I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.
“INSTRUCTIONS”
Although I put several poems into Smoke and Mirrors, my last collection, I had originally planned that this collection would be prose only. I eventually decided to put the poems in anyway, mostly because I like this one so much. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it’s nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it’s interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don’t have to read it, either. (And while I’ve spent weeks cheerfully agonizing about what order to put this collection into, how best to shape and order it, you can-and should-read it in any way that strikes your fancy.)
Quite literally, a set of instructions for what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale.
“HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS?”
I was asked for a story for an anthology themed about gargoyles, and, deadline approaching, found myself feeling rather blank.
Gargoyles, it occurred to me, were placed upon churches and cathedrals to protect them. I wondered if a gargoyle could be placed on something else to protect it. Such as, for example, a heart…
Having just reread it for the first time in eight years, I found myself mildly surprised by the sex, but that’s probably just general dissatisfaction with the story.
“MY LIFE”
This odd little monologue was written to accompany a photograph of a sock monkey in a book of two hundred photographs of sock monkeys called, not surprisingly, Sock Monkeys, by photographer Arne Svenson. The sock monkey in the photo I was given looked like he’d had a hard sort of life, but an interesting one.
An old friend of mine had just started writing for the Weekly World News, and I’d had much fun making up stories for her to use. I started wondering whether there was, somewhere out there, someone who had a Weekly World News sort of a life. In Sock Monkeys it was printed as prose, but I like it better with the line breaks. I have no doubt that, given enough alcohol and a willing ear, it could go on forever. (Occasionally people write to me at my Web site to find out if I would mind if they use this, or other bits of mine, as audition pieces. I don’t mind.)
“FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT”
There are seven stories still to go in the Major Arcana, and I’ve promised artist Rick Berry that I’ll write them one day, and then he can paint them.
“FEEDERS AND EATERS”
This story was a nightmare I had in my twenties.
I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is not story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold into leaves, from silk to cobwebs, on waking.
Still, there are things you can bring back with you from dreams: atmosphere, moments, people, a theme. This is the only time I can remember bringing back a whole story, though.
I first wrote it as a comic, illustrated by the multitalented Mark Buckingham, and then later tried re- imagining it as an outline for a pornographic horror film I’d never make (a story called “Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture”). A few years ago editor Steve Jones asked me if I would like to resurrect an unjustly forgotten story of mine for his Keep Out the Night anthology, and I remembered this story and rolled up my sleeves and started to type.
Shaggy inkcaps are indeed wonderfully tasty mushrooms, but they do deliquesce into an unpleasant, black, inky substance shortly after you’ve picked them, which is why you will never see them in shops.
“DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP”
I was asked to write an entry in a book of imaginary diseases (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts). It seemed to me that an imaginary disease about making imaginary diseases might be interesting. I wrote it with the aid of a long-forgotten computer program called Babble and a dusty, leather-bound book of advice to the home physician.
“IN THE END”
I was trying to imagine the very last book of the Bible.
And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means “that thing over there.” (“Quick, brave Himalayan Guide-what’s that thing over there?”
“Yeti.”
“I see.”)
“GOLIATH”
“They want you to write a story,” said my agent, some years ago. “It’s to go on the Web site of a film that hasn’t come out yet, called The Matrix. They’re sending you a script.” I read the film script with interest, and wrote this story, which went up onto the Web a week or so before the film came out, and is still there.
“PAGES FROM A JOURNAL FOUND IN A SHOEBOX LEFT IN A GREYHOUND BUS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, AND LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY”
This was written for my friend Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour book, several years ago, and it made me extremely happy when it was picked up for a “best-of-the-year” anthology. It’s a story inspired very loosely by the music of Scarlet’s Walk. I wanted to write something about identity and travel and America, like a tiny companion piece to American Gods, in which everything, including any kind of resolution, hovered just out of reach.
“HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES”
The process of writing a story fascinates me as much as the outcome. This one, for example, began life as two different (failed) attempts to write an account of a tourist holiday on Earth, intended for Australian critic and editor Jonathan Strahan’s upcoming anthology The Starry Rift. (The story is not in there. This is the first time it’s appeared in print. I’m going to write another story for Jonathan’s book instead, I hope.) The tale I had in mind wasn’t working; I just had a couple of fragments that didn’t go anywhere. I was doomed and had started sending e-mails to Jonathan telling him that there wasn’t going to be a story, at least, not one from me. He wrote back telling me he’d just got an excellent story in from an author I admired, and she wrote it in twenty-four hours.
So, nettled, I took an empty notebook and a pen and I went down to the gazebo at the bottom of the garden and during the course of the afternoon I wrote this story. I got to read it aloud for the first time a few weeks later at a benefit at the legendary CBGBs. It was the best possible location to read a story about punk and 1977, and it made me feel very happy.
“THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME”
Written in a hotel room in New York the week I read the audio book of my novel Stardust, while waiting for a car to come and take me away, for editor and poet Rain Graves, who had asked me for a couple of poems for her Web site at www.spiderwords.com. I was happy to discover that it worked when read before an audience.
“SUNBIRD”
My oldest daughter, Holly, told me exactly what she wanted for her eighteenth birthday. “I want something nobody else could ever give me, Dad. I want you to write me a short story.” And then, because she knows me well, she added, “And I know you’re always late, and I don’t want to stress you out or anything, so as long as I get it by my nineteenth birthday, you’re fine.”
There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable-you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.
“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look. Holly didn’t get it until her nineteen-and-a-halfth birthday, when I was in the middle
