Scar Tissue

By James Cooper

Original Stories Inspired by Dark Fiction's Contemporary Trailblazers:
Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, Daphne du Maurier, Robert McCammon & Peter Straub.

James Cooper, one of Britain's finest exponents of contemporary dark fiction, invites you to reflect upon the work of some of the world's most distinguished authors.

In this masterful new collection, you will discover a range of extraordinary stories,  each of which will hack into your heart and make you bleed, leaving its mark—a scar, if you will—a smooth reminder of how deeply we are all drawn to horror's edge . . . Prefaced with insightful introductory essays, this fascinating new collection resonates with familiar narratives, blurring the lines and triggering an exquisite synthesis of the imagination.

So immerse yourself in the art of superior storytelling with a book that shines a light on the mechanics of genre fiction, exploring in the process how the very best in the business produce tales that are memorable, always inventive and utterly original.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786369604

Book preview

Dedication

For Pete and Nicky Crowther,

two perfectly formed stories,

lodged in our collective imagination forever...

And for Anna and Ethan, always.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT ABOUT THE HORROR?

––––––––

AN APPRECIATION OF JAMES COOPER

Horror has always been contentious. When you tell people you write horror, the reactions you get are likely to range from surprise to suspicion to recoil, often ending in outright dismissal: I don’t read horror. I would argue that anyone who reads, reads horror, and that much of the scepticism on the part of some sections of our audience stems from confusion around the definition of what horror is. I would say it’s quite simple: horror is what horrifies you, what raises the hairs on the back of your neck, what makes you feel cold at the thought of it, what keeps you turning words and images over in your mind for a long time, longer than you might expect or even care for.

Of course, these things are going to be different for every reader, and therein lies their potency.

Back at the beginning of the current millennium, when I first began writing stories for publication, horror was a dirty word in literary circles. Those of us who date back that far will remember the so-called horror boom of the seventies and eighties, when the early success of Stephen King launched a landslide of copycat careers, when the horror shelves in bookstores filled up with fly-by-night, derivative works with nothing to recommend them save a certain relish for killing off characters as messily as possible; cynical precursors of the Final Destination franchise with none of the humour and irony, and no one wants that. The horror boom was inevitably followed by the horror bust, and by the time I started sending stories to magazines, it was more or less impossible for anyone but Stephen King to sell a horror novel, except by taking the evasive action of redefining it.

Of course, the classics were still available and still being talked about, but what I remember most clearly from that time is the excitement I felt when I realised that horror was still being written, that new writers and new readers were continuing to find each other, that horror fiction had not gone extinct, but underground.

This was before the advent of Amazon, before the launch of today’s online magazines; work by new writers was harder to come by, scarce books that had gone out of print might seem lost for good. If anything, this difficulty in finding great horror fiction added to its allure. I can recall the joy I experienced at my first convention, when a visit to the dealers’ room brought me into contact with what seemed to me then a vast number of new voices, new faces, new print magazines and independent publishers, all of them passionate about horror fiction, all of them open to making new discoveries.

Many of the books I bought then are with me still. One that remains more meaningful to me than most is a paperback that was one of the first titles to be published by the Canadian indie press Atomic Fez. I first learned about it through an advertisement in one of the horror zines. The cover carries an image of a sinister-looking mansion, silhouetted against a grey sky atop a darkening hillside. On the right of the picture, three figures walk in single file towards the house, and something about them suggests their intentions are not healthy. The whole image appears blurred, as if it has been captured through a rain-spattered lens, or left to gather dust in a drawer, and it is this found quality in particular that still compels me. The book carries a cover quote from Graham Joyce, whose fiction I first came to know and admire through short stories published in the groundbreaking UK magazine of slipstream fiction, The Third Alternative. If I had needed further recommendation, this was it.

I still remember the excitement I felt on purchasing this book, a queasy feeling of having stumbled upon something that would prove important in some way, a turning point maybe, and so it proved. The book I have been describing is The Beautiful Red, the second collection of an author named James Cooper. His name was new to me at the time—it was new to everyone—but in the decade or so since publishing The Beautiful Red, Cooper has continued to consolidate his position as one of the most interesting and accomplished of UK horror writers. That his work has retained many of the qualities that made that collection so compelling and so unique has meant that when Cooper wins readers, he keeps them.

James Cooper’s work is odd. It is edgy, individual, outspoken. It is steeped in a knowledge of and love for horror fiction that informs every line. It has, above all, a quality of unnerving weirdness that makes you question what you know of the world. The outlook for horror fiction now is much brighter—or should I say much darker—than it was when Cooper first began publishing. The burgeoning of weird fiction in the United States, the folk horror revival in the UK have revitalised the landscape of horror fiction to a marvellous extent—and notably increased the number of publishers and editors willing to acquire and promote new horror writers. What must never be forgotten, though, is that there are some writers—impassioned, obsessive, beautiful souls—who have been writing all along, who kept the faith, who are vital in linking this new generation of writers with their forebears, those who survived the fall of the house of horror and then set about rebuilding it.

One of my most informative experiences during my early years in horror was reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, King’s book-length personal essay on the horror cinema and horror literature of the twentieth century. Told in King’s inimitably down-to-earth style, Danse Macabre is a treasure house of a book, an in-depth study of horror that does more than simply name names. Danse Macabre taught me who was important in horror fiction; it also told me why, and revealed to me more than a little of how the best in horror fiction is able to act so readily and so powerfully on our imagination and senses.

This also is a book I often return to, and I was reminded of it—brilliantly, forcefully—almost as soon as I began reading James Cooper’s newest collection, Scar Tissue, the book you are holding in your hands and hopefully, once you have dispensed with my preamble, are about to start reading. In his foreword to the collection, Cooper describes Scar Tissue as one man’s humble offering in honour of some of the finest practitioners of the horror genre during the last fifty years. Scar Tissue is fiction, not fact, but like Danse Macabre it is something in the manner of a personal odyssey, a journey through horror that offers us the author’s reflections on his work to date, filtered through the considerable store of knowledge he has accrued, through the living, scarified medium of the horror story.

Cooper has made of himself a bridge—from the generation of horror writers who preceded the boom, who in some cases precipitated it, to the further shore, where their work is now recognised as the seminal and guiding influence it has proved itself to be. Cooper—who was born of the boom and survived the bust—in writing his way through his influences and milestones emerges on the other side strengthened in character, starker in outline, more purposeful in the pursuit of his own ambitions.

In this most unusual and inventive of horror collections, Cooper takes us on one hell of a ghost train ride, through some marvellous and aptly terrifying locations: the jungles of Vietnam, a shabby motel in Texas, the ice-bound mountains of the Arctic circle, a sweltering garden in Florida, inside the labyrinthine corridors of a hijacked mind. In his introduction to Childhood, Inc., the story Cooper has written in tribute to the poisoned youthful idylls of the late, great Ray Bradbury, Cooper expresses some understandable nervousness over whether he’s done the master proud. As I read the story, the thought that kept recurring was how amused and how delighted Bradbury would surely have been, had he lived to sample this out-of-body experience of the literary kind. Indeed, I can imagine him worrying away at it, wondering if it were not, in fact, a story he himself had written and then forgotten about, dug up from an obscure anthology and given a new lease of life.

I can believe that all the authors reverenced here—those still with us and those who have passed on—would feel the same. What all would doubtless doubly appreciate is Cooper’s pride in, and stout defence of, horror writing per se. There isn’t a writer in this book whose work I don’t greatly admire, Cooper reveals, though admiration for writers of horror stories is hard to come by. In celebrating the writers who have inspired him, influenced him, and yes, scarred him, Cooper quotes from the speech given by the great noir writer Walter Mosley on the occasion of Stephen King being presented the National Book Award in 2003. Paying tribute to King, Mosley is at pains to stress his championship of the common man, his skill in rendering the multitudinous and quotidian terrors of everyday life. Undeniably a valid observation’, Cooper muses, but what about the horror?"

Cooper doesn’t hold back. If it’s horror you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place. Scar Tissue is as intimate as it is ambitious, as terrifying as it is truthful. Enjoy the journey.

—Nina Allan

Rothesay, Isle of Bute

November 2021

FOREWORD

THE HEALING PROCESS

1

GOOD BOOKS ARE LIKE KNIVES; they hack into our heart and make us bleed, exposing the red meat, tearing into the very essence of who we really are. Every story we read cuts into us, leaving its mark—a scar, if you will—a smooth reminder of a life lived, an extra layer of experience. When the final page is turned, we scream at the darkness, not because the book is ending, but because we know what comes next: the slow formation of the stigmata. The thing left over; a sign that something rapturous might remain.

2

So to this book, a flagship project that reveals to the world my own scars in all their terrible glory. Not so much a conventional short story collection as a tribute to some of the writers who, over the years, have helped shape my own writing and moved me in ways they could never even begin to imagine. They aren’t the most distinguished writers of my generation, or even the most revered, but they are chief among those who have buried themselves in my psyche, deep down, where the scar tissue is sleek and black.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness,¹ as Oscar Wilde claimed, then consider this book of stories one man’s humble offering in honour of some of the finest practitioners of the horror genre during the last fifty years. It’s an homage to those I admire most, a collection of nightmares born of many years wrestling personal demons that reading fiction has helped me defeat. This was the path I chose to begin the healing. Without literature I sometimes wonder how I might ever have scratched out the shadow that from a young age I sensed darkening my soul.

3

The beauty of fiction, especially powerful horror fiction, is that it will always leave some kind of lasting impression. It may well damage you along the way, but it always gives back so much more; if you let it, that is. And this is the great Gordian knot, isn’t it? The capitulation, the giving over of part of yourself that is required in any metaphysical exchange. Untangle that particular kink in the weave and you’re home free. The keys to the kingdom are yours.

Perhaps it’s an easier process with horror fiction because we all know and accept that a fundamental part of defeating any evil knocking at the door is to become part of it, in order to better understand how it thinks. How else does Father Karras in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist expel the demon from Regan MacNeil? His crisis of faith leaves him spiritually exposed, allowing him to better appreciate the darkness in which he’s engulfed. The same too can be said of Boone in Clive Barker’s Cabal, who is only able to overcome Decker by opening himself up to the darkness of Midian, the real monster at the heart of the book. There are countless other examples, but the underlying contention is apparent for all to see: first the hurt, then the healing. A balance of darkness and light.

4

When I was ten years old I found a dead body. Or should it be: When I was ten years old I saw a dead body. Okay, still not quite enough. I’m looking for something else to complete the picture. How about: When I was ten years old I wrote about a dead body. There, that brings everything together, doesn’t it? The explorer, the witness, the reporter. Great storytellers are all three, I think. Taking our arm, showing us the way, transforming our experience into something we can almost understand.

5

What the hell does all this literary trepanning have to do with our previous discussion, you might well ask? Well, it’s a simple point, really, but one that’s worth drawing a line under, I think: when we read, we all bear different scars. We come away from our reading experience emotionally and psychologically changed, whether we like it or not; no two readers ever really feeling exactly the same.

When we read a horror novel, of course, we want to be hurt, we’re ready to figuratively bleed; we happily invite the scar tissue to form. Horror novels, as you and I know all too well, are designed with the express purpose of glorying in the spilling of blood. The good ones stay with us because when it feels like our own blood that is being shed, the whole process becomes almost sacrificial, an act of propitiation or worship to a remote but merciful god.

Perhaps that’s it, maybe we have blindly stumbled across the key to the riddle here. For the sake of our discussion, the Supreme Being must always be the writer; in which case it could be argued that the stories I’m setting before you in this book are nothing more than blood offerings to venerate a handful of my adopted gods. Could that be it, do you think? Have I alighted upon a personal truth? There is no doubt that I have shed blood for these false idols (on one occasion, quite literally: never read a Stephen King novel and chop onions at the same time...), but is that enough to draw everything together so that I understand the purpose of horror fiction—and my curious attachment to it—more completely? I’m not so sure. The edges still feel a little rough; the core message still needs knocking into shape.

How about we shift the focus slightly and try framing the debate through the mercurial mind of Franz Kafka, who wrote that a book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.² But the savvy horror reader knows that the axe, and the axe-wielder, can do more than break ice. It can tear flesh and cut to the bone. More significantly, it can bury itself deep in a person’s head, where the stories live; where, in the writer, they are born and, in the reader, they are transformed.

This is the ultimate revelation, then, the grand epiphany: God help anyone who picks up a horror novel and doesn’t understand the importance of the axe.

6

For the record, there isn’t a writer in this book whose work I don’t greatly admire. That might sound like a back-handed compliment, but admiration for writers of horror stories is hard to come by. Just try reading the reviews.

To prove the point, let’s take Stephen King as an example—a pretty obvious one, I grant you, but of all the writers selected for this book, he undoubtedly reaches the widest audience. King is also a writer with whom a vast number of readers feel they have forged an intimate relation-ship over several decades interacting with his work.

When the National Book Foundation granted King the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, he was introduced at the ceremony by the writer Walter Mosley. In his speech, Mosley celebrated King’s instinctual understanding of the fears that form the psyche of America’s working class.³ This is accurate, of course, up to a point, but it surely overlooks the bigger picture. More on this in a moment.

Mosley continued in his speech to focus on the narrative realism that informs much of King’s fiction and generates such emotional resonance. He knows fear, he said, and not the fear of demonic forces alone, but also of loneliness and poverty, of hunger and the unknown.⁴ Again, this is undeniably a valid observation, and for many readers—and I include myself here—it is King’s ability to tap into these commonplace fears that elevate his work and make his novels and stories so compelling.

But there’s an obvious lacuna here—a missing piece of the puzzle—that needs to be addressed. When I first read Mosley’s speech, the first question that sprang to mind was: what about the horror? King’s work is rooted in the real world and can legitimately be described as American Realism, but only until the first monster is released from the cage! King’s horror is also deeply embedded in a rich tradition of Gothic and supernatural fiction, the historical and cultural context of which cannot be ignored. To suggest otherwise would be to disregard what is most obvious about King’s narratives: they are driven by the uncanny and the weird. It is perfectly reasonable to admire King’s work for exploring the horrors of everyday life—addiction, domestic abuse and family dysfunction are all common themes in his novels—but it seems thoroughly remiss to do so at the expense of the otherworldly motifs that underpin them.

Margaret Atwood falls into the same trap. In her review of King’s novel Doctor Sleep, she suggests that down below the horror trappings the book is essentially about families.⁵ Anyone who has read the novel appreciates that this argument forms only a very small part of the story. Doctor Sleep—which is a very modest book by anyone’s standards and a poor sequel to a classic that was probably best left alone—is one of King’s wilder rides, a novel that, while it can be read as a tale about the family as a social institution, lends itself more definitively to a reading that concentrates on the fantastic rather than the mundane.

Joshua Rothman, in his article What Stephen King Isn’t in The New Yorker, drills into the heart of the argument better than most. He suggests that King’s writing—what King himself calls the truth inside the lie⁶—is so powerful because it feels accurate about things that are unreal.⁷ This is where the admiration is born, I think, in King’s ability to present what is not and can never be, and utterly convince us that what we are digesting is just a distorted form of the truth. There are lots of writers, Rothman concludes, who tell it like it is, but only a few who, with such commitment and intensity, tell it like it isn’t. King takes the weird and gives it weight.⁸

If that’s not worthy of admiration, might I suggest that you leave by the nearest exit; you appear to have come to the wrong place.

7

If you sit for a moment and pick over the bones of someone’s life, what you usually find is a memory of pain. This is often the case when reading great horror fiction. Not necessarily the physical pain the writer might have endured—though this is sometimes a part of it—but the mental strain any writer experiences when trying to overcome the tyranny of the blank page. This is a form of suffering that leaves scars of its own, nestled in the black stuff, unreachable, but there all the same.

Leonard Cohen, no stranger to mental anguish himself, once wrote: A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.⁹ Putting aside the biblical connotation, Cohen’s idea rings true because language is the way we commonly brand the world; it’s how every torment we’ve ever suffered gets its name.

Hold out your arm long enough and you’ll feel the pain of the world tearing at every tendon, every sinew. Even gravity, it would seem, is against us.

8

You hold in your hands, then, a book of suffering. nine stories inspired by the pain and torment of writers who have made the word flesh.

These stories aren’t a wet dream of gushing adolescence or woefully derivative fan fiction. I’ve been working on them for many years, trying to figure out how each selected writer more often than not finds the right word, the razor-sharp phrase that invariably cuts to the bone. They are love letters to a select group of writers whose work has reminded me, not just of the cosmic darkness beyond the rim, but also of humanity’s beating heart and the cool purpose that drives it. They aren’t the only writers whose work I have reflected on in this way, nor are they perhaps the choices you might have made were you to undertake the same project, but they are undoubtedly writers who have dug under my skin and left permanent scars. For this I consider myself blessed. One of the lucky ones. A middle-aged man covered in scar tissue, who has lived and breathed the pain.

David J. Leffell, MD., wrote in an article for the Yale School of Medicine, Scars...that are jagged may heal with a shape that reflects the original injury.¹⁰ If I truly am blessed, you’ll read these stories and see the rough outline of the work on which they were based. You’ll find yourself reliving your own passage through the darkness and see the torchlight up ahead—always there, always within reach—flickering bright and unassailable at horror’s edge.

—James Cooper

Nottinghamshire

February 2021

¹ Oscar Wilde

² Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January, 1904

³ Walter Mosley: Introducing Stephen King at the National Book Awards, 2003 (https://www.nationalbook.org/stephen-king-accepts-the-2003-medal-for-distinguished-contribution-to-american-letters/)

⁴ Ibid

⁵ Margaret Atwood: Shine On—Review of Doctor Sleep, The New York Times Book Review, September 19, 2013

⁶ Stephen King: Acceptance Speech at the National Book Awards, 2003 (https://www.national-book.org/stephen-king-accepts-the-2003-medal-for-distinguished-contribution-to-american-letters/)

⁷ Joshua Rothman, What Stephen King Isn’t, The New Yorker, October 11, 2013

⁸ Ibid

⁹ Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game, (Harvill Secker, 1963) p.48

¹⁰ David J. Leffell, MD., Time (and Care) Heals All Wounds, (Yale School of Medicine, 2000)

SCAR#1

PETER STRAUB

INTRODUCTION: HE DREAMS AWAKE...

––––––––

PETER STRAUB ISN’T JUST another writer. He’s the guy in the expensive suit, sitting in the corner of the library, contentedly reading Henry James whilst listening to Ben Webster and sipping a glass of Merlot. He’s a cut above in every respect, the kind of novelist that aspiring writers should be looking to for a blueprint of how it’s done. That he happens to be a champion of the horror genre, having written some of the finest tales of terror in the twentieth century, is our enduring good fortune. We are blessed to have in our company one of the most sophisticated novelists of his generation, Douglas Winter drawing our attention to the fact that Straub has walked the uncertain—and often unbreakable—line between popular fiction and serious literature"’.¹¹

It is into this rather daunting realm that your humble servant must journey, hoping to discover what really powers Straub’s fiction, looking for what the man himself calls moments of terrible terror and extremity, the point at which one can experience a sort of clarity.¹² This will be no easy task. Straub’s work is a complex structure of allegory, myth and dream most often employed to recall, reawaken and reassemble the pieces of both public and private trauma.¹³ All good and well, but finding a way in to this universe, especially to present a faithful and relevant story of my own, will require a significant degree of disciplined thinking. So where to start?

I spent a substantial amount of time considering Straub’s writing and how to best represent the common thread—assuming one could be identified—that ran though his work. I was well aware that Straub’s work was polished to perfection, and remembered him explaining to Stanley Wiater that there really must be a love of just working the language. A delight in making sentences.¹⁴ This was the first decisive step forward. If Straub was building a religion around manipulating language, then I firmly believed I could be an honest disciple. His war cry of fiction first...and horror second¹⁵ suited me just fine. Any horror worthy of the name must have a context, no matter how ambiguous; the story must come first, otherwise the horror embedded within it will collapse.

So far so good, then. Straub and I worshipped at the same altar. I just had to make sure that my prayer—respectfully conceived and submitted—was half as good as his. With such an imposing body of work to draw on, it was hard to know where to begin. My first experience with Straub as a young boy was the bad-mannered, noisy and operatic¹⁶ Ghost Story, which made me realise what could be achieved if horror fiction took itself seriously. Here was a book that showed mankind’s fundamental condition in all its glory: irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.¹⁷ Naturally, I loved it, even if, at the time, there were layers of meaning that remained tantalisingly out of reach. Still, this was not the Straub narrative that consumed me. That honour belonged to Harry Beevers and the Blue Rose stories, most notably The Ghost Village, Koko and The Throat. If I was to produce a story that saluted Peter Straub, it would surely have to occupy the same space. The territory I was most interested in exploring was what Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli defined as war as an initiation and an altered state.¹⁸ It was with this in mind that Clay Newburg and Mrs Tillman were born and A Brighter Garden began to take shape.

I re-read the Blue Rose stories again—allowing the beating heart of each piece to burn its way into my brain—and was reminded of Straub’s own observation in If You Could See Me Now: No story exists without its past.¹⁹ This was the engine that drove most of Straub’s fiction, I realised, the complicated relationship between the present and the past. If my own story was to be true to Straub’s core philosophy, it would have to tread the same ground. A Brighter Garden—already divided in my mind between two very disparate worlds—would move to the same rhythm as the Blue Rose stories. As author Kevin Lucia suggests: In much of Straub’s work, the past is very often the heart of his stories’ horror and the reach of that past is unforgiving, unrelenting.²⁰

This got me thinking about the nature of time in Straub’s novels more acutely. A man’s history always seemed to define him. This was the object lesson and there was something in this notion that excited me creatively. I began to consider how my own story might develop, especially focusing on the impact of the passage of time, not only on Clay Newburg, but also on an attentive reader, immersed in the tale, who him/herself would be transformed, for good or bad, by what s/he’d read. This drew me towards the field of trauma theory, particularly Michelle Balaev’s view that the origin of traumatic response is forever unknown and unintegrated; yet the ambiguous, literal event is ever-present and intrusive. ²¹This idea seemed to speak plain and true to the very nature of Peter Straub’s writing, and it was to this theory that I wanted my own tale to defer.

Okay, so there I sat, research complete, persuasive conclusion drawn, but I still hadn’t written a word of the damn story. I had a framework and a cogent approach that I knew in my head was viable. I also sensed the path I wanted to take somewhere up ahead, but couldn’t quite see it as clearly as I needed to if the story was to hit the right note. In moments like these, it often makes sense to return to the source, which is precisely what I did, thereby enabling Miles Teagarden from If You Could See Me Now to point the way, reiterating that effects can leak backward and forward in time, staining otherwise innocent events. ²²

I quickly understood this to be the force that would propel my narrative. What Straub himself called the business of repressed memories, events that have been rejected and buried;²³ what Tim Underhill in The Throat defined as the missing, unifying section of the puzzle...you have kept from yourself.²⁴ This is where I would discover the soul of my story—or equally, the point at which my incompetence would be exposed.

So I began to write, and A Brighter Garden quickly felt like something worthy of the undertaking. Clay Newburg, as you’re about to discover, is a man for whom the passage of time creates a desperate cycle of pain. Nonetheless, he is a character I quickly came to love, despite his flaws, who, like many Straubian creations has denied or forgotten some crucial and determining event that boils and smokes inside them.²⁵

Almost inevitably, the story grew into something I hadn’t anticipated, perhaps because it felt right, in keeping with Straub’s own sense of allowing the narrative to exist outside the frame. Quite often, that’s how it felt; that Clay Newburg and Mrs Tillman lived and breathed beyond the page, that the story itself was alive.

This is Clay Newburg, then, the kind of man you might know, the kind of man you might even be. Just be warned from the outset: wartime Vietnam...is eternally with him.²⁶

¹¹ Douglas E. Winter, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror, (Pan Books, 1990) p.272

¹² Peter Straub: The Path of Extremity, Locus vol.32, no.1, January 1994

¹³ John C. Tibbetts, The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub, (McFarland & Company, 2016) p.6/7

¹⁴ Stanley Wiater, Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, (Avon Books), 1990 p.87

¹⁵ TZ Interview: Peter Straub: I Looked into my Imagination and that’s what I found, Twilight Zone Magazine, May 1981 vol.1, no.2 p.15

¹⁶ Ibid

¹⁷ Peter Straub, Ed., American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now, (Library of America, 2009) p.7

¹⁸ Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, (University of South Carolina Press, 1996) p.78

¹⁹ Peter Straub, If You Could See Me Now, (Ballantine Books, 1977) p.84

²⁰ Kevin Lucia, Revelations: Peter Straub, Cemetery Dance Online, Dec 13 2019

²¹ Michelle Balaev, Trends in Literary Trauma Theory, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, June 1 2008

²² Peter Straub, If You Could See Me Now, (Ballantine Books, 1977) p.107

²³ John C. Tibbetts, A Magellan of the Interior: Peter Straub, The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media, (Palgrave, 2011) p.310

²⁴ Peter Straub, The Throat, (Penguin Books Ltd., 1993) p.79

²⁵ John C. Tibbetts, A Magellan of the Interior: Peter Straub, The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media, (Palgrave, 2011) p.305

²⁶ Bernadette Lynn Bosky, Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub’s Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 313, September 2014

A BRIGHTER GARDEN

SOMETIMES I LIE AWAKE thinking about the enemy. I try to pin it down, isolate what I’m fighting inside, but the noise is too loud and the darkness too complete. The enemy remains unclear. I close my eyes and feel the night pressing in. I feel the impossible gravity of the heat. The atmosphere is thick and comes at me in waves: the humidity, the stink, the endless, shifting rains. Back then, the enemy was the gooks lying in wait in the paddies, their black faces hidden, their bodies unimaginably still. It was easy to hate them, because we were told to. This is the enemy, they said. This is what it looks like. But it was a lie, like so much of the stuff we were told over there. The enemy had many faces. It was the mountains and the mud and the jungle and the ticks; it was the leeches and the tunnels and the silence and the mines. My God, if we’d known in advance how relentless the rain was or how swiftly the jungle dulled the blade, maybe we’d have had an outside chance. But life’s funny like that, I guess. We never get to see the full picture, do we? Not at first; not as we’d hoped. This is what I consider, as I lie awake trying hard not to think of Vietnam. Except now the pictures are there, fully formed, and I see everything with a kind of watered-down clarity. I know what’s coming because I’ve looked it square in the face. This is the enemy, I think. This, right here. It is anything that has the power to take you down.

2016

Florida heat. It gets under the skin, agitating the blood, making everyone crazy. All those damn shootings. Most of them are because the heat has burnt the sense out of some lost soul in Miami or Tampa, dragging them to the edge of the pit, brainpan sizzling with rage. Imagine this place without air-conditioning, Larry used to say. We’d be in hell. You know that, right?

It felt that way today, even at 8:45 in the morning. The truck was like an oven, its busted A/C flinging out hot air even when it was turned off. I had every window rolled down, but that only reminded me what kind of day was heading my way. The heat was like a caged animal, waiting to be released. By midday, anyone with any sense would be inside.

Traffic was heavy, as it always was at this time along the South Dixie Freeway. Vehicles were nose to tail, snaking down the road, getting nowhere fast. Everyone I could see already looked flustered. This is how it starts, I thought. No air to breathe, no stretch of highway to eat up. A man could go flat-out crazy just thinking about it.

I turned on the radio and listened to the morning’s misery. Economy plummeting; gang wars across the County; some poor woman’s husband shot in the head while collecting the groceries. I re-tuned the station and found WJLU, a Christian broadcaster I’d stumbled across before, listening to some guy tell the world that they were "reaching the lost, discipling the saved". As a slogan it stank, but this I could live with. The missionary zeal fell easily into the white space inside my head. A song came on. A woman singing about Jesus being at the wheel. That would have been real good right now. He might have been able to do something about this damn traffic.

I crawled along for another half a mile or so and then slung a left onto the Causeway and headed for East 3rd Avenue. The Indian River soaked up the sun, already warm enough to bathe in. I briefly considered stopping and jumping in. It certainly felt more appealing than anything else I had planned for the day, though I had no doubt that Mrs Tillman would give me hell if I was even a minute later than I’d promised. A right on Saxon Drive, followed by a steady cruise south until I arrived at Coronado Cove. The old lady lived in a sprawling bungalow that had been in her family for generations, the property overlooking the Indian River Lagoon Preserve. A ring of buttonwood trees and red maple that surrounded the place offered the kind of privacy that Mrs Tillman assured me was essential for a temperate life. Her garden, she said, provided spiritual balance. It all sounded like hot air to me, but one man’s baloney is another’s scripture, I guess, so I just smiled and carried on working. I had enough nonsense in my head already, without dwelling too long on Mrs Tillman’s foolishness. As long as she paid me for my afternoon sweat I was happy to listen to any garbage that came my way. Even the holy stuff.

I pulled the truck onto the drive and got out, waiting for what came next. Sure enough, no sooner had my feet hit the asphalt than Mrs Tillman was out the door and rushing to greet me.

I thought we said nine sharp, Mr Newburg, she said, glancing at her watch. I held my tongue and started unpacking my tools. Always with the Mr Newburg shit. I’d pleaded with her to call me Clay, must be a hundred times, but no dice. When she spoke to me it was like she was talking to a mortgage adviser or a school teacher. I wasn’t any of those things and wanted to tell her to cut it out. It was one of a dozen different gripes I had with the woman every time I came over. If I didn’t need the money so bad, I’d have told her to stick her damn koi pond where the sun don’t shine; which in Florida, is not an easy thing to do.

Traffic was a bear, Mrs Tillman. The Dixie’s almost at a standstill. How much overtime do I owe you?

She bristled, failing to appreciate the joke. That’s beside the point. If a man can’t keep his word, what use is he? That’s what I always say.

This was true; she did always say it. And I always wanted to throttle her for getting my day off to such a shitty start.

Not to worry, Mrs Tillman. I’m here now, aren’t I? I should get to work. Idle hands and all that.

I moved towards the rear of the truck, hoping she’d let me alone to get on with things, but as always, she intended to punish me for being a minute or two late.

Not just yet, she said. Come inside a moment. I’ve just made a fresh pot of coffee. I want to go over the plans one more time.

She flounced off up the driveway towards the front door, expecting me to follow, which, to my great shame, I did. What a man will do for money, I thought. A lonely old bird holds out a cheque and there goes your dignity. All for a few more dollars in the bank. What a fucked-up world we’ve made for ourselves.

I followed her through the front door, along a hallway lined with framed photos, and into a large, open kitchen. She had already taken two mugs from a cupboard and was filling them with coffee.

Milk and sugar, Mr Newburg?

She knew I didn’t take either, yet she always asked, as though my preference might have changed since I was last in the house. I wondered what she’d do if I suddenly said yes to both.

Just the coffee, Mrs Tillman. That’s unhealthy enough, I reckon.

She looked up, startled. Nonsense! Americans have been drinking this stuff for centuries. How do you think we got where we are today?

As usual, I had no answer; I never had answers to any of Mrs Tillman’s moronic questions. I usually just stood and waited until Mrs Tillman felt that her point had been sufficiently made. Then, after a brief acknowledgement that I must have been mistaken, we moved on.

Coffee, Mr Newburg! Uncle Sam’s best friend.

I nodded my head, feeling a dull throb at the back of my skull, and took a seat at the breakfast table. Whatever she had in store for me, I knew it would be over faster if I clammed up and allowed her to have the floor. If experience with Mrs Tillman had taught me anything, it was that the old crow loved the sound of her own voice. I guessed she rarely had visitors anymore, which was why my arrival often got her so worked up. She finally had a friendly ear to bend. Or so she thought. I vaguely wondered if she realised I was only here for the cash. Then it occurred to me that maybe she had a hidden agenda of her own, that she didn’t really want the koi pond at all. What she really wanted was another body in the house, someone she could pay to boss around, someone whose dignity could be bought on the cheap.

The pain in my skull felt like I’d been hit with an iron skillet. Christ, I was too old for this shit. I should have been put down years ago, like a sick dog. There was only so much misery an old man could be expected to endure. Life was weird sometimes, how it dragged you to hell and back then gave you a mess like this to work through. Sometimes it was hard to figure out which was worse, ’Nam or Florida. I didn’t say stuff like that out loud, of course; I knew it didn’t make a lick of sense. But right here, watching Mrs Tillman’s skinny behind bent over the table, poring over the plans for the koi pond, I couldn’t for the life of me differentiate between the two.

Take a look at this, she said, tapping the blueprint she’d laid out on the Formica. I was thinking we could make this area here a little bigger. You know, for a waterfall. What do you think?

I rose and joined her, looking at where she was pointing. Hard to know what to think, in truth. An extra day’s work; another grubby little cheque to cash; more back-breaking labour under the