Dreams (33 page)

"
The Adventure of the Voorish Sign
"
was written at the request of John Pelan for inclusion in the anthology
Shadows Over Baker Street
(Ballantine Books, 2003) co-edited by Pelan and Michael Reeves. Of course Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos have both fascinated me since I was a small child, the former dating from the matinee showing of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
—the Rathbone and Bruce version!—to which my brother Jerry was forced to bring me, and the latter from the unforgettable Sunday morning when I read "The Dunwich Horror
"
in a paperback anthology I'd snuck into church and hidden inside my hymnal.

This opportunity to bring together Dr. Doyle's and Mr. Lovecraft's great creations—leavened, perhaps, with a slight element of the Order of the Golden Dawn—was irresistible.

"At the Esquire" was the first short story I ever sold. It appeared in
Dude
magazine for November, 1968. It's based on a real incident involving the late artist Jack Gaughan, myself, and our respective spouses, Phoebe and Patricia. I was working in the computer industry at the time, and when the story appeared in
Dude
I proudly passed a copy of the magazine around my office. It was greeted with enthusiasm, which I found highly flattering until I realized that nobody cared about my story—all eyes were focused on the photos of the unclad ladies featured in
Dude.

"Nothing Personal" was written at the request of one of my favorite editors, Darrell Schweitzer, for inclusion in his anthology
Cthulhu Reigns
(DAW Books, 2010). It's another Lovecraftian piece, of course.

"Tee Shirts" is a thinly disguised memoir of my experiences in the early 1970s as a popular media journalist. It has never been published before. Instead, I have used it as a performance piece with great success and active response from audiences. One person questioned my ability to dredge up these memories with such accuracy and in such detail, and I could only respond that, "I don't do strong drugs any more."

"Dingbats" was written for William Jones for inclusion in his anthology
Horrors Beyond
(Elder Signs Press, 2005). My older son reacted to it with shock. "Dad, are you writing lesbian porn now?" I didn't
think
that was what I was writing.

In 1979 editor Jonathan Bacon asked me to write the concluding chapter of a round-robin serial,
Ghor Kin-Slayer: The Saga of Genseric's Fifth-Born Son.
This was based on an opening chapter found among the papers of the late Robert E. Howard. The other authors made up a truly amazing roster of talented fantasists. Some were contemporaries, others were titans whose works I had devoured and whose success I had envied as a teenaged fan, decades before. Just look at this list:

Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph Payne Brennan, Richard L. Tierney, Michael Moorcock, Charles R. Saunders, Andrew J. Offutt, Manly Wade Wellman, Darrell Schweitzer, A. E. van Vogt, Brian Lumley, Frank Belknap Long, Adrian Cole, Ramsey Campbell, H. Warner Munn, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

The chapters appeared regularly in a semi-professional magazine of the era called
Fantasy Crossroads.
Unfortunately,
Fantasy Crossroads
ceased publication halfway through the serial. Editor Bacon furnished me with back issues containing all published chapters and manuscript copies of those that remained unpublished.

As I read through the installments it became obvious that every chapter had merit, but the overall plotline—if you could even call it that!—was an incoherent jumble. Not surprising, as no overall plan or outline was found among Two-Gun Bob Howard's papers. Fifteen intervening authors had taken off from Howard's opening chapter in fifteen wildly varied directions.

My job: to find a way to tie up all those loose ends. When I delivered my manuscript Jonathan Bacon was certainly pleased. In fact, he told me, "You did a wonderful job—almost as good a job as I'd hoped to get from the first author I asked to write the conclusion, but couldn't recruit." Ah, sharper than a serpent's tooth. The complete book was published by Necronomicon Press in 1997. Its validity as a novel may be debatable but I think "The River of Fog" works as a stand-alone piece.

"Cairo, Good-bye" is a thinly fictionalized memoir of my days in a second-run movie house as I worked my way through college. I used it as a performance piece until an audience member, Rudy Rucker, asked if he might publish it in his online magazine,
Flurb.
It appeared in the magazine's ninth issue in 2010.

"Report of the Admissions Committee" was another story commissioned by William Jones, this time for his anthology
Tales Out of Miskatonic University
(Elder Signs Press, 2010). I find it fascinating that Miskatonic University has achieved so great a presence in our culture. Several times I have had to explain to acquaintances that my Miskatonic U sweatshirt / baseball cap / lapel pin / license holder are artifacts of an institution that doesn't exist.

"Fourth Avenue Interlude" was written for editor Christopher Conlon. My friend Kage Baker, since deceased, deeply mourned and sorely missed, told me that Conlon was assembling an anthology based on "The Lighthouse," a fragmentary tale found among the papers of the great Edgar Allan Poe. This is still another thinly fictionalized memoir. It appeared in
Poe's Lighthouse
(Cemetery Dance Publications, 2006).

You may or may not be familiar with
Publishers Weekly,
a very important trade journal that keeps people in the book business informed as to trends and events in our world.
PW
, as it is familiarly known, also carries many book reviews and/or previews.

Some years ago I got a real thrill when I picked up a new copy of
PW
and discovered that I'd rated two reviews in its columns, one for a collection of short stories called
Before 12:01 and After
and the other for a collection of essays called
Writer at Large.

While both reviews were favorable—good for the ego and eventually for the royalty reports!—
PW
's reviewer made a most intriguing remark. The reviewer said that my rather folksy narrative style carried over from my essays to my stories until it became difficult to tell memoir from fable.

I recite this incident as a warning to the reader. "Sergeant Ghost" is actually and literally true. Every last word of it. So why is it included in a fiction collection? I suppose, because people who have read it in manuscript insist that it can't possibly be true. "It's a fun read," I keep hearing, "but you must be making this up!"

Dear Reader: You don't have to believe this story if you don't want to. It's perfectly okay with me!

"The Law" was written at the request of Marty Halpern for a proposed anthology. As far as I can recall, it's the only "first contact" story I've ever written. Marty complimented me on the story but I never received a formal acceptance and I don't know what became of the anthology. One of the many mysteries of the publishing world. I have a sneaky feeling that the editors wound up with too many stories and that mine was simply squeezed out. Or maybe not.

I suppose every author since dear old Grandpa Will Shakespeare has lived through that dreadful moment of sitting in front of an empty sheet of parchment or blank sheet of paper or vacant monitor screen, unpaid bills piling up, a deadline looming, and not an idea in his head. That's what happened to poor Jimmy Kerr, and here's the result.

"Dreemz.biz," was written at the request of William Jones, but appeared in an anthology edited by James Ambuehl,
Hardboiled Cthulhu
(Dimension Books, 2006).

"Wyshes.com" was also written at William Jones' request and appeared in
Horrors Beyond II
(Elder Signs Press, 2007).

"Heaven.god" was introduced as a performance piece at Andrew Migliore and Greg Lowney's wonderful H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con in 2010; this is its first appearance in print.

These three stories chronicle the adventures of Webster Sloat, a onetime tech writer now living in northern California, supplementing his income with occasional consulting jobs in Silicon Valley. Any resemblance between Webster and myself is not exactly coincidental.