The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

TRAIPSING THROUGH THE DARK ^{THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES}

J.L. Bryan: “Plastic” was written specifically for this anthology. Rob told me the theme was isolation, and this idea popped into my head—someone who’s all alone but surrounded by every kind of consumer goods imaginable. The character creates/hallucinates a world where he is not alone, with bizarre and funny consequences. I think the strongest inspiration for this story actually came from one of Rob’s stories in the first Gate anthology: “Sullivan Street.” I wanted to explore something similar, a character with a life that was wealthy in a material sense but spiritually and emotionally empty. On top of that, it was great fun to figure out how an entire human life could be represented by different retailers at the mall. When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about living in a big shopping mall, probably after I read a book about kids who ran away from home to live in a museum. So, mix all those elements together, and you get the odd story of “Plastic.”

D.P. Prior: Back in the summer of 2011 my son Theo got heavily into zombies. It started with Marvel Zombies and swiftly progressed to Resident Evil. It struck me at the time that I’d always studiously avoided the zombie genre and so felt it was about time I gave it a look. I started with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and was surprised at how good it was. This led to Dawn of the Dead (including the excellent 2004 remake), Day of the Dead, Survival of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. By this stage it was a case of ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’, and so I watched as much of the genre as I could lay my hands on, some of it good, much of it exceedingly bad: Quarantine, Quarantine 2, Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, The Dead…

By the end of the summer, Theo was thoroughly sick of zombies and heavily into Nerf guns. It was about that time I wrote an article for the blog Two Ends of the Pen called ‘Zombies on my Mind’, which was my attempt at rationalizing the genre. That pretty much brought my zombie phase to a conclusion until Rob asked if I’d like to contribute to The Gate 2. Having read the first two books of Rob’s The Rift series, which is steeped in zombies, I couldn’t resist having a bash at the genre myself.

The Indian Rope Trick was a challenge to write in many ways. First off, I only had a couple of weeks to write it from start to finish due to the publishing deadline for The Gate 2. Next, and perhaps hardest, was attempting to write from a nine year old’s point of view. There were also issues regarding the balance of comedy and horror, gratuity, and language that needed to be addressed.

The writing itself was thoroughly enjoyable, which is not always the case. It was a great opportunity to experiment with style, and I got to play around with speech rhythms, particularly when Wesley gets agitated.

Daniel Pyle: As the eldest of five brothers, I was rarely alone as a child. In some ways, this was great—I usually had a playmate if I wanted one, and all those little bros made it much easier to gang up on our parents…Brussels sprouts for dinner? We don’t think so—but there were times when I wished they’d all go away for a while so I could get a few measly minutes of peace and quiet. Think Home Alone. In Missouri. With a smaller house.

When Rob told me that one of the themes of this anthology was going to be isolation, I decided to play around with the idea of siblings and alone time. I wanted to write about older siblings. Maybe because my brothers and I are grown up now—or as grown up as we’re ever going to get—or maybe because I didn’t like the idea of killing off a kid on page one of my story (page three would have been fine). I also wanted to add a twist, which I won’t give away here in case you’re one of those weirdos who reads the notes before the stories. In the end, I was very happy with how it turned out. In fact, I think this might be my best story yet. It’s my favorite anyway, and I hope you enjoyed it too.

Michael Crane: This story started with an image in my head of an old woman knocking on her neighbor’s door, screaming about zombies. I thought it’d be fun to have a character that clearly wasn’t right in the head, although I knew that she wouldn’t be the main character, nor would the story only be about her. It was just a starting point for me. I learned more about the characters as I continued to write, not exactly sure where it would all lead. That’s when writing is the most exciting for me. When your characters take you on a journey where you’re not sure how it’ll all play out in the end.

Steven Pirie: In Does Laura like Elephants?, I wanted to explore the relationships between four characters, two couples who had essentially been cheating on each other, with one of the characters, Laura, set in her own, distant, stroke-induced twilight world. This dysfunctional setup gave me a character who was there, yet at the same time was lost, and I wondered how that would add to the dynamics of the four of them. Laura could not speak or interact meaningfully, so I gave her an occult-like relationship both within herself and with Don, her lover. I was keen to inject humour, as I believe that’s what folk would turn to for respite in such a situation. Of course, I have exaggerated it somewhat for effect. What emerged is a story that has hidden depths and is one of my favourites.

Robert J. Duperre: The inspiration for 39 Days actually came from a short story I read a while back, Sweepers by Leslianne Wilder. It was a great—albeit very short—tale about rising oceans and people trapped in a skyscraper. Though I loved the story, I couldn’t help but think the tale could have been stretched out, made more personal.

So when Dan Pyle contacted me hoping I could write a story for his Unnatural Disasters anthology, I took the same basic premise, changed it around to make it my own, and focused on the people involved instead of the events themselves. What came out on the other side is probably the best short story I’ve ever written…or at least my own personal favorite.

K. Allen Wood: When I set out to write “The Candle Eaters,” I wanted to do something with Halloween as the backdrop. I’d long had the idea for the story, and when another small-press magazine announced they were putting out a Halloween issue, I had the perfect reason to finally write it.

I had four months to get it done. Plenty of time. However, before I knew it, those four months had dwindled to just three weeks.

The first version I wrote was extremely dark, featured characters with few redeeming qualities, and had an ending full of death and destruction. This was not the story that had been in my head for so long.

With no time for a rewrite, I submitted it anyway—and was promptly rejected.

What I did accomplish with that first version, I think, was come up with some original elements within the oft-used Halloween motif. Specifically the “candle eaters,” which of course are a riff on the old-time tradition of using hollowed-out turnips or pumpkins to ward off evil spirits.

When Rob e-mailed asking if I’d like to send him something for The Gate 2, I said I would. When he said the theme would be “isolation and despair,” I immediately thought of this story.

On the surface, the story included here isn’t drastically different from that first version, but after a few rewrites I think it accomplishes what I’d initially envisioned so long ago, which was a story fundamentally about faith and hope without being overly sentimental.

(I also managed to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands, The Dead Milkmen.)

Ultimately, I just hope “The Candle Eaters” is a good, entertaining story.

Mercedes M. Yardley: The invitation to this anthology came about at a particularly difficult time. My husband and I were delighted to discover that we were expecting triplets (surprise!) but ended up losing two of our little girls. The third is happy and healthy. Writing was a struggle and Robby D. and his artist, Jesse Young, were kind enough to pitch a few ideas to help get my creative juices flowing. One idea was a girl who was alone on an island.

This struck me. A lonely girl seemed like such a beautiful thing to play with. I created a horrifying yet feasible scenario where a little girl was left alone except for the unwanted company of her abductor. The only other individual to talk to is a rather strange friend called Black Mary. The eventual arrival of the littlest Red Mary spurs the girl into action. Are the Marys figments of the girl’s mind brought on by her abuse and isolation? Are they ghosts from the man’s previous victims? That’s not for me to tell you.

Perhaps her mind is creating companionship. Perhaps she is haunted. It would seem that I am haunted, as well.

David McAfee: This is the third installment in my series of short stories dealing with a very talkative serial killer. The other two can be found in my two short story collections: The Lake and 17 Other Stories, and Devil Music and 18 Other Stories. Like the previous entries in the series, I hope Exhibit C is brutal, creepy, and disturbingly entertaining to those who read it.

Joel Arnold: The Canoe started with a vision I had of a canoe that keeps appearing mysteriously at the dock of a cabin in the deep north woods of Minnesota no matter how many times the cabin’s owner releases it back into the current of the river. I decided to have the characters be a father and son of Cambodian decent; the father living with memories of the terrors of Pol Pot’s regime, while the son just wants to fit into American society. I peer-tutored Cambodian kids when I was in high school at a time when these kids still remembered living under Pol Pot’s rule, and ever since then I have been fascinated by their stories of survival in such harsh and nightmarish conditions. But as their children who didn’t experience that nightmare first-hand grow up in American society, those experiences are only stories their parents and grandparents may or may not tell them. And being kids, they often just want to fit in with their American peers. I wanted to write about this dynamic between father and son; how the father wants to protect his son, while the son just wants to find his own group of peers. While the canoe in the story at first serves as a way for the father and son to bond, it later becomes something that keeps the father and son apart.

On a side-note, the canoe has the name ‘Farbanti’ written on it, which—although not explained in the story—is in reference to a Norse god who ferried the dead to the underworld.

Benjamin X. Wretlind: Destination was a concept piece. I wanted to write something in the science fiction genre, but being a horror writer at the time, I didn’t know what to do. So, like most people, I borrowed an idea from something I had written a long, long time ago: THE FERRYMAN, a short story about Charon, the old guy who ferries souls across the River Styx but hates his job. That piece turned into DESTINATION nearly a decade and a half later.

Dawn McCullough-White: I was looking at some of the photos of damage that had been done to cemeteries in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—the flooding, the broken tombs—and then this idea came to me about a person caught up in a flash flood that tears through a cemetery, and how gruesome and horrifying that might be. And that was when I knew, this was my story, I wanted to put some poor sap into that situation. I also thought this would give me the chance to continue writing about Jules, an assassin and favorite character in my trilogy (the Trilogy of Shadows). Just explore a little bit more about his life prior to my books and I’d also have the chance to torture him a bit more…

David Dalglish: Origins for Worldwide Event (originally titled Too Brief A Touch until mocking by other various authors in this collection prompted a change) are fairly simple. Shouldn’t be too surprising that religion plays a part. It involved the question, if God existed, why didn’t he simply announce himself to the world, removing all possible doubt? Ignoring arguments involving faith and belief being relevant should such a thing be a undisputable fact, my initial response was very simple: it just wouldn’t matter. God could appear in the clouds, wave his hands, and go “Hi guys!” and there’d still be people out there claiming aliens, tainted water, group hallucinations, government conspiracies, etc. He’d have to appear again. And again. And again, like some goofy timeclock. “It’s New Year’s everybody, wave hi to God!”

But what if something did happen? What if, for just a brief moment, the whole world was made aware of something bigger than ourselves?

That idea, combined with one of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories of all time, The Last Night of the World, became what was eventually titled Worldwide Event. It’s a pretty dark story, but then again, I don’t see how to make it end joyfully. If I ended it midway through, then it’d have been rainbows and sunshine without difficulty. But when exploring the possibility that the greatest miracle of our time would still not be enough to change anything… well… I consider that just a little dark. Just a little depressing. Never my intent, but rarely does my intent ever really matter when I’m writing a story. The story’s the boss, after all. I’m just along for the ride.

Robert J. Duperre: This tale was directly inspired by the fantastic illustration of Jesse’s that graces the back cover of this book. When I first saw it, I immediately pictured a story of sadness and terror that also had a sort of beauty to it, a hope in the future that the horrible beings the image presented had no right to feel. When J.L. Bryan asked me to contribute a story to the re-release of his own short story collection, I decided enough was enough and finally put what was in my head on paper. Abigail’s depressing story and eventual salvation is what came out. I’m quite happy with it.

Robert J. Duperre: At the beginning of last year, David Dalglish contacted me, wondering if I could possibly write up a story for him to include in A Land of Ash, a compilation dealing with the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera and its aftermath.

Of any story I’ve written, this one was the hardest, both in execution and idea. I struggled for weeks to just come up with a plot. Every story I began ended less than a thousand words in, as it was plainly obvious that the story just wasn’t working.

Finally, I took some of the conspiracies my father-in-law told me, imagined them coming from the mouth of an old man who’d prepared for circumstances much like this, and placed a young girl in his care. In the original version of the story, an important event in Guido’s life, the event that made him shut himself off from society, is presented in between each break as a flashback. When I finished writing it, although I thought it was decent, my wife said it needed a lot of work and I agreed. I was ready to tell Dave forget it, that I couldn’t get him anything in time, but he was stalwart. “Just send it to me,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s making it seem stinky.”

The next day Dave sent the story back to me, chopped almost in half. All of Guido’s weighty backstory was eliminated, and what I read was a tightly knit, well-written tale of isolation and despair. In other words, this story wouldn’t have been half as good as it is without Dave, and for that he deserves tons of thanks. It’s one of the best pieces of fiction that has my name attached to it, it is the inspiration for the cover of this anthology, and has a feel and pace that I try to mimic each time I sit at my desk and plug away.

All in all, I feel it’s the perfect choice to close out this collection.

So that’s it, folks. You’ve come to the end of our little journey through depression and loneliness. Please, if you liked this collection (or even if you hated it), feel free to stop by Amazon or whatever outlet you picked it up at and leave a review. Your opinion matters to us, as it should for every small press publisher. And also, make sure to visit http://theriftonline.com for updates on current and future projects from T.R.O. Publishing.

Look out for The Gate 3: 13 Stories of Monsters Among Us, slated to be released between November of 2012 and January of 2013. Trust me, it’s going to be another good’un.