Nine Frights

Introduction

Toward a Theory of Terror

We’re an adaptive bunch, we human beings. In a more cynical mood, I might say that we go through life wearing blinders, like skittish horses. But I’m feeling generous today, so I’ll stick with adaptive. Very early in life, we master the ability to adapt to absolutely terrifying situations, and for most of us, we keep that ability as long as we live.

Look at just some of the things we deal with on a daily basis.

The certainty that we will die.

The certainty that everyone we have ever loved will die.

The possibility of some lingering, debilitating disease that makes the rest of our lives, however brief or lasting that might be, painful and miserable.

The possibility, every time we’re near a road—on foot, on a bike or motorcycle, or in a car or bus—that we’ll be crushed by thousands of pounds of hurtling steel.

The possibility that every stranger we meet is a serial killer or other predator.

The possibility that every time we go to sleep at night, someone might break into our homes, with malicious intent.

The possibility, every time we leave home, of the same thing happening.

The possibility that we’ll lose our jobs, our health insurance, our ability to afford a roof and four walls, or that next meal.

The possibility that those same things might happen to our loved ones.

We get into airplanes, even though we know that sometimes they crash, and sometimes they’re hijacked and used as weapons, and sometimes the roof tears off the fuselage mid-flight. And that guy next to you in coach? Don’t let him follow you home.

We swim in rivers and oceans, even though they contain sharks and water moccasins and snapping turtles and giant squid. And we can’t see the bottom, can we?

We go through closed doors as if no danger might exist on the other side. We answer the phone when it rings late at night, though those calls always bring bad news. We bring children into the world knowing full well that we can only shield them against so much.

And for kids, it’s even worse. A toddler can’t know what kind of people her parents are. He can’t tell if it’s safe to trust that smiling man at the drugstore, or the jolly guy wearing a Santa suit at the mall. Every time she goes to school, there’s no guarantee that she’ll ever see home again.

Yet, we keep going. When the sensible thing to do might be to imitate the armadillo, to curl into a defensive ball and hold the world at bay, we ignore sense and continue living our lives. We adapt to the terrors we face; we accept that they’re part of life. If we truly thought about them, we’d be frozen, so we just take them in stride.

No one can function under a prolonged assault of fear. Some last longer than others, but for most, our mental defenses wear down, and we break. Or else we put aside that fear (if we can—soldiers in combat, police on dangerous streets, firefighters responding to the big blaze; they don’t always have that luxury), and we go on.

Some of us never like to admit to these fears, never like to face that terror.

Others...sometimes, we like to peer into the abyss.

Those are the people who read—and often, the people who write—horror stories.

***

I don’t write many short stories.

When I was younger, I thought there was a progression: that a writer wrote short stories until he had mastered them, then turned to the more demanding form of the novel.

I know better now, of course. There is no mastery. There is only trial and error, and error, and error, and then more trial. There is getting better, but there is no having attained best. And I know, too, that some writers excel at the longer forms but stink at the short, and vice versa, and some are blessed enough to write equally well at any length. It’s okay to scowl at those, when you pass them on the street, and maybe to mutter curses.

The first writing I made any money on was a short story—a crime story—for which I won third place in a college literary contest. The prize was $35. I wasn’t there when it was awarded, because my name had been left off the list of winners, so I went apartment-hunting that evening instead of attending the ceremony.

The first writing I got published in a marginally professional publication was an interview with former Monkee, Michael Nesmith (and if I had it to do over again, I’d ask him how it felt to know his name would be prefaced with the words former Monkee for the rest of his life), in a local music magazine. That was, obviously, nonfiction, and there was no money in it.

After that was a long dry spell.

In 1988, the dry spell was broken when I sold a science fiction short story to a very prestigious anthology called Full Spectrum. This was the first volume of Full Spectrum, published in mass market paperback by Bantam Books. Had I waited until the second volume, my first story would have been contained in a hardcover. But that was okay—it was a professional sale, involving both money and publication. That was a good feeling. And since I was managing a bookstore, Hunter’s Books, in La Jolla, CA at the time, I could sell the book containing my story (and we sold a lot of them) and then autograph them on the spot.

After that? You guessed it. A long dry spell.

Then, in a twist you won’t find in many authors’ life stories, the next time I was paid for writing, it was for coming up with the text for a Topps trading card set (news to me that they had stopped including that micro-thin plank of bubble gum). That one job led to other paths—a career in the comic book industry, work writing comic book scripts (of which I have still written more than novels and short stories combined), and finally, novels based on comic book characters. The first one of those, Gen¹³: Netherwar, was written with my pal Christopher Golden, and it opened the door to many more novels. Most of these are what’s called tie-in novels, or licensed fiction. They’re original novels about existing characters, from TV shows, movies, games, comics, whatever. I have written plenty of those in my career—more of them than I’ve written short stories, I believe. Certainly more than I have published short stories.

In between the tie-in work, I was also writing original novels. First, the young adult horror quartet Witch Season (which, at this writing, is about to be reissued as Dark Vengeance), then a reasonably epic horror novel called The Slab, and a little later a very loose trilogy of supernatural thrillers/horror novels set on different parts of the US/Mexico border: Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, and Cold Black Hearts.

Notice the common thread here? The one word that appears in each book’s description?

Not all of the tie-in novels I did were horror-oriented, but the vast majority of them were...even when they weren’t necessarily supposed to be. I wrote a horror novel about Superman, a horror novel about Spider-Man. Even that first novel, Gen ¹³: Netherwar, was a horror novel about teenage superheroes.

More recently, I wrote an original e-book thriller called The Devil’s Bait that doesn’t include any elements of supernatural horror. My agent, as I write these words, is shopping around a crime novel that, likewise, contains nothing supernatural (although it is horrific in the real-world sense).

Those 45 or so novels kept me pretty busy. But here and there, I would be asked to contribute a short story to an anthology, or I’d have an idea for a story that wasn’t long enough to be made into a novel. I never thought of myself as a short story writer, but over the years, I’ve produced a handful or two. Again, except for those intended for a specific sort of book (my Zorro short story, for instance), most of them are stories of supernatural horror, or at least, dark (sometimes very dark) suspense.

Some of those stories are contained in this book.

They’re not all meant to keep the reader from sleeping at night, to require that the lights be left on and the doors locked, checked, and double-checked. Some are simply meant to amuse, or to create a little frisson, to raise the hairs on the back of the reader’s neck, just a bit.

And some are just plain creepy.

***

The way I see it, we have two options in life. We can ignore the terrors that surround us, although that ignoring can turn to internalizing—so that if that adaptive ignorance ever fails, if the terrors are forced into our faces, they’ll take us down that much faster.

Or we can look into the abyss. We can consider the terrors of life in other ways—through fiction, for instance—and maybe come out of it better able to cope with the real-life ones when we meet them down the road.

We still adapt. We accept. But not without occasionally reminding ourselves of some of the things that can go wrong. Not without remembering that we just don’t know what’s behind that next door.

If you’re that second type, you might enjoy what follows...

###

Janey in Amber

Years ago, my family and I took an east coast trip that included a stop in Philadelphia, to see some of the inspiring sights there pertaining to the birth of our nation. Constitution Hall, the Liberty Bell, and all the rest. Since I was close, my friend John Passarella (author of the Wendy Ward trilogy, among other terrific horror tales) suggested—make that insisted—that I stop in and do a signing at an indie genre bookstore called Between Books, in Claymont, DE.

A great bookstore, as it turns out.

There was a ferocious thunderstorm that afternoon, with lightning striking so close to our hotel room in Philadelphia’s historic area that I thought the Liberty Bell would have another crack. At the time, I did not live someplace (now I do) where such storms were commonplace, and I voiced my doubts that anybody would brave it to see not-so-famous me. Jack insisted again, so we made the drive into Delaware and found the store. Greg Schauer, the owner, has made it a terrific place to visit, one of those stores in which the thrill of discovery is endless. We didn’t walk out without spending some money. I was largely right about the attendance—I was not such an enormous draw, even accompanied by Jack, to drag people out in the storm.

Still, it was a grand time, and I enjoyed the store, and dinner after with Jack and his family.

Years later, on the occasion of the store’s 30th anniversary, Greg decided to publish an anthology featuring stories from some of the many writers who have signed there, and he was gracious enough to invite me to participate. There was no particular theme, he said, he just wanted good stories that we felt represented our writing. The lineup for The Stories in Between is an impressive one, including not only me and Jack but Jonathan Carroll, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Frost, Maria V. Snyder, Jonathan Maberry, and more. Fantasist Enterprises put it out, each story is beautifully illustrated, and I highly recommend that you pick a copy up if you love excellent speculative fiction presented in a gorgeous book.

My contribution was Janey in Amber. It was written expressly for Greg’s anthology, and has never been seen elsewhere, until now.

###

Janey in Amber

Sometimes her mother’s house seemed like alien territory. After Dad’s death, Mother had redecorated the place, almost top to bottom. The room that had been Janey’s was called the sewing room now, although Mother had never done much sewing and rarely seemed to use it for anything. She kept a day bed there, which Janey and Jack slept in when they visited. At night, with the lights off, the room whispered to her, reminding her of half-forgotten memories, but when the sun streamed through white lace curtains in the morning it was an unknown land full of sights and odd floral scents that evoked strangers’ lives.

What hadn’t changed were the three maple trees in the backyard. Maybe they had grown a little taller, but it was hard to tell, because as a child they had always seemed so towering anyway. This time of year, afternoon sun angled between the houses down the street and lit the crimson leaves on fire. Those that had already fallen pooled around slender trunks like children hesitant to leave their parents’ comforting sides. Janey kicked through them, dry and crackling underfoot, making her think of the cast-off skins of serpents.

You like this place, don’t you? Jack asked.

Yes. Janey answered without hesitation. She sniffed the autumn air, which carried hints of wood smoke and dark spices and enough of a chill to start her nose running. She touched its tip. Out here, I mean. In the yard, it’s...the most like it was. Inside...I can hardly find Dad in there at all. Or me.

Fortunately, Jack said, draping a strong arm over her shoulders, I can always find you, inside or out.

That is a good thing.

I think so.

Janey burrowed against his chest for a minute. His other arm wrapped around her, cutting the cold, like rolled blankets against her shoulders and back. We should go in, she said, wishing she didn’t mean it. She would give anything to stay here, in Jack’s arms, captured in the dying rays of the sun. Like an insect trapped in amber, she could remain that way forever, watching the eons pass from within a golden cage.

I’m sure she’s fine, Jack said. She’s probably asleep.

Probably. But I think we should look in.

Jack kissed her forehead. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his chin rasped against her flesh. Whatever you say, darling.

And Janey thought, idyllic, that’s the perfect word for what this is. Idyllic.

***

Mother’s room smelled bitter, like piss from one of her rare accidents mixed with some tart liquid medicine she had spilled, all of it confined in stale air. She didn’t like having the window open, not this time of year. She was always cold and kept a space heater going, in spite of the central heating that kept the house at seventy-four degrees. Janey worried about her starting a fire somehow, but the space heater seemed safe enough. If it was knocked over it shut off automatically, and you could put your hand right on it without getting burned.

Janey pushed open the door a few inches and looked inside. The warmth slapped her face. Mother was sitting up in bed, eyes open, and she turned her head toward the door as