Tag: Do the Dead Sing?

Highway to Hell

I realized the other night that, of all things, I take more pride in my short stories than I do in my novels. Isn’t that strange? Novels are, in theory, much more difficult to write than a short story–even at its barest minimum, a novel should be at least fifty thousand words while short stories generally cut off around a thousand. I think it’s because I still carry the scars from that asshole writing professor in college. I always struggle with short stories, and always have; I used to say that if I wrote a successful short story it was completely and entirely by accident. But writing erotica was an excellent tutorial in short story writing; in what other type of short story is “beginning, middle, end” so clearly delineated?

My first short story that got published outside of the realm of erotica was “Smalltown Boy,” which was published in 2003, I think. It’s still one of my favorite stories of my own; it’s an Alabama story and I am still very proud of it. I used to think I’d never get a short story published anywhere that wasn’t erotica, so when my stories started getting acceptances and published in non-erotica markets, it was very cool.

I like writing short stories because I can encapsulate an idea in that short form rather than writing an entire novel. I can also experiment with voice, style, theme, setting and story. I have any number of stories that don’t work but are completed; I have a lot more than were started and stalled because I didn’t know how to finish them. I think I have around a hundred short stories or so in progress; I actually counted a few years ago because someone asked and I didn’t know the answer.\

Several years ago, an Australian crime writer I’ve known for decades reached out and asked me if I would contribute a story to an anthology her publishing company was producing, The Only One in the World, which was a Sherlock Holmes collection–but the only rule was you couldn’t set the stories in London, period; I had never written anything close to a Holmes story and have never really been much of a Holmesian (I do love Laurie King’s Mary Russell series), but it was a challenge so I said yes–because for me, I love writing challenges because they push me out of my comfort zone and make me try things I might not ordinarily try. That story became “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy” (still one of my favorite titles of all time) and it was a lot of fun to write, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself writing it…to the point I’ve considered revisiting my Holmes and Watson in 1916 New Orleans, several times.

Last year, the Sherlock editor, Narrelle Harris, reached out to me to see if I’d write something for a new anthology, The Fresh Hell, and there was a list of horror tropes we were given to chose from. Being from Louisiana, how could I not pick “haunted bayou”?

And so I started writing a story that became “Solace in a Dying Hour.”

Madeleine Chaisson opened her eyes and knew that the next time she shut them would be the last.

She cocked her head to listen. Even amongst those few (some say blessed, others cursed) who could hear them, most would describe the strange sounds they made as they danced about the dark, still waters as whistling. But Madeleine was special, different, not like the others.

She heard them clearly. She knew they weren’t whistling. They were singing.

But the sound she heard now was just the gulls over Bayou St Ferdinand shrieking as they swooped and flapped their wings looking for morsels of food. 

Dirty scavengers, she thought with a scowl. She hated the gulls; had since she was a little girl growing up in this very house.

How much gull shit had she cleaned off the dock during her long lifetime? Papa would backhand her if he saw any of the dried white splotches with black pellets on the dock when he brought the boat back in from a day shrimping out in the Gulf.

‘It rots the wood, you lazy cochon,’ he’d say in his sing-song southeast Louisiana Cajun accent while she rubbed her stinging cheek. ‘And who will have to rebuild the damned thing when it collapses? Don’t I already work hard to keep you clothed and fed?’

Even with him years in his grave, after she began wondering if that was even true, she’d still take the bucket out and scrub the gull shit from the weathered old wood.

If I were a witch like they always said, I could have snapped my fingers and cleaned it, she thought with a snort.

The new anthology debuted today, and it is available on Amazon and other sellers here in the United States; here is the link to Bookshop.org : here. This link is to the trade paper; there’s also a much more expensive hardcover edition as well if you disdain paperbacks.

“Solace in a Dying Hour” is another one of my south Louisiana stories. It took me a long while to get to the point where I was comfortable writing about Louisiana outside of New Orleans (don’t ever ask me about the colossal error in geography I made in Bourbon Street Blues…I SAID DON’T ASK!); I think my first was “Rougarou.” I also wrote and published “A Whisper from the Graveyard” since that one, and this is my third. I’ve started building a fictional world of Louisiana outside of the city over the last seven or eight years or so; it could be longer since I no longer have any sense of time anymore. I have revisited rural Louisiana in books like Need, The Orion Mask, and A Streetcar Named Murder; I have more stories and books I am going to write about my fictional rural Louisiana; I’ve also fictionalized the north shore several times already.

“Solace” is an homage of sorts to two other stories I really loved, “Do the Dead Sing?” by Stephen King and “An Unremarkable Heart” by Karin Slaughter. Both involve someone lying in bed dying, and reliving some pretty horrible things that happened over the course of their lives. I had been studying Louisiana folklore and legends for quite some time, but it was around 2017 or 2018 that I started really doing a deep dive into Louisiana history and culture. A co-worker had moved to Houma, which is deep in the bayou country, and she was doing the same. She was who suggested I write about le feu follet, the swamp lights some see. There are numerous definitions and descriptions of who and what le feu follet actually are; I decided I wanted to use the lights and the whistling aspects of their legend, and I wanted the story to focus on a woman who’s lived a very hard life and been through some things…but who could not only see le feu follet for what they actually are and appear, but could tell that they weren’t whistling, but singing. I also kind of based her on my maternal grandmother, a very quiet woman who never showed emotion and never complained about anything; things were what they were and you just dealt with them, period. I wanted to get that sense of quiet strength that you can usually only find in rural Southern women, that practical pragmatism that has gotten them through hard lives and a lot of tragedy.

My maternal grandmother was pretty amazing, really.

I am very proud of the story and how it turned out; the anthology itself is amazing, and the cover is gorgeous. I hope you enjoy it should you choose to check it out.

Give It Up

It rained overnight, and is still damp and gloomy this morning. There really is nothing like sleeping during a downpour, is there, the constant strumming of the rain, the comfort and warmth of the mattress and under the blankets, is there?

Yesterday was a crazy busy day for one Gregalicious, who got up in the morning and did some work, cleaned, and then walked to Comic Con for a signing and a panel. The signing was fun, and the panel discussion about creativity and creativity triggers was also a lot of fun; as exhausting and draining as it is to do public appearances, I also always somehow forget, in the nervousness and terror of having to speak in front of a room full of people, how much I actually enjoy talking about writing and creativity. So, there’s that. I then came home, watched the ice dance final at US Nationals, and then the Saints play-off game, which was a nail-biter down to the very last play of the game (GEAUX SAINTS!). We stayed up and watched the Golden Globes before going to bed; I also managed to get some brainstorming done in my journal, and I also read a short story, to keep the Short Story Project going.

One of the truly fun things about the panel was that Tom Cook was on it. Tom was an animator/director for Hanna-Barbera in the late 1960’s/1970’s, and of course, one of the shows he worked on was Scooby Doo Where Are You, which tremendously influenced me in the direction of mysteries and crime when I was a kid. So meeting Tom, and thanking him for the influence, was kind of a thrill for the weekend for me. I am starting to feel energized about writing again, which is very cool.

The short story I read was “East Wind,” from Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll and Other Lost Stories.

the doll

Nearly a hundred miles west of the Scillies, far from the main track of ships, lies the small, rocky island of St. Hilda’s. Only a few miles square, it is a barren, rugged place, with great jagged cliffs that run deep into deep water. The harbour is hardly more than a creek, and the entrance like a black hole cut out of the rock. The island rises out of the sea a queer, misshapen crag, splendid inits desolation, with a grey face lifted to the four winds. It might have been thrown up from the depths of the Atlantic in a moment of great unrest, and set there, a small defiant piece of land, to withstand forever that anger of the sea Over a century ago few knew of its existence, and the many sailors who saw its black outline on the horizon imagined it to be little more than a solitary rock, standing like a sentinel in mid-ocean.

“East Wind” is an early du Maurier tale, from early in her career (which people seem to want to divide into ‘pre’ and ‘post’ Rebecca); and in some ways the inexperience shows. The story is, as so many of her later stories are, very matter-of-fact; simply told with a move this  to that to the other; unemotional and simple. However, what is actually missing from this story that shows up in her later stories are layers of detail and complexity; stories like “Don’t Look Now” and “The Birds” have so many layers to burrow through, so much detail, and so much creepy, quiet horror that they continue to haunt the reader once the story is told. “East Wind” is an equally unpleasant tale, but doesn’t have the impact of the later stories in its telling.

As I started reading it, it reminded me of one of my favorite Stephen King stories, “The Reach”, which was the final story I think in Skeleton Crew, and was originally called “Do the Dead Sing?”, which is, in my opinion, a far superior title. That story was from the point of view of an old woman, dying in her bed on a cold, blustery winter night, and remembering something that happened many years ago–while also hearing her beloved dead one’s calling to her to join them. The story was brilliant and beautiful and haunting, and as I said, remains one of my favorite King stories to this day.

The du Maurier tale is similar in that it is about a remote island, where the inhabitants have very little contact with the outside world and because of a limited pool, have become more than a little inbred. The east wind of the title is brutal, blasting away at the little island and making the seas rough, so a brig of foreign sailors is forced to take shelter in the harbor, foreigners who don’s speak the same language. These exotic to the islanders strangers have an odd impact on the islanders, who become intoxicated in the strangeness and newness of this experience, which eventually leads to seduction and murder, changing and scarring the island forever; and of course, once this has happened and the east wind stops blowing, they get back in their ship and sail away because, of course, it was nothing to them. This is, of course, a terrific theme that du Maurier returns to again and again in her work; the dionysian influence of an outside force that causes trouble and then moves on without a care, leaving damage in its wake. The story itself, which is short and unemotional, is important as an early work because the reader, the duMaurier afficionado, can see how she developed themes she used extensively in her later career; her fascination with the concept of the unfeeling outside force on ordinary people’s lives, and the disruption such an influence can cause.

And now, back to the spice mines.