Scary Stories for a Good Cause: Ben Monroe on "The Quarry"
Tell us a little about your story, “The Quarry.”
Sure! “The Quarry” is a short story about a bunch of kids out messing around in the height of summer—and then things go south for them. It was inspired by memories of goofing around with my best friends when we were kids, swimming in Lake Anza in the Berkeley hills, as well as a camping trip I took with my family a few years ago on the Eel River.
By L.S. Johnson (https://traversingz.com/)
Ben Monroe grew up in Northern California and has spent most of his life there. He lives in the East Bay area with his wife and two children. His most recent published works are In the Belly of the Beast and Other Tales of Cthulhu Wars and the graphic novel Planet Apocalypse.
Tell us a little about your story, “The Quarry.”
Sure! “The Quarry” is a short story about a bunch of kids out messing around in the height of summer—and then things go south for them. It was inspired by memories of goofing around with my best friends when we were kids, swimming in Lake Anza in the Berkeley hills, as well as a camping trip I took with my family a few years ago on the Eel River.
Strangely enough (and of course it’s part of the fun of writing) I didn’t really consciously go into those memories when I began writing it. I had an image in my head of the titular quarry, and of something that might be lurking in the depths of it. And as I started writing, it all came together.
Reading “The Quarry,” I was reminded of many classic kids/teen movies from the ‘80s—The Goonies and The Lost Boys, for instance, as well as the recent Stranger Things. Was that a conscious association on your part when writing the story?
Not at first. When I started, it was just a story about kids going out on an adventure. And then the more I worked on it, the more I realized it would be fun to set it in the ‘80s. I guess primarily because back in the ‘80s I was the age these kids are in the story. After making that decision, I went back and reinforced the time a little with a few pop culture references.
But at the same time, ‘80s horror is my jam. I grew up in Berkeley in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and was a horror, sci-fi, and fantasy nut. The Lost Boys is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I’ve watched The Goonies countless times as an adult and a teen (it’s one of my kids’ favorite movies, too!). I don’t think writing it like those types of stories was really a conscious effort on my part, but there’s no way I can say they weren’t influential.
Another ‘80s story I had to keep in mind when I wrote “The Quarry” was Stephen King’s “The Raft,” which I first experienced as part of the film Creepshow 2. When I was writing my story, I was constantly thinking about King’s piece, making sure I wasn’t treading the same waters.
What is your relationship to California, and does California influence your work?
I’ve lived in California almost my entire life. Shortly after I was born my family moved to San Diego, where we lived for a while before we moved to the UK for another year or so. When I was three, we moved back to Berkeley, and I’ve been living in the East Bay Area ever since.
Northern California has been my stomping grounds for nearly fifty years and has both consciously and probably unconsciously influenced my stories. My novel In the Belly of the Beast takes place in the Sierras, with flashback moments to events taking place in San Francisco, Oakland, and Folsom. My forthcoming story “A Hell of a View” starts off in Oakland, and strolls down the coast to Santa Cruz.
“The Quarry” is set in Alcosta, a fictitious city I’ve been fiddling with for a while now. Call it the “Arkham” or “Castle Rock” of Northern California, if you will. It’s inspired by many of my favorite places in NorCal, including some Berkeley weirdness, the urban, industrial areas of Oakland, and a smattering of Central Coast wilderness.
As writers, we constantly use our imaginations, sometimes in terrifying ways. But can you imagine a hopeful future for California? What might that future look like?
Absolutely. California is a land of dreamers, and innovators. We had the Gold Rush of the 1800s, created the Hollywood entertainment industry in the early 1900s, and at the end of the century we started the tech boom. We’re the people that keep changing the world, and everyone’s waiting to see what we do next.
I find it interesting that when Spanish settlers first came to the Ohlone territories back in the 1600s they found it so amazingly beautiful, they named it after a fairy tale land from a fantasy/romance novel of the time (Amadis De Gaul – https://www.californiafrontier.net/name-california/). Are we the only place in the world named for a work of literature? Beats me. But I think it’s astoundingly fitting.
Where can readers find more of your work?
My website www.benmonroe.com has links to my Amazon author page, as well as my blog which I update semi-occasionally. I’m also pretty active on Twitter @_BenMonroe_.
NEXT POST ON MONDAY 5/20/19, SCARY STORIES FOR A GOOD CAUSE: Erika Mailman ON “SEVEN SECONDS”
Scary Stories for a Good Cause: John McCallum Swain on "The Wolf Who Never Was"
Tell us a little about your story, “The Wolf Who Never Was.”
A few years ago I saw an open call from April Moon Books, an outfit that has come up with some really fun themes for their anthologies. They were looking for stories inspired by the old Hammer horror films I watched religiously on TV as a child. Hammer cranked out monster flicks from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s, and they played on TV nonstop when I was small. Some of them were corny, and some of them are now classics. Hammer’s lurid, titillating and bloody reboots of Frankenstein, Dracula …
By L.S. Johnson (https://traversingz.com/)
John McCallum Swain has lived in Canada, Germany, Scotland, and the United States, where he now shares his home with a small herd of cats. His tales, ranging from graphic horror to alternate history, have appeared in Weird Menace: Volume 2, Spawn of the Ripper, Peeling Back the Skin, Blood Sweat & Fears, The Stars at My Door, Death’s Garden, and many other anthologies. His own titles include the horror and speculative fiction collections My Vile Bounty and Califhorrornia, and the novellas Smile and The Unicorn Man.
Tell us a little about your story, “The Wolf Who Never Was.”
A few years ago I saw an open call from April Moon Books, an outfit that has come up with some really fun themes for their anthologies. They were looking for stories inspired by the old Hammer horror films I watched religiously on TV as a child. Hammer cranked out monster flicks from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s, and they played on TV nonstop when I was small. Some of them were corny, and some of them are now classics. Hammer’s lurid, titillating and bloody reboots of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy made international stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and they scared the hell out of me when I first saw them. I knew I could write a good story based on that material. The challenge was writing something different, something with a twist. That’s when I began to think of behind-the-scenes scenarios; what if there was an actual goddamned monster on the set of a monster movie? And the production in this case is Hammer’s only werewolf movie, The Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.
And I had several questions for this one, but my most pressing (and rhetorical) question is: why Oliver Reed?
I chose Oliver Reed for two reasons. First, I really like Oliver Reed. I grew up watching his movies, and his turn as Bills Sykes in the 1968 musical Oliver! horrified me as much as any Hammer horror movie monster. Hey, cut me some slack, I was about 8 when I saw it, and to be fair, it’s said that Reed was so effective at portraying a menacing bastard that he terrified the children he was working with on the set. In other words, he scared the ever-loving shit out of little kids and got paid for it. That’s a special kind of awesome that I really appreciate. Also, alcoholism has irreparably impacted my own life, and as we saw with Reed’s death during the filming of Gladiator, it’s a sordid, awful addiction that takes will and reason to overcome. Oliver couldn’t do that, and since most horror writers write horror to work out shit they are dealing with either on the surface or way down deep, I thought I’d try and suggest a noble reason why Oliver Reed died as he did, to redeem him despite his tragic flaws.
What is your relationship to California, and does California influence your work?
I was born in Canada, and since I was a military brat I bounced around a lot. I’ve seen most of Europe and lived in Scotland for a few years, but the longest I’ve ever been in one place is in California. This really is the land of dreams. Not all of them come true, but it’s a great place to keep trying to achieve them. My first book of short stories is set here. Califhorrornia: Dark Tales from the Golden State (that goddamned title looks better in print than it sounds rolling off the tongue) is available on Amazon.
As writers, we constantly use our imaginations, sometimes in terrifying ways. But can you imagine a hopeful future for California? What might that future look like?
California is the most culturally diverse state in the union. Some people see that as a scary thing. I see it as a strength. With diversity comes many different points of view. With different points of view come as yet unimagined solutions to the problems we face as a state and a nation. All we really need is water. If we can get our act together with serious water rationing, solar or wind or wave powered and marine life friendly desalination plants, use gray water effectively, and experiment with towing glaciers to port cities, we can survive on our own. Then again, it’s life’s more awful scenarios that are bread and butter for writers—one of the stories in Califhorrornia is about the devastating effects a water shortage has on the residents of a single street.
Where can readers find more of your work?
I’m working on a series of horror stories that take place in my fictional Ottawa Valley town of Kitchissippi. The stories are all set in the ‘70s and will ultimately explain why Kitchissippi became a ghost town by 1981. The stories focus on the children of Kitchissippi; the things they fear are not supernatural, but perversions of nature and the human mind, so there are no vampires, werewolves or zombies—most of my monsters are human. I have been extremely fortunate to have Kitchissippi tales appear in Blood, Sweat, and Fears: Horror Inspired by the 1970s, Death’s Garden, and Peel Back the Skin. The foundation of those 70s horror tales is my novella The Unicorn Man, my take on the Frankenstein mythos that first appeared in 4rchetypes: Modern Interpretations of Classic Horror. All of these tales and more can be found on Amazon, at the link below. Thanks for reading!
NEXT POST ON MONDAY 5/13/19, SCARY STORIES FOR A GOOD CAUSE: BEN MONROE ON “THE QUARRY”
Scary Stories for a Good Cause: Nancy Etchemendy on "Cooking with Rodents"
Tell us a little about your story, “Cooking with Rodents.”
There are a few life forms on our planet that almost universally elicit a response of horror in humans. Some people can keep their cool in the presence of spiders, scorpions, and snakes, though it takes an effort. Rats, though—I’ve seen even exterminators shiver at the prospect of entering a dark crawlspace that smells like rats. It’s an unsurprising fact about horror writers that we sometimes sit around thinking about the most disgusting things imaginable, and often stories come out of this process. Eating a rat is about the most disgusting thing I can think of doing. I wrote this story 25 years ago …
By L.S. Johnson (https://traversingz.com/)
www.etchemendy.com
Nancy Etchemendy’s novels, short fiction, and poetry have appeared regularly for the past 40 years, both in the US and abroad. Her work has earned a number of awards, including three Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award. Cat in Glass and Other Tales of the Unnatural, her collection of short dark fantasy, was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Tell us a little about your story, “Cooking with Rodents.”
There are a few life forms on our planet that almost universally elicit a response of horror in humans. Some people can keep their cool in the presence of spiders, scorpions, and snakes, though it takes an effort. Rats, though—I’ve seen even exterminators shiver at the prospect of entering a dark crawlspace that smells like rats. It’s an unsurprising fact about horror writers that we sometimes sit around thinking about the most disgusting things imaginable, and often stories come out of this process. Eating a rat is about the most disgusting thing I can think of doing. I wrote this story 25 years ago, and it still makes me feel like throwing up (in a good way) every time I read it. Heh heh ... maybe that means it’s a classic.
Even for a horror story, the premise is unusual. What inspired you to write the story?
I can’t take much credit for inspiration on this one, because I wrote it on assignment for an obscure anthology, “Rat Tales,” edited by Jon Gustafson, rest his soul. Each story in the anthology had to begin with the sentence, “There were rats in the soufflé again.” A story that starts with a line like that could go in a lot of different directions. But it seemed to me that anyone who’s using rat meat in a soufflé must be trying hard to keep up appearances in a pretty desperate situation. I decided on the Julia Child approach because ... well, people use French cuisine to keep up appearances even in normal circumstances. Plus, I like to cook, and I wanted to see if I could make a rat soufflé sound delicious. I got permission from Jon to change the first sentence to present tense because the story is a recipe, and recipes are traditionally written in present tense. And off I went.
What is your relationship to California, and does California influence your work?
In 1976, when my husband and I were still in our twenties, we moved to California from our hometown (Reno, Nevada) so he could do graduate work at Stanford. I wasn’t happy about the move; I had a lot of preconceived ideas about California and Californians, most of them negative. But before the first winter was over, I was in love with my new life. I remember driving down Highway 1 in a convertible with the top down on a February day (with a goat and a three-legged dog in the backseat, but that’s another story). We stopped for artichoke soup in Pescadero, then headed to the beach, where we went tidepooling and got sunburned. All the while, I knew that back in Reno there was a foot of snow on the ground. I was sure I must be dreaming or had died and gone to heaven.
All of the places where I’ve spent time influence my work, including California, where I’ve now spent most of my life. For me, setting is one of the most powerful elements of any story. It molds the characters and the nature of their lives. It dictates what you can and can’t do with the plot, and it heavily influences the tone and voice of a piece. Painting a setting with authenticity and confidence is all about getting the details right. So the most convincing fiction is set in places the writer knows well. Given this, it’s unsurprising that a good many of my stories are set in Northern California, where the details come naturally to me from long experience. Because the geography and even the weather of Northern California is so rich and varied, it’s a large and flexible sandbox for a writer to work in. It doesn’t matter what kind of story I want to write. There’s a California setting that will suit it.
The location for “Cooking with Rodents” is unnamed. We know only that it’s a place where there is (and probably has been for some time) broad economic inequality and a tacit class system. It’s a place where there are rats and the vestiges of a farm-to-table culture. It’s set in a near future transformed by climate change and social upheaval, where the vestigial wealthy cling desperately to remnants of their old way of life. I was living in and thinking of California when I wrote it.
As writers, we constantly use our imaginations, sometimes in terrifying ways. But can you imagine a hopeful future for California? What might that future look like?
I’ve just finished reading The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, a slim but terrifying piece of nonfiction by David Wallace-Wells, a respected American journalist. He has compiled and analyzed an enormous amount of scientific work and extrapolative analyses by various corporations, non-profits, and government agencies from local to federal. Wallace-Wells does the best job so far of making a compelling case for immediate action. The book spells out clearly the ways in which climate change is already affecting our lives and the increasingly disruptive ways in which it will affect us going forward. I’ve had trouble sleeping since I first picked up the book.
The best science predicts that we are on the cusp of a time in which “weather patterns” will be an oxymoron. If we do nothing to cut the amount of greenhouse gas we are dumping into the atmosphere, we can throw the old term “normal” out the window. In California, each new year will bring higher tides, more flooding, and more wildfires like the Camp Fire. With each slight increase in the temperature, more species will go extinct, and those that survive will move further north. This includes humans, and it goes a long way toward explaining the number of refugees we’re seeing almost everywhere on the planet.
So, can I imagine a hopeful future for California? Yes, I can. In fact, I can imagine a pleasing future for California. Even Wallace-Wells thinks we can still pull ourselves out of the fire. The catch is that we have to start immediately. “We have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all,” he says. “A carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.” In other words, a hopeful future for California—and the world—hinges on our ability to change the way we’ve been doing things. All we have to do is pull together, reach consensus about what needs to be done, and then find leaders who can help us make it happen. That may be hard to imagine (which might be why we see so many people writing dystopias). But stranger acts of public will have come to pass, especially when people have felt their lives and their children’s lives are at stake, as is now the case.
Where can readers find more of your work?
A complete list of my publications is available at www.etchemendy.com.
Next post on Monday 5/6/19, Scary Stories for a Good Cause: John McCallum Swain on “The Wolf Who Never Was”
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