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

  He destroyed the painting instantly, breaking the balsawood in two, then breaking those pieces in two, throwing the whole thing into the trash can. That still wasn’t good enough. He wanted it out of the house, and he took the trash can out to the alley and dumped its contents into the garbage bin of his apartment building.

  He returned to his apartment, closed and locked the door, and sat on the couch breathing heavily, trying not to think about the knives in the kitchen, the hammer in the hall closet, the Drano under the bathroom sink.

  Was this what his mom had done? Had she destroyed her work upon completion? Was that why he could not remember seeing either of the other two paintings that had come in the box?

  He hoped so.

  He not only threw away the picture, he tossed out the paints, the brush and ripped up the box before throwing it into the trash as well. There was nothing left of the paint-by-numbers kit, and the knowledge of that left him feeling relieved. He posted on the Tyrese message board that he was done, asking everyone to leave him alone.

  But as the days passed… he missed it. Not the actual physical painting, but the process of painting. And the camaraderie of those constant emails, telling him what to do and how to do it. His nights now seemed empty. He tried reading, tried watching TV, went out with some of the guys from work, even started playing a video game that he’d been assured he would love. But the pointlessness of it all reminded him of that bleak landscape–

  suicide

  –and made him wonder why he bothered with any of it. He hadn’t felt that way when he was painting, and more than anything else it was the loss of purpose he missed. He wondered if his mom had felt the same, if that was why she’d continued on and finished a second picture after the first.

  He had just fast-forwarded through a movie he’d thought he would like when there was a knock at his door. That was odd. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and his friends were not the type to just drop in unannounced. He got up, unlocked and opened the door to see who it was, and standing on his porch in full goth regalia were Johnny and Prallix.

  He wasn’t aware that he had given them his address, but that nitpicking little detail was forgotten immediately when he saw what Johnny was holding in his hand.

  A balsawood board.

  A painting.

  He could have slammed the door on them, he could have told them to go away, but he did neither, only stood there, waiting to be shown what they had brought him to see. His muscles tensed as Johnny flipped the board over, holding it up.

  Rick looked at the painting.

  It was a face.

  The most terrifying face he’d ever seen.

  He turned away, trembling. He had never seen such a visage before. It was not that of a monster; there was not about it the distorted features of a demon or the exaggerated aspects of some horrorshow creature. It was the face of a man, but it was the most evil man he had ever laid eyes upon, and the representation of that countenance was so subtly realistic that it filled him with terror.

  “I painted this over the past week,” Johnny said. Next to him, Prallix nodded.

  “It’s nice,” Rick told them.

  It wasn’t, and the couple had to know that, but all three of them pretended it was the most beautiful painting any of them had ever seen. He saw in Johnny’s eyes the same sense of hopelessness he’d experienced, the same desperate need to stave off despair that he felt in himself. Prallix’s expression was blank.

  Still looking away from the picture, Rick thought once more of his mom. Why, he wondered, had she stopped after two paintings? If the first one hadn’t dissuaded her and she’d continued on, why hadn’t she completed the third?

  The Tyrese sets had only been made from 1964 through 1967. In 1967, she had met and married his father. Was that why she had given it up? Because something else in her life had taken precedence?

  But why had she kept the set, then? Had she planned on eventually going back and finishing the last picture?

  She had to have been horrified by what she’d created, but perhaps it was all she’d had in her life at that time. And maybe when he’d come along, she’d finally forgotten about it, and the box had been left to rot in the garage.

  He himself had no wife, no child, nothing to take him away from the purposelessness of his life.

  He glanced again at the painting, wanted to destroy it, but didn’t.

  “Come in,” he told Johnny and Prallix, opening the door wider. “I’m glad you came over.”

  They helped him. All of them helped him, all of the Tyrese devotees, sending him words of advice and encouragement, messages of fellowship and solidarity.

  He made a new brush out of carved chicken bone and braided rat hair.

  He replenished his supply of paints, buying other, newer sets from different companies, mixing in toothpaste, insect repellent, dirt, spit, urine, and his own blood in order to get the entire Tyrese spectrum, one through sixteen.

  He printed out a pattern sent to him by Johnny and Prallix, then, following their instructions, had it imprinted on a 9 x 11 piece of balsawood.

  Looking over the panel, he had no idea what it could possibly be when finished, and he liked that uncertainty, smiling happily to himself.

  He picked up the brush.

  He was ready to begin.

  ****

  Remembrance by Bentley Little

  The End of an Era

  I would not be where I am today if not for David Silva.

  I would not be who I am today if not for David Silva.

  ****

  1983: I was getting ready to graduate from college with a BA in Communications. The only talent I had was writing, so I’d enrolled in a practical course of study–journalism–that would allow me to tell stories and earn a living at it. But I wanted to tell my own stories, not those of other people, and for several years, I’d been writing short fiction and sending it out in vain to publications I found in Writer’s Market.

  It was December, and, not yet ready to venture out into the real world, I’d decided to stay in school for a few more years. I was going to get a Master’s degree in Political Science, figuring it would serve me in good stead when I landed a job as a reporter.

  Then I received a letter from David Silva, a letter on personal stationary imprinted with a skull in a top hat and the motto “Better weird than plastic” under the neat, almost calligraphic signature, “Dave.”

  He was accepting my short story “Pray 4 Baby” for his magazine, The Horror Show.

  My life changed in an instant.

  The money wasn’t much ($8.75 to be exact–I still have the check, uncashed, framed in my office), but that wasn’t the point. An editor actually thought one of my stories was worth publishing! It was going to be in a magazine!

  The next day, I returned to school and filed papers to change my major from Political Science to English.

  I was going to be a writer.

  David Silva believed in my work even when others didn’t, and over the next several years, I had stories in almost every issue of The Horror Show, it seemed (I submitted my work so often that I still remember the magazine’s address). Eventually, other editors started coming around, and my fiction began to appear in a variety of publications. But Dave was my rock, and my loyalty was to him. Before I submitted to Twilight Zone or Night Cry or Playboy, I always gave him first crack at whatever I’d written, and I was always excited and elated when he accepted something.

  I was not the only one Dave introduced to the world. A whole generation of us got our start writing for The Horror Show: Elizabeth Massie, Poppy Z. Brite, Kevin J. Anderson, Brian Hodge, Ronald Kelly and many, many more. Soon professionals began to appear within the pages of the publication. Joe Lansdale! Robert McCammon! Dean Koontz!

  And their stories were printed next to ours.

  The exposure was invaluable, and my appearance in a Dean Koontz special issue led to meeting Dean, who found me the agent I am still with today.

&n
bsp; When my novel The Revelation was published, I offered special thanks on the dedication page to “David Silva, editor of The Horror Show, for giving me my first break, and for his important and consistent support throughout the years.”

  I finally met Dave in person when we both attended an HWA awards ceremony. Shy, almost painfully so, he was tall and bearded, wearing flannel. He looked like a lumberjack. We talked briefly, glad to meet each other, and promised to get together at some future date, away from the chaos surrounding us, so we could talk in peace.

  I never saw him again.

  ****

  1990: I was shocked when Dave told me that he was discontinuing The Horror Show. I guess I had assumed it would always be there, and its loss saddened me. He said he wanted to devote more time to his own fiction, which was understandable. He was also planning to start a weekly horror newsletter called Hellnotes, and asked if I would be willing to contribute book reviews. I didn’t think the newsletter would fly, but it was Dave asking me, so I said yes.

  To my surprise the publication lasted for years, and I stuck with it even after it went online. I had no internet access, but I would write my reviews, Dave would transcribe them, and in a week or so, he would send me a printout of the issue. I finally bailed when he eventually passed the newsletter on to someone else.

  Later, he resurrected Hellnotes, and while I was no longer a contributor, Dave was kind enough to tout each of my new releases and give me free publicity when other horror publications were ignoring my existence.

  We remained in touch.

  I sent him free copies of my books.

  He sent me free copies of his.

  Life was not kind to David Silva. His mom died of cancer, and he lost his house in Oak Run, California. He was forced to move in with his sister and her husband in Las Vegas. But life is grist for a writer’s mill, and it was this personal knowledge of life’s fragility that lent to Dave’s fiction a melancholy edge which deepened his work and made it so achingly true.

  A few years ago, he hit me up for a blurb. I’d recently read his newest collection of interconnected short stories, The Shadows of Kingston Mills, and I’d been blown away. I wrote a gushing fan letter to tell him so, and he humbly and somewhat embarrassedly asked if I would be willing to give him a cover quote. The business was changing, and he was looking to sell himself anew to publishers who might not be familiar with his work. “Of course!” I responded.

  Unable to restrict my praise to a sentence, I wrote a paragraph:

  “David B. Silva is one of the great unsung heroes of horror. Always possessed of an amazing eye for talent, he published the early efforts of an entire generation of authors in his late great magazine The Horror Show. Unfortunately, his roles of editor and publisher have tended to overshadow his own extraordinary abilities as a writer. For David B. Silva is one of the most criminally underappreciated artists in the history of the genre. Combining the deft characterization of Stephen King with the literary subtlety of the best of Ramsey Campbell, he has for years been turning out stunning fiction that has never gotten the audience it deserves. He may be one of those unlucky authors destined to be fully appreciated only after his death, but in my opinion, David Silva is one of the best damn authors working today.”

  It was my honest belief, and I stand by it.

  The words are as true today as when I wrote them.

  ****

  I don’t have many friends in the horror field. Horror, for me, is a literary preference not a lifestyle, so my personal life and my professional life are not really entwined. But now two of those friends are gone, Richard Laymon and David Silva, and my life is poorer for it.

  The genre is poorer for it.

  Dave’s death marks the end of an era. Will it be noted on the NBC Nightly News? Will it even be recognized by the vast majority of horror fans? No. But to those of us in the field who came of literary age in the 1980s, who went to Wes Craven movies on our dates and hoarded our hard-earned dollars to buy the latest Stephen King hardcover, who waited expectantly for the arrival of the next issue of The Horror Show in the mail, the passing of David Silva is a momentous and truly tragic event, one that touches us all.

  A nice guy in a cutthroat business, a genuinely generous man in a selfish world, David Silva was one of a kind.

  I miss you, Dave.

  Better weird than plastic.

  Bentley Little

  GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

  Thomas F. Monteleone

  “I first noticed there was a problem a few months ago. A big problem.”

  Isabel looked at me over her horn-rimmed glasses with an expression of semi-interest. She had big hazel eyes. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  We were sitting at lunch in the cafeteria of Weller and Fein, one of the city’s bigger investment firms. She and I both worked in their IT division and we’d become friends. Well, at least friendly enough to eat lunch together…

  I cleared my throat, looked around to see if anyone might be eavesdropping. “Well, you know, I didn’t say anything to anybody until recently because it sounded too… too nutty… too paranoid.”

  Isabel grinned. It made her look a little impish, younger than her twenty-nine years. “Okay, so you decided I would be the one you could, trust?”

  “Well… yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t really talk to all that many people anyway. But, hey! That was meant as a compliment, not–”

  Isabel held up her hand to stop me. “It’s okay Alec, I understand what you mean. So go on–out with it.”

  She had this way of making me feel comfortable, and I appreciated that. I’m usually a mess around women I find attractive. “Okay. You ever listen to talk radio?”

  “Sometimes. In the car. I get tired of hearing the same songs all the time.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, me too. One of the stations has a segment called Curb Your Intelligence. You ever hear it?”

  Now she outright smiled and I melted a little. Even with her hair pulled back in that plain pony-tail, she looked so pretty to me. “Oh, sure. It’s usually good fun. The guy who stands out on the sidewalk and asks people simple questions.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like Who Did We Fight in World War II? or What Happened to the Titanic? Usually about half the people get ’em right.”

  “I know, I’m amazed at some of the things people say….” Isabel shook her head, frowned. She’d gotten her degree at Drexel up in Philly and she was so smart–another reason I liked her.

  I nodded. “Well, that’s what I was getting at. Some right. Some near-misses. And some–just no clue.”

  Isabel chuckled, then paused to assume a more serious pose. “But you said you noticed a problem… so what’s this have to do with it?”

  Her gaze was direct, penetrating, and for a moment I felt unsure of how to continue. I didn’t want to sound stupid. (And in light of what I was going to tell her, that was of utmost importance.)

  “I kind of got hooked on the show, and I’ve been listening to it on the way home from work for about two months straight, and lately, it’s getting almost absurd.”

  “In what way?” Isabel leaned a little closer because I’d spoken in a half whisper.

  “The questions the guy asks–they seem to be getting easier… more ridiculously easy… but the people he asks can’t seem to answer hardly any of them.”

  “I’m not all that surprised,” she said in that know-it-all tone of hers I’d come to find so coy. “I mean, c’mon, Alec… there’s a lot of really vapid people out there. And they decide elections. You know the term: low information voters.”

  “Yeah, I know. People who can’t tell you the Vice-President’s name and stuff like that. But lately… I don’t know. Yesterday, the reporter asked this girl, a woman actually, How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?”

  Isabel blurted out a laugh.

  “Seriously,” I said. “That was the question. But what she said was more incredible. She said: You know, I’m not sure, but I think there’s two. I t
ook an astronomy class in community college… so yeah, I think it’s two, right?”

  Isabel did not respond. She could not respond because her mouth hung open in slack-jawed amazement. Finally: “Oh my God, Alec, nobody is that… that stupid!”

  “I understand completely if you don’t believe me, but I heard her say it. I swear I did.”

  Isabel paused before speaking. She sipped from her coffee. (Alec knew she hated the company-issued Styrofoam cups; she used her own big ceramic mug inscribed with the words Join a Proud Minority… Read Books.)

  “Okay,” she said. “I believe you. But what’s that have to do with this big ‘problem’ you said you’ve been noticing?”

  I took in a long breath, eased it out. “It’s a little complicated. I’m… I’m still getting it clear in my head. So if some of what I’m trying to say doesn’t come out exactly right, stay with me, okay?”

  “Sure.” Isabel glanced at her watch. “Hey, we’ve got to get back on the clock….”

  “Already? You’re kidding.”

  She shrugged. “You know what they say about time and flying and having fun.”

  “But I’m just getting started…”

  “I know you are.” Isabel grinned. “Tell you what–let’s talk about it after work.”

  I admit I was kind of surprised by her suggestion. It sounded like she was making a date with me and I didn’t want to blow it. But I found myself fumbling for the right answer. “Oh, sure… okay… where?”

  Isabel tilted head just a little bit as she pondered this. “You like Chinese? We could go to Ding How. It’s right on Broadway in Fells Point.”

  ****

  Several hours later we were seated across from each other in a booth. Muted elevator music blended with the thrumming conversations of other patrons. Spread before us lay an assortment of Mandarin-style dishes I’d never tried before. Not surprising since my only association with Chinese cooking consisted of chop suey and egg drop soup. Isabel, however, seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the cuisine and ordered an amazing array of entrees without ever looking at the menu.