Edward M. Erdelac's Blog, page 37

World Horror Con 2012, The Stoker Awards, and Salt Lake City by Day and Night

So I'm back from the World Horror Convention and Stoker Awards, which was held this past weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah.

WHC was unlike other conventions I have attended, and I was a bit unprepared frankly. The ratio of creators and publishers to fans and readers was a bit more lopsided than I'm used to. I arrived at WHC hoping to have a good reading, get the word of my books out, and sell copies of Merkabah Rider. Well, the reading turnout was pretty sparse and I sold maybe a handful of books compared to my usual haul. I should've expected this, being in the room with luminaries like Robert McCammon, Mike Mignola, Rick Haulata, and one of my literary heroes, Joe R. Lansdale, to say nothing of really talented authors like Joe McKinney, Weston Ochse, Jeff Strand, William F. Nolan, and a slew of others.

But, I was a bit on the low side come Saturday night. Understand, a lot contributed to my bad mood besides the going generally unnoticed for the first half of the Con.

First off, when my flight got in I was operating on about three hours of sleep thanks to some last minute book proposal preparations and general packing stuff. I flew in with Del Howison, proprietor of Dark Delicacies books in Burbank, which I think is the largest bookstore specializing in horror in the country, and the very talented Mr. John Skipp. Not to say I flew in with them as in together. We'd never met.  I recognized Del by his famous snow white mane, and John introduced himself when he found out I was heading to WHC as well, and then graciously introduced me to Del. I wanted to get in with these guys, but I'm a terrible gladhander, particularly when I'm sleep deprived, and I'm afraid beyond the handshake, I didn't make much of an impression.

So I was sort of beating my head against the cab window about that all the way to the Motel 6, and I just wanted to crawl into bed and catch up on my sleep till I had to be at the Radisson for my first event, which I think was the Kaffee Klatch with Joe R. Lansdale. Arriving at what would be my accomodations for the next three days however, I received my first real blow. The lobby and half the rooms were under rennovation, and the other half of the place was occupied by Latter Day Saint Church members who had flown in for some big annual meeting or address.

The guy suggested I come back around 2pm.

This was at 10AM.

So that meant not only no sleep, but a mile and a half hike to the Radisson with all my crap, and no prospect of sleep at the other end of it.

Tim Marquits, Yours Truly, Lincoln Crisler, Karina Fabian

I phoned my fellow Damnation Books authors, live-action GI Joe Lincoln Crisler (editor on Corrupts Absolutely? and author of WILD) and my sometime editor Tim Marquitz (author of Dawn of War and The Demon Squad series) and they kindly offered to let me crash in their room at the Radisson. However, when I got there, I found the excitement of meeting these two long time e-collaborators to be too lively an occasion to spend unconscious. We blathered back and forth for a while (there'd been a SNAFU between Lightning Source and UPS and the copies of Corrupts Absolutely? Lincoln had worked like hell to promote weren't going to arrive in time to premiere at the con – no copies of my own Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel either), then went down and commiserated a bit with Kim and William Richards of Damnation Books.

I then headed to the meet and greet with Joe R. Lansdale.

I've talked to Joe now and then on Facebook (we both hated the Matrix and loved Real Steel), but meeting the guy in person got me a bit fidgety in an unfortunately fanboy sorta way.  They say you should never meet your heroes, but Joe was just as funny and personable and easy going as you'd want your heroes to be. It was a bit of a one man show, but what the hell, nobody'd come to hear me talk, and in my experience people from Texas either talk a blue streak or hardly at all. I was frankly glad it was the former so it just wasn't a bunch of us goombahs staring at each other.

Bruce Lee? Yeah, you might call me a fan.

The guy cited Robert E. Howard and quoted Bruce Lee and echoed most of my own thoughts on the writing work ethic and always keeping your reading horizons as broad as possible. Wish I'd had the opportunity to sit down and just have a beer with the guy, but I think maybe I was a bit starstruck.  I mean, Joe Lansdale. For me, there's Howard, Matheson, and Lansdale. Meeting Kazuo Koike a few years back in San Diego is the only thing that's come remotely close for me.As it was, after the deal was done, I sought him out at his table (where he was sitting with Robert McCammon and his awesome wife Karen, all three of them co-founders of the HWA) and told him that he was the second guy I'd dedicated the first installment in the Merkabah Rider series to (the first being Bob Howard), and that I'd just like him to have a copy.  He thanked me, and asked me to sign it for him, and I in turn asked him to sign my copy of Dead In The West.

Without Dead In The West and Joe's Jonah Hex stories, there would be no Merkabah Rider. It was a shining moment for me. The man is a class act, and I hope we have a chance to connect again further down the road.

No pics, I realized.  Yeah, I don't tend to take pictures of people unless we're close. Definitely not total strangers. I don't know if the subjects find it intrusive, but I know I feel pretty dang intrusive sticking a camera in somebody's face, or asking them to stand beside me and pose for one.

My buddy Bill Duke. Don't ask him about me. He'll deny it...yeah, that's right.

Now I have done this, but when I look at those pics (this one of me and Bill Duke comes to mind), I feel sort of silly. Here's shlubby ass me and badass Bill Duke.  I'm lowering the property value. Just feels kind've artificial to me. I guess it's proof you met the person, but….oh I dunno. I mean, we're not buddies, and if you want proof I met Joe Lansdale, I've got my copy of Dead In The West. And if you don't believe me….screw you, cowboy.

So then I had my reading, which, as I mentioned you could hear the wind blow at. C'est la vie. Like a one two punch comes the mass autograph session, which was pretty much dominated by the bigger names. Looking back on it now, I see I was prepared for a different experience. The point of WHC was not to sell books, but to make a splash, do a little politicking, get your name out there. Nobody understood this more in my line of sight than Lincoln Crisler. Watching the guy in action is like watching a dynamo. He's everybody's buddy, and he's somehow everywhere. I have a newfound respect for the guy's ambition. Combine it with his talent and I expect to see him at the podium during the Stokers in the next couple years.

I had another chance at the DB books party celebrating the release of Corrupts Absolutely? Lincoln (dang him) talked me into reading from my story Conviction to a crowded room full of strangers. Now if you've picked that one up yet, or read about it here on the blog, you know that one's a bit of a departure from my usual work. It's told from the point of view of an abused African American kid in the Cabrini Green housing projects. So picture me (don't bother, look up at that shlubby pic of me next to Bill Duke) and imagine me (after a couple quickly downed beers) reading (in part):

"Know what I'm sayin? This is how we do, folk. All day every day, nigga. Right-right. LK Killa! 'Ay nigga! Who this 'lil nigga? Who you steppin' to, nigga? What set? What set? Man chill BillDawg, s'that trick nigga Punkinhead. Whatchoo lookin' at, Punkinhead? Ugly ass bitch! God-damn you ugly! Go on in nigga, get yo grammaw's diapers."

I was a little reluctant at first, but screw it. I'm not ashamed of anything I write, certainly not Conviction, which is a good little story, I think. If somebody can't separate the character from the writer, it's there problem not mine. I have no regrets, and I thank Lincoln for nudging me into it with drill instructor aplomb ('Just read the freakin' thing!'). No real idea how it went over as I was reading from a laptop screen and couldn't really look up, but I know the party quieted down till I was done and the only guy that came up to me besides Tim was a guy who suggested I turn Conviction into a theater piece, so I guess it went over OK. Nobody jabbed me with a broken bottle, anyway.

Although the night was young, I am not. I had a 1.5 mile walk back to the Motel 6, so I undertook it.

Now during the day, and I know a lot of the other con-goers will bear this out, it was wall to wall khakis and short sleeve shirts as the LDS people had the run of the place. But night time in SLC is a bit different. The homogenous scene of the daytime totally disappears around 2AM when the clubs let out. There is a sweet street machine subculture that roams the streets at night, peeling their tires and thumping bass, the souped up engines roaring like dragons in the dark. Cars both vintage and sleekly modern.

SLC has a button down reputation, but the liquor flows freely at the clubs, and the raucous crowds attest to it. I saw a couple fights on the walk home, and the splash of police mars lights on the concrete, and sidestepped an 80 proof puddle of vomit at least once.  Nothing too harsh was going on I don't think, but don't be fooled into thinking that SLC is a square town, because it's not. All that homogeny disappears (at least at 2AM anyway). All the minorities you don't see in the downtown area during the day are in full effect at night, and I'm not just talking about ethnicity. There is a thriving gay community as well, apparently, full in the shadow of the Mormom Temple's illustrious spires.

More on that later though (the spires not the gay community, sorry).

Saturday morning I had pitch sessions with a couple publishers, one seemed encouraging, the other not so much. OK.

Then I was fifth wheel on the Vampires in Literature panel with Hal Bodner moderating Leslie S. Klinger, James Dorr, and Thomas Roche (two of them voting members on the HWA's Most Influential Vampire Novel of the Last 100 Years committee). God bless Hal for remembering to ask me things when the panel already had such a worthy crew of knowledgeable persons. I did my best to hang in there and contribute, but even found myself asking questions.

After that I was feeling a bit self-piteous. I had tried my hand Friday night at the Gross Out Contest (where contestants read the most disgusting piece of prose they can come up with), and even though I realized my story Wrath of Benjo from Dark Moon Books' Slices of Flesh was way outclassed (if you can really call it 'classed'), but I had signed my name, so I went up and read anyways – besides, Joe Lansdale was one of the judges, and it was a chance to read my own stuff in front of the guy. I got sandwiched between John Skipp (who, at the audiences' cajoling, spouted off an entirely extemporaneous bit about dog molestation) and Jason Reinhardt, who elucidated us on the finer points of necrophilic incest (just a boy in love with his mom).  Yeah the judge forgot to even call my name at the end. Haha. Lincoln was there too, and placed fourth.

So I hoofed it back to the Motel and worked for a few hours on a pulp novella I'm doing for Airship 27, which I'll announce when I get the dang thing done and in. I lost track of time actually in the court of Haroun al-Rashid (that's a hint, true believers), and headed back to the Radisson in time to catch the last half hour of the Stoker Awards. A lot of deserving people walked away with those beautiful little castles, and Rick Haulata seemed to speak directly to me when he said that the most important thing to do was to just keep showing up (he also said the difference between a writer and a pizza is a pizza can feed a family of four). I got to hear Alan Moore's rambling backhanded acceptance speech for best horror comic, which was better written than most books I've read lately. Also got to see Richard Matheson accept the Best Vampire Novel of The Century award for I Am Legend via video. Pretty amazing.

Now at the after party my experience at WHC really got into the swing for me. A little late, sure, but that was my fault. I was hanging around, watching Rick and Joe talk, waiting for an opening to just go in and shake Rick's hand and thank him for the inspiring words, when a pair of ladies came up to me and told me frankly I looked like a wallflower. Well, I had been one pretty much all weekend after all, so they were calling it plain. The two ladies were none other than Jeff Strand's wife Lynne Hansen and Alice Henderson (a fellow Star Wars contributor it turns out, who had a similar experience in writing for the franchise), who were good enough to draw me out and get me talking about writing, HWA, and my experiences thus far. I really can't thank these two enough. Had I turned around and walked out prior to their talking with me, I likely would've gone home feeling I hadn't made much stride at the con. But, they introduced me to people, who introduced me to people and so forth. I didn't wind up going home till about 4AM, at which time I discovered Salt Lake City has an awesome 24 hour Mexican place called Alberto's that serves a mean machaca burrito and adobada tacos (I had never heard of them either, but if you like guacamole, you'll like these).

Sunday morning I walked out of the Motel 6 in a t-shirt right into a Chicago-style ice storm. So, I walked back in, wrote a little more, got dressed, and checked out (which is why I didn't get to attend the HWA business meeting – sorry, guys). Had lunch at the La Trang, the best dang Vietnamese restaurant I've ever eaten at, and hung around the Radisson, even sold a couple books. I had a great talk with Weston Ochse about this colorful thong-wearing bookstore owner in Quartzsite, Arizona, and our various relations in the military.  Even had words with William F. Nolan about our mutual admiration for his friend Richard Matheson's Incredible Shrinking Man (my favorite Matheson book) and The Beardless Warriors.

Now here's where things get really interesting (or not, depends on your point of view).

Lincoln, Tim, and Laura Hickman and I headed over to BJ's (er JB's) for lunch and I decided to take a walk over to the nearby Mormon Temple to take a couple pics while they ate (since I had a bellyful of Vietnamese yet).

Now everybody has their preconceived notions about the Mormons (well everybody who is not a Mormon anyway). Stepping into the Temple Square area on this, one of the biggest Sundays of the year for them, was like stepping back into the past. Throngs, I mean throngs of people were crowding the area, so much so that SLC police had deployed in vans to direct both foot and vehicular traffic. Wading into the midst of this is like getting caught up in a river. You can't really go against the tide, you just sort of float along.

Dotted along the thoroughfare were anti-LDS protesters. I strained to listen to what their bullhorn beefs were about, but let's be honest, who can understand the tinny stuff coming out of those street preachers' handhelds? Half of them wore placards that were legible but a bit vague, and one guy even had a bunch of apocalyptic stuff pasted to his car.

Now added to this din were lines of people who would seemingly spontaneously burst into chorus. We're talking Mormon Tabernacle level of singing. Have you ever walked down the sidewalk between two rows of people lifting their voices in praise of God? That swell, that angelic sound of human voices in perfect unison assailing you from both sides – it's an indescribable sensation. You can just about feel it pressing on your soul.

I wandered from the sidewalk into the temple courtyards and started snapping pics at the edifice. This is one beautiful building after another. The sky besieging spires (toldja I get back to those), the golden angel trumpeting at the top, the vertical architecture (which sorta reminded me of a Stoker, actually, but on an immensely grander scale), the total effect of the fervent believers and the reflecting pools and the monuments and landscaping, it makes the open heart soar, frankly. If God's not your thing, just revel in the sheer majesty of what the human mind can conceive of and build.

Then, a heavily accented gentleman came up to me and told me he noticed I was taking pictures. I figured it was the LDS security, who had once already asked me to not remain standing in the path of the crowds filing into the huge conference center with its articially recycling waterfall, but no, this guy introduced himself (and I wanna say his name was Hector, and I hope it was) as just a pilgrim come up with his friends from Columbia for the conference. He took my picture a couple times and offered to show me around.

Sure – when would I have a chance to do this again, I figured. So Hector took me around the courtyard, explaining things and answering questions as we went. The Temple is only opened for special ceremonies and weddings. All these people, none of them were here to go inside that commanding structure. He pointed out the old Meeting Hall, and explained that ceremonies and lectures in every language in the world take place there. You see people walking around sometimes with flags on their lapels, flags from different countries. These are people who have taken it upon themselves to help others who come to the Temple from their respective nations. In the Meeting Hall, Spanish speakers, Japanese, even Tongans can gather and hear lectures in their native tongues.

Hector took me into one of the visitor's centers then. In the middle is a big model of the ancient city of Jerusalem to scale – looks like the map room from Raiders of The Lost Ark.

See if you can spot the Well of Souls.

All along the walls are beautiful paintings and displays depicting scenes and individuals from the bible.  Prophets, Ezekial, Moses, Isaiah (in wax, seated in a mock up of a nomadic Hebrew tent), a staute of Adam and Eve, Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnazzer's dream.

But at the top, you ascend a winding ramp into this planetarium like domed room painted with stars and nebulae, and in the center is a giant white staute of Christ. Hector explained to me that this represented their belief in Jesus as the center of the universe.

Jesus As The Center of The Universe (me included for scale)

Now I kept waiting for the pitch. You know the pitch. The 'free personality test' pitch you get when you walk down Hollywood Blvd. between Ripley's and The Egyptian Theatre. The pitch the guys in the short sleeved shirts who come to your door on bikes give you, or the guy on campus with the bullhorn, or whichever guy 'the pitch' conjures to mind.

Hector showed me a room depicting the charity work the LDS church does worldwide. I asked him if he had always been a Mormon, and he admitted he was the only one in his traditionally Catholic family. Perfect place for the pitch. I think he pointed out the wax figure of Joseph Smith to me. I admitted I was a Catholic to him as well. He said that then I understood, that LDS' book of Mormon is a book added onto the New Testament. I did already know this. I made no judgment. I've never read the Book of Mormon and I think the extent of my education on it comes from that one South Park episode.

However, I am of same opinion of Robert E. Howard's Conan, who said,

"Crom's Devils! Let men worship what gods they will!"

I asserted that just as the Book of Mormon is an addition to the New Testament, so too is the New Testament an addition to the Hebrew Torah. Hector smiled to hear this, and clapped my shoulder.

He was nice guy, and when I told him I had to get back to my friends, he made no protest, no last ditch high pressure sales pitch, didn't plead with me to see more. He advised me, if I ever came back, to visit the other building, which had a miniature model of the Temple with a cross section cut out, showing the interior. He escorted me to the Temple grounds gate and shook my hand.

"You have a generous spirit," he told me. "I hope I will see you again some time."

Who knows?

The world is a strange and wonderful place, full of diverse people who can get together on their common struggles with Star Wars and appreciation of the printed word, scary stories, and thong wearing booksellers.

So I came away from World Horror Con 2012 with some new friends, some new hopes, some new knowledge, and the realization that I have nothing in particular against Mormons.

Hasta pronto.

PS – Picked up a copy of Dark Moon Digest #7, featuring the ghost story I wrote with my daughter Magnolia. Here's her first 'author pic.'

World Horror Con 2012

Next week I'll be at the World Horror Convention at the Radisson in Salt Lake City.

http://www.whc2012.org/World_Horror_2012.html

I'll be hovering all over the place starting Friday morning, likely commiserating with my fellow Damnation Books authors Tim Marquitz (Dawn of War Trilogy) and Lincoln Crisler (WILD, Corrupts Absolutely?). Hope to rub elbows with a couple of authors I'd admire as well. Excited to see Joe R. Lansdale and Robert McCammon will be there.

Specifically though, if you wanna find me, I'll be reading one of my works at 5:30pm on Friday, March 30th.

I'll also be at the mass book signing from about 8-10pm pushing copies of Merkabah Rider.

After that, 10PM or so Friday night I'll be jumping between the Dark Moon Books (the story I wrote with my daughter Magnolia, The Better To See You, appears in Dark Moon Digest #7 and my story The Wrath of Benjo is in their charity anthology Slices of Flesh) and Damnation Books (publishers of Dubaku and The Merkabah Rider series as well as Corrupts Absolutely? the dark metahuman anthology my story Conviction appears in) parties.

Then Saturday at noon I'm on the Vampires Through The Ages panel with Leslie S. Klinger, James Dorr, Hal Bodner, and Thomas Roche.

The rest of Saturday and Sunday I'll be bopping around all over or taking in the sights of Salt Lake City.

Hasta pronto!

 

On Conviction

It's a busy busy March. In addition to getting together something special for the epic, penultimate installment of the Merkabah Rider series, tentatively called Once Upon A Time In The Weird West, I've got a few projects coming your way.

Out now from Damnation Books, publishers of Merkabah Rider and Dubaku, and editor/author/live action GI Joe Lincoln Crisler, is Corrupts Absolutely? an anthology of dark metahuman fiction exploring the notion of 'what would happen if the average person had superpowers?' It's a great looking anthology with offerings by Cat Rambo, Weston Ochse, Joe McKinney, Tim Marquitz, and bizarrely, a pair of my old high school buddies, the talented Malon Edwards and Wayne Helge among others.

My own story, Conviction, takes place in the old (and mostly demolished now) Cabrini Green Housing Projects of my old abode, Chicago.

It's origins go all the way back to my roleplaying game days, when a guy named Aaron gave me the title and premise and told me 'I don't ever intend to write anything, so take this concept and run with it.' The premise was, a kid can make anything happen, can alter reality around him, simply with the power of conviction, by convincing himself beyond any doubt that he can affect change. The idea stayed with me for a good twenty or so years, till Lincoln's anthology came along and gave it a home. So thanks, Aaron, wherever you are.

The second ingredient was Katsuhiro Otomo's excellent manga Domu, about a senile resident of a Japanese housing project with Akira level mental powers, who uses it to basically steal and collect (and in the process murder the original owners of) various trinkets belonging to unsuspecting members of the community. As a policeman investigates the bizarre associated deaths, a little girl moves in with her family, a girl with the same psionic abilities. Someday, if given the chance, I would love to adapt and film this story with a minority cast set in Cabrini.

The showdown in Katsuhiro Otomo's 'Domu'

Cabrini-Green has been the setting for entertainment before, from Good Times to the horror film Candyman.

Good Times: Where I first thought Janet Jackson was dyn-o-mite.

Cabrini Green, for those that don't know anything about it, was a massive complex of high rise low income housing situated in South Chicago. You can read about it here -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini_Green

'The Reds' at Cabrini-Green

My own extremely brief experience with Cabrini dates back to around 1995 or '96. I drove a date up to Chicago, I don't remember where we were heading, possibly one of the museums, and I made a wrong turn and ended up driving through. I recall my date (she was African American), becoming extremely agitated and hunkering down deep in the passenger seat.

"What's the matter?" I said.

""We're in Cabrini!" she laughed nervously, wiggling further down in her seat.

What I knew about Cabrini Green at that time you could fit on the end of Tinkerbell's pinky and still have room to paint her nails. I knew only it was 'a bad place' full of 'thugs.'

What it really was was a ghetto. An intitutionalized concentration of low income predominantly African American households whose basic design seemed to be crafted to break up black families. I have no idea as to what it's origins were, but in researching it for Conviction, I gotta call a pig a pig.  Unable to make ends meet, mothers applied for assistance. The city would pull surprise inspections on assisted families, and if they found the father in residence, they would immediately cut off benefits. This caused fathers to necessarily live in separate apartments from their wives and children, effectively increasing the temptation of drugs, infidelity, and violence, all of which were rampant thanks to the deep infiltration of local street gangs. In its heyday, police treated Cabrini almost like a sovereign nation, refusing to pursue criminals inside or respond to calls for distress from its terrorized residents without significant paramilitary force. They sealed it off at New Years because the gangsters basically ran the show, waltzing down the street firing Tec-9′s and MAC-10′s into the air.

The situation of the buildings created a killzone in the center courtyard. Gangsters fired from hundreds of possible elevated positions. They burrowed holes in the adjoining apartments on various floors so that if police attempted raids, perpetrators could easily escape to stairwells or elevators.

If I remember right, Virginia Madsen made her way through one of the so-called (by police) 'ratholes' inbetween apartments in Cabrini.

In the name of preventing suicides and violence (protecting the residents supposedly), iron cages were erected over the open walkways, reinforcing its penetentiary look.

Nah the bars are for your protection, not ours.

So, in picking a setting for Conviction, I picked Cabrini, because if ever there was a place that inspired hopelessness in a youth, it was that place.

The main character of Conviction is Abassi, a picked upon kid raised by an unsympathetic grandmother, who witnessed the debasement and murder of his own drug addicted older sister at the hands of a cadre of local Gangster Disciples, and was beaten near to death for it.

Miss Orozco, a social worker at his school, tells him something he's never heard before; that he matters, that he if he can but visualize something better, he can make it happen. She brings hope to a kid without hope, and that little push puts him on a road to improvement.  She teaches him a word he's never heard before – conviction.

Then, in the weird and wonderful way superhero fiction creates metahumans out of improbable events (Peter Parker and his irradiated spider, The Flash and his lightning bolt and shelf of chemicals), an event occurs which once married to this new conviction, grants Abassi incredible powers.

But without any guidance or positive reinforcement to temper them, what does a child without hope do with them?

That's Conviction…

And here's an excerpt -

I wait in the Killing Field between the reds and the whites, where the crackheads go and the po-pos won't 'cause they get shot at from the windows. Them windows is like hundreds of eyes, and the red and white buildings be like giants looking down on you. I wait by the wet mattresses and the busted stones and the bottles and the pipes and the crinklin' chip bags and the yellow grass that ain't never been green.

I stare at the ground while I wait. It's wet from the rain. Rain s'posed to make things grow. They ain't no reason it shouldn't be green. They ain't no reason they can't be flowers.

Yes they is. The poison. The poison in the dirt from the blood and the rock and the puke and the dog shit and the people shit and the glass, which is the only green they is.

I think about the grass bein' green. I breathe.

From where I sit, it turns green, like it always should've been. The green spreads out across the whole lot. The grass drinks up the rain and spits out the poison into the street where it belong. It grows up my ankles, so thick you can't see the glass and the garbage no more. There are pink and yellow flowers like the ones in my picture.

I get up. I know what I can do now.

Pick up a copy of Corrupts Absolutely? from the publisher http://damnationbooks.com

or right here in print and Kindle from Amazon -  http://www.amazon.com/Corrupts-Absolutely-Metahuman-Fiction-ebook/dp/B007GE8RLC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331238309&sr=8-1

ConDor, The Surprise, El Terminator, and The Holy Field: San Diego 2012

Back from a sojourn in San Diego pushing Merkabah Rider and talking immortality at ConDor XIX.

The Con was not the greatest match for MR, sorry to say…mainly science fiction focused. I only had about 45 minutes to sell books, so no bills will be paid this go 'round. Thanks to those who showed up at my reading, though.

HMS Surprise: Figurehead

In between reading and my panel, the inimitable Jeff Carter and my son Auggie's godfather Elliott and I took a jaunt to San Diego's Maritime Museum, located on the harbor. For years I have been trying to set foot on the deck of the HMS Surprise, Jack Aubrey's warship from the Peter Weir/Russel Crowe movie Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World.

Lucky Jack's Great Cabin

I've always loved the movie. It got me quickly hooked on the excellent Patrick O'Brian novels featuring Lucky Jack and his sometime spy sometime naturalist all the time surgeon Stephen Maturin. I've tried to get to the museum during Comic Con but have always failed, last year, because I received a call from my wife that she was in labor with my son.

Anyhow, this time I made it. I love history of all sorts, and while I'm not overly familiar with the Age of Sail, it's a time period that's always interested me, and that I'd like to return to in my writing sometime after Merkabah Rider reaches its conclusion. The tween deck I believe must have been lowered from its original position because the cannons (all bearing colorful names like Inferno, one of them after a famous female dancer, Nancy Dawson) were on sort of raised steps, yet still looked comfortably out through the gun ports. Grabbing the double wheel of the Surprise and standing on her quarterdeck was an indescribable feeling. You get the sense that (and I believe this anyway) Aubrey and Maturin really did exist somewhere in some time. Maybe not in this world, but in some other.

At the wheel

As Melville said of the cannibal harpooneer Quequeg's island birthplace in that other maritime favorite of mine, 'It is not down on any map; true places never are.'

Never mind the manuvers....just go straight at 'em.

In the belly of the beast

We also got down and squeezed our way through the Russian B-39 diesel submarine they have birthed behind The Surprise (interesting to see the two vessels side by side, like some weird encounter from the writers of The Final Countdown or something). When I was in Cub Scouts in Chicago we had a father son outing, spending the night on board the submarine USS Silversides. I remember it being cramped and hot. The B-39 was even more cramped (so much that I got a brief flash of my claustrophobia about midway through the walk), but strangely cool the farther down ladder you went.

It was interesting to see the English labelmaker stips pasted on the dive plane controls. Reminded me of when the Enterprise crew had to relabel all the Klingon Bird of Prey consoles in Star Trek IV.

Aft torpedo section - 'This way to the egress, comrade.

After that we got on board the Star of India.

Star of India's main cabins

First commissioned as The Euterpe, after the Greek muse of music and poetry, she was built with and iron hull in 1863, kind of an experimental vessel for its time. After a long history that included hauling cargo and emmigrants, she was recommissioned as The Star of India and continues to sail around the globe with a volunteer crew every year. After the relative smallness and simplicty of The Surprise (which dwarfed a replica of Columbus' Nina which I went aboard in Chicago maybe fifteen or sixteen years ago), Star Of India seems like a luxury liner. The cabin is laid out with beautiful woodwork (a small four poster bed in the Captain's digs!), and though the accomodations are small, they're permanent, as opposed to the hammocks and removable bulkheads of a British naval vessel.

After seeing the ships it was back to ConDor where I moderated a discussion of the pros and cons of immortality (though the cons came up the most) in speculative fiction (no real immortals stepped up to particpate, so we confined the talk to speculative fiction) with a bright group of writers and RPG designers including Kevin Gerard, William Stoddard and Elwin Cotman (the jelly fishes are Turritopsis nutricula, Elwin. No wonder you couldn't remember the name.). The discussion was lively and illuminating. My personal feeling remains that if immortality were to come calling, I wouldn't kick it out of bed. I've got plenty of hobbies. Seriously, if a man's lifespan were to coincide with the infinity of the universe, then how much would there be to see and learn? Maybe I watch too much Doctor Who.

Ven conmigo, quieres vivir.

Following the close of the con, we went to San Diego's Old Town, which I'd always thought was the same as the Gas Lamp District, but is more like Los Angeles' Olvers Street (though larger and a little less authentic). Lots of old Spanish haciendas converted into Anglo-friendly Mexican restaurants with too tangy salsa. We were greeted outside Miguel's Cantina by a pretty embarrassingly stereotypical animatronic Mexican in a sombrero and serape who chided us in a sleepy Cheech Marin-type accent to come in for some burritos. The Mexican terminator jokes and the cervezas did flow.

After dinner we headed down the street to a little walled in graveyard with white crosses and plank tombstones Jeff had spied from the window of the Star Destroyer.

The dirt plot with a few twisted old trees, surrounded by a low stone wall and situated between an out of commission Thai Restaurant and some other business, is El Campo Santo (The Holy Field) Cemetary, a graveyard dating back to the 1840′s that was apparently partly paved over by the march of progress. The little graves scattered throughout the graveyard (which I have to admit upon reflection, was weirdly quiet considering it was surrounded by bars and eateries on a Saturday night) are marked with facsimilies of old period newspaper clippings and historical notes.

Who dug the gravedigger's grave?

Apparently the graveyard was also used as an execution ground, and a good deal of Native American insurrectionists who had rebeled against being taxed without representation were hung and buried there. There was the grave of a gentleman who had commandeered a rowboat with intent to hijack a berthed sloop in the harbor and wound up getting executed for horse thievery on some weird 19th century technicality. Leaning against one of the white crosses was a shovel. This grave marked the repose of an Indian man who had apparently attacked his wife with a knife, and upon confessing it to the local priest was sentenced to be El Campo Santo's gravedigger from then on.

There was a fascinating newspaper article describing the funeral of the infant daughter of a local Spaniard. The little body was not enclosed in a coffin for the funeral procession, but borne on an open bier to the cemetary, led by the priest and an altar boy holding the cross, flanked by six little girls in white dresses, with a Mexican boy lighting firecrackers bringing up the rear.

On a billboard inside the little cemetary was a huge partial list of the interred, whose bodies now resided beneath the freeways and streets, houses and businesses surrounding. Included was a little blurb on the discovery of ten mass graves for which no account could be found or determined.

"Zombies," I said.

"Probably from some battle," said Jeff.

Writers….

So it's every hand to his rope or gun, quick's the word and sharp's the action. After all... 'Surprise' is on our side.

My ConDor XIX Schedule

Hey all, a brief note this week to let you know I'll be appearing at ConDor in San Diego on Saturday March 3rd.

http://www.condorcon.org/html/mainmenu.html

I'll be signing/selling books in the Dealers Room from 11-noon, then doing a reading from The Merkabah Rider series at 12 (I think in the Brittany room).

At 5PM I'll be talking about immortality on the 'Who Wants To Live Forever?' panel in the Garden Ballroom I with William Stoddard, Elwin Cotman, Christopher Farnsworth, and Kevin Gerard.

Hope to see you there.

 

My Love For Comics Has A Giant Sized Origin

I'm a comic book fan from waayyy back. I can trace my interest in funnybooks directly back to four big oversized comic books my parents bought for me back in the day. This was a couple years before I could read, so I used to make up the story and dialogue as I followed along with the pictures, running to grab an adult when something particularly interesting to me came up and I just HAD to know what was going on.

Marvel Treasury Edition #18

Marvel Treasury Edition #18 featured Werewolf By Night, whose standalone series is the only complete run I've ever hunted down and purchased. There was also an Iron Fist story about a guy who was born old and aged backwards, the X-Men (out of costume, so I had no idea who they were) and Morbius the Living Vampire, and a Ghost Rider story with a bad guy cyclist called The Orb, who wore a big blue eyeball motorcycle helmet for a very good reason. He had ditched his bike during a race and crossed the finish line ON HIS FACE. Leaving me with this indelible image (I think I might've been four)…

The Orb Unmasked

Gah! No wonder my interests went the way they did. I covered my eyes through the climactic unmasking in Return of The Jedi because I imagined Vader would look much like The Orb….but Anakin had nothing on him.

Marvel Treasury Edition #25  – Spider-Man vs. The Hulk at The Winter Olympics. I remember The Mole Man created a machine to lift the Olympic village out of reach. Peter Parker was there covering the games. I don't remember why the Hulk was there. I think the Mole Man's guys competed against the Olympians for some reason, and I don't remember if they were actual real life Olympians. All I remember about this is there was a lady with a bubble head space helmet which got cracked and made her rapidly age. The Mole Man carried her off and The Hulk pounded the village back to ground level with his fists.

Sweet

Hulk, MODOK and The Harpy

Marvel Treasury Edition #26: The Rampaging Hulk. My impressions of this one as a kid are hard to put to words as an adult. I remember being fascinated and repelled by MODOK, the leader of AIM. The guy is just a huge head and face with relatively spindly mechanical arms. Freakish. There was also The Harpy, who was a hot chick (apparently Betty Ross) that seemed to have the same problem as The Hulk, except she turned into a green skinned half bird woman, which again, freaked me out (and yet was also titillating, because her clothes tore off).

What is it with me and green chicks? Later there was the Orion girl, She-Hulk, and Oola, but first there was Harpy...

The thing I remember clearest though was the little story in the back which featured Hercules getting into a barfight with a trucker looking guy with nails that came out of his fists. I think the fight started over Hercules hording all the chicks in the place. At the end, their tremendous fight cleared out the bar. I had no idea who Wolverine was till years and years later. This story confused the heck out of me as a kid because I thought the trucker guy was a bad guy and couldn't figure out why they got along in the end.

It also introduced me to the term 'skirts' as a word for women.

Finally, there was the magnum opus of my collection, which I wish to God I could find. Thankfully DC put this one out again recently in a nifty hardcover edition which my lovely wife got me for Christmas.

Oh yeah.

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.

It's as awesome as it sounds and not nearly as bad. The Neil Adams art is great, the story line killer. An alien fleet appears in orbit and demands to fight Earth's greatest champion over the fate of the planet. Superman steps up to the challenge, but Muhammad Ali argues that as a native earthling, HE'S Earth's greatest champion.

They decide to settle it with an exhibition bout, battling it out under a simulated red sun. Ali OWNS Supes, apparently putting him in traction.

Ali goes toe to toe with the massive alien boxer, but sensing the alien commander's duplicitous nature, Ali and Superman had previously formed a plan. Bundini Brown (Ali's real life cornerman) is in reality Superman in disguise. He goes off to cripple the alien fleet while Ali takes a pounding in the ring. What happens next is best left to the actual panels…I think by the time I got a hold of this one I could read a little bit, so imagine a six or seven year old little white kid speaking Ali's dialogue in his best Mr. T voice.

BAD-ASS

Meanwhile, don't think Superman has been slouching all this time either….

SEE ABOVE

And the real kicker at the end, which was a stipulation Muhammad Ali demanded before he allowed DC to use his likeness…

Haw! Yeah, Ali figures out in a single issue what it took decades for Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen to learn. That's why he's the greatest, I guess.

Anyway, in retrospect, these four comics likely informed my own storytelling for years to come. I've always been attracted to old fashioned stories transplanted or retold with weird concepts.

Jack Russell's (AKA Werewolf By Night – yeah, like the terrier) appearance in #18 probably went a long way towards fostering my love for werewolves, which I expounded on in my pirate horror novella Red Sails.

Bizarre, oddly sympathetic villains like The Mole Man, MODOK, and The Orb have always appealed to me. My first encounter with martial arts was probably the Iron Fist story in #18.

My professional Star Wars story was a boxing tale, and part of the Chevin cornerman's name, Eedund Cus, was just Dundee (ie Ali cornerman Angelo Dundee) backwards.  My appreciation for Muhammad Ali no doubt sprang from reading his exploits with Superman at a young age.

Of course, my tastes changed over the years. In the 80′s, like most kids, I was reading The Punisher (but enjoying DC's illicit modern day continuation of The Shadow with Howard Chaykin, Bill Scienkiewicz and Kyle Baker more) X-Men, and Wolverine, with an early stint through Marvel's fantastic GI Joe and Transformers comics. That was probably the peak of my collecting days, when I built up my boxes, finding little gem titles I continue to return to every so often like Milk and Cheese, Groo The Wanderer, Hellboy, and Marshall Law. Then came The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and all the heavy stuff that followed.  I don't pick up monthlies anymore, relying mainly on word of mouth and wikipedia to keep up with what's going on there. I still go to Comic Con every year, pick up the occasional funnybook or trade paperback.

But I look back on these (and probably a giant sized Shazam/Captain Marvel edition I can't even begin to remember enough to seek out) early, slightly goofy but genuinely great books as the beginning of my comics education. I lost them all a long time ago. Read them so many times the covers disappeared followed by the title splash pages, and finally the whole shebang.

Think I know what I'll shop for at Comic Con this year.

On The Occassion of Robert E. Howard's Birthday

Today, January 22nd, is the birthday of Robert E. Howard, chief among my writing influences.

A Texan and a writer for the pulps in the 1930′s, Howard is best remembered for having created the character of Conan The Barbarian, represented to the public in one good movie and two abyssmal ones (and a TV show barely worth mentioning). He also created King Kull, Breckenridge Elkins, Bran Mak Morn, and my personal favorites, Solomon Kane and Cormac Mac Art.

Howard was a writer with an unsurpassed ability to churn out visceral, kinetic action. Consider this passage from his ultimate Conan tale, The Hour of The Dragon -

"By Mitra, it is the king!" swore Tarascus. He cast a swift look about him, and laughed. "That other was a jackal in his harness! In, dogs, and take his head!"

The three soldiers–men-at-arms wearing the emblem of the royal guards– rushed at the king, and one felled the squire with a blow of a mace. The other two fared less well. As the first rushed in, lifting his sword, Conan met him with a sweeping stroke that severed mail-links like cloth, and sheared the Nemedian's arm and shoulder clean from his body. His corpse, pitching backward, fell across his companion's legs. The man stumbled, and before he could recover, the great sword was through him.

Conan wrenched out his steel with a racking gasp, and staggered back against the tent-pole. His great limbs trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat poured down his face and neck. But his eyes flamed with exultant savagery and he panted: "Why do you stand afar off, dog of Belverus? I can't reach you; come in and die!"

Or this, from one of my personal favorites, the weird western The Horror From The Mound -

Through darting jets and licking tongues of flames they reeled and rolled like a demon and a mortal warring on the fire-lanced floors of hell. And in the growing tumult of the flames, Brill gathered himself for one last volcanic burst of frenzied strength. Breaking away and staggering up, gasping and bloody, he lunged blindly at the foul shape and caught it in a grip not even the vampire could break. And whirling his fiendish assailant bodily on high, he dashed him down across the uptilted edge of the fallen table as a man might break a stick of wood across his knee. Something cracked like a snapping branch and the vampire fell from Brill's grasp to writhe in a strange broken posture on the burning floor. Yet it was not dead, for its flaming eyes still burned on Brill with a ghastly hunger, and it strove to crawl toward him with its broken spine, as a dying snake crawls.

Howard never lived to see his own legacy. On June 11 Howard left his mother's deathbed, went to his car, took a .380 Colt automatic from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. He was thirty years old.

I really believe had he lived he would not be much more well known and highly regarded than he is among the public at large. Had he had time to develop his craft, I think he would be as prestigious an author at Cormac McCarthy whose own hypnotic, violent prose is at least as affecting

Anyway, happy birthday, Bob.

MIDNIGHT

by Robert E. Howard

Red leaned his elbows upon the table and cursed. The candle guttered low. The bottle was empty, and a slow fire coiled in our brains–the fire which devours and consumes and destroys but never leaps into full wild flame.

I looked at Red with bleared eyes. He hid his face in his hands. He was thinking of a woman he knew. The cards, greasy with handling and stained with whiskey and candle tallow, lay scattered between us. The desire for gambling was gone, and there was no more whiskey.

"Cheer up, Red," I said. "Listen–I'll tell you: Somewhere in the world the sun is coming up like a red dragon to shine on a gilded pagoda; somewhere the bleak stars are gleaming on the white sands where a magic caravan is sleeping out the ages. Somewhere the night wind is blowing through the grass of a mysterious grave. Somewhere there is a gossamer sailed ship carving a wake of silver foam across the dark blue of the Mediterranean. This isn't all, Red."

"Oh, Christ," he groaned, reaching for the empty bottle, "I wish I had a drink."

An Ignoble Story For A Noble Cause: The Wrath of Benjo in Slices of Flesh

Hey ever'body, Slices of Flesh will be premiering this March at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City from Dark Moon Books. It's a weighty novel length charity anthology with a pretty impressive roster of horror authors including some headliners like Graham Masterton (whose Manitou series readers of Merkabah Rider 3 will know I'm a fan of), Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Keene, and with the usual awesome cover from none other than Hellboy's Mike Mignola.

The net profits for this endeavor are slated to go to charity, in particular Project Literacy http://www.project-literacy.org/, a very worthy cause dedicated to raising the awareness of and more importantly, erradicating adult illiteracy.

Over 86 authors are slated to appear, including D.L. Snell (of Snell's Market Scoops), William F. Nolan (legendary creator of Logan's Run), and oh yeah, yours truly.

My contribution is a vile little tale called The Wrath of Benjo, about a very lonesome, very angry, very hungry tsukumogami, which is a neat little critter from tenth century Japanese folklore.

Tsukumogami

I'll post the usual commentary about it once the thing premieres in a couple months. I'll be at WHC as well at the Damnation Books table, so anybody's going uh….I'll be there.

Here's a link to DMB's announcement with a more complete list of authors. You can also see Mike's great cover in all its gory, inky detail.

Happy to have my name alongside so many talented folks.

http://www.darkmoonbooks.com/Slices_of_Flesh.htm

Words From A Singer In The Shadows

Changing it up a bit this week, lads and ladies. Had a fairly major (well in my mind – nobody will ever hear of it) professional disappointment today and feeling good and sorry for myself, angry at the world.

Happened to read something I thought I'd share, in the hopes that some lonesome driver in the ether might happen across it here at DT and take heart from, not for what's said, but by whom.  I don't like to print big quotes, but screw it. If it turns out somebody owns the rights to this, well they shouldn't. All parties involved are deceased and I don't think much of people who make their living off of dead relatives or ride their surnames to a comfortable existence. However I'm legally bound to say I'll abide by such drivel, so drop me a line and I'll take this down if it turns out I should.

But I won't like it.

-EME

"I feel inclined to talk about myself tonight and I'm not going to apologize about talking about myself because it's not in my line.

'Verily a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.' I find it so. I have progressed beyond the average man to the extent that people's belief is not absolutely necessary to my life and living but not to the point where I am absolutely indifferent to flagrant skepticism. I realize that there is really only one person in the world who really believes that I'll never amount to a damn at the writing game and that person is myself. The trouble is that comparisons, when the trouble is taken to draw them, are so inifitely to my discredit. Here am I, with seven years of hard work behind me and only some twenty five stories, articles, and rhymes marketed to show for it. Here am I, slugging away at a cheap, little known magazine which may already be bankrupt, weaving fanciful and impossible tales and absolutely unknown outside that magazine's limited clientele. When compared to the clever, intelligent and gifted writers of today who have already reached their zenith, I admit there is little to my favor.

But what few people seem to realize is that these men served their apprenticeship just as I am serving mine. Their work is the finished article — mine the crude, groping handiwork of the beginner. Seven years of hard work — but how many of these demigods reached the pinnacles in seven — or ten, or twenty. Many, I grant you, leaped into fame with much less labor than I have already done. But they were geniuses. I am not a genius, neither am I clever, educated, or especially intelligent. But I have faith in myself and a capacity for work. What I am writing now is less than nothing in the long run, even though it represents my heart's blood. The world is not interested in heart's blood, but Success Accomplished and nothing else. The toil, the sweat, the torment means nothing. What the world wants is perfection and of what lies behind, men reckon little.  A man may toil a lifetime, toil like a giant and perform the deeds of unthoughted heroes, but if he does not succeeed, as the world measures success, all his labors and hardships go for naught and he is a jest and a by-word, soon forgotten.

But I'll succeed if I live, in my eyes and according to worldly standards. And when I come to the end of the trail, if I have lost, I can say that at least I never whimpered for sympathy in my work. And if I win I can say I made it absolutely on my own with never a helping hand and that I owe nothing, not one damned thing, to anyone. Still, it sometimes rasps that I should be condemned utterly for what appears under my name today.  No one judges George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, or Jack London by what they wrote early in their youth when they were struggling up the long ladder and neither will I be judged by my earlier efforts, when the dust has drunk my brain and my dreams.

But God, the utter futility of it descends on the soul of me like a thick fog through which I can see no light. Surely, for by the time I have gained the heights of success I will old and hardened so by life that the taste of success will be as dust and ashes in my soul — a man without hope, without joy, and without friends….

….The emptiness of success I know –though I have never tasted it– is a reality for always through the cheers of the mob will come like a writhing serpent the memory of the jeers of the mob when I worked and sweated pure red blood. And I will always think: you uplift me now, but you scorned me then, and where is the difference? For I am now and I was then, and then I built the cornerstones and the foundations, and now I stand on the spire and where is the difference? Damn you all. That's what I will think in the days to come; but now I must bend my back to the cornerstones and foundations and make them firm so that my spires may rend apart the stars and all the world may see the glimmer of my skeleton against them when I stand on my spires at the end.

Year by year, day by day, hour by hour, the steel pierces my heart and my brain and I grow harder and harder and less human. Oh God, for the gift of satire and malediction to make men cringe and writhe and curse. God, for the power to sit in my study and send out spears of hate and vengeance to shatter the brains and blast the souls of men.

Let it be. I am a fool to say all this stuff, but I see I that I have not yet learned the first necessary truth of life — to lock up in the heart and the soul all truths and dreams and visions of dreams. Each time a man opens his heart he breaks his armor and weakens his battle might.'

-Robert E. Howard, October 1928, from Glenn Lord's Selected Letters.

Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel Notes

Before I jump into this post, Chag Urim Sameach/Happy Hanukkah.

My gift to you is, first three readers to send an email to emerdelac (AT) gmail.com get a free e-copy of Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel in .epub, .mobi, or .pdf.  Just state which you prefer. I'll post on here when I get enough responses.

Now on with the rest of the shew….

I like reading the thought processes and inspirations behind stuff I read by other authors. Joe R. Lansdale did this for his High Cotton collection, prefacing each story with a short bit about how it came to be. When I wrote for Star Wars I did something like this on the official blog, a sort of key to the easter eggs and references I put in the story for fans, something guys like Dan Wallace and Jason Fry still do on there.

Anyway, I've done one for each of the Merkabah Rider books, and it being Hankukah, felt like time to sit down and whip up one for the latest installment, Have Glyphs Will Travel, which came out at the beginning of December.

These might be partly spoiler-ific, so if you haven't read the book yet, you might hold off and come back later.

Still here?

OK.

In Episode 9, The Long Sabbath –

Really not too much homaging in this one. The critters the turncoat riders put in the hapless adjutant and his scout are meant to be Mythos spawned of course, but they're my own creation, sprung from me reading about the phenomenon of kamikaze ants and their last ditch method of defending their colony from invaders.

Exploding ant traps an enemy worker

Cattle stampedes are the most harrowing, violent danger I can think of for an old-time cattleman, from what I've read and seen. The stampede scenes in Lonesome Dove and Red River have always stuck with me. The only thing I could think of worse than being in one was being immobilized in the middle of one.

There is one extra-Rider allusion. Abe Lillard, the Rider's best friend from San Francisco, is meant to be the half-Jewish son of Tommy Lillard, a character portrayed by Harrison Ford in a western that was a huge inspiration for The Merkabah Rider series. I would assume Abe was named for Tommy's best friend.

Avram Belinski (L) and Tommy Lillard (R)

In Episode 10, The War Shaman –

Lots of history easter eggs in this one. It's actually my favorite of the book as it was clearest in my head from start to finish and includes a cameo by some of the greatest of the Chiricahua Apache warriors, a people whom I have an unadulterated admiration for.

Goyaala is Geronimo of course, and stuttering Juh (pronounced 'whoa' if you were wondering), Vittorio and the warrior woman Lozen are all real individuals. Lozen's purported seeing Power and the chant she uses to activate it was documented as well. As a matter of fact, all the named Apache are taken from historical record, even the outlaw Bedonkohe, Inya.

Faustus' extra-dimensional origins have been delved into by me in an earlier post here….http://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/merkabah-rider-author-notes/

Of the various stories he mentions as being real, of course the whaler with the Indian figurehead is the Pequod of Moby Dick, the boy with the sword from the stone is intended to be Arthur, and the thirteen heroes with two hearts between them, well, you don't need a 'doctorate' to know 'who' that is.

Thirteen heroes (eleven pictured) with two hearts between them.

The company of cavalry Faustus, the Rider, Belden and Kabede meet on the road are commanded by Adna Chaffee, who was an actual Civil War veteran and later became a General, seeing action in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion and the Phillipine Insurrection.

Tom Horn

Riding along with him is the famous German scout Al Seiber, who was General George Crook's chief civilian scout during the Geronimo campaign. Tom, the boy accompanying him, is Tom Horn, the infamous range detective later hung for murder in Cheyenne,Wyoming (perhaps unjustly) and portrayed by Steve McQueen in the titular movie. Togo-de-chuz and his 'kid', the Apache scouts Seiber mentions as his preferred companions, were real Apache scouts, the 'kid' being Has-kay-bay-nay-ntayl, later known as 'The Apache Kid.'

The Apache Kid was an interesting character who was a longtime friend (and very nearly a surrogate son) of Seiber. When a drunken scout killed his father, the Kid retaliated and became an outlaw.  He surrendered to the Army and was sentenced to a year in Alcatraz and later Yuma Territorial Prison, the latter of which he is one of the only known escapees from. He and three others overpowered some guards and fled into a snowstorm, never to be seen again. One of his pursuers was future author Edgar Rice Burroughs, then a member of the seventh cavalry!

The Apache Kid

Nacozari and the Moctezume Mining Company are both real, but the existence of the Apache stronghold of Pa Gotzin Kay is debatable. It's tangled up with the story of the Lost Adams Diggings, a legendary gold vein, also the inspiration for MacKenna's Gold. I've moved it from the traditional location of New Mexico.

Oh there's lots of Lovecraftian stuff in this one as well. Misquamicus of course, also the subject of Graham Masterton's great Manitou series of novels. I've made him a sort of endless being, on par with his brother, and tied him into most of the major Native American doings from the dawn of recorded history and on that I could find, from the early treacheries of Cortes to the Maroon rebellion in Jamaica, where I had read some of the captive Indians involved in the burning of Providence, Rhode Island had been shipped off as slaves, and I imagined Misquamacus would have found work to his liking. The Sand Creek Massacre was one of the worst acts of genocide enacted by the United States against the native populace. It was actually the basis for the original weird western stories I wrote in high school, some of which evolved into Merkabah Rider.

A deformed Misquamacus in the future, from 'The Manitou'

Misquamacus' dealings with the Billington clan of New England are documented in Lovecraft's The Lurker At The Threshold, where his devotion to Nyarlathotep and conjuring of Ossodagowah are both mentioned.

 The supernatural aspects of the bad guys who side with Misquamacus are mostly my own invention of course, though the Pawnee did at one time practice a somewhat infamous human sacrifice ritual, and the Tonkawas did believe they were descended from wolves. Any misrepresentations are of course my own fault, but I make no apologies portraying skinwalkers in a negative light.  I don't think any Navajo would take issue with it.

 The Rider's likening his claustrophobia to the various mental afflictions of an old friend from his yeshiva in San Francisco named Aloysius Monkowitz is a shameless (or perhaps shameful) allusion to a probable ancestor of a certain neurotic modern day San Francisco detective with a similar name of whom I'm a fan.

Aloysius Monkowitz's famous descendant.

In Episode 11, The Mules of The Mazzikim

This is another one short on easter eggs, but there are a couple.

The scalp the Kwtsan Indian tries to sell the Rider on the bridge going into Yuma is the scalp of Joe (John Joel) Glanton, the leader of the band of vicious scalphunters hired by the Mexican government to collect bounties on Apache Indian scalps in the 1840's and vividly portrayed in one my favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or, An Evening's Redness In The West. Glanton and his gang took over the ferry over the Gila River at Yuma and regularly robbed and extorted crossers. They were later slaughtered by the Kwtsans on that spot.

The Rabbi Belinski the Rider mentions as having overseen his bar mitzvah was the aforementioned Tommy Lillard's best friend, a rabbi who once undertook an amazing journey across the west to deliver a Torah scroll to San Francisco.

The lawman, Marshal Books, who arrests the Rider is the same ailing Books (or perhaps the brother of) who years later has it out on his birthday in an El Paso(or perhaps Carson City) saloon with several of his nemeses.

Happy birthday, Books

In Episode 12, The Man Called Other

Every aspect of Yuma Prison I could realistically portray I did, from the color of the cots to the processing of prisoners, to the rings in the floor and The Dark Cell. I visited what's left of the place last year and the museum that sits on the site. Judge Berry was real, and the warden of the time was the real guy, Captain C.V. Meder (though not the acting warden, obviously).

In Episode Thirteen, The Fire King Triumphant

The title of The Fire King Triumphant is paraphrased from the headline of the Tombstone Epitaph ('The Fire King Reaps A Harvest') about the May 1882 fire that actually swept through the town of Tombstone. It really did start in the outhouse behind Tivoli's as depicted. If you get yourself a street map from the time, I've done my best to keep the layout of the story true to the town.

W.W. Spates appeared in the last book, and I talked about the inspiration for him. His colleague, the linguistic expert Warren Rice is intended to be a younger version of the silver haired linguist who accompanied Harry Armitage in The Dunwich Horror.

 China Mary, the shrewd entrepreneur with ties to the Chinese Benevolence Society (or tong) in Tombstone, was a real lady, as was her Can Can Chop House. The word her man uses to describe the amorphous beasties in Lepsy's barrels is hundun, which does mean dumpling, or wonton, but also refers to a legendary faceless, formless beast from Chinese folklore. The hundun is primordial chaos, a lump of flesh or thunder egg from which creatures of reality are born, or a featureless creature lacking the seven openings which mark humanity.

hundun

The villain of this story Lepsy himself is a reference to a ghost story from Dudleyville or Pinal, Arizona. Lepsy supposedly did hire Chinese workers and burn them as remuneration. When a sheriff and his posse went after them, Lepsy did the same for him. In the canyon where these crimes supposedly occurred, you can see scorch marks and smell burnt flesh.

Camillus Sydney and Mollie Fly did own the photography studio in Tombstone at 312 Fremont Street. On October 26 1881 the Gunfight at the OK Corral took place in the alley between his boarding house out back and the next house over, and it was inside his place that Ike Clanton and Sheriff Johnny Behan took cover.

Fly and Mollie both took photographs in their studio and abroad, Mollie being one of the most prominent female photographers of her time. Fly took the famous photos of the Billy Clanton and the McClaurys in their caskets. Fly also accompanied Crook to Canyon de Los Embudos in 1886 and took pictures of Geronimo in the field – the only photographs of Native Americans actively engaged in resisting the US government.

Mollie Fly took this picture of the CS Fly studio as it burned for the second time in 1912.

Finally, Moon Fugate and his peculiar pigmentation condition are a reference to the famous Blue Fugates a hill clan from Hazard, Kentucky, born with methemoglobinemia or met-H, a genetic blood disorder which results in blue skin.

The Blue Fugates of Kentucky

That's about all this time out, kiddies. Whew!

Soon, news about the final chapter in the Merkabah Rider saga. It'll be something special.

Don't forget the giveaway.

Happy holidays, whichever holiday it may be, and good new year on you.

-Hasta pronto,

EME