The Nostalgia of Texas Gothic and Horror

Last Monday, I had the pleasure of moderating the Q&A and book signing of I Was A Teenage Slasher with one of my favorite authors, Stephen Graham Jones. It's been years since I've attended such a book event in a Barnes & Noble and it felt pretty damn good. Considering it was a week-work afternoon during rush hour, we had a great SRO crowd.

Slasher is a very American story, tapping on cultural touchstones that may not resonate with someone who was not raised in this country. Though Jones and I grew up hundreds of miles and a decade apart, we were each familiar with the identical childhood and adolescent rituals that provided a backdrop to this tale. The Saturday morning marathon watching cartoons. Hanging out at the local convenience store. High school culture with the cool kids and everyone else. The Band. Majorettes. The markers of Texas Gothic--water towers forlorn as abandoned cathedrals, long stretches of desolate highway through the dusty prairie. Barbed-wire fences and cattle guards. Rust. Dirt. Youthful angst and a yearning for the bigger world on the other side of the horizon. A promise to get away and never look back. Then drawn back to immerse yourself in the selected memories of your past.

But Slashers is hardly an ode to nostalgia with its graphic depictions of torture and humiliating slayings. Jones used a couple of tropes to power the momentum and stoke the horror. First is that of an unreliable narrator to string you along from one ghastly murder to another, making you distrust your ability to understand the narrative. Second, his protagonist (and villain) and the side-kick accomplice note how the slayings conformed to the plot of a teenage horror flick and so predicted who gets offed next. Jones' prose is so enveloping and descriptive that it's a wonder you can flip through the pages and not get any blood spatter. His writing style is to lead the reader into a darkened room, then "I blow out the candle and let their hand go."

We also saw another side to Jones, revealed by his desire to write a rom-com and perhaps pen the script for a Hallmark Christmas Special (playing it straight, no slashers invited). When asked which character he'd like to be cast as in Pulp Fiction, it was Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman.

First Piece Published--Feeling Remembered.

 by Thomas Kies

As I was walking Annie, our dog, one morning, I thought about the first piece of fiction that I was lucky enough to have published back in 1979.  It was a short story called Fast Dancing Detroit Style.  No, it wasn’t a mystery story.  It was horror—an erotic ghost story. I was paid $250, I was 26 at the time and I thought I was hot as a box of matches.

After all.  I’d been published in Cavalier magazine, the same publication where Stephen King got his start. With the same editor that he worked with, Maurice DeWalt.  

And yes, Cavalier was a men’s magazine that featured some of the top writers of the time, but it was also filled with full frontal nude women.  I remember proudly telling my father about being published and a couple of days later he phoned me to tell me how humiliating it had been to go into an adult bookstore to buy the magazine. I’m not sure he ever told me if he liked the story or not.  

Cavalier was launched by Fawcett Publications in 1952.  The original format was to feature novels and novelettes by Fawcett’s Gold Medal authors like Richard Prather and Micky Spillane. During the 1960s, the magazine featured such writers as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Coover, Richard Gehman, Garson Kanin, Paul Krassner, John D. MacDonald, Albert Moravia, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shelton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Theodore Sturgeon and Colin Wilson.

Film critic Manny Farber had a monthly column in the 1960s. Stephen King was a contributor during the 1970s, and his stories were also featured in Cavalier Yearbook.

I followed up my first published story with more horror only to be turned down by Mr. DeWalt saying, “These are too much like Stephen King.”  Okay…I guess that’s not bad.  

I tried other magazines, mostly “pulp publications” like Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, Weird Tales, Analog, and Strange Tales.  The cover pages, by the way, often featured illustrations of scantily clad women in the clutches of space aliens.  

I even submitted short stores to Playboy (no luck there) and Omni, a glossy four-color magazine devoted to both science fiction and science fact.  The editor was Ben Bova.  He was the author of over 120 books on science and science fiction, had won the Hugo Award six times, and was the president of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. 

He sent me a personal rejection letter on one of my submissions with a handwritten note that said, “,,,keep at it.  You’re a good writer.”  

That was in the 70s and 80s and I was raising a family and working full time at the Elmira Star-Gazette. I wrote short stories in my spare time on my manual typewriter at my desk tucked away on the porch.  On the wall next to my desk was a corkboard where I kept the rejections slips.  

Back then, you’d submit stories by hardcopy via the mail accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope so that if your story was rejected, you’d at least hear back with a pre-printed slip of paper saying that they were sorry they couldn’t respond personally and that your story just wasn’t right for their publication. 

So, I found my copy of Cavalier from 44 years ago that I tucked away in a closet and reread my erotic horror story.  Could I have improved upon it?  Sure.

But you know, I enjoyed reading it.  Almost as much as I did when it first arrived in my mailbox a lifetime ago. But I think I'll stick with mysteries. 

We Are What We Read

I’m nearly at the end of teaching my Creative Writing class and it’s been as much of a learning experience for me as it has for them.   We started out as eight strangers and by the end, we know a lot about each other.

In each class, I assign a writing prompt such as create a character and put that character in an action scene. This week’s writing prompt is to write a scene of romance primarily using dialogue. Next week’s assignment, and our final one, will be to write the first few pages of your book and the last few pages of your book.

All of the members of this class are good writers.  Some are outstanding.

One of the classmates uses the writing prompts to add to his folksy short story about a boy losing his bike.  One of the writers is extraordinary at humor.  One has a remarkable ability to describe scenes.  One is a thriller addict and it comes out in his writing.

Three of the students are millennials and I hesitate to pigeonhole any demographic, but I’ve noticed that when they read their work aloud, they do it from their phones using Google-Docs. And all three of them write about medieval fantasy worlds of assassins, magic, and fierce warriors.

When asked about the subject matter, I discovered that Dungeons & Dragons has made an impressive comeback.  I’d thought that the game had died out in the eighties.  I was wrong.

I was impressed when one of the other students asked them if they’d read The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit and they replied that they had.

It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten an inkling that younger folks interested in writing enjoyed that genre.  I spoke to a middle school class about writing and asked them what kind of interests they had.  It was the medieval fantasy genre but also, and not surprising, science fiction and superheroes.

I thought back to what genres interested me when I was much younger.  Back in the seventies, pulp science fiction and horror magazines filled with strange and wonderful short stories held my fascination.  I began writing my own and submitting them.

Not one of them sold.

However, I did get a really positive personal letter from Ben Bova, the publisher of Omni.

I kept writing short stories and finally got one published in a glossy men’s magazine called Cavalier. A tawdry publication, but the one that first published Stephen King’s short stories.

Mine was called Fast Dancing Detroit Style and it was about a killer who picks up a hitchhiker in the Nevada desert who turns out to be a ghost.

It wasn’t much later that I picked up my first Travis McGee mystery.  I was hooked.  I discovered that I love mysteries.  But that's not what I started writing, not yet.

As a fledgling writer I took a few detours, trying my hand at a historical novel (awful), a horror novel (even worse), and a flat out thriller (my own wife wouldn’t read it).

No, I was exclusively reading mysteries:  Sue Grafton, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosely, Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, and Mickey Spillane, as well as many, many others.  Mysteries are my niche.  I enjoy reading them and I enjoy writing them.

The point of this rambling blog?  We are what we read.  Or perhaps what movies we watch and games we play.

Stay safe.  Stay healthy.

www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Writers Gotta' Write

Hello and welcome to my first blog. I’m extremely excited and honored to be joining the Type M for Murder family.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions about what you’d like me to write, please let me know!

Since the beginning is the best place to start, let’s do that. I’m going to make an admission, it took me 20 years to get published. When Cindy, my wife, and I were dating, and I was a single dad, she said, “Okay, your life is a do-over. What is it you want to be more than anything else?”

My reply was immediate. “I want to be a novelist.”

She quickly wrote it down on a cocktail napkin (we were at a holiday reception) and handed it to me. “Never lose this. This is who you are.”

Well, I lost it. Who keeps old cocktail napkins?

But I kept the dream.

Because I was still at the newspaper in Norwalk, Connecticut and raising my daughter, I could only write part-time. But write I did. My first attempt at a novel was entitled Crossbones. It was a historical novel about pirates and the destruction of Port Royal in Jamaica by an earthquake and tidal wave. I quickly discovered that historical novels are not my genre. It was awful.


By the way, NBC aired a television series by the same name in 2014. Not their genre either.

My second attempt at a novel was a mystery/thriller set in Connecticut called Pieces of Jake. I managed to land an agent from New York and I thought I was ready for the bestseller list. However, I discovered that this agent had little patience if one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan didn’t buy the manuscript. When we didn’t get a contract, he dropped me like a bad habit.

I had a chance to review the rejection comments from the editors and they primarily talked about the lack of character development. That’s when I started work on Providence and Random Road. Initially, the book was in two first-person voices. Two protagonists, one a male, the other a female. Then I discovered that the most interesting of the two was the female and opted to write the entire novel in the voice of Geneva Chase. I still couldn’t manage to get an agent interested. But I thought the character development was miles ahead of anything else I’d written.

Moving on, I tried my hand at horror. Also, not my genre.

Then a straight-out thriller. So bad my own wife wouldn’t read it.

Back to Providence and Random Road. I had a good feeling about it, I liked the main character, Geneva Chase, and felt the story had good bones. I shortened the title to Random Road and rewrote the hell out of it. Then, rather than take the shotgun approach, I painstakingly researched agents. I started by Googling and using the criteria: literary agents, debut authors, mysteries.

About thirty agents popped up. I learned about each one, who they represented, what they were looking for, and tailor-made the query letter to each. I made certain that if they were looking for 50 sample pages, I sent 50 sample pages. If they were looking for a synopsis (which I hate doing), I sent a synopsis.

I got four requests for the entire manuscript! To make a long story short, I signed with the incredible agent, Kimberley Cameron, and I’m working on my third Geneva Chase mystery for Poisoned Pen Press. In September, I’ll be on a panel at a Mystery Conference in Scottsdale honoring Ian Rankin and then at Bouchercon, I'm on a panel entitled “In the Papers—Journalists in Fiction.”

Recently, I gave a talk to about 50 people and I told the story about how it took 20 years to finally get published.  Someone in the audience asked, “Wasn’t it hard to write all those books over all those years and not get published? Didn’t you ever feel like giving up?”

My answer was, “A writer’s gotta’ write.” And my wife, Cindy, wouldn’t let me give up.

I might not have physical possession of that cocktail napkin, but I have what was written on it tattooed on my memory. I want to be a novelist.