Sharing Needles—This was the last of the stories, written in 2003. I was invited to submit to an anthology called Family Plots, where each story was to involve family members committing a murder. I’ve been a true crime aficionado since high school, and this seemed like a good opportunity to explore that fascination. The challenge was to set up a story where most of the internalizing came from journal entries and the details emerged through the dialogue. Not exactly “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” as twist endings go, but I still like it. As I recall, there were going to be 30+ contributors for Family Plots and it probably would have been a logistical nightmare to get signatures from everyone for a publisher based in Australia, but the publisher folded and the project followed.
Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in Five Acts—The World Horror Convention in 2000 was held in Denver, and I wanted to show up with something even more deranged. The funny thing is that it wasn’t originally going to be a sequel to “Damaged Goods.” I forgot about this until my friend forwarded me an old email, but I was using the same concept with different characters and a different tone. The problem was that I had to be cognizant of a sensible time limit on reading, and short of using an excerpt out of context I didn’t see how it was going to happen—it was taking too long to set up. The easy solution was to use Von and Greg again. There was a very different atmosphere to the Gross Out this time, though, and by the time I read (I went last), the collective interest was all but bled dry. I took 2nd to Mark McLaughlin, a far more animated reader. The story did impress Kelly Laymon, though, who wanted to put together an anthology to use “Genital Grinder” as the closer. An amusing irony, because I remember having an unemployment claim at the time and being denied a shot at benefits for the week because the temp agency didn’t deem the trip integral to my career. My college graduation would have been that weekend, but it wasn’t a choice to me; I was going to read “Genital Grinder.” This version of the story has been altered significantly and expanded by a few thousand words, once more for a new continuity and to embellish details I glossed over to have a more presentable story for a reading limit.
An additional fun fact to this is that Richard Laymon was once again a judge at WHC 2000, and asked me to mail a copy of the story to him. I was happy enough to do that with nothing expected in return—“Richard Laymon asked me to send him my story!” was reward enough—but an “equal trade” for him was to send me a copy of The Travelling Vampire Show—hardcover edition. So not to have gone to WHC 2000, opting instead to do menial clerical tasks for a business that probably wouldn’t have told me my time was up there until the very last day (just to make sure I didn’t do a half-assed job at zero hour or, you know, actually contact my temp agency about finding me a new place to land immediately afterwards instead of having to wait for a new gig with no money coming in, which I’ve found is SOP for pretty much every single business that ever hired a temp) and go to a negligible graduation ceremony . . . I may as well never have written the story at all. I am pretty sure its appearance in Kelly Laymon’s anthology for Freak Press is why this book is happening in the first place.
Laymon’s note in the book—“May all your travels lead to good things.”
See? Sometimes there’s more to a story about a snuff movie than people being indiscriminately snuffed. Now, no one tell Peter Straub about the Ghost Story homage, okay?
Development—The story that was intended for In Laymon’s Terms. The deadline was running out on me (I actually still have the email I sent to Steve Gerlach asking that I not be disqualified for submitting because I didn’t factor in the time difference in Australia), so I think I basically sat down and wrote all or the bulk of this in 10-12 hours on the last day left. This came before “Sharing Needles,” and I think I was a bit obsessed with the “twist” possibilities from stories which used journals or dictations as a device. I had caught up to Island not long before this, and it was undoubtedly the biggest influence. Well, that and a chance remark from a friend with a job developing film about the kind of snapshots he was seeing on a daily basis. This was before the digital camera age really took over, and these days Carl would probably do his thing with a cell phone (if he could part with the money for one), so that’s why I specifically tagged the journal entries with a year in this version. The irony of the marathon writing day needed to accomplish “Development” is that In Laymon’s Terms would not actually be published for the better part of 10 years, so there was a time capsule sensibility to it when I finally got to read ILT in summer of 2011.
Emissary—The oldest of these stories, written sometime in the late 90s. I watched Faces of Death IV at a fairly impressionable age . . . impressionable enough to believe what I had seen was the real deal, no doubt about it. Years later I discovered otherwise, but those initial impressions lingered and are pretty much echoed by Gabriel in the story. Since I was determined to create stories out of the most extreme things I knew at the time, shockumentaries proved obvious fodder. I had a thing at the time for underdog characters being messengers of a greater calling, probably a byproduct of the Jaffe in Barker’s The Great and Secret Show, a beginning that has always stayed with me. Of course, who can say Gabriel actually was or wasn’t such a person? I’m not even sure.
Genital Grinder II: Dis-Membered—I don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t have reassembled this story. To me, this was the ultimo Von and Greg adventure. Each section was written for a different bracket of an online gross-out tournament hosted by Delirium, grand prize being the publication of the winner’s own short story collection and various Delirium titles for the ol’ bookshelf. I had a few highlights mapped out in advance, but mostly it was written on the fly as needed for each new round. For reasons still unknown to me, I didn’t save the story (but at least I still have that all important email to Steve Gerlach). I thought I had it stored on an email account, but no such luck, at least for all of it. I had parts 3 and 4. The computer I originally wrote it on was long gone, and it wasn’t on any of the disks I had. I asked my friend Darrin if he still had it, because I had emailed him the installments before they went to the tournament. With help from his father, they found part 1 in addition to the aforementioned original Von and Gregless beginning to “Genital Grinder.” Bob Strauss did the proofreading for the Delirium tournament, so I hit him up on the remote chance he might still have part 2 so many years later. He still had a hard copy, thankfully, and emailed me the scans of it. Now what would have been so hard about rewriting part 2 if he couldn’t have provided it, you might wonder. Because apart from the initial dick robbery set-up and woman in the attic, I didn’t remember very much of the story at all. It seems hard to believe that someone could forget reading some of these depravities, much less actually coming up with them in the first place, but that’s what happened. I didn’t remember there was a Slut Necro Lambda, and definitely not what exactly that might be.