G. Wayne Miller's Blog, page 17

#33Stories: No. 8, "The Work of Human Hands"

#33Stories
No. 8: “The Work of Human Hands”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Originally published in 1993 by Random House.


Introduction to the new edition, Crossroad Press, 2012:

During the course of my writing career, I have been privileged to meet many extraordinary people, from many walks of life. Hardy Hendren belongs to a rare class. Measured by the good he has done for so many others, directly through his operations and indirectly through his teachings and the surgeons he trained (and the surgeons they have now trained), he ranks with another pioneer I knew and wrote about in my book King of Hearts: C. Walton Lillehei, remembered as The Father of Open Heart Surgery. A rare class, indeed: a class of two.

This new edition of The Work of Human Hands, which includes an updated Epilogue, remains a testament to Hardy’s impact on countless thousands of lives.
To that group, I must add my own.

As recounted in the Foreword, I met Hardy almost 25 years ago, when I was at a critical juncture in my development as a writer. I had published one book, Thunder Rise, a horror/mystery novel, and I had dreams of one day writing only fiction. My day job was staff writer at The Providence Journal, a newspaper published every day since its founding in 1829. Hardy welcomed me into his world and the book that resulted began my run as a non-fiction author –– a run that allowed me the freedom to continue my fiction and also to make movies.

But Hardy gave me something more valuable than a professional boost. He gave me reminders of the value of hard work and discipline; of the need for honesty, decency and charity; of the importance of family; and of the eventual rewards of perseverance, even when the going is protracted and tough, as writing, like life, often is. More than this, Hardy gave lasting friendship, along with did Eleanor, his lovely wife. He brought my three children into his circle (he is godfather to my son, Calvin). Hardy and I continue to share stories, laughs and joys (and a few sorrows). I sometimes turn to him for counsel, and he sometimes seeks mine. Some will say this crosses a journalistic line, but for every rule, there is an exception. This rule, I gladly break. So Hardy, my heartfelt thanks.

In preparing this edition of The Work of Human Hands with Crossroad publisher David N. Wilson (to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude), Hardy and I spoke repeatedly on the phone, and the emails went back and forth. On the eve of bringing his non-profit educational foundation to fruition, his gift to generations now and in the future, Hardy felt honored to have the book return to print. In one of his messages to me, he summarized the mutual sentiments that were forged so many years ago, when researching and writing the words on these pages. He wrote:

“I have always felt it was my good fortune that you came to see me with a book in mind!  From that came a great book and a very valued lifelong friendship. Any time the Millers would like to breathe the pure Duxbury air, come with the whole family.”

The invitation, as you might imagine, holds true on this end, too.

In my book (as it were), Hardy Hendren is the best.

-- 30 --

READ on Kindle

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LISTEN on Audible

READ the paperback edition.

Context:

Fate is a funny thing. I was a journalist by day and a horror/mystery/sci-fi writer by night (and early morning) when, in 1989, the year “Thunder Rise” was published, a young man who had worked briefly (and brilliantly) at The Providence Journal after graduating from Brown University contacted me. Jon Karp had taken a job as an editorial assistant at Random House. He said he had always liked my writing and wondered if I had any book ideas.

I did: “Asylum,” the sequel to “Thunder Rise.”

Jon did not want fiction. Did I have any non-fiction ideas?

I did: Dr. W. Hardy Hendren, the chief of surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, a true surgical miracle worker. Jon liked that. “The Work of Human Hands” was the first book he ever bought – but hardly the last in his long and distinguished career. He went on to buy and edit three more of my non-fiction books at Random House -- and more recently he bought a fifth, “Top Brain, Bottom Brain,” co-authored with neuroscientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, as publisher of Simon & Schuster, the title he holds today. Jon took a chance on me in 1989 when there was little reason to – my single published book was horror! – and I remain grateful to this day.

The reviews for “The Work of Human Hands” were positive, including these glowing words from the Los Angeles Times. I remember vividly when Jon called with work of it – how excited he was: "Only rarely does a work of nonfiction equal or surpass the novel in the art of storytelling, the play of emotion and the sheer grandeur of human spirit. Alive! by Piers Paul Read was such a book. So was Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and, more recently, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. To this short list I must add The Work of Human Hands.''

The Chicago Tribune also liked the book, writing "Worshipful biographies of great surgeons are so common that one must really be special to merit attention. This one is.'' And how thrilling to receive my first review in The New York Times, with the Book Review stating “"Mr. Miller reminds us that in the hands of visionary and dedicated doctors, miracles still happen.''

Synopsis:

THE WORK OF HUMAN HANDS is a timeless medical journey through pioneering surgeon Dr. Hardy Hendren’s legendary operating room that the Los Angeles Times called “impossible to forget.”

Set at Boston Children’s Hospital, which U.S. News & World Report consistently rates as America’s best children’s hospital, THE WORK OF HUMAN HANDS is available now for the first time in digital format and a new paperback will also be available soon. The new edition includes a fresh introduction and a greatly expanded epilogue updating readers on Hendren and patient Lucy Moore today.

The central narrative remains an epic story of struggle against seemingly impossible odds as Hendren faces one of his biggest challenges: Lucy Moore, a fourteen-month-old girl born with life-threatening defects of the heart, central nervous system and genitourinary system. Before Hendren, surgeons regarded Lucy's condition as fatal.

But at the hands of master surgeon Hendren, she will go on to lead a normal life. And Hendren is aided in that quest by Aldo R. Castaneda, the pioneering cardiac surgeon, and R. Michael Scott, the internationally renowned neurosurgeon. Hendren, Castaneda and Scott are all affiliated with the Harvard Medical School.

The Work of Human Hands is also the story of a revered hospital, its lore, its people and their remarkable accomplishments – an example of the best of health care in America. Poignant and dramatic, lively and engrossing, with breathtaking insight into the craft of surgery, The Work of Human Hands is medical and literary journalism at its best.

“At a time when TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER win huge followings for their stories, The Work of Human Hands stands out as a real-life medical drama with a cast of uniquely colorful characters,” said Crossroad publisher David N. Wilson. “We are thrilled to publish this new edition of the classic Work of Human Hands.”

Said author G. Wayne Miller: “At a time when health care dominates the public discourse, and rightly so, it’s refreshing to rejoice in the triumphs. American medicine truly can perform miracles.”

Today, the 14-month-old baby who spent nearly 24 hours on Hendren’s operating table is a college graduate, fully healed. Hendren performed his last surgery in 2004, when he was 78, but he continues to work full-time on his non-profit W. Hardy Hendren Education Foundation for Pediatric Surgery and Urology. He still receives some of the world’s most prestigious medical honors, most recently the Jacobson Innovation Award of the American College of Surgeons, in June 2012.

The publisher and author are donating a portion of the proceeds from this edition of The Work of Human Hands to the Hendren Foundation.

The paperback edition, 1999, Borderlands Press.

#33Stories: No. 7, "God Can Be a Cruel Bastard"

#33Stories
No. 7: “God Can Be a Cruel Bastard”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Originally published in “Chilled to the Bone,” 1990, The Berkley Publishing Group.




pp. 234 - 235 of "God Can Be a Cruel Bastard":

At 11: 30, I left the bar and drove to Sunset Point. It was Monday, a night off for Wakefield's holy hell-raisers, and I wasn't terribly worried about the police. The cemetery gates were secured with a chain and lock for the night, but I was prepared for that. Before leaving New York, I'd purchased bolt-cutters – spent almost 50 bucks for them – and they did the job cleanly and easily. I drove through, stopped, and closed the gates behind me.

It was a cinch finding Steve's grave. I parked by the war memorial, got out and opened the trunk. It was full of tools. Brand-new tools I'd bought at the same store where I'd purchased the bolt-cutters. There was a shovel. A crow bar. A sledgehammer. A screwdriver. A battery-powered lantern. I hadn't found a winch.

Before I picked up any of those tools, I stood.

Stood and remembered once again – there were a million memories that day, too many to begin to sort out – remembered the high-school conversations we'd had not far from here.
It had always been Steve's biggest nightmare.

That someday he would die, and having no say from that point on about the fate of his earthly remains, he would be buried. That having been buried, having been locked into his satin-lined box – tons of earth above him, six feet of hard-packed earth impenetrable to sound – he would wake up.
Wake up.

Fully conscious.

In his casket.

His locked, pitch-dark casket. Would wake up like that, and would run his fingers along the cloth, would pry his frantic fingers into the joint between the coffin's lid and bottom, would locate the hinges... rusted solid, rusted forever...

and then he would scream.

Scream through bloodless lips. Scream, the impossibly stuffy air filling his lungs, his fingers tearing madly at his surroundings, his sweat profuse and dank like the mold already beginning to grow around him.

And then – then, at the moment when panic was greatest – there would be the pronouncement.
Maybe it would only be inside his head. Maybe it would actually be a voice, deep, throaty, authoritative.

God's voice.

Forever.

Just that single word, forever.

Steve would hear it, and he would begin to scream again, and then it would happen... utter hopelessness, drowning him.

But not truly drowning him, of course.

Forever.

Never to sleep.

No eternal rest.

God can be a cruel bastard, he always said. Wouldn't that be a cruel bastard kind of thing to do? Wouldn't that bring a smile to a cruel bastard's lips?

Please don't think Steve was a morbid son of a bitch, because he wasn't. Not about most stuff. He didn't believe in ghosts or goblins or vampires or spirits or any of that flapdoodle. Just this hangup, this crazy conviction that God was saving this practical joke for him – him, specifically for him, a conviction so firm you'd think it had been written in the Bible somewhere.

I should mention that Steve had another fear that chilled him to the bone. Claustrophobia. The paralyzing fear of enclosed spaces. The fear of closets, phone booths, tunnels, caves.

And coffins....

-- 30 –

READ “God Can Be a Cruel Bastard” in “Since the Sky Blew Off: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 1, Kindle Edition.”


Context:

They say horror writers exorcise their fears by writing. They’re right. “God Can Be a Cruel Bastard” is how I tried to chase one of mine back in the early 1990s.

It also is an example, one of many, where you will find a degree of reflection and commentary on social and cultural issues, including politics, the treatment of women, the stigma surrounding those living with mental illness and intellectual disability – and, in this case, religion. Raised Roman Catholic during the era of the unforgiving and scary Baltimore Catechism by the daughter of Irish immigrants (and a once-Protestant father who converted), I was trying to make sense of organized faith, which for some is salvation and blessing, and for others cruelty and real-life horror. Look around the world today.

But I digress. Come back tomorrow for an uplifting story about a real-life miracle worker…

#33Stories: No. 6, "Freddy and Rita"

#33Stories
No. 6: “Freddy and Rita”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Originally published in NECON stories, 1990, Three Bobs Press, Providence, R.I.



pp. 40 – 41 of “Freddy and Rita”:

The missiles fall at noon on a perfect August day. New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles –– all gone, instantly. Springfield, Massachusetts, a small city west of Boston, has the misfortune to be spared. The nearest hit is the submarine base at New London Connecticut, fifty miles south. Before they sign off, the emergency people on the radio and TV say it will be eight hours before the cloud reaches Springfield. Plenty of time, they predict, to evacuate north to Vermont where only one weapon, an errant one that failed to detonate, has dropped into a pasture.

It is six-twenty p.m.

Freddy is hungry. Freddy has a weight problem and he's almost always hungry. He strolls Merchants Mall rifling through the trash barrels, as is his wont, for something good to eat. Usually, he is rewarded — half a hot dog, a Chicken McNugget, the soggy bottom of Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone, his favorite treat — but today, the pickings are slim. He moves down the mall, working the barrels, humming a tune whose words he's never learned. In Angelo's Department store, the window-display TVs are still on, but only silver static fills the screens. On the street corners, the traffic lights continue through their cycles: red to green to yellow and back to red. Smoke curls from a small fire in the alley behind Burger King. It is quiet.

Freddy is alone.

Six or seven hours ago (or was it more? time is such an elusive concept), the mall was mobbed. When the announcement came, there was a moment of silence. You could see something new, something terrible, in the faces of the shoppers and bankers and secretaries on their lunchtime strolls. Like someone had died or the president had been shot. It didn't last, that strange silence. Soon there was screaming, and people running, and cars racing, and horns blaring, and then there was a traffic jam that didn't unclog.

When most everyone had gone, the looters moved in. Freddy found shelter in a doorway and watched. It was kind of funny, what they went after. Not the TVs or jewelry or even the money in the banks, as near as he could tell. Things like flashlights and battery-powered radios and cans of soda. Freddy even saw one guy with a bag of canned hams come tearing out of the deli. Freddy went to get one for himself, but by the time he got there, they were all gone, along with all the cheeses and bologna and chicken roll.

Today is Freddy's 42nd birthday.

This morning, with Mother's help, he dressed in his madras shorts and that green shirt with the alligator over the pocket that she gave him last Christmas. He put on white knee socks and sneakers and, lastly, his Red Sox cap. He's never been to Fenway Park, but you don't have to in order to get one of those caps. You can buy them right inside the sports department at Angelo's, and Freddy did, his last birthday, right after Mother's check came in. When he gets home tonight, she's going to have a special meal for him. Hot dogs, and potato salad, and chocolate ice cream with fudge sauce and whipped cream from a can for dessert.

He continues up the mall. Now and again, he looks at the sky. It is still cloudless. He doesn't know what the cloud they say's coming will look like: a normal fluffy white cloud, or maybe a dark cloud, like before the thunderstorm or the hurricane that September weekend a few years back. He doesn't know what will drop out of the cloud, if anything at all.
Freddy finds Rita at the fountain.

The water isn't squirting out today, but there's plenty left in the pool, and she's sitting next to it, her head cocked toward the sky, her sunglasses on. Cool. It's like she's getting a tan…

-- 30 --

READ “Freddy and Rita” in “The Big Book of NECON,” the 2009 collection edited by Bob Booth.

READ “Freddy and Rita” in “Since the Sky Blew Off: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 1, Kindle Edition.”

THE ORIGINAL “NECON Stories.” 



Context:

Another dystopian story, written as the Cold War had finally breathed its last, but not without the possibility of nuclear holocaust continuing. Those who lived through the tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. were affected in many ways – ways that, to one degree or another, continue – and have been resurrected with Kim Jong-un’s North Korea ballistic capabilities. Writers then and now worked these fears into their fiction. Stephen King, for example, in works including The Stand, which was a big influence on my own writing.

Which brings us to NECON, officially Camp NECON: The Northeastern Writers’ Conference, the annual gathering co-founded in 1980 by Mary Booth and the late Bob Booth (whose obituary I had the honor of writing for The Providence Journal).

King was an early attendee at NECON, back in the day, as the saying goes, when he was rising fast on the literary scene but not quite the best-selling master he became. I attended several NECONs in the mid and late ‘80s, with writers and artists including Gahan Wilson, Tom Monteleone, Elizabeth Massie, Kathryn Ptacek, Paul F. Olson, Peter Straub, Chet Williamson, Robert McCammon, David Wilson, Courtney Skinner, and the late Charles F. Grant and Les Daniels. Good times down there at Roger Williams University. Lasting friendships made.

I never met King at NECON, though his “The Old Dude’s Ticker,” written in the early 1970s but not sold at that time, was the story before “Freddy and Rita” in the “The Big Book of NECON.” I did, however, have the chance to meet King in New York, in 1986. He was granting interviews for Maximum Overdrive, the film he directed, in his suite in a hotel overlooking Central Park. What a thrill to meet him! I had been hooked on King since reading ‘Salem’s Lot – which, like much of his work, maybe all, has withstood the test of time.

Here’s that story:


KING OF HORROR His career's in 'Overdrive' as he directs his first film
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: August 3, 1986  Page: I-01  Section: ARTS  Edition: ALL  

STEPHEN KING, the most popular horror writer of all time, is eating pizza - thick, oily, mega-calorie pizza with all the fixings. He's eating it the way a big hungry kid would - ferociously and noisily. Stephen King loves pizza, just as he loves scaring the pants off people.

King, who has made enough money from what he calls his "marketable obsession" to buy Brooks Brothers' entire inventory, is dressed in jeans, work shirt, running shoes. Comfort is the thing for King, who sets many of his stories in rural Maine, the place he's lived most of his 38 years.

Would his visitor like a slice of that greasy monster masquerading as a pizza, he asks politely? No? Then have a seat. Feel at home.

He sits - flops is probably a better word - onto an oversized chair in his hotel suite. King is well over six feet tall, and his long legs seem to stretch halfway across this elegantly furnished sitting room. He brushes his black hair off his face, grins mischievously, and peers from behind thick glasses, his "Coke bottles," as he's referred to them.

"Whatever you want to talk about," he says in a voice that is a curious mix of Downeast twang and Ted Kennedy drone. "The film is what I'm supposed to talk about, so why don't we start with the film?"

Maximum Overdrive, King's first shot at directing, opened last weekend. It's about a group of people trapped by driverless vehicles in an isolated truck stop the week all the machines in the world go murderously beserk. Machines gone mad. It's a favorite King theme, and if one were to psychoanalyze it, the connection to modern man's uneasy coexistence with his nuclear genie would be hard to miss.

The obvious first question, of course, is why a one-time teacher who has parlayed a lifelong fascination with the macabre into a fairy-tale existence as best-selling author (70 million books in print) would want to trade his golden pen for a camera.

Certainly, King is no stranger to movies. He admits to being a horror-movie junkie growing up in the '50s and '60s; as an adult, he has written the screenplays for five films, including Overdrive. Eight of his full-length novels have been made into films of varying quality, and another four (including Pet Sematary, his most recent) are in various stages of production. On top of all that, several King short stories have been adapted for TV, and an unpublished novel has been sold for a mini-series.

So why direct?

"Curiosity," he says, continuing to gorge himself on pizza.

Actually, it wasn't simply curiosity that prompted King to accept movie mogul Dino De Laurentis's offer to direct.

Pleased with some

Although King is pleased with some film adaptations of his works - he thinks Cujo and The Dead Zone are great - he has been disappointed with others. In particular, Firestarter, Children of the Corn, and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, still make King cringe. (He once described Firestarter as "flavorless," like "cafeteria mashed potatoes.")

The disappointing films, King explains between bites, failed to capture the spirit of his written works - either they didn't frighten, or took implausible twists, or were blandly acted, or sloppily directed, whatever. With Overdrive, King finally wanted to see if he could capture that spirit on film. If he couldn't, well, at least he'd have no one but himself to blame.

"My son's got this wonderful imitation of Leonard Malton on Entertainment Tonight," King says, becoming suddenly animated.

"He'll start off the way he always starts off when he's going to give a really bad review. He'll say, 'This is Leonard Malton, Entertainment Tonight. Stephen King says that he wanted to direct a picture to see if whatever makes his books so successful could be translated to film if he did it himself.

" 'The answer is no]' "

King grins. "Actually," he continues, "the answer is yes. I think. I think it has a lot of appeal of the books."

Not that he's exactly rehearsing his Academy Award acceptance speech, as he notes wryly. Although the film does not look amateurish - for a rookie, King's grasp of cinematic technique is quite impressive - its human characters are undeveloped. And despite King's hopes, Overdrive only hints at his books' rich textures. It's hard to escape the conclusion that what King does so well in print probably can't be translated onto the silver screen.

"I think by and large this movie will get kind of a sour critical reception," he predicts. "It's a 'moron movie,' for one thing. It's crash and bash. It's a head-banger movie - really, really loud."

Promotional tour

Critics notwithstanding, King believes audiences will like Overdrive as much as he does. He hopes so, anyway. The only reason he agreed to do a nationwide promotional tour is to hype the film. Too many earlier King films, he laments, have lasted in theaters all of two weeks.

"Graham Greene said . . . writers write books they can't find on library shelves. To some extent, I think directors must direct movies that they can't go and watch in movie theaters.

"Overdrive is fun. I like movies where you can just, like, check your brains at the box office and pick 'em up two hours later. Sit and kind of let it flow over you and, you know, dig on it. This movie is just sort of gaudy blaaaaah. It's not a heavy social statement," he asserts.

Suddenly, without warning, the lines on King's face deepen, his eyes become cat slits and he's baring his teeth - he's got one hell of a set of incisors, one discovers. Normally a rational and intelligent human being, he's transformed himself into a raving lunatic.

He jumps up and screams: "One of the things I wanted was to never let up. My idea is that what you do is build up, like reaching out and grabbing somebody by the ----] Right out of the page if possible or right out of the screen] Tell you what, ------------, you're mine]]]]]]"

He sits down again, laughing like - like a kid.

Four new novels

To say that Stephen King is big is a little like saying Carrie, telekinetic murderess of his first novel, is odd.

Some noteworthy footnotes to the King saga:

* The initial hardcover printing of last year's Skeleton Crew, his second anthology, was one million copies, one of the largest first hardcover printings in publishing history.

* King books are hot collectors items. In May, for example, an uncorrected proof of his Night Shift collection brought $2,500 at a San Francisco auction. A small-press magazine in which one of his stories appeared years ago brought a cool $150.

* For a decade, King's books have consistently topped the best-seller lists. According to Publishers Weekly, his scorecard for 1985 included the fifth and 11th best-selling fiction hardcover books; the second, fourth and eight best-selling mass paperbacks; and the second and third best-selling trade paperbacks. Total sales of those seven books alone: 11.49 million.

* King has his own monthly newspaper, Castle Rock, published and edited by his secretary, Stephanie Leonard.

* Against the advice of his publisher, who's worried that the market will be saturated (King disagrees), King will release four new novels in the next year, including the 1,000-page-plus IT later this summer.

* A musical version of Carrie takes to Broadway this fall.

Not to mention all those movies.

This being America, money has come hand-in-hand with his fame. King is so rich that when someone threatened to buy his favorite radio station in Bangor, Maine, and replace its rock format with EZ Listening, he rushed out and bought it himself. Rumor has it he paid cash.

The unknowns remain

Naturally, there are secrets to King's success.

One - hardly the best-kept - is that people, millions of them, anyway, like to be scared. Late at night, with the wind moaning, the leaves on the trees rustling, the kids sleeping (are they still breathing?) and something downstairs making a strange noise (is it only the cat?), they love to curl up with a good scary book and let the chills crawl down their spines.

King has lectured and written extensively about fear. He understands that no matter how technologically advanced we become, no matter how much the scientists figure out about ourselves and our world, the great unknowns remain: darkness, death, whatever is beyond the grave.

Still, there are plenty of horror writers slogging away out there, including several who have won critical acclaim - such as Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho, and Peter Straub, author of the million-seller Ghost Story, and J.N. Williamson and Richard Matheson, two of the more prolific writers of the genre. Some are literary, closer to Poe than King; others are more gruesome, more skilled with plot. In terms of popularity, King has eclipsed them all.

The real secret is where King has taken horror - out of the Egyptian mummy's tomb and straight into the living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens of contemporary middle- and lower-class America. King's landscape is the America of kids and pets and Coke and malls and cheeseburgers and troubles with the mortgage payment and that old clunker, the family car - much the same vision of America that Steven Speilberg has brought to Hollywood.

Not that everything is ordinary in King's works. Whether haunted car or haunted child, King's villains and monsters and spirits are deeply troubling, frequently uncontrollable, and usually deadly. There's a lot of darkness in King's work, and plenty of ghosts. Death is never very far away.

It is precisely this juxtaposition - ordinary people victimized by extraordinary forces - that is the key to all good horror, not just King's.

Hitting the nerves

Still . . . 70 million books, 16 movies, a Broadway play, and no end in sight?

"Some of it," King explains as he polishes off lunch, "has got to be that I'm talking about things that, like you say, hit nerves. Or maybe they don't hit nerves - maybe they just resonate.

"You know, people say, 'I know about that, because that happened to me.' I don't mean an ability to light fires or anything like that (the heroine of Firestarter is a young girl with pyrotechnic powers), but something about family life, or something your kid said, something like that."

Not that King's intent is anthropological exposition; he is not a scholar, nor does he pretend to be. He bases his fiction on situations he understands because they've been his life, too - family, marriage, the battle (at least in the early days) for a buck. King and his wife, Tabitha, also an author, have three children. The eldest is 16.

"I don't write with an audience in mind. I mean, the audience is me. My popularity says something about my own mind. It's a little bit distressing when you think about it. It says, 'Well, here's a person who's so perfectly in tune with middle-cultural drone that there must be this incredible bowling alley echo inside his head.' "

Even King's detractors - there's no shortage of critics who dismiss his work as insignificant - concede that he has a true talent for depicting children. Maybe that's because King himself could well be the biggest kid in America. Even when they are blessed/cursed with supernatural powers, King's fictional children are flesh and blood - so seemingly real that you wonder if they don't actually exist somewhere, and King is only documenting their lives.

In fact, King's own children have had enormous impact, and if you doubt that, you only need look at his dedications.

"I grew up with them," he says. "Bringing up baby or child or children or whatever has been one of the experiences of my life, and so it's one of the things I write about. But also it's a way of trying to make sense of how the child you were yourself became the man that you are and that whole crazy business."

Woes with women

As good as King has been creating children, he has had his woes with women, as countless critics have been quick to point out.

"I've had such problems with women characters," he agrees, the smile leaving his face. "God knows I have tried. I tried with Donna Trenton in Cujo - tried to make a real woman. (I thought) she worked pretty well, except I got hit pretty hard by a lot of critics. An awful lot of critics said the dog is punishment for adultery.

"The death of her child . . . consciously, on top of my mind, I was simply trying to create a convincing chain of events that would put the boy and her in that position where they could spend a period of time. But when you think about it. . . .

"Yes, I've had trouble with women. It's funny because that's why I started to write Carrie. This friend of mine said to me, 'The trouble with you is you don't understand women.' I said, 'What do you mean?' It's like he'd accused me of being a virgin or something like that, which I just barely wasn't at that time.

"He says, 'Ah, all these stories with these hairy-chested horror things, these guys fighting monsters and stuff like that.' I was trying to tell him, 'You don't understand. That's what they buy, these men's magazines.' He said, 'You couldn't create a woman character if you tried. You know, a good one.' I said I bet I could. Carrie - that's a book about women, almost completely about women. There are almost no male characters in it."

Father ran off

By now, the story of King's climb to the top is legendary.

It begins with a kid growing up in Maine and (for four years) in Connecticut - a kid whose father ran off never to be heard from again, a kid whose mother raised him and his elder brother on a shoestring. On the outside, King was a polite child who liked cars, played some sports - but inside, he would later recall, he often felt unhappy, "different," even violent.

He remembers writing his first horror story at the age of seven; it was about dinosaurs on a rampage. Through his teens, he read voraciously, spent hours in movie theaters, kept on writing and writing and writing. It was while attending the University of Maine, Orono, that he began to sell short stories to magazines. But his novels, and there were several of them by this point, were going nowhere.

After college, he and his wife worked a succession of jobs to keep their family afloat: Tabitha as a waitress, he as a worker in a coin laundry and as an English teacher at a private school. The short stories kept selling - they were helping to pay the rent on the tiny trailer where they lived - but the novels were still moribund.

King wrote Carrie working late into the night in the furnace room of their trailer - the only available space in already cramped quarters. Somewhere, King says, they still have the Olivetti portable typewriter on which he banged out several early novels and stories.

The old portable

"There were no word processors then," King remembers. "I used my wife's portable. She stills says sometimes - in jest, I think - 'My husband married me for my portable typewriter.' It's got my fingerprints carved into the keys. I mean, I beat that thing to death just about.

"I used to have to bring Joe in in his crib to where I worked, which was the furnace room. You'd get hot and you'd be going along good and he'd wake up and you'd have to give him a bottle because he'd cried. It was just, you know, you get it done the best you can.

"You don't raise your head and look around, because if you do you just get depressed. And I was depressed then. Because I was selling some short stories, but I had had like three, four novels bounced back at me at that time and also a number of other short stories."

Even after finally selling Carrie to Doubleday, the struggle continued.

"My wife used to work at 'Drunken' Donuts,' which is what they called it on the night shift. I used to take care of the kids while I did the rewrite. This was after the contract and everything, but before we had any money. I mean, the contract was only for $2,500. It wasn't exactly a king's ransom," he says, seemingly unaware of the pun.

The big break came with the paperback contract for Carrie, which had done reasonably well in hardcover. King had expected to earn $5,000 to $12,000 on the paperback rights. When his editor called to tell him that the sale had been for $400,000, virtually unprecedented at the time for a newcomer, he was flabbergasted.

He celebrated by buying the thing he thought his wife would like the most - a $29 hair dryer.

'Normal' life in Maine

It seems a lifetime ago, those early days.

Today, King and his family live in a large Victorian house in Bangor. He has a summer home on a Maine lake, drives a Mercedes, is a Red Sox fan, loves beer as much as pizza, enjoys tennis and softball, usually wears a beard in winter. Except when he's on tour, he writes every day of the year, except Christmas, the Fourth of July and his birthday. He does the family shopping. His children attend public schools.

"They don't have any sense that there's anything really odd about what I do because I've never made out like I'm a big shot because I don't feel that I am. Also, we don't live in New York or California, where they might live in an atmosphere that's a little stranger. They seem pretty normal."

Although he is Bangor's most famous citizen - arguably Maine's, as well - the natives, he says, "mostly leave me alone. I have the town broken in. I guess familiarity breeds contempt."

Not that he hasn't become something of a celebrity for the tourists - a class of citizen he has often lampooned in his written works.

"Oh, sure," he says. "They have Canadian tour buses that come down to go to the mall - the Bangor Mall, which is the closest real big super mall to Nova Scotia. One of the things they throw in with this is you get to go by the 'Stephen King House,' like you're stuffed and embalmed. You're in there and one day you look out and you see this huge bus with 150 Canadians lined up along the fence snapping pictures. It's very odd."

Next interview

A TV crew has arrived early to set up for King's next interview. "Let's go into the bedroom," he suggests. "It's quieter." He gets up, crosses the room and closes the door behind him. Stretching full-length on his unmade bed, he props himself up on his elbows and resumes talking about his film.

Overdrive is based on "Trucks," one of several brilliant short stories in his first anthology, Night Shift.

"It's always been my favorite from that collection," he says. "Trucks I liked just for the feel of it. It had a desperate film noir quality as a story."

Machines gone mad. In Overdrive, which will be remembered more for its special effects and pyrotechnics than its acting or social significance, they go one step further: They try to take over the world. Knives, soda machines, video games, lawnmowers, a drawbridge, cars, 18-wheelers - all become killers.

"I'm fascinated by (machines)," King says enthusiastically. "They scare me. There's so much potential for destruction. In the film there's a track shot that starts on this hammock that's empty and swinging. In the background you see a guy who's obviously had his head cut off by his own chainsaw. The chainsaw is buried somewhere in his neck.

"There's a little Watchman with a little teeny screen giving this information about machines having gone beserk. The camera pans down and tracks and you see an overturned Styrofoam cooler and then you see empty beer bottles and then you see the Watchman. It doesn't have a picture on it but it's splattered with blood.

"Then you see the guy and you track up his body and he's all been shredded because he's been, you know, 'lawn-mowered' to death. You come to the lawnmower itself and it's all covered with blood and everything. When it finally runs, it chases this kid. It's quite funny."

He chuckles, then pauses. "Well to me, it's funny," he explains. "A lot of people are going to say it's gross and gratuitous. That's OK."

Machines and actors

King chose Overdrive for his directorial debut because he thought it would be easier to work with special effects and machines rather than with real-life actors.

It turned out to be the other way around.

"I thought to myself: 'My electric knife is never going to say, 'I can't cut the actress's arm today because my hairdresser didn't come in from New York.' My truck is never going to say, 'I can't run by myself today because I'm having my period.' You know what I mean?

"I went into the thing with a lot of the stereotyped ideas that people get about actors. You know, 'They're a bunch of conceited snobs. They're all babyish, you have to baby them along, you have to always be feeding them constant praise, they're always difficult to work with,' all this stuff.

"It turned out all to be b-------. They all worked really hard. They gave me more than 150 percent. They were almost always at their best.

"The actors were great, but all the machines . . . they wouldn't run. The trucks wouldn't start. We crashed four vehicles that were supposed to roll over before one finally did, and that was only on the third take. We had problems with the power mower. It was radio-controlled. Back at the studio, it went like a bat out of hell. Get it on location, it would just sit there.

"The electric knife that goes beserk . . . skittering along the floor like a big bug. The special-effects guys built three knives using dildo motors - basically vibrator motors to make them work. Two of them got wrecked on bad takes and we only had one left and we had to get it right. Luckily we did."

What scares him

The TV people are ready and time is almost up.

A few questions remain.

What scares you?

"Just about everything, in one way or another," he says. "But I think the thing that scares me most would be to check on one of my kids one night and find him dead in bed."

Did you ever expect to sell 70 million books?

"I don't even know what that figure means," he says, as if still finding it impossible to believe. "Do you realize if I live along enough there could be as many copies of my stuff actually sold as there are people in the country?"

No, King never expected all this - not even in his wildest dreams.

Are you afraid that someday it'll all be gone?

"Yeah," he laughs, starting to act out a scene from a movie where an enormously fat man explodes after a gargantuan meal. "Someday I'll just burst like that guy in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Did you see that? 'Just one more mint.' 'Nah, I'll burst'. . . and he did."

#33Stories: No. 5, "Thunder Rise"

#33Stories
No. 5: “Thunder Rise”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

A horror novel originally published in 1989 by William Morrow, with later paperback, foreign, Kindle and audiobook editions.



pp. 128 – 129 of the original hardcover edition:

“Oh, honey…” He wrapped his arms around her.

“She was quivering. Any worse, and he would have believed she was convulsing. He tightened his embrace. He couldn’t ever recall experiencing such a strong sense of how fragile, how small a child really is. Not even when she was a baby had the feeling been so powerful. He’d often thought he would lay down his life for his child. Until he’d never realized how willingly he’d actually do it.
“Shhhh.” He soothed her. His own breath were coming in heaves. He was becoming aware of a ballooning pain in his left foot. “It w-w-was there,” she cried. “B-b-by the window.”

“What, sweetheart?”

“A R-r-rham-pho-rhyn-chus.”

“It must have been a nightmare.”

“But it w-w-wasn’t. It opened the window. It was there. It had huge wings.”

“A nightmare, honey.”

“No. I saw it. It flew in and – and… started coming closer and closer. Right on my bed. I was trying to get away and – and that’s why I’m on the… floor.”

“But there aren’t dinosaurs anymore,” he reminded her gently. “There haven’t been for millions and millions of years. You know that.”

She could not be dissuaded. “But I saw it. And it talked to me. It said it was going to – to take me away. Not tonight, but someday. “When it was good and ready,’ it said. And I was going to… die. Daddy… please don’t let it…” Her crying, which had tapered off, returned with tidal force.

“Shhhh. Sometimes we think we see things, but it’s only a dream. Dream can be very real, you know. Very real. I remember when I was just your age, I used to dream that I could fly. I could see trees and roofs and cars and people, all very tiny down there. It was cold up so high, and I could hear the wind rushing by, and I was sure I was flying. But then I would wake up and know it was a dream.”

-- 30 --

READ the 2001 paperback edition.

READ Thunder Rise on Kindle.

LISTEN to the audio book.

(The original hardcover, paperback and foreign editions are long out of print)

Context:

Will, first let me say I was very fond of italics… and ellipses. I have since become more sparing!

Completion and publication of “Thunder Rise” was the realization of a long dream. The fact that it was edited by the late Alan D. Williams, who edited Stephen King among other greats, was frosting on the cake, if you’ll pardon a bad and mixed metaphor. I remember clear as yesterday meeting Alan in his office some number of stories up in a building in midtown Manhattan, where he had welcome Kind and the many others, how awed I was. What was a guy from rural Rhode Island doing there? I lived then in Pascoag, where I raised my family.

I had arrived there thanks to Kay McCauley, who, with her brother the late Kirby McCauley, represented King and many other great writer (Kay still reps George R.R. Martin, he of “Game of Thrones”). I met Kay at the 12th World Fantasy Convention, held in 1986 at The Biltmore in Providence, right across from The Providence Journal. She took a chance on me, like many other at various stages of my fiction and non-fiction careers, and I remain deeply grateful. Thanks again, Kay, for being my agent for so many years and books.

“Thunder Rise” was also my first exposure to critics, and on this debut novel, they were mostly kind. "A modern-day journey into a darkened world where the souls of children are the stakes," wrote Library Journal; "Well-paced and effective," wrote Publishers Weekly; "A promising debut," said Tulsa Oklahoma World.

Not that the hatchets did not eventually come out. The details escape me after so long, but it may have been “Thunder Rise” – more likely, the later, non-fiction “Coming of Age” – that elicited this beginning of a review from The Los Angeles Times: “You hate to get down on a writer from Rhode Island; after all, how many of them can there be?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty damn close.

Ouch!

Anyway, “Thunder Rise” established made me an author. It further motivated me to write, and it was a good calling card for other editors, including, a couple of years later, a young editor at Random House, Jon Karp, now the publisher of Simon & Schuster. More about that book and Jon Karp coming on Day 8.

Bound galleys, first such I ever saw. Paperback editions Trade paperback edition.
The Kindle edition, from Crossroad Press.

#33Stories: No. 4, "We Who Are His Followers"

#33Stories
No. 4: “We Who Are His Followers”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Originally published in The Horror Show, Winter 1987.



A passage from “We Who Are His Followers”:

The day the winds had started, two months ago, so many had been like Gina. So many had turned their backs completely on Him, had turned toward the false one in the foolish hope that in that direction they would be saved, and the winds would stop, and the sands would retreat, and they could get back about the business of their filthy lives. Candlelight vigils were in every public building. The airwaves were jammed with entreaties, offerings, services that went on through the night. Processions filled the city streets, already covered with a growing layer of sand and debris. Many of us who remained true were initially ridiculed, and later arrested, and more than one of us was put to death in gruesome spectacles that filled stadiums and malls.

We were fortunate. With Him showing the way, we escaped. Me, Gina, Sarah, among the first of His true believers.

The wind kept coming, and with it the purifying sand, the means of our sanctification, spreading inland from both coasts, spreading toward the coasts from the Great Plains, killing trees and smothering crops and filling reservoirs and choking the air. The migrations began then, entire towns on the march, band after band of frenzied doomed heathens in search of food and water and sanity in a world that seemed to have gone mad. Gina, Sarah and I – the three of us seemed luckier than most. Of course, it was not luck. The strength of our faith kept us alive. Through visions, He delivered us safely to those buildings that still stood, still had canned goods, and water, and shelter from the wind.

Sarah and I fell asleep late that night, the night we found Gina worshipping the false one. The voices of the 'dead did not bother us. We slept the way we always had since the wind – uneasily, with thirsty nightmares that did not end even when we had opened our eyes.

It was dawn when I awoke. Sarah still slumbered.

Something had happened while we'd slept. Something He had ordained, something He had always promised to us, His true believers. The wind had stopped. The sand, as well. For the first time in two months, you could see further than twenty-five feet. You could breathe, and not cough or choke. You could see the ocean, grayish clouds hovering over it like fog. You could see wreckage of another house the wind had devoured, and the mangled top of a swing set, and the partially buried hulk of a windowless old car, and if you dug down a bit, I'm sure you could have seen the mummified bodies of those who had doubted.

Mostly, you could see one great landscape of white, like a Vermont village after snow.

There were no more voices of the dead.

He came to me in a vision then, in the first moment of that strange new quiet, while Sarah slumbered on…

-- 30 --

READ “We Who Are His Followers” in “Since the Sky Blew Off - The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 1 Kindle Edition.” 
The collection also includes my stories “God Can Be A Cruel Bastard,” “We Who Are His Followers,” “Not Just Traces of Me,” “All My Children,” “A Process of Change,” “Windhams’ Folly,” “Freddy and Rita,” “To Be Cold, Like Trees,” “Since the Sky Blew Off” and “The Good Book”; plus two screen treatments: “Money for Nothing” and “Alden’s Neck.”

LISTEN to a Blood Noir podcast, by the marvelous Mark Slade and his talented crew. 


Context:

During the 1980s and into the ‘90s, no one was more supportive of horror writers, especially ones trying to break in, than the late Dave Silva, a writer and publisher of the legendary The Horror Show zine. That is where “We Who Are His Followers” was originally published. Another shining moment for me. I was delighted and humbled.

And it was not the first such moment, courtesy of Dave. I believe that the first story of mine that he took was “Death Train,” which appeared in the Spring 1986 The Horror Show. I remember when the contributor’s copies arrived in the mail – what a celebration that ensued! And when he included me on the cover of the Fall 1987 edition as one of six Rising Stars (the great writer Elizabeth Massie was another), together with my story “God of Self”… well, you can imagine. That and Dave’s generosity in general, at a time when the form rejection letters were arriving regularly, was terrific encouragement to keep going. And not just with the short form, but also the novel after “Drowned” that I had begun: “Thunder Rise,” more on that tomorrow.

During my long fiction- and non-fiction writing career, I have accumulated untold numbers of books, stories, magazines, source materials, etc. It all would fill my house and then some if I had not donated to libraries at the University of Rhode Island, Harvard and elsewhere, and put some in storage. But among the treasures I keep in my study are my copies of The Horror Show, and a beautiful limited edition of Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva, published by Cemetery Dance in 2015 and signed by its editors and contributors, including Elizabeth, writer and editor Paul F. Olson, Robert R. McCammon,, Yvonne Navarro, Joe Lansdale, Tom Monteleone and others. Took it out just this morning and held it in my hands, remembering writing my story contained therein, “Nothing There,”but mostly Dave, who I met just once, at the 1987 World Fantasy Convention in Nashville, but who I held as a dear friend.

This is my tribute to Dave that appeared in Better Weird:

Back then -- back before the modern Internet -- back when Stephen King was just becoming big -- this was how you broke into short horror fiction. You wrote your stories and sent them off with a hopeful cover letter to magazines you’d found in a directory or bought at a bookstore or newsstand. You enclosed a SASE: a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Then you waited.
And waited.

Sometimes it was weeks, even months, before an editor got back to you, if they ever did -- and many did not. The waiting was frustrating and discouraging in the worst way, the form rejection letter like a slap in the face. Occasionally -- very occasionally -- an editor would send a handwritten note.
Or a letter of acceptance.

I received many of those in the mid and late 1980s from Dave Silva, a great publisher and editor. A writer himself, Dave was a wonderful friend of writers: an encouraging and supportive man who just happened to produce, four times a year, from his home in Oak Run, California (on a road called Misty Springs Lane, no less!), the best magazine of that golden era. Beautifully illustrated and designed, The Horror Show had no equal. And it was the work of but one man, who loved and nurtured it like a child.

The stories of Dean Koontz, Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Beth Massie, Bentley Little, Poppy Z. Brite, Joe Lansdale, Paul F. Olson, editor of this volume, and many more, filled the pages of The Horror Show. I felt privileged and lucky to be part of that group -- and nothing motivated me to keep going like seeing one of my stories in Dave’s pages. When I made it on the cover as one of five Rising Stars in the Fall 1987 issue, I was walking on air. Good stuff, my friends. Damn good stuff.

Dave rarely attended the NECON, World Fantasy and other conventions of the time, where we, what might be called his Horror Show stable, gathered to talk shop and drink beer (lots of beer). But he was there in conversation and in spirit. And when I finally met him, just once, he was exactly what I had imagined: a modest man with an outsized talent and a passion for writing and writers. A gentle man who always promptly sent a kind and encouraging handwritten note, even when he passed on a story.

Better weird than plastic, is how Dave signed his introduction to every issue of The Horror Show.

True enough, Dave. Thanks for everything. Rest in peace.

#33Stories: No. 3, "Since the Sky Blew Off"

#33Stories
No. 3: “Since the Sky Blew Off”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, mid-December 1985.



A passage from “Since the Sky Blew Off”:

Mather was correct on the offspring issue, of course. He'd been correct on every issue since he took charge two years ago when the sky blew off, the crops started wilting, and the world's population started dying by the hundreds of millions.

It was summer, the summer of my twenty–seventh year, and it had been the most glorious summer of my life. We were living in New York, then, all of us, living in style and with more than our fair share of creature comforts in an upper West Side neighborhood that only recently had been gentrified. We were the brie–chablis crowd, the folks with the MBA's and the designer bathrooms who spent weekends on Cape Cod and February vacations in Aspen. There wasn't a one of us who wasn't making fifty grand then, minimum, not a one of us who wasn't employed with one of Wall Street's or Madison Avenue's most reputable firms.

Was it the Soviets, us, or some third party? I don't know if anyone anywhere ever really learned the answer to that question, not at the beginning, when the only effects were those amazing Technicolor sunsets and that crazy shift in the jet–stream, or, later on, when political institutions and economies were disintegrating faster than global temperatures and the seas were rising. In the early days, when the presses still ran and the six o'clock news was still being broadcast, there was all sorts of talk that it had been the test of some new thermonuclear weapon – more frightening and more secret than the Bomb, which had every true–blooded Yuppie doing flips back then.

I have to believe the guy upstairs has a pretty mean streak of irony because that wasn't it by a long shot. There was no big bang, no escalation of crisis, no state of alert, no Warsaw Pact troops marching across Germany, no Colonel Khadafy dropping a surprise on Israel – just a sky the color of fresh blood the evening of July twenty–sixth.

Maybe it was the test of a new killer technology related to the so–called Star Wars program that the late President Reagan had announced a decade before. Maybe it was the test of something the Soviets had up their sleeves that our intelligence never picked up.

Maybe the Martians landed in a Kansas cornfield and decided to zap ninety–five percent of the human race, just for kicks.

Whatever it was, it silently and quickly burned off half the upper atmosphere, leaving plants to die, food chains to be disrupted and destroyed.

We didn't know how bad it had really been until it turned winter, and winter brought no dirty snow on Fifth Avenue, no frost on Macy's windows, no skating in Central Park, no temperatures lower than the sixties, not even in January or February.

By spring, the hospitals and doctors were overloaded with skin–cancer cases and people whose vision was fading away to darkness.

By summer, the effects of the failed wheat and corn crops were filtering down, and grocery stores experienced their first shortages.

By fall, there was rioting and looting, and the cities began to burn. Police and the National Guard controlled some of it, at first, but then the panic set in. When it did, the authorities put down their weapons and ran.

By the next winter, starvation was coast–to–coast and the typhus had gone wild.

It was, of course, Mather's idea to leave New York. Right from the start, everything had been Mather's idea. We got out of the city in June, before the real panic hit, and we headed up the Connecticut coast. There was still gas left, although there were shortages and growing lines at the stations, so we drove, charging up a storm on our American Express and Visa cards as we went.

Mostly, we traveled by night, holing up during the daylight hours in cheap motels. When we did have to go outside, no matter how briefly, Mather made sure we wore sunglasses and painted ourselves with sunscreen, protection factor fifteen. Eventually there was a run on sunscreen and finally supplies dried up, but Mather had been smart enough to buy cases of it before John Q. Public fully realized what was going on. He'd done the same thing with penicillin and guns, so we were okay on those fronts, too.

We were in Boston when the fabric of American society began to dissolve, slowly but completely, like a cube of sugar in water. It was September, the hottest September ever recorded by the National Weather Service, and no one any longer had any doubt what was happening.

Mather had decided to put down roots, at least until we could figure out what the long–term plan would be. After disposing of a gang of winos, we'd made our home in an abandoned subway tunnel near Park Street Station, which is almost directly under City Hall. From a defensive perspective, the tunnel was a dream – only one entrance, which we kept clear with occasional firefights. From the survival point of view, it gave us decent access to stores and warehouses, particularly those mammoth ones along the waterfront, which were still stocked weeks after everything else ran out. The day the looting began in earnest, we grabbed enough canned juices and beef stew and hams for at least a year, according to Mather's calculations.

It was a sickening scene we found when the Great Fire finally forced us to the surface. Bodies strewn everywhere, smoldering or just plain rotting, every one of them guaranteed to be harboring enough disease to wipe us out a thousand times over. Immediately Mather decided to head north, where, he said, we would have the best chance of establishing a camp. We passed other bands as we walked, and we had some skirmishes, losing two of our original group in the process.

Now the big threat was roamers…

At the moment, the origin of the roamers wasn't the issue. The point was Pete's reaction.
"I can't do it, Russ," he whispered. "There's been too much already."

I looked at him, his profile expanding and shrinking in the campfire's glow. I looked at him long and hard, but I can't say that I was surprised. Mather and I had had a private talk about him just before leaving.

"Don't stare at me like that," he said, "like I'm a criminal. I've been thinking about it for weeks. Mather's crazy on this. Paranoid. Can't you see it? There's no need for this, Russ. No need."

"What do you suggest then?" I said, calmly.

Below us, an infant started to cry. The night took that cry, twisted and deformed it, made it ghostlike and disembodied. Both of us were silent for a moment.

"What's your idea?" I repeated.

"That we button up and go back home. Forget them."

"And what about when Mather sees smoke tomorrow morning?"

"There wouldn't have to be any smoke," he said after a moment. "We could tell them to move on. They could be over the border in New York State by daybreak. It can be our little secret, Russ. You and me. Mather need never know."

It went on like that for maybe ten minutes, back and forth, back and forth.

Finally, I gave in.

"You win," I said.

"You don't mean it."

"I do," I whispered. "Now, listen. It's your idea. Why don't you be the one to tell them."

"Thanks," he said. "Really, thanks. And, listen: Mather will never know."

Pete started for the stairs. "Don't you think you ought to leave your shotgun here?" I asked. "Wouldn't want to create the wrong impression.

"Sure. Right." He handed his weapon to me and headed down the loft.

"Any hesitation," Mather had said during our private chat, "and you have my full and complete authorization."

I waited until Pete had reached the campfire. Then I shot him through the back. The noise was startling, but before anyone down there could react much, I emptied the shotgun in their direction eight times. In fifteen seconds, it was over. On my way out of the barn, I was lucky – I found a five–gallon can of gas, and it was full. I poured the gas over the bodies, stepped back, and tossed a coal from the campfire. It went up with a roar.

-- 30 –

READ “Since the Sky Blew Off"  in “Since the Sky Blew Off - The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 1 Kindle Edition.” 

The collection also includes my stories “God Can Be A Cruel Bastard,” “We Who Are His Followers,” “Not Just Traces of Me,” “All My Children,” “A Process of Change,” “Windhams’ Folly,” “Freddy and Rita,” “To Be Cold, Like Trees,” "We Who Are His Followers,” and “The Good Book”; plus two screen treatments: “Money for Nothing” and “Alden’s Neck.”

Context:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine published the dystopian story “Since the Sky Blew Off” in its edition of mid-December 1985. The magazine was print-only then, needless to say, and I remember buying a copy (actually, several!) from a newsstand on Dorrance Street, Providence, not far from the Biltmore Hotel.

This was a huge honor for me – published since 1956, when the man for whom it is named was at the height of his cinematic career, AHMM featured work by such luminaries as Donald Westlake, Ed McBain, Robert Bloch, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Jack Ritchie, and Ed Hoch. It won many awards. At the age of 31, I felt like I had arrived!



Unlike Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, AHMM is still published, I am pleased to report – published in print and online editions. “The finest in crime and suspense short fiction" is its motto, and that says it all.

“Since the Sky Blew Off” was republished in 1986 in Band 184 of Alfred Hitchcock’s Kriminalmagazin, the German edition, with the translated title “Seit der Himmel gebrannt hatte” – my first foreign sale!



I followed the sale of “Since the Sky Blew Off” with another sale to AHMM: “To Be Cold, Like Trees,” another dystopian tale published in July 1987.

But “Sky” proved inspiration for a number of screen treatments I later write with my fabulous screenwriting partner, Drew Smith. One, which you will see on May 18, contains perhaps my favorite fictional character: Birdman. That also happened to be my nickname in grammar school – Birdie for short – but how I earned that is a story for another time, and best told over a beer...

The story also was the title selection in my first collection of short stories published by Crossroad Press. You can read it all there, along with “To Be Cold, Like Trees” and 10 others.

##33 Stories: No. 2, "Drowned: A Different Kind of Zombie Tale"

#33Stories
No. 2: “Drowned: A Different Kind of Zombie Tale”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

A passage midway through “Drowned: A Different Kind of Zombie Tale”:




“I think we ought to turn around right this instant and go home,” Jack said. “This is fucking sick. You’re fucking sick, Joel. You ought to have your head examined.”

“Come on, Jack, you’re playing right into his hands,” Kathy said. “That’s just the reaction he’s looking for. It’s a prank, can’t you see?”

“It’s not a prank,” Joel said.

“Come on, Joel.”

“It’s not a prank.”

Kathy wasn’t sure what to think any more. Now that they were here, or almost here — now that they were entering the domain of the dead — the fun-and-games aspect of the evening was gone.

Can he really be serious about this? she wondered. Can he?

And she thought: No, he can’t.

But she didn’t know if she believed that.

It’s more than sick, Jack was thinking. It’s illegal, and it’s perverted — more perverted than any of Joel’s other stunts, and God knows he’s pulled some good ones.

Like that séance.

It was the coincidence that was most disturbing to Jack. The circumstances of Sully’s death had been troubling him enough anyway — now this whole incredible scene, driving out to his grave with a whack job who claimed he was going to dig him up. He wasn’t concerned that Joel might succeed in his goal. No, that wasn’t it.


No one can raise the dead. Not possible.

But seeing Sully’s body, his face, already beginning to rot…

…he couldn’t do it.

“What’s the matter, Jack, afraid?” Joel said.

“No. I just want to go home.” His anger had passed. In its place was…
…the voice of his grandmother.

(Me, Jacky. Here with you.)

“You want home, you’ll have to walk,” Joel said with sudden anger, “because I came here to do something and I’m not leaving until it’s done. Look, you knew what you were getting into when you got in this car tonight. I’ve been telling you all week.”

“I didn’t think you were serious,” Jack said. His head felt fuzzy again.

“What did you need, a signed affidavit?”

“I figured you were kidding. Only crazy people pull shit like this.”

Joel hit the brakes, nearly sending Kathy through the windshield.

“Jesus Christ,” she swore. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

Joel jumped out, flipped his seat forward and leaned into the back seat, his face six inches from Jack’s. “This time I’m serious, fisher boy. You want out? This is your chance.”

“Heh, I—”

“Go, Jack. Or stay. The choice is yours. Just make up your mind. And fast. I don’t have all night.”

“Knock it off, Joel,” Kathy said. “He’s creeped out by this place. He’s not the only one.”
“You keep out of this. Which is it, Jack?”

Jack looked past Joel into the night, the darkness, so different here. The car had stopped moving, but that other sound was still out there, somewhere. Sweet Jesus, were things ever fucked up. If only he hadn’t smoked so much shit he could figure it out. As it was, his thoughts were one giant jumble of misfiring neurons.

Stay, and he would be helping to rob a grave. Robbing a fucking grave, for Christ’s sake. Sully’s grave, no less.

Leave, and he would never hear the end of it. Joel would paint him as a coward.

Leave, and he would have to walk back through… whatever it was that was out there.

That was what was so scary… whatever it was that was out there.

(So lonely, Jacky. So dark.)

It was completely irrational, the notion that there was something out there.

(Me, Jacky. Nanny. I’m here. But I’m not alone. Something horrible is here with me, too. You must go. Now, before it is too late.)

After so many joints, so real.

Jack tried to move his legs — just tried, to see what they would do — but they were paralyzed. Frozen.
“I take it you’re staying,” Joel said.

He hopped inside, slammed the door, and threw the car in gear.

Ahead of them, the indistinct shapes of tombstones emerged from the shadows. Here and there, where the Toyota’s headlights caught their polished marble surfaces, there were flashes of light. Joel slowed to a snail’s pace. He’d scouted the cemetery this morning, and he’d found Sully’s grave with little trouble. Nighttime was a different matter.

Trees.

He remembered how close to trees the plot had been. That meant the perimeter road. He drove slowly to the end of the cemetery and took a left at the shed.

As he hunted, Kathy fished the roaches out of the ashtray, tamped them into a glass pipe she carried in her purse, and lit the bowl. She passed it back to Jack. He refused.

“I think that’s it.”

Joel did, too. He put the car in neutral and shone the glove-compartment flashlight on the stone, which bore Sully’s father’s name.

“We’re here.” Joel shut the car off, killed the headlights, and got out.

Before Kathy or Jack could respond, Joel went to the trunk and opened it. The shovels were on top.

He tossed them toward the tombstone. The kerosene lantern was next. He turned the wick up, lifted the globe, lit it, then placed it near the shovels. Its flame sputtered and flared, casting shadows in the wavering light.

Last was a cardboard box with a greasy towel draped over the top. Handling it carefully, he placed the box next to the lantern. Jack watched, hypnotized.

Because the box was rattling. Not enough that you’d notice it if you weren’t looking for something, but Jack was looking for something…

…and listening.


He swallowed, but it did nothing to drive the dryness from his mouth.

Joel took a shovel and passed it to Kathy.

“You’re crazy,” she said, refusing it.

She thought: How much longer can he keep this up? A joke’s a joke, but this is getting ridiculous.
Except it’s not a joke. Never been a joke, I see that now. Never been anything but deadly  serious business. What we’re seeing is what we’re going to get…

A man possessed.

-- 30 --


Context:

This was the first novel I completed, although I had begun various others, abandoning them after a certain point when the magic had drained away and I was left with nothing but a bunch of words on the page (fellow writers, you KNOW what I mean). Originally titled “Sully,” “Drowned” came to fruition when I lived in Jamestown, Rhode Island, in the early 1980s.

Initially, I made no effort at publishing it. Possessed of what I thought was a better idea – what became my first published book, “Thunder Rise,” coming Day 5 in #33Stories – I tucked it into the old trunk and moved on. That’s part of this writing gig, always movin’ on.

Many years later, I hooked up with David Wilson, author and publisher of Crossroad Press.

Wonderful guy. He eventually published three collections of my short stories and three of my books, including a reprint of “Thunder Rise” and what became the final two volumes of the “Thunder Rise” anthology: “Drowned” and “Asylum.” Look for more later in #33Stories.

This is the introduction to “Drowned: A Different Kind of Zombie Tale” that appeared in the August 2015 publication by Crossroad Press:

You hold in your hands (or behold on your screen) the first novel I ever wrote. More accurately, the first I ever completed. You know how that goes. Thank you for being here! My gratitude, too, to David Wilson, David Dodd, and Crossroad Press. They are a class act.

As the subtitle reveals, "Drowned" is a zombie story, one written years before The Walking Dead and the numerous other living-dead books, stories, movies, and TV series that are so popular today — but which have a long, sometimes proud, literary tradition. Drowned belongs to a novelistic genre that dates back through Lovecraft to the early-19th nineteenth-century Shelley. Of course, the theme of people returning from the dead, or never dying, predates recorded history.

Here’s the story behind this zombie tale:

These many years ago, I completed Drowned, produced a hard copy from a printer, and put it aside without, as I recall, attempting to sell it. I finally was finding success in getting short stories published — nothing like publication to encourage a writer! — and I simultaneously was intent on penning Thunder Rise, the first book I sold, which had started to take shape in my mind as I was writing Drowned. Asylum and Summer Place, which round out the Thunder Rise trilogy, followed Thunder Rise. Crossroad Press has brought out editions of all three, including an audible version of Thunder Rise. Another tip of the hat to David and his team.

Drowned remained more or less forgotten (make that more) until, during one of my periodic attempts to reform my pack-rat ways (they always fail), I found a hard copy in a box buried beneath other boxes hidden behind old Christmas decorations and furniture in the attic of a house where I once lived. I began re-reading this novel that was originally titled "Sully" (a pretty bland name, I concluded, in deciding to change it). Time has a way of losing things on you, or at least locking them away (especially if you write incessantly, which I do, and have, since grammar school), and so the re-reading was, in many passages, like reading a new book.

A weird experience I’d never had before…

The bottom line is I liked it and deemed it worthy of publication, but  (I’ll leave final judgment to you). Stylistically unpolished in a few spots, it had a nice cast of characters, an intriguing setting, some good plot points, and an effective narrative arc. Plus — again, you be the judge — an unusual twist on the time-honored zombie formula.

The thought of scanning or retyping was daunting, and I almost put "Drowned" back in its box — a reburial, as it were, one that likely would have had no chance of resurrection, if you’ll pardon the pun. Then, digging through various computer archives (a long, frustrating dig… yes, I’m a digital pack rat, too, and not always well organized, despite best intentions) I finally found Drowned and got to work. I cleaned up some rough spots and contemporized certain references (tape decks became iPods, for example, and VCRs got dumped in the dustbin of history, to paraphrase Trotsky). I made some word-choice changes (taking out a lot of adjectives and adverbs, an exercise Stephen King strongly recommends in his masterful On Writing). Importantly, I strengthened the connection to Thunder Rise.

But mostly, I let her stand.

An obvious question is: why was the sequel to the Thunder Rise trilogy written first? The answer: with Drowned, I first imagined the supernatural world of The Evil, of Hobbamock, the demon that Charlie Moonlight fights in Thunder Rise and the same malevolence that haunts a psychiatric hospital (Asylum) and a family vacation home (Summer Place) even after Charlie is victorious. As Pierre Antoine, the voodoo priest in Drowned, describes it:

The Evil, the source of all suffering, of all human sickness and misery and pain. Hobbamock, as it became personified on Thunder Rise.

So, enjoy the read! And always remember: never, ever mess with The Evil, as poor Joel White does in the pages ahead.

#33Stories: No. 1, "The Warden"

#33Stories
No. 1: “The Warden”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

pp. 99 to 100 of the May 1985 edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine:

Jack Warden was the latest in that brand of late-20th century American folk hero – the electronic whizz kid-entrepreneur. Lately, the trade publications had taken to comparing him to Nolan Bushnell and Steve Jobs.

Warden hadn’t made a splash only on the business pages. Not yet forty, he’d wrecked two marriages, served time for drunk driving, fathered an illegitimate child, Presently, he was engaged in an ugly custody battle that was generating a lot of local ink.

More intriguing was all that talk of Warden’s alleged obsession with the black arts.

No one knew where the rumors had started. Maybe it was his house – a brooding Victorian mansion whose last owner had hung himself in the pantry, or so they said. Maybe it was that widely repeated quote that he’d sell his soul for the perfect computer.

Maybe it was Albany Mystery Number One: the disappearance of his partner, T.J. Putnam. One morning last spring, T.J. kissed his wife, slid into his Caddie and left for work. Or somewhere, because he never made it to Warden Computer. There was an investigation, a nationwide search, a generous reward that Warden put up – but T.J. never surfaced. Not even his car was found.

T.J. had been on the outs with Warden. Two big egos on a collision course. Warden himself told the cops that, and the cops told a newspaper reporter, and soon it was all over the city. The cops knew about T.J.’s debts, about some shadowy friends – but they didn’t have a thing on Warden. Just this silly babble about Black Masses and devils.

Privately, Warden had to laugh. He’d clogged the courts with libel suits, but he thrived on attention. Everybody knew that. He liked to think he took his cues from Ted Turner, the only man he had ever envied.

“I hope you enjoy the machine,” he said to Dexter, who had been watching him with a blend of fascination and distaste. “It’s quite an invention, artificial intelligence. Quite an invention.”

“Quite,” Dexter said.

“Every day, they get more and more like us, these little microchips do,” Warden said. “Someday, they’ll be asking for the right to vote.”

Then he laughed – louder and longer, Dexter imagined, than he should have.

Add caption
Context:

I wrote this in 1984, at the start of the home-computer age, on my own first machine of the dawning internet age: an IBM PC. It had two five-and-a-quarter inch floppy discs, one that contained the early MS-DOS operating system, and the second for memory; each had just 360 KB of memory (KB: that’s no typo), but the whole setup seemed a complete wonder, which is one of the emotions that suffuses “The Warden.” Crazy times then – you reached the internet, what little there was to it, by dial-up modem. I can still hear the sound of that external (and PAINFULLY slow) device beeping into an ordinary telephone line.

Hey, at least computers, crude as they were by today’s standards, were an advance over  manual and electric typewriters.

This was a feverish writing period for me: working long hours by day at The Providence Journal, where I covered the social-services beat (the state prison, the state psychiatric hospital, the state institution for the intellectually and developmentally disabled, the child-welfare agency), then coming home, dining, putting my first child, Rachel, to bed, and writing horror, mystery and science-fiction short stories late into the night on that PC.

I was submitting pretty much anywhere I could – this was the early Stephen King era, and all sorts of publications big and small were around – and if memory serves me, I had already succeeded in placing a few stories in small-circulation, home-produced zines (for no money, of course, you were thrilled just to get in print). And how did we aspiring writers get those stories to those publications? By printing on a dot-matrix printer, another marvel of the age, and mailing via USPS with a query letter and return envelope with postage for return of the manuscript if rejected (a LOT were rejected).

And then came this card in the mail:



How excited I was! An actual payday for something I had created from pure ether. A penny-and-a-quarter per word, totaling something like $50. Seems like peanuts now, and it was even 33 years ago, but it proved powerfully motivational. And so I kept writing and writing, and not just short stories, but the beginnings of horror novels. More about those later in #33Stories.

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine long ago ceased publication after a run of some three decades.

ps

I would have loved to republish the whole story, but the original file is long lost, and I just don’t have the time to retype the whole thing – it ran to 14 (small-type) published pages, pp. 97 to 111!

pps

That "Coast Guard" photo was while on assignment for The Cape Cod Times.

#33Stories: Introduction and running table off contents

Introduction follows this Table of Contents.

-- Story one, May 1, 2018: "The Warden"

-- Story two, May 2, 2018: "Drowned: A Different Kind of Zombie Tale"


Introduction to #33Stories:

Memory can be an unreliable thing, but mine tells me I wrote my first story in grammar school, perhaps as early as third grade, although more likely in fifth or sixth. It did not result from a class exercise or homework assignment, but rather it emerged unprompted from my imagination. Reading was big in my home, so really, no big surprise. In a 1997 interview coinciding with my book Toy Wars, I described it as “a story set under the ocean with sea creatures, who had a little community, a little home, it was a fantasy; it was an octopus, it was a fish.”

Whatever. High school found me writing incessantly, and my first published story was an essay in the fall of 1968 in The Paper, the newspaper at St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Mass., where I was a freshman. My first fiction was published there, too, under the nom de plume of G. Wayne Poe.

Yeah, I know.

But I was a teenager, and having escaped parochial school, I was discovering the literary world. Edgar Allan was a big favorite, as soon would be H.P. Lovecraft and, a little later, Stephen King. King remains my favorite fiction writer. I once had the honor of interviewing him, but I digress…

Long story short, haha, I kept writing – through high school and college, while touring Europe after graduation, while smashing bags for Delta Airlines at Logan Airport, a time during which my mother sometimes remarked “we sacrificed to put you through Harvard for this?”

No, not for that, but for this: the chance to eventually support myself with the pen. Which I did full-time starting when I was hired as a reporter with the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript in August 1978, after a brief but successful freelance period. Been a journalist ever since.

But I never stopped the “other” writing, which long-windedly brings us to #33Stories, a retrospective of some of my non-newspaper work timed to coincide with my first major sale of a fiction piece, which was published in May 1985.

Every day this May, I will publish an excerpt or an entirety of a work produced away from the day job from 1985 through this year, roughly in chronological order, and with background as appropriate: short stories, books, screenplays, treatments and films. Some were previously published, others not. So some days, you get to look into the trunk.

Thirty-three years ago, #33Stories. A bit contrived, yes. A bit interesting, hopefully.

Of course, May has 31 days. I will publish no. 32 on June 1, and no. 33 on June 12, a day of particular significance to me.

Finally, for now: Why?

I wrote and write because I have to, as I am hardly the first storyteller to remark. During my horror/mystery/fantasy/sci-fi days, I wrote to entertain – to stoke the imagination, to scare, and amuse, to put flesh and blood on the bones of characters born in the wind. But in many of these earlier stories, as with my entire body of  newspaper journalism, you will also find a fair dollop of reflection and commentary on social and cultural issues, including religion, politics, the treatment of women, and the stigma surrounding those living with mental illness and intellectual disability, among others. Sometimes, fiction best illuminates reality.

Please come back tomorrow, for #1 in #33Stories: “The Warden,” published in the May 1985 edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

And as the month unfolds, I will be building the #33Stories table of contents on this post, see above.

Starting tomorrow: #33Stories

Memory can be an unreliable thing, but mine tells me I wrote my first story in grammar school, perhaps as early as third grade, although more likely in fifth or sixth. It did not result from a class exercise or homework assignment, but rather it emerged unprompted from my imagination. Reading was big in my home, so really, no big surprise. In a 1997 interview coinciding with my book Toy Wars, I described it as “a story set under the ocean with sea creatures, who had a little community, a little home, it was a fantasy; it was an octopus, it was a fish.”

Whatever. High school found me writing incessantly, and my first published story was an essay in the fall of 1968 in The Paper, the newspaper at St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Mass., where I was a freshman. My first fiction was published there, too, under the nom de plume of G. Wayne Poe.

Yeah, I know.

But I was a teenager, and having escaped parochial school, I was discovering the literary world. Edgar Allan was a big favorite, as soon would be H.P. Lovecraft and, a little later, Stephen King. King remains my favorite fiction writer. I once had the honor of interviewing him, but I digress…

Long story short, haha, I kept writing – through high school and college, while touring Europe after graduation, while smashing bags for Delta Airlines at Logan Airport, a time during which my mother sometimes remarked “we sacrificed to put you through Harvard for this?”

No, not for that, but for this: the chance to eventually support myself with the pen. Which I did full-time starting when I was hired as a reporter with the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript in August 1978, after a brief but successful freelance period. Been a journalist ever since.

But I never stopped the “other” writing, which long-windedly brings us to #33Stories, a retrospective of some of my non-newspaper work timed to coincide with my first major sale of a fiction piece, which was published in May 1985.

Every day this May, I will publish an excerpt or an entirety of a work produced away from the day job from 1985 through this year, roughly in chronological order, and with background as appropriate: short stories, books, screenplays, treatments and films. Some were previously published, others not. So some days, you get to look into the trunk.

Thirty-three years ago, #33Stories. A bit contrived, yes. A bit interesting, hopefully.

Of course, May has 31 days. I will publish no. 32 on June 1, and no. 33 on June 12, a day of particular significance to me.

Finally, for now: Why?

I wrote and write because I have to, as I am hardly the first storyteller to remark. During my horror/mystery/fantasy/sci-fi days, I wrote to entertain – to stoke the imagination, to scare, and amuse, to put flesh and blood on the bones of characters born in the wind. But in many of these earlier stories, as with my entire body of  newspaper journalism, you will also find a fair dollop of reflection and commentary on social and cultural issues, including religion, politics, the treatment of women, and the stigma surrounding those living with mental illness and intellectual disability, among others. Sometimes, fiction best illuminates reality.

Please come back tomorrow, for #1 in #33Stories: “The Warden,” published in the May 1985 edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

And as the month unfolds, I will be building the #33Stories table of contents on this post.

-- Story one, May 1, 2018: "The Warden."