The 65th Delusion
The Art of Fiction Meets the Art of Music
When I was in high school I had a teacher, Mr. Graham, if I remember his name correctly, who used to listen to CDs in his classroom before first period. I would get to school early and sit in his classroom to read. The music serenaded me as I read, though at the time I didn’t care for his choices, which were few. He’d listen to Social Distortion sometimes, Beck’s Odelay album was a frequent flier as well, but the one Mr. Graham preferred because he thought it was good “morning music” was Cake’s Fashion Nugget.
I sat in his room with a book open, typically Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, something of that nature, while songs about going the distance and Daria played in the background, morning after morning. Got to be I hated that album. Problem was, I disliked Social Distortion even more and I wasn’t too fond of Beck’s Odelay record despite being a huge fan of Mellow Gold.
But I wasn’t there to listen to music. I was there early to crack open a book and read. Mr. Graham, however, had his own routine to ready himself for the day. These tunes prepared him for dealing with angsty teenagers, pranksters, rude comments, and everything else that comes with teaching senior chemistry—I think that was the class (I also had Mr. Graham in my freshman year, which happened to be his first year teaching).
Despite how aggravating listening to Cake every damn day was, I didn’t have to be there. I could have hung out somewhere else or gotten to school later, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of friends by senior year. I’d isolated myself, preferring to read in the library during lunch with my buddy Paul, who was also an avid reader, and get to school early to read in Mr. Graham’s class—again, with Paul because he had that class too. Mr. Graham had to be there. It was his classroom. He had to make it as pleasant as possible and starting his day with certain music put him in the right mind frame for dealing with our ungrateful asses. He was one of my better teachers and he was still young enough to give a shit.
Years later when I was dating my future wife, she brought over her CDs. Flipping through them, I came across one with a crown on it that looked familiar. Cake’s Fashion Nugget. I told her about how many times I had to hear that damn album my senior year of high school. Then I said I wanted to hear it again. The songs came back to me as if I had continued to listen to them every morning of my life since my senior year in 1999. I remembered every word. Every note. Every bass line. Every horn section. Every guitar lick.
And I loved it. What I thought would be a mere venture down memory lane, just a taste of some minute slice of nostalgia, turned into a full-on love fest for the album. How was it that an album I loathed only five or so short years before had turned into something I considered a 10/10 record?
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago while listening to Fashion Nugget while driving. Yes, the songs are bangers. They’re catchy and compelling with a unique Cake flair and pithy lyrics that tell little stories. But as I thought about my history with the album, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had pleasant memories of those mornings listening to it over and over again because I had been simultaneously reading great fiction, getting completely lost and absorbed in each book I was reading at the time. If you were beaten repeatedly while listening to a certain record over and over, you wouldn’t look back on it favorably. Listening to it years later would elicit horrible feelings and memories and you’d probably never listen again. The same could be said about listening to something you weren’t into while doing something you love. It sort of creates a bond to that music. And I’ve had a bond with Cake’s wonderful Fashion Nugget album for many years now, perhaps thanks to the written word.
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In December Death’s Head Press released my book Sing Me a Deah Song. This is the latest in their popular splatter western series. It’s a tale of revenge in the west with singing corpses, gunfights, magic spells, psychotic villains, double crosses, dark pasts, and even a fortune teller. Being a big fan of the more violent westerns that came out of the late sixties such as Fistful of Dollars and Hang ‘Em High, those were certainly influences for me while writing this book, but also a wonderful novel by Micheal McDowell called Katie. As much as I want The Elementals to be my favorite McDowell book—because that one is so damn good—it’s actually Katie. Not a western but takes place around the New Jersey area in the same time period, reading this book put me into a great headspace for writing Sing Me a Death Song, and was certainly responsible for my character Louise, who is a nod to the palm reader in Katie.
Sing Me a Death Song is available anywhere you buy books online and the audiobook is forthcoming.
I just finished reading a book called Facade by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It was published with the Dell Abyss line in the nineties. I’ve read a few of the Abyss books and find them hit or miss. This one was a hit for me, though it didn’t quite feel like a Dell Abyss book. There is something about those books, the ones I’ve read at least, that has a certain feel. Sometimes they’re experimental, typically they’re very dark, and often they skirt the trappings of typical traditional horror for something uniquely nineties, for lack of a more eloquent term—dare I say something more grunge. Facade is more of a straight mystery with some underlying horror elements. A famous TV actor is recovering from a fall off a cliff on set by returning to the house where his daughter was whisked away by a caped baddie and murdered a few years before. She’s not the only one to be murdered on the stretch of beach. He investigates, trying to figure out why his house and the immediate area is prone to murder. The characters were great and their interactions believable enough to keep me interested in what was really just a murder mystery. The horror elements almost seemed tacked on. The end didn’t offer anything I didn’t suspect early on in the book, which kind of bummed me out. It was a fun and compelling read with a bit of a downer ending. It reminded me a little bit of the Vincent Price movie Madhouse—my favorite Price movie next to House of Wax, by the way.
January was my best month yet, partially thanks to Baby Fights getting some love on an extreme horror Subreddit. I don’t use Reddit so I have no idea what that is, but I saw a nice bump in sales over the span of a day or two and I am assured that the Subreddit is the culprit. I’m cool with that. Big thank you to everyone who bought a book in January. That is typically one of my worst selling months of the year, so I was over the moon to see so many of you out grabbing horror books.
That’s all for this newsletter. Like always, read horror and tell the world about it!