Storytellersunplugged

by Jeffrey Thomas

When it comes to brother acts, for me film-makers come to mind more readily than authors. There are Larry and Andy Wachowski (the MATRIX movies), Peter and Bobby Farrelly (DUMB AND DUMBER and the hilarious STUCK ON YOU, about conjoined brothers), the Polish Brothers (TWIN FALLS IDAHO, also about conjoined twins, and the surreally haunting NORTHFORK), the Brothers Quay (brilliant stop motion animators), Joel and Ethan Coen (BLOOD SIMPLE, FARGO), Kerry and Kevin Conran (SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW) and Paul and Leonard Schrader (BLUE COLLLAR, THE YAKUZA).

But my brother Scott and I can still relate to these collaborative brother teams (we’ve always been especially fond of the Schraders, Paul having written our favorite film, TAXI DRIVER). We understand what it must be like for them to work together – conjoining their brains, so to speak. They say twins sometimes develop a secret language that no one else can understand. When that kind of bond takes place between two human beings with creative impulses, a kind of magic can happen. But what shapes the particular directions taken by any human persona? One can’t help but wonder if it’s a genetic predisposition behind the leanings of creative siblings, or if it’s an issue of environment. There are plenty of fine collaborators who are not related by blood. They can still share a secret language…based on films they both grew up with, books and music they were both exposed to. Maybe being brothers just gives two people a shortcut to such a relationship.

(I’ll leave it to someone else to write about the creative bond between sisters, or even parents and their children…except to boastfully relate that my father, mother, sister and brother Craig are all published writers as well.)

Right now I’m proofreading the book PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY, for its imminent release. The futuristic and nightmarish city of Punktown is my own invention, but as early as I conceived of it I was inviting my brother Scott to write Punktown-based stories, too. So while he hasn’t spent as much time in that dark metropolis as I have, he has been acquainted with it for just as long. (An example of his Punktown stories can already be found in PUNKTOWN: THIRD EYE, an anthology for which I also invited a lot of non-Thomases to set stories in Punktown.) Proofing SHADES OF GREY – and I adapted that subheading from one of Scott’s tales – has again made me reflect on that rewarding brother/fellow writer relationship.

Rereading Scott’s stories for this book has been a thrill almost as strong as reading them for the first time. Sometimes I think Scott evokes Punktown more effectively than I do myself; at least, I too often catch myself saying, with envy, why didn’t I think of that? For many years, everything we wrote was done so with the other in mind as our particular audience. After all, we weren’t published yet – we were our only assured audience! But also, I think it has to do with the way a singer might single out one face in a crowd that he can more directly perform for. Trying to ever impress each other, and in an amicable way ever outdo each other, I’m sure helped Scott and I to up the ante and better our skills. And there were the added bonuses in this sharing of each other’s work, like writing a humorous page of a particular story and sneaking it in with the rest, so that it would start out innocently enough before it dissolved into nonsense and gave itself away as one of those prank booby-traps. We have consciously and sometimes less consciously cribbed each other’s ideas. We’ve had long, animated conversations about each other’s current novel-in-progress. When particularly animated, we used to take to pacing the floor as we spoke, back and forth in opposite directions or around and around each other if the room was large enough, as if our foot motions helped generate our thoughts, like twin hamsters running in twin wheels to power some bizarre machine. This is a trait I gave to two brothers whom I made the protagonists of my most recently completed novel, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS – and only Scott would have recognized that characteristic, had I not just shared it with you now.

The odd thing is, we have only once collaborated on a story in the literal sense; that is to say, putting both our bylines on a single story. That was the story ORANGES AND APPLES, which was a bonus feature for a lettered edition book entitled NETHER: IMPROPER BEDTIME STORIES. NETHER combined my erotic horror collection HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD with Scott’s erotic horror collection SHADOWS OF FLESH. The way we approached this story was for one to write a few pages, then email it to the other for his few pages, and then back again, improvising the plot as we went along. I still had another few pages to go when I felt that Scott had brought the story to a point that was hard to go beyond, so I decided to end it there and then. But recently, when we were invited to contribute a story to Brian Keene’s anthology IN DELIRIUM, we changed the title of the story to APPLES AND ORANGES and I managed to balance the story out with a final section of my own after all. It was a fun experience, but direct collaboration has never been something either of us has been fond of, so it may never be repeated. As into each other’s work as we are, ultimately we are too into our own work to invite the hand of another, however much that hand might share genetic material. But Scott is welcome to visit Punktown again, whether I am currently staying in the city or not, any time he desires. He’s a citizen there, too. His very disturbing story PULSE (itself a conscious homage to TAXI DRIVER) makes buying PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY worthwhile all by itself, in my opinion.

Down the road, another book of ours called THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH will be released. This one found its origins in the notion of both of us writing a novella inspired by the same piece of art, in this case a digital painting created by the talented Travis Anthony Soumis (who did the cover for PUNKTOWN: THIRD EYE and the cover and interiors for PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY). But besides this image figuring into both of our stories, there are other little similarities however wildly different the novellas are. Both stories focus a lot on their New England settings, and both involve extradimensional travel, things we didn’t realize until we had finished and read the other’s story. We both put a lot of our own personalities, our tastes and interests, our own experiences, into our work…and of course we better than any friend or fan can distinguish between what is real and what is invented, when reading each other’s stuff. Though Scott lives in Maine now and I in Massachusetts, and we see each other and speak on the phone very seldom, the effect we’ve had on each other’s art is ongoing. If I have any talent at all, again it’s because I was trying to give him a good story to read. Or make a better story than the last one of his I had read!

Now, Scott and I have very different visions, don’t get me wrong. I lean more toward horror with SF influences, or SF with horrific elements, whereas he favors dark fantasy, horror often set in the Victorian area or thereabouts. His style is unlike mine; more blatantly poetic and idiosyncratic. We have our own distinct identities. But we find it hard to stop rubbing elbows, even when we’re doing our own thing. Scott and I have often appeared in anthologies together, such as LEVIATHAN THREE, OCTOBERLAND, STRANGEWOOD TALES, DEATHREALMS, THE DEAD INN, and THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES XXII. I’m too lazy to go look through my stacks of magazines; we’ve been in plenty of those together, too. I hope the trend continues. I like to think that coming upon an anthology in which we both appear, Scott’s fans will check out my work, and vice versa.

Getting back to movies and brother partnerships…back in the 80’s, primarily, Scott and I used to make our own video movies together. We’d get very passionate about them, and there were certainly brotherly spats (I was amused when watching a featurette on SKY CAPTAIN to hear how the Conran brothers would fight on the set…though presumably not with the violence of the group Oasis’ obnoxious Gallagher brothers). I think making those home movies, inventing props and settings on the spot, creating our own fantastical makeup effects on fantastically nonexistent budgets, and playing 90% of the roles ourselves, was the most fun I’ve ever known creatively. Sure, these home videos are so raw they’re probably unwatchable to anyone but ourselves, even though several take place in Punktown, so the Coens need not worry about the competition. But we came up with ideas that later on I would work into some of my written Punktown excursions. And mainly, we cemented a bond…and celebrated a process…and played in the sandbox of creativity together.

We’ve worked hard, in the years since we were each other’s only fan, to get our books out there, to win readers who wanted to read us again. But to this day, I’m sure, nobody looks forward to a new book by one of the Thomas Brothers more than the other brother does. In a way, no matter whom I actually dedicate a book to, each one is dedicated to him.

(A final note: check out Scott Thomas’s latest collection, WESTERMEAD, from Raw Dog Screaming Press. It will make you shiver, and cry, and laugh, and make you wish you had a brother if you don’t already.)