How I Spent my Vacation

Greetings and Salutations y'all...

So for the last 6 weeks or so I've been doing a bunch of guest blogging on other sites in order to promote Infernal Machines. I'm very grateful to all the people who've lent their support, whether it was through reading and reviewing the book or simply leting me come by and shoot the shit for a while. For those of you who were unaware of the tour, here's a link to the sites that took part in the tour.

As a means of wrapping the whole thing up, I'm going to be spending the next few days posting some of the material from the tour, starting with the folowing essay. Oh, and Happy Easter everybody - Will



A lot of people who read my stuff end up asking me why I write Horror. It’s a question that’s asked of Horror writers more than most genres, when you run into somebody who pens, let’s say Westerns, or Sci-Fi the question is usually “Where do you get your ideas?”

But for Horror it’s more often than not the Why, rather than the How. I think a lot of the time this question is a politely worded variation on What the hell is wrong with your brain? While I can’t answer for other writers, the answer in my case is: I don’t know, but this might have something to do with it…

When I was a kid, on holidays my Mom and Dad would pack me and my little brother into their 1983 Buick Roadmaster station wagon — you’re probably imagining one with wood paneling and that weird roof rack thingie that served no ostensible purpose whatsoever, and you’re totally right — and drive us the 7 or so hours from Long island to New Rochelle to our Aunt Abbey’s house. I say house, but manse is probably closer to it. It was one of these sprawling 200 year old numbers with a basement that looked like a set piece straight out of one of the Saw flicks.

No matter which holiday it was there would be several traditions we would perform each time we went. For example, the dinner served was always turkey, no matter what. Easter — turkey. Christmas — turkey. Thanksgiving — well, you get the picture. A lot of families get together and gossip about each other, and I guess we were no different, but I’ve noticed looking back it wasn’t quite gossiping so much as it was story-telling. The difference may be marginal, or a matter of semantics, but here it is, anyway:

The stories were usually the same, and they involved the people who were already there, usually they were the butt of some joke or other due to either too much alcohol, or having had some sort of emotional outburst, and the stories got better the more times they were told due to various embellishments or tweaks, which I now think of as “edits”. Whoever told each story over and over had a way of refining them over the years until they had the oratory command of a field general and the timing of a stand-up comic.

Of all the story-tellers in my family, the most gifted was my Uncle Robert. He was also the one who got me to love Horror without ever once taking me to a movie or even telling me a ghost story, that I can remember.

There’s other stuff, too — if I’m going to look back and try to find whatever drove me into my life’s work, I’ve got to be at least somewhat fair about it. I saw Salem’s Lot when I was 5 years old, and to say that it had an effect on me is like saying Georgia O’ Keefe might have had an interest in flowers that looked kind of like vaginas. I used to tape crucifixes to my windows and sleep with a stuffed snake wrapped around my neck as some sort of fang shield. I broke into abandoned buildings in my neighborhood and searched for “Evidence of the Paranormal”. (What that evidence might have looked like, who’s to say, but I always envisioned some crudely spray-painted message, like: “Vampyres Here!” with a downward slanting arrow pointing to an otherwise hidden root cellar.)



I watched movies like Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was probably way too young to process them in a healthy way, but I loved every minute of them. I dug the classics, too — everything from the 1950’s BEM movies like This Island Earth and The Angry Red Planet to the Atomic Age cautionary tales like Them. I watched the Howard Hawkes version of The Thing at least a dozen times before John Carpenter’s masterful remake even existed. I dug, even at a young age, the moody surreal tension in Fritz Lang’s M, and don’t even get me started on the Universal Pictures classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.



You’ll notice I’m just talking about movies here, and not books. That’s because I saw all this crazy shit when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. Which leads us to the question why would I have started watching horror flicks — at least that many horror flicks — when I was that young? Again, we’ve got to go back to my Uncle Robert, and that fucking basement.
Man, I loved that guy. He passed away about 3 days before my 22nd birthday. I was still in the Marine Corps at the time, and I didn’t hear about it until the whole thing was over and he was buried. I never got a chance to tell him how much he meant to me…

The basement was scary enough without any of his help. The house was built on a tract of land right next to a power plant, and there was a rail station less than a quarter mile away, so it always seemed like that basement was breathing. There was a central hallway painted an institutional green with crimson trim, and it hadn’t been cleaned up since god only knows when. The house itself had been built some time at the turn of the 20th Century. There may have been 6 rooms, or 8 — three or four on either side of the Hallway from Hell. To my 4 year-old eyes, it looked about as long as a fucking football field.



This was the other holiday tradition — exploring Aunt Abbey’s basement — it was like a rite of passage for us kids to go down there, usually at some fabricated request the first few times and then as we got older, just because.

The bloody axe is the one that I remember, even if it was the tamest by later standards. This was when we were still so young that Uncle Robert had to escort us down there. I don’t know how much time he spent thinking up new ways to scare the shit out of us, and maybe the axe was the 1st stunt he ever pulled. I don’t remember a single thing I got for Christmas when I was that young the way I remember that axe.

Robert was leading us — me, my little brother and my cousin Michael — down Bram Stoker’s favorite hallway, opening up each doorway like one of those chicks on The Price is Right, saying in a low, sing-song voice “Nope, it’s not he-ere…”

Each room proved to be empty until the very last one, and I saw that axe. Laying in a single strip of muted lamplight, covered in blood, Uncle Robert screaming at all of us “Run!!!” and I don’t even think my feet hit a single step on the way back up the stairs, I swear all of us kids fucking levitated our way out of the basement by sheer force of will only to see our parents actually chuckling at our expense in the living room.



A few minutes later, Robert calmed down our hysterics by showing us the ketchup bottle, and my Mom and Dad confirming that it was in fact, a prank. Okay, so you might be thinking that’s kind of a fucked up prank to pull on a bunch of kids, but from then on every time we went to Aunt Abbey’s house the trip to the basement was as integral a part of the whole thing as the turkey dinner.
The reason I write the stories I do is because my family taught me that, sometimes, love means scaring the shit out of little kids and then having a good laugh about it afterwards.

External Links... plus Sulawesi, Isle of Nightmares

'Sup.

It's been kind of a busy month. I participated in Kayla Curry's Blogger Book Fair this weekend, and so most of my extra-curricular focus has been on doing some stuff on other blog sites. To be more specific I wrote a flash fiction piece for Thomas Winship's Vaempires site, which you can check here... Along with my own humble effort, there's a couple of real doozeys by some other, very talented writers.

I also did two interviews, one with Beck Sherman at Dying To Write and another with Brandon R Luffman at his site on Wordpress.

Last week I wrote a guest post for the excellent Armand Rosamilia, but I'm having some trouble linking to it currently. So instead, I'll just throw up some of it here. If you get a chance, definitely check out some of Armand's work. I'm a big fan of his Miami Spy Games zombie series.

So without further ado, here's an excerpt from the post I did for him: Sulawesi,Isle of Nightmares


It’s quite obvious that Mother Nature hates us. And I’m not talking about that quiet seething hatred you may encounter from time to time when you crash a dinner party and everybody is just too gosh-darned polite to ask you to leave (or is that just me?). No, this is the crazy, jabbering breed of hatred that a homeless lunatic might have for the guy who stole his imaginary pet dragon. If you have any doubts about this, look no further than the Indonesian Isle of Sulawesi, where scientists have recently discovered some new and objectively terrifying level-ups to some of the most common animals on earth.

For example, the Sulawesi Babirusa is a wild pig that is fairly common in this region. While the males tend to travel solo, the wimmin’ and chillun’ will sometimes travel in packs numbering close to 100. The males can grow up to 100 kilograms (that’s 220 lbs for us non-communists) and run at a top speed of 35 mph.
Oh and there’s this:

That second pair of tusks is not only the most WTF set of secondary teeth you’ll see outside of the Alien franchise; if left unchecked, they will curve right back into the boar’s skull, pierce his brain and kill him. So, to recap, they are a massive, fast-as-hell breed of omnivore with a built-in biological imperative to destroy as much stuff as possible, as often as possible.

If pigs aren’t your thing, that’s okay. Say hi to the Garuda Wasp –

About roughly the size of a small hummingbird, these fellows are characterized by an unusually thick, armor-like exoskeleton rendering them almost impossible to squoosh. Also, their massive mandibles - which they tend to wrap around their heads when not in use - are twice as long as their front forelegs. There’s just something a little too horrifying for words about a species that will wear its own jaws as some sort of jaunty scarf, but then again what can you say about an animal whose venom is well-documented at turning some of its victims into zombies?

But, for me at least, this is the true face of horror:

That’s not a snake, it’s one of 9 species of fanged frogs that scientists have found recently around Sulawesi. Or, to be more accurate, one of 9 species of rapidly adapting fanged frogs that are taking over the island. This is, and has been the stuff of my nightmares ever since I saw this as a kid:

At least in the movie, they had the decency to not give the things goddamn fangs, but Mother Nature has no such compunctions, on account of – like I said earlier – she totally hates us.

More Notes from the Refractory Zone

Greetings and Salutations, y'all...

I realize I've been kinda quiet so far this month. To be fair, there's been a lot going on as I am getting ready to do a bit of guest blogging for some really excellent people in the next few weeks. Here's a quick shout out with some links to their stuff:

Thomas Winship is the author of the Vaempires series. I'm currenty reading the 1st one of the bunch, and it's a lot of fun. Think post-dystopian/neo-splatterpunk/dark fantasy with some vampires thrown in for good measure. Within the 1st half dozen pages of the story there's enough bloodshed to cover a small stadium, and it's very well written. You can check out more about his work here.

Armand Rosamilia is the creator of the Miami Spy Games: Russian Zombie Gun series, as well as the Keyport Cthulhu anthology and more short stories than you could hurl a chainsaw at. Here's a link to his website.

Also, Brandon Luffman and Beck Sherman will both be doing interviews with me in the next couple of weeks, so by all means please check them out as well. I really can't thank all of these very talented and hard working people enough for their time and effort in helping me to promote Infernal Machines

This week I've been doing a lot of research on the Densus Church, which is one of the oldest churches still standing in Romania. Portions of the church date back to the 2nd century AD - it is believed that these earliest parts of the building started out in life as either a fortress or an early Pagan temple. Pagan, in this case at least, is kind of a catch-all label for the Dacians; a Proto-Romanian tribe of Indo-Europeans who roamed the Carpathian Mountains several thousand years ago. Many Dacians and Thracians were at least henotheists, of not outright monotheists; they worshipped a god by the name of Zalmoxis. It is believed that when the Romans conquered this region, they converted what is now known as the Densus Church into a temple for Mars, the God of War.

Later portions of the Densus Church were built in the 7th Century, with further additions added in the 13th century. It is believed that the Christian Frescoes that adorn the interior of the church were painted sometime in the 1500s over older, pagan-themed murals. Most of them depict Jesus Christ in traditional Romanian garb.

The dominant feature is a large, monolithic stone tower built right above the naos of the Church. Over the altar is a massive stone carving of two lions with their backs to each other, with their tails entwined. It is believed that this part of the church was built as a mausoleum to the Roman General Longinus Maximus, who once governed the territory now known as Romania.

And Now, an Update from the Good Folks at Immortal Ink Publishing...

(Will's notes: I'd like to take a moment to publicly thank the creative and talented S.M. Boyce. Her tireless efforts are a large reason that Infernal Machines is doing as well as it is. She's also a fantastic author herself - if any of you are into the Fantasy Genre, check out Litchgates and Treason, which are books 1 & 2 of the Grimoire Fantasy Trilogy.

Anyway, IIP is putting together a promotional tour for the release of my book, and I am grateful to all of them for doing so. Click here for the latest info on said tour. Cheers, Will)

The London Aquarium Part 1 - Zazel and The Great Farini

To understand, to properly appreciate what this 13 year old girl actually did, one needs to find a regulation size football field, and on a clear spring day just stand under one of the goalposts. It’s not enough to just envision this - one night be able to get the gist of what 300 linear feet might look like, he or she can easily enough intellectualize the distance from goalpost to goalpost. You can imagine, or put the right hemisphere of your brain to good use and mathematically postulate the height required for a mass of 90 lbs of screaming, bent for oblivion, human tissue and hair and bones to sail from end to end in a single pass – but nobody of sound mind can equivocate the arithmetic involved with the sheer blind terror that begins to boil in the base of the genitalia and diffuses through the guts and into the bone marrow at the prospect of such a hell trip until you actually meditate on the distance with your eyeballs. And that distance you’re looking at, that’s just blank space. If you fail to hit that dismayingly small safety net on the other side, there’s nothing but grass. When Zazel made her first jump in 1878, it was over a sweaty, filthy mosh pit of gamblers and drunks and prostitutes, over a couple of elephants and a brackish tank wherein floated the bloated corpse of a dead whale.

And maybe, just maybe, she sailed in a perfect single arc over His Satanic Majesty himself, Jack the Motherfucking Ripper, as the voices began to set in on him, whispering.

The London Royal Aquarium opened on January 22nd, 1876 among much fanfare and the absolute noblest of intensions. A massive, lushly appointed hall capped with a multifaceted crystal dome that dazzled on a sunny day like a jewel visible from space, it sat immediately to the west of Westminster Abbey with the intended purpose of being a gathering mecca for the highest minds of the Free World, a sort of cognoscenti mecca for the Pre-Mensa world. Displays of fine art and exhibits of the latest developments in modern science were to stand hand in hand like none had ever seen since the very height of Athens itself, heralding a New Golden Age.

Only, nobody really gave a shit. They’d tried this sort of thing earlier in London at the Crystal Palace Assembly in 1851, and even with the urgency of the 6-month expiration date that had been attached to it, the thing barely broke even. The Royal Aquarium had been built as a sort of permanent structure, and yet within the first few months, it was already hemorrhaging money like a big fleshy sieve.
Part of the problem was that it tried to be too many things to too many people. Imagine if the biggest frigging Wal-Mart you ever saw suddenly sprouted caterpillar legs, high-tailed it to Las Vegas and grudgefucked the Circus-Circus. The demon baby that would result from such an act would no doubt resemble the Royal Aquarium, which boasted among other things, 16 massive fish tanks, a skating rink, symphony hall, art gallery, hair-dressers shop and never you bloody mind the cacophonous myriad of kiosks, each with a different set of wares to hawk, many of them competing side by side, with the mindset of whoever could shout just a little bit louder would edge out their competition.

How on earth anybody thought that the Arts and Sciences might have a chance of flourishing under such conditions is a mystery, and yet some of the most successful minds in Victorian England were backing this endeavor, folks like Henry Labouchere and Arthur Sullivan (he of the Gilbert and Sullivan composing duo) were on the goddamn board of directors.

An expensive system of moving and filtering fresh and sea water through the massive tanks built into the floors had been completed, and yet none of them ever became the teeming houses of sea life that had been the LRA’s original intent. The dead whale, however was on full display by the spring of 1877, floating in a brackish hell of ichor and eels that were ever feasting and gorging and fattening themselves on the great hulking pile of rotten flesh, as an endless looping circle of carrion flies lit and took off from the bubbling surface.

Enter William Leonard Hunt, A.K.A. the Great Farini. Hunt was born in 1938 in New York to a pair of 2nd generation working class parents. From an early age, he knew he was born to be a circus performer. Against all odds, he put together street performances. As early as the age of 8 years old, Hunt began staging impromptu street performances in his transplanted hometown of Bowmanville, Canada. More often than not, these acts would end up with Hunt’s father breaking the show up and literally chasing young William down the street and lashing the shit out of his back as they ran with a beefy leather belt.

The man who would become The Great Farini took these public beatings in stride, going on to become an accomplished swimmer, diver and gymnast. He moved on to weightlifting and kettle bells and began staging much larger strongman acts later on as a teenager. In 1859, he performed his first high-wire act, tiptoeing his way across a tight rope suspended above the Ganaraska River in Port Hope. He called himself “Signor Farini.” Less than a year later, he would cement his reputation as a major player in the Circus business when he took his tightrope act to a slightly larger venue, that being Niagara Falls. Yes, that Niagara Falls.

Not only is Niagara Falls the tallest waterfall in all of North America, the vertical drop being over 165 feet from the top of the Horseshoe Falls into the basin, but its combined flow, dumping the water from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario via the Niagara River, it is the largest and most powerful in the world. It will kill the fuck out of you.

And yet in 1860, Hunt not only crossed the thing on a tightrope, but did so while wearing a hand-cranked washing machine strapped to his fucking back. This became a weekly performance for the man who would become The Great Farini, and then twice a week, upping the ante on his stunts by performing somersaults and flips on the tightrope, or wearing a blindfold, or even carrying the occasional volunteer across the gulf. In 1864, as Hunt/Farini was attempting to cross the tightrope while wearing a pair of stilts, the Law of Averages decided it had just about enough of his antics and flicked him into the white foaming abyss.

Somehow the Great Farini survived. Once he recovered from getting his ass kicked by Poseidon, he decided to travel the world. He took his act to Europe and then the Middle East. According to some sources, he may have also crossed the Kalahari Desert on foot. In 1866, he moved to London and quickly gained fame as being one of the greatest circus performers in Europe.

However, kicking the Grim Reaper in the balls and stealing his lunch money is a young man’s game, and by 1869 The Great Farini moved from being the performer to training and managing circus talent. Farini has been credited with inventing the trick known as the “Human Cannonball,” but it was a 14 year old girl named Rossa Matilda Richter who took that 1st flight across the London Royal Aquarium.

Verne Nash & The Kansas City Massacre

(Will's notes: For those of you who may have been unaware, my book Infernal Machines is now available to the public. You can pick it up either on Amazon or at Barnes&Noble(.com) .

Which is great. I mean, I couldn't be happier about getting the book published. But when I started this blog, I always wanted it to be the sort of place where folks could come by, have a laugh and maybe find out about some cool shit they never knew - you know, the secondary reason for the existence of the Internet [The primary reason being, of course, Porn.]

So, with that in mind, I'd like to get back to the business of blogging about the weird shit that I either come across while researching stuff for other sites, or otherwise just pops into my head due to whatever bad chemistry I have cooking up there. This week is some stuff about the Kansas City Massacre. Rock on.)

Verne Nash & The Kansas City Massacre

So in the 1930’s, Hot Springs Arkansas was kind of like the Post-Prohibition Era Vegas. Not current Vegas mind you, but more like the Meyer Lansky/Bugs Moran era Vegas, only with way, way more syphilis. It was a favorite retreat of Al Capone along with the rest of the Chicago Syndicate, and the Hot Springs PD had absolutely no problem looking out for the gangsters as long as they were funneling a Mississippi River-sized stream of cash into the burgeoning villa’s array of crooked casinos...

Whorehouses...

...And oddly enough, bait and tackle shops.

(Fact: You could ask for a “Red Wiggler” at 2/3rds of the aforementioned businesses and get, well… something)

For about 10 years, a guy named Frank “Jelly” Nash was inconveniencing much of the Midwest by robbing every third or fourth business he walked into and then more often than not shooting his co-conspirators in the back after the robberies were complete. While there’s no confirmation on whether or not he was actually in fact The Joker, Nash still maintained enough underworld clout to establish a hiding place for himself in Hot Springs once Federal Agents began looking for him in earnest.

FBI Agents Frank Smith and F. Joseph Lackey discovered Nash’s whereabouts and enlisted the help of a decorated Oklahoma cop named Otto Reed to hunt down Nash and bring him to justice. While this might seem like an uncharacteristic merging of law enforcement jurisdictions, bear in mind that in 1933 most FBI agents were still not permitted to carry firearms.

Somehow, Agents Smith and Lackey were able to Jedi-mind-trick Frank Nash into cuffing himself and climbing into their car, after which the Agents and their Police escort wisely decided to get the fuck out of Hot Springs, and fast. However, Nash’s gangland connections were already on the line with Verne Miller, who was pretty much the Post-Prohibition Era’s answer to Anton Sigur.

(Imagine this guy, only without all the warmth...)

(Told ya so.)

Miller had already made his bones as a competent Yegg Man (which was Post-Prohibition Era slang for Bank Robber), having worked with both the Barker Gang and the infamous Machine Gun Kelly, although unlike them, his name wasn’t splashed across the papers. This may have been due to the fact that his moonlighting as a hit man with the New York based Murder Incorporated required him to stay somewhat “low-pro”. Verne Miller was one industrious evil motherfucker.

More likely though, his anonymity was on account of before any of that stuff began, he was the Sheriff of Huron, South Dakota.

Well, Nash’s underworld connections asked Miller to handle the situation with the Federal Agents, and handle it the former Sheriff did, intercepting the arrest party at the Kansas City Union Station with enough hardware to bring down fucking Robocop and basically shooting everyone to smithereens, including Frank Nash, whom he’d been dispatched originally to rescue.

The nationwide manhunt for Verne Miller lasted more than a year, culminating with a sit-down between the Chicago SAC and Syndicate Mob Boss Frank Nitti, after enough leads confirmed Miller’s whereabouts to be somewhere in the Windy City. Well aware that the Chicago Mob also had just about enough of Miller’s antics, the Feds asked Nitti to keep the Mob out of it, and just let the feds handle this one. Nitti, being the helpful sort of Kingpin, said of course, no problem.

Coincidentally, about a week later the FBI did locate Miller in a vacant lot not far from Bridgeport, laying naked next to a hammer and missing most of his head.

(He died as he lived, pretty much up to his armpits in blood.)

We Made It

First of all, I'd like to congratulate the Planet Earth. You foiled Niburu's plan to collide with you - causing an extinction level event - by sailing in a smooth elliptical arc around the sun. That's some pretty fancy fucking maneuvering.

Secondly... Suck it, Mayans! Yeah, you heard me. Nice try. We'll see you again in another 5,200 years. And by the way - Faktun??? That's what you call this big important cycle? I'd spend a few hours explaining just how objectively hilarious that word sounds but I don't swing at soft pitches.

And third, let's all just take a moment and appreciate how little the stupid factor actually got ratcheted up on Friday. I remember watching that wretched Roland Emmerich flick about the Apocalypse (there was nothing else on Redbox that night, don't judge me) and just envisioning a sea of hillbillies descending pell-mell on the local Walmart on, like, December the 19th or whatever, just destroying the place in a mad search for batteries, bottles of Mountain Dew and Hungry Man Fried Chicken dinners. (You know, because they're hillbillies. They're not going to drink bottled water - I've seen The Learning Channel.) Anyway, none of that stuff happened. So, uh, good work guys.

Anyway, something pretty amazing did happen on 12/21/12. My book Infernal Machines came out on Amazon and made the Top 20 Hot New Release list within the 1st 24 hours. For those of you who helped put it there, you have my eternal gratitude. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, here's a couple of links that'll help.


Anyway, enough about the book stuff for now. Today I'd like to talk about another couple of subjects that are near and dear to my heart:

Beer

& Dogs

And also how utterly fucking awesome New Zealanders are. Like a lot of industrialized nations, New Zealand is dealing with a dog surplus problem. There's a lot of stray dogs and abandoned dogs and dogs that need to be rescued and stuff, and to that end just like here in the U.S. they've got dog shelters. However, apparently New Zealand does not suffer from the same surplus of lawyers as we do here in the States, because that's really the only way I could see one shelter in particular being able to pull off what they did...

...They taught a bunch of dogs how to drive.

As in, cars. As in, there are dogs in New Zealand that can actually drive cars now.

If you click on the above article you can actually watch the video of the trainers working with the dogs. The point of teaching them this trick, aside from just general sheer awesomeness, was to demonstrate that rescue dogs are every bit as capable of learning how to live in your home as, say raising a puppy from birth. The driving dogs were all adult rescues, thus finally disproving the adage about old dogs and new tricks.

In all seriousness, I love this story for so many reasons. First of all, my older dog is a rescue, and I got him when he was already a couple off years old, and horribly abused. He's one of the gentlest sweetest things you've ever seen and... Wait, wait - I know I'm bordering on just grossing some of you out with all of this sappy stuff, but you haven't heard my idea yet...

Train your dog to be your designated driver.

Just think how great it would be, no matter how skunked you got at your favorite watering hole, afterwards just stumble outside, squeeze into your car and mumble "Home, Rex..."

No more taxis, no more debating with your drinking buddies over whose turn it is, and besides, if your dogs are anything like mine, the only thing they like better than roadtrips is a nice brand new piece of furniture to chew on.

Yes sir, there's a new year on the horizon, fraught with brand new possibilities. So thank you, you crazy Kiwi dog-rescuing sons of bitches, for making the world just a little more wonderful.