Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 3
April 7, 2025
FULL BLEED: THRONES AND DOMINIONS
April 3, 2025
FULL BLEED: CHICXULUB STARTS HERE
FULL BLEED: CHICXULUB IS HERE
March 27, 2025
FULL BLEED: NO MORE SORRY
March 25, 2025
FULL BLEED: THE GREAT AND SHIMMERING MOTORIK
March 20, 2025
FULL BLEED: WITH BUCKSHOT EYES AND A PURPLE HEART
FULL BLEED: THE THIRSTY EYE
March 13, 2025
FULL BLEED: PLEASE DON'T BE SAD IF IT WAS A STRAIGHT MIND YOU HAD
March 7, 2025
In Seven-Eights Time
Okay, since we passed a thousand on the Fake Believe kickstarter (and if you haven't checked it out, you might want to, if nothing else than acknowledgement that putting up fiction for free on the internet is totally insane and doesn't get you anywhere. But I'm honoring tradition by doing so) I'm posting a free horror story for everyone to read. This is from a couple years back, and (you know this part) never found a home with any outlet. So it has a home now. Right here. Enjoy.
In Seven-Eights Time
Matt Maxwell copyrighted and all that jazz.
Toby twisted the lid of the glass jar off and the biting scent of the nail polish remover boiled out invisibly. He turned the jar and tipped its contents onto the felt mat. The now-dead mantis danced out a little, stiff in rigor. It was frozen now, robbed of the grace and aloofness that had animated it moments ago.
He tasted the last bits of the chemical perfume from the now empty jar. At his left hand sat a collection of needles and hatpins he’d bought for all of a dollar from that junk store in Santa Fe. He told them he’d needed some long pins or something. He’d just caught an amazing bug and he needed to keep it. The clerk pulled out the old Skippy jar filled with pins and sharp junk. They asked him if that would do. Toby said yes, because it had clearly been fate.
That was the first one. The very first. That night of dry thunderstorms and electric charge in the air when he’d seen that kid hitchhiking lit up by the headlights and the chaparral strewn out behind him like stacks of fish bones. That kid had his thumb out and freckles on his face and hair like a surfer bleached out in the sun. He saw Toby stop and asked for a lift, the cold making him sad and little. Toby said yes, because it had clearly been fate.
When he and the boy were done with one another, Toby dragged the body (much lighter than he’d thought) out over the scrabbling dirt and rock and sticking brush to a place where maybe he’d be found and maybe it wouldn’t be for a long time. Not a lot of traffic. Probably even fewer people looking for that lost boy and his freckles. The wind kicked up and threw a faint veil of pebbles at Toby, getting only laughter in reply.
“Should have stopped me before I’d even done it,” he said to whatever force had been behind the wind, if there was any. “Should have stopped me before the idea was even in my head.”
The wind said nothing to that.
Toby swung the flashlight down to a dark motion that he’d seen at the boy’s chest. He was entranced by a slow and skittered trundling of legs on a spider bigger than his hand. The tarantula hunkered down possessively on the boy’s body. Toby could hear the denim rubbed by arachnid hairs, furtive between the irregular gales. The critter was dusted over with desert sand that it looked like a ghost, a thing meant to ferry souls from one world to the next. But now it was pinned in the light.
“Yeah, you’re not going anywhere,” Toby said. He took the red bandana from his back pocket and fingered the spider into the center of it, then tucked the fabric into a bindle.
After Toby got the pins and cotton balls and nail polish remover and a tarnished sliver picture frame with a red felt backing, he took the spider back to the motor court room he’d rented and turned the glass into a killing jar. He then carefully speared the spider in two places and pressed those pins into the felt span between the etched metal edges. His first. He later went to the library to learn its name: Aphonopelma chalcodes, a name even bigger than the spider itself. But it wasn’t just a spider. It was a guardian. It was there to take that boy’s spirit home and that was too bad. Not everyone gets to go home.
Toby kept that totem and the sole it bore with him.
It was only the first. The first of so many souls.
The praying mantis took some work to trick into the jar. It looked so fragile and delicate that the fear of ripping it to pieces kept Toby slow and tentative. Its legs flicked as it picked its way across the woman’s floral-print blouse, stopping at the dark stickiness as if that were a gulf it could not cross. It tasted the air with its forelegs but went no further. Maybe it knew what was coming.
The night had been heavy, thick with another oncoming storm. The clouds were under-lit with spill from the city of Charlotte off in the distance. Night was the texture of black mud all curdled and congealed. Toby could all but see the hands of whatever was above them all set to wring the clouds dry, bringing a flooding rain with that. He shouldn’t even have to bury her. The sky would do it for him.
But he didn’t have long to capture that mantis. He’d done it all the other times and it wouldn’t do to break the streak now.
Even if his collection was getting harder to haul around now, what with the pop-out plastic shells covering the bugs so that he could move them safely. He’d learned his lesson with that tarantula, breaking one of the legs after taking it down while leaving Cincy. After that waitress. The leg lay there on the stained floor like a withered string of fingerbones, each knuckle slightly contracted.
So he had to be more careful. All those souls. Fragile things. Maybe even trapped in those dead shells. It was a sacred weight, measurable only by forces greater than him.
The mantis was all legs now, twiddling in place as Toby ushered it into the glass jar. It played legs off the glass, shining with the distant light and the first drops of rain spattering against it. The bug jumped as a raindrop big as a dime smacked into its abdomen. The wings were orange in the light and marked in a pattern that somehow reflected that blood-marked flowered blouse. Toby was dazzled by the similarity, falling into it and frozen as the insect leaped up into the air with a snicking sound like a knife opening. Exactly like it.
He mouthed a curse but only got a syllable in.
A gust of wind blow the bug back to him, whisper gentle. It picked its way up his chest, raindrops weltering off the shell and he captured both it and the errant soul it was bearing.
Then he drove home whistling a tune nobody else knew but him, whistling it the whole time. Fate. It was fate.
He’d been so diligent, so careful to keep one for every assay out into the world that he’d carved out for himself. He never took a souvenir, not like some others he’d read about. No evidence. Just what the earth had seen fit to give to him by way of a keepsake, jars for souls in all different shapes.
He flicked the trailer light on and looked up at the wall in the back of what pretended to be the living room. The plastic and glass squares of his collection all gleamed. Something seemed to move behind one of them, but he rubbed his eyes and wiped that away. Just comedown after.
He’d lost count of these trophies. Maybe one for every state in the lower forty-eight, not that he’d been to all of them. Counting your winnings, though, that was just rude, still in the middle of the game and all. Toby wasn’t sure who he was playing it against. But someone not him was keeping track and that was good enough. They could weigh souls and keep count both.
He brought the mantis in the jar up to his eye level and watched the bug try to paw its way out of the place where it was going to die.
“It’s okay, friend. Your labors have come to a close. Mine continue.”
A blast of wind shouldered into the trailer, rocking it linebacker-hard. One of the frames fell from the wall and clattered to the floor, plastic facing tumbling off in another direction. Toby set the jar down and went to see what had dropped. One of the bigger pieces.
Oh, he remembered her. She had black hair and skin ruddy as the dirt she’d died on. Blue eyes that saw everything but not soon enough. When he’d finished, her DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS shirt would never be white again. And then, all in dream, this moth with a pair of eyes on the backsides of its huge wings alighted on the bridge of the woman’s nose and spread those wings. The moth’s eyes became the woman’s in echo. Toby had taken the creature with trembling hands. It rested on his knuckles patiently as he edgingly stepped back to the truck and the toolbox he kept there. It was barely big enough. He’d dumped out its contents, placed a couple of nail polish-soaked cotton balls in the bottom and closed the lid as gently as kissing his mother goodnight.
He remembered the moth and thanked whoever was listening that it was still intact and whole, wings spread and those eyes making it seem like an owl or other predator. But it wasn’t that. It was only pretending.
The wind lashed and wet leaves smacked against windows heavy as drunken birds. There were other sounds beneath that. But Toby was far too old to be scared by them. Man on his path couldn’t be made jumpy by much and expect to stay in the game long.
He sat down with the forceps and took a cotton ball, dripping bitter stink, and snuck it under the lid of the jar that he’d been handed so long ago. Then he just waited for the legs to stop twitching so much, for that curious exploration to dissolve away to something a little more pliable.
The storm continued.
He pierced the thorax of the mantis just as the wind hammered his home once more. Tired, he flinched and thought he saw a twitching of limbs, maybe a final death throe. But insects weren’t that complicated or possessive of their own lives. Many people weren’t, when it came down to things. They’d given up or fled or shut down or maybe in honor of Toby’s capture of everything that they’d ever held or would hold dear. Insects fought more but didn’t rattle or wheeze once it was done.
But the mantis hadn’t moved, cleanly impaled. Toby was tired enough that he simply pressed the needle into the cork ball. The insect hung there like a titan king of some doomed place. Toby dragged himself to rest at the couch, shoes on, tired as a child.
And he slept without dream or trouble. For a time.
He awoke beneath a thin and tired blanket that he’d pulled across himself in his sleep. Something danced across his bare hand, pulling him from dreamlessness with little prickings, little leg tips grabbing and plucking then releasing as something made its way across his knucklebones.
He pulled his hand away and looked. Nothing. Nothing there.
Night wasn’t over yet. The ring of lights strung between his trailer and Mrs. Travis’ had fallen during the storm, which still lingered hangover-heavy. There was a trail of weak luminance leading from the road where they’d fallen, directly to his window. Leaves stuck to it like spots on a dog. Between them, lit from the ground and behind, were little insects, lightless fireflies maybe. They flit between leaves, between the black splotches, only for a second at a time. Toby had never seen their like, but he hadn’t been here forever, either.
The room was washed in dark and barely picked out in whatever was falling through the window now. His fingers bracketed the switch and he snapped it. Instead of an unobstructed bath of light, there was a mottling, almost a leaking of electricity and incandescence that crept out from interlocked fingers or jagged bodies crushed together on the surface of the bulb. That persisted for a second or two before a sizzle, snap and then pop as the bulb blew. He snapped the switch once. Then once more. Nothing. He snorted.
“That fuse again. I’ll fix it later.”
The shape and quality of the light tugged at him, something about how it wept, as if pushing past a clinging obstruction. Just like the leaves smacked onto the window, only these didn’t move. He had the feeling of a hand closing around the light fixture, snuffing it surely as a candle between calloused fingertips. That sensation settled around him and he realized he needed distraction, any kind.
He went to pull something from the fridge. The greenish and underwater light poured out and he grabbed the last can from the wire shelf. Leaving the door open, he used the refrigerator to illuminate the room.
“Huh. Not the fuse.”
His eye caught on a gleam of light on top of the galley table, in his work space. A naked strand of gold shone back at him from a copse of tarnished and silver and bronzed needles. It was tall and proud. And unladen.
“The hell?”
The mantis was gone. The can, unopened, thudded to the floor, solid. Toby pressed his fingers to his eyes and rubbed hard enough to make them tear.
The golden sliver gleamed, not even a sheen of residue left behind. There came a prickling like a thousand cockroaches running underneath his shirt starting at the base of his spine and spreading outward from there. Something twisted beneath his ribs, a sensation he hadn’t felt since he was a child.
He wondered aloud where the thing had gone, standing there sweating in the drafty chill of the trailer. Then his sight fell across the collection of mismatched frames and glass on the back wall. Or where it should have been. Instead, they lay in a careless litter on the floor. Every single one of them was down and dumped in a jumbling of angles and planes of reflection in the fluorescent spill.
Cursing, he swatted the cork ball and bare needles from the table, taking with it the felt mat. The crawly sensation stuck to him like summer sweat. He tried to retrace his steps, to figure out what would have made him forget to kill the mantis or not mount it properly. The image of it stuck behind his eyes, jointed legs straining and pulling the insect body free over the head of the long needle. He shook his head until stars danced in his eyes.
“Crazy. This is crazy.” Toby stared at the upended pincushion. “Just didn’t kill it and it wiggled off. Just wiggled off. Now it’s dead.”
Unless it wasn’t. He imagined the mantis sucking the last breath of that woman. He imagined that charge lingering like static in the air. Wasn’t electricity life?
The refrigerator fired up, compressor huffing and chugging to maintain the chill. His heart wrung itself out at that and then he had a good laugh. Until he heard the first loose scuttling, something bigger than a cockroach. Somewhere.
As he pivoted to reach for the refrigerator door, there was another sizzle then snap and the door light went out in the same moment as the compressor giving out.
“That’s the fuse box. Pfft.” Canting his head, he tried to get a look out the window and a guess when dawn might roll around. Outside, the rain dripped from uncounted trees and overhangs but at least the wind had stopped. Or just held its breath.
Resigned, Toby went to pick up the upended pincushion. Shouldn’t be sloppy, and stepping on that in the dark could have been an unpleasant surprise.
He wondered if the swelling riverbank and wind had done its job on the broad with the flowered blouse. Not that it made any never-mind. He wasn’t fool enough to leave a trace easily found, and that CSI garbage only works on television. He crouched and reached for the glinting of the needles, stuck out at uneven intervals like jackstraws.
“Come here, you-“
Something bit his hand. He could see the outline of it glistening and pale like a string of bones ripped from a child. The stinger was dug deep in the flesh, pouring out a permeating burning, feeling like his hand had been laid open right at the webbing between forefinger and thumb.
“No scorpions around,” he said before swallowing the next words.
Of course not, he thought. They’re not from around here. But I brought one with me. That woman outside Tucson, someone’s mother maybe, gray hair and spectacles and waiting by the bus stop. And after, that fat yellow scorpion had crawled up her arm and all but dared him to pick it up. It had stood, front end lifted up towards the woman’s head like it was breathing. It had tried to sting him then, but only got him now.
Toby brought his hand up and the scorpion dangled from it, legs and pincers grabbing air, abdomen swinging like a pendulum in the moist light from the matted window. He stared at it despite the biting pain, like it was a tumor he’d sprouted one morning or a new scar that he’d gotten on a drunk without the faintest idea as to how it had come about.
“Fun’s fun, but enough.” He snapped his wrist and forearm in a single motion, hard enough to send the scorpion flying. His hand throbbed with the pain of a gunshot wound. He then pressed his thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand onto the wound. It was hot as a stove burner, but the pressure helped, or at least distracted him from the pain.
Fumbling through the toolbox, Toby came up with the little LED light no bigger than a key head. It came on and he passed a watery circle of light about the room. The scorpion was nowhere to be found. But there was another sound, more clatter. This time around the ruin of frames strewn at the base of the wall. It was a sinuous sound, pair after pair of legs with a motion rippling through them like a lazy surfline.
The tail end of the centipede disappeared into an aggregation of corners, sliding out of the light. Toby moved in closer to get a better look and realized that something was missing. There was the glass and the metal, the frames were all there. But the things that had been framed, they were nowhere to be seen. He tried to think of the centipede and who he’d found it on, remembering the pretty black waitress who was broken down on the roadside. How the centipede drank her in, legs flicking in waves.
A choking croak escaped his lips. Every inch of his skin now was crawling with phantom limbs, exoskeletons and chitin and bristling hairs all dragging over the surface of him. He swept his hands up and down his body, finding nothing there. His own touch banished the sensation, pushing it deeper inward.
He knew that he shouldn’t be counting, but that was all he could do. The scorpion, the tarantula, the black widow and Jerusalem cricket, the locust and moths, that black butterfly with its wings chased in gold, the June bugs that shone electric green and the firefly that continued to glow for three whole nights even after it had been spiked. None of them were to be found, only suggestive emptiness between borders, sometimes the needles left embedded in the backing, sometimes torn out. He wondered how many of them still scuttled around with the needles slowing them down.
The throbbing in his hand crept up past his wrist and he could feel individual nerves in his fingers flaring and pulsing with a beating that was not his own heart.
The wind pushed the trailer around and knocked his collection off the wall. He was lucky it hadn’t happened already. He passed the light around the room and saw no glistening of carapace or hunched clutch of legs. Something had gotten in the trailer and stung him. It wasn’t a scorpion he’d taken from one of his victims near all the way across the United States ago. That wasn’t a thing that could have happened.
Toby cursed at the pain in his hand and then took a couple steps to the kitchen and the sink.
“Just wash this out and I’ll be right as rain. Clean up later.”
The faucet gurgled like it always did and then spit up body-temperature water. He passed his hand under the stream and didn’t feel any relief.
He bent down to look for the dropped beer, weakly feeling around with his bad hand, penlight in the good one. He swept the light past his feet and something red and black with long legs crawling over one of his boots. Without thought he yelped and tried to kick the centipede free. Maybe he even did.
His weight thrown out of balance, he tried to set his loose foot down, only to find not the floor, but the aluminum can of beer that he’d been seeking. He crashed backwards, shoulder and base of his neck smacking into the countertop and then sliding down the cabinet on the way to the floor. Nerves pinched, his good hand went dead and the edges of his vision went torn technicolor as he slid to a stop, staring upwards at the ceiling which was catching the first lightening of dawn.
His good arm refused to move when he willed. The scorpion-stung hand throbbed uselessly. He tried rolling onto his side and then knees. He’d be fine if he could do that. It was futile as trying to pull a pickup truck out of a bog one-handed.
Then he laughed at the stupidity of all this, a hollow chuckle that rang throughout the closeness of the trailer. He kept laughing until the wings of the moth bigger than his hand flapped erratically, bouncing along the ceiling like it could batter its way out. He heard the scuffle of the insect on the greasy surface, but more than that, he heard a metallic tinging or scratching noise dragged along with it.
Then the moth dove and hovered above him, early sun catching a glint of the needle embedded in it, point still sharp and facing downward. He dared not look away. There was a blur and a swoop as it didn’t flutter but dove. He felt the needle enter the skin at the bridge of his nose, right where it met the skull. Something else heavier than gravity was behind this, pushing it in a finger’s length or more until it came to rest on a structure that Toby didn’t want to name nor could he at that moment. There was impossible weight behind it. Maybe even heavier than a soul’s. More things than he could name went numb. He could feel sensation but not move a limb or even close his eyes.
The moth wrenched and pulled itself free of the needle, flapping madly and all Toby could do was suffer through it, unable to flick it away or turn his face or even scream for it to stop. For a second he thought he could not just smell the perfume of that woman, but her, the sweat and skin of her.
The huge moth hovered for a moment and alit on the countertop, just watching with beaded eyes that still glittered somehow like wet rubies in the morning light.
The sound came next, resonating along the floor of the trailer, the whole thing becoming a drum head for countless delicate fingertips and legs. It scraped with ruined bodies, and most of all a heavy scuttling that came in a 7/8 time, undergirding the whole song. Its unevenness scratched at Toby made him impatient for what was coming.
“G… Go ahead,” he mumbled, dredging up strength enough for defiance.
But they did not go ahead. They would have all day. And the day after that. And then some more.
March 5, 2025
FULL BLEED: DIS/RE/APPEAR
These things used to be popular. But I'm behind the times so maybe it's not anymore. At any rate, maybe it's a way for people get a sense of the texture and origins of this particular work. And I do want to jump in for a second and talk about historical accuracy or inaccuracy in all the Hazeland works.
The books aren't strictly biographical. Some of these things I was heavily into around the time when these books were supposed to have taken place (ie when I was anywhere from say twelve to twenty or so years old.) I dug punk rock. I wasn't part of any punk rock scene. I was too weird and gawky and out in the suburbs and frankly fine being a dork and geek and nerd. Also the timing of things where punk had mostly burned out or changed into something else by the time I'd gotten tipped to it. I wasn't a goth. I listened to 91X from San Diego and was a little confused when it switched formats from what we'd call classic rock (contemporary rock in 1982, which really wasn't as calcified as classic rock is now, but let's not get in the weeds) to new wave or college rock or what we'd call it now.
I didn't read Love and Rockets until many many years after those first groundbreaking issues came out. I was never that cool. I was too busy tracking down junky Bronze Age Marvel comics.
So yeah, I was never cool. I'm still not cool. Merely a good student.
And for that matter, Hazeland is a confection of past history and my own experience and where we all are now. There's some projection of the present (which is the future of the time portrayed in the work) and yeah, nostalgic impulse or acknowledgement or however you want to label it. I never said it was a work of historical accuracy, though I certainly try to bring a sense of how today and yesterday are different countries to things, but I'm not writing a textbook or even an oral history.
Hell, I won't even tell you what year these books actually take place. You might want to guess from some of the music cues, but I might just be head-faking you. It's been known to happen.
Now on with the show.
Fake Believe itself was written a little while ago, but I've carried around the germs of these things for some time before that. At least in the case of the influences I can directly identify.
Detective Stories
There's only a handful of these that I've really sat down and read, primarily those of Hammett and Chandler, I think a few of Willeford and Thompson, too. That said, I'm old enough that I saw some of these lurid men's adventure magazines on stands when I was a kid. When I was older there was sort of a renaissance of them with more respectable presentations, an elevation, if you will. I'm not saying that I channeled any of that sort of fervid energy and let's face it, shamelessness in tone and content. But it was sitting in the back of my mind. It's most evident in "Cut/Paste" which takes the PI concept and turns it a little sideways, running things down weirder corridors than the earlier generations of these stories might've had in mind.
Folk Magic
I love magic systems. Mana. Crystals. Recharge times. The whole nine yards. Kidding. They're death. They're Anti-Life. They belong in RPG rulebooks and cheat guides for AAA games so that the numbers can go up just a little bit more. But I love reading about folk magic, which is more a way of engaging with the world than it is a way of measuring character power levels or min/maxing your warlock. So things like rings of salt and ways to deal with water or keeping the authorities away from your land or what you should/shouldn't be doing on the night of the full moon is the kind of stuff I love. Or even the best way to keep a ghost in a Coke bottle.
Tommy's
This won't be the first time I've invoked this Los Angeles landmark. Hopefully it'll stay open until all of us are long gone, as opposed to the Pantry which is closing forever as you read this. Anyways, Tommy's is a special place for me, particularly the shop on Beverly and Highland, which I've been going to since the early-middle eighties. There's probably no reason for it to be special, right? It's a hamburger stand that's maybe remarkable for refusing to change its model (too much -- it offers breakfast sandwiches now) or with the times. Anyways, go there and get a double chili burger. Hang out on a Friday night and see everyone who comes by. Get a taste of how things were done fifty years ago and haven't changed all that much.
Love and Rockets
One of the greatest American comics, if not the greatest. I don't want to say that it's a simple book, because it's not. But it's put together in such a way that it doesn't need pyrotechnics or anything more than what it does with sturdy linework and keen observation and heart. Everyday people who you've never before met all living and breathing on the page. There's a reason why the kids in "Third Saturdays" are trying to track these comics down, even though they shouldn't be all that hard to find.
6th Street Coming and Going
The thing about cities is that they're changing and alive, just on a timescale that humans don't necessarily adhere to particularly well. When a structure goes up, we expect it to stay up for our lifetime and past that. So when one comes down, particularly an iconic structure like the 6th Street Bridge (made famous in too many films and drives through the city), one's reminded of the passage of time in a fundamental way. Even if that bridge is taken down and then replaced with a new, contemporary, replacement, that recognition of time passed sticks around. Sure, enough people will eventually die and forget the original, but for a handful of perhaps obsessed weirdos. Or those who are watching a Fast and Furious movie, or even Maniac Cop 2 (which does not take place in LA at all, but in New York. Maybe these things never go away.
Industrial/Goth
Goth is one of those things I came to later on, even though I lived through what some folks would regard its heyday in the middle-late eighties. It was in the air around me. I had a classmate in some English and Sociology classes who was either goth or deathpunk or whatever. There were weirdos in high school, but mostly they were just listening to Nick Cave and not out there in black leather glooming it up. So yeah, I was never in the subculture. Leather makes me sweat and want to pass out. That said, sometimes only Siouxsie hits the spot. Or even Drab Majesty. Or any of the other hundreds of bands who are making goth and industrial sounds and darkwave (including the weekly show of the same name over on SiriusXM radio). I don't fit in the lifestyle at all, being a weird and gawky kind of middle-aged white dude. I can't live the life. But I love the music and I wanted to play around with it some, particularly in the story "Suicide Jewelry" with its new-to-town star hungry for fame no matter what the cost.
Beauty in Ugly
So that picture of the razorwire imposed over the neon signage of the old Rialto Theater (don’t be fooled, it’s an Urban Outfitters inside and hasn’t been a theater for several decades) is one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken in LA. It’s the contrast and tension between what’s easily described as beautiful and what’s casually tossed away as ugly. And how those things are side by side in Los Angeles every day, every minute, every second. It’s that friction that makes this place great and weird and upsetting and strange. Sure, every city has their own brand of that going on, and LA’s is unique. Yes, there’s more than aesthetic tension. That sometimes snaps into periods of great change, even traumatic change. Even when the money and developers want things to stay one way or to become one way, reality steps in and shifts things around some.
In Search Of
I think this is actually a repeat from the influence board I did for The Queen of No Tomorrows, several years ago. And it's funny, because I'd never intended to include them at all in the original plan. And by "include" I mean "base the main character's old job on a show I liked as a kid." But yeah, as a kid in the seventies with any interest in the paranormal and weird shit, you were glued to the TV on Saturdays when the latest episode of In Search Of would run. Almost-real paranormal activity and weird history and real-world phenomena all delivered by Leonard Nimoy (and his fabulous dresser). Yeah, that was the good stuff. I still dip into the show from time to time, mostly as background or pure texture. And yeah, clearly Quest4 is my tribute to In Search Of. I'm glad that I get to play with the show and its crew a bit more now. A long ways from a casual aside and bit of background texture that just worked its way into a book a few years ago, yeah? Anyways, you'll get to meet 'em in the story "In What Furnace" which takes our crew out to the wilds of... Yucaipa? Yeah, it's a real place. Look it up.
The End of Bunker Hill
The 6th Street bridge was a place I got to visit more than in just movies. Spent a morning walking back and forth over it, just taking pictures of the spalling concrete and the cityline under the gray summer clouds and heat. It's a place I touched. Not so with Bunker Hill, which was a formerly-wealthy and gradually turned to working-class neighborhood that got eradicated in time and development (particularly the placement of the 110 Freeway, which runs right adjacent to the heart of downtown and through what was once its outskirts.) Bunker Hill is a place I've only seen in films: Kiss Me Deadly, Angel's Flight and in particular, The Exiles. The place had developed a reputation for being run-down and shabby, which just means it was more than rich white people living there. Eventually the whole place was sacrificed so we could sit in traffic trying to get from the 101 to the 405. Progress! The neighborhood made a last appearance in a Darren McGavin show called The Outsider, an episode of which featured houses up on flatbed trucks waiting to be preserved, and yeah, that's where the beginning of "Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts" comes from. It was all real.
Redevelopment of DTLA
One of the themes that keeps popping up in a few of these stories is how downtown LA (DTLA, natch) was really left to go to seed in wake of the sixties and through the seventies. There were still busy streets and Broadway still hosted the best collection of neon signage concentrated anywhere in town. It was also run-down and not the best place to hang out. When I was a younger teen it felt dangerous. Or maybe that was just the vibes that my dad gave off when taking us through there. Towards the end of the seventies and the advent of the coming Olympic Games in 1984, redevelopment began to move back in to snap up real estate and attempt to re-gentrify. That was an ongoing process, still continuing. After all, is a city like Los Angeles ever in a final state of completion? Nope. For a time, though, it was a much wilder place, with low rents to support artists and musicians and a much more bohemian kind of life than what it shook out to be.
Luis Rodriguez the Republic of East LA
The Republic of East LA is a collection of short stories by writer Luis Rodgriguez, who really opened my eyes up to the range of stories and lives folks living in parts of LA I never really visited were living. Not much more to say on that other than they have a vibrance and vitality that I'd be happy to muster a quarter of. Something I should probably revisit, now that I stand here writing these words.
Vertigo Comics
Honestly, I'm gonna do a much longer post on the intersection of the Vertigo (and really pre-Vertigo horror/weird comics that filtered out of DC from the mid-eighties all the way to the early two thousands.) So, around this period, DC imported a whole bunch of creators from the UK, some who'd worked on 2000AD and similar titles, some who were from fanzines and the like. This led to a major reinvention of what kinds of stories superhero comics could tell, the atmosphere they could generate and the ideas they could grapple with. Outsider characters were reborn in much stranger forms and with editorial freedom. Now, the truth of it is that some of this had its roots in the Bronze Age of comics, Marvel in particular, with weird genre combinations. But the arrival of this British invasion meant that things were really going to change, at least for a little while. And these stories really hit me at the right time, particularly in combination with the art experimentation that was allowed for by refinements in print and paper, finally yielding fully-painted comics filled with delicate and beautiful and horrifying art. It was a great time to put a couple bucks down and read something new and wild. It's still stuck with me.
70s Loser Renaissance Films
Original concept, do not steal. Lots of folks have written about this period in American studio films, where stories about criminals and outsiders and folks who'd just plain run out of luck and you were there to watch it, were allowed to be told. We got some of this in the 30s-50s with the heyday of film noir, of course (and this period dovetails with a reinvention of noir, or neo-noir depending on who you're talking to.) The studios finally broke away from the need for a happy ending or telling stories that would sit well with happy suburbians. Now we were getting stories about people who were out there on the margins (granted, the margins were a lot easier to live in, economically, back then as opposed to after a few decades of pretty muscular inflation and competitive real estate markets). We could get stories like Cisco Pike, where Kris Kristoffersen plays a down on his luck former dealer trying to make it in country music, being roped into one last deal (no, it's never that) by scheming cop Gene Hackman. Or Vanishing Point, where a former cop who's walked away from the corruption of the force turns to a life or wandering only to deliver a package from Denver to San Francisco and ends up on the wrong side of the law merely for existing in the margins. There's a thousand more and they all seem like relics of a lost age because they are. They weren't written to be chopped and stretched over ten hours of prestige. Short, sharp shocks with their blend of optimism and hopelessness, shot on streets and in cars and in the smog that you'd escape if only you could.
Night Walks in DTLA
I miss the world before Covid. Back then I used to travel to LA a couple times a year and visit friends, get great food. And detournement. Yeah, that. If you're not familiar with the term, it's just glorified wandering. Now the Situationists turned it into a political process, or would use it to hijack a piece of art, for instance, and repurpose it. But in the sense I'm talking about, it would be just to go out and walk around. And take pictures. Decontextualize pieces of the city or sidewalk or texture on a wall or green neon glowing on a quinceñera dress behind metal roll-up grates. The signage would come on and things would take a new life, making even trash look beautiful and alien and wonderful. I've been able to do a little of that since the world broke, but not enough.
Weirdos on Twitter/Bluesky - New Perspectives
Feels like a million years ago that I was on Twitter. I bailed for the same reasons a lot of you did. Mostly it got too depressing. I probably stayed too long as it was. I'm over on Bluesky now (pretty easy to find). One of the things that kept me over at Twitter as long as I was the opportunity to get to chat with and see folks who I probably never would have. Folks will talk about things on these sites that they might not talk about in public (strange I know, but it's true.) So I got to see some real life from gay folk, Black folk, trans folk, anyone who isn't me. You can learn a whole lot if you just sit down and listen and don't pick fights stupidly. And for that, I'm thankful. It's been an amazing opportunity to hear from people who I wouldn't otherwise, and to be exposed to things I wouldn't have been. So thank you for sharing your life with this cringe white guy from the suburbs.
This next section is a little bit of the music that went into things or maybe captures the vibe of the places that get described in the stories of Fake Believe.
Skateland – for Third Saturdays
Originally a playlist put together by the folks at Aquarium Drunkard, Skateland is an imaginary Saturday night party that never really ends. It doesn’t even have to be on roller skates. Just has to want to be young and maybe on the outside and knowing that, not fearing it because the inside is duller than what we got. You can still listen to it here and you really should: Skateland at Soundcloud
Gutterball – “Trial Separation Blues” for Cut/Paste
Originally a one-off collaboration between Steve Wynn and members of House of Freaks and the Long Ryders, the band put out a couple records in the early nineties, but they sound like the seventies filtered through some more (then) contemporary sounds. It’s kinda ramshackle bar rock, but smarter and wiser than all that. Again, it knows what it is and is fine with that, just so long as there’s grocery money in the back pocket when you need it.
Laurie Anderson – “Gravity’s Angel” for In What Furnace
In What Furnace is a story about the folks behind a paranormal television program hunting down and finding something that might be the result of science gone wrong or something far worse than that. This song is sort of a perfect way to see something born out of technology gone more than a little mad but still be strangely beautiful and compelling.
Mazzy Star – “Disappear” for Suicide Jewelry
If you’ve ever wanted to get lost in someone else, then maybe this is the way to do it.
Algiers – “Remains” by Algiers for A Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts
A gospel dirge for a world that’s been left behind. Perfect for an entire community that’s been wiped off the map and is desperate for a way to be saved.
Stones – “Tumbling Dice” for Club Closed: Private Party
Yeah, they were a long way from being the scrappy kids who’d listened to a bunch of blues records, but still managed to hold onto their tin crown as kings of the losers. A tough act to maintain when you’re at the top of the charts, I suppose. This is them at nearly their most swaggering, sure that whatever they were going to get into, they’d be able to get out of.
Chameleons – “Swamp Thing” for The Cinderhaus
Perhaps an odd choice of subject or title, but the atmosphere of sophistication in strangeness is perfect for the semi-annual auction of the outré and fantastic, this year held in the dilapidated Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, which might have seen better days at one time, but none more fantastic.
The last one is kind of a cheat. It’s no secret that I’d love to rework some of The Queen of No Tomorrows. Nothing more would I like to fix than how Ariela the titular Queen met her fate. It’s actually perfect in a way. You’ll know if you’ve read it. I’d still like to have done things differently, but this seemed to be the demand of not only the book that I’d pitched to my editor but of the book itself. It couldn’t have been different. I wished it was. I love writing Ariela Ramona Califia Gutiérrez, Nuestra Reina de Sombra y Silencio. And you’re not supposed to love your characters, right? Something about you not letting bad things happen to them blah blah blah. It’s fun to write the scare quotes villain who seems to have everything planned and squared away. It’s fun to write deviousness contrasted with an inability to prevent fate from taking a bite out of you. So I guess I wanted to pay tribute to her one more time, particularly with the story titled Club Closed: Private Party, where you get to see a decidedly different side of her. But no mistake, she’s still the Queen.
She might even appear in another story in Fake Believe, but you can’t blink or you’ll miss it.
Highway 62 on Goodreads
Desert blacktop, too much caffeine, too little sl ...more
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