Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Read online

  I was scared, going out onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House, but the experience was amazing: the story was received with a standing ovation, and we followed it with an interview (artist Eddie Campbell was the interviewer) and a poem, also with FourPlay.

  Six months later, we performed it again, with more paintings by Eddie, in Hobart, Tasmania, in front of three thousand people, in a huge shed at a festival, and again, they loved it.

  Now we had a problem. The only people who had ever seen the show were in Australia. It seemed unfair, somehow. We needed an excuse to travel, to bring the FourPlay string quartet across the world (pop-culture-literate and brilliant musicians, they are: I fell in love with their version of the Doctor Who theme before I ever knew them). Fortunately, Eddie Campbell had taken his paintings, and done many more, and then laid out the text into something halfway between an illustrated story and a graphic novel, and HarperCollins were publishing it in the U.S. and Headline publishing it in the UK.

  We went on tour, FourPlay and Eddie and me, to San Francisco, to New York, to London and to Edinburgh. We got a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

  And still I wonder how much of the story I wrote, and how much was simply waiting there for me, like the gray rocks that sit like bones on the low hills of Skye.

  My Last Landlady

  This was written for a publication of the World Horror Convention. That year, it was in Brighton. Brighton these days is a bustling, arty, go-ahead, exciting seaside metropolis. When I was a boy, though, we would go to Brighton out of season, and it was dreary and cold and murderous.

  Obviously, this story is set in that long-gone Brighton and not the current one. You have nothing to be scared of if you stay in a bed-and-breakfast there now.

  Adventure Story

  I was asked to write this story by Ira Glass for his This American Life radio show. He liked it, but his producers didn’t, so I wrote them an op-ed instead, about how “adventures are all very well in their place, but there is a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain,” and this story went on to be published in McSweeney’s Quarterly.

  I had been thinking a lot about death, and the way that when people die they take their stories with them. It’s a sort of companion piece to my novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I think, at least in that respect.

  Orange

  Jonathan Strahan is a nice man and a good editor. He lives in Perth, Western Australia. I have a bad habit of breaking his heart by writing something for an anthology he is editing and then taking it away. I always try and mend his broken heart by writing something else, though. This is one of those something elses.

  The way a story is told is as important as the story being told, although the way that the story is told is usually a little less obvious than it is here. I had a story in my head, but it wasn’t until I thought of the questionnaire format that it all fell into place. I wrote the story in airports and on the plane to Australia, where I was going to be attending the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and read it a day or so after I had landed to an audience of many people and to my pale and scary goddaughter, Hayley Campbell, whose grumblings about orange tan smears on the fridge might have inspired the story in the first place.

  A Calendar of Tales

  This was one of the oddest and most pleasant things I’ve done in the last few years.

  When I was young, I would read Harlan Ellison’s short-story collections with delight. I loved the stories, and I loved his accounts of how the stories had come to be written just as much. I learned many things from Harlan, but the thing that I took away from his introductions that made the most impact was just the idea that the way that you wrote the stories was, you did the work. You showed up, and you did it.

  And that never seemed more clear or obvious than when Harlan would explain that he had written such and such a short story in a bookshop window, or live on air on the radio, or in a similar situation. That people had suggested titles or words. He was demonstrating to the world that writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic. Somewhere, a writer was sitting down and writing. I loved the idea of trying to write in a shop window.

  But, I thought, the world had changed. You could now have a shop window that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to press their faces to the glass and watch.

  BlackBerry came to me and asked if I would be willing to do a social media project, anything I wanted, and seemed perfectly happy when I suggested that I’d like to write “A Calendar of Tales,” each story spinning off a reply to a tweet about the months of the year—questions like “Why is January dangerous?” “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen in July?” (Someone named @mendozacarla replied, “An Igloo made of books,” and I knew what my story would be.) “Who would you like to see again in December?”

  I asked the questions, got tens of thousands of replies, and chose twelve.

  I wrote the twelve stories (March was the first, December the last), then invited people to make their own art based on the stories. Five short films were made about the process, and the whole thing was blogged, tweeted, and put out into the world, for free, on the Web. It was a joy to make stories in public. Harlan Ellison isn’t a big fan of things like Twitter, but I phoned him when the project was over, and I told him it was his fault and that I hoped it would inspire someone who had been following it, as much as his bookshop window tales had inspired me.

  (My most grateful thanks to @zyblonius, @TheAstralGypsy, @MorgueHumor, @_NikkiLS_, @StarlingV, @DKSakar, @mendozacarla, @gabiottasnest, @TheGhostRegion, @elainelowe, @MeiLinMiranda, and @Geminitm for their inspirational tweets.)

  The Case of Death and Honey

  I encountered the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy, and fell in love, and never forgot Holmes or the redoubtable Dr. Watson who chronicled his detective work; Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother; or Arthur Conan Doyle, the mind behind it all. I loved the rationalism, the idea that an intelligent, observant person could take a handful of clues and build them up into a world. I loved learning who these people were, a story at a time.

  Holmes colored things. When I began to keep bees, I was always aware that I was merely following in Holmes’s footsteps. But then I would wonder why Holmes had taken up beekeeping. After all, it’s not the most labor intensive of retirement hobbies. And Sherlock Holmes was never happy unless he was working on a case: indolence and inactivity were death to him.

  I met Les Klinger at the first meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars I attended, in 2002. I liked him very much. (I liked all the people there: grown-up women and men who, when not being eminent jurists, journalists, surgeons, and wastrels, had elected to believe that somewhere it was always 1889 in 221b Baker Street, and Mrs. Hudson would soon be bringing up both the tea and an eminent client.)

  This story was written for Les and for Laurie King for their collection A Study in Sherlock. It was inspired by a jar of snow-white honey I was offered on the side of a mountain in China.

  I wrote this story over a week in a hotel room, while my wife and my youngest daughter and her friend were at the beach.

  “The Case of Death and Honey” was nominated for an Anthony Award, an Edgar Award, and a Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award. That it didn’t win any of them made me no less happy: I’d never been nominated for a crime-writing award before, probably never would again.

  The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury

  I forgot my friend. Or rather, I remembered everything about him except his name. He had died over a decade before. I remembered our phone conversations, our time together, the way he talked and gestured, the books he had written. I resolved that I would not go to the Internet and look. I would simply remember his name. I would walk around trying to remember his name, and began to be haunted by the idea that if I could not remember his name he would never have existed. Foolishness, I knew, but still . . .

  I wrote “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury” as a ninetieth-bi
rthday present for Ray Bradbury, and as a way of talking about the impact that Ray Bradbury had on me as a boy, and as an adult, and, as far as I could, about what he had done to the world. I wrote it as a love letter and as a thank-you and as a birthday present for an author who made me dream, taught me about words and what they could accomplish, and who never let me down as a reader or as a person as I grew up.

  My editor at William Morrow, Jennifer Brehl (she edited this book, and everything I’ve done for adults since Anansi Boys), went to his bedside and read the story to him. The thank-you message he sent me by video meant the world to me.

  My friend Mark Evanier told me that he met Ray Bradbury when he was a boy of eleven or twelve. When Bradbury found out that Mark wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can’t just write one book and stop. That it’s work, but the best kind of work. Mark grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.

  Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.

  I encountered Ray Bradbury’s stories as a boy. The first one I read was “Homecoming,” about a human child in a world of Addams Family–style monsters, who wanted to fit in. It was the first time anyone had ever written a story that spoke to me personally. There was a copy of The Silver Locusts (the UK title of The Martian Chronicles) knocking about my house. I read it, loved it, and bought all the Bradbury books I could from the traveling bookshop that set up once a term in my school. I learned about Poe from Bradbury. There was poetry in the short stories, and it didn’t matter that I was missing so much: what I took from the stories was enough.

  Some authors I read and loved as a boy disappointed me as I aged. Bradbury never did. His horror stories remained as chilling, his dark fantasies as darkly fantastic, his science fiction (he never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well) as much of an exploration of the sense of wonder as they had been when I was a child.

  He was a good writer, and he wrote well in many disciplines. He was one of the first science fiction writers to escape the “pulp” magazines and to be published in the “slicks.” He wrote scripts for Hollywood films. Good films were made from his novels and stories. Long before I was a writer Bradbury was one of the writers that other writers aspired to become.

  A Ray Bradbury story meant something on its own—it told you nothing of what the story would be about, but it told you about atmosphere, about language, about some sort of magic escaping into the world. Death Is a Lonely Business, his detective novel, is as much a Bradbury story as Something Wicked This Way Comes or Fahrenheit 451 or any of the horror, or science fiction, or magical realism, or realism you’ll find in the short-story collections. He was a genre on his own, and on his own terms. A young man from Waukegan, Illinois, who went to Los Angeles, educated himself in libraries, and wrote until he got good, then transcended genre and became a genre of one, often emulated, absolutely inimitable.

  I met him first when I was a young writer and he was in the UK for his seventieth-birthday celebrations, held at the Natural History Museum. We became friends in an odd, upside-down way, sitting beside each other at book signings, at events. I would be there when Ray spoke in public over the years. Sometimes I’d introduce him to the audience. I was the master of ceremonies when Ray was given his Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America: he told them about a child he had watched, teased by his friends for wanting to enter a toy shop because they said it was too young for him, and how much Ray had wanted to persuade the child to ignore his friends and play with the toys.

  He’d speak about the practicalities of a writer’s life (“You have to write!” he would tell people. “You have to write every day! I still write every day!”) and about being a child inside (he said he had a photographic memory, going back to babyhood, and perhaps he did), about joy, about love.

  He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that’s a positive thing rather than an absence of character. He was enthusiastic, and it seemed that that enthusiasm would keep him going forever. He genuinely liked people. He left the world a better place, and left better places in it: the red sands and canals of Mars, the midwestern Hallowe’ens and small towns and dark carnivals. And he kept writing.

  “Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything,” Ray said once, in an interview.

  He gave people so many reasons to love him. We did. And, so far, we have not forgotten.

  Jerusalem

  This story was commissioned by the BBC for its William Blake Week. They asked if I could write a story to be read on Radio Four, inspired by a Blake poem.

  I had recently visited Jerusalem, and wondered what it would actually take to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. And what kind of person would want to.

  I make many things up, but Jerusalem syndrome is a real thing.

  Click-Clack the Rattlebag

  I wrote this in the house of my friends Peter Nicholls and Clare Coney, in Surrey Hills, Melbourne, Australia. It was Christmas. Oddly enough, despite the sweltering temperatures, it was a white Christmas: thick, marble-sized hail fell during our Christmas dinner and blanketed the Coney-Nicholls lawn. I wrote it for a book of new monsters, edited by Kasey Lansdale, but it was first published as an audiobook by Audible in the U.S. and the UK. They gave it away for free, for Hallowe’en, and gave money to good causes for each person who downloaded it. So everyone was happy, except the people who had downloaded the story, and listened to it late at night, and then had to go around turning all the lights on.

  The house in the story is based on my friend Tori’s house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.

  An Invocation of Incuriosity

  Children are driven by a sense of injustice, and it sticks around as we age, bury it however we try. It still rankles that, almost forty years ago, when I was fifteen, I wrote a short story for my mock English O level that was graded down from an A to a C with an explanatory comment from the teacher that it “was too original. Must obviously have copied it from somewhere.” Many years later, I took my favorite idea from that tale and put it into this. I’m pretty sure that the idea was original, but it gave me pleasure to put it into a story dedicated to Jack Vance and set in the world of The Dying Earth.

  Writers live in houses other people built.

  They were giants, the men and the women who made the houses we inhabit. They started with a barren place and they built Speculative Fiction, always leaving the building unfinished so the people who came by after they were gone could put on another room, or another story. Clark Ashton Smith dug the foundations of the Dying Earth stories, and Jack Vance came along and built them high and glorious, as he made so much high and glorious, and built a world in which all science is now magic, at the very end of the world, when the sun is dim and preparing to go out.

  I discovered The Dying Earth when I was thirteen, in an anthology called Flashing Swords. The story was called “Morreion,” and it started me dreaming. I found a British paperback copy of The Dying Earth, filled with strange misprints, but the stories were there and they were as magical as “Morreion” had been. In a dark secondhand book shop where men in overcoats bought used pornography I found a copy of The Eyes of the Overworld and then tiny dusty books of short stories—“The Moon Moth” is, I felt then and feel now, the most perfectly built SF short story that anyone has ever written—and around that point Jack Vance books began to be published in the UK and suddenly all I had to do to read Jack Vance books was buy them. And I did: The Demon Princes, the Alastor trilogy, and the rest. I loved
the way he would digress, I loved the way he would imagine, and most of all I loved the way he wrote it all down: wryly, gently, amused, like a god would be amused, but never in a way that made less of what he wrote, like James Branch Cabell but with a heart as well as a brain.

  Every now and again I’ve noticed myself crafting a Vance sentence, and it always makes me happy when I do—but he’s not a writer I’d ever dare to imitate. I don’t think he’s imitable. There are few enough of the writers I loved when I was thirteen I can see myself going back to twenty years from now. Jack Vance I will reread forever.

  “An Invocation of Incuriosity” won the Locus Award for Best Short Story, which delighted me, although I considered it as much an award for Jack Vance as for my tale, and it thrilled and vindicated my inner mock-O-level-taking teenager.

  “And Weep, Like Alexander”

  It has long been a source of puzzlement to me that none of the inventions we were promised when I was a boy, the ones that were due to make our lives much more fun and interesting in the world to come, ever arrived. We got computers, and phones which do everything that computers used to do, but no flying cars, no glorious spaceships, no easy travel to other planets (as Ted Mooney put it).

  This story was written as part of a fund-raising book for the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The book, Fables from the Fountain, edited by Ian Whates, was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, itself modeled on the club stories of the early twentieth century. (Lord Dunsany’s stories of Mr. Joseph Jorkens are my favorite club stories.) I took the name Obediah Polkinghorn from one of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories, as a tribute to Clarke himself. (I met and interviewed him, back in 1985. I remember being surprised by the West Country burr in his voice.)