Last night I swung by Borders in downtown Palo Alto, and of course I checked out how they were doing in terms of stocking books that include me. (One copy of the Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 trade paperback, three copies of the mass market paperback, and a princely five copies of The Living Dead.) While I was there in the horror anthologies section, a father and his son — who looked about twelve — appeared. The dad was introducing his son to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. The son took down a volume and said, “Does this have that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ story?” and the dad said, “Yeah, so either get that one or ‘At the Mountains of Madness.'” The son said, “What’s that about?” and the dad said, “Well, it’s about these … mountains … of madness.” (I guess it’s been a while since he read it.) Anyway, it always warms my heart to see a father and son bonding over unnameable eldritch terrors.
And speaking of The Living Dead, last week’s New York Review of Science Fiction reading series with me and John Langan went swimmingly. The event was scheduled against the second presidential debate, so I was a little worried that that would affect the turnout, but in fact quite a lively crowd showed up. (One attendee suggested that, given a choice between zombie horror and presidential politics, the audience had gone with the less-scary alternative.)
Before I read my story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” I told an anecdote that went something like this: “I’d never really written any horror before, but back around the time I graduated from college my life had become so miserable that horror was the only way I could express all my angsty angst. I’m happy to get a chance to read this story tonight to a live audience because this sort of reminds me of going on camping trips as a kid and telling ghost stories around the campfire. In fact, I went on a family camping trip shortly after writing this story, and so I actually did once read this story around a campfire. One of the people along on that trip was one of my dad’s colleagues, who went on to become the first and only female tenured physics faculty member at Stanford. She’s not a big horror fan, and I think the story really freaked her out. It’s been years now, but every time I see her she still mentions how scared she was by my story about the vampires, and I have to tell her, ‘Actually, it was zombies … geez, I thought you were supposed to be smart.'”
John Langan also posted about the evening (he notes some interesting points of congruence between his story and mine), and so did Jordache, who reports of the story I read, “The story follows a young sentient zombie during a zombie invasion and what happens to him when he gets in contact with his still-human family. I really enjoyed the story and was moved by it. I wasn’t expecting to be moved by zombie stories … I expected a lot of gore. It says a lot about the quality of the stories in this collection.” I also met for the first time the writers Carrie Laben, Rhodi Hawk, and M. M. De Voe, as well as Hippocampus Press editor Derrick Hussey (who you can see in this clip from The Ali G Show). (Also present, apparently, was David Wellington, author of the Monster Island zombie series, though I never really got a chance to say hi.)
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