Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #103: Religion and Outer Space: "Antigone"

One of my earliest blogs was titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the way to Dagobah . . . or, How Science Fiction Got Religion" (read here). Early science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, and a host of lesser lights depicted the future in outer space as devoid of religion. In their stories, religion is simply gone, a relic that has passed off the scene along with mule trains and triremes. The supreme expression of this assumption was a story by Lester Del Ray called "Evensong," in which a desperate being is fleeing from pursuers, finds a planet where he thinks he is safe, but then is captured. Quoting from that blog:  His benevolent captor tells him he will be taken to a planet where he will be well-treated and have a nice home. The creature whimpers pathetically, "But I'm God!" His captor returns, "Yes, but I am Man." The story appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. You can read it here.

So it was and still is in some science fiction. But the funny thing that happened was that science fiction suddenly became laced with religion. This was first apparent, at least to me, in Star Wars, where we learned about the Force, met the Jedi (who were rather like Shaolin monks), and encountered Yoda (whose name sounded like Yoga and who greatly resembled a Zen master). Religion, banished in the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly made a rather spectacular comeback.

Antigone, from the play

My story "Antigone" happily inhabits this new world where to talk about religion is okay. In my science fiction world-building, various religions thrive. The Mervogian races worships the "holy light" of the Besrid nebula. Numerous planets kneel before the Goddess Robinna. Earth, of course, has transported its religions into space. Some alien races have accepted earthly religion. The Barzalian and Golorian planetary systems have converted to Roman Catholicism—the Barzalians expressing the Catholicism of Saint Francis, the Golorians that of Cortez and the Conquistadors. Other religions exist in various places. Again, quoting my own writing, The human race … has always had religions. To assume religion will simply go away because people can fly into space seems a bit specious. And to assume other civilizations would not have religions is equally specious.

"Antigone" takes place on a colony planet that is part of the Earth-led Terran Alliance. In my world, the predominant race of the Terran Alliance, the most populous and influential, is the Indian race. The most common religion is Hinduism (though there is a significant "European" minority and all races have equal status). On Planet Antigone, a cult has grown up that worships the figure of Antigone. It draws mostly from the European population of the Indian-dominated planet, but attracts people from all faiths. They have Temples, icons of the goddess, and many converts. The government is tolerant, but the Thebans (followers of Antigone, who came from that city) are militant. When the government begins to develop a grove that Thebans consider sacred, they revolt.

Thebans: Antigone worshipers

Their revolt is well-planned. They surprise the army, win some initial victories and, as terrorists often do, take hostages. One of the hostages is Asha, the wife of Lorac, an army officer who is the main character of the story. She is a doctor.

The military counterattacks. They find the followers of Antigone are not well-trained. They are, however, led by a formidable military commander named Evangeline Müller. After some fierce fighting, the Terran military manages to surround the main force of Thebans. A group of commandos infiltrate the camp and find out the Antigone worshipers are in collusion with a hostile race of beings, the Housali, who are supplying them with arms. They also find out why many of the Theban militants claimed to have seen Antigone. The Housali have selected a young woman to impersonate her. They have done plastic surgery to make her look like images of Antigone. They also give her mind-altering drugs that enable her to project mental energy that induces a peaceful, ecstatic feelings in anyone close to her. The Thebans believe their blissful, supernal feelings come from being near the goddess. They are ready to give up everything and to die for her.

The Terran military also finds a Housali ship, with cloaking capabilities, moored in the middle of the Theban camp. And Lorcan sees the captured Asha. He controls his desire to liberate her.The Terrans seize the Housali ship and rescue Asha. She is quiet. After a while, Lorac realizes the Housali have sexually assaulted her.

Using the ship's monitor, they find the location of Evangeline Müller and capture her. The revolt dissolved without her leadership. The Terrans also capture the Housali woman who impersonates Antigone.

The aftermath of the revolt brings stern retribution. Insurgents are punished with death or imprisonment. The woman who impersonated Antigone is acquitted of all guilt because the Housali forced her, a slave, to participate in the ruse. Evangeline Müller is tried for treason and sentenced to be hanged. Lorac goes to her to tell her that neither he nor Asha bear her any ill will. She has been told that the guards who will execute her are planning to conduct the hanging in such a way that she slowly strangles to death. Lorac knows the soldier assigned to do the execution. She pleads with him to intervene for her so he will make it quick. Thinking of all the suffering Müller has caused, and what happened to his wife, he is reluctant but agrees and successfully intervenes on her part. When she is executed, she dies instantly. Asha is asked, at the last minute, to participate in the autopsy that certifies her death.

At the end, he and Asha pay a tribute to her. They realize how people are caught up in falsity and how all of us are vulnerable to deception. The ceremony they perform indicates Evangeline has been forgiven. The planet is renamed Gargi Vachaknu, after a Hindu sage. Worship of Antigone is severely restricted, though not forbidden.

The story appeared in Fiction on the Web. Read it here.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

Coming soon:  the sequel to my vampire novel, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute. Read the first book in the series to prepare you for the second one.

Happy summer.

Happy reading.  

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #103: Vampire Justice: "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard.

Vampire stories take place at night, since that's the only time vampires can emerge from the safety of their dark hiding places. Night always has romantic associations, and especially since the 1800s. In the age of Beethoven, Chopin, and other romantic composers we get things like the "Moonlight" sonata and lots of compositions called "nocturnes," which meant music written to evoke the mysterious, quiet, semi-magical state of darkness. A literary example of this is a short poem by Carl Sandburg, famous for his work "Chicago." Many will remember reading it in high school and encountering the memorable first line of the poem, "Hog butcher for the world." Sandburg was popular when I was in grade school and anthologized in many textbooks. His popularity has dropped off quite a bit, but one of his poems, "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard," figures in one of my vampire stories. Here is the poem:

Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

"Stuff" of the moon catches the reader's attention right away—not "light of the moon" or "rays of the moon." Stuff, as if it were not particles of light but something of substance, something you could pick up and handle. And, of course, the poet evokes night, willow trees, watery ripples, moonbeams on the water of an old pond. It is very much the "stuff" of romantic writing and music.

Jancinda

The night, though, is not always a romantic, numinous, mysterious time. It can be dangerous. It is a time when criminals stalk, looking for victims. In this story, it is also a time when vampires roam about to hunt. Jancinda Lamott, swoops into a deserted area to enjoy the quiet and repose of it before she goes to hunt. Jancinda is a conflicted vampire. She feels remorse that she must kill once a month to satisfy her need for blood. She will later express the anguish she feels from her Calvinistic background, saying, "How can God let something like this [becoming a vampire] happen and then hold us responsible for it?" She knows there are no answers for her question. The peace and serenity of the deserted tourist park with its old mill and mill pond, calms her.

Her calm is broken when someone seizes her and puts a knife against her cheek. She has been seized by a serial killer who says he plans to assault her and then kill her. Jancinda is in no danger and plays along, asking him why he wants to kill her, how many victims he has taken, and tells him she's sorry he lives such a twisted life. This strikes a chord and he tells her not to psychoanalyze him and to stay within her "her bounds." She asks what her bounds are and he says it is what he tells her to do.

Hop Cat Bar, Grand Rapids, MI

Tiring of the ruse, Jancinda turns around, bears her fangs, and shows her talons. Terror-stricken, he falls back and swings his knife at her. She catches it and snaps the blade in half with finger and thumb. She kills him, drinks his blood, and feels a little better about herself because she has destroyed a reprehensible person. She has done good. But not all her victims are bad. The conflicts mount in her mind. She calls her boyfriend, Wesley—a human mortal who knows she's a vampire and whom she protects from her undead friends. They meet at a local bar.

Wesley smiles when he sees her and asks her if she's been out hunting. She admits what he, familiar with her moods, already knows and tells him about her experience: “I went hunting. It was supreme irony. A guy grabbed me and put a knife to my throat. He said he was going to fuck me and then kill me.” Wesley laughs, says he wishes he could see the look on the would-be killer's face when he found out who he had encountered. Jancinda, however, is still in a funk. She invites Wesley to her place.

When they are finished and she is asleep, she contemplates the morality of her existence. How is what she does any different from what the serial killer she eliminated does? She thinks of the good she has done by stopping him. She also thinks of vampire friends who have done things for the good of individuals and nations. She realizes there are no clear-cut answers. One simply must cling to things one believes are right. She has her life. She has Wesley. She has a good job she can work at without going into sunlight. Jancinda must leave it at that. She must live the life she has and not expect to understand it.

The story appeared in Danse Macabre, a journal no longer available and with no archive (a journal by that name is currently being published, but it is not the same one in which my story appeared).

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

The sequel to Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute will be released soon. Read the original you will have the backstory for the sequel.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #102: The Trouble With Magic, "The Woman in the Lamp."

The story of Aladdin and the magical lamp is part of the European cannon of fairy tales thanks to its publication, by French Scholar Antoine Galland in 1717. Though originating from Syria, the tale is popular in European lands and countries like the United States and Australia, which derive from European nations. It has been retold in a thousand ways, from Galland's version to the Disney Aladdin with Robin Williams as the voice of the genie.

The set-up to the story has become a proverbial. An example is an old Twilight Zone episode. A man and his wife encounter a genie but end up squandering their wishes. And the wishes don't make them happy. So the moral is, Be content with what you have; or, If you're not happy with what you have, magic won't really change that. Another Twilight Zone episode using the genie was called I Dream of Genie. In this one, the man finds the proverbial lamp, sees a shabby genie dressed in a rumpled three-piece suit who tells him he has one wish. The man says, "Isn't that three wishes?" and the genie tells him they're unionized now and only give one wish.

He has a day to decide what it will be. He imagines being married to a famous movie star, being a celebrity, and, finally, serving as the President of the United States. But he sees the drawbacks of these and their problems. Then (and the ending still delights me) he suddenly has an epiphany. He says to his beloved dog "Old boy, you and I are going to ask for something unique." Next scene, a homeless drunk sees a lamp and rubs it. Out comes not the rumpled, bored genie who will only grant one wish, but the main character, dressed in the traditional genie costume of turban, baggy pants, and sleeveless shirt (his dog has on a turban too). He going to give the poor man three wishes.

And there are other "takes":  I Dream of Jeannie, where a man puts up with the presence of a real, live female genie who causes him endless trouble; or The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad, where the hero and his girlfriend are told how being a genie, "the slave of the lamp," is not all it's cracked up to be.

My story The Woman in the Lamp plugs into all of this.

The main character, Curtis, an illustrator with aspirations to be a famous artist of the ilk of Van Gogh, finds the lamp and the genie, a beautiful woman (not blonde, she looks Persian or Arab) informs him she is his slave and he has not three wishes but unlimited wishes. After a wish for a pizza confirms that the genie—named Nadria—is real and not a delusion, the narrator begins to use her magic. He becomes inconspicuously rich. He begins to think he can now be a world-famous artist. But here, the considerations begin to bother him.

He is disturbed by Nadria calling him "master" and herself his "slave." He ends up yielding to the desire to sexually exploit her. He also uses her to fulfill one of his hidden desires. He is enamored of a female classical guitarist named Sigourney Chantrelle. By his wish, he meets her one night in a bar and ends up sleeping with her. Things are going well … sort of.

Sigourney Chantrelle's life and career take a nosedive after her encounter with him. She goes through a divorce, which results in drinking and depression. She fades as a guitarist and ends up teaching students at a small college. He splits up with Alicia, his girlfriend, who finds out that he has been unfaithful to her. He also finds he is afraid to paint the art he wants to do—the art that will launch him from being an advertising illustrator to being a true artist. He feels remorse for sexually exploiting Narida. Magic indeed has a dark side.

Sindbad's girlfriend promises to help the Genie

Curtis wonders how he can get out of his dilemma. Then he remembers The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad, a movie he saw as a child. In the end, the captive boy genie is freed by Sindbad and his girlfriend. They are able to do this because of a cryptic message in the lamp that tells how to break the spell that has enslaved the genie. Though his source is a Hollywood movie, Chad thinks perhaps they did some research for it and there might be a shred of truth in the story. Sure enough, Nadria shrinks him down so he can enter the lamp. He finds a message in Persian, has an Iranian friend translate it, and learns how he can free Nadria. After he does, Alicia returns to him. He determines to give away all the money he has accumulated through Nadria's magic. He and Alicia will live off their salaries, meager though they are. Nadria will be free after a millennium of slavery to the lamp. Curtis has learned the true nature of magic and why it doesn't really "work" when you use it for selfish purposes.

The story appeared in the journal Aphelion. Read it here.

For additional titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #101: Beer and Time Travel: "Remembrance of the Future"

Just a few of the many Michigan craft beer brands

I saw a submissions call for stories about beer. I am a beer drinker, and the city I live in, Grand Rapids, Michigan, once tied with Charlotte, North Carolina, for the award of Best Beer City in the United States. Our town is filled with breweries, and the local brews are marvelously good. So when I saw the call for papers on beer, I wanted to contribute to the anthology. How could I come up with a unique story on the drink that is so much a part of American culture?  The answer came from Mexico.

Pulque

I had seen references to a type of Mexican beer called pulque, made of the fermented sap of the maguey plant (better known to English-speakers as agave). I had read about it, wanted to try it, but could not find it. Some research revealed that it was popular in Mexico, where one could find pulque bars, but the drink was difficult to find outside that nation because transporting or canning it purportedly ruined the flavor. Most pulque bars were local, so the industry had not gone international. I asked my daughter, who had lived and taught four years in Mexico, about the drink:  "Pulque is nasty," she told me. I guess it's an acquired taste.

But the Mexican connection gave me an idea for a story.

A local epicure and chef named Phil Ochs (he is distantly related to the late folk singer by the same name) writes and gives seminars on cooking with beer. His title is The Beervangelist. He is locally famous and makes a living by writing a column on cooking with beer, appearing on TV, and giving seminars where he teaches recipes using various brews. He has dreams of making it big and landing a TV show—becoming "a beer-cooking Rachel Ray or Emeril Lagasse." When he hears that a pulque bar, La Casa Pulque, with the curious subtitle Recuerdos del Futuro (Remembrance of the Future), has opened up, he contacts the owner, Maya Perez , who invites to organize a cooking seminar there and to come and meet her and taste pulque. He visits on a snowy night.

Aztec pyramid in Choulula, Mexico

Maya shows him around and gives him glasses of pulque to taste. After the tour, and when he has drunk several glasses, a man shows up and threatens her. He steps forward in her defense and, when he is gone, asks her who he is and if he is a gang leader. He is, she says, and tells him to be careful, he might pull of knife the next time. Phil tells her he grew up in a rough neighborhood and knows how to fight with a knife. When the bar closes, she invites him to her place. Her place is a portal that transports them back in time.  Maya tells him they are in the ancient city of Choulula, Mexico, and identifies herself: “I am Mayahuel. I am a goddess—the goddess of rising, swelling, fermentation and of pulque.”

Depiction of Mayahuel

She authenticates her goddess-hood and also convinces him, by making love to him Aztec-style, that he is not mad. She explains that she has gotten on the wrong side of Mixtotl, the man who threatened her, who is in fact a god, because she has refused to participate in the festival dedicated to him, in which a man and a woman are sacrificed. The man, the woman, and the priest who performs the sacrifice must be drunk on pulque (a historical fact I discovered doing research). Not an Aztec but a Mayan goddess, the ritual sickens her. She has escaped to the future to avoid her part in it (and by doing so to bring it to an end). Mixtotl has come for her and insisted she return to ancient times and play her part in the sacrifice. She has chosen Phil as her champion. He must defeat Mixtotl to free Maya and to end the ceremony.

Mayahuel, contemporary depiction

Supernatural stories always contain a charmed object. Maya gives Phil a knife given to her by Raugutiene, the Baltic goddess of beer and fermentation (Maya knows all the gods and goddesses of brewing), with whom she took refuge when she first escaped Mexico. It not only cuts; every cut creates a certain amount of drunkenness in one's opponent. Phil is encouraged but also knows that ancient gods were skillful warriors with supernatural powers. It would not be an easy fight.

He has discovered, in fighting with gang members in his old neighborhood, that they often went through a set of ritual moves before fighting. He won knife several fights by attacking them when they were going through their preliminary "dance." Sure enough, Mixtotl, begins a dance to begin the fight. While he is doing it, Phil gets a good cut on him. Using the skills learned on mean streets, he is able to disable Mixtotl—though the spell of the knife helps greatly. With victory, he wins freedom for Maya. The human sacrifices will end. Mixtotl will not be worshiped. And she can return to the future to run her bar—and to explore a relationship with her new-found mortal lover.

The story appeared in an anthology, Six-Pack of Stories. It is available in print. Get a copy here.

 For more good reads, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Soon, a sequel to my vampire novel, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute, will be released. It is titled Sinfonia:  A Painted House. Stay tuned.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

For additional titles see my
Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your
comments. This is my 100th
blog, so you will be commenting
on a historical artifact!

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.

Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer #99: Horror, “The Gremlin.”

I don’t write a lot of horror—some, but not much, since I prefer paranormal and fantasy writing with a little literary fiction mixed in. But I do indulge occasionally. I have written several stories for The Horror Zine, one of the best e-zines of that genre on the web. One of them was “The Gremlin.”

Most people know that Gremlins are creatures who tear up airplanes. RAF pilots in World War II reported seeing them—probably a result of fatigue and stress from flying too many missions. They began to appear in novels and stories and became famous with the publication of a book by Roald Dahl, better known for later stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and Giant Peach. They took their place in mythology, a specialized sort of elf or imp. But they weren’t always cute little creatures. Many people remember the episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” from The Twilight Zone where William Shatner sees a Gremlin on the wing of passenger plane. Everyone remembers the scene where he pulls the curtain back and the Gremlin is staring at him, its face pressed against the window.

I had been trying to write a story in response to a call for submissions of Indiana stories. After repeated attempts to write a tale about my hometown of Kokomo, Indiana (yes, there is such a place; no, it is not the place the Beach Boys mention in their song), I gave up on my original story and decided to switch it to a horror tale. For some reason, I chose a Gremlin.

Elwood Haynes and early automobile

One of Kokomo’s claims to fame is that one of the first automobiles was invented there. It was built and driven in 1906 by a man named Elwood Haynes (who also invented the process for making stainless steel). I had originally meant to write a story of his first drive down a road called Punkinvine Pike, but the story just would not set up. So I switched it to a story about a young man and young woman driving down the pike who are attached by a Gremlin.

Why would a Gremlin attack them? I’m not sure. But those creatures seem to have an aversion to mechanical things. I got the idea that Haynes’ development of automobiles ruined their peaceful environment and they still harbor a lot of chagrin toward mechanical things. They hit the gremlin, call the police, but the creature manages to get away before they police arrive. They ask Alex (the main character, Alex Haynes, is related to Elwood) what happened. He tells them they hit something, some kind of animal that looked like an orangutan but had green fur. The police ask if he has been drinking. His girlfriend’s parents take her home. Alex then is taken to the police station. He asks why. They only say they want to question him further out of “concern for public safety”—the creature he has described, they say, might be dangerous, might have escaped from a zoo.

Gremlin from Twilight Zone

At the police station he is questioned by federal agents. They tell him the blood and fur samples on his car are not related to any species except some they found on British aircraft during World War II. Then they ask him if he knows anything about Gremlins. Alex answers:  “Gremlins? Well, it was a car produced by American Motors in the 1960s. Or a monster—one of them scared the hell out of William Shatner on an old Twilight Zone episode. Other than that, I’m not real up on them.”

They reply that they are concerned because Gremlins really do seem to exist, evidence of them has been found in the Middle East, and they are concerned this may be a threat to national security. “So he might be working for Al Qaeda?” Alex asks. After more questioning, they let him go. He returns home. The Gremlin comes after him.

It breaks into his house. He has a .22 hunting rifle—not a lot of velocity—but puts enough bullets in it that the creature flees. When he jumps out the window he broke in through there is the sound of machine gun and heavy weapons fire. The local SWAT team and the federal agents are there. He knows a SWAT team member from school. She tells them they have to take him in:  standard policy for anyone they find with a weapon, and he still had the .22. There, the Federal Agents tell him they thought the creature might come back and so they and the local police staked the place out. “If this was a gremlin, we need to study it. Unleashing such creatures on our military installations, especially in the Middle East, is something we must be concerned about—at least about the possibility. We want learn as much about the creature as we can. And we don’t want the existence of the creature to leak out so that we have an uncontrollable media event on our hands. We’ll have to ask you to keep quiet about this—in fact, we’ll have to insist on it.”

Alex understands. The Federal Agents say they will pay him “compensation” for all that has happened. If the government can’t throw you in jail, he muses, they can always pay you off. He feels some sympathy for the Gremlin, who takes on the stock role of the pitiable monster—like Frankenstein or the American Werewolf in London. He wonders if Elwood Haynes perhaps first woke the creature when he drove his early automobile; if the creature perhaps hibernated but was awakened by the scent of a relative’s blood. He wonders where it all will end. He also wonders how many more gremlins will begin to awaken now.

The story appeared in Shadow Masters, a publication put out by the very fine publication, The Horror Zine. It is available through Amazon. 

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