Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Introductions, Sides, and the Most Important Words You Write

I’ve been reading a book by Peter Straub called SIDES and it made me think – as you who know me best will realize all things of importance do. This book caught my eye first because it was by Peter – who I consider a strong influence on my work, and whose novels I’ve loved for decades. When I read the description, though, I was a bit confused.

SIDES is a non-fiction compilation. This is not really a rarity – many of our contemporaries have published books filled with essays, reviews, articles, and sometimes lessons learned in their literary lives. Stephen King has ON WRITING – for instance, and DANSE MACABRE. Both great books. Tom Monteleone collected his Mothers and Fathers Italian Association (MAFIA) columns in a very nice hardcover volume and I enjoyed that as well.

But this book – SIDES – is a collection half made up of introductions Peter has written for other people’s books – and half from a fictional non-fiction voice. I haven’t reached that second section yet, but here was my first thought. Why on earth would someone collect the introductions they’d done for the work of others? In the first place, most people don’t do a very good job of this. The average introduction for a book – more prevalent in the collectible presses than anywhere else – runs down the content, offers an anecdote or a platitude or two, and sends the reader on his way.

I’ve been very fortunate lately – and two of our own Storytellers contributors, Brian Hodge and Elizabeth Massie are the reason. Both of them agreed to do introductions for books I have due this year, and both of them put effort, time, and thought into writing something that not only introduces the work – but stands alone as something readers will remember. There work ethic and integrity is behind this, and it’s why I asked them first…but I digress.

Most introductions don’t strike me as very well done – so I couldn’t figure out why anyone would collect them. I found out. When Peter Straub agrees to introduce a book, he not only dissects the content in its story-sized or novelesque chunks – he does the same to the words, and sometimes the patterns and social commentary buried in the prose. He analyzes the voice, the flavor, and the style of the author he’s introducing – often holding them up to a magnifying glass I’m guessing they never expected to be confronted with. I believe that an introduction like those he offered, for instance, to collections by two of my own favorite authors, Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin Kiernan, might win over readers before they read a single word of prose. In fact, it could have the opposite effect, warning readers of the emotional content, the depth of pain and the artistic depth of the fiction, and the emotional and psychological makeup of the author in time to prevent them diving into something they aren’t ready for.

An incredible amount of work went into the works collected in this volume. It’s worth the cover price for the introductions to editions of Dracula and the Island of Dr. Moreau alone. Peter delved into the times when each was written, the social issues dealt with by H. G. Wells in his work – the difficulties of Darwinian science in a world polluted by overbearing religious zeal and power-hungry royals. I’m quite certain Peter found things in both of these books that the author would blink at in surprise a couple of times…and then nod in agreement with, even if they weren’t conscious inclusions.

The point I’m after here, and there is a point, is that the work I’m reading shows a conscientious, conscious effort to make every word with the author’s name attached vivid, powerful, and worth reading. It is an example for others to follow – and it’s a long-time battle cry of many of us here – Sully, Rick, Janet – Beth and Brian – you can find a number of essays on this site covering the ethics and discipline many of us associate with writing.

These essays at Storytellers Unplugged are an example. You can toss off something, or you can wait until the moment when something strikes you and pins your fingers to the keys. I could probably give some pretty good advice to writers – could teach things I’ve learned along the way – but I’ve chosen another path here. I try to find something that just wants out of my head – something I’m thinking about, or living through – something that won’t let me go until I tell it. I take these things and work them around in my head until it about drives me crazy…and then I release it in a flood on to the screen (almost said paper, but – well – haven’t done that in a while).

My name will be attached to what I write here. The Internet has a long memory, and I want to be remembered for saying things that mattered. I’d suggest you all take the time to check into Peter’s book - see the effort and care he gave to making his introductions integral parts of the books he was associated with – and take it to heart.

I’ll leave you with two other short, sort of self-serving examples… Beth, and Brian? This essay is for you, as much as for Peter. You’ve both honored me with your time, thought, and words – things that we value. Thanks.

“But all those points aside, it’s the characters who make the tale for me. As a writer myself, I feel like a story is what characters do or don’t do as opposed to a plot through which characters move. Dave seems to have this same feeling. He’s got a story to tell, but only because the characters have relayed it to him. They’ve told him what happened to them, and Dave had the decency to write it all down and flesh it all out.
Dave’s characters may not be the folks you see every day on the subway or in the BMG next to you on the highway. They may not sip spiced chai at Starbucks, water their tidy window boxes, or take elevators ten stories to their office each morning. But these characters are people. Genuine, breathing, living people who, in spite of the clothes they wear and the swampy territory in which they live, have the same hopes and fears that anyone else has. They get nervous, they get angry, they argue, they fight, they rationalize, and they do their best to survive.”

–Elizabeth Massie from the Intro to:
“The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of  Nature”

” Ennui’s touchstones with the past are sometimes overt — like the historical timeframes of the opening title story and its anchoring closer, “The Preacher’s Marsh,” as well as other stops between — but more often it’s as if the past has given the present a deep, lingering soul kiss. You don’t have to get any farther than the title of “New Leather & Old Cognac” to gain a sense of musty old books and antiquarian gems, while the DNA of H.P. Lovecraft finds its way into “From My Reflection, Darkly,” as well as “Darkness and the Light” and its yearning cousin “The Call of Farther Shores.” And just try reading “When Words Collide” without thinking of Rod Serling giving it his tight-lipped smile of approval.

As fate would have it, while in the middle of this intro, I blundered across what makes Dave tick … or has for at least the past decade-plus.

It happened while I was on an archaeological closet-cleaning expedition, striking down a large, docile population of magazines with their own Judgment Day, deciding which got saved and which were destined for the recycling bin. In one of those moments of pure serendipity, I wound up staring at issue #9 of the long-defunct Horror Magazine, from 1997, whose cover asked: “Are Serial Killers the New Monsters of Horror? Are the Old Monsters Dead?” It then declared, above shots of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Gary Gilmore (bonus points if you can guess who was the only one grinning), that Stephen Mark Rainey said NO!, while David Niall Wilson said YES!

Why, yes … that David Niall Wilson.

Their elaborations unfolded in a double splash page of side-by-side essays, but Dave and Mark were actually closer in view than the point/counterpoint format suggested. Sadly, nobody got called an ignorant slut. In fact, Dave seemed nearly as unmoved and unconvinced by the whole serial-killers-are-the-future thing as Mark did, a fact that, eleven years on, is effectively, if at the time inadvertently, underscored by the layout designer’s decision to fill up the second page of Dave’s essay with sixteen photos of Andrew Cunanan. Actually, six photos repeated, and notable mainly for their showcasing of the eerie mutability in Cunanan’s appearance, which ranged from sullen Latino to friendly Asian to dorky Caucasian.

By now you may be asking, “Ummm … who’s Andrew Cunanan again?”

Yeah. Exactly.

The crash-course refresher, then: Earlier in ’97, he murdered five people, his last victim being fashion designer Gianni Versace, before eating his own gun to avoid capture. Admittedly, I’d forgotten all about the wormy little shit, despite having read an intriguingly unconventional book about him a couple years after the fact, Gary Indiana’s Three-Month Fever. A hot topic at one time, by now Cunanan has pretty much vaporized to footnote status among serial- and spree-killer trivia hounds. He just wasn’t aberrant enough for longevity anymore, especially in such celebrity-fixated times; if he hadn’t murdered one, it’s unlikely anyone outside of his blast radius would’ve known who he was.

No staying power. Not much of a memorable monster.

So it was interesting to backtrack and reflect on Ennui in the prism of Dave’s essay, both its content and layout. Rather than following the lure of the serial killer trend of the time, or reducing his color palate to mostly shades of red, he seems to have formulated an intent to rejigger horror’s literary past until the results could feel both vintage and modern at the same time. Which comes to a perfect balance in “The Fall of the House of Escher,” an obvious and self-aware homage to Poe, but run through a filter of twentieth-century sensibilities and surrealism.

Rebounding to the essay, though, what jumped out at me most was this telling paragraph:

“Too often the direction chosen [to break with the monsters of the past] is to shock, or disgust, to see how far the reader’s sensibilities can be stretched before they throw the book down, sickened. This is the approach of other forms of media, but in fiction it is a very real dead-end road. Fiction should entertain, first and foremost. Good fiction will achieve that entertainment and reach into a reader’s mind for elements that make them a part of what they are reading. Great fiction pulls at the reader’s heart-strings, draws them in, manipulates their emotions, then returns them, safe and fulfilled, to where it found them, possibly marked by the experience, but intact.” (I didn’t even remember writing this – DNW)

Dave may not have intended that as his manifesto for all the work that lay ahead, but in hindsight, you can certainly read it that way.”

– Brian Hodge from the Introduction to “Ennui & Other States of Madness”

The bottom line, then, is this. The most important words you write on a recurring basis are your first, middle if you have one, and last name. Don’t attach them to anything lightly…

-DNW
Macabre Ink

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