Sweet Dreams Story Snippets

We're ramping up to publishing the anthology over the next couple of days. As a bit of a treat, keep reading for the first couple of snippets, and some info on the authors.

Snippet # 1 - Joseph Garraty


I stumbled over Joe Garraty's book Voice back in the very first days of my kindle ownership, and his writing simply blew me away. If you like genuine gritty, swaggering rock 'n roll horror, click that link as fast as you can. Since then I've read everything he's brought out - The Q-Bomb is a fun little sci-fi story, The Price is one of the creepiest, darkest urban fantasies I've ever read, and To Rule this Broken Earth takes that gritty, sensual feel of otherness into an epic post-apocalyptic fantasy that never takes the easy route. In that time, we've become friends via email, and Joe is probably one of the main reasons my own writing has improved. In the short tale Everyone Goes To Hell, he also shows a diabolical sense of humour.

Everyone Goes To Hell

Joseph Garraty

Everyone ends up in Hell, you know. Virtually everyone, anyway. Certainly everyone I ever met. I never heard of anyone who went the other way, but I suppose it’s possible, at least in some hypothetical sense.

I tried explaining this to Bill Sanderson right from the beginning, but it didn’t take.

I appeared in his goofy little summoning circle on a whim. Somebody had to do it. We were all getting annoyed by his constant entreaties, and I guess I didn’t have anything better to do that evening than to go try to shut him up. It was a stupid chore. Like going to the dentist, it wasn’t valuable work that needed doing, it was an irritating waste of time one had to endure in order to stave off a bigger irritation.

When I arrived, Bill was prostrate on the floor, chanting madly, nonsense syllables interspersed with phrases like “O Mighty Seraph” and “Hear your humble supplicant” and all that foolishness.

He was so absorbed in it that he didn’t even see me appear. I watched him for a few moments, but he still didn’t so much as glance up. Maybe he was expecting a bang and a flash, a puff of violet smoke, a thundering voice?

I stepped down off the dais, casually stepping over the circle and the inscriptions, and sat on the floor next to him.

“Bill,” I said, patting him affectionately on the back, “you can knock it off. I’m here.”

He scrambled to his feet, tottering as his creaky old knees tried to give out. I reached up a hand to steady him. He stared at me, eyes so wide that the irises seemed lost in rheumy yellow whites. 

Then he threw himself back to the floor.

“Holy One!” he shouted. “I beg thee, O Mighty Seraph—”

I cut him off. “Enough already! I heard you the first time.”

He sat up, blinking in the smoke from the candles. “You…you did?”

“Yeah, sure.” I could see the naked hope in his eyes.

No fool like an old fool, I guess.

“Come on, Bill, get up. Let’s go sit somewhere comfortable, and I’ll explain a few things.”

He nodded, and I helped him to his feet, more slowly this time. He shuffled to the door, casting nervous glances back at me every few feet. I followed him upstairs to the study without a word.

“Nice place,” I remarked as he showed me a chair. It was, too. Deep carpets, high ceilings, teak and mahogany and weirder, more expensive woods all over the place. Ugly light fixtures that cost a fortune. The proles would probably have called this a library, but to Bill it was just the study.

Bill sat in the chair opposite me, wincing as he lowered himself.

“You were supposed to stay in the circle,” he began, his chin thrust out defiantly.

“Oh, good. You got your composure back.”

Snippet # 2 - Naomi Clark

Naomi Clark is one of the writers I'd like to be when I grow up. Now a twitter buddy, I stumbled over her on Amazon, got hooked, then starting reading everything of hers I could get my grubby little paws onto. From the dark humour of the Ethan Banning series, to her dark urban werewolf tales like the Vargulf Trilogy and Silver Kiss, she proves from the first page that female writers can kick ass and take names with the best of them. Her latest release, Night and Chaos went live this week on Amazon, and it's one of the best urban fantasy books I've read, with an interesting take on the Deva mythology, and one of the strongest opening scenes ever. Just to prove she can pull off a slice of dark Gothic elegance as well, her contribution to Sweet Dreams is Here Be Monsters.

Here Be Monsters

Naomi Clark

I hate the sea. I hate the pound and rush of waves on sand, the stench of rotting seaweed and eye-watering brine. I hate the endless shrieks of the gulls. The dark waters chill me, fill my head with nebulous images of great serpents and twisted, alien life forms untouched by sunlight and air. I hate people who romanticise it, talk about pirates and mermaids, adventure and mystery. No. The ocean is not for men. I’ve always believed that. Maybe we came from the sea once, but we left for a reason. And if I had my way, I’d never go back.

            But I rarely get my way. Science and nature reporters for small-time cable TV channels tend not to, so when I was woken up at three am by my producer and told to get my arse down to the Northumberland coast for the ‘story of a life time,’ I didn’t argue. I swallowed my exhaustion and my dread and hatred of the ocean, and did as I was told.

Caraway Beach was cold, wet, and grim. I stood at the water’s edge in green wellies and a battered blue raincoat, watching the camera crew scuttle around trying to set up their cameras and avoid the drizzle and the wind whipping in off the grey-blue ocean. The sky overhead was black with storm clouds. Every now and then, thunder rumbled in the distance, making me shiver and jump. I stared up at those clouds, waiting for lightning. It was much better than staring down at the stone-strewn sand and the thing we were here to film.

“It has to be a whale,” Andrew remarked, joining me. He was the boom operator, new to the team, nice enough guy, but always just...loitering around me. It made me slightly uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “Every time someone gets excited about krakens, Loch Ness Monsters, or dinosaurs, it turns out to be a mangled whale carcass.”

There you have it folks - the first two snippets from two of the most talented authors I know. Pop back tomorrow for some more from Sweet Dreams, and thanks for reading.

Joseph Garraty - Guest Blog

A couple of months ago I made excited fan-girl noises over Voice, a great little horror I picked up on kindle.


Joseph Garraty has since become a twitter buddy and pen-pal of sorts, and if you aren't following his blog yet you really should be. He's a busy guy, so when he agreed to a guest post for me I made more excited fan-girl noises.


You can find Voice here:
Amazon – Kindle format

Amazon – Paperback

Barnes and Noble ebook

Smashwords

Follow Joseph's blog at : http://www.josephgarraty.com 
Take it away, Joe!

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I'm a quiet, low key kind of guy. People at work joke that, if i'm talking, you'd better listen up, because if  I've expended all that effort to open my mouth, it must be because I have something important to say. I wouldn't go that far, but I would say I go through life in a pleasant state of calm equilibrium. I'm not loud or aggressive, I get along with most people, and I tend to take a lot of care in my daily actions. I drive the speed limit, for Christ's sake.


On the other hand, I recently released a horror novel full of bloody and horrible events, and this is me on stage (head blurred, due to banging):

It would be reasonable for the casual observer to ask just what the hell is going on here. How in the world do horror fiction and loud rock and roll music fit into the life of a man who breaks out into a nervous sweat if it  looks like he's going to be a couple of minutes late to an appointment?


I've spent a bunch of time thinking about that, and I don't think its a contradiction at all. I think it's actually healthy (but then I would think that, wouldn't I?). Here's why:


Modern life is essentially a contest between the higher functions and the lower, between long-term goals and immediate needs - or, if you're into literary criticism, between the Apollonian and Dionysian. I am not into literary criticism, so I'll call it a contest between being a social animal and just being an animal. One the one hand, for society to function we need to cooperate, to make accommodations for each other, and, yes, to drive the speed limit. On the other hand, our ancestors (and I'm talking ancestors back to friggin' protozoa here) did not survive by driving the speed limit. They survived because basic animal biology is driven by what my brother's bio professor called "The four F's:fighting, feeding, fleeing and ... reproduction." That shit is wired in to our biology—we wouldn’t be here if it weren't.

If there’s a contradiction, that’s it. The human animal is wired with tension at the very foundation. Coping with that basic tension, though—there’s nothing contradictory about that, and that’s where the horror fiction and loud music come in. At first glance, the works of Stephen King and, say, Mötorhead don’t seem to have a lot in common. But if we peel back the surface layer, what do we find?

The four F’s. Everywhere. Rock and roll at its core is a celebration of the fourth F, the music of reckless abandon and pure sexual energy. Done right, there’s nothing cerebral about it—it all comes straight from the gut, or maybe the pelvis. Horror fiction is a different animal, much more concerned with fighting and fleeing—and feeding.

The way I look at it, the two complement each other perfectly, and indeed have been enthusiastic partners for a long time. Go back and dust off the legend of Robert Johnson, the blues player, and right there you have the roots of rock and roll coupled with a deal with the devil. Later, of course, Black Sabbath came along and married the dark themes of horror to rock music in a more explicit way, and in doing so spawned an entire genre dedicated to that marriage. Nearly all heavy metal imagery is laden with horror themes—just walk into the music store (does anybody do that anymore?) and grab any metal CD at random, and you can’t miss it. Hell, Metallica’s got at least one song based on a Lovecraft story, and it doesn’t get more obvious than that.

I believe we get balance in our lives from experiencing these things. The human brain is an immensely complex and powerful simulation engine, and by channeling your favorite Dionysian art form (oops, that slipped through) through it periodically, you keep the humors in balance—absorbing the art is, in fact, neurologically similar to having had those experiences yourself to some degree. And you get it without the vast social and personal disruption of satisfying your four F’s the hard way.

I don’t think this is a catharsis thing, either. It’s not that we go through life and then one day need some rock music and a bloody story to keep us from exploding, any more than we go through life eating only steak and then one day need to eat some asparagus to keep from exploding. It’s balance.

And, as an animal that basically wants to fuck and eat, and wants it right now, living life in a society that wishes we’d all obey the speed limit, a little balance goes a long way.

That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.