by his. A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night: One evening it’s a romantic Victorian B&B with a supposedly haunted gazebo out back, the next it’s a cruddy Motel 6 with what looks like old bloodstains on the ceiling. The places where you stop to rest and dream are unique—but the road is the same, always waiting to carry you on to whatever’s next. And when it’s over, you’ve arrived someplace new, someplace (you hope) with a good view. A place to breathe deep and take it all in.
I hope it was a brisk, fun road trip for you. I hope you roared along at full throttle. It took a little longer for me: I wrote the oldest of these tales in 2006, while the most recent was finished a few scant months before we went to press. That’s slightly more than a decade, which is also roughly how long I took to write the tales in my last collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts. At that rate, barring tragedy (and can anyone bar tragedy?), I hope to write somewhere between thirty and fifty more short stories before I’m done.
That might be morbid, but if you’ve read this far, it’s kind of late to complain.
Some readers are always curious to learn how a story got written and what was on the writer’s mind when he wrote it. How did those bloodstains get on the ceiling in Room 217? And is there any proof that a pale woman in a lilac dress haunts the old gazebo in the yard? I don’t have all the answers, but maybe I have a few. The interested should proceed. Those who are satisfied with the stories alone, thanks for riding with me this far. I hope you had a thrill. Let’s do it again sometime.
INTRODUCTION: WHO’S YOUR DADDY?
I can hear you saying wh-a-a-aaaaaat, the introduction gets its own story note? It does, but only to mention that it’s the expression of some thoughts I’ve been thinking for a few years now. Elements of “Who’s Your Daddy?” have appeared in somewhat different form, in essays such as “The Truck” (from Road Rage, IDW Publishing) and “Bring On the Bad Guys” (which first appeared on Goodreads). I’m sure I’ve also talked about Tom Savini’s influence on my work elsewhere. It’s probably just as well that I stick with fiction—I’ve got only so many stories to tell about myself and only so many different ways to tell them.
THROTTLE
Richard Matheson came home from World War II, sat down at his typewriter, and rattled off several spare, savage masterpieces of suspense: I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Legend of Hell House among them. Although he was genre-fluid—he wrote crime, westerns, war, and sci-fi, including one of the very best episodes of the original Star Trek—he left the deepest imprint on the horror genre. A good Richard Matheson story moves like an eighteen-wheeler, thundering downhill with no brakes, and God help anything in the way.
In fact, one of Matheson’s most famous stories, “Duel,” featured a runaway tanker trunk as the antagonist and was the inspiration for that Spielberg film we discussed back in the introduction.
In 2008 I was asked if I wanted to write a story for an anthology honoring Matheson’s work. The idea was that each contributing writer would take one of Matheson’s concepts and reinvent it, take it in a new, unexpected direction. No one had to twist my arm. I had hardly finished reading the e-mail before I knew what I wanted to do. I had instantly imagined a short story about a faceless trucker taking on a gang of outlaw bikers, in a chase that would soon devolve into a war in the sand.
I saw pretty quickly that I was going to have one problem writing the story, which is that I had never ridden a motorcycle in my life. But my dad had—he’d been hauling around on hogs since he was a teenager. So I pitched him my idea and asked if he wanted to write it with me. He said yes. And there we were, playing Truck again, twenty-six years after our last game.
The summer after we wrote “Throttle,” I got my motorcycle license and wound up buying a Triumph Bonneville. My dad is