Back in college, a bunch of us got called into the dorm lounge one day to receive some bad news: one of our dorm mates had attempted suicide. He was fine, they were able to save him, but he wouldn’t be coming back to school. A terrible thing of course, we all sat mournful and appropriately shocked at the news. Then my buddy, Al, asked the dorm director how this kid had…you know, done it. Turns out he’d taken an overdose of Sudafed.

I went into one of those inappropriate snicker fits, the kind that happen in church or in a meeting with your boss, where laughter is the worst option. I was weakened by it, sliding off the chair, unable to stop while the others stared on in horror like I was a monster. Come ON! The guy had tried to dry his sinuses to death.

Since I’ve started publishing fiction, my brand of humor has been repeatedly called ‘dark’ or ‘black’, which recently led me to pondering the source. Does a dark sense of humor come from the viewpoint of an author, or does the world regularly present us with these scenarios that only a certain personality type recognizes as humorous? Are they same thing? And where do we draw the line between dark humor and a simple lack of taste?

The late Roald Dahl considered this endlessly, as evidenced in this quote:

“If a bucket of paint falls on a man’s head, that’s funny. If the bucket fractures his skull at the same time and kills him, that’s not funny, it’s tragic. And yet if a man falls into a sausage machine and is sold in the shop at so much a pound, that’s funny. It’s also tragic. So why is it funny? I don’t know, but what I do know is that somewhere within this very difficult area lies the secret of all black comedy.”

I think most will agree that Roald Dahl found that balance in his own work. I wonder if his was based purely on speculations, or if he too felt plagued with darkly humorous scenarios thrust before him in daily life. This reminds me of another incident that happened while I was skiing with a group of friends at Killington Mountain. We spotted a man with no arms, expertly swishing down a mogul field, and thought, Wow! That is incredible. There was nothing funny about it. We certainly weren’t juvenile and callous enough to laugh at a no-armed skier. We looked on in awe and admiration of his courage.

Yet two hours later we spotted the same man in the ski lodge, casually watching the television as he had lunch with a companion. My friend nudged me and signaled to the TV screen on which played out the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The knight continued to fight King Arthur even after both his arms had been hacked off by Arthur’s sword, jumping and kicking as fake blood gushed dramatically from his stumps. Dear God, I thought, why are you doing this to me? I mean, what are the odds of watching a no-armed man watching a comedy scene about a no-armed man? I don’t want to laugh at the no-armed skier! The universe is NOT playing fair.

There is a certain safety in laughing at such things in the realm of entertainment, and it would stand to reason that suspension of disbelief or the fiction buffer is the key. But there are just as many staunch haters of Monty Python’s brand of humor as there are fans. I’ve seen people come to blows over this topic. Which brings back the theory that dark humor is about viewpoint in observer and creator alike.

Since I can’t dig up Roald Dahl and ask him, I participated in a discussion with some living writers of black humor about their life view and how it affects their writing. Author Aurelio O’Brien used to make his living on animated kiddie films but crossed over to the dark side with his first novel, Eve, a blackly humorous tale of genetic tampering gone awry in a dystopian future.

“For me, so much of life is observably funny and this automatically feeds my writing. When I was creating my all organic, genetically designed future, things like McDonald’s Characters directly inspired me to go further than I might otherwise think to go…The little giggling “McNuggets” are really chunks of dead fowl flesh with cute little smiles carved into them. I find these kinds of things to be so twisted and humorous and odd. Most people don’t think about these characters beyond their surface appeal. So, when people tell me my Lick-n-Span© is gross, I think, is it really any grosser than having a hacked up chicken giggle at you?”

I agree with O’Brien on this: most consumer icons are creepy. Like the Tidy Bowl man and Mr. Clean. Why is it always a little fantasy man helping the lonely housewife with her daily chores? Strange men coming up out of the floor and the toilet? And why does the housewife always keep them a secret from her husband? Notice the way Mr. Clean winks at her when hubby walks in? And what’s the real purpose of that little hand guy from Hamburger Helper? What’s he really helping her with? Does anyone else ponder these things?

Speaking of sex and animation, most people know Gary K. Wolf as the creator of Disney’s Roger Rabbit, but he’s also a novelist, and one of the masters of dark humor. For Wolf, the humor definitely comes from a unique way of seeing the world and is more second nature than calculated creativity.

“There’s something unfathomable about humor writers that compels them to look at a situation or a character, twist it, turn it, squeeze it, squash it until it’s a round peg that fits into a square hole and looks funny doing it,” says Wolf. “Good stand up comedians have the same ability, taking everyday situations and making them funny. They do it verbally. Most of the humorous writers I know, me included, aren’t very funny in conversation. In fact I’m so boring I could suck the laughs out of a hyena convention. However give us a blank page and a pen, and we’ll have you in stitches. I’ve been applauded by editors, critics, and readers for the humor in my work. All well and good except they were talking about what I consider to be my serious work. What I’m saying is that there’s something perverse about the way I look at reality or, in the case of science fiction, unreality. I see a situation, I make it funny. Can’t help it. Don’t do it intentionally. That’s just the way I write.”

Gary makes a good point here about stand up comedians, which prompted me to speak with one of my favorite and darkest comedians–Dave McDonough. Dave, who’s confessed to needing roughly seventy jokes written for a half-hour set, has a serial killer on valium kind of delivery, and pushes the envelope with some wince-worthy jokes, but he’s booked solid most weeks, so the man has found his groove, and his audience.

“There is a balancing act but you can’t make everyone happy,” says McDonough. “I cross the line sometimes but that’s half the fun. I don’t have any material I draw the line at except Muslim jokes, because I need my head. I tell a Jesus Christ/abortion joke and a Male inmate rape joke that often get applause breaks, so there’s a way to make the darkest of topics palatable to the public. I’m nowhere near as dark or as crazy as the freak I play onstage, I’m really a positive introverted person by nature, who happens to believe that the world is coming to an end.”

So writers and entertainers alike seem to reiterate my previous theory that black humor is a personality trait, an inherent point of view within the creative mind before the material ever reaches the page, or the stage. But in the spirit of point/counterpoint, I figured there had to be a dark humor writer who didn’t necessarily see the real world through gore-colored, Groucho Marx glasses. Someone calculating, a mere craftsman, crazy on the page but with a solid, normal worldview. I needed author Jeff Strand.

If you’ve read Strand’s popular, horror/humor brand of fiction, you’re now scratching your head and saying, “Did she just call Jeff Strand normal?” Especially after reading excerpts like this one from his book, Disposal, which shows off his talent for making gore and violence a casual affair.

“We’ll finish slicing up my husband’s body, then we’ll get rid of the chunks, then we’ll take a long shower, and then we’ll get some sleep–and no, you can’t spend the night–and then I’ll pay you.”

The reason I thought I’d get calculated normalcy from Jeff Strand obviously didn’t come from the content of his fiction. But having had many writing-craft related discussions with Strand, I always end up shaking my head at the logic he applies to the structure of writing, putting himself completely outside the whacky content in order to plot his scenes with almost mathematical precision. He’s like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, fixing the radio while everyone else is running around throwing coconut cream pies.

But I was wrong. While Strand recognizes more conventional, logical theories about the crux of black humor, in the end he too opts for the warp theory.

“We’re living in dark times, and one theory is that because it’s difficult to cope with or even comprehend some of the horrors around us, we use them for comedic effect to help us better deal with them,” says Strand. “Which is a good, correct theory. But at the same time, I think most of us are just sickos. The college student who creates an elaborate online animation of The Puppy Blender isn’t doing it as a defense mechanism. We’re all warped!”

Warped indeed. Though like Roald Dahl, Jeff finds himself balancing that delicate line between humor and bad taste.

“If I can come up with a genuinely funny angle that’s more than just “Oooh! Look how tasteless I can be!” then my only off-limits material would be specific real-life people suffering tragedies. Cancer itself is acceptable. A real-life person dying of cancer is not. I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to make something funnier just because of the uncomfortable subject matter–it would just have to be handled in a way that justified the material.”

And so ends the cage match, the popular vote going to the theory that black humor writers have an inherently black sense of humor, a real life view of the world that powers the motor for creating the dark funnies. And the only limitations are applied when putting pen to page, balancing the scales of humor and darkness to make the mix palatable for human consumption. If the mix is just right, the audience will laugh. Or at least some of them. Because as all humor is in the eye of the beholder, it’s inevitable that part of the population will always stare slack-jawed, horrified as you giggle maniacally at the boy who tried to dry his sinuses to death.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

This summer, I was entertaining guests from overseas who had never been to America. It’s always interesting to see what others find novel and exciting about your own country, usually things that seem commonplace and mundane to us. Much like my first trip to England where I squealed in delight at every crumbling castle ruin, only to learn my hosts had gotten drunk, had sex, and sprayed graffiti on the bevy of ancient stones in their youth.

On a quest to show my foreign guests the beauty of the New England seashores, I drove them down the length of Cape Cod to Provincetown. But their excitement peaked before reaching what I considered the pinnacle of our destination, and they pressed their faces against the car windows, shouting, “Look! A drive-in movie theater! A drive-in movie theater!”

Granted, drive-ins have diminished drastically enough over the decades to make them a novelty even to us, although they are still actively doing business and peppered sporadically throughout most American states. And we clearly remember the days when going to the drive-in was the ultimate event on a summer evening.

I tried to shift my guests’ attention to the real scenery as we drove past. Hey, look at the sand dunes! How ‘bout that ocean, huh? I think I just saw a fish jump, did you see it? But they were no longer interested. They wanted to know about the drive-in. What was it like? How many films did they show in a night? How did the sound work? How did they line up the cars? Was it like what they’d seen in American films and TV shows like Happy Days or Grease?

I first assured them that the era represented in Happy Days was before my time, and that I wasn’t even sperm yet when greasers used switch blade combs and fondled poodle skirts in the back of souped-up hot rods. They seemed disappointed, so I tried to recall what drive-in movies meant to me as a kid growing up in an American suburb.

I told them about being dumped, pajama clad into the back of a station wagon with pillows and blankets, and being forced to go to sleep after the initial kids movie, while the parents watched the R-rated feature. Of course we never went to sleep. My mother had some sort of radar though, and her hand would snake its way into the back and slap our heads down each time we tried to peek at the adult material playing out on the screen.

But as we got a bit older, inevitably there was that one friend who had a car. With five under-agers cramped into the trunk of an old Impala, we’d glide into the Sunset Drive-in, gleeful about the latest hack-em-up horror movie on the big screen. There was something simply glorious about being out after dark in the night air, nacho squeeze-cheese dribbling down your chin while Jason from Friday the 13th stalked and slaughtered the counselors of Camp Crystal Lake.

“That doesn’t sound like fun; it sounds scary,” my foreign guests commented.

“No,” I replied, “that wasn’t the best part. The best part was when you had to use the bathroom! Because the creaky, rotting-wood doors of the restroom stalls gave you that summer camp feel and, if you were lucky enough to be in there alone, you could just imagine Jason sneaking in with his knife while your heart hammered and you power-peed as fast as possible before running back to the car.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun either.”

I tried to explain that it was the mood the drive-in created, a feel of not just watching the film, but being a part of something electric, as alive as the summer bugs we battled with useless Pic mosquito coils burning lazily on the Impala’s dashboard.

My guests asked if waitresses wearing roller skates had brought us our popcorn. I told that they hadn’t. We’d had to go to the snack bar and get our own popcorn.

At this point they lost interest and moved on to commentary on the sand dunes and sea gulls. I considered pleading my case further, perhaps giving details about dancing hotdogs and the beauty of snack bar intermission.

But in the end I succumbed to the truth that my drive-in experience was perhaps not one of universal appeal. Perhaps it’s just one of those personal things that meant something different to everyone. You simply had to be there.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m craving a chili dog with non-dairy squeeze-cheese.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

Writers in the horror and paranormal genres do a lot of gum flapping about fear. What scares you, what scares the reader, and particularly prevalent, what scared you as a kid. Like humor, fear is one of those subjective topics people wrestle and war over. As discerning adults, we’ll admit that fear as an art form is in the eye of the beholder. Some like slasher films, some like Gothic ghost stories, so what? To each his own. But deep down we know it’s more personal.

It’s said that a baby cries so frequently the first year of life in order to develop its lungs—a survival tool, annoying as it may be at three in the morning. Fear is also a survival tool, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that our minds should flex this muscle in early childhood as well? All kids go through fazes of heightened night terrors, sleeping with the light on, monsters in the closet and what have you. Maybe it comes on naturally, or perhaps something occurs to flip that internal switch; a story, a film, a scary event, and the kid spends the next year running an emotional gauntlet.

I thought about this recently when I read a novel called Ace Hawkins and The Wrath of Santa Claus by Byron Starr for a pre-publication review. This is a darkly humorous action thriller, sort of a Tarantino meets Willy Wonka rather than a horror story—but it reminded me of a childhood fear. I was scared shitless of Santa. And I’ll get back to that, because in digging through the memory sewer lines of my bizarre childhood, I was reminded that Santa was merely the climax of my phobias that year. It was a year of fear.

Prior to my fifth birthday I’d still felt rather immune to danger and knew very little of fear beyond the horror of enforced nap times. But something shifted in me that year, a psychological and physiological change, like a form of preschool puberty, but instead of hormones coursing through me, it was terror and anxiety. It all started with slugs.

I didn’t know what a slug was until the gooey, heat-flattened carcass of one caused a scandal on the Kindergarten blacktop one morning at recess. While we kicked dirt at it and marveled and poked it with a stick, I learned that these horrific jellied snail things could conceivably be hiding in my own lawn, and that I should take care not to go barefoot. I was crestfallen. Going barefoot was my favorite thing in the world. But the threat of stepping on a slug was too great, and I spent the early summer in flip flops, diligently scanning the grass for the dreaded, tentacled culprits.

I imagined I saw them everywhere. Everything was a slug; clumps of sun-bleached grass, a drop of dew, a suspiciously shaped rock. My mother sat me down and tried to talk sense into me. She swore the likelihood of me stepping on a slug in the yard was slim to none, and that it would be perfectly safe to go barefoot. Oh, but I wasn’t letting my guard down. I knew they were just waiting for me to relax and take my shoes off. So I stayed vigilante.

But then my birthday party came. There was cake and presents, cousins and friends from school, games and excitement. As the sun went down, all the kids took to the yard to catch fireflies and I went with them. I got soft, careless. And in my distracted state, ran outside without shoes on. Now the moral of this tale should have been that irrational fears are unfounded. I should have closed out my birthday with my mother tucking me in, saying “See dear? You went barefoot and nothing happened.”

The problem is I DID step on a slug that night. Yep. After fearing it all spring and over-focusing on it to the point of mania, it actually happened. Three acres of backyard, and my sweet little bare piggies managed to find my arch nemesis, hiding in the green. It squished up right between my first and second toe, becoming lodged there for a few traumatic seconds until my squealing, maniacal freak-out dance flung it loose. I was inconsolable.

That was it; the switch had been thrown in my mind. My fears, I learned, were very real and my anxiety over them was valid. If you fear it, it will come. After that I was afraid of everything. If you thought the slugs were bad, imagine what happened when I discovered snakes. I feared poisonous insects, tornadoes, prowlers breaking into our home at night, getting struck by lightning, worms, mad dogs, and a variety of fatal childhood illnesses. And then the Christmas Season was upon us.

Being five years old, it was the first year I fully comprehended the hoopla that was Christmas for a small child. I remember the gleeful, wide-eyed smiles as my parents explained that a huge guy dressed in a red suit was going to break into my house that night while I was sleeping. And like that wasn’t bad enough, they added that Santa, this prowler, was going to be MAD if I wasn’t asleep when he got there. Oh, fabulous! Tuck me in right now, I can’t wait. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep.

My heart beat against my chest throughout the night as I listened for the sound of this red giant that planned to land on my roof and shimmy Mission Impossible style into my living room to deliver toys—right after he came to check if I was sleeping. Then I heard a noise on the roof…or rather I thought I did. So I screamed. Loudly and repeatedly.

My parents ran bleary-eyed into the room, awakened by my bloodcurdling wails of terror. What the HELL was wrong with me, they wanted to know?

“Santa’s gonna get me!” I cried.

I recall them looking at me like I was a broken appliance they were thinking of returning to the store, and trying to assure me that Santa was a good thing, not a monster to be feared. But they were tired and low on patience, and I was ultimately ordered to go to sleep and shut the Hell up. So I spent the wee hours of Christmas Eve huddled into a ball beneath my blankets, trying to become small so Santa wouldn’t see me when he trespassed into my room. Eventually I nodded off, and awoke the next morning to discover that Santa had not in fact killed me in my sleep.

I never had another year like my fifth, and thereafter my terror of slugs and lightning and Santa Claus seemed silly to me. But I still recall the raw, almost manic sensitivity to any possible threat, real or imagined that seemed to have a grip on me during that time, both physically and psychologically. And as I said, it makes me wonder. Does human fear get its own period in our maturity to thrive and dominate our bodies, like acne and masturbation and addiction to Twinkies?

Maybe so. Or maybe the slugs really are just waiting for us to drop our guard, and take our shoes off.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

I can understand why people reject the concept of alien visitations. And it’s not because it’s outrageous. I mean come on; that’s one huge freaking universe out there that we know almost nothing about, despite our expensive telescopes. It’s obviously possible. So why the adamant railing against the concept of aliens by the majority?

Because aliens piss us off, that’s why. In a world where our intellectual domination is unquestioned as a species, we don’t like the idea of someone more advanced coming down and prodding at us like a vaguely interesting crop of mushrooms. And I do mean vaguely interesting. Because let’s face it, unlike our science fiction alien stories, we’re not even important enough to attack. How patronizing is that? Sure, we’re insignificant, underdeveloped, kind of stupid and prone to primitive, violent behavior, but do they have to rub our faces in it? Shoot a laser at us once in a while! At least give the illusion that we’re a concern, and not just a field trip for some alien high school science class.

Along with their infuriating indifference, their secrecy is annoying as hell. They know things about the universe, and they won’t tell us. They don’t deem us worthy of the information. We are so low in their big poppy black eyes, that we don’t even warrant a pat on the head and a lie about the universe. Even a child too young to comprehend life’s big questions will get some kind of explanation from their parents. And we are asking the questions. Through our literature, our scientific research, our space programs, and at the very least our obsession with them, we ask. We know that they know that we want to know, and they know that we know that they know we want to know. Bastards.

I think it’s time to develop a new plan. If they won’t give us the information, we’ll have to take it by force. Or at the very least annoy them into a reaction. Sure, they’re smarter than we are and infinitely more advanced, but that didn’t stop them from crashing in the desert back in the 40s, did it? Plus they have a predictably lame pattern with the whole ‘hide in the middle of rural nowhere and abduct lonely farmers’ tactic. So here’s what we need to do.

We get some special effects guys to whip up one of those creepy humanoid looking robots, the realistic ones they use in films that can walk around and move their arms and stuff. Take the technology NASA’s using in the Mars Phoenix Lander, and inject it into the robot, so it has recording, photographic and data gathering abilities by remote command. Now like peanut butter on a bird feeder, we need something to lure the aliens’ attention—so we Cletus the robot up. Dress him like a farmer, surround him with cows and drop him out in a field in the middle of the night, somewhere with a lot of reported UFO activity. He’d have to be programmed with artificial life signs so he’ll come up on the aliens’ radar when they’re scanning for human guinea pigs out in the redneck hood. Then we wait for him to be abducted.

Once the Cletus Probe is successfully planted on the alien ship, he sends readings back down to us mushrooms here on earth; recordings, photographs, environmental samples, the whole shebang.

Of course it’s inevitable that the aliens will figure out pretty quick that the Cletus Probe isn’t a real human, but chances are we’ll get a least some info before they spit him back out. And just think…we might manage to piss them off for a change. Because like any neglected child, we really just want to be acknowledged. And just like a toddler throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, if we can’t get the positive strokes, we’ll gladly go for the negative. It’s hypothetical of course, but if we could actually fool the aliens into abducting the Cletus Probe, hot damn if that’s not worthy of a spanking! We may just get shot with that laser blast yet.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

All I hear lately is how “kids today have no imagination.” They don’t read, they don’t think, and with all the video games stunting their creativity, they’ve even lost the ability to make things up. Because that’s our tale of the trenches, isn’t it? That we had to use our imaginations when we were kids. How dreadful. We had to make up our own games.

But let’s examine this. Sure, I was one of the windblown rascals tearing around backyards making up games. But it wasn’t because there was nothing else available. Those were simply the only kind of games I liked. Archaic as we were, we did have prepackaged options, but while some kids wet themselves with glee at the mention of Monopoly or Electronic Battleship, my heart always sank when the fun headed in this direction. I didn’t want to sit indoors and run some redundant, predetermined gauntlet. I wanted to make shit up.

This hatred of board games followed me into adulthood. On vacations with friends, I was chastised for my lack of patience and huffing boredom while others spent hours rolling dice around a slab of cardboard. Life is wrought with enough problems. Why would you purchase problems in a box? It wasn’t until I heard comedian Steven Wright repeat nearly this exact sentiment in an interview that it occurred to me I wasn’t alone. Maybe there are two types of people—the kind that want to be in control and create the games, and the ones that are happy just to play.

It’s impossible that every single kid now under the age of sixteen is obsessed with video games, just as every kid we played in the woods with wasn’t a rule-maker. In hindsight, while we were in the forest playing Danger Island, there were maybe three or four of us concocting the rules—the rest of the hoards just followed what was presented. This doesn’t mean they lacked imagination. After all, can we not enjoy a book that someone else has written? Perhaps the obsessive video gaming children fall into this category; their imaginations are stimulated by the machinations of others, and while they might never create a game themselves, they can certainly appreciate its creativity.

This isn’t to say I understand the whole game-love thing. I admit that part of this is because I have no patience, and part of it’s because I really really suck at them. Sure, I frequented the arcades back in my day, but once things went beyond Galaga and Xaxon, I was pretty much done. I’ve never quite learned how to use the new controllers either, with the whole press this arrow to move and this one to jump and these two at the same time to pick things up. Just give me a joystick with a blast button and show me what to blow up.

But I’ve been trying to widen my perceptions regarding today’s youth, because as much as I have to admit my prejudices—and I do have them (will you boys please pull up your pants for Christ sakes?)—I remember when it was my childhood generation being ostracized as shallow, capitalist techno-zombies.

We had dozens of hippie babysitters watch us after school, and when they weren’t smoking joints in the bathroom, they’d shake their dread heads and point their finger at us. “Look at you, man,” they’d say. “With your color TVs and your Atari and your ten speed bikes, man.” These rants usually turned into something akin to ‘blah blah blah commercialism, blah blah blah Vietnam’, but in their perspective, we were the ones squashing the hard earned imagination out of their world. We were the generation that had stopped thinking and chose the easy way out. Their lives had been full of deep thoughts and revolutions of the soul, while ours was a party at Caligula’s house.

And if that’s how they saw us, we need to entertain the possibility that our view of the younger generation is probably skewed as we look through our outdated Fisher Price View Masters. Aside from technological enhancements, these kids aren’t all that different from us in the imagination department. I mean, was our youth culture really so brilliant? I questioned this after a sobering altercation with my favorite fifteen-year-old.

The teen in question asked if I thought his mother was being unfair when she confiscated several of his new rap CDs, due to “abhorrent sexual content.” Although I’d always been the cool friend-of-mom, I said I had to side with his mother on this one. Rap music was full of blatant sexual innuendo that kids his age shouldn’t be listening to.

“You grew up in the 80s, right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You listened to Whitesnake?”
“Yes,” I said. “I listened to Whitesnake.”
“Huh. What was that big hit they had? Oh I remember now. I’m gonna slide it in right to the top.”
“Yeah but—”
“And what was that April Wine album you had?”
“Harder Faster. But that’s not the same, because—”
“Right, and I’m remembering an AC/DC song. Let me think…”
“Okay,” I said. “I see where you’re going, but—”
“Ah, got it. Let me put my love into you, babe.”
“Uh huh.”
“Let me cut your cake with my knife.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll go talk to your mother.”

As he walked away I stared distastefully at his ensemble, wanting to yell at him to pull up his pants and tuck in his boxer shorts. But suddenly I had a flashback of myself, razor blade in hand, strategically slicing up the legs and ass of my jeans before a Bon Jovi concert.
At the time, it was very imaginative.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

In his younger days, my husband was part of a successful Death Metal band in the UK, and in recalling some of their more prevalent creative arguments, introduced me to the term ‘Blood all over the place.’ It was a catchphrase to describe a certain type of lyrical suggestion offered repeatedly by band members who favored torn carcasses and graphically horrific descriptions of doom, whether or not they made any sense or fit into the song in question.

While never in the music business, I could certainly relate to the term in reference to horror writing. I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet when everyone was a horror writer, and flaming skulls graced the doomy black web pages of a thousand zines, each claiming to be the darkest lair of hair-raising fiction. Every writer, it seemed, was competing to conjure the grossest images of depravity. Dead babies hung from trees in apocalyptic settings, people were skinned alive, tortured, decapitated, and often with graphic sexual undertones.

A horror writer I know once referred to this as the ‘and then his dick exploded’ brand of fiction, a literary equivalent to Death Metal’s ‘Blood all over the place.’

I’d like to say I was immune to this tactic, but found myself getting sucked in after multiple rejections telling me my stories were ‘too fantasy’ or ‘too Twilight Zone’ or ‘too humorous.’ I raged at the injustice. I had no elves or swords in my stories! They were paranormal and clever and weird, what more did these people want?

A horror anthology came along that everyone wanted to get into. They wanted dark gruesome stories set to some satanic theme or other, and everyone in my little tribe of writer friends was submitting. This was it, I decided, I’m gonna show’em what’s what! I crafted a tale of dark and dirty deeds, Hell demons and doom I was sure would rival the best of the ‘and then his dick exploded’ entries. I’m so very bad, I thought. Lock up your children, I’m pure evil!

I showed the story to an editor friend who’d published a lot of my previous work, and happened to like my style, before I was confident enough to realize I was developing ‘a style.’ He wrote me back with an unenthusiastic pat on the head and said the story was ‘okay.’ I was baffled, as he usually loved my stuff. So I nagged him for more details.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “This story is not you. You’re trying to write like someone else, and it doesn’t work.”

Well crap, I thought. I’d branded myself a horror writer, and I couldn’t cut the mustard no matter how many rotting demons I summoned. So I sought to challenge my badness in another way. I was selling a lot of nonfiction at the time, a venue that didn’t require exploding dicks so much as an analysis of strange events. So when a friend who worked in the environmental cleanup business told me about a particularly bone chilling job, I decided to investigate and write about it. I would explore the horror of reality, confident that I could handle the transition and blend these two passions into a unique and powerful article. It was a terrible mistake.

The event in question was the suicide of a young man who’d sat on the train tracks one night and waited for death to come. The engineer described seeing the man at the last minute, sitting cross-legged with his middle finger up – a final fuck you to the world. How romantic, I thought.

But no. My mind, I realized, was reacting like this was fiction. And this railroad engineer, though experienced in the realism of the event, was telling it as such, as if it was some ghost story to be dramatized in a hushed voice by a flickering campfire. But it was not such a tale. It was real.

I dismissed the engineer, wanting to move deeper into the realism, past my image of that mysterious lover of death with his middle finger raised to meet his maker. But as I interviewed the supervisor of the environmental cleanup team, the real mortality began. The shattered pieces of this victim’s life, however poetic, were for his friends and family to concern themselves with. It was the shattered pieces of his body that I’d doomed myself to learn about. And in that capacity, I learned this death was far less romantic.

“Bio-haz cleanups are usually voluntary assignments, unless we’re shorthanded for some reason. We’ve found it’s not wise to force the assignment on guys that don’t feel comfortable with it,” the supervisor said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He laughed. “These guys are used to cleaning up oil, gasoline and chemicals. You can’t just toss anyone into a zone strewn with body parts and expect them to perform. If you’ve ever seen a guy vomit into his respirator, well, that can be a worse sight than a splatter of intestines scraped off of a rock.”

I begged to differ on that account, but then who the hell was I but a pampered horror fan? I was still picturing a brilliant red spray of blood, spider-webbed Tom Savini style across a neighboring oak tree. I imagined a dislodged eyeball resting decoratively in a nest of crab grass. Judging by the description I was given, I wasn’t too far off the mark.

Save for the smell, and the insects.

“Sure, the stench can be bad if the cleanup happens in the summer, like this one did. But it has its advantages too. The medical crew comes in first and takes whatever whole pieces of the body they can find; torso, limbs, if there’s anything left. It’s our job to clean up what remains after that; tissue, bodily fluids, tiny parts. That’s where the bees are helpful. The bees are attracted to the blood. There was a whole swarm of them buzzing around this one pile of stones near the tracks. So we shooed them away and dug down a bit, and sure enough, there was a finger in there. We would have missed it otherwise.”

I started feeling queasy, and embarrassed that I planned to sell this piece to a horror magazine. The supervisor rambled on about sterilization, bleach solution, tear resistant Tyvek coveralls and three pairs of gloves on each hand. He spoke of approximations of the region around the body’s initial landing, safety goggles to prevent eye contamination, and respirators over the mouth to avoid accidental ingestion of small body parts or kicked up fluids.

“Yeah, we see identifiable parts, but you try not to think of it that way,” he told me. “Doesn’t matter if you’re using your tongs to pick up an eyeball, a piece of brain, or just a lump of tissue. It all goes into the red bio-haz bags and gets sealed up. You can’t think of it as human. It’s all just waste in the end.”
The professionals had become desensitized to the carnage. How they achieved this indifference is hard to say, and likely catered to their individual mindsets. In the film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz tells us to make a friend of horror, lest it become an enemy to be feared. Could this be what we seek as we expose ourselves to carnage through the filtered lens of the movie director, or the pages of our beloved novels?

Perhaps. And why shouldn’t we? After all, our version is far preferable to that other world, that real world, where life ends in a pile of sealed bags routed for a medical waste facility. In the world of reality, our death is a contaminant to be scraped off of a tree. In our blessed fantasy world, death can be reversed, zombies raised, immortality traded for monstrosity.

The assignment transitioned me back to horror fiction, but not in the capacity I expected. It’s no wonder we prefer to romanticize death. In our coveted fiction universe, blood conducts magical rites, vampirism, opens doors to new dimensions. In the world of reality, blood spawns little more than disease. So has our filtered fiction lens made us a friend of horror, as powerfully cold as the fictional Colonel Kurtz?

Probably not, if we had to use such skills in the real world. Would I be the one to vomit into my respirator if forced to pick decapitated fingers out of gravel? Likely.

And so failing to find my dark side in either fiction or nonfiction, I accepted that I’m not cut out to be hardcore. But as my editor friend so bluntly said, it was never really me to begin with. I’m comfortable now with my quirky, humorous, semi-fantasy Twilight Zone style of writing, and my nonfiction work can be as banal as an interview with a local dog trainer.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t still read horror, and I admit to enjoying the occasional ‘and then his dick exploded’ story. But I keep my filters well in place, and wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a horror fan’s reality, where blood is pretty, bodily fluids are magic, and true death is always optional.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

I dreamed one night that my sister had adopted a skeletal chicken as a pet. It was a creepy little thing, naturally, but she would smile maternally as it skittered around on its little skeletal feet, clacking its wings. “Isn’t he cute? His name is Butterscotch!”

He wasn’t cute, but I woke up intrigued as always by the subconscious mind, thinking Eureka! I’ll write a story about a skeletal chicken called Butterscotch. But before thinking about opening a crisp white word document, I went to Google. Why? Because that’s what writers have to do now when they get an idea, especially in the horror and paranormal genres, where this byline repeats like a metronome…it’s all been done…it’s all been done…it’s all been done.

This mantra divides writers into two teams. The first team insists established themes should be avoided at all costs; no ghosts, vampires, aliens, possessed children and the like. The second team takes the more optimistic it’s not the subject, but what you do with it that makes it original stance. They’re both right. The bummer comes when you think you’ve carved out an original idea, only to find out after the story’s published that someone else had the same original thought (usually Stephen King). This is why I had to Google a damned skeletal chicken while drinking my morning coffee. For all I knew there was an entire underground genre for skeletal chickens I just wasn’t hip to yet.

Of course some enjoy repeatedly reading a certain theme, evidenced by the row of mass market mystery thrillers in your local drug store. We’ve all made a stop on the way to the beach when the library or the local Borders was too much of a pain in the ass, and we needed some fast food entertainment. I did this recently, scouring the back cover blurbs of one paperback after another. Beautiful women are being murdered, the first one told me. A serial killer is targeting beautiful young girls, said the second. When the mutilated bodies of beautiful women start washing up on the shore… And so on down the line. Damn, aren’t ugly people worthy of killing anymore?

But I suppose every genre has a limited pool to choose from. In the past year I’ve read three women’s fiction novels about a gal who returns home for a family emergency only to discover the real problem is her own sheltered life, until a mysterious stranger awakens her spirit, and her vagina. So why do paranormal writers agonize so much over originality?

Perhaps it’s because the paranormal is so unlimited…in theory anyway. We don’t have to pick from a grab bag of beautiful dead women or eccentric yet wise old neighbors if we don’t want to. We can make new creatures and concepts, outrageous ideas unlimited by the confines of reality. Or we can explore the angle Hitchcock and Stephen King use so well; familiarity gone awry. Take something normal and comfortable like birds or cars and twist it into a unique shape to form a novel idea.

Butterscotch?

But the challenge is part of the lure of writing, isn’t it? And those rare occasions that we’re sure our imaginations have stumbled on something fresh, and we’ve successfully researched the archives of skeletal chicken literature and found no like minded stories, we relax a bit, and open that crisp white word document. And struggle to block out the voice that tells us someone on the other side of the globe has plucked the thought from our mind, and is writing their skeletal chicken story even as we peck.

But at the very least, we can try to get there first. Now if you’ll excuse me, Butterscotch is waiting.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

Kids who grew up in the 70s were blessed by an abundance of original sci-fi creations, as well as a backwash of reruns from the postwar 50s and 60s when fantasy themes reigned as a tool for taking people’s minds off the reality outside their living rooms. Science fiction dominated our Sunday afternoon viewing, and while our parents might have been placated by the sight of poorly costumed monsters and a boom microphone hanging in the shot, these shows weren’t without a tasty dose of trauma for our innocent yet eager young minds. I couldn’t have been more than a tot when I watched the green giant from War of the Gargantuas hungrily chomp down a screaming woman then spit her bloody dress onto the ground like a discarded peanut shell.

But our revulsions weren’t the only formative stirrings of this impressionable time, before cultural taboos taught us that beings made of fur and scales and slabs of celluloid were inappropriate romantic interests. We were developing our first crushes, and most who delve deep enough will admit that their first loves weren’t spawned on the school playground or at summer camp. They were the likes of Judy Jetson and Flash Gordon and Herman Munster. Okay, maybe not Herman Munster, but mine were just as questionable and twice as disturbing. And so I give you my top five inappropriate childhood crushes from the world of science fiction:

Number Five: Cornelius/Caesar from Planet of the Apes

Okay, I know Cornelius and Caesar were technically two different characters, but anyone would be hard pressed to discern between them from a performance standpoint. Both were played by Roddy McDowall, and the variation came only in the plot timeline of one being the father, the other being the son. But oh, when we first met Cornelius…his deep, smoldering brown eyes beneath that Cro-Magnon cliff of a forehead, such a contrast to his cultured vocal delivery and sickly sweet, inherent goodness. An ape with a British accent and a heart of gold, we loved him even more as the messianic Caesar who led the revolt in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. We got chills when he threw down that mop in the town square, mad as hell and not gonna ape it anymore! I would have followed him into battle, and carried his mop to boot.

Number Four: Mr. Spock

While certainly not alone in my Spock crush, I was grossly outnumbered by the little girls swooning over Kirk in his tight green leotard shirt. But I had no interest in the green shirt. I wanted the green blood. The pointed ears, the cocked eyebrow, Spock was the perfect training ground for girls who would grow up to date a series of cold-blooded, emotionally unavailable men. Sure he was the ultimate challenge, but secretly we convinced ourselves we’d be the one woman that could mind meld ourselves in touch with his human side and reap the benefits of those dexterous, nerve pinching fingers.

Number Three: Enik from Land of the Lost

The thinking girls Sleestak, Enik was one of the original Altrusian inhabitants from before their civilization’s fall. With his divining rod and bracelet of magical crystals, he was an intellectually advanced creature, feared by the postwar, evil Sleestaks. Not only was he multi-dimensional, he wore a stunning red blouse which added a comfort level for those of us made squeamish by the unabashed nudity of the other lizard men.

Number Two: The Brown Gargantua

Antitheses to his fearsome, human eating green brother, this strapping giant from War of the Gargantuas had a hero quality defined by his love of humanity and his less slimy, blow-dried blond fur. While he shared the same ferocious pointed teeth of his green counterpart, his eyes had a gentle, sleepy quality under a swoop of blond mane that gave him a mutant Shaun Cassidy air. He was big and powerful like his brother, but he was on our side, as proven when he finds the slimy green giant contentedly napping amidst a pool of blood from the humans he’d been snacking on. Our beloved brown gargantua does what any noble creature would do, and commences beating our evil adversary with a tree. That’s hot.

Number One: The Great Gazoo

Okay, this is the embarrassing one, but what can I say. I’ve always had a thing for short men with a great sense of humor. I loved The Flintstones, but even as a kid I sometimes found Fred and Barney’s innate stupidity tiresome, so I was always thrilled when Gazoo came around to smack them up a bit. He was exiled from his home planet for creating a doomsday machine, so he’s got the bad boy quality going for him, but since he never actually pushes the button, we give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s a pretty good guy underneath it all. Brilliant, ambitious and out of this world, Gazoo is without a doubt the most eligible bachelor in the Hanna-Barbera universe, and he’d be a hell of a fun date if he ever gets that flying saucer running again.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

* Names have been changed to protect the urinaters, since ‘Andy’ threw a fit that I told the whole world he peed on the side of the road. Some people are so touchy. *

It’s been several years now since my buddy Andy told me about the homemade shack he’d seen in the woods. We were heading up to New Hampshire so he could visit a specialty motorcycle shop, and I was along for the ride. It was a sunny day and I had the window down as we cruised along a stretch of highway, scenically lacking in civilization.  The road was lined on either side with a canopy of plush trees, full with summer leaves.

Andy pointed at the passing wall of wooded green. “You can’t see it because it’s further up in the woods,” he said, “but some guy built a weird little shack out there. I think he lives in it.”

I was sure he was full of crap. It wouldn’t have been the first time. He once tried to convince me he’d discovered a mummy in the basement of his college dorm, which miraculously ended up being a long lost relative of his. So needless to say, I believed very little of what Andy told me. But this turned out to be one of those rare, “boy who cried wolf” times that he was actually serious.

He claimed he’d stopped for an ‘emergency piss’ and wandered into the woods for fear he’d be spotted by a passing cop, then stumbled upon a homemade shack made from wood scraps and plastic bags. Curiosity getting the better of him, he crawled inside the little hut to look around, where he found remains of a recently consumed meal, a tiny gas heater, items of men’s clothing and a candle. Now I’m not sure that this next part wasn’t added to give the story dramatic suspense, but he claimed the inside of the hut was warm, like the tiny heater had been recently active. So he left, scared of being discovered by whatever vagrant occupied the little shamble.

I dismissed the story with a “yeah, okay, whatever,” thinking the mystery shack concocted less of cardboard and more of Andy’s imagination. Until three weeks later when I got a frantic phone call from Andy in his car.

“You’re not going to believe this. I’m with Mark. We were going up to the bike shop to return some stuff, so I stopped to show him the shack. The guy is there!”

“What guy?” I asked.

“The guy!” he said. “The man in the box.”

The man in the box. That did it. My writer’s brain saw those five words printed on a title page, and I cursed, knowing I was about to jump off another cliff after my friend, and probably land in a big pile of shit.

“Is he homeless? Is he weird? How old is he? Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“No idea,” Andy said. “We were on our way through the trees when I saw him crawl inside. He looked a little dirty, but pretty normal.”

“Did he see you guys?”

“I don’t think so. We turned around and came back to the car. I just had to tell you.”

“Stay there, I’m coming up,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“Because I want to talk to that guy, and I’m not going up there alone.”

After a few minutes of bitching that he had things to do that day, Andy finally agreed to stay there with Mark until I arrived. I grabbed my little tape recorder, praying the man in the box would still be there when I arrived—and that he wasn’t a crazed psychopath who wanted to make a lamp out of my uterus. But just in case, I grabbed my pepper spray on the way out the door.

When the three of us approached the shack, we weren’t sure if the man was inside. I knew we’d find out soon enough, as our approach was not quiet. In their nervousness, Mark and Andy giggled, and in my nervousness, I repeatedly whispered for them to “SHUT UP!”

Then, just as I’d suspected, the man stepped out of the shack to see what the racket was. His clothing was standard camp wear, canvas pants, boots, and a T-shirt. His hair was short, corporate styled despite a layer of dust.

But something wasn’t right about him…something about his eyes. They were rimmed red and glazed, like he was having trouble focusing. If he were a cartoon, he would have had those little spirals circling around his pupils.

“Hello,” Andy said, still muffling giggles.

“You’re trespassing,” the man said. His voice was firm, yet calm. “I know there aren’t any signs posted, but this is my property. It runs back four acres from that point over there.” He pointed to some unmarked spot back the way we came.

I tried to assess his age and came in somewhere around forty. He was well spoken, but seemed disoriented. I suppose he hadn’t been expecting company. For all he knew, we were the ones wanting to make balloon animals out of his flesh.

Andy went into diplomacy mode, explaining that we meant no harm, and how he’d stumbled across the shack in the past, and was merely curious about it.

The man glanced back at his little structure then looked at us.

“What were you doing up here?” he asked.

Andy told him he’d stopped off the road to relieve himself. The man stared off in the direction of the roadway, his face pinched. “I hate to have to put signs up,” he grumbled. “It ruins the beauty of the land to post signs everywhere, but if people are going to just start walking up from the road…”

Andy apologized and told the man that we were just leaving. I wanted to kick him. The guy turned to crawl back into his shack. I wasn’t having it.

“Do you live in there?” I asked.

He paused. “Of course not. I own an old colonial about a mile off. This is just a project.”

“What kind of project?” I pushed.

Andy and Mark stood behind me, waiting to see if I was going to send the stranger into a rage with my probing questions. But the guy grinned.

“Well, I could explain it, but you wouldn’t understand. It’ll sound nuts.”

He’d said the magic words. I knew insanity had to come into this eventually. A grown man who owned a big expensive house with acres of land did not sit around in a childishly built wood shack for any logical reason.

“Try me,” I said.

He made a second attempt to shoo us off his property. I pleaded, flashed my tape recorder and told him I was a writer, and that exploring unusual people was a bit of a hobby. I assured him I’d heard many a strange tale, and doubted anything he could tell me would shock. Andy and Mark backed me up, loyally offering that I too was a bit touched in the head. After several minutes of banter about my psychological state, the man in the box invited us in.

We each pulled up a dirty floorboard and sat in a semi-circle inside the dusty wooden scrap hut. The man introduced himself as Dale and said he owned his own business, which tended to produce a load of stress. Dale found stress affecting him in many ways; his temper, his personality, his relationships, and his health. He realized a few years back that he was all-consumed with running the business, and rarely thought of or did anything else. That’s when he started the shack project.

“I run my own business too,” Andy offered. “But I deal with stress by having a couple of beers when I get home.”

Dale smiled at Andy and shook his head, with that look people get when they’re about to drop pearls of wisdom on your naïve, unenlightened head.

Andy and I exchanged a glance. We both thought we knew where this was going. This Dale character had created a Thoreau style environment to bring him back to nature, combat the rat race and all that hippie bullshit. In essence we were right, but we were about to learn that Dale took the self-exploration to a whole other level.

“Beers at the end of the day,” Dale said, nodding. “If that works for you, cool. Me, I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy altering my consciousness by other means.”

A fat summer bug flew into the shack, smacked into the back wall and frantically buzzed around. Andy, Mark, and I barely glanced at it, but Dale got a strange, dopey grin.

“Beetle beetle beetle,” he said. “Get out of my house, beetle!”

I looked over at Mark, who raised a wary eyebrow.

Dale’s eyes followed the flight of the insect, entranced. “Beetle beetle beetle,” he repeated. “Why don’t you listen to me? You weren’t invited, beetle!”

I knew if Andy looked my way, I’d lose my composure, so I avoided his eyes. Instead, I looked directly at Dale.

He grinned. “Can you see that beetle? Because I’m on hour forty-seven. This is about the time I start hallucinating a little.”

I frowned. “Hour forty-seven. What does that mean?”

“Sleep deprivation. I come out to this shack once a year, when I feel myself getting to that point where work’s taken over my head. I spend three days out here with no sleep. Total deprivation. When I go back home, I sleep for a day or so, and then I go back to my life, a new man.”

I’d experienced the effects of sleep deprivation only once, and that was after a twenty-four hour stretch of partying after graduating high school. I’d had a few fleeting hallucinations that morning before I hit the sack. But this guy claimed to be on hour forty-seven with no sleep.

“Whoa,” Mark said. “Your brain must be whacked right now.”

Dale giggled. “Actually, it hasn’t fully kicked in yet. By nightfall I’ll be in the zone. By day three, I can barely think straight. I’m married, so my wife comes out to get me at the end of the third day, and walks me home. Otherwise who knows where I’d end up?”

“How do you keep yourself awake?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Will power. Lack of comforts. I just force myself to do it.”

Andy spoke up. “Now wait a minute. How does this purge you of stress? I don’t get it. Sleep deprivation makes me crankier.”

Sitting cross-legged, Dale turned his strange gaze on Andy. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“Then explain it,” I said, afraid the guy was going to clam up.

He looked around the shack. “Okay, there’s always a certain point, usually at hour fifty-five or so, when it starts to happen. It’s like everything out here, the trees, the bugs, the ground, it all starts talking to me.”

“Talking to you…” I repeated.

At that moment, Mark lost it. Frankly, I was amazed he’d held it together for as long as he did. Unlike Dale, Mark was no stranger to drugs, and had apparently smoked a joint on the ride up. I felt for him. I was barely keeping a straight face, and I was toxin-free.

Dale turned to Mark, who’d now sent Andy off into a fit of giggles. I was afraid Dale would be mad, but he laughed too. “Are you guys really here?” he asked, which set them off worse.

Sensing that we might be on the cusp of a fruity nut case breakthrough, I tried to lead Dale back to his original thought. “So you were saying these things in the woods talk to you.”

Dale grabbed a cardboard box, dragging it toward him. He pulled three tattered notebooks out. “I write it down. At least some of it. When I’m in that place where it all starts to speak, I write it down. I read it a week later, after I’ve slept and I’m back at work. I find messages in it. I know it sounds crazy, but reading this stuff later keeps things in focus.”

“So it’s the flow of your subconscious,” I said.

I thought my statement would validate Dale, let him know I understood and was hip to what he was doing. I was down with his sickness.

But the comment pissed him off. He frowned at me and pointed to the notebooks on his lap. “This is not some stream of consciousness that came from my brain. The bugs and the trees actually talk to me. Because I come out here and sacrifice my body and mind to the forest. This is my temple where I come to worship them. They understand that, so they share their wisdom with me.”

I bit my lip and nodded, afraid to even glance at my friends.

But then Andy leaned in to me. “I think he’s peaking.”

That was all it took. I let out a snorting laugh. Dale scowled. Sensing he was becoming irritated with us, I decided to wrap things up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what hour forty-eight would bring. He was loopy enough as it was.

“Thanks for talking to us, Dale. I really appreciate it.” I hit the rewind button on my little tape recorder.

Dale looked down at the device. “Hey, can I keep that tape? I’d love to have a recording of one of my trips. I’ve never done that before.”

I told him I needed the tape to reference direct quotes. He looked terribly disappointed so I made a deal with him. If he gave me a passage from one of his ‘in the zone’ notebooks, I’d send him a copy of my write up from our visit. At first he was reluctant. Finally, he agreed, and wrote his address on a small scrap of paper torn from the notebook. After another grueling fifteen minutes of perusing his notebooks for just the right passage, he tore out a hand-written page and gave it to me. “This was from day three, last year,” he said. “It was a magical night for sure.”

We left Dale to his deprivation. As far as the passage he gave me, all I can say is it must have been a magical evening indeed.

‘My poison in your veins, your blood in my mouth. Yes, yes yes. How could I be so dumb? Dumb and blind. Mosquito talking to me as he looks around my temple. Not a predator, a partner, a give and take, a trade, to get to know each other. He needed to give me his poison so I could know his mind, hear his thoughts, and he could speak to me. He needed to drink my blood so he could hear my thoughts, understand my words, and I could speak to him. We are connected now, the mosquito and I, his poison in my veins, my blood in his mouth. Bumpy bumpy lumpies on my skin from your poison kiss!’

Yeah. I doubt I’ll ever return to visit the man in the box, but if I do, I’m bringing Thorazine.  And a big can of Raid.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

by Adrienne Jones

My nineteen-year-old nephew is a fellow Star Trek fan, which is fabulous since you don’t see many Generation Y Trekkies, and it gives us something in common to bridge the gap. But what I love most about conversations with Josh is that, although he’s extremely enlightened for his age, he still possesses the childlike honesty he’s had since he was three, when he sat down next to a girlfriend of mine, looked up at her with his Disney baby eyes, and said “Wow, your legs are HUGE!”

So he got me thinking in a recent Trek conversation when he said, “They’re crazy; I’d be in that holodeck ALL the time, and my programs wouldn’t be boring.” Of course, any Star Trek fan has had the same thought: the crew can live out these fantasy scenarios in a setting that looks, feels and tastes like reality, but they pop in to play Sherlock Holmes or some such lameness? Not that Trek hasn’t touched on the more visceral, gluttonous potential of the holodeck. We’ve seen Lt. Barclay’s bouts with holo-addiction, and even the ever prim Captain Janeway experienced a crisis of conscience when she got a crush on a holo character.

But is the tepid holo-use reflective of the show’s PG rating, or is it indicative of a core truth at the base of fiction’s centuries-old love affair with artificial life? We don’t want AIs for mere entertainment or stimulation. We’ve been at the top of the intellectual food chain for the duration of our species’ life span, and our fulfillment with each other is waning. It’s why toothless yahoos stare at the night sky looking for aliens. What we want is something new, an alternate intellectual companionship, a desire both provocative and terrifying.

Pinocchio scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, though not for its intended reasons. Like many child fantasy stories, the theme was to stick to your roots, quite literal in Pinocchio’s case since he was carved from a tree. Playing on abandonment fears, the story shows us what happens when we leave home and hearth to venture out into the big bad world: predators, loneliness, the struggle for survival. There’s no place like home. But I was more bothered by the quagmire of Pinocchio’s existence. He’s a talking piece of wood that wants to be human. Aside from the clichéd B horror films depicting an evil, murderous Pinocchio, did this concept not make anyone else nervous? I mean, there’s a whole forest of trees out there, what if they all decide to follow in Pinocchio’s clogged footsteps? They could take over in no time!

While the more amicable I-want-to-be-a-real-boy Pinocchio theme continues to pepper science fiction with characters like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, twice as many variations portray artificial life forms going terribly awry to the detriment of humanity. From Frankenstein to The Terminator, our hankering to create life from the inanimate comes with the underlying threat that it’ll come back and bite us in the ass. Yet, despite this blatantly obvious moral to the ongoing fairy tale, the theme will not die. Humans are fascinated with creating something sentient outside of our own gene pool, a concept with a cul-de-sac of contradictions.

Despite the planet’s overpopulation and cornucopia of differing cultures and races, we’re just freaking bored with ourselves. If it were merely about creating life, we’d all have babies and be satisfied. But no, we want talking dolls, regardless of their potential to pick up a knife and skitter around in homicidal glee.

Even Star Trek couldn’t decide which route to take with this. The characters on the holodeck were to be treated as ‘just a program’, never to be approached with feeling, (and prone to become dangerous adversaries on the many occasions that the safeties malfunctioned, in which case they could pick up weapons and kill you in a very real and permanent way). Yet The Doctor, an emergency medical hologram was to be treated as part of the crew, with sensitivity given to his needs and emotions.

Naturally the technological advancements of late have added a whole new spectrum to the quest for artificial life, edging toward a manufactured brain based on the same principles as a biological one. But these ideas are geared toward enhancing our own species toward an evolutionary reprieve from the bonds of physical mortality, potentially providing the ability to advance technologically and possibly further into the realms of outer space.

But while the computer age bridged the gap of fantasy and reality, giving the ghost in the machine themes of past films a primitive feel, it’s had an adverse effect on cyberpunk. Humanity’s growing knowledge of technology has taken the mystery out of machines, so we’re not as intrigued by the concept of robots turning their guns on us. So what’s left to feed the need?

I see fiction going back to Mary Shelley basics. We’ve come on in leaps and bounds technologically, but the Millennium has come and gone, and so far Skynet has not become self aware and obliterated eighty percent of the planet. Quite frankly I think people were a little disappointed. So we’re turning our need inward rather than outward again, reaching not for the stars, but for our own flesh, as evidenced in the upsurge of zombies and other genetically mutated foes to conflict with our humanity. If we can’t make something new out of nothing, then by God we’ll alter ourselves! A zombie may not be the best company, particularly the flesh eating variety, but damn it, they’re different.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.