Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Read online

  BETTER WEIRD

  A Tribute to David B. Silva

  Edited by

  Richard Chizmar

  Brian James Freeman

  Paul F. Olson

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Baltimore MD

  2014

  Edited by Richard Chizmar, Brian James Freeman, and Paul F. Olson

  "Introduction" © 2015 Paul F. Olson

  "The End of Us" © 2015 Kealan Patrick Burke

  "Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" originally appeared in Masques edited by J.N. Williamson (Maclay and Associates, 1984) © Joe R. Lansdale

  "Paint by Numbers" © 2015 Bentley Little

  "Get Off of My Cloud" © 2015 Thomas F. Monteleone

  "Tru-Blood" originally appeared in SINISTER - Tales of Dread 2013 (DM Publishing, August 30 2013) © Billie Sue Mosiman

  "Burying Betsy" originally appeared on DreadCentral.com in 2006 © Brian Keene

  "Each Night, Each Year" originally appeared in Post Mortem, New Tales of Ghostly Horror edited by Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva (St. Martin's Press, 1989) © Kathryn Ptacek

  "Yellachile's Cage" © 2015 Robert R. McCammon

  "Zachary's Glass Shoppe" originally appeared in Deathrealm #10 (Fall/Winter 1989) © Yvonne Navarro

  "Here with the Shadows" originallly appeared in the collection Here With the Shadows (The Swan River Press, Dublin, February 2014) © 2014 Steve Rasnic Tem

  "Among the Dead" © 2015 J.F. Gonzalez

  "Nothing There" © 2015 G. Wayne Miller

  "Hide and Go Peek" originally appeared in the collection Sundown (Necon E-books, 2011) © 2011 Elizabeth Massie

  "Eternal, Ever Since Wednesday" © 2015 Brian Hodge

  "Muse" © 2015 Robert Swartwood

  "Recurring Nightmare" originally appeared in The Horror Show (Summer 1989) © G.L. Raisor

  "When the Heart Sings" © 2015 Paul F. Olson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  First Digital Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-482-2

  Cover Artwork Copyright ©2014 by Harry O. Morris

  Digital Design by DH Digital Editions

  INTRODUCTION

  Let’s be honest. There’s a really good chance that Dave would have hated this book.

  In the bundle of confusing, occasionally funny, sometimes frustrating, and always very human contradictions that were David B. Silva, this anthology runs smack dab into the biggest contradiction of all: for a man who was so incredibly passionate about his work, giving to others, generous with his time, openhearted with his criticism, and lavish with encouragement, advice and support for everyone who needed it, Dave was incredibly, even painfully shy, and utterly adverse to calling attention to himself in any way.

  I knew Dave for thirty years, and I can pretty confidently predict that the fuss people are making about him would have mortified him. Deep down, in a place he would never acknowledge, let alone admit, I suspect he would have been pleased. I like to think he would have taken this book off the shelf from time to time – maybe a lot of times – and snuck a look at it, that he would have read and reread the stories, feeling gratitude at the outstanding caliber of writers who lined up to honor him. I like to think he would have lingered over their tributes and felt justifiably proud, that maybe he would even smile a bit to realize for the first time just how highly regarded he was as an editor, a writer, a friend. But Dave was Dave, and that means he also would have denied those feelings, struggled with them, fought hard against them, telling himself he wasn’t worthy of the attention, that the accolades were misguided or misplaced, that some people must have nothing better to do with their time than make a fuss over someone who doesn’t deserve it.

  There’s nothing we can do about that now, of course. Most of us – even his closest friends – missed the chance to say these things to him when he was alive. We lost the opportunity to tell him how much we respected him as an editor, how his writing left us in awe, how we valued his wisdom and unwavering support. So we’ll have to do it now.

  The world of horror fiction is full of restless spirits who come back from the dead, to do what they failed to do in life.

  It works the other way, too.

  Those of us left behind also have things to do. We have duties to our colleagues and friends, our loved ones. And if we do not fulfill those duties while they’re still with us, we must do it after they are gone.

  ****

  The news that David Blair Silva had died at the age of 62 broke on March 13, 2013, and the first tributes followed within minutes. The little corner of social media occupied by horror fans and professionals began to buzz with hastily-posted expressions of shock and disbelief and sorrow. Within an hour or two, more thoughtful, detailed remarks began to emerge. I also tried to say some things that first day, but had trouble framing my thoughts in a coherent fashion. I didn’t do much better over the next two weeks, as requests came in for personal remembrances of Dave. I floundered with those pieces as well, sure that I was fumbling the task, unable to say what I really needed to say.

  Frankly, I’m still having trouble with it now, several months later.

  Dave and I met through the mail in 1983, when I sent him a story for The Horror Show, which at that point had only published one fairly unimpressive issue – all of the stories written by Dave himself and a few friends, using pseudonyms, printed in a tabloid format (years later, when I visited his home, he showed me the countless little holes in his coffee table left behind from pushing the staples into that first issue). Dave rejected the first story I submitted, but encouraged me to send more. I immediately shipped off another, and he bought it for the whopping sum of $10 – a quarter-of-a-cent per word – thus giving me my first paying sale. In gratitude I sent him a thank-you letter, and we began a regular correspondence that quickly grew into friendship.

  Over the next few years, we visited each other’s homes, traveled to conventions together, and began a long history of plotting and scheming – an idea-rich blast furnace of a co-conspiratorship that led to everything from an imaginary magazine (Iocus, which went on to become a complex April Fool’s prank in the pages of The Horror Show) to the birth of a real magazine (my own publication, Horrorstruck), to a pair of well-received anthologies (Post Mortem and Dead End: City Limits) to an aborted science-horror trilogy (that one went through at least four titles, beginning with Pox and ending with Flex Time), and eventually to the birth of our final collaborative project (the Hellnotes newsletter).

  Through those years and the many that followed, I relied wholeheartedly on Dave’s presence in my life. Invariably, he was the one I turned to when I needed advice, when I wanted feedback on something I had written, when I was excited or angry about something in the horror field, when I discovered a new writer I wanted to share, when I was confused about a new development or rising trend in the publishing business, when I had a question about almost anything from reading and writing to computers and websites.

  I was far from alone. For a man who spent his entire adult life in solitude, first hidden in the mountains of northern California and later hidden among the teeming masses of Las Vegas, Dave had a vast extended family of friends, colleagues, collaborators, students and fans
.

  Of course, the influence of The Horror Show has become legendary. Every horror fan of a certain age, and a good many younger fans, too, know all about Dave’s baby, that little magazine that cast such a big shadow over the genre in the 1980s – the sheer number of writers he published over the course of nine years and twenty-eight issues, the staggering number of authors whose careers he launched by buying their stories for the first time, the authors whose talent blossomed under his careful eye and gentle guidance, the number of other small-press magazines that sprang to life because their editors were inspired by Dave’s example, and the number of those editors he actively assisted with everything from simple words of support to incisive, step-by-step mentoring.

  A lot of the writers in the pages of this anthology fit into one or more of those categories. So do I. So does the publisher of this book. So do many others not represented here.

  Dave was less well known as a writer, which sounds like a funny thing to say about someone who was both an accomplished story craftsman and novelist, who won a Bram Stoker Award and earned a number of “Best Of” appearances, and who has been acclaimed as one of the finest short fiction writers of his generation. Some of that is due to the nature of the business itself, how damned hard it is for anyone who’s not a celebrity or a member of the multi-million-seller club to get due attention for his or her work. Some is probably because of Dave himself – we’re back to his deep-bred modesty and shyness, his loathing to call attention to himself, his desire to focus only on the work and ignore anything that smacked of business or, god forbid, promotion. It’s easy to imagine a different Dave, one who wasn’t so reticent about blowing his own horn, who didn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming to conventions, who wasn’t afraid to splash himself all over Facebook and never missed a chance to post about how wonderful he was – it’s easy to imagine a Dave like that parlaying his considerable skills into a highly-lucrative career as one of horror’s brightest stars.

  But have no doubt: even though the majority of it was launched in relative obscurity, Dave’s writing will stand the test of time. A hundred years from now, you will still see works like “The Calling” or “Dry Whiskey,” “Dwindling” or “The Night in Fog” or Slipping” or “All the Lonely People” popping up whenever or wherever the best horror fiction is assembled. Few of us are fortunate enough to write such timeless tales, but for Dave it happened almost every time he put fingers to keyboard. That’s not to say it was easy for him. He was not a fast writer or one of those who made it all seem effortless and painless. He struggled a lot. He agonized over every word, every line. But that terrible exertion resulted in something special – a body of work that will be with us for generations.

  ****

  If I could tell you one thing about Dave that you might not know – something he never would have told you himself – I think I’d want to tell you how absolutely fearless he was. I’m not sure he even knew that he was fearless. If you pressed him, he probably would have described it as stubbornness or having the courage of his convictions, both of which are true as far as they go. But there was much more to it than that. Trust me. The man had guts.

  Of course, that leads us to yet another contradiction. Writers are, by nature, a pretty insecure lot, and Dave was as insecure as the best of them. He was plagued with uncertainty and doubt, always questioning his talent, his knowledge, his ability, his creative energy. But despite that, he was never afraid to take a chance, and he never gave up on anything without a fight. That was evident right from the very beginning, when he made the decision to soldier on with The Horror Show after that first problematic issue, after that pile of newsprint sat there in the corner of his living room unsold, after his publishing buddies shrugged their shoulders and walked away. A lesser editor would have bailed out right then, but not Dave. He pushed on, and in fact pushed harder, deciding immediately to expand the scope and ambition of the magazine and see if he could actually make something of it. And, of course, we know how that came out. He not only made something of it, he made it the absolute best.

  He did the same thing when we were launching Hellnotes in 1997. From the very beginning we had the crazy idea that we could turn out a product that was not only a valuable newsletter but also a technological leap forward for its time, published simultaneously in three formats – e-mail, fax, and hard-copy. The idea terrified me. I saw too many pitfalls. I thought of the workload, the expense, the logistical hurdles we would have to overcome. Dave saw them, too, but he didn’t care. He was determined to make it work. And a month or so later, after our first few issues had come out to a resounding “ho hum” from the horror community, he doubled down on his determination, grabbed me by the collar, and told me we were going to turn things around. He did that again some years later, after we had given up the newsletter and turned it over to other folks, after they were done with it and had given it back to him. Rather than fold up shop then, or stick to the safe, tried and true newsletter-by-email approach, he decided to take another leap forward, to completely revamp the Hellnotes concept and turn that weekly publication into a constantly-updated news website. And somehow he made that work too, beating the odds and making Hellnotes a leader in a crowded field.

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Dave was fearless with his writing. I’ve honestly never known a writer with such a small collection of trunk stories, with so few aborted novels, partially-finished tales, works that were completed but deemed not good enough to send out. Dave simply didn’t have those things. That’s because when he started something, he saw it through to the end. When the work got hard, he worked harder. When the sweat and strain were too much, he wiped his brow and kept right on typing. When doubts rose up and assailed him – as they did almost every day of his creative life – he turned up the music to drown them out and pushed on past every hurdle, until he reached the final sentence. And then, if it wasn’t good enough, he rewrote until it was. And with Dave, that meant it was very, very good indeed.

  ****

  I’ve heard a few people say recently that Dave Silva’s life was tragic, but if that’s the only way we choose to remember him, we are making a tremendous mistake. Yes, it’s true – as it’s true for far too many accomplished people who strive to make a living in creative endeavors – that Dave struggled in his last few years. It’s true that he been in failing health for some time, that his finances were precarious, that he could not afford the medical treatment he needed. It’s true that he died broke, unable at the end to even afford the vital Internet link that kept him connected to his network of friends and professional colleagues. And it’s true that he died alone. But to look at only those things and think they somehow define this man is shortsighted. It’s unfair. And it’s just plain wrong. It misses the very essence of Dave.

  More than anything, the story of David B. Silva is the story of a life well-lived, certainly a life that was lived precisely the way he wanted to live it, charting his own course, marching to his own beat. It was a life spent doing the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else. It was a life filled with constant creativity, surrounded by words and the people who write them.

  That bigger picture starts to come into focus when you look at this anthology and the writers who contributed to it, all of whom, by the way, have their own eloquent things to say about Dave and his impact, none of whom hesitated for even a fraction of second when asked to participate in the project. Read their stories – some brand new, some carefully-selected reprints. Read their comments about the man we are honoring. Do that and you start to see Dave’s life measured the only way that really counts, by the number of lives he touched and how deeply he touched them.

  ****

  As you’ve probably gathered by now, the essence of Dave Silva cannot be captured in just a few words. He actually tried doing that himself a few times. For years, he summed up himself and his work with that familiar slogan he first used in the pages of The Horror Show and in letters to friends, the cat
chphrase that gave this anthology its name: Better weird than plastic. Later, like the good editor he was, he tried distilling that down even further, describing himself simply as a dreamer, a lost boy. But those words, while true, still fail to capture the man.

  Dave Silva was many things: a beloved son and brother, an editor without par, a poet who wrote in prose, a good friend, a wise teacher, a fearless leader, a great listener, an outgoing man who was painfully shy, a proud man who was determinedly self-deprecating, a blazing talent who continually doubted his abilities, a quiet man with a big voice, a sad man with a booming laugh, a dead-serious joker, a pessimistic optimist, an avowed hermit who enthusiastically and unreservedly loved mankind.

  I’m struck in particular by two of those things, because they come closest to getting to the heart of the matter, the heart of the man.

  Wise teacher.

  Good friend.

  That’s the Dave Silva who left his mark on us. That’s that Dave Silva we remember and celebrate here, the one whose legacy lives on in these pages and will echo in the long haunted hallways of the horror genre for years to come.

  And, Dave? Wherever you are, I know you’re squirming right now, and I’m sorry, but we really don’t have any choice.

  Some things simply must be said, even when they’re said too late.

  Thank you, Dave.

  Thank you for what you did.

  Thank you for who you were.

  Thank you for everything.

  Paul F. Olson

  THE END OF US

  Kealan Patrick Burke

  Tick, tick, tock.

  The razor, gleaming and pristine, is poised over a vein that looks like a small blue wire beneath white electrical tape, carrying the current to a heart that no longer wants to accept the pulse. In the mirror, my reflection, pale and defeated, looks back with cold eyes, nods almost imperceptibly, encouraging me to continue. In my head, my father’s voice–Look at yourself, kiddo. This is the thing to do. And then my mother’s voice, feebler, as it was at the end of her life, her face only marginally paler than mine is now: Where did I go wrong with you? Could I have done any better? Neither one of them could ever be relied upon to save me, nor can they save me now. Instead they’ve become cheerleaders at my suicide, spectators at the end. Do it. You might as well. But I don’t. Not yet. Instead I stare back at that cold, unimpressive and unimpressed reflection, let its eyes rove over the limp, lifeless hair, the adult acne, the crooked teeth, and I wonder how Stacey could ever have found me attractive, how she ever found me at all when the world is stuffed to capacity with prettier people, people with something to offer. Contributors.