“Gargoyle” to appear in Spectral Realms #10

I logged into my email this morning to find a response from Mr. Joshi concerning my submission to Spectral Realms of my prose poem Gargoyle. He called it “Splendid”, and said he would like to place it in the 10th issue of the journal. There it shall be in good company with my other prose poem Morbidezza.

Gargoyle began as a response to a lyric in a song from the 1977 TV special Halloween with the New Addams Family. In there they have a line about Gargoyles coming off the walls to frighten you, and I countered that that’s not at all what gargoyles are for, and then I wrote this prose poem. It has changed a bit since I first wrote it sometime betwixt 1990-91, and it was even set to music by my old band The Dark Young, a recording of which may be found on our 1994 eponymously titled debut album. For a listen, go to https://thedarkyoung.bandcamp.com/track/gargoyle

The artist who created the logo we used on our album, Felix Rust, also did an illustrated version of the poem, a scan of which is featured below:

Illustrated version of my Gargoyle poem, calligraphy and illustration by Felix Rust.

 

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Update 10/03/2018

After some deliberation, I have decided that I have wasted too much time on my chapbook projects trying to work with others on making them fancy. I’m going to buckle down just do it myself. I have also decided that I will save some cost and do both of my planned books as a single collection. So instead of individual copies of Black Hymeneal and The Grimoire of the Dark Young, I plan to issue them as one collection under the umbrella of MiscellManny. I may do future releases of my amateur writings under this title.

August Derleth’s “The Drifting Snow” (1939)

Fangs: The Vampire Archives Vol. 2 [2010,Vintage Crime/Black Lizard]

Flipping through the pages of Fangs: The Vampire Archives, Volume 2, I found and re-read The Drifting Snow by August Derleth. Initially published in the February 1939 issue of Weird Tales, it is one of his most popular supernatural tales and has been anthologized many times; it may also be found in his 1948 Arkham House collection, Not Long for This World. The basic idea is an elderly matron is visited by her relatives at her cabin in the Wisconsin woodland. A snowstorm is brewing and the younger family members are feeling antsy and they believe old aunt Mary has gone off her head because she wants the curtains drawn on the window leading out front. Mary has her reasons, which she eventually divulges, she believes her husband was killed by a revenant that he unintentionally created and that they both come back to lure others to their doom when they see their ghosts in the drifting snow (hence the title).

It’s supposed to be a vampire tale, but I don’t think it works as such because the initial revenant, a former servant from their household whom old Henry had turned out of the house on a similarly snowy night, after he caught her sleeping with his son, has no reason to be a vampire; she wasn’t a suicide, she wasn’t bitten by a vampire, and she wasn’t involved in any deviltry before she died of alleged exposure. If anything, she might have been a sad or even vengeful ghost, but a vampire is stretching it. Also, Derleth gives away the vampire bit way too early and doesn’t back it up. The victims supposedly are found similarly dead from exposure, not drained of blood or youth, and the only tell-tale marks on their body are dainty little hand prints. After a decent build up, Derleth rushes to an end that just doesn’t hold up. I am surprised that it is as celebrated a tale as it is.

Climactic scene from the Vampire Tales 1974 adaptation of August Derleth’s The Drifting Snow.

In 1974 Marvel Comics did an adaptation for their Vampire Tales comic, and even they had to jazz it up a bit because it wasn’t vampire-y enough.

Update 09/27/2018

This past weekend I helped celebrate my cousin Jason’s birthday by giving him a little chapbook I created at Kinkos featuring Thalía and Morbidezza, since he is a big vampire aficionado. I was surprised at how easy it was to make and, although not exactly cheap, it wasn’t that expensive either. I think I might use their services to make chapbooks for both The Grimoire of the Dark Young and Black Hymeneal. It’s not quite the look I wanted, but to just get them out into the world as well as fulfill my promise to the people who donated to my cause back in 2014, I think it will work. If those come out okay I may make one for Nativity in Black since my friend, artist Thérèse Lavery, did a lovely illustration for it over the summer.

I am still working with my buddy artist Dick Kelly on a chapbook of my Krampus poem. He has been working diligently on the illustrations and sending me photos of his progress and giving me art samples whenever we meet up. I hope to have it in time for the 2018 holiday season.

 

Update 09/25/2018

This morning, I logged on briefly to my email to find a message from Ashley Dioses saying that although it made it to the 2nd round, The Baleful Beldam did not make it to the final round for the Witch issue of Eye To the Telescope. She did however suggest that I send it on to Obediah Baird at The Audient Void and tell him she sent me. I did as she said and thanked her for her help. If Mr. Baird doesn’t take it, perhaps S.T. Joshi will accept it for Spectral Realms.

Coffins: The Vampire Archives, Volume 3 [2010, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard]

In other news, I stumbled across my copy of Coffins: The Vampire Archives, Volume 3 in my room and decided to peruse the pages. I found an M.R. James tale I hadn’t read before called Wailing Well. Like Count Magnus, it contains a fiend (or in this case fiends) which are vaguely vampiric in nature. Although I wouldn’t count it among his very best works (which is probably why I hadn’t come across it before) it was definitely a creepy fun read and it was nice to see something new (to me at least) by the master of the modern English ghost story.

Wailing Well [Frontispiece, number 137 of 157 copies, Stanford Dingley, The Mill House Press, 1928]

After reading the James story, I decided to dive into Edgar Allan Poe’s Liegia, which I hadn’t read in quite some time. About half way through it dawned on me that my Morbidezza is heavily influenced by Poe. I know this should come as no surprise, as Ol’ Edgar’s shadow looms largely over my creative output, but when I wrote Morbidezza I was only consciously thinking of the old accounts I’d read in Montague Summers’ series of books on historical vampirism and the earlier literary vampire tales like Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla or Wake Not the Dead by Ernst Raupach, but it has all the elements of a classic Poe tale: a historical setting with a moribund mistress, a besotted suitor, and implied necrophilia, all told in a little over 700 words in a baroque style using archaic language and arcane references. How I did not see it before, I don’t know. Either way, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written thus far and I cannot wait to see the reaction from the Spectral Realms readership when issue #10 becomes available in March.

Update 09-16-2018: Thalía

I was cleaning up some of the clutter in my room when, rummaging through an old cardboard box, I found a notebook open to the first page, that had the original manuscript for my poem Thalía, which will be in the Summer 2018 issue (#9) of Spectral Realms. If you look closely, I have the terza rima rhyme scheme in the margins to keep track of what goes where. The writing in ink was the stuff I had initially come up with and the pencil writing was what I added afterward.

Working manuscript for Thalía.

Cover Art for Spectral Realms #9

Hippocampus Press has posted a picture of the draft for the cover art to Spectral Realms #9. Featured below, it is “Chiron’s Burden – Pleiades Children” by artist Kim Bo Yung. I cannot wait to receive my contributor’s copy and will post pictures whenever I do.

“Chiron’s Burden – Pleiades Children” by Kim Bo Yung.