as it was the people who were fans of it. Sorry… I meant Fans. Big capital ‘F.’ They scared me a little bit.

On to The Idiot. You may be wondering what this has to do with creepy fiction (other than that it’s written by a 19th century Russian author). You may be wondering how this fits in with this blog. You may especially be wondering what, exactly, I did, to piss off the penguins. I can’t answer all of those questions, of course, but I can say that, while the big theme in this book is still perhaps the one that you learned (‘how a corrupt society deals with an honest man’) a secondary theme that keeps popping up is ‘mental debilitation is a bitch.’

If you know about Dostoyevsky’s (damn you, spellcheck… I VERIFIED THAT) struggles with epilepsy, depression, and living in Russia, sections where Prince Myshkin is talking about his experiences with epilepsy take on an extra meaning. And I was fine with that. Then I got to Part II, Chapter V, where the Prince is wandering St Petersburg, after a dramatic confrontation with his frenemy Rogojin. Even before he collapsed, I knew something was up, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck start to creep up toward my head. Everything I was reading was suddenly becoming very, painfully familiar.

Here’s an audio link to the page at the excellent Librivox site… go to Part II Chapter V.)

The part that really frightened me, and may frighten you, is that I’ve recently been randomly, irresponsibly thinking that, at a certain level, a lot of  mental disturbances converge near a single point. The bi-polar, suffering from a breakdown, acts much like someone with anxiety disorder, or psychosis, or even certain stops along the Autism Spectrum. It’s a pleasant mental exercise. And then… this. Dostoyevsky (you know what, WordPress spellcheck? Here! Достоевский! Spellcheck that!) describes everything in painful detail; the flash of insight, the pure body-high, the thought that you’re plugged in directly to The Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Noodly Wonderfulness, followed by paranoia, dread, and fear… this is real. Or at least it felt real when I read it.

Happy reading, folks.

Yup, I am talking about By The Shores of Silver Lake.

Yes, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book.

This book is still written in the vein of her earlier novels… it’s mostly sweet, genuinely heartwarming without being treacly (though Grownup Chris had more of a problem with Laura always telling Mary that she would see something out loud for her… once or twice would have been enough…) and, while episodic, still a satisfying book. Perhaps that’s why certain things, like Laura finding out one that of her friends, who had just turned thirteen, was married off (and considered ‘lucky’ by her own mother because of it), or seeing Ma tell Laura to lock herself and the girls in their room so their boarders don’t break in and do G-D only knows what, or hearing of murder and frontier justice on the high prairie, stand out a lot more than they would in an all-around dark book. True, people on the frontier had to be concerned with practicality above civilization, but I still don’t remember my third-grade teacher highlighting these points when she read this book to us.

I’m actually kind of worried, now. The two “Little House” books that I have the least memory of are this one and The Long Winter, but the few memories I have of the latter are already dark. What shall I find in that one?