Three Miles Past Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THREE MILES PAST never would have happened if Mark Scioneaux hadn’t flagged me over to his table at World Horror in Salt Lake City in 2011. He showed me what Nightscape was about. By then I’d already been talking to Robert Shane Wilson for a while, about that excellent Horror for Good anthology, which I loserly never got around to actually sending a story across for. But what Mark wondered was if I had any novellas they could maybe run. My first thought was that I had no idea what a novella was, or how it worked. My next thought was that it’s just a long story, right? Just one not so long as a novel? I shot four across to him, finally. And, instead of taking one, he said maybe they could just take them all; the other’s “Sterling City,” coming out all by itself. So, yes, cons are where good things happen, sometimes. And, as for the cover, by Boden Steiner—I know Boden from around Denver, and have always dug his work. So, when we needed a cover, I was begging for Boden to work on it. And, as you can see, he did what he does, and it’s so cool. What he also did, though, was title the book. Since this wasn’t a collection until Mark and Robert suggested it, I hadn’t ever thought on what a title for it could be. As close as I could come was Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. But what does Stein have to do with horror, right? I just shot all three stories to Boden as single files, told him I didn’t even have an order for them yet. And then he came back with that title—a lift from the first story. And it completely works. So, thanks for the art and the title, Boden, and thanks to Mark for flagging me down, and, thanks to Robert for cleaning the stories up for me so much. Other people to thank: Stephen King, for all his ‘haunted object’ stories (word processors, laundry presses, etc.), each of which always gets to me; this dog I saw just at the edge of my headlights one night lost in the mountains of New Mexico, a dog who was standing there holding what I’ll swear was a human forearm and hand in its mouth; John Langan, who, with his fiction, challenged me to write one of these; Nick Kimbro, for talking horror and horror and horror, always, and writing it, too; Matthew Treon, for not-on-purposely showing me a last-minute fix for the first story; Joe R. Lansdale, for always setting the standard for horror stories, and just for how to be a writer and a person; and, to my wife Nancy: the one dream I’ve ever had about being really and actually dead, I wasn’t, because you were there with me. We were nineteen again, holding hands, moving so fast down a blacktop road in Texas that we had to be ghosts. It didn’t matter, though. We were together. Thank you for that, and for all of this.

  Barebones

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of eleven novels and, now, three collections.

  He lives in Colorado.