Everything You Need: Short Stories (30 page)

This is one of many reasons why, when Stephen Jones emails, I take care to read what he says.

T
HE SEVENTEENTH KIND

This was inspired by us finally getting cable (quite some time ago now) and becoming briefly obsessed with QVC, the shopping channel. We used to love lurching back from the pub, settling back, and watching people giving their all trying to shift units of all manner of crap – live on TV. The two favorite quotes mentioned in the story were things we actually heard. After a while I became particularly intrigued by the presenters, wondering how they felt about the whole experience — from the superbly-coiffed guy who gave it 110% every time (regardless of how banal the product) to a woman whose eyes seemed to betray, once in a while, awareness of the absurdity of it all: and who once memorably lost it during a half-hour debacle in which a whizzy new piece of salad-making equipment utterly failed to do what it was supposed to, instead pinging bits of celery and tomato all over the studio. I thought she was going to die laughing.

There was something weird, too, about the idea of the people who might be watching all this in the small hours, and calling in with their comments and questions. I pictured them sitting alone, at home, alone, bathed in the light of the flickering screen... and wondered who they were.

From somewhere in between the two came this story.

W
HAT HAPPENS
WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT

Being a parent is scary sometimes. Yes, a lot of it is day-to-day and affable and some of it’s infuriating. I won’t lie to you about that. But there’s a simple and horribly powerful love involved, too, and with that comes the possibility of terrible things.

Ever since we met, my wife has been my first reader. Every novel or story or screenplay that I’ve finished gets printed out and put warily in front of her (or, these days, converted to pdf and emailed for consumption on her iPad). She’s my filter. She tells me whether a story basically stands up or not.

She’s never read this one. I didn’t send it to her. I know it stands up (and was hugely honored when it won the British Fantasy Award in 2011). I know also that my wife really, really wouldn’t enjoy reading it. She puts up with enough through being married to me. Even I have limits.

T
HE THINGS
HE SAID

Something I’ve noticed as I continue to write short stories (and, after a decade in which I produced almost none, the pace does seem to be picking up again, thankfully) is that the same subjects come up time and again. This isn’t surprising, of course. Themes and situations and tropes are bound to reoccur. Once you’ve written one or two vampire stories, or a handful of zombie tales, you may come to feel that you’ve done the straight-ahead approach and become attracted to more oblique takes: stories that put the apparent subject in its proper place (the background, as color, or as an organizing structure like a musical key), and instead attempt to deal with the underlying meaning.

The Things He Said
is one of these. It’s a story about zombies. Kind of. It’s more about how people deal with epic adversity, however, and about how much (or how little) change it may cause. Some people are good, some are bad, and there’s a lot of us in that murky area in between. The end of the world won’t change that.

T
HE GIST

The Gist is by far the most complicated project I’ve ever undertaken, and also the longest I’ve ever taken to write a story. I wrote several
novels
in the time this took to steer to its conclusion… Quite early on in the process I conceived of the idea of having the tale — which concerns a translator, and strange old books — subsequently translated into a series of languages, with the translator on each occasion only being able to ask questions of the person before them in line: to see, in effect, whether the gist survived.

I finally finished the story (it took years not because it was hard work, but because it just seemed to want to take its own sweet time) and spent a year laboriously setting up a series of five languages, which then promptly fell apart at the first hurdle. I was on the verge of abandoning the entire project but thankfully Bill Shafer at Subterranean encouraged me to give it another try, so I set up a far more restrained version, just going from English to French and then back again.

It wound up being one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done, and I’m delighted with
Subterranean’s book
.

E
VERYTHING YOU NEED

I suppose this is partly a reflection on married life, though in my case the relationship is reversed. My wife is the one who knows where the hell everything is. Some of the time.

Despite the fact it’s rounding off the collection, and is the title story, I’m not sure there’s much I can say about this one. It is what it is. Often, when it comes to my own work, those are the stories I’m happiest with.

T
HE DARKENING TREE

A very short poem. I don’t normally write poems. But I wrote this one.

T
his Is Now
was originally
in
Best New Horror 16
, Robinson 2005

Unbelief
was originally in
Stories
, Morrow 2010

Walking Wounded
was originally in
Dark Terrors 3
, Gollancz, 1997

The Seventeenth Kind
was originally in
This Is Now
, Earthling Publications 2007

A Place for Everything
was originally in
PostScripts 10, WHC and Michael Marshall Smith Special Issue
, 2007

The Last Barbecue
was originally in
Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback
, running Press 2012

The Stuff That Goes On In Their Heads
was originally in
Swallowed By The Cracks
, Dark Arts Books 2011

Unnoticed
is original to this collection

The Good listener
is original to this collection

Different Now
was originally in
Scaremongers
, Tanjen 1997

Author Of The Death
is original to this collection

Sad, Dark Thing
was originally in
A Book Of Horrors
, Jo Fletcher Books 2011

What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night
was originally published as a chapbook from Nightjar Press 2009

The Things He Said
was originally in
Travellers In Darkness
, the souvenir book of the 2007 World horror convention

Substitutions
was originally in
Black Wings
, PS Publishing 2010

The Woodcutter
is original to this collection

Everything You Need
is original to this collection

The Gist
was originally published as a
chapbook
by Subterranean Press, 2013

The Darkening Tree
originally appeared to accompany the image used on the jacket of this ebook, on
Instagram
, 2014

Story Notes
is original to this collection