The Cover Story: Subterranean: TODF2

Really nice cover by Dave McKean. And the insides look pretty great, too, with my novella "Vampire Lake" in fine company.

For the Horror Hounds at Capac High School

Hello Mr. Partridge,

I teach a class in Horror Stories at Capac High School in Capac, Michigan. We are reading a story of yours, "The Hollow Man." I thought it would be very special if my students could hear back from you about that particular story. Would you be willing to share your thoughts about how you came to write it? What, exactly, the narrator is? Is there a major theme that you were thinking about at the time? Thanks for any time and consideration you can give us.

Sincerely,
Janette Shurat
English Teacher
Capac High School
Capac, Michigan

Glad to comment, Ms. Shurat... and howdy, Capac High. Hope you're having a good Tuesday morning.

I've published more than seventy short stories, but "The Hollow Man" is probably the winner when it comes to picking the one I wrote earliest -- I was still in college when I typed it up, not much older than most of you are now. I thought (still think) it was the best story I wrote during that time. I sent it out to horror magazines shortly after graduation, but it came back with rejection slips. Years later, when I started having luck publishing my stories, I took another look at "The Hollow Man." To tell the truth I didn't change much, but this time I had luck selling it, to a respected horror journal called Grue. Since then, the story has been reprinted many times, and it appeared a few years ago in S. T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales from Penguin Classics.

As to how I came to write the tale: I'd long admired the work of Jack London, and his short story "To Build a Fire" was an old favorite I'd never quite forgotten. That tale of a man's grim battle for survival in a frozen wasteland was in my mind as I set about writing "The Hollow Man," as was T. S. Elliot's poem with a similar title, "The Hollow Men." Boil up those two bits of inspiration with the idea of four men and a monster battling for survival in a desolate, London-style environment, and I thought I had the beginnings of a good story.

Of course, beginnings are usually easy -- inspiration always carries a writer along through those. It's middles and endings that are hard. Telling the tale from the monster's point of view was one thing that made "The Hollow Man" interesting, because I was writing from a viewpoint that was alien to the reader but would not seem that way to the narrator. That was a challenge, as was the clipped, rhythmic cadence of the monster's voice.

As for the monster, part of the initial inspiration was the Wendigo, the legendary cannibalistic creature of the northern United States and Canada. But I didn't really want to make the monster in "The Hollow Man" too easy to define. I wanted to leave it a bit mysterious, which for me means the creature is ultimately more frightening. For my money, the unexplained is always a little bit scarier. In other words, I didn't want to give the reader an owner's manual for my monster; I just wanted to give folks a map to the dark patch of country where the creature might be glimpsed in the dim moonlight of a winter's night.

As for the theme of the tale, I like to leave those answers up to the reader. I'll just say that for me "The Hollow Man" is a tale of survival, and that's one word that can have a variety of definitions depending on your perspective... and the perspective of the characters in the tale.

A Town Without Pity

A Midwestern town. You know it's name. You were born there.

It's Halloween... and getting on toward dark. Things are the same as they've always been. There's the main street, the old brick church in the town square, the movie theater -- this year with a Vincent Price double-bill. And past all that is the road that leads out of town. It's black as a licorice whip under an October sky, black as the night that's coming and the long winter nights that will follow, black as the little town it leaves behind.

Those are the first two paragraphs of my Halloween novel, Dark Harvest. And now that the new mass-market paperback edition is out, I'm starting to get some familiar emails again. The ones that ask what part of the Midwest I'm from. The ones that assume I must come from a small town to have written a book populated with cornfields, and two-lane blacktop roads that run straight as the path of a bullet, and plenty of dead ends.

And that's kind of flattering, for a couple reasons. First off, I'm from a blue-collar town in the San Francisco Bay Area. Second, a lot of these emails come from folks who grew up in Midwestern towns and are surprised when they find out where I'm from. They often tell me that I captured the vibe of a small town just right -- at least when it comes to the dark side.

That makes me feel pretty good. As a writer, it means I did my job. Part of the trick to telling stories is learning to inhabit places (and people) that aren't part of your experience. In some ways, learning to do a good job of that is just learning to pay attention -- to people, to places, to everything. There's another part of the trick that is just as important, but I can't quite put a name to it. It falls somewhere between empathy and acting, or at least the facility actors use to and live in a character's skin. And to tell the truth, that's one of those little mysteries about writing that I don't try too hard to understand. I'm afraid doing that might hijack the guts right out of the magic.

But some stuff... it's funny where it comes from. Like most creative folks from the boomer generation, a lot of my first impressions came from television. That includes small towns. As a suburban kid planted in front of the TV, I encountered lots of those -- most notably Andy Griffith's Mayberry. That imaginary corner of North Carolina probably set the template for me on what a small town was. It certainly set the template for what most boomer kids thought a small town should be.

Of course, I encountered other small towns as I grew a little older... some of them on the late, late show. One of those was a fenced-off corner of hell in a William Castle thriller called Macabre, which was probably one of the first "adult" horror/dark suspense movies I ever saw.

People always talk about the gimmicks in Castle's movies, but there was a lot more to them than that. Castle's films always bothered me as a kid -- not so much the monsters, but the people who showed up along with them. As a kid, I couldn't quite figure those people out. The House on Haunted Hill worked that way, and so did The Tingler. I loved the monster in the latter, was scared to death of it. But the people in that movie really bothered me. I didn't understand them, or what they did, or why. As a kid, they were out of my reach, the way some adults were when I heard them talking while they didn't realize I was listening... and that made them scary, too.

Macabre was about a kidnapped child in a small town. An anonymous phone caller claimed the little girl had been buried alive, and the folks looking for the girl only had five hours to find her before her oxygen ran out. Of course, this amped up the suspense to a pretty wild degree. The movie riveted me, and it made me really uneasy at the same time. Because the town in Macabre was the same as all the other small towns I saw on television -- at least it looked that way on the surface. It could have passed for Mayberry. But this town and the people in it were... well, different. As the story progressed, there seemed to be more to each character than I first imagined -- from the doctor whose daughter had been kidnapped, to the rich grandfather, to the crazy blind girl, and even the town cop.

It was the cop who bothered me most. He was played by Jim Backus, who for most of us boomers was forever the Millionaire on Gilligan's Island. In other words, Backus was an overblown blustering puffball. But not in Macabre, he wasn't. He wasn't anything like Andy Griffith, either. Backus played a guy with secrets of his own, and a score to settle, and a gun and a badge that would let him do it. And he could turn from smiling and friendly to mean as a rattlesnake in about on tick of the clock. For me, that was a kind of scary I'd never encountered, and it was just one more thing about the movie that set me on edge (as did the ending, a dark twist which took me completely by surprise as a kid).

I thought about Macabre for a long time after seeing it. It really made me uncomfortable. And it gave me my first inkling that maybe there was another side to small towns and the people in them, a darker side that you wouldn't find in places like Mayberry.

Of course, I was just a kid when I encountered Mayberry and the the town in Macabre. As I grew older, other stories amplified that notion, including Ray Bradbury's darker work and the small-town noir novels I devoured after college. That's some of what I had inside me when I set out to build a Midwestern town with plenty of secrets in Dark Harvest.

But while I knew creating that town was important, I understood that creating the people in it was the primary thing that would bring the town to life. There was my own bad cop (Jerry Ricks), and a kid named Pete McCormick who was on the run with a stolen .45 in his hand, and all the folks trapped in a town they can never escape. The same was true when it came to inventing the monster that haunted every one of them -- the walking scarecrow known as the October Boy. And it wasn't watching television that helped me with those little problems. Living was what gave me the ability to create the characters in Dark Harvest.

That's the only way you really learn about people... and monsters. For me, one of the most important parts of writing effective fiction is learning to trust what you know and trust your worldview, and let that guide your story. Transfer that to paper, and it's what gives the page a heartbeat. That brings a story (and the people in it) alive.

Do the job right, and you can bring a small town to life, too.

Even if you're a guy who's never lived in one.

Even a Man Who is Pure at Heart...

...and says his prayers at night will boil up a skullful of nightmares while listening to this midnight symphony of a shuffle play (i.e. here's another five reasons I still love my CD collection):

Double Trouble

Two boxes hit the doorstep this week, and if you take a look inside 'em you'll see there's a whole lotta pumpkins goin' on (i.e. if I owe you a copy of Dark Harvest or Johnny Halloween, watch your mailbox -- I've been signing books and stuffin' envelopes today).

Bloch-Heads Unite!

If you're a fan of Robert Bloch (as I am), you'll want to click on over and check out five pages of outrageous photos on the Wisconsin Historical Society website.

One: I think Bloch was one old pulpmeister who really knew how to party. And B: pictures like this make me want to grab my 1930's Royal typewriter from it's filing cabinet perch and start the machine-gun rattle of a pulp story. And lastly: if the creator of Psycho came knocking on your door on Halloween night, it'd be safe to say you'd definitely get more trick than treat.

Shroud Magazine: Special Halloween Issue

Shroud Magazine #10 is now up for preorder. A Halloween special edited by Kevin Lucia, this one features an interview with yours truly (conducted by Brian J. Hatcher) plus a personal fave among the stories I've written in the last few years, a Halloween piece called "Three Doors."

There's also work by Dan Keohane, Rio Youers, Lisa Mannetti, Kelli Owen, and a host of other talented folks. Plus a cover by Steven Gilberts and interior woodcuts by Danny Evarts. This is the first I've seen of the work of both artists, and I've got to say they've got the right stuff.