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The Realms Of Nightmare

Some years ago I wrote a novel-length story called Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts, but it was very different than the story collection that I eventually published under that title. I published it on-line, on a site called Steamit, which at the time was popular with many of my on-line friends. (If you are interested in reading it, it’s here.) EDIT: This is the link to all the chapters:

I judge that story an ambitious failure. Sometimes you push yourself in too many uncomfortable directions at once, and it just doesn’t work.

The main influences were Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo In Slumberland (and the animated film based on it by Masami Hata and William Hurtz), Rodger Zelazny’s Nine Princes In Amber, Neal Gaimen’s Sandman, and Alan Moore’s Marvelman (aka Miracleman).

Yeah, it was kind of a mess. The basic storyline was that the main character Samhain Jackknife (called “Sam” by his friends as an homage to Lord Of Light) was a nightmare–a literal demonic creature who was the son of a Lord of Nightmare and a Goddess of Plague–who had been hidden in human form on an analog of Earth called The Midworld. He had grown up in two worlds, as an ordinary boy from a well-to-do family during the day, and a Prince of Nightmare during the night.

He was born to be a plaguebringer and destined to cause a disease that would kill off most of the human race, but there was a loophole in his curse. Any woman her married would, in time, give birth to the plague, but he could have ordinary sexual relations with women–as long as they were married to an ordinary human man.

The story itself gets complicated and tied up with some thinly veiled barbs at the polyamorous lifestyle. It suffers greatly from trying too hard to write a Zelazny-style hero, the indolent and ironic immortal who tries to escape the squabbles of gods and demons to live as a mortal.

The plot involves Sam helping a swinger couple that he used to be intimate with to find the wife’s current lover, a young woman artist who had been an outlaw magic user in her youth. I tried to do a lot of Literary New Wave things in the story–I avoided naming the city for as long as I could, just calling it The City, and put in a lot of oddball homages that really had no place in the story.

But the one thing that I managed to salvage from the work was the Realms Of Nightmare and the Lords thereof.

I wanted to codify them as archetypes of Nightmares and spent a lot of time working on the list until I had nine that I felt comfortable with:

Wild Beasts: The Grimm, lord of Nivose

Darkness: Nox, master of Brumaire

The Sea: Chuzz, lady of Pluviose

Fire: Agni, lady of Thermidor

Sickness/Disability: Fellmonger, lord of Messidor

Desire: Heget, lady of Verdemaire

Insects/Vermin: Chimiculeon, lord of Ventose

Machinery: XOR, master of Ferose

Chaos: Mistigris, master of Bascose

The names of the Realms (except for Ferose, which I invented) are months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, just because I’ve always thought the names were kind of cool.

The realms themselves have changed quite a bit from my original concepts–Nivose, for example, was originally peopled only by talking beasts, which made the inhabitants obligate cannibals.

And they have become “realer”–I’ve tried to make less dreamlike and more like alternate worlds that function by different rules, but are logical and internally consistent.

The first non-Sam Jackknife story I wrote set in The City (which by then had a name, Dracoheim, after the dragon who is the Lord Mayor) was “An Interrupted Scandal”, which appeared first in Cirsova magazine, Issue 10, Winter 2018 and was later reprinted in my collection Dark Fantasies.

Shortly after that I saw a call for stories involving magic shops, and I came up with “Grand Theft Nightmare” and Erik Rugar was born.

This gave rise, in time, to the second (and far superior) iteration of Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts. In addition to the seven stories in that volume I have three other Rugar stories–“That Summer’s Evening Long Ago” in StoryHack, Issue 7, “The Forests Of The Night” in Sidearm & Sorcery Vol 1, and “Better Off Dead” in my collection Small Worlds.

Then came a call for stories set in a magical school. For a while I’d been toying with the idea of a blue collar magic school, a trade school rather than a prestigious Academy for Wizards. That’s how I came up with Magus Leonid Vetch, retired wizard who now teaches the technical workers for Dracoheim’s magical technologies.

I wrote “Lab Day” for Fantastic Schools Volume 2, then “The Last Night Of Summer” for Fantastic Schools Hols, and my story “Materials Science” will be in the upcoming Fantastic Schools Staff anthology.

I am currently working on a few more Magus Vetch stories with the intention of making a collection of connected stories in the same spirit of Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts (the Rugar version).

This character is allowing me to drift farther afield from Dracoheim–Agent Rugar is kind of stuck in the city, but Magus Vetch can do more travelling.

So, I guess the moral of this story is that writing is never really wasted. Elements of even a bad story can often be scavenged to go into a good one.

Strange Blades: Blade vs. Ghost Rider

Dominique Barrett, aka King Vader, is an LA based filmmaker with an extraordinary degree of natural talent. I have been following his career with a great deal of enjoyment. He started with short films, parodies of existing IPs and comic subjects primarily. I was drawn to his work because he has nigh-flawless sense of timing and an excellent visual vocabulary. He speaks in images.

His latest feature length (58 min) project is an homage to Comic Book films called Strange Blades: Blade Vs. Ghost Rider and is available in its entirety on YouTube. As an aside, I don’t know if he is using the copywritten characters with permission or not. I don’t really care–he’s making better Marvel movies than Marvel is.

The story is fairly straightforward, as suits the genre. Blade, the half-vampire who hunts vampires, is working on eliminating a nest of bloodsuckers. The film opens with him questioning a captured vampire for information. The interrogation takes place in a garage, and at the end of it Blade opens the rollup door, allowing the sunlight to pour in and incinerate the vampire.

It’s the kind of scene that Barrett excels at, mixing practical effects with intimate camera work, and it has a comic book feel–I could see it as series of panels.

From there the story moves quickly to a confrontation at the vampire’s club in a scene that uses ambient music brilliantly. Soon, though, Blade encounters a threat outside of his area of competence, a strange figure with a flaming skull for a head who is able to take Blade’s strongest attacks without flinching.

The film is well plotted, revolving around Blade’s need to discover who this strange new enemy is, why he is attacking him, and how to defeat him. Other characters from the comics are introduced as sources of information, but the film keeps its tight focus on Blade. The ending is satisfying, featuring a final battle which requires the main character to both out-fight and out-think his nemesis.

As with all Barrett’s films, the visuals are a delight for the eyes. His special effects, both practical and digital, are seamless, enhancing the story rather than distracting from it.

The script is the weakest element. In this reviewer’s opinion it draws too much from mainstream comic book movies. Much of the dialogue is exposition, and the verbal tone shifts jarringly from drama to humor. I’d say it’s as good as recent Marvel films, but that is a very low bar. Frankly, I think Barrett’s visuals deserve better.

Script issues aside, as with his previous feature, Don’t Disrespect Halloween Part 5, I would have been satisfied if I had paid to see Strange Blades in a theater. The film made its premier on the big screen, in fact, at DreamCon in Austin, TX.

I am looking forward to more great films from Barrett, and I expect to see his work at my local multiplex before much longer.

“Ozarks Hellbenders” First session

Tonight I ran a game for the first time in… dunno. 20 years, maybe? I’m using 1st Edition Gamma World rules, set in the Kansas City, MO area a few hundred years after an atomic war.

The setting is designed to be in the same world as The Mixed GM’s Long Florida campaign with an eye to eventual crossovers.

Since the lore of Long Florida involves a desolate and nigh-impassable wasteland north of the setting, we figure that my campaign is taking place north of that wasteland.

Travel from one game setting to the other, then would involve extraordinary measures of some kind, teleportation, long distance flight, or just being badass enough to take on the mutant cyborg dinosaur liches that infest the intervening regions.

In any event, we’ve spent some time making up characters due to multiple sessions being cancelled for various different work and home life related reasons.

The current crop of PCs.

Bort The Two Brained: Human mutant with Poor Duel Brain, Precognition, Hostility Field, and Force Field. I decided that he has two states of consciousness, one of which has the precog ability, and the other that can project a sonic field that creates a barrier that protects him, but also gives anyone in the area a splitting headache that makes them want to kill him to shut up that horrible noise.

Big Melvyn: Human mutant, 15 feet tall, with telepathic flight and heightened metabolism. Again, I linked the negative mutation with the positive one, so that flying makes him really hungry.

Violet: Mutant Animal. A giant cottonmouth viper with Heightened Intelligence, Extra Body Parts (cartilaginous arms), Increased Strength and Heightened Precision. Major combat monster.

Dedrick: Pure Strain Human. Rolled a high charisma, plus the PSH bonus. He’s just this guy–everybody likes him.

The PCs are adventuring to collect ancient artifacts that they can sell to the mysterious Tech Traders who travel from town to town buying relics of the past. For the initial game, I planned an expedition to the mysterious Independence Mall.

It was a three day journey (Bort and Dedrick have large riding dogs, the other PCs are on foot and slithering). The first night they heard something big moving through the woods and wisely elected to lay low and let it go past.

Then, along the way they encountered a group of Armadillo Men. Dedrick was able to convince them that they were just passing through and meant no harm, so after being warned not to leave the highway, the Armadillo men let them go.

In the Mall itself Violet slithered in through a hole in the wall and reconnoitered, then the rest of the party came in through one of the main entrances. They saw a number of humanoid corpses hung up as a warning, but no evidence of who or what had put them there. They quickly went through the Mall and filled their saddlebags and pockets with metal things from a store that seemed to be full of knives and other kitchen items.

They left the Mall before sunset (I may have telegraphed a bit that things would get rough after dark by how I kept telling them the position of the sun and how much time they had left before it set) and are currently headed back to their village.

Now, they simply have to get past the Armadillo Men again, this time with some obvious loot that might change the sort of reception they will get. A cut of their goods in exchange for safe passage could be offered–we’ll see how they respond.

All in all, I think it went okay. We did it all through a Discord channel–I do want to use Roll20, but I haven’t put the time into learning how to use it on the GM side yet.

“It Only Hurts When I Swallow”

J. Manfred Weichsel writes gross books. His series entitled Tales To Make You Vomit is exactly what it claims to be–disgusting stories intended to revolt the reader.

So, if you’re not interested in being revolted, offended, and generally grossed out, I don’t recommend these books. (Interestingly enough, he is also a regular contributor to Cirsova Magazine, as well as other Pulp Revival publications. He, like I, has a broad range of styles.)

A while back I was corresponding with JMW and I brought up the possibility of him trying his hand at publishing, and he responded that he’d already considered it and asked if I would be willing to submit a story to a multi-author Tales To Make You Vomit collection:

You are to write a hard science fiction story along the lines of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or even Philip K. Dick. Hard science fiction means that instead of the fantastical elements being magical in origin or left unexplained, they are the result of future technology or societal change. Hard science fiction does not only deal with future tech. It also deals with sociological themes, and imagines how hypothetical future societies might operate, and how their cultures might look. A fairly common definition of the genre is that science fiction is the literature of ideas, and asks the question, “What if?”

So, your stories should be set in the future, and should incorporate some sort of hypothetical future technology, as well as future society, or future culture. They can take place in outer space or on an alien planet, or they can take place right here on a future, technologically advanced earth.

But, while the afore-mentioned authors either presented an optimistic vision of humanity’s future or a warning to the future written with the intent of improving humanity’s chances, these are extreme horror stories. Extreme horror is a nihilistic and misanthropic genre, as opposed to the humanism of classic sci-fi. So don’t be afraid to get as negative as you possibly can regarding human nature, humanity’s future, and humanity’s role in the universe. The purpose of these stories is to tear down, undermine, and destroy. This is subversive literature. Be nihilistic. Let your antisocial impulses flow. Show me unlikable characters doing reprehensible things in an amoral universe.  

Sure, says I, I’ll give it a shot.

So I sat down and brainstormed and came up with the most disgusting thing I could.

That was the easy part. It’s no great trick to come up with a gross-out gag.

The problem is that I’m a technician and I think in terms of practical, realistic engineering. So I couldn’t just handwave away the technical details–that’s not how my mind works. I ended up doing a lot of research for this story, mostly on medical matters, and I found out some pretty disturbing things about my own body. Sometimes it really is better not to know how things work.

The other issue is that I can’t make myself write characters that I don’t believe in, and that meant I had to work myself into a mindset where I could understand the rationalizations that would allow someone to do the horrible things that are done to my main character and believe that they are justified.

It’s not that difficult to get into that state of mind, but it is emotionally exhausting.

All told, I have to say that I am very satisfied with the craft of this story. I treated the characters and the situations as honestly as I could. It’s a disturbingly plausible story–I’m pretty sure the events that I describe are physically possible with current technology. The legal and social changes that would allow such things… well, I’d like to believe that’s impossible, but I have my doubts.

Tales To Make You Vomit: Gruesome Futures will be available on Godless starting August 18th, and other publication platforms on September 1st.

Not for the faint of heart, or weak of stomach.

Small Worlds by Misha Burnett

A lovely review of Small Worlds

Davetopia

Burnett combines strange situations with characters who embrace hard work as a virtue, drawing together a range of examples of the weird being wonderful.

This collection contains ten short stories in a variety of genres:

• “Josef: A Fable”: Josef, an ordinary man of ordinary accomplishment faces the question of whether his existence is worthwhile. Evoking the same faceless bureaucracy as Kafka and Gillam’s Brazil but without the same vaulting absurdities, Burnett captures the tawdry horror of feeling not quite good enough.

• “Better Off Dead”: When a series of attacks by the undead echo a closed case, Erik Rugar fears a necromantic serial killer has returned to Dracoheim. Set in a city that lies in the liminal zone between cosmic horror and cautionary fairy tales and featuring a classic cynical detective protagonist, this story is a fresh and engaging noir perspective on urban fantasy. While it contains enough references to other…

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Shepherd: A Place For Readers

A while back a guy named Ben Fox started a website called Shepherd. He sent me an email with an intriguing request–would I, as an indie author, be willing to write a list of five novels that I would recommend? The kicker is that I would be able to promote my own work on the recommendation page. After some thought, I came up with a list of The best thrillers that make it weird (and weird makes it better). I wanted to promote Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts, and it seemed like linking it to Weird Thrillers that I enjoy might get me some new readers.

I liked the look of the finished page, but, to be honest, I forgot about it. After all, there are a lot of author promotion websites out there, and most of them don’t last very long.

Well, as it happens, they didn’t forget about me. Recently an author acquaintance of wrote a page to recommend Catskinner’s Book, which I really appreciate.

So I went back to check out the site, and it’s not only still there, but appears to be thriving. There are a lot of lists to browse, and a nice feature where you can input an author or a book and see what lists it shows up on.

I know that a number of my readers aren’t happy with the book recommendations on the big commercial sites, but this one is structured differently. He does get an affiliate fee for books purchased through his site, but he doesn’t accept advertising. If a book is recommended, it’s because somebody genuinely likes it, not because the author or publisher paid for a plug.

So check it out. It’s set up for browsing, one of those sites where a link will lead to a link to something that you’ve heard of and been meaning to read and off to someplace else… it’s kind of easy to get lost there.

“Summer Of The Stranger”

When I first pitched Small Worlds to Cirsova, and we decided to go ahead with that project, the editor asked if I would be interested in working with them on another project.

“The Mighty Sons of Hercules anthology / anthology series is planned as an homage to the classic peplum Sword & Sandal film genre of the 50s & 60s.”

I was hesitant at first–not sure if I could do it justice. They made it very clear that they weren’t interested in a cynical “reimaging” or “deconstruction” of the concept, but a genuine tale of heroism, a man of legendary strength who uses his power to fight against evil and support the downtrodden.

I played around with several ideas before settling on the concept of viewing the hero through the eyes of a boy on the edge of manhood.

Thus was born, “Summer Of The Stranger”. I was able to return to an earlier era in my own life, when the world was more magical, or perhaps I was less cynical. I am very happy with the story, it pushed me in a new direction, and I think the readers will appreciate my narrator’s story of the stranger who changed his life.

I was aiming for a Coming Of Age story, drawing inspiration from Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island and Mattie Ross from True Grit. But I also wanted to put my own spin on it, revisiting the Ashkenazi inspired setting I created for “Conessa’s Sword” and “Through Dry Places” in my Dark Fantasies collection. Makheist, son of Herakles, finds himself in conflict not only with the bandits who menace the narrator’s tiny village, but the pacifistic response of the villagers.

I believe that I captured the spirit of The Mighty Sons Of Hercules, action, adventure, and strength in defense of weakness, not “might makes right” but “might doing what is right”.

The Mighty Sons Of Hercules Kickstarter campaign begins 6/30/23

What’s Going On? Update for Early June

Cirsova

The Small Worlds Kickstarter was a success! We’ll begin fulfilling as soon as the funds clear. This is a major win for us before our open submissions period in August. We’ll have this up for retail as soon as we get the book out to everyone who pre-ordered it. Additionally, once we send out the digital rewards, the audiobook for An Atlas of Bad Roads will be going live on ACX.

The next immediate big thing is the Summer Issue, which will be out 6/15. We’ll devote an entire post to it in the next couple of days, but the eBook is available for pre-order.

The Mighty Sons of Hercules is about to go up on Kickstarter for pre-order. I’ll post a link and a full post as soon as it’s approved.

We’ll be open for submissions in August. Things are still really crazy, and we’ll need more funding…

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