I've been a reader as long as I can remember, which is getting uncomfortably close to half a century. I grew up in a house full of books, and can't recall a time when I wasn't fascinated by the possibilities contained between the covers. As soon as I graduated from books with pictures on every page, I gravitated towards tales of the imagination. I devoured the handful of volumes of fairy tales and ghost stories my elementary school library had to offer, over and over again.
The librarian kept books in the back room for more advanced readers, and by the time I was in the third grade I was given the run of that tantalizing collection. I consider the day I picked Andre Norton's Star Man's Son from that intriguing pile to be one of the most important days of my life, for it opened up whole new worlds to me I never suspected existed. I didn't stop reading tales of everyday, mundane life, but given my druthers, it was the unexplored worlds of science fiction and fantasy that attracted me. Tom Sawyer and his pals were all right, in small doses, but their worlds were too close to my own. I yearned for vastness of space and distance of time, and there both were in the books hidden away from the unitiated among my peers.
I don't recall many of the titles I read that year. I know Frankenstein was among them, though. Up to that point, I'd only read horror tales in the short form, through the one collection of classic spooky stories in the main collection. I knew the name. Even before then, I'd gotten into the habit of getting up early on Saturday mornings, before the cartoons came on, to catch classic horror films shown in the wee hours on one of the local stations, or run to the living room after school to check out The Big Show, the afternoon movie on Channel Five, in hopes of finding a Karloff or Lugosi flick. And here was in my hands was the source of all those scary images available on our little black-and-white nineteen-inch screen. My wonderment knew no bounds. I read it at least twice that year, and still re-visit that seminal work from time to time.
Of course, my parents were concerned with my fascination with literary and cinematic horrors. They were convinced I would turn out to be a serial killer or something. It only got worse when I discovered that a friend of mine had copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I read and re-read every one I could get my hands on. And then there were the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies published by Dell in those halcyon days, packed with terrors and frights, leavened with mystery and adventure.
My reading world kept on expanding. It wasn't long after discovering that horror came in novel length that I fould a couple of volumes by Rafael Sabatini in my grandmother's attic that led me in yet another literary direction. Every summer, my brother and I would take a train from Nashville down to Alabama for a few weeks, and every visit I would re-read both Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. These were photoplay editions, illustrated with stills from the silent versions of both books. I liberated them at some point, and they're still on my shelves here in my office, in a place of honor, read halfway to tatters.
My parents' reading leaned more towards mysteries, Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen and Leslie Charteris. I added these to my myth-pool, sucking up every novel and short story in their personal library. I watched old Charlie Chan movies on The Big Show, along with the Saint and the Falcon and Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. I looked for the novels to fill in the time between movies. My school library was a poor source for these, but the public library was full of them, and my library card got a thorough workout in the mystery section.
There were comic books and comic strips and television shows that fed my interests, too. Television in the Sixties was full of the fantastic. The first specific episode of any TV show I remember seeing was 'The Sixth Finger' on the original Outer Limits. I can't imagine what my folks were thinking of when they let me stay up late to watch it at the age of five. I recall watching the last new episode of The Twilight Zone at my aunt and uncle's house when I was about six. And there was the original Smothers Brothers show, in which Tommy was an angel, and My Living Doll, with Julie Newmar as a robot, The Munsters and The Addams Family and I Dream of Genie and Bewitched, Batman and The Green Hornet. On the more serious side, The Wild Wild West and the Man and Girl from U.N.C.L.E fed my jones for televised fantasy and adventure. That was a great decade to grow up in.
The pinnacle came when Dark Shadows debuted. School was out at 3:00, and everyone I knew raced home to catch the adventures of Barnabas Collins at 3:30 before we went out to play. Unless, of course, The Big Show had a scary movie on at 4:00. Riding bikes down the steep hill in front of our house could wait for the Wolf Man to go to his final reward - until the next installment in the series.
By the end of the decade, I'd discovered Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft and all that pulp stuff from decades before. I read Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the complete tales of Edgar Allen Poe; Tarzan and John Carter and Heinlein's Starship Troopers; the hard-boiled mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. My personal library grew, mostly cheap paperbacks and Whitman hardbacks, priced just within the reach of my meagre allowance.
But even the best of decades must come to an end. I grew up, went to college, got married, had kids, worked in various jobs I hated to pay the bills. We bought a house, then another, owned a series of cars that never seemed to run right. I shifted from the world of imagination into the world of the mundane. I still watched the odd horror film, but it wasn't the same. Nothing was. The comic books weren't as good as I remembered, the TV shows looked cheaper and cheesier, and adventure strips disappeared altogether from the newspaper comics pages.
But I still have the old books to comfort me, even after so many eyars. I could reach behind me right now and pluck Tales to Tremble By from a shelf, or Sabatini's Scaramouche, or The Hound of the Baskervilles, or Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Movies and television are ethereal and transient, but the stories last forever.
It was about the time I discovered the internet that all these literary threads began to weave together in my mind. I'd always sort of thought of writing down my own stories, new tales of mystery and horror and adventure. Near the end of the last millenium, I started putting it together.
I came across a website that offered the opportunity for nascent authors to create stories within a shared fantasy world, about 1998 I guess it was. I created a character and injected him into the setting, with his adventures leaning as much towards mystery as fantasy. He evolved gradually into the sort of fantasy detective that had been lurking around the back of my brain for a while, and I had a lot of fun with him.
The website petered out eventually, but I still have those stories tucked away on my hard-drive, a Vast Amorphous Fantasy Thing that will probably never see publication.
It wasn't long after that, that I got involved in an online role-playing game whose name I forget. The gist was that various fantasy characters find themselves in the real world. I created new characters for that game, and spent many an hour in back-and-forth interaction between my characters and other writers' characters. I learned a lot about character development and plotting from that game, dialogue and descriptions, and more than a few of the people I made up for that game have found their ways into my stories.
One of the heroes I created was a private eye named Harvey Drago, who had the unique ability to make himself intangible. He could hide in walls or walk through solid objects. I made up little mysteries for him to solve in the game, and he grew in my mind until I determined to write down his adventures in more permanent form. The impetus came in 2001, when I came across the National Novel Writing website.
My first NaNovel was originally called Fair Exchange, for some reason I do not recollect. I combined all the genres I'd loved into one yarn, in which a hard-boiled detective in the Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe mold was hired by a vampire pimp to find out who was leaving the ladies of the evening out after sunrise. The next year, I wrote a sequel called Altar Ego. A third story followed in 2003, which petered out before completion, although I did reach the 50,000 word goal. Rather than complete it, I resolved to revisit the first book and see if it were possible to put it into publishable form.
I spent a long time on it, but decided at some point that there was a story that needed to come before it. I abandoned the book now called Dead Women in Love, and switched to the previous tale. I worked on it for several years, in between child rearing and constant car repairs and home maintenance. Life conspired to keep me from the keyboard, but at long last I had a book I thought was worthy of publication, a hard-boiled supernatural mystery called Smarter Than the Average Werewolf.
Not everyone agreed with my assessment. My friends were enthusiastic about the book, but I needed affirmation from a higher source. It did not come for quite a while. Close to a hundred agents passed on it, mostly without comment. The most useful critique I received was that it was too 'quirky'.
Well, yes, that's the idea. I gave up on agents and offered it to a few small presses. The good folks at Belfire Press jumped on it like it was a loose ball in the end zone, and it is now available from their website. Please to purchase many copies, for I still have one child in college.
And that's the vague outline of the Reader's Digest version of my literary life, the more-or-less true tale of how I came to write stories that straddle my favorite genres. In future posts, I'll explore specifics of how the disparate genres coalesced to form the portmanteau genre I call ParaNoirMal, and why that's not an exactly accurate description of what I do, catchy though the word is. And other things, whatever it occurs to me to write about.
I hope you'll join me for the journey. It ought to be fun.
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