THE EMISSARY Goes Live!

The Kindle version of the new book is up and available for pre-order. The paperback should pop up in a day, maybe two. It's good to see a new book come to print, since it has been a couple of years since my last novel.

From the author of THE FLOCK comes THE EMISSARY, a novel of modern fantasy and horror.

In the North Carolina mountains the town of Jasperton has lost a fading enchantment that has protected it for almost one hundred years from an ancient curse. Martin and Amy Braun, separated, and their marriage almost at an end over the death of their young son, suddenly find themselves reunited to care for a lost child who bears a striking resemblance to their deceased boy. As the town begins to fall victim to the rising influence of an aged evil, they must decide if the child is an emissary for salvation, or for the malignant forces gathering within the town.

THE EMISSARY by James Robert Smith. I was very, very happy with the cover art!

Eating Crow.

In the past there has likely not been a bigger opponent to self-publishing than I have been. It wasn't merely the act of self-publishing that got on my last nerve, but the absence of quality in the material that is constantly being self-published. In those early days I would read book after book that was self-published, and never once did I read anything that rose above the level of the worst of a massive slush pile on a suffering editor's desk.

Thus, I hated the concept of self-publishing and not only wanted nothing to do with it, I wanted it to go away.

In the end the concept seems to have weakened an already emaciated traditional publishing marketplace. The number of publishers willing and able to dig through submissions has dwindled to the point that it's sad to watch because what one is seeing is the death of a very old industry.

And so, as I hinted some time back in an earlier blog post, it is time for me to eat crow (as they say) and do what I had not wished to do. And that is to join the ranks of the self-published.

Since those early days I have managed to find well-written novels whose authors have gone what is called the "indie" route. All right, then, I'll have to go down that road also. Over the past year I've tried a few short story efforts almost as advertising promotions.

Currently I need to get my older novels back into print. I recently got the rights back to all of my traditionally published novels with the exception of THE FLOCK from Tor-Forge Books. The rest are mine again and so I'll tackle publishing and promoting them on my own.

We'll see how it goes. At this point in my writing career, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Worst case, I'm at the same point I'm at right now.

And so it goes.

First up will be THE EMISSARY. It's a novel I had sold a couple of years ago, but the small press publisher who accepted it has apparently folded. THE EMISSARY is an important book to me. The ideas and themes for it occurred to me many years back and I kept struggling with the concepts for a very long time before I put it all together in a story that made me happy. I think I put more sweat and toil and thought into this novel than anything I have ever written.

In the North Carolina mountains the town of Jasperton has lost a fading enchantment that has protected it for almost one hundred years from an ancient curse. Martin and Amy Braun, separated, and their marriage almost at an end over the death of their young son, suddenly find themselves reunited to care for a lost child who bears a striking resemblance to their deceased boy. As the town begins to fall victim to the rising influence of an aged evil, they must decide if the child is an emissary for salvation, or for the malignant forces gathering within the town.

Appearing very soon in both ebook and print formats.

Listen

I never realized it until I started compiling the stories that I wanted to include in A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS, but to that date I had written quite a lot of ghost stories. It didn't hit me just how many I had created until I began to sift through the sold and unsold manuscripts and found that a plurality of them were ghost yarns.

One always has favorites. This is they way of things. I have favorite stories among the ones I have penned, and among the four or so of the ones at the top is a story that I wrote for an anthology edited by Stephen Mark Rainey. It's called "Listen".

When I think of the concept of ghosts and the supernatural I see them as forces, influences, things that cannot quite be touched--but which can touch you. It was with this thought foremost in my mind as I sat down before my keyboard to create this tale.

Recently a woman I had not previously known friended me on Facebook. She did so because she wanted to adapt "Listen" to an audio format for a YouTube video (how's that for a mixing of concepts?). I didn't know her, did not know her work, but was frankly flattered that she'd picked one of my favorite tales to adapt and that she'd been kind enough to make friends with me so that she could ask for that permission.

I didn't really think about it. I just granted the request with--I must admit--some humility. And, of course, I hoped that she would do a decent job of it.

Today she sent me the link to her adaptation. To say that I was pleased is a massive understatement. I've had a novel adapted to audio, and comic book scripts adapted to graphic art, and one novel turned into a screenplay. Julia Morgan's audio adaptation of "Listen" is the best transformation of one of my fictions that I've witnessed. She completely understands everything I was thinking when I wrote it. It is flawless. It is amazing.

And so...listen.

I Don't Believe in No Ghosts!

With apologies to William Friedkin and David Lynch.

Truth? Fiction? Who can say?!

Lousy Movie

I went to see the new horror film MAMA last night.

It was an awful movie.

The problems of the film were many and the movie was infected through and through with poor concepts, bad execution, and lousy writing.

First and foremost it borrowed too heavily from earlier and much more effectively produced films. The influence of both THE GRUDGE and the execrable remake THE WOMAN IN BLACK are painfully evident as the film unfolds. In addition, aside from the focus of the movie: two abandoned children--the movie doesn't have any really sympathetic characters.

What it does have is a marginally neat monster, which borrows far too heavily from the Japanese import, THE GRUDGE. There's not a whole lot of difference between the vengeful ghost from that movie and the oh-so-similar ghost in this one. As you watch the movie, that sameness and lack of originality dog your thoughts constantly. Whenever there's a creepy scene or a patented cinematic surprise moment, your only thought is: Oh. I saw that used in THE GRUDGE.

Yeah, yeah. Just like THE GRUDGE.

The screenplay was also extremely weak. It opens with a dramatic setup leading to a contrived plot development that descends into the-writer-pulled-the-line-out-of-his-ass story. Nothing makes any real sense. Characters say and do things that are against type, against logic, against reason. Time and again the story depends completely on wild coincidence, especially concerning the revelations of an otherwise completely throwaway character encountered in two scenes and never heard from again--her reason for being is obviously to insert a piece into a very poorly rendered puzzle.

All in all, I consider the movie to have been a complete waste of my time. There are some cool computer-generated graphics with the monster, but other than that, it's a film I could have done without having seen.

Oh, well. You never know.

This is the short (introduced by the movie's executive producer, Guillermo del Toro) that got the attention of the studios and allowed the film to go forward. It's an excellent little piece and could have spawned a decent film. Alas.

Sunday Stroll at Reedy Creek Park

Saturday night the hospital called and asked Carole to come in to scrub for a C-section as they were short-handed. So she got dressed and went in. She came back home at about 3:00 am. Then they called her on Sunday and asked her to fill in at the maternity ward for six hours, so she did that. But she was so tired that she asked me to drive her to work. I did that, but decided to take my camera and go for a short hike at Reedy Creek Park on the way back to the house.

Reedy Creek Park is a pretty cool place, but I generally avoid it during warm months because of the thick crowds that take advantage of the picnic grounds and the lake fishing and biking trails. I go there to hike, since there's a pretty darned good system of woodland trails in the park. It's also a fairly large park--over 700 acres. I can almost get a feeling of wilderness and solitude if I can hit a day when there aren't many people (and dogs) in there.

Today was a Sunday, which would generally make it a crowd day. But the temperatures were in the high 40s so there weren't any picnickers in the park. Mainly there were just people playing disc golf and a fair number of hikers like myself. It wasn't too bad.

I've posted some columns about the park before. One of my favorite spots there are the ruins of an old farmhouse that has fallen to rocky bits. There are a couple of genuinely creepy ghost stories about the place, one of which I keep meaning to use as the basis for a short story or novella. It's percolating.

This is the site of the old farmhouse. This was the house of the son of the couple who originally owned most of the acreage. There's a ghost story attached to this place that genuinely scared me when I read of it. Not the ghost itself...I don't believe in such. But what happened to the person whose ghost apparently haunted the vicinity because of what happened to her.

This corner of the house was reassembled by the County some years ago. They pieced the stones back together. In fact, the house was completely in bits before they decided to cement some of it to its original state to give a better idea of the scope of the old place. It wasn't a huge house, but wasn't insubstantial, either.

The cursed farmhouse from the opposite side from where you arrive by way of the Sierra Loop Trail.

When things are just right, you can pretend you're really in the woods.

Dead Facebook Friends

I have Facebook friends who have died. Actually, in reality died. Dead Facebook friends whose icons still stare at me from the screen from time to time when the system mysteriously dredges them up to float there, reminding me. I suppose a lot of people here have dead Facebook friends. If you defriend them, they'd haunt you in other ways if there were such things as ghosts.

Marley, a famous ghost from fiction (psst! The only kind).

My dad, who is also dead, had this to say about ghosts--we were sitting in the forest in the mountains of north Georgia just looking at the trees. And he suddenly said:

"You know how I know that there's no such things as ghosts?"

Since I was twelve at that point and had not believed in gods or the supernatural since I was eight years old, I already didn't believe in ghosts. But my dad was sharp and almost always had something interesting to say, so I bit.

"Nope. Why?" I asked.

Then he swept his arm to indicate the forest all around us growing on the steep Appalachian hillsides that had once been part of a vast Indian Nation but which (at least this 120 acres on which we sat) now belonged to him.

"Because this was once all Indian land, before we slaughtered them all. If there were such a thing as ghosts, they'd rise up from here and kill every fucking white man around."

Help Me, She Said: A True Story

"I don't believe in ghosts."

I say that to myself a lot when I'm hiking through deep forests when I'm all alone. Kind of like Bert Lahr in THE WIZARD OF OZ movie.

On June 1 of this year (2009), I took several days off from work so that I could take my travel trailer and run up to the mountains near Wilson Creek to find some solitude. I needed that solitude so that I could finish a particularly stubborn manuscript. As I always do when I'm camping, I went with the idea of cramming as much hiking as I could into the working vacation.

My first full day I decided to head to a cliff top. Along the way I found myself hiking through a kind of forest I'd never encountered. The classic southern coves are filled with what are called Poplar/Hemlock forests. So named because the dominant trees are Tulip poplars and either Eastern or Carolina hemlocks. Both of these trees are relatively fast growing, and both can reach really huge dimensions by eastern standards. But the forest I found myself hiking through was mainly white oak and hemlocks. It was weird. I'd never seen these two species together in such a forest. Of course the hemlocks were almost all dead (as I've belabored here many times), but there were enough hanging on to life so that I could see what the forest must have looked like several years ago: beautiful.

I found myself on a trail that took me along a high ridge line. My intention was to hike out to a peak called Darkside Cliffs. I'd heard the views there were impressive. In addition, I also found myself completely alone. I had encountered no one at all since I'd driven away from the campsite, and there were no other vehicles parked at the trail head. The forest seemed completely deserted of humans, other than myself.

It was getting late in the afternoon so I wanted to get to the cliffs and see the views before the sun started to set. I surely didn't want to get caught hiking in the dark, an undertaking I'd experience in the past, and one which I don't find particularly fun.

When hiking alone, one hears many things. The forest is almost always filled with sounds. Blowing leaves, creaking trunks, bird song, the scuttle of bugs in the undergrowth. And so on. One sound that can get the blood pounding if you've never heard it is the truly creepy groan of tree trunks rubbing together in the wind. There are almost always trees that have managed to be in such close proximity that through exuberant growth or by accident, they find themselves in physical contact. When a high wind pushes them, the creaking and groaning of one woody trunk against the other can make your hair stand on end. There's nothing else quite like it.


And so I found myself hiking through this wilderness, completely alone.

The wind was blowing.

Dry leaves were clattering along the forest floor.

I heard that ominous thunder of one trunk all but cracking against the other.

A voice called out to me.

I stopped in my tracks. "Hello?" I asked. I looked around. The weird thing about this oak and hemlock forest was that it was clear. That is, I could see through it for a long way. There was almost no clinging undergrowth and the limbs of each tree were high on the trunks, making for unobstructed views through the forest.

There was no reply so I pushed on. The wind continued to blow. I could hear the crunching of my boots over the small stones on the path and the cracking of dry twigs under my feet. Again, I heard a voice call out to me. Did it say Help me? Goddamn!

I stopped again. It sounded like a little girl.

"Hello? Who's there?" I yelled it out. I turned around and around, looking in every direction through the forest.

I didn't see a soul. It was just those dark woods. And me.

I was getting to a bend in the trail, so I just pushed on, figuring the wind was playing tricks on the old ears. It happens almost every time I go hiking alone. You make of the forest sounds what you will. I was hurrying again, wanting to get to those fantastic views. But I didn't get far before I heard the voice once more.

This time, I was sure of what I'd heard:

Help me. Help me.

"HELLO!" I yelled it this time. "Are you okay? Where are you? I don't see you!" I stumbled into the forest, headed for where I'd heard the voice. It couldn't have come from more than a dozen feet away. I thrashed about in the woods, looking for someone, calling out. "Where are you?" I kept asking that.

And then, seeming to come from just up the slope within all of those white oaks and dying hemlocks I heard the voice. It was a little girl. Maybe six or seven years old from the sound of her. But I couldn't see her. And this is what she said, practically in my ear:

Help me. My mommy's dead.

You must forgive me. I ran. I ran away and away and away. I didn't look back.

Ghosts

For a guy who doesn't believe in ghosts, I tend to write a lot about them. Once, I was looking at my list of short stories and realized that about half of everything I'd written was a ghost story of one type or another.

For some years, I've been working on a novel I'm calling PORT CITY. I take to it from time to time and work on a chapter here and there. It's at about 60,000 words, but at the rate I work on it, I'll probably be about 60 years old before it's done.

Here's a little tiny bit of it, ghost included:

It could, and would, happen at almost any time. He might be reading. He might be eating. He might even be watching television or just waking up from a nap. At a time such as those, or many others, the ghost would arrive.

It was no big deal. He would stop what he was doing, say hello to the ghost, or It’s good to see you, and then they would talk. About anything. They would just sit there or stand there and shoot the breeze; talk about anything and everything. The ghost would tell him things. Never what to do but, rather, what not to do. He was always happy to accept this advice, and generally took the words to heart.

After all, the ghost had once been his father.

I do believe in ghosts, I DO believe in ghosts...

I’m a skeptic. And I mean that in the hardest, most adamant terms. For me, the scientific principle holds. If there’s no evidence, I’m not convinced.

When I was younger, and would hear tall tales by others that they’d seen, or heard, or felt the presence of a ghost, I would roll my eyes if I was in a good mood, and tell them they were full of shit if I wasn’t feeling very gracious. I didn’t then, and don’t now, believe in any kind of an afterlife. There just can’t be anything like a ghost. Show me one, or show me how to detect one, and maybe…just maybe, now…we’ll talk seriously about it. Until then, it’s just so much hot air.

So what I had concluded, after some little thought, was that anyone who claimed to have seen a ghost was either:

A: lying like an incumbent politician.

Or:

B: Doin’ some ‘shrooms.

There was no middle ground, and no other alternative. If you told me you saw a ghost you were either a liar or you were floating wrong-side up.

And then I became a mailman, and within two weeks, everything changed.

It’s not that I saw a ghost. Well, not exactly. But what happened was that I gained…well…a new perspective. I began to see things a little differently. What I’m talking about are dogs. As in, dawgs. Mongrels. Flea-bitten mutts. Filthy, snarling, barking, biting, stinking fecal-factories. Those generally large, highly territorial, extremely aggressive carnivores that Mankind has dragged along for the ride into oblivion.

No, I did not see the ghosts brought to me by a dog. Although, I genuinely wished to send many hounds into the hereafter. (You know that movie, All Dogs Go to Heaven? For me, that’s not a title, but a reasonable proposition. All of them. Like, right now.)

No, no ghosts. What happened was that, as a new letter carrier, schlepping mail in the worst possible sections of the worst routes in town, I began to encounter dogs by the dozens. By the scores. Dogs tied up with rope. Dogs restrained by battleship chain. Dogs behind fences. Dogs on the other sides of doors. Dogs raging through closed windows. And, Jove help me, dogs running loose and slavering like speed-freak zombies for my precious flesh.

Within a week I was quite frightened of dogs. Within two weeks I began to hate them with a white-hot passion. Within three weeks I was carving notches in my postal vehicle steering wheel; one for each dog squashed.

I learned, in short order, fear of doggies. Yes, I was a caniphobe.

And here’s where I found a new respect for those who claim to see the ghost of the old maid who used to live down the block and at whose yard they rolled with tp in their junior year; for those who said they heard their drowned little brother calling out from the drainpipe in the sink; for those who said their husband’s spirit was haunting them for screwing around that time five years into their marriage.

I found that new respect because, by the regal head of Anubis, I was seeing dogs every-freaking-where I looked. I’d be lugging my mailbag down a garbage-strewn side road near the corner of Crip Street and Blood Avenue and look up and see a German shepherd waiting to pounce. Only to realize I was looking at a holly shrub. Or I’d be rounding the corner in the Hicksville Apartment Complex and see a Doberman scratching to leap from the edge of a building, only to realize it was nothing but a broom propped against a brick wall. In short:

I was seeing ghosts.

After about a year of being a mailman, I stopped seeing these dog shades. I learned how to just stop being scared witless of them all of the time and just be cautious and careful. Yeah, I’m still a little bit afraid of the worthless ass-licking bags of stench. But not to the point that I see them where they aren’t.

And I found, along the way, that while those people who say they see those ghosts aren’t really seeing anything at all, I do believe that THEY believe they’re seeing ghosts.

As for the notches in my steering wheel? Sixteen and counting. In mailman parlance, I’m an ace three times over.