Brian Keene's Blog, page 152

MEETING THE BLACK by Tom Piccirilli – Guest Blog

As you know, Tom Piccirilli is battling brain cancer. So far, chemo and radiation are going well. The pills he will have to take for the rest of his life cost $14,000 a month (no, that is not a typo). Luckily, he has been accepted into a program that will help pay for those. But even so, he and his wife Michelle can still use your help. You can donate money to Tom via PayPal to PicSelf1@aol.com. You can purchase one of his digital books published by Crossroads Press. From now until the end of the year, 100% of the sales will go to Tom. Or you can purchase his latest hardcover, The Walls of the Castle, up for pre-order today from Dark Regions Press. 20% of the proceeds will go to Tom.

Last month, when I visited Tom after his surgery, he told me he’d “written a little something” about what he was going through before and after the operation. That little something is called Meeting the Black, and it’s a powerful piece. I’m very proud to share it here with you. 

MEETING THE BLACK

For my amazing wife, Michelle, my brother and sister-in-law Bill & Ginny Piccirilli, Shannon Piccirilli-Wells, my cousin Jan Bartone, Toni Suiter, Anna Wietzell, Melissa, Christopher, Branden, Nicki, Jon, Adam Findey, Angie, Barb, David N. Wilson, David Dodd, Neil Gaiman, Brian Keene, Geoff Cooper, Mike Oliveri, Mike Huyck, John Urbancik, David Jae Smith, Kate Miciak, Randall Klein, Matt Schwartz, Ed Gorman, Dean Koontz, everyone who reached out and reached in, everyone who gave so much as a nickel to the fundraiser, everyone who took the time to drop a caring note on Facebook, Twitter, who emailed, phoned, carded, loved. You’re all righteous and you all saved my ass.

8/29/12

Noir truth.

What I know: I’ve got a tumor in my head that’s halfway between the size of a golf-ball and a tennis-ball, according to the neurosurgeon. I like him. His name is Lars. How can you not like an Eastern European brain surgeon named Lars? He doesn’t smile much, which is probably a good thing. The nurses say he’s brilliant and soft-spoken. He’s stolid, a little staid. He speaks with a clipped accent, and he takes his time looking at you. He swung his hand out when we met. He’s kind of a lurchy dude, tall, broad, looks like he should be in a German expressionistic film, his chin muscles are tight. His eyes a touch remote. He’s not a warm dude, but do you need your doctor to perform brain surgery with tears in his eyes? Let’s say no.

What I see: shadows, shapes, blurs, after-images, burning roadside in the rain glares. My mother died hallucinating that her room was full of angels with burning copper penny wings. Maybe they weren’t hallucinations. I see them too. These blazing, flaring lights. At first I thought it was due to the Diabetes. I went to the endocrinologist. I went to the ophthalmologist. He said he saw something behind my eyes. Maybe blood. Maybe cataracts. Maybe something scarier? He sent me on to the Retinal Specialist.

What I felt: nauseous, fatigued, vertigo. Serious vertigo, like Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo. Spinning, twirling, got to put your hands out to hold onto the furniture vertigo. People falling off the roof vertigo. The Retinal Specialist said he was sending me on to the hospital for an MRI. He made a point of stating that he wouldn’t look at the MRI. He didn’t look at MRIs. The neurologist would look at them. Okay, chief, said me.

Where I’ve been. In the hospital. Wedged into an MRI. It shows the radiology people something bad. The nurse’s voice comes over the little speaker in there and she keeps me in the loop. “This scan will last for five minutes, Thomas. Try to keep very still.” Except I can’t keep still. I’m not fidgety but I’m breathing heavily. I can feel my chest expanding and my arms pressing on the sides of the machine, and I’m a little twitchy. The machine bangs like it’s full of starving babies that want out.

What I know: Things aren’t right. I’m not myself. I’m often in a fog lately. I can’t see, I can’t think clearly, I haven’t been writing much. And there it is. When everything else runs out on me, I can always count on the writing. It’s always there. And now, it’s slipping through my fingers too. Jesus, not that, take the rest of it, but not that. What am I if I can’t write. I’m not me. I’m not the person I’m supposed to be.

What I hear: a deep throb in the back of my brother’s throat as he says, “Love you, brother.” He’s not the warmest man in the world and I’ve made him suffer for that in the writing, and I shouldn’t have, but you put it down the way you can. I’m often angry. He’s taken a beating. But now he’s scared, and Christ, that scares me. He was always stone, he was always the jock, the rock, the guy who didn’t tremble. Now he’s worried. About me.

What I’m thinking about: all of that and more. My dead old man, who died when I was seven. He’s always been gone. He’s always been the invisible pit whose presence has haunted me. His death to cancer made me noir. His death to cancer made me horror. It made me fear. It made me put words down. It put the hole in me that still isn’t filled. Is that a wasted life? Shouldn’t I be a whole person by now? I’m 47. Older than he was when he went down.

Where I’m going: on Monday. In for surgery to have the tumor removed. As much of it as they can remove. The doc tells me he doesn’t shave heads. He will use staples to close the sutures. He says it will take five hours to tug out this aggressively growing mass. There’s still a slight chance it’s not “cancerous.” That it is “benign.” Just your average everyday aggressively growing mass of tennis-ball sized blackness waiting to eat up the rest of my brain, I suppose. I think of it like a lost nightmare. It started in my subconscious and couldn’t find its way out. Maybe it’s this, this essay, this story, my story, the last bit of my story waiting to be told. Maybe it just wants to be born like all the other books. Maybe it’s my fault. I should’ve helped it out more. Then it wouldn’t have turned on me.

What else I’m thinking about: Humphrey Bogart. I read a biography on Bogie once that spoke of how he was an iconic heroic performer not just because of the figure of courage and strength he cut on film but because of how he faced his own death, when he was so frail and weak that Bacall had to single-handedly lower him downstairs in a dumbwaiter to visit with his friends. No matter what happens to me I’ll never be slim enough for Michelle to carry me single-handedly anywhere. She was losing her breath pushing my fat ass around the hospital in a wheelchair.

Stray thoughts like stray bullets: a year or so ago Harlan Ellison thought he was dying and went around telling everybody, and then the little fucker just kept on going. I wonder if it’s possible for me too. I commented on my Facebook about some of this stuff and the generous comments and kind regards and sweet words of respect made me ring with gratitude. If only I could distill half that love down into a pill and pop that instead of all the other meds I’m taking: steroids, anti-seizure pills, painkillers, hyper-tension, Diabetes, anti-vertigo, anti-nausea. If only the throb in my brother Bill’s voice could be injected into my spinal column.

Will the burning angels carry me away? My brother asked me a strange question on the phone last night. Maybe not so strange. A different kind of question, but we’re in a different place, a different set of circumstances. We’re both scared. He asked if I believed if our mother was “watching over me.” I told him the truth. I said that I didn’t think I believed that she was watching over me as such–-as a ghost looking down from some perch in paradise, but I also said that I wanted to believe her presence was nearby and helping me as she always did in life. Part of this is because I met two older women in the hospital yesterday who tugged at my heart in a motherly fashion. My neurologist, or one of my neurologists, was a very sweet woman who stared at me with a deep glowing care, the kind that only truly sincere and caring people can look at you like. The other was an older nurse and administrator who occasionally whispered some endearing comments about us, like, “Wow, you kids have been through the wringer.” You don’t know how much you miss that kind of down to earth talk until you don’t have much of it around anymore. My cousin Jan, bless her, is something of a new-agey person who always feels the need to couch her commentary in profundities like, “It’s all just energy, Tom! There are no coincidences!” I wish I could think like that, I suppose. I don’t know what it means, but she tells me I should talk to my “cells.” I keep trying to start conversations with my cells.

“Cells?” I say. “What the fuck?”

Cells respond: “Yo, man, we just work here, you’re the chief.”

What I want to say to my cells: “Look, blame me if you want, okay. I did you wrong. I ate bad shit. I smoked cigars for a while. I’ve never been trim and fit. Hold the grudge, but don’t give up the good fight now. We’re, what, halfway through the race? Come on, you can hold on for longer than that, can’t you? Besides, who are you really hurting, huh? Me? You’re gonna go in the ground with me, fuckers. Lars is going to yank you out of my brain and throw you on the floor. Cells, get in line, get back into formation, hup one, two, all that, start doing your jobs again. I need you. Besides, it’s all just energy, there are no coincidences.”

“The fuck are you talking about, man?”

“I don’t know, just go with it, yeah?”

So after Lars does his thing: he says it will take four to five hours to dig out as much of this aggressively growing mass as he can. Then he staples me back up and I’m off to ICU for a day or two. They don’t get word back on exactly what the cells are for a week or so. Then they’ll know for sure if it’s cancer and if I go on for radiation and chemotherapy and all those other things that ate away at my father inch by inch. He says I’ll have some “transient” weakness on my left side that rehab will fix up.

I ask, “Physical weakness, yes?”

This is me begging.

Please, anything but mental weakness. Christ, don’t leave me without my personality, without my memories, without my creativity. He tells me that if I’ve got to have a brain tumor, mine is in a good place for it. Right frontal lobe. He takes a big white Germanic finger and pokes me on the right frontal lobe. He says I shouldn’t lose anything. This part of the brain isn’t used for much.

Something to be thankful for: empty brain space!

It’s all just energy, it’s all just empty brain space!

Sure, whatever the fuck!

So I sit here with my eyes closed, my head lit up, waiting for the black. Maybe the black is just sleep, maybe it’s the waiting station to another universe, maybe it’s death or the private office to Big G, maybe blindness Whatever it is, it’s scary. I try to be strong like Bogie. I try to be strong like my friends, mentors, and heroes Jack Cady, Richard Laymon, Rod Serling, like Charles Beaumont, like Charles Willeford, like Charlie Grant. Charlie never liked me and I never knew why, but that’s how it goes too. Maybe he’ll be able to tell me soon.

I try to be strong like Harlan, like my father, like my mother, like anyone else, because I am not strong. I am about to simper, I am about to whimper. I am about to weep. My cells scream, “Oh come on, man, don’t fall down now!” I’m trying not to. I’ve written more about heroes than I have about losers. Well, maybe not. It’s close. But I should still be in enough control to pull a little steel out of my spine. I should be that tough, no?

Maybe. I’m trying. For Michelle’s sake. And for the sake of my dwindling dignity. So this is what’s in my ledger in the big book? A destiny that ends with brain cancer? That ends with my fat ass up on a table while Lars pokes at my head with scalpels and pulls out black squirmy pieces of me? I just imagine the cancer crawling across the floor like the Blob, eating the nurses, taking over the hospital floor by floor and then out into the street, and then building by building, overturning buses, fighting the National Guard, the Army, NATO.

“Cells, do your thing! Rob a bank too, we got bills to pay!”

“Sure thing, man!”

The pulsating, burning lights are like roadside flares in the rain. They’re getting worse.

Noir truth.

Consciously or unconsciously, for the price of a dark dream, you have brought about your own doom.

I didn’t go after the wrong woman, I didn’t mouth off to the bad cop, I didn’t push a gun into the ribs of the mob boss, I didn’t shove the old lady down the stairs in her wheelchair. I’m a lousy noir character.

Then again Lars could be a Russian hitter only posing as a surgeon. I could wake up on the table and grab his wrist and stop him from drilling another doctor, his real target, wanted by the Russian mob for not paying for a load of snatched Ukrainian babies. This could be my last chance for glory.

Then again, sometimes the narrator/protagonist is just some poor schlep who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s not paying attention. He walks down the street like there are no razors nearby.

Speaking of which–I have a gentleman’s agreement with Lars…or I almost do…I didn’t actually know how to broach the subject, but I planned on doing it. I was going to say to him, “Look, Lars, when you have your fingers in my brain up to the fucking second knuckle, and if you find out you can either kill my fat ass dead or leave me an imbecile, then for Christ’s sake finish me off. I do not want to be Nicholson in the last two minutes of Cuckoo’s Nest, Capisce?” Lars agrees, or I imagine that he does.

***

9/30/12

Cancer in the canoodle makes me a love guru. I’m telling everybody I love them. I tell my buddies on the phone that I love them. It’s not the easiest word in the world to say, or to hear. One friend said, “Thank you.” It broke my heart. We’re in the same place waiting for the black. He’s getting a divorce, I’m dying. On Facebook I’ve got 4,000 friends saying prayers and wishing me good will. It means a lot. Their generosity is amazing. Their respect and kindness counts for a lot. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve so many nice comments. These people write better than me. These people love better than me. It makes me feel blessed, another sentiment I’m not all that familiar with most of the time. It staggers me. I write back that I’m thankful for their love. I tell everybody I love them. Why not? I do. I hope to Christ I’m a good step-father. I hated mine until after he was dead. Then I understood him a little better. I hope my three step-kids don’t have to go through that. It’s torture.

The emails are sweet. The phone calls are full of tears and laughter. I can’t go out of the game being a lousy bastard. I’ve got to reach farther. I’ve got to help whoever is left to help. I’ve got to say and do the right things. It’s spooky on top of spooky. Leaving your last mark, saying your last words, writing the last sentence. I’ve finished dozens of novels and hundreds of stories, but they’re not the main story. Somehow, after all of that, I still don’t know how to end the big story, the important one, the only one that matters. You’d think I would have figured something out by now.

I hope this thing here, whatever it is–-a blog, an essay, last stray thought–-helps someone else. My wife, my brother, my buddies, my fans, my friends that I haven’t gotten a chance to speak to. Dick Laymon died at the desk, writing. Robert B. Parker did the same. I always said I hoped I did too. Here’s the chance, I suppose. Is it better to slump or sit up straight? Should I prop my chin on the keypad? Should I have all my favorite books huddled around me as a cairn of protection? What says, “I love you,” more?

Hopefully the work will hold up. Hopefully they’ll keep reading. Hopefully it will all still matter a week from now, a month from now. Hopefully the fans will remain fans and there will be a few new ones added along for a while. You have to consider. You have to pay attention. You have to make sure all your love is in every sentence. I hope there’s more love than hate or anger. I hope that’s what they take away from it. But I worry.

I promised people blurbs and reviews. I really hate to break promises. I suppose I could give them all the same one: This is the best book I never got to finish. Love away, people.

I’m afraid I’ve broken my last promise to Michelle too. I told her nothing bad would happen.I’m going to try to stick with it. All those good thoughts and prayers and positive energy has to go someplace righteous, yeah?

I hope I was a halfway decent person. I hope they remember me kindly. I hope the words keep entertaining and perhaps even educating. I guess the generosity is helping out. I am hopeful. If you’ve got to be sitting here thinking of your possible imminent death, you might as well be a love guru doing it than just some bitter bastard.

So I won’t sleep with the fishes, but I will go sit with them. We have a beautiful pond full of fish out back and I’m going to sit in the sun like an old Sicilian should. I managed to get a few more I love yous in under the wire. Extra special thanks to Jan, Connie, and Bob. A few more tears too, but the good kind that matter.

Noir truth. You can lose the fight, but you have to lose it fairly. You can’t cheat in the last reel. You take it on the chin or in the gut or in the back of the head, but you stand tall doing it. No slinking, no last minute wincing. You play your string out to the end.

If I have a legacy it’s in your hands now. Do the best with it that you can, if you can.

You never want to fall, and you never want them to see you fall. But if you’ve got to fall, it’s good to have two good buddies nearby to pick your fat ass back up.

So my thanks to Jon and power-lifter Adam Findley for helping me up after a bout of vertigo this afternoon left me sitting in my dogs’ water bowl. Spooky for all of us, especially the dogs.

What I hear: Lindsay Lohan has fucked up again. And somebody in post0-op is listening to TMZ Live.

What I know: I’m still here among the living, covered in vomit with four or five little vomit bags sitting on my chest. Lars tells me everything went well. He got out 98% of the mass, which is about ten percent of my brain. Say what you will about brain cancer, it puts things in perspective. You figure shit out quickly. They wheel me around post-op and I try to keep my guts in.

Noir truth: You can’t forget all the oaths you made on the graves of your fathers. Both my old man and my step-father were cut to pieces, radiation, chemo, sick all the time. Now they’re saying I’m headed for it too. I think of how tough I was just ten minutes ago, two days ago, making promises about things I didn’t know and could never understand otherwise. Radiation, yeah, hit me. Chemo, pills, let me at them. When it comes between that and the black, hell yeah.

So I met the black or maybe it met me, but it wasn’t much of a tussle. It takes me a while to even find where the surgery went down. I’ve got staples all over my head but they didn’t shave away any big chunks and there’s no significant pain. Lars leaves to go give the good word to my family. Michelle comes in a few minutes later. She was scared at what she’d find. When her old man went in for heart surgery he looked like death and afterwards even worse. I’ve got color, I’ve got hair, I can smile and respond. I want to jaw. I talk and talk and call out to Lars and everybody else.

TMZ is still playing. How that is conducive to healing, I don’t know, but I guess it’s more life than death.

Maybe I’m hallucinating a little. I seem to see Edgar popping up all around me, running in circles. Or maybe I’m having an out of body experience and I’m in fact teleporting back home from moment to moment.

The support is there. The love is there. I can feel myself laid out upon a set of immense strong hands. Human hands. People’s hands. I want to thank everyone individually. It’s a gift that can never be repaid, but thank you all anyway.

We get up to our room and Lars pays a visit. He tells us it’s a long uphill fight, that this cancer is aggressive and terminal. I’ll be fighting it for the rest of my life and it’ll probably do me in one of these days. I keep picturing a feathery fluffy black growth trying to take over the pure snowy gleeful thoughts already there. The pure-driven snow personality is me. The black rot, what is it? The death wish? My noir heart?

“Cells?”

“Yo!”

“We still rockin’?”

“A-ok, babe.”

“You keep doing your thing and I’ll keep doing mine.”

“Let’s call it a plan of action.”

“Right on.”

So what’s left?

Skull bone, Titanium steel plates, fruiting bodies of toadstools, and a million more stories?

What I know: I’m scared and will always be scared. I’m still here among the living. I fight because when you get down to it you have no choice. You suck air, you focus will, you dream, you fight past your demons and shadows and enemy cells.

Thanks to all of you–

BizarroCon Schedule

If you’re going to BizarroCon in Portland, Oregon this weekend, here is my complete schedule.

FRIDAY

12:30-1:30pm: BOOK MARKETING AND AUTHOR PERSONA (Brian Keene) — A one hour lecture and Q&A with bestselling horror author Brian Keene. Learn how to market your books and develop a public persona in the digital age…without being a douche. (Location: The Barley Room)

2:00-2:30pm READING — Brian Keene and Robert Devereaux. (Location: The Ad House)

SATURDAY

12:30-1:15pm: THE WRITING LIFE (Brian Keene, Robert Devereaux, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Mykle Hansen, Kevin Shamel) — Maintaining productivity and staying focused on your goals as a writer while facing self-doubt and the obstacles of daily life. (Location: The Barley Room)

1:30-2:15pm: WHAT TO DO WITH A POO-FLAVORED DICK (John Skipp, Brian Keene, Shane McKenzie, Robert Devereaux, Jeff Burk) — Shock in bizarro and horror fiction—what has been done, what not to do, and what the hell is even shocking anymore anyway? (Location: The Barley Room)

7:00-10:00pm: THE ULTIMATE BIZARRO SHOWDOWN—After the awards dinner, bizarro authors compete to see who is indeed the weirdest of the weird. Each author must give the most unique and entertaining three minute reading performance of their lives or risk being yanked off stage by the drunk and annoyed audience members. Winners will be given snazzy prizes. Hosted by Mykle Hansen. Judges: Robert Devereaux, Brian Keene, John Skipp (Location: The Ballroom)

GHOST WALK now in paperback

CLICK HERE TO ORDER (For information on digital editions, see below)

There are all kinds of legends about the forests of Central Pennsylvania, and in this sequel to DARK HOLLOW, the truth about those legends is finally revealed.

Halloween is coming, and a new haunted attraction is open for business in LeHorn’s Hollow. Folks will come from miles around to walk down the spooky trail and get scared witless. But there’s one thing the owners of the ghost walk haven’t counted on. There really is something waiting in the woods—a vast, ancient evil whose hunger threatens to consume all life on Earth. Soon, the unsuspecting customers will pay their money and get in line… to die. And only one man, occult detective Levi Stoltzfus, can save them and stop the evil before it is unleashed.

For release dates on Deadite Press Kindle and Nook editions of my work, please ask the publisher.

Works In Progress

MUSINGS (short story for Cemetery Dance Four Killers anthology)



THE LOST LEVEL (Lost world-styled novel for Apex Book Company)



HOLE IN THE WORLD (Labyrinth-related novel for Camelot Books)



APOCRYPHA (book for former newsletter subscribers)



WITH TEETH (Vampire novel for Cemetery Dance)



SUBURBAN GOTHIC (Sequel to Urban Gothic, for Deadite Press)

Movie Updates

Dark Hollow – First trailer coming soon!

Suburban Holocaust – DVD on sale now!

Ghoul – DVD up for pre-order. In stores January!

Fast Zombies Suck – Currently undergoing re-shoots. DVD release February!

CLICKERS VS. ZOMBIES Now In Paperback!

CLICK HERE TO ORDER (For information on digital editions, see below)

From best-selling authors J.F. Gonzalez and Brian Keene comes the wildest, pulpiest, most over-the-top installment in the Clickers series yet – a crossover with Keene’s THE RISING!

In the aftermath of a devastating tsunami and a series of undersea earthquakes, hordes of Clickers swarm onto the California coastline, slaughtering everything in their path. As the attacks spread to other parts of the world, humanity fights back, unaware that a second foe is about to emerge – Ob, the leader of a supernatural race of beings known as the Siqqusim, who have the ability to possess and reanimate the dead.

Now, Earth faces an invasion from not one, but two enemies – the mindless and hungry Clickers, and the evil and equally ravenous zombies. Both groups have only one goal in mind – the total extermination of the human race. But what happens when these two forces meet… No matter who wins, mankind loses!

For release dates on Deadite Press Kindle and Nook editions of my work, please ask the publisher.

Professional Manuscript Review Update

A month ago, I announced that I would be offering professional manuscript reviews for a limited time. You can read all the details, rules, etc. here. Now that a month has gone by, and I’ve got a comfortable handle on how many I have to do and the time-frame it will take to do them, I’m announcing an official cut-off date — which is November 10th (this Saturday). Any manuscripts post-dated after that will be returned unopened. So if you want to take part in this, please make sure they go in the mail before the 10th. Depending on how successful folks think my feedback was, I’ll probably do this again next year at some point.

The Ultimate Teaser

Jack Ketchum

Edward Lee

Brian Keene

Bryan Smith

J.F. Gonzalez

Wrath James White

Ryan Harding

and Shane McKenzie

One novella. Eight collaborators. Hardcore just got harder.

2013 – Deadite Press – All proceeds will go to Tom Piccirilli

To Do At Bizarro-Con

If you’re attending Bizarro-Con in Portland, Oregon this November 15th through the 18th, you might want to check out:

BOOK MARKETING AND AUTHOR PERSONA

Learn how to market your books and develop a public persona in the digital age…without being a douche. A one hour lecture and Q&A with bestselling horror author Brian Keene.

As I did with Roots, I’ll most likely re-post the speech bit here after the con.

Tom Piccirilli Update

As you all know by now, Tom Piccirilli is battling brain cancer. We raised over $23,500 for him via IndieGoGo, but now that the campaign is over, people are wondering how they can continue to contribute. You can donate money immediately via PayPal to Tom’s sister-in-law via the PayPal Donate button at the top of this page. Tom starts six weeks of chemo and radiation treatments next week. The pills he will have to take for the rest of his life cost $14,000 a month. Luckily, they’ve been accepted into a program that will help pay for those. But as you can imagine, they can still use your help.