a draft before I was asked to jump in. Contributors were offered a selection of illustrations and asked to pick one and write a story about it. As it happened, though, there was a piece among them that looked as if it had been specifically crafted for “All I Care About Is You,” almost as if McKean knew what I was going to write before I wrote it. And maybe he did.
I’m not entirely kidding. The best works of art have a tendency to fall through time differently than human beings. They remember, but they also anticipate. A good piece can mean different things to different people at different times, and all of those meanings are true, even if they contradict one another. McKean didn’t know what I was going to write and didn’t need to. His imagination knew what might be written, and that was enough.
THUMBPRINT
“Thumbprint” is the oldest story here. It was composed in 2006, after PS Publishing released their edition of 20th Century Ghosts but before the publication of Heart-Shaped Box. I was, at the time, dimly aware that I was in trouble. Professionally, things had never looked better, but psychologically, I was beginning to tussle with anxiety and the pressure to write another novel. I had already begun a couple of things that didn’t make it past page ten. Stories roared to life and were shot down before they took their first steps. “Thumbprint” was the only thing that made it through the enfilade, a nasty story about a hard, resilient woman who came back from Iraq with blood on her conscience, only to find herself stalked by an unseen hunter here in the States. In retrospect I guess Mal was tough enough to make it home from the sand and tough enough to carry me through this particular story. It was published in Postscripts in 2007. Later, comic-book writer Jason Ciaramella and artist Vic Malhotra adapted “Thumbprint” into a bare-knuckled graphic novel, heavy on the war, light on the peace.
THE DEVIL ON THE STAIRCASE
The first draft of the story was written in longhand while I was on a holiday in Positano. Because it was a vacation, I didn’t intend to be writing anything, since one conventional definition of a vacation is “a time in which you are not working.” Only I get restless when I don’t write. I don’t feel like myself anymore. A couple days into the trip, on a hike up one of the Amalfi coast’s vertiginous staircases, this idea popped into my head, and by next morning I was scratching away.
That first draft looked like any other story. But when I began typing up a second draft, the title looked like this, before I centered it:
The Devil
on the Staircase
Which to my eye seemed like two steps leading downward. I remembered Malamud’s comment about form matching content and went to work rebuilding my flights of fancy into flights of stairs.
Trivia for design buffs: The staircases work only when printed in a monotype such as Courier where every letter takes up exactly as much space as any other letter. Reprint my staircases of words in a font like Caslon or Fournier and they melt apart.
TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD
I made one mistake in this story. Back when I wrote it, it seemed reasonable to imagine that a kid facing the undead hordes would turn to social media for help. Truth is, though, here in 2019 it’s clearer than ever that social media won’t save us from zombies—it’s turning us into them.
MUMS
Sometimes I think the national crop is not wheat or corn but paranoia.
IN THE TALL GRASS
At the time of this writing, director Vincenzo Natali has just wrapped up a movie-length adaptation of this story for Netflix, and by the time Full Throttle is in bookstores, In the Tall Grass will most probably be available to stream in nearly 190 countries. That’s a pretty wild result for a short story that was written in . . . six days.
Both here, and with “Throttle,” the experience of working with my father has been the same. Ever see one of those Road Runner cartoons? I always feel like Wile E. Coyote strapped to the rocket, and my dad is the missile. We came up with this story over flapjacks in an International House of Pancakes, on a week when we were both in between projects. We started writing the next morning. It was first published across two issues of Esquire.