Chad Holley was born and raised in Mississippi and received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1999. His stories have begun to appear in such places as the Chattahoochee Review and the Greensboro Review. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of stories.
• In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor said something to the effect that too often the stories she fussed over least seemed to be the ones folks liked the most. I want to say that’s been true of “The Island in the River,” but then maybe it’s been long enough now that I’ve just forgotten the fussing. There is always fussing. The initial ingredients for this story were a terrible dream, a recent hunting trip, and the crackling vinyl soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Ex-police officer, ex-army tank gunner, and ex-auto parts salesman, Edward Lee is the author of more than a dozen novels, most recently the police procedural Dahmer’s Not Dead (with Elizabeth Steffen), and the conspiracy thriller The Stickmen. Lee has also sold over sixty short stories in the horror and suspense field, plus a number of comic scripts. Currently he lives in Seattle, where he pursues a peculiar hobby: collecting crab shells.
• “ICU” actually went through several phases of revision over the past few years. I wanted to write something hard, fast, and dark, with a payoff ending, but something that also probed fairly deeply into the psyche of a sophisticated modern sociopath. I wanted the trimmings to be reaclass="underline" hence, via a stack of textbooks and some law enforcement journals, I did quite a bit of research involving the technical mechanics of child pornography. its statistics, its distribution, etc. I reworked the piece a number of times, avoiding telling the story from the antagonist’s point of view, which seemed too dark, but then I just said to hell with it and did it. Lastly, I tweaked the ending at the suggestion of editor Al Sarrantonio and was thrilled to have the piece published in Avon’s 999.
Dennis Lehane considers himself a short story writer who somehow fell into writing novels. He has written five crime novels, including Gone, Baby, Gone and Prayers for Rain, with the Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro as the lead characters. His next novel, Mystic River, is his first novel not of that series. He lives in Boston with his wife, Sheila, and their two bulldogs, Marlon and Stella.
• I went to college in Florida, and usually I’d drive to or from Boston at the beginning and end of the school year. Sometimes I’d take I-95, and other times I’d spend four or five days driving the back roads through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Delaware. For some reason, every time I passed through the Carolinas, the roads were littered with what seemed like a prodigious number of dog corpses. I’ve never discovered any logical reasons for this, but just the same, time and time again. I’d drive through the Carolinas and see several dead dogs. It stuck in my head, and when I was in graduate school I wrote an early draft of “Running Out of Dog” that was solely about a guy who worries that his best friend has become one of those men who may one day walk into a place of business with a loaded rifle and kill everyone he sees. Five years later, I dusted the story off and decided to open it up. I added several characters (as well as twenty-five manuscript pages), changed the time in which the story was set, and created a far more ambiguous ending. What stayed the same was the basic idea — a guy who shoots dogs for a living and gets an unhealthy taste for it — and the tide. Like all my stories, I’m not sure how I feel about it, but it’s my wife’s favorite. My dogs, however, hate it.
A native of Houston, Texas, Thomas H. McNeely has recently received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the J. Frank Dobie Memorial Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sheep” is his first published work of fiction. He teaches at the Grub Street Writers’ Workshops and Emerson College in Boston, where he is currently at work on a collection of linked stories.
• The idea for “Sheep” came to me while I was working for a nonprofit law firm in Texas that defended death row cases. At the time, I spent many hours looking at crime scene photos and many hours with the men who committed those crimes. I was struck by my inability to connect what I saw in those pictures with the men I came to know. That moment, and the comparisons it suggested to me about the criminal justice system’s inability to consider how the men they sought to execute came to be who they were, formed the kernel of the story.
All of my models for Lloyd, unfortunately, are dead. The story is a tribute to their courage, and the courage of the people who defended them. Many thanks also to James Carroll and Pamela Painter.
Martha Moffett was born at the end of a dirt road in St. Clair County, Alabama, was a student of Hudson Strode’s at the University of Alabama, then worked in publishing in New York City (GQ the American Heritage Dictionary, Ladies’ Home Journal). She wrote her first novel on the subway on the way to work and raised three daughters. She currently lives in Florida, where she recently won a state fellowship and grant for a play. She remembers with gratitude a fellowship at Yaddo, where her lunch was left on the front porch so that she could work all day.
• I’ve always liked to read scary, suspenseful stories, but this is the first story I’ve written that scared me. I think it works because the reader knows what a bad type Nick is, and feels anxiety for Storey, who doesn’t have a clue.
Several readers have commented on the difficulty of writing from a male viewpoint, but there was no difficulty. I’ve never seen why there should be. Don’t we all think about each other, study each other, pretend to be each other, remember all the words spoken in bed? Writing from a male viewpoint is an interesting undertaking.
Patently squeamish when it comes to reading about himself in the third person because of its obituary-like overtones, Josh Pryor lives outside Los Angeles, where he is a part-time professor of composition at El Camino College. He has published several pieces of short fiction in both national and regional magazines and is currently at work on a collection of stories and his second novel, The IT Conspiracy. He can be reached at joshuapryor@yahoo. com.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “mystery writer” per se. My fiction, however, seems to have a mind of its own, often wedding characters to circumstance in suspenseful, typically macabre twists of fate. Usually I’ll start out with the best of intentions, but when I sit down to write, something comes over me, and had things have a way of happening to those unfortunate souls spawned from my imagination.
“Wrong Numbers” was inspired by a friend who actually worked in human resources at Pac Bell. My initial intent was to write a story about a new hire gone wrong. At the time, not even I realized that Karloff was a budding psychopath and how terribly wrongly events would unfold.
Shel Silverstein was born in Chicago in 1930 and is best known for such children’s books as The Giving Tree, which sold more than five million copies, and A Light in the Attic, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 182 weeks. One of the most versatile and successful artists of our time, he regularly published cartoons and illustrations in Playboy, and he wrote the words and music for many popular entertainers, including Lynn Anderson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dr. Hook, the Brothers Four, and Johnny Cash, including Cash’s famous “A Boy Named Sue.” The kind and gentle man who brought so much delight to so many millions of children of all ages died on May 10, 1999.