Theo

There have been far too many endings lately.

That trail up by the dams—a steep, winding kilometre uphill to the rocky vantage point overlooking Hayward Lake and all the way south beyond the wide Fraser River into rural America. That trail was one he particularly loved. Not for the views, since dog eyes are not made for grand vistas, but for the climb, the steady pace through the silent forest, over wet mulch and slick roots, beside fallen logs, waxy green salal, fragile trillium, ears and muzzle alert for black bear or cougar. How many times did we walk that route together? All those times.

Rain, sleet, heat, those dull-echo grey days of no weather, of no weather at all. The turned ankle times. The pissing on everything that smells of other dog times. The stone in the shoe times. The wariness of fresh, steaming bear scat times. The bug-cloud sweat-feast times. The hot, dusty berry times. The bright, shining times.

But that one time. That one time I thought I'd lost him. Turned out it wouldn't be the last, for this infuriating Houdini of dogs. And now… well, I have lost him in the end, after all. As we always do. But that one day… Here I must admit to a wilderness faux pas, a backcountry indiscretion: I would let him slip his leash. I know, I know. Admonish me, all you Sierra Club acolytes. Scold me for my sinful self-centredness. I offer nothing by way of excuse. Except that his uninhibited joy was infectious, rendered me irresponsible.

We began on the easy, flat stretch between the parking lot and the true trailhead, parallel to the road. Reaching that trailhead, beginning to climb, lost in thought, it took me a little too long to realize he was gone. I called his name. Quietly at first. Theo. A good name. A god name. The silence of the forest was an implacable judge of my negligence. I called him again. He wasn't there, I knew it. Alarmed now, I left the trail, bushwhacked for a while, but I knew he was not in this part of the woods, could sense his unpresence. I couldn't continue to climb, there was almost no chance he was ahead of me. Or, wait? Had I missed him as he passed me? Stealth was not foreign to this dog. It was possible. Indecision; we welcome it, sometimes, when we wish to abdicate. And there comes a time when we all wish to abdicate. Eventually, I called it—go back, he's behind you—so I retraced my steps; perhaps, limping behind me on the trail, he was hurt. I made it to the road, searched anxiously for blood or fur on this grey tarmac curve of a route that saw more than its share of gravel trucks and logging trucks. Nothing. I crossed and reentered the forest, heading back toward the place where I'd left the car, in a patch of sunlight, in a silent parking lot. Starting to rehearse what I was going to tell my young child about how I'd lost our dog in the woods, my shamed heart dull as a cracked bell in my numb chest, the stirrings of grief chasing mere worry away.

And then I heard it. A keening that sounded like the earth's last coyote, an abandoned, wild sound. A banshee wail. Lost. But ahead of me. I walked faster, breaking into a partial jog, hiking boots a carthorse hindrance, my backpack bobbing ungainly in my wake like an outgrowth of guilt. And I burst from the forest into the parking lot and he was there, was always there, of course he was there, you don't lose dogs in the forest, sitting beside my car and howling like a tiny rusted wolf, first seeing me and hesitantly approaching, head cocked, then ecstatically greeting my equally euphoric hands as I petted him all over his writhing body, a dance of unbridled love, two pack members reunited.

There were other moments. Always, we remember the extremes. The losing fight with a raccoon, halfway up the fence. An outraged shriek and eight stitches. Successfully seeing off a black bear, its dark hindquarters scrambling for purchase on a swaying fence. More magical escapes from the yard. A night in jail. Almost hidden, a tawny back forging trenches in one December's abundance of snow. Another losing argument with a bad tempered dog. A scar on his scalp. Walks, always walks. "Wow, he looks just like a fox!" Steadfast companion of an only child. Beloved, sweet, self-contained. Cool, in fact. Not a canine word, perhaps, but apt here.

Listen: they come into your world trusting you, curled small enough for a palm, dark almond eyes blameless and mostly devoid of all that makes being human so utterly painful, and then they leave your world with that same heartbreaking trust in those same eyes, now bedimmed yet still encompassing you. In his case, held fast on a sterile table, a hypodermic pushed into a vein in his right foreleg, an overdose of anesthetic, his bereft, inconsolable pack close by, holding him, offering their warmth and their smell, those quiet, tolerant eyes watching, watching, three or four almost-panic-breaths, two, three, four, five, then stillness forever, that once-proud and silly head brought low, now cannonball-weighty on muscles slackened to damp string by life's hasty retreat. And his small body, somehow smaller now than it ever was in life, cooling so fast it makes my own breath catch and hitch, not knowing whether to exhale or inhale, caught on the cusp of all grieving breaths ever taken in this world, ever to be taken.

He's on that trail now, somewhere in my memory or in the impossible world, my little golden friend, and he's trying to get back to that ticking car on that quiet patch of black asphalt. Maybe an owl swoops over him, or he hears the harsh cries of ravens far above in the tops of cedars, or a snake glides by in the green untidy detritus of the rainforest beside the trail and he thinks briefly of investigating. But his ears twitch and he is avid with the rawness of it all, is smelling the youth and the age of the world at once, absorbing the joyous tragedy of everything that ever mattered, as he runs, knowing he will soon see me come striding down that leafy, rocky path, my face a picture of consternation, and he will cock his head then bound like a small deer and finally stop his infernal howling when he knows for sure that love's come back, however briefly, to visit awhile once more.

Heads Up for the Slaughterhouse

So, I've mentioned it in passing, but I might as well make it a more *formal* announcement. For anyone (and I can't for the life of me think why they would) who wants to know what type of pale, awful critters make those scuttling noises down in the dim cellar of my subconscious, Richard Godwin will be interviewing me tomorrow (Saturday, September 8, 2012). Except "interview" is a wholly inadequate word for this monstrosity. Conducted on and off between March and July of this year, and running over 7,000 words, this thing felt more like an interrogation from someone who was trying to torment me by forcing me to think beyond my comfort zone than any other interview ever. Oddly enough, I don't mean that negatively. The strange mix of relentlessness and openendedness seemed to combine almost alchemically in order to extract a series of interesting (comic, bewildered, bitter, awestruck, sad, pissy, loving) responses that might well occasion some anxious concern over my mental health from some quarters, but I feel better for having stayed on this particular bucking bronco, so yeah. Okay, I'll say it: some of this felt damn near cathartic, and although my reticent side remains a little uncomfortable with its candid nature, I still think it's the best insight out there into why I write and why I write what I write and why I write about the things I write about. Uh. Anyway, look for it tomorrow.

Incidentally, his interview series with crime/horror writers he terms Chin Wag at the Slaughterhouse is well worth checking out in its entirety, with everyone from Jack Ketchum to R.J. Ellory, as well as my good friend Dan Mader, all given the "sharp, bright light in the eyes in the stark, dim room" treatment.

Drink for the Thirst to Come

I finished a book last night that I'm going to need to expound upon. A collection of short horror stories by Lawrence Santoro, it's intriguingly and even poetically titled Drink for the Thirst to Come. This is a book that jumped out at me from the endless conveyor belt of social network promotions we are subjected to at every turn, for two reasons: the aforementioned lyrical title, and a cover picture for which "creepy" is an altogether inadequate adjective. There is something about the face on that cover—suggestive of a mutant, broken Christ-figure hounded to the world's last margins—which dredges up long-forgotten nightmares and something closer to existential disquiet and an awful pity than out-and-out horror.

And for the most part, the stories themselves operate in a similar vein.

But let me rewind. For far too long, certainly since reading John Claude Smith's The Dark is Light Enough for Me, I've been looking for a collection that might scratch a certain maddening itch: it would need to be dark, very dark, but written by someone fully in control of their narrative and characters, adept in the language of unease. Outright gore is fine, even familiar tropes of the horror genre, but I want to get below the surface, take a peek at the stuff that fills me with a disturbance that won't dissipate. I suppose I've been foraging for sickening, shuddering nightmares to prove to me I'm not alone in my own. A twisted kindred impulse. So I downloaded Santoro's collection to my Kindle and left it there a while, savouring the anticipation.

Until one day, the urge to open it finally arrived.

And I began to read...

...and was hit with the most profound sense of disappointment. This wasn't the sobbing monstrosity I was expecting. For starters, the font/typeface was beyond ugly, bordering on the unreadable. And I was immediately disoriented by the opening story for which the volume is named. The tone of the narrative was like nothing I've read in a long while. Phrases seemed strange, hyphen-heavy (oh, enough, David!) and awkward: "the green-forever", "just-up corn", "down-rushing mud." Already, from this vantage point, I can see I was reacting to my own shattered expectations and allowing the admittedly awful font to influence my overall response to the words on the page.

Let me just say this: I am more than glad I persevered.

This first story takes an age to get going, coughing and rattling like an ancient jalopy before roaring into unexpected life. Okay, the font doesn't get better, but the sense of reading something truly worthwhile sure does. It is a quest story set in a post-apocalyptic world, but that description is like saying Riddley Walker's about some weird kid in a Kent of the future. And returning to those opening passages now, I see something I completely missed first time around: Santoro's writing style itself is a comet that comes closest to being captured by the orbit of a star named Bradbury than anything I've read in a long, long time. Yeah, go back and read that slightly awkward sentence again. I mean it. And because on this occasion I had been looking for a Barker or possibly even a Ligotti, I almost missed out on the equally dark treats that followed.

I don't want this post to get out of hand, so I'll resist a blow-by-blow account of each individual story. Suffice it to say, there is plenty here to creep you out, all the way down to the follicles, to turn your stomach, to genuinely frighten you enough to want the lights turned back on for real. Even the stock monsters of horrordom appear in altered form, disguised enough to terrify anew via the delayed shock of recognition. The voice is often perfect for each story. Gruff, strange, foreign, familiar. Settings and mood are never repeated one story to the next. New Orleans here. Chicago there. 1940s England elsewhere. The most common theme is one of haunting. Again, not ghosts per se, but something cold and spectral seen through dirty gauze in an infected room. A feeling we ourselves are the ghosts trying and mostly failing to engage with the world within these pages just out of reach. A world we might be better off avoiding, all the same. Speaking of which, I have encountered many an atrocity, both in fiction and in real life, sadly, but there's one story here I would seriously hesitate to recommend to anyone with even the slightest tenderness in his or her heart. I'll merely describe "Little Girl Down the Way" as one of the most harrowing horror stories I never want to read again. It is vile and yet it is brilliant. And I almost hate myself for even admitting that.

Alongside the frankly bizarre font issues throughout, let me issue one more word of warning: these stories, almost without exception, are long. They occasionally ramble and twist, taking tangents that occasionally work and that sometimes don't. But sit with them, stay with them, prop them up when they flag, let them reciprocate, and as Santoro suggests in his foreword, read them aloud. Taste the writhing sounds of life itself trying to make sense of the darkness, defining its own opposition to that negation of all things.

No doubt there's some moral here, something along the lines of the serendipitous defiance of expectations, but, whatever, I'm glad I pushed through and found myself in a very odd and eldritch dimension indeed, perhaps not the one I was expecting, but one that scratched another itch—a crawling, anxiety-ridden itch—I didn't even know I had.

Excise

Felt like sharing an old poem I submitted once to a Canadian website named Poets Against War. I am wary of poetry as I hold it in such high regard that I feel completely inadequate in my admittedly rare attempts at the form. There's a purity to it that is almost intimidating. Anyway, this one is decent, nothing more. But since I am committing more time to my blog (two or three faint and hesitant cries of "yay" drift from the peanut gallery), I need to come up with more content, so consider this an adequate placeholder, no more, no less.

Excise

It's in the rubble

dubious patterns

for those eyes becoming fluent in

the patois of woe.

It's in the drinking men

in dark bars

who never offer their backs

to the bright doors.

It's in the quick flinch

of children

the sudden narrowing stutter

at a backfiring car.

Emergence. Chaos into patterns.

Seismic events

at first merely shudder.

Recognition

begins with one blink

of a clear eye

soon to be jaundiced

as the queasy map of infection

around an untreatable wound.

It's in the blood and the bond

the heart the hearth

the fond slow burn of the kill

it's deep although

(listen, still)

we may yet have something new to learn.

The Uber Cannons of Snark

© Miramax Films, 1994Okay, I’m going to go full douchenozzle in this post. You may know me for my mildly snarky yet oddly gentle sense of humour, but enough’s enough. Time on this occasion to unleash both barrels of the Über Cannons of Snark.

No messing about, here are eight dick moves for writers, and once you’ve read them, please stop doing them. Now. And I’m turning the barrels on myself, too: I’ve been as guilty as anyone with a few of these. Well, a couple, at least. Okay, one of them.

8. Quit trying to earn your book nerd cred. Telling people you don’t own a television and that you don’t even miss it doesn’t actually make you look the erudite techno-rebel you think it does. Or the noble ascetic, either. Or whatever other worthy character your inner movie is projecting on the murky screen inside your head. No, it makes you look more like an elitist luddite and an extremist bizarropod. Guess what, folks? You can own and even occasionally watch a television and you might on occasion be entertained or learn something or catch a great Seinfeld rerun or discover how badass the honey badger really is (wait, that’s YouTube) or marvel at Lionel Messi’s close ball control or weep uncontrollably at an old classic movie… or at Mitt Romney’s awkward and obvious avoidance of any questions with the letters T, A and X in close proximity… and none of this will prevent you from also reading books. One does not exclude the other. May I repeat that? One does not exclude the other! Blaming TV for all the pop culture trash out there is like blaming the internet for porn… oh wait…. Think I broke my brain again. Give me a second…

7. Speaking of pop culture trash, bemoaning the fact Snooki has a bestselling book to her name does nothing for you other than to raise your blood pressure a few notches. It’s stupid and pointless. As, indeed, you believe the young lady herself to be. But let’s reframe it: she is an example of a young person from a generation many older folk dismiss as unmotivated and entitled. Did she sit around in various bars and clubs in Seaside Heights getting hella crunk like you assume most of her contemporaries did/do? Well, okay, sort of. But the key is, she did it on camera, even getting punched in the face for her troubles, and did it all with enough tawdry poignance that people couldn’t help but notice her. And try watching the scene where she’s so achingly (and at that point, pretty much deservedly) lonely she wanders the boardwalk barefoot, literally begging for someone to party with her, without feeling even a twinge of genuine pity in your black and empty heart. Just try it. Anyway, she bootstrapped her decidedly odd and needy defiance into something lucrative. Fair play to her. So what? Move on, that’s what.

6. In fact, stop being envious, period. Of sparkly vampires or soccer mom spanking sessions. Lamenting your own obscurity while publicly calling out examples of undeserved success is not a good look. Who gets to decide the “undeserved” part? Do you really want to end up looking like those hoary old classic rock bands in the ’70s who turned up their noses at upstarts like… the Sex Pistols? The Clash? The Ramones? Again, we don’t have to take sides, we can listen to both, capiche? Even if we’re a dinosaur (and at some point, everyone has to take his or her turn in the Dino-dome), it’s better to be Neil Young than Ted freaking Nugent, after all. And I’m not even saying that because I’m Canadian. Honest. Embrace it all and stop experiencing life in narrowcast (or something… sometimes I worry even I don’t know what I’m talking about). And when it comes to music, thanks partly to the whole iTunes revolution, we seem to have collectively gotten that message at last. Now we just need to extend it to books and realise how much of this is simply down to subjective taste and stop reinventing hierarchies that only ever succeed in pissing everyone off or, worse, intimidating new writers into quitting before they’ve ever had the chance to learn and hone their skills. Stop telling people who’s allowed to eat at the big folks’ table. Besides, the big folks’ table looks a little dull. And you can’t even put your elbows on it.

5. Oh, and the corollary to that last one: if you do begin to experience a measure of success, be gracious about it. Don’t set odd little traps for others. Don’t suddenly act like the King or Queen of I Am Bearer Of The Ultimate Secret and start rubbing your friends’ faces in it only to then turn around and imply they’re acting jealous when in fact they’re only being aghast and uncomfortable at your embarrassing hubris. No, this is bad behaviour all around, stop it. Sure, success can be down to hard work, but there’s often a measure of sheer random luck involved, right-place-right-time kind of thing. Many writers work their typing fingers to the calcium-depleted bone with relatively little success. You gonna tell them they don’t deserve it? Some of them? All of them? And even more pertinent: you cannot know whether this relative upsurge in your own fortunes will last. What is that thing they say pride comes before? You know exactly what I’m saying. Show a little humility, fool. Be kind.

4. Back in the day, writers were sticklike figures barely subsisting on the rotted cotton wadding inside an old stained recliner they dragged to their meagre garret from an alleyway before the rats could use it for nests. They were isolated and flea-bitten wrecks, drinking methylated spirits until blindness finally destroyed their only chance at literary fame and fortune. Okay, not really, them’s stereotypes, but indulge me. In place of unbearable loneliness, we now have…. Facebook. Social media. Which we’re told to use relentlessly, to connect with people like a string of special and—thanks to inactivity and the universal accessibility of Cheetos—increasingly odd-shaped snowflakes. Snowflakes with orange teeth. And we do it. We even befriend people, genuinely. It’s a social thing. We’re a social animal. The artificial divide between writer and reader is now virtually gone (sorry, pun not intended). Which is great and everything, but now we can bite back… snipe back directly at the suddenly malicious critics and readers who attack our precious babies. We can use the very tools we’re most adept in—words—to strike, like Jules Winnfield, with great vengeance and furious anger on our foes. Everywhere. On Amazon. On our personal blogs. On Facebook. Twitter. Mwahahaha, we are The Forgers of Words, hear us roar… Well, no. We really shouldn’t do that. Not even once. It will have no effect other than to convince a sizeable number of silent observers that we’re an arsey little hosebag. And, wherever you are posting or commenting on the interwebs, never forget the vast, silent bank of lurkers. Their eyes are beady and mean and they will watch you and they will judge you. It’s sheer professional suicide to act like a handicapped badger’s spleen… and besides, you know that cool “lay my vengeance upon thee” Ezekiel-schtick in Pulp Fiction? Tarantino made it the hell up. ‘Nuff said.

3. Now, with this one I don’t fully see eye to eye with many of my writer peers. I’m talking about politics and religion. And unlike others, I don’t think you should avoid these topics. In fact, they’re pretty much the motherlode for any discussion of the human condition, the sacred and the profane… which is what we as writers should be eating for breakfast. Before moving onto philosophy and existential eel porn by lunch time. So don’t avoid them. But… be tactful. If someone disagrees with you, try not to call him a rabid baboon’s esophagus. Quite honestly, the only writers I would advise to STFU on this stuff are the true bigots: the racists, the sexists, the homophobes. They just need to sit down, be quiet, watch how normal people work, and learn how utterly futile their pathetic attempts to swim against the prevailing winds are, almost as excruciatingly failworthy as my last metaphor, in fact.

2. Spam. You just knew the pink, lukewarm meat of doom was going to make an appearance, didn’t you? Look, I get it. We’re told, exhorted in fact, to promote our work across a kajillion social networks with names like Tinglr and GoodFellas and FaceSpace. So we sign up for most of them and then… we go nuts. This isn’t one can of Spam, oh no, this is a cloying, gelatinous, somehow horribly sluggish, pink slough of the stuff. For the love of all that is holy, calm down. Breathe. Okay. You’re in a vast hall, and there are small groups of people scattered around. First, you don’t stand in the middle and randomly start yelling “Guys, I’m so excited! Got a 5 Star review on Smashwords today. Squeeee.” Right? (In fact, please don’t ever say squee, period, okay? Unless you’re five and like to wear tiaras.) You certainly don’t shoulder your way into a group and say “I just sold three copies of my book on the Lithuanian version of Amazon this week!” No, you find a conversation that interests you, and you politely join in when there’s a lull. It’s really that simple. Do the stuff yo’ mama taught you. Check you don’t have spinach in your teeth. Wash behind your ears. Say please and thank you. Don’t interrupt. Don’t fart and blame it on the server. Be nice. And guess what? People will like you. After which, there may come a time when someone turns to you and asks “so what is it you do?” Bingo! The online world really is but a reflection of the real world… only with way more kitties… and lots more naughty stuff. But yeah, it’s common sense, really. Moderation. Balance. If you feel you’ve crossed the line this week, cool your jets next week.

1. I was going to talk about dodgy or questionable ethics surrounding the whole recent reviews controversy, but I think I’m going to leave that to someone who will do it far more justice in a longer post than I ever could here. Instead, I’ll end somewhat anticlimactically on a subject that will make most of you sigh and look at your watch and say “oh, is that the time?” Namely… editing. Yes, go ahead, scurry away, you horrible little wordworm, but you know what’s coming, don’t you? I can still see you, so I’mma shout at your retreating backs: “HIRE AN EDITOR!” Now, this final item is in no way self-serving (cough, Be Write There, hack), but it cannot and should not be avoided. If money’s tight, go the beta reader route… something. Can you imagine if God himself had thought “You know, in the time it’ll take me to find an editor, I could have this thing up and running and put through Coker’s meatgrinder twice over, and besides, I think I’m a pretty good writer, possibly even the best. Nah, forget it, who’ll even know”? You might have gotten something like this:

1. At the start, God made up heaven and earth.

2. And teh earth was without from, and void; and drakness was up all over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of teh waters.

3. And God says, Let their be light: and thurr was light.

4. And God seen the light, that it was a’ight: and God partitioned the light from teh darkness.

5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he thought about for a bit and eventually decided to call Night.

6. And the evening and the mourning were the 1st day.

Wait, the evening was the first day? Um… help? Someone? Where’d that editor go?