Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales Read online

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ED BRYANT, DOUG LEWIS…

  AND THE MEMORY OF TOMI.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: The Passion of the Norm

  Introduction: Learning The Trade

  Little Bookshop of Horrors

  MR. FOX

  Hard-Boiled Horror

  THE BADDEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE HOUSE

  Rejection, Resolve and Respect

  BLACK LEATHER KITES

  The First Dance

  SAVE THE LAST DANCE

  Building Your Sandcastle

  SANDPRINT

  Seeing the Wizard

  VESSELS

  On Zombies … And Hunger

  IN BEAUTY, LIKE THE NIGHT

  A Keyboard Built For One

  BODY BAGS

  You Can’t Write With a Bowling Ball

  COSMOS

  An Oxblood Stetson Hat

  STACKALEE

  A Couple of Wolves At the Door

  TOOTH AND NAIL

  Coming Soon: The Small Press Apocalypse

  THE ENTOURAGE

  The Care and Feeding of First Novels

  KISS OF DEATH

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  A Few Recommendations

  DR. FRANKENSTEIN’S SECRETS OF STYLE

  A Word From the Editor[s]

  TREATS

  Writing For Them & Writing For You

  VELVET FANGS

  The 3” x 5” Secret to Good Outlines

  ¡CUIDADO!

  The Macbeth School of Horror

  WHEN THE FRUIT COMES RIPE

  It’s the Steak, Not the Sizzle

  WALKERS

  When Opportunity Knocks…

  THE SEASON OF GIVING

  Afterword: Head, Heart & Guts

  Foreword: The Passion of the Norm

  By Edward Bryant

  Even in this enlightened 21st century, out here in the expansive American West, that once endless track stretching from the Mississippi across the Rockies and the Sierras through California to the Pacific, people sometimes stare a little askance at us guys who wax enthusiastic when describing some other guy's passion. Tough cookies. As Norman Mailer would have once said, a long, long time ago,"Fug'em if they can't take a joke."

  Norm Partridge's passion ain't no joke. For quite a few years I've been telling writing students and anybody else who'll listen that aspiring writers need, at the very least, talent (duh!), a capacity for back-breaking work, a thick skin when it comes to discouragement, ambition, a grounding in common sense as well as a peek into the visionary, some real experience in terms of how the world and the people within it work, and the rare ability to attract lightning from a clear sky. And one more thing. Passion. Passion is heightened energy, conviction, vigor. Passion can make a bad writer's work passable. It turns a good writer's work unforgettable.

  I first encountered the passion of the Norm in the early '90s, during the heyday of Doug and Tomi Lewis' Roadklll Press and their retail store, Little Bookshop of Horrors. I spent a lot of time hanging out there, talking books and writing, and avoiding work (I never said I always practiced what I preached). One Saturday afternoon in 1991, Doug Lewis told me to check out some guy's story in the George Hatch anthology, Guignoir. The story title was the same as the venue. The author was one Norman Partridge. I had never heard of him. Doug's recommendation wasn't really a suggestion; it was more like an order.

  Norman Partridge was not a terrific byline, I thought. Norm's surname had that pop-culture family ring about it. Brady, Manson, Partridge. For a solid ten years after encountering "Guignoir," every time I heard Norm's surname, "Come On, Get Happy" arranged for Chinese opera would play in my head.

  But the story was worth it. I once described "Guignoir" as " ... a quirky novel's worth of bizarre characters, kinky behavior, and a mythic distinctively American landscape, all in the space of a novelette. Damned Impressive." And I'll repeat that because I still feel the same way more than a decade later. Damned impressive.

  I agreed wholeheartedly when Doug and Tomi determined to publish Norm's first story collection. Roadkill, up until that time, had only done exquisite but modestly sized chapbooks. The collection would be the press's first perfect-bound trade paperback. As the five new stories and pair of reprints rolled in, I arm-wrestled with the Lewises for the chance to read them. We collectively talked, sometimes argued, about the sequence of contents, the art (Alan Clark's spectacularly gruesome wraparound showing a sequence of heads skewered on knife-blade barbie), and all the rest of the publishing process. I lost the argument about putting the title and author's name on the spine. I won the suggestion to expand the title to Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales.

  Most important for me, I got to write the book's introduction. I'll repeat here a couple of the most pertinent observations: "My feeling about introducing you to Norm's first book is the identical sum of wonder and enthusiasm I would enjoy were I introducing the initial story collections by such as Dan Simmons or Connie Willis or Clive Barker." And "The thing about these seven stories is they're not all the same. Norman Partridge is not just a high-energy and prolific storyteller, he's willing to take chances, to attempt a wide spectrum of different effects. He may be a writin' fool, but he's no fool at all when it comes to crafting solid fiction."

  Finally, I want to elaborate on that, just briefly. What I've come to realize over the years is that Norm's passion for writing is more specifically a passion for writing the mythic. He's steeped in the complex culture of old -and new- millennial America, just as much as, say, Tom Wolfe. Norm's suffused with music, film, and the rest of the complex tapestry of our often undervalued popular culture, along with a strong sense of what makes all us humans human. He's got an instinct for recognizing, sorting out, and incorporating myriad societal signposts. In other words, he's got an unconscious gift for semiotics. Honest. Fortunately he—and we—are saved from academic likes of another Harold Bloom by—and note the pleasing symmetry—by Norm Partridge's passion. Passion for life, passion for writing.

  'Nuff said.

  If you think you can jump in right now, without any apprenticeship, and lay bricks as well as a four, five, or six years' apprenticed bricklayer; if you think you can jump in on the floor and nail on shoes on ten horses as well as a man who has served a three, four, or five years' apprenticeship at shoeing horses on the floor, if you think you can jump in and nail laths, or spread plaster, or do concrete work, without previous experience, better or as well as the men who have served their three, four, and five years of apprenticeship;—in short, if you think that a vastly better-paid trade than that, namely, the writing- game, can be achieved in your first short story not yet written, or long story not yet written, why go ahead my boy and jump to it, and I'll pat you on the back—pat you on the back! The world will crush you in for the great genius that you are if you can do such a thing. In the meantime have a little patience and learn the trade.

  If you know my career, you know that I am a brass-tack man. And I have given you the brass tacks right here....

  —Jack London,

  from a letter to aspiring writer Jess Dorman,

  Sept. 28, 1913

  Introduction: Learning The Trade

  In 1987, I set out to be a writer.

  That was something I had always wanted to be. I started writing stories as a kid, and I kept on writing stories through my teens. In college I could be found pecking away on my Olivetti electric typewriter whenever I didn't have a paper to write, and I submitted stories to several publications while I was earning my BA—everything from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to Stuart David Schiff's Whispers to Far West. All of
those stories came back with rejection slips. No surprises there. Most of them were just this side of awful.

  Back to 1987. I was a couple years short of turning thirty at the time. College was seven or eight years in my rearview mirror. I'd spent most of my twenties working in public libraries and not writing a word. Not that I'd given up hope of becoming a writer—I read voraciously, especially in the horror genre, and the idea of writing and publishing stories of my own was always in the back of my mind.

  Every once in a while I'd dust off the old Olivetti, set it up on the kitchen table, and try to do something about that. I'd work on a short story, and I'd make plans to submit the finished product to a magazine like The Twilight Zone or one of Charles Grant's Shadows anthologies, but I'd never quite end up popping the cork on the whole endeavor. I'd get three or four pages of not very good stuff... and then I'd retype and revise those three or four pages in an attempt to make them better (usually I'd just end up stretching them out to five or six pages of not very good stuff)... and then I'd retype them again and try to make them sound more like pages that had come out of King or McCammon or Koontz's typewriter... and pretty soon I'd go stale on the whole idea and find something else to do (which isn't too difficult a task when you're in your twenties).

  Even when I was "working" on a story, I felt more like a typist than a writer. I'd rough out a few pages, and then I'd start the process described above. I kept telling myself that I needed to streamline the revision process. If I could find a way to spend less time retyping a whole page just to insert a line or take one out, maybe I could get something done. But I couldn't figure out a way to do that.

  Fortunately, someone else figured it out for me. PC's were becoming affordable about this time. A couple friends had actually bought computers, but I didn't think that was a possibility for me. Not with what I made at the library, anyway.

  But you know what? I couldn't quite shake the idea of getting my own computer. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really wanted one of those things. Accompanying that realization came another (by now unavoidable)—I really wanted to be a writer. The truth is that I was tired of talking about that particular endeavor. Hell, I was even tired of thinking about it. I wanted to do it... or get it out of my system once and for all.

  About that time, getting a computer made the jump from want to need.

  Damn the torpedoes, I figured, and I reached for my wallet.

  Just like my first car, my first computer was used, it was an early version of the Apple Maclntosh, with the computer and its tiny screen built into one unit. There wasn't a hard drive, or a modem, or any of that stuff. My little Mac was just your basic glorified typewriter, except for the wonderfully primitive MacPaint program, which, if you never experienced it, might best be described as an Etch-a-Sketch with all the bells and whistles.

  If I remember correctly, the previous owner had upgraded my machine from 54k to 256k, but I didn't care about that. As long as the MacWrite program worked and the dot-matrix printer kicked out text at the speedy rate of about a minute a page, I figured I was good to go.

  And go I did. This might surprise you, but the first thing I set out to write was a children's novel. I'd been exposed to lots of those working in libraries, and I'll admit that part of the appeal of the idea was that writing children's fiction seemed somewhat less intimidating than trying to write a "real" book. So I typed words into my little Mac, and, slowly but surely, the printer kicked them out. I accumulated a stack of pages on a fantasy novel about a bunch of kids who slipped into an alternate universe while playing Dungeons & Dragons. I gave up on that one about halfway through and started another with a weirder, funnier sensibility—kind of my take on a Daniel Pinkwater book. The Chocolate Chip Cookie Calamity was about a kid and his milkman pal who manage to outwit a band of chocolate chip cookie-men and the evil scientist who invented them.

  Self-delusion is often a beginning writer's best friend, but not in this case. I had no idea what a mess my children's book was when I typed "The End." Fact is I thought it was something special, and I set about looking for a publisher. Shrewdly, I figured that I didn't need an agent... why cut in some stranger for 15% of the deal when I might just sell the book myself?

  Besides, I needed the money. Shortly after printing out my novel manuscript, I fried my little Mac's power board. Zap. Dead computer. I was out of business.

  I called around and discovered that it was going to cost a chunk of change to get a new power board installed. I didn't have a sliver, let alone a chunk. But hey, I figured I'd just finished my first novel. It was out there in the mail, winging its way to the powers-that-be in New York.

  Who knew what could happen?

  What happened was that nothing much happened. A couple months went by, and I didn't hear anything from that editor about my children's novel.

  So I saved my money, because I wanted to get back to writing. A friend aimed me in the direction of a computer repair shop down in Berkeley that specialized in Macs, and I tossed my computer in my pickup truck, made the trip down, and dropped off my dead soldier (which now had a little scorch mark on its side).[1]

  About a week later, I returned to pick up my Mac. A spiffy new power board had been installed and the tech rang up the charges. In the course of our conversation, he explained to me that the early Macs were victims of overly optimistic engineering. The designers hadn't thought it necessary to install fans in them, so the power board couldn't really cool down... and that meant the guts of those Apples were sometimes going to fry, no matter what precautions you took.

  "It's just the nature of the beast," said the tech.

  He might have said more than that. I don't really remember. I felt like someone had just whacked me upside the head with a two-by-four, because no one had mentioned anything about overly optimistic engineering or frying guts when I dropped off my computer for repair.

  So I stood there, listening but not hearing a word. I was thinking that I hadn't made one thin dime from writing. I was thinking about the check I'd just written—the one with three numbers to the left of the decimal point. I was looking at the shiny new computers sitting on the tables around the store. I was noticing the four-figure price tags they wore. I was imagining how I'd feel if I were back here in a couple of months with another burnt-out power board, and a novel that was sitting on a desk somewhere in New York City waiting for an editor to look at it... or worse, a novel that had been rejected.

  I was thinking that this writing thing could put me in the hole pretty quickly.

  "Isn't there anything else I can do?" I asked.

  Of course, my question was more wide-ranging than the tech could imagine.

  Of course, he didn't understand that.

  I took my computer home and set it up on the kitchen table in my apartment. I started writing another children's novel, but I couldn't kick it into gear. In the meantime. The Chocolate Chip Cookie Calamity found its way back to me with a rejection letter. I sent it out a couple more times with the same result. It seemed I was going nowhere fast.

  One afternoon I pulled out a couple of the horror stories I'd written in college. I figured I'd give them a quick revision, maybe send one off to The Twilight Zone magazine. I'd been subscribing to TZ since it started up in the early eighties, and I'd read most issues cover-to-cover. It didn't seem like a bad idea to try them with a short story if I could manage to get something down on paper I thought would measure up.

  I worked on a few things—some old, some new. Before long I submitted a story to TZ, which was rejected. That was okay. I figured I'd hit them with another as soon as I had one ready. The truth was that I'd wanted to write horror fiction all along, and I was beginning to look at ways I could break into that market. Short stories seemed like the way to go. I figured getting a story into TZ would be a good start.

  At that point, the only problem with my little plan was that TZ was on its last legs. Pretty quickly, it ceased publication. But one of the last i
ssues featured an article on "small press" horror magazines by a young guy named Bob Morrish,[2] and that article caught my eye.

  Thanks to Bob, I discovered that a lot of would-be publishers were producing little 'zines with the same invention that was allowing me to craft my stories: the home computer. Admittedly, I was skeptical about the whole proposition of “home publishing" and "little magazines."[3] But I was hungry for potential markets, and I was beginning to type "The End" pretty frequently, so I parked my skepticism at the curb and sent off for some sample issues.

  Before long those little 'zines started showing up in my mailbox. Some were just awful, in both content and execution, but I was pleased to discover that others were pretty darn good. The Horror Show impressed me immediately—Dave Silva's magazine featured many fine writers and was often just as entertaining as TZ on a fraction of the budget. Other quality publications included Noctulpa, Grue, and Deathrealm, all of which printed fiction by new writers who had yet to be discovered by New York publishers. In these and other small press magazines I first encountered the work of Poppy Z. Brite, Bentley Little, Brian Hodge, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Holder, Lucy Taylor, and a host of other talented newcomers who were looking for a way to break into the horror/dark fantasy market.