Dead Clown Barbecue (35 page)

He scurried out of the street and onto the sidewalk, and then into an alley.

Safe. Finally.

There were not a lot of options in life for a man whose soul had been transferred into a ventriloquist's dummy, but at least Wally could now pick his own. He walked down the alley, whistling a happy yet creepy little tune.

STORY NOTES

"Pett Semmuteary."
As with
Gleefully Macabre Tales,
I start the collection off with a dose of animal cruelty! As a moviegoer or book-reader, I'm like most of the world when I say, "Kill all the humans you want but leave the kitty alone!" But it doesn't upset me in my own writing, probably because I know
for certain
that no animals were harmed and that no research was done. This story, obviously a send-up of Stephen King's
Pet Sematary,
was written just for this book, and it came from me deciding out of nowhere that it would be funny to have a title where "Pet Cemetery" was even more misspelled. And that's all I had for a while, but once I got the idea that burying pets in this resurrection cemetery had become routine and annoying to our main character, the story was a quick and easy one to write.

"Comeuppance."
I originally called this story "The Voodoo Tattoo," but then I decided that was too much of a spoiler. (And, obviously, I hope you're not reading this before the story itself. If so, I apologize for the spoiler.) This story was a lot of fun to write, mostly because I love writing with an exaggerated, overly formal tone.

"The Apocalypse Ain't So Bad."
I came up with the idea for this story shortly after reading Brian Keene's
Dead Sea
, an amazingly bleak novel in which characters often ask "In a world overrun by zombies, what's the point of even going on living?" (Answer: There isn't one.) So I thought it would be fun to take a character with the opposite viewpoint, a sunny guy who sees the positive side of everything. Then, of course, I had to break him of that habit.

"The Bell . . . FROM HELL!!!"
This originally appeared in an anthology called
Blood Lite,
which contained stories by big-name authors like Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher. If you look at the Amazon reviews, you'll see that 99% of the people who bought this book bought it just for their contributions and couldn't care less about poor little "The Bell . . . FROM HELL!!!" (And most of those people were mad that Charlaine Harris hadn't done a Sookie Stackhouse story.) It was a bit disheartening . . . until I got the royalty check, and realized that being in an anthology with Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher is a very good thing indeed.

"Work/Life Balance."
As of this writing, I have spent 16.5 years working in a corporate environment, so I'm a man who knows how Casual Fridays work. If you get nothing else from this book, and that's a strong possibility, I hope you take away the cautionary message from this story. In much the same way that same-sex marriage can only lead to people being forced at gunpoint to marry gay pugs, Casual Friday will destroy the earth. Only you — assuming that you work in middle management at a corporation — can stop it.

"Stop Stabbing Me."
Another story written specifically for this collection. When I write a novel, I don't outline unless the cruel publisher forces me to, but I like to at least have a pretty good idea of where I'm headed. With short stories, I often just start writing, making it up paragraph by paragraph, and see where it leads. Which is what happened here. I knew that I didn't want to go for the obvious ending of the narrator stabbing his older brother to death, but aside from that, this story was all ad-lib.

"Eight-Legged Vengeance."
I originally called this "The Eight Legs of Vengeance," and it took me far too long to realize that "Eight-Legged Vengeance" was the way to go. I have a fondness for comedy in which simple tasks become ridiculously difficult. I'd love to do this kind of story at novel length.

"The Drop."
Originally, after the narrator goes splat, he realizes that he's a now a zombie. The editor asked me to get rid of that part. Deep inside, I knew he was right, so I did. Later, when I posted the story on my website, I used my original ending, with a disclaimer saying that when this story first appeared the editor made me change the ending, and he was right to do so, but I still kind of wanted people to see the zombie-ending version. Now, reviewing the story again for inclusion in this book, yes, I continue to believe that the editor was right, and since this is pretty much the "permanent" version of this story, I present it zombie-ending-free.

"Here's What Happened . . ."
Somehow I lost the file for this story, so to include it in this collection I had to completely retype it. Yeah, I know that there are worse problems for somebody to have, but still, my pain will be significantly magnified if you think that this particular story sucked.

"Pregnancy Test"
I think that if somebody invented a device like this, which brings you merry entertainment during a very stressful couple of minutes, they'd make a fortune. Feel free to use the idea and send me half of the money.

"Mr. Twitcher's Miracle Baby-Chopping Machine."
This is one of my personal favorites of my own stories. The germ of the idea goes all the way back to 1990 or 1991, when I was in a creative writing class in college. There was a real-life case where a mother had murdered her children, and one of my classmates wrote a poem about it . . . a
terrible
poem. It was passionate and heartfelt, but the depth of his exploration of the issue essentially came down to: this was a bad thing for the mother to do. A couple of decades later, I decided to write about somebody having a life-changing moral epiphany about something absurdly obvious; in this case, baby-killing.

"The Carver."
Before the 300-copy hardcover limited edition of
Gleefully Macabre Tales
was published, I had a moment of complete whack-job insanity where I said to my publisher, "Hey, what if I wrote a piece of micro-fiction on every signature sheet?" I found this idea so delightful that I immediately started writing a bunch of one-or-two sentence stories. Then, a short while later, I thought "Aaaiiiieeee!!! What have I done?!?" Fortunately, the publisher came back and said, "That's really not necessary," presumably because he didn't want me to be seventeen months late returning the signature sheets. Years later, when I was desperately seeking a story idea for the World Horror Convention souvenir book, I found the one-sentence story of the serial killer who uses the pumpkin-tracing patterns on human faces. That ended up not actually being the point of the story, but it was a nice springboard.

"Push The Button."
A direct parody of Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button," except that it's based entirely on my memory of being a kid and having one of my friends telling me about this really great episode of
The Twilight Zone.
Flashing forward to 2012, Cult Movie Mania did a fantastic film series that ran for about six weeks. For the final week, they showed a trio of short films, and between those were live skits I wrote. Actor Joel B. Wynkoop performed in all of them, and Joel is an actor who treats the script as a blueprint . . . in other words, he ad-libs his ass off. So this is "Push The Button" as it was originally written, except that it's a short story instead of a script, and the omniscient narration was completely different. I'm not one to pat myself on the back over my own work, but c'mon, "It's like I don't even know you anymore!" was pretty clever, right?

"Specimen 313."
So I got this e-mail from Christopher Golden, asking if there was any way I could write a story really quickly for a new anthology called
The Monster's Corner,
a collection of stories from the monster's point of view. In this situation, the correct answer is, and I quote, "yes." Then I started brainstorming sympathetic monsters that the other authors in the book hadn't already used. I thought that "giant Venus flytraps" was probably a safe bet, and Christopher Golden (I can call him "Chris," but why show off?) confirmed that there were no stories about sympathetic carnivorous plants. I don't think the word "sweet" is used very often to describe my short fiction, but, y'know, despite the blood and ghastly death, I think this story is kind of sweet.

"My Knife Collection."
What does it say about me that I love to write from the point of view of reprehensible killers? Hopefully nothing. The protagonists in my novels tend to have some pretty deep flaws, but in short fiction, I often go all-out and write about despicable people. It's just fun. Sorry about that.

"Drain Bamage."
You know how some authors say that their characters tell them what to do? I'm not one of those authors. This story, though, is an example of something that turned out completely different from what I'd intended. The concept was that I wanted to write a dark comedy about a little boy who drops his baby sister, then spends his whole life thinking that he may have caused brain damage. There were lots of directions the story could take (his sister goes insane, his sister doesn't go insane but he kills her thinking she's gone insane, the brother goes insane from the experience, etc.) but as humor, they all seemed too obvious. So I went with "the brother goes insane from the experience," but suddenly shifted the tone into something pitch-black and deadly serious.

"Gramma's Corpse."
Another story like "Drain Bamage" that was conceived as a dark comedy, but about a page into it, I realized that the story worked perfectly fine as a straightforward creep-out. I don't know if the story is scary or not, but I've done a live reading of it, and when the girl hits the corpse and its eye pops open, the audience gasped. Heh heh.

"Burden."
Yeah, I know. This is one big bummer of a story. It was written for an anthology, and that was the assignment: really downbeat, unpleasant horror. I'd spent about a year after college taking care of a quadriplegic man at his home, and — bathroom tasks notwithstanding — it was a perfectly fine job. It wasn't easy to get him into his recliner, but once I did, hey, we could sit down and watch
Die Hard
together, or I could read him
First Blood.
Not a bad gig. But when I was scanning my brain for material for a truly miserable little tale, it was clear how this experience could be transformed into something bitter and mean-spirited. When I turned in the story, the editor said, "I love the idea but it should be from the point-of-view of the paralyzed brother. Can you do a rewrite?" This, of course, would have turned it into a
completely
different story, and crossed the line from "As your editor, here are suggestions to improve the story" (always welcome) to "If I were writing the story myself, this is what I would have done" (boo!). And I withdrew the story.

"Rough Draft."
People on the Internet skim a lot. There have been many times when I've posted things that are obvious jokes, as long as you actually
read
them, that people took seriously. Sometimes it's hilarious: I once posted a fake news article about how I'd been disqualified for a writing award, an article that was credible at first but ended with me fending off the authorities with a stolen trophy and a quote from the Chief of Police saying "We tried to subdue him, but the tip of that award was really pointy!" Several people who didn't read the whole article expressed outrage over my unfair treatment. Sometimes I feel guilty: ages ago, I did a 13-part serial comedy novel called
Destiny's Noogie,
and one part was a long (and increasingly ridiculous) rant about how I couldn't finish the chapter and just wanted to quit. It never occurred to me that anybody could possibly take it seriously, and most people got the joke, but I also got some "I'm really sorry to hear this, and I hope it gets better" responses, and, worse, a couple of people sent lengthy "I too have gone through writer's block, and I know how difficult it can be, and here's what I did to get over it" e-mails. Writing back to say "Uh, I was just kidding" made me feel like a Jerk Supreme. And . . . yeah, when "Rough Draft" was posted online, some people wondered if the correct version had been published. So my hope is that they didn't read the whole thing.

"Fangboy and the Troll."
Of all of my Novels That Hardly Anybody Has Read,
Fangboy
is my favorite. So it was a lot of fun to revisit that book and write a "missing" chapter. If you enjoyed this story, you should definitely read
Fangboy.
If you did not enjoy this, you should still read
Fangboy
, but lower your expectations.

"Dead in the Water."
No matter what the market, I always try to write to the best of my abilities. That said, when I wrote this story, for an anthology of zombie stories that take place in St. Petersburg, Florida, I wasn't getting paid for it, so my goal was to have as much fun as possible. Thus the extreme silliness on display here. (As opposed to all of the other stories in this collection, which are literate tales of great dignity.) I drive over the Howard Frankland Bridge on a semi-regular basis, so if any dissatisfied readers were trying to kill me, there are far worse ways to go about it than filling that bridge with zombies.

"Immunity."
I love writing comedy in which people are extremely impressed by their own accomplishments, but this was my first time exploring that in a "serious" story. It's kind of a nihilistic little piece, now that I think about it. I should have called it "The Apocalypse Sucks, After All."