Midlisters Read online

  Midlisters

  Kealan Patrick Burke

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Introduction Copyright 2007 by Dallas Mayr

  Cover Photography by Adrienne Wallace

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  INTRODUCTION

  Ah! the writerly life! The tiny checks. The unpaid bills. The isolation. The years before there were any damn checks at all when you had all you could do to keep the wolves of family and friends’ skepticism at bay while you trudged through the tundra of your own consciousness, convinced beyond all reason and evidence that there would be checks someday and even recognition if only you kept going. And then later, the nagging suspicion that everything you do is sub-par compared to all the really fine writers out there and that your readers must be at least a little batshit to be bothering with you.

  The feeling that at some point you really ought to hang up your spurs for good.

  Then of course the upside. They go back aways. The words of encouragement from your high school English teacher. The college girls who imagine you’re the sensitive type. And tend to act on that supposition. Your first published story—which comes with a check!

  I told you so to all those goddamn well-meaning wolves out there!

  Your first published novel. A much bigger check! And later, your first book convention, where you receive unexpected praise from what Burke here calls “a small cabal of supporters” which is maybe not really so small after all and a pretty young thing tells you that you’re the only reason she came here.

  Sweet.

  And not so sweet. Because the upside always mingles with and sometimes absolutely hinges on the down. Especially for those souls like us who write the ghastly stuff.

  And all this Kealan Patrick Burke knows. He knows what we horror writers are—and sometimes aren’t—really up to.

  He knows about admiration and envy, loss, suspicion and fear.

  All kinds of fear. Of the particularly human variety.

  At one point in the story an older successful writer’s sitting in a bar talking with our protagonist. A midlister. A young writer filled with insecurities at his first convention and more than a little jealous of his new acquaintance. The guy talks about the subject. What subject? asks the younger man.

  The one you think you’re already writing about, he says. The same one we all fear: Death. Mortality. Isolation. Fear of being alone. Fear of having to bury our loved ones, and the selfishness of wanting to go before them, despite the terror the mere thought of it instills in us.

  Close? he asks. The young man nods. The bad news is, he says, it doesn’t get any easier to write about the closer you get to it.

  And I’m here to testify, it doesn’t. Not if you really do your job.

  Not if you really peer into the guts of the thing as Burke does. The hard and cold. The soft and warm. Midlisters creeps up on you with a deft sense of character and intelligence and knowledge of what writers really think and do and feel and then hauls off and whacks you one. Just like life tends to whack you one just when you aren’t looking. And does so with verity.

  Earlier in the same conversation the older writer surprises the hell out of his colleague by telling him that though he usually doesn’t go in for the kind of nasty stuff he writes he actually respects his book a lot. Why? the young man wants to know.

  Because it had real people in it, he says. And real people with real fears. They weren’t cardboard cutouts waiting for the shredder.

  I felt for them. Feared for them, and if I’m not mistaken, that’s what horror is supposed to do.

  Amen to that.

  —Jack Ketchum

  Chapter 1

  Murder.

  It was just a word.

  A word I used in my work on an almost daily basis. And if I wasn't actively employing it as a device to dispatch a character, I was thinking about the best way to do it. Envisioning it. Using the people that shuffled around me in Wal-Mart as Crash Test Dummies. Wondering how that old man would fall if a poker came down on his head from behind. Or how that obese lady would shriek if a machete were thrust into her sizable midsection.

  The slacker with the sledgehammer.

  The clerk with the carving knife.

  The bag-boy with the baseball bat.

  The look in that infant's eyes as his mother's head plunks into the cart while she keeps pushing for at least a few feet.

  And so on and so forth.

  Or maybe, in the mood for subtlety, I shied away from the graphic, the grue, the gore, because the scene demanded something quieter. Then again, maybe the story had been quiet (a little…too…quiet…), and graphic was exactly what was needed.

  What to do, what to do. Minimalist, or full-on fucking Pollock in his red period? Whichever. It had to be something for the readers to savor and the critics to remember. Something for my fans to disseminate while I sat at inexpensive tables in out-of-the-way bookstores, my cramped hand splayed out, pinning down the book, the cover peeled back to expose the tender flesh beneath where some faceless person I would never meet had tattooed my name. I would try to look interested, try to keep from agonizing over whether or not the greasy-haired kid with the retainer and beads of spittle nestled in the corners of his mouth actually bought my book new or if that leprous bald patch on the cover was the handiwork of the book's original owner, who ripped the price tag off with nary a second thought right before they went and sold it on eBay for a quarter of the original price. But in the end, the scowl always stayed a smile, even if it was more like a wound the doctors couldn't quite figure out to heal; I'd nod in all the right places, endure the kid's animated, probably forced enthusiasm, and scratch my name on the skin of my soul a second time.

  The kid would leave happy, maybe tell his buddies he met me and I'm a nice guy, if a little bit on the creepy-looking side. I'd be left with the mystery. His book or not? eBay or ABEbooks. Half-Price Books or the CVS Bargain Bin. Invariably, I'd realize the futility of trying to figure it all out, the folly of caring, and go back to the story in mind.

  Back to murder.

  As more beaming faces slid into view, and a book, maybe a dozen of them were shoved in front of me, I'd keep that plastic smile going for the benefit of all concerned, while behind my eyes I was a serial killer, sicker of course than I could ever have the capability to be, running down my latest blonde big-breasted victim. Listening to her screams, watching her fall, bearing down on her in all my faux psychotic tiresome misogynistic glory. There might be chainsaws; there'd certainly be blood, and everyone would leave with a grin. And no one ever said my work was without merit. Know why? Because I wasn't Hollywood, and I got a free pass because I wrote literature. I got a free pass because the murder in my books was still just a word.

  Make-believe. It meant nothing.

  Until it happened for real.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Kent Gray, and for a long time I hated him. No, I didn't hate him. I fucking loathed the guy. And while, during my occasional visits to his online forum and various other literary message boards I eloquently and reasonably defended my disgust for his work, backing it up with solid examples why everyone else should feel the same way, and being ever-so-careful not to let my hatred of the man himself bleed into my criticism (which given our respective positio
ns on the career ladder would have meant a couple of months of weathering emails loaded with suggestions on how the Kama Sutra, my grandmother and some Astroglide would make for a great evening's entertainment), the truth was I envied him, greatly. And it was not an envy that sprung from something glamorous. He didn't attend premieres of the films they made from his work with the kind of women I would never have draped over his arm. Nothing like that. For starters, despite his success in the literary realm, they never made a movie of his work. They should have. There was no good reason I could see why they didn't (though slow agonizing torture couldn't have pried that opinion out me on a public forum). But, despite plenty of it being optioned (the announcements of which I had to endure ad infinitum from those troglodytes on his goddamn website message board), nothing ever made it to screen. Kent didn't care, as he so graciously informed his ravening fan base. In fact, according to him, he preferred to have the "integrity" of his work "untainted by Hollywood's convoluted sense of story," whereas I would gladly have donated one of my balls if it meant some fresh-faced cocaine-snuffing fuckwad at Paramount would even glance askew at something with my name on it.

  Even the reviews of his books were nothing special. He seldom got raves, but negative reviews were rarer still. There was always something, that great messy unidentifiable something that made everybody like his work on some level, and by default, it endeared them to its creator. And most importantly, in the eyes of those who decide whether or not we'll be paying the gas bill for the next few months, he was a steady seller. His erotic science fiction novels always managed to hold a place, outside the realm of the heavy-hitters like Sting-King and Snora Roberts and Evanobitch, but not far enough down for him to feel my breath on the back of his neck, or to be concerned that anything I threw with my good arm would come anywhere close to grazing him.

  He wasn't much of a public figure either, though how much of that was PR, designed to guarantee standing room only whenever he did do a signing, or show up at a benefit for some noble literary function, is anybody's guess. Fact was, you didn't see his handsome smiling mug all over the place, or on billboards flanking highways famous for bad traffic, so chances were you'd have no choice but to sit there sweating and choking on your own cigarette smoke while his fat head beamed down on you with smug approval. He wasn't rich, another misconception he gleefully obliterated.

  And for such honesty, he was really the only reliable source. God knows you can't find out these things on the streets, where the general buying public assumes that if there's a book in Barnes & Noble with your name on it, it means you must have the key to the literary equivalent of the executive washroom. They see you and immediately become starry-eyed zombies, their brains assailing them with alert messages that they have found themselves in the company of greatness, which in today's society means someone who has been on TV or the newspapers (celebrity or notoriety doesn't matter— those terms have become interchangeable.) Kent "got by," as did I. We both managed to earn enough to keep ourselves afloat. That, and a basic love for what we did, or a love we used to have for what we did, was one of the only things we had in common. That, and fear, but I'll get to that later.

  So, he sold better than I did. His reviews were better. He had a greater readership. More enthusiastic fans. In the weeks before the Aurora Convention where we met for the first and last time, my (worryingly, at times) frequent Google searches on his name turned up at least sixty more pages than mine. His website was more expensive, more accessible, and uncontaminated by pop-up ads. His publisher believed in him, and so gave his books an enthusiastic push. Physically, he was in better shape. He was good-looking, had more hair and better teeth.

  Plenty to hate, right? Plenty to invoke ire and envy in equal measures. Hell, maybe you're a writer who lost out on a few awards to the prolific Mr. Gray. If so, envy shouldn't strike you as a radical, unreasonable reaction. I'd hardly be the only guy in that particular self-help group.

  But that's not it.

  None of those qualities made me hate him with the intensity that kept me awake at nights and left me with the kind of creative impotency that can drive most sane men mad, or to murder, whichever occurs to them first and goes untreated. No, my envy had a simpler, less cosmetic basis: I hated Kent Gray because he was a better writer.

  * * *

  Gray was, in fact, the kind of writer I had dreamed of being since my early teens when I found myself up to my elbows in Jules Verne, Wells, Hodgson, Lovecraft, Poe, and Blackwood, thick oversized and wordy volumes I had cadged from the library using my mother's card. Up until she died last year, my mother liked to reminisce about how for a long time she thought the skin on my father's face was made from newsprint (Black and White and Read All Over, haw-haw), and mine was a garish palette of ever-changing monstrosities. Such a remark might have had a profoundly adverse effect on my self-confidence, had I not known she was referring to the covers of those Weird Tales magazines I read at every available opportunity, starting at the breakfast table and ending in my bedroom, beneath the covers with a flashlight (clichéd, I know, but no less true). There are huge banks in my memory, saved on my cerebral hard drive and labeled Age: 12-15, in which nothing exists but fond memories of my escape into those dusty tomes and cheap horror comics. You might keep your recollections of your first kiss, your first broken bone, or the first time you jacked off to Leanna Quiqley's naked graveyard dance in Return of the Living Dead 2 on the top of the stack, but for me, it was all about the words, the stories, and how I would someday use them myself to create the kinds of worlds that offered me an exeunt stage left from the banality of middle-class life. I read on, and I read more, and the passing of time was measured only by the quality of light through the small window in my room. Inevitably, my social skills began to atrophy and in school my grades developed an irresistible attraction to the bottom of the curve. Whenever my mother poked her head in to check that I was studying, she nodded her approval at the sight of the massive science textbook clamped between my grubby hands, little knowing that it was a screen concealing from view the latest Shadows anthology.

  As my appreciation grew, and the shaky buds of my writing talent began to unfurl, parent-teacher conferences became more frequent.

  My mother would sit across the table from my math teacher, arms were folded all over the place like knights reluctant to wield their weapons in the presence of a minor, and I was discussed as if in failing at school, I'd become incorporeal. The only time I got to relax was when my English teacher, a cross-eyed, bushy-haired, but fiercely passionate old guy by the name of Hanson (no relation to the generic pop-culture trio of prepubescent yodelers, thank God), made my mother blush by raving about my potential so enthusiastically, both of us ended up dabbing his spittle from our faces on the way to the car. Hanson called me a "natural-born storyteller with an ear for dialogue" and told her to buy me books instead of clothes or records from now on. It would be, said he, nothing less than an investment in my future. And she did, but the continued erosion of my other grades always countered her pride. As did my father's contention that a life spent living in my own head and making up stories was akin to a life on the breadline. "You want to lie for a living?" he said once. "Become a lawyer. At least you'll get paid for it."

  By this time I was fifteen, so while I couldn't yet count telling him where to stick his opinions among my privileges unless I wanted my jaw broken, I was stubborn enough and secure enough in my goals to not let my father's disdain or my mother's uncertainty prevent me from doing what I felt I was born to do. I made friends and lost them when they realized we shared no common interests. While they were chasing ass and alcohol, I was chasing participles and publication, which managed to elude and taunt me, and sour my disposition well into my twenties, by which time I had taken on and left a variety of mind-numbing jobs and temporary girlfriends (though in truth, most of the women in my life left me, and not the other way round, despite my periodic claims to the contrary).

  Eventually, six weeks
before my twenty-sixth birthday, I came home from my latest stint as a security guard for a briny abandoned warehouse on the docks near my apartment, to find awaiting me a slim white envelope bearing the return address of a magazine I had sent a story to almost a year before.

  I didn't even bother opening it.

  I got drunk first, then opened the six bills that had been padding the floor beneath that letter. I might have cried a little as I watched my paltry paycheck vanish in a whirlwind of overdue notices. I might even have seen the ghost of my dad—who wasn't dead at the time (that wouldn't happen for another few years), but might as well have been for all I saw of him—sitting in the ratty armchair across from me in my damp anorexic apartment, shaking his head in disappointment.

  So I cried, and I beat the living shit out of that chair until I was sure I'd broken a bone in my hand and the chair had coughed up what little guts it'd had when I'd bought it at a yard sale, then I snatched up the letter, tore it open so angrily I ripped the contents in half, and tried to focus on what was undoubtedly the latest in an apparently bottomless well of rejection slips.

  I don't know how long I stood there squinting and sniffling at those shreds of paper before it dawned on me that one of them was a check, but when it did, I think I very quietly, very calmly went to the bathroom and threw up a half-bottle of cheap whiskey.

  Chapter 3

  That check, for the princely sum of $122.07, from the editor of Eldritch Echoes (now defunct, but not, I like to think, because they ran my story), saved my life, and certainly my mind. I can look up from this screen right now and it's there, framed on the wall over my desk, slightly yellowed from being in the sun over the years, which gives it a healthier pallor than my own. I should have spent it the very next day. I needed to spend it. After all, that story, written in two days, and edited over one, had earned me roughly half what I was getting for a full week's shift at the warehouse. I should have used it to pay bills, or to celebrate. Instead I taped the check back together, tacked it to the wall (which I wish I hadn't—that tiny hole in the top of the check somehow diminishes the mystique) and sat down with the acceptance letter. It was short, and sweet: