As for the aforementioned attic scene, I had to read Jayne Eyre for a lit class in college, and some rather extreme commentary on the book suggested that Rochester hid his wife in the attic because she had syphilis. I thought that was something more befitting my own work when I chanced upon a picture of tertiary syphilis online one day.
I did end up winning the tournament, but Delirium temporarily went on hiatus shortly after and my collection was one of the casualties.
Final Indications—For a time, there were plans to do a Horrornet anthology with contributions by some of the various regulars. Brian Keene was going to be the editor. “Final Indications” was my entry. It never came to pass, unfortunately. I was pleased when excavating it to discover I still liked it, since there was a time when I considered it my best short story. I’ve always said “extreme ideas” were as interesting to me as extreme fiction in general, which is why I always liked the cosmic horror of Lovecraft. This story probably shows a lot more influence in the way of Palahniuk and Ballard, though. When I was a kid, I used to think 2000 was going to be the end of it all. For some reason, I thought this was comforting. I had no such illusions when the time actually came. At 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, I was watching Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox yet again, not expecting anything but a really bad time for Giovanni Lombardo Radice. The Y2K scare provided some interesting “human interest” stories in 1999, though, including one guy who I believe sold a lot of possessions to help fund a self-described “Mad Max” car for his family to have the advantage when it was time to pillage and plunder in the new dark age. At some point, I got to thinking about what someone who really believed in Armageddon would do when it didn’t happen . . . and what if it happened and we didn’t even know it.
This collection gave me the chance to go back and expand some of the ideas in these stories. In some cases they are a little longer than in their original (or intended) publication, while others are almost half again as long. A lot of names have been changed because I had a bad habit of using the same names a lot of times, and it was painfully obvious when the stories were all put together.
I hope to be back soon with other unseemly concepts, “bad ideas” in the grand Travis Bickle tradition. In my bios from publications, I used to tell readers to email me with the subject line “ARE YOU MORBID?” I’m still a big Celtic Frost fan (finally got to see them on the Monotheist tour), so you may do that at areyoustillmorbid@gmail.com. About 8 years since writing the oldest story here, the answer would still seem to be . . . yes.
RYAN HARDING is the co-author of the Partners in Chyme chapbook with Edward Lee. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies In Laymon’s Terms and Excitable Boys and the chapbooks A Darker Dawning and A Darker Dawning 2: Reign in Black. Right now, he is probably either watching a film involving strange camera angles and a black-gloved killer or thinking about watching one.