Everywhere and Nowhere
I have always loved essays by authors that illuminate the origins behind their short stories. Since Dark Black was released, people have been messaging me on social media, inquiring about the stories and the inspiration behind them. The short answer? Everywhere and nowhere.
When I speak at high schools, libraries, colleges and before writer’s groups, stories are seriously everywhere. Ray Bradbury used to tell me frequently that you need to have your “antennae up” to receive a story idea. Story prompts might hide in a newspaper article, or in the image of a silhouette standing in an illuminated window at night. Story ideas come from travel, and dreams, and from art. I get ideas from music and movies and visual art all the time. Stories come from our memories and from our fears. If your antennae are receptive, if you are curious and you have your eyes open to the world, you see that stories are absolutely everywhere. Bradbury, of course, famously used to come up with story ideas by simply making lists of nouns and seeing what each word prompted within him.
But stories also come from nowhere. Stories are mystical like that. Like a rabbit appearing from a top hat, words and sentences and punctuation construct into an idea, articulating emotions, and creating a sort of moving painting in the minds of readers. In this way, stories appear from the ether, from the realm of legerdemain. They come from nowhere and, when they work, stay with us forever.
The twenty stories in Dark Black come from everywhere and nowhere. As time goes on, I will add more stories and the inspiration behind them. So here goes…
“Little Spells”
“Little Spells” story illustration by Dan Grzeca
I have always had great admiration for Truman Capote’s 1965 nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood. The writing is sublime. The evocation of small-town Kansas circa 1959 is magnificent. But I have always been conflicted about the book as well. Here we are, reading about the murder of a real-life family—the Clutters. These were very real people. Capote didn’t know them. Yet he road into Holcomb, Kansas and made them famous through writing about their violent and tragic deaths. Later, the 1967 neo-noir cinematic adaptation was, morbidly, made in the same house where the crimes occurred, with the same furniture. Writing the book enriched Capote, and made him world famous, but it also destroyed him. He never finished another book, becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol.
I found it fascinating that the house from the book was still standing, little changed in over 60 years. Only a few families had lived in it over the decades. I then began to wonder, what would happen if the Clutter house made infamous in Capote’s In Cold Blood became available on a vacation home rental site like “Air BnB?” I wrote this story to find out. It wasn’t until I was finished with a draft that I realized that I was writing about the very real contemporary trend of “murder tourism.” I was also, in a meta-fictional fashion, continuing the exploitation of innocence, and this became the theme of the story.
“The Circumference of the Glare on the Patio”
In the fall of 2018 I gave the Dark Black manuscript to my literary agent. She suggested it needed two more stories. And I’m glad she did. “The Circumference of the Glare on the Patio” was one of the last stories I wrote before the book was published. It is obviously a “torn from the headlines” idea, inspired by the tragic epidemic of school shootings we see in the United States. I was thinking about this and wondered, what if a student had some sort of subtle superhuman abilities? Could even that stop a man with an AR-15? So often stories revolve around answering a question. We write stories and read stories to find the answers. I had this question and wrote the story quickly. The last line of the story is a reference to the great jazz musician, John Coltrane who is mentioned earlier in the tale.
One astute reader noticed that the same fictional town—Sterling Springs—comes up frequently in Dark Black. All these stories are in same world. At least in my mind. The protagonist in “Circumference of the Glare on the Patio” attends the same community college as the main character in the story, “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor.”
“Guided by Demons”
I spent years as a staff writer for magazines and alternative arts and culture newspapers before I began writing books. With some of the tales in Dark Black, I wanted to experiment with narrative forms, such as the epistolary story or the contemporary fairy tale, for example. This made me wonder if I could write a fictional short story, but do it disguised as a music magazine feature story, something that might run in Rolling Stone. Music is an absolutely central part of my life. This is why you see so many musical references throughout Dark Black. I listen to music when I create. The poetry of the lyrics, combined with the music itself, speaks to my soul in ways few other art forms can. One of many genres I love is punk. I love the simplicity, the ragged pop melodies, the aggressiveness as a stress reliever, and, most of all, the anti-establishment ethos. With this in mind, I decided to write a magazine profile of a totally fictional punk rock musician. This got me to thinking, what if someone like Billie Joe from Green Day, wrote a punk album with a ghost? But not just any ghost. The spirit of a dead musical legend. Once I started writing this story, the magazine writer in my DNA took over and I wrote this story rather quickly. And, yes, the death of the character “Tommy Neptune” was very much inspired by the tragic passing of singer Scott Weiland in a parking lot outside of the Mall America.
Creepy coda: the week I finished this story I was with my family staying at a Radisson Blu hotel and looked out the window. Down below, was a parking lot. I thought it looked familiar, somehow. It was then I realized that I was looking at, 18 floors below, the very spot where Scott Weiland had OD’d in his tour bus. Weird.
“Conjuring Danny Squires”
I wrote this one in 2012. It’s one of the earlier short stories included in the book. I wrote the first paragraph one sunny morning, seated on a patio of a Westwood coffee shop before Ray Bradbury’s funeral. That was a very sad day, obviously, and I wanted to honor Ray by writing something, and being creative. He would have wanted that.
Growing up, my best friend was a boy named Danny Squires. He taught me that it was okay to still play with toys when I was 11, even when other kids made fun of me. He taught me about rock and roll—Queen and Aerosmith and KISS. He showed me how much he loved his dog, and it changed the way I started to love my own dogs in turn—as dear friends, as our canine children. Danny was almost mystical in how wise and creative he was. And he was one of the best friends I ever had. I moved away from Danny when I was 13, but we stayed in touch. He would come visit in the summer and stay with me and my family for months. We would spend days writing our first very primitive (and not very good) books. But this is how you learn. By doing. His Mom was a single parent and his long summer visits helped her, too.
Danny died, tragically, in a car accident, when he was 24. And I will love him forever.
This story is about the long and impossible path to accepting death. There is a lot of this arching over Dark Black. This book is my way of looking at grief. The characters in this story are entirely fictional, but the mood and the themes are most certainly not. This story was first published in the 2013 Chicago Reader annual fiction issue, a tremendous honor.
I dedicate this story to the memory of the great Danny Squires.
“Monsters and Angels”
I once asked Ray Bradbury why he never wrote a western. After all, he worked in just about every other genre. Ray told me had written a western story that he simply never finished. He wrote it for film director John Huston, who he worked with when he wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film Moby Dick. The short story Bradbury started, he told me, was about a “ghost horse.” Early in his career, Bradbury was deeply influenced by the ruggedness of Steinbeck and Hemingway stories, and I can only imagine this story would have been a bit in that tradition, imbued with that singular dusting of Bradburian fantasy.
As I was assembling Dark Black, I realized I wanted to write my own supernatural western. The western genre—with the sweeping landscapes, the isolation, and the utter loneliness—have always captivated me. I am particularly drawn to westerns where characters face regret, remorse, and who seek redemption.
With all of this in mind, I wrote “Monsters and Angels,” about a pastor in Cincinnati who, in a moment of confused rage, kills a man and now a fugitive running form the law, flees to the desolate plains of Nebraska to live in isolation, to contend with his sins. On a winter night, he encounters something supernatural. Dirvishes of snow that appear alive, shifting, sentient. Are they there to pass judgement upon him?
“All The Summer Before Us”
“All the Summer Before Us” illustration from Dark Black by Dan Grzeca. The art for this story, and the illustration for “Song of the Cicada,” are probably my personal favorites from the book.
I originally wrote this in 2013 as a short, lyric essay for the summer issue of the Chicago alternative arts and culture weekly, Newcity. I learned many things from Ray Bradbury over the years and one thing I always found cool was that his early short story “The Night” was really a nonfiction essay that he snuck into his classic 1957 novel, Dandelion Wine. “That story is 100 percent true,” he told me.
“All the Summer Before Us” is also 100 percent true. Once I made the decision to bookend Dark Black with two pieces of flash fiction that represented beginnings and endings in life, I made a few minor changes to the original essay and turned it into a short work of flash fiction. But that concrete tower is very real. The conversations on top were too. As far as I know, that old tower we used to climb is still out there in the country waiting for a new generation of dreamers to scale its ladder to the stars.
“The Girl in the Funeral Parlor”
Many of you are familiar with this story. It appeared in my book Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (WilliamMorrow, 2012). The book won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for “Superior Achievement in an Anthology.”
Artwork for “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor,” from the Spanish edition of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Barb Hernandez (Kelonia Editorial)
In the book, all the writers penned a short essay about the origins of their contribution. Here is what I wrote:
When I was nineteen, I delivered flowers in a far-west suburb of Chicago where the strip-malls ended and the farmland began. One crisp Saturday morning I set an arrangement up in a funeral home before the services. I was all alone, just me and the deceased resting in a plush, open casket. I glanced at the body that day, and the image had been branded in my mind ever since. Lying in the casket was a young mother holding her baby. I was shocked. I left and climbed in my delivery truck and started to cry. That mother and child have haunted me ever since.
It was this memory that caused me to write “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor.” But I didn’t want to just retell my experience. I wanted to look at my memory through the prism of fiction, as Ray Bradbury regularly did in such stories as “The Lake,” “The Crowd,” “Banshee” and so many others. I wanted my story to take on a life of its own, as good stories so often do. It was at this point that the concept came to —what if you met the love of your life and it was too late? What if that true love was dead?
The story almost wrote itself form that moment forward.
When Shadow Show was made into an audio book, actor James Urbaniak was enlisted to read my story. This man played Robert Crumb in 2003’s American Splendor! No surprise, he did an absolutely remarkable job. The audio version of Shadow Show featured, along with James Urbaniak, the great George Takai, Neil Gaiman, F. Murray Abraham, among many others. It is a remarkable production, with the Foreword read by Mort Castle and me. The audio book was nominated for an Audie Award, the Oscars of audio books.
As an offering for those of you reading this essay and visiting this site, I present the audio version of my story right here. The amazing actor James Urbaniak reading my 2012 story, “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor”.
“Song of the Cicada”
This is one my favorite stories in Dark Black. I love jazz and I have always wanted to write a jazz story. In 2013, I took my family, my wife and three daughters, on a road trip to Colorado. We were joined by my father. On our way west, we drove through Iowa where my Dad grew up. He told us about an old ballroom along the Lincoln Highway where all the greats once played, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, among many others. Today, that ballroom is a bowling alley, but as I started researching its history, I discovered that they occasionally carried live, coast-to-coast radio broadcasts of the concerts at the venue. This was all it took for me to imagine a renowned jazz trumpeter and noted composer whose career is in decline. The story takes place on a sweltering summer night in the early 1950s at the old Iowa ballroom and the show is going to be broadcast across the nation. This is his big chance to prove, even as jazz is getting ready to be eclipsed in popularity by the new genre of rock and roll, that he still has it. That his career still has relevance and meaning. But then his reliable trumpet is stolen. This is the instrument he has played throughout his career, given to him by his father in Harlem in the 1920s.
I wanted to write a sort of fantasy story that had no elements of the actual fantastic. A story that looked at the magic in our own reality, the wonder that resides in every day, if you just look for it.
