Witching Hour Theatre Page 8

  Her mouth was very warm and wet. A wave of pleasant dizziness rushed over him. He leaned into her, let his hands roam over her warm back.

  After a time, she pulled away slowly and gazed up at him. “Wow.”

  “‘Wow’, what?”

  “You’d really skip Dog Warriors for me?”

  “Dog Soldiers. And yes, I’d skip Dog Soldiers for you.” He glanced at the ground between them. “If you wanted, I’d skip all three films for you.”

  Smiling, she kissed him one more time and led him toward the ticket booth.

  “We’ll stay for the first movie,” Nichole said.

  “You want to make me wait a little, huh?”

  “No, I want to watch that guy eat himself.”

  “That should go well with Date Package Number One,” Larry said, and pulled out his wallet.

  My Wife, Stephen King, and Witching Hour Theatre

  An Afterword by the Author

  First of all, despite the wording of the title above, I’m not implying that Stephen King is my wife. I toyed with several titles for this Afterword, and I went with the one that rang the truest. So you can dispense with the jokes about Jonathan and Stephen sitting in a tree.

  Like Roland Deschain, the hero of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, I’ve always been a plodder. In any endeavor, I tend to improve gradually, at a rate so glacial that most folks would lose patience and move on to something else. Granted, I don’t shoot like Roland or do battle with Crimson Kings, but I am a steadfast, determined person.

  I don’t have Stephen King’s talent either.

  I don’t say that to be falsely modest or to take anything away from my favorite writer’s work ethic. I genuinely believe that Stephen King has a rare and glorious gift for storytelling that is innate, an ability that some have referred to as satanic, as though King, as a younger man, made some Faustian bargain with the arch-fiend to procure his otherworldly talent.

  To King’s infinite credit, he is also a tireless worker, an artist eternally devoted to improving his craft. Don’t believe me? Check out Full Dark, No Stars or Joyland, both books from the latter stages of his career, both supreme works of art.

  When you combine King’s talent with King’s work ethic, you end up with nothing more or less than the best horror writer in history, an author I’d put my money on in a no-holds-barred battle with any literary luminary—Shakespeare, Dostoevsky…even Elmore Leonard, my second-favorite author.

  For me, at least, King outwrites them all.

  So what does Stephen King have to do with Witching Hour Theatre?

  Well, nothing.

  And everything.

  You see, Stephen King is the man who made me love words. Prior to discovering The Tommyknockers during my fourteenth year, I was convinced of my own stupidity and utterly certain that books existed on an intellectual plane far above my own. But when I read King’s weird novel about aliens, I realized that books could not only be comprehensible, they could also be entertaining.

  So I decided to be a writer.

  Oh, not all at once. I was only a kid, and I was far more concerned with girls and sports to actually sit down and write. But when I was a senior in high school and my basketball career came to an end, I did attempt to craft my first novel.

  The problem was, I had no craft.

  How much talent I had is up for debate and is very much the concern of this rambling essay. A few people read my story—one teacher, the older sister of my best friend, a couple others—and claimed it showed real talent. Whether it did or didn’t isn’t really the point; after all, what were they supposed to say? Man, this really sucks ass! You should be ashamed of yourself! No, the point is that they encouraged me, and at the time, that was enough.

  But as high school turned into college, and I began to read more widely (thanks to the book list in the back of King’s Danse Macabre), I realized I had a long way to go before I could even flirt with being published in the smallest of the “For-the-Love” presses (see: no payment).

  Anyway, by the time I had finished high school, I had read twenty or so books, all of them by Stephen King. When I reached college, I finally branched out into other writers. During that eye-opening, endlessly fascinating first semester at Purdue, King led me to…

  Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

  Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

  Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings.

  Ramsey Campbell’s The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

  Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  There were others, of course, but what was happening was a slow-building revelation (remember, I’m a plodder). Yes, these authors were far better than I, and the fact of that was slightly daunting.

  But far stronger than my sense of doubt was the realization that this was what I wanted to do. This was how I wanted to make people feel.

  By the time I’d finished my undergrad work, I had discovered Peter Straub’s Ghost Story; The Other, by Thomas Tryon; the fabulous and essential anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural; and a slew of other seminal works of horror.

  I had also procured my degree in English Education for two reasons. One, many teachers had impacted my life, and I wanted to make a difference in the lives of young people as well. Two, I wanted to be a writer, and I knew that teaching would not only provide me with a Summer Break during which I could write, but that the profession would also immerse me consistently and completely in the world of words.

  Becoming a teacher was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

  But I also became a coach. Additionally, as a teacher, my pay was tied to the amount of grad work I completed.

  So for the next decade I coached varsity girls’ basketball, varsity track, junior varsity volleyball, coordinated a youth basketball program, and generally lived with a whistle in my mouth. I don’t regret that and would never trade my experiences in coaching, but the fact is, coaching devoured the time I might have spent writing.

  What little time was left over was devoted to graduate school. I had entire classes on single authors: Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller. I enjoyed some amazing independent studies with Purdue professors, fascinating afternoons with me and the teacher and the text.

  But I wrote very little. What I did write during that period was invariably derivative of what I was reading. I’ve always been a very receptive writer, which means I have to be careful about what I read. I’m not talking about plagiarism, of course, but I can usually spot the influence of what I’m reading in what I’m writing. Because of that, I try not to read Richard Laymon if I’m writing a slow-building ghost story; I avoid reading M.R. James if I’m writing a splattery monster feature.

  You see, though? I was always reading. Even when I was coaching, even when I was spending three hours a night in grad classes, even when I was beginning to date a young woman very different than any woman I’d ever met, I was reading.

  Oh…about that young woman.

  She was the other thing that happened over the first decade of my teaching career. She was also the best thing that happened over the first decade of my teaching career.

  I don’t want to get too personal here, the kind of oversharing that will make you power off your Kindle in revulsion or embarrassment. But I will say that I became a better person the day I met my future wife. I wasn’t a horrible person before—at least I hope I wasn’t—but to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, she made me want to be a better man.

  We met when we were twenty-six and I was stupid. I’m pretty certain I was stupid until I was thirty, and only marginally smarter in the years after that, but at least I had the sense to realize that here was something special, here was a person I needed to keep in my life. She was patient with me and supportive of my writing, which leads me to Witching Hour Theatre.

  Up until then, I’d only written a few things. Stories, snatches of bad poetry. A disastrous first attempt at
a novel that would one day be called House of Skin (a book that the legendary Edward Lee would eventually call “The Quintessential Haunted House Novel” and that The Library Journal would say was “reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story”).

  My wife read my first stab at House of Skin (then titled Starlight, which would, by the way, become the name of the cinema in Witching Hour Theatre) and was generous in her response. In measured tones, she admitted that she didn’t quite understand all of it, but that it was evident I had talent. A more honest assessment would have been “This is the most pretentious drivel I’ve ever read!” but she probably figured that wouldn’t be very constructive and opted for a gentler response.

  Deep down, I knew my writing wasn’t very good.

  I knew I needed to get better.

  Remember when I said I was a “receptive” writer? That was half of the problem. I’d pick up an Ernest Hemingway book, and pretty soon my sentence structure would look like his, only not nearly as good. I’d read the Marquis de Sade, and all of a sudden my characters were torturing each other and rutting like sex-starved rabbits. I’d binge on Hunter S. Thompson, and before you knew it, my stories were turning into acid-fueled road trips.

  I knew I had to become my own writer.

  But first, I had to learn to close the floodgates a little.

  As always, I returned to Stephen King. I began to compare his books to the books he’d recommended in Danse Macabre. I placed Hell House next to The Shining and looked for similarities. I held up John Farris, Ira Levin, Flannery and O’Conner, and squinted to spot a resemblance to King’s novels.

  At first, I didn’t see anything.

  But then…

  Have you ever looked at one of those trick 3D pictures, the ones that don’t seem to show anything, and then you’re supposed to unfocus your eyes, and refocus them, and perform a somersault, and utter an ancient Sumerian incantation, and—

  (Okay, a confession: I’ve never seen a single image in one of those damned pictures. I suspect it’s all a big conspiracy to make me strain my eyes to spot something that isn’t there. You’re all in on the joke, aren’t you? Admit it!)

  Nevertheless, I did begin to see the other writers present in Stephen King’s work. I began to realize that, just like me, King had been influenced. Oh, don’t get me wrong. He’s completely his own writer, a voice so distinct you’ll be encountering its influence for generations (including the generations writing today).

  Yet if you look closely, you’ll also find hints of his influences here and there. Nothing overt, mind you. Just subtle reminders that King, like every other accomplished writer, had to start somewhere. That he too has heroes.

  And that, my friends, inspired me.

  I began to read differently. Not frantically, the way I did before. Not feverishly, as though there was some secret binary code embedded in the word count that would help me unlock my unrealized potential.

  No, I began to take my time about my reading. I went from devouring eighty or a hundred books a year to a number more modest. More importantly, I began to re-read, not for masochistic punishment, but for the secrets of individual books, for the lineage between this writer and that writer.

  For craft.

  At that time (we’re in my late twenties now), I was reading a lot of Richard Laymon. Some folks love Laymon, some folks hate Laymon; I belong unapologetically to the former camp.

  Yet because of King, I knew I couldn’t be Laymon. Nor did I want to be.

  Ah, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pick up a few tricks from him, did it?

  So I sat down at the keyboard one October afternoon and began to hunt and peck in my customary way. I plodded. But at the same time, I experienced an incredible sense of liberation. Was this, I wondered, how it felt to enjoy writing? Perhaps.

  So I wrote some more.

  At the end of a couple months—I wrote very slowly in those days, remember—I had a novella. It wasn’t perfect, I knew, and there was a lot of Laymon in it. But it wasn’t an imitation of Laymon.

  That represented progress.

  When I’d spent a week or two editing it—not nearly enough, admittedly—I printed it out and handed it to my girlfriend. I sat in the next room and perspired. I knew I should be busying myself with other tasks, but I couldn’t. I’d been telling people I wanted to be a writer ever since high school, and if this sucked…well, I guess I’d keep trying. But I hoped it wouldn’t suck. I desperately wanted some validation for making what I believed were major improvements to my writing style.

  My girlfriend opened the door to the room where I sat quivering with anticipation.

  “Well?” I asked, steeling myself for the laughter and the derision.

  “Money,” she answered.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Come again?”

  “This is money,” she explained.

  Without knowing it, my future wife had changed my future life.

  As it turns out, I made almost no money on Witching Hour Theatre. What I did gain was confidence.

  Boy, would I ever need it.

  Because for several years after that, I struggled to figure it out, struggled with my voice, wrestled with my schedule, and generally felt like an utter failure.

  But there was always Witching Hour Theatre, the proof that yes, I could finish something. The proof that yes, I could tell a decent story.

  Witching Hour Theatre was the raft that kept me afloat in a churning sea of rejection.

  Of course, my wife was even more instrumental in keeping my hope alive.

  I think the average wife would have begrudged her husband all those hours I spent in his writing room rather than spending time with her. I think the average wife would have lost patience with me rather than remaining steadfast in her support.

  Thankfully, I don’t have the average wife.

  If you’ve read this far, Honey, thank you for everything.

  I couldn’t have done it without you.

  For the rest of you reading this, I hope you read more of my work.

  And I genuinely appreciate your reading this story.

  Until next time…

  Also by Jonathan Janz

  Savage Species

  Night Terrors (#1) - FREE

  The Children (#2)

  Dark Zone (#3)

  The Arena (#4)

  The Old One (#5)

  Savage Species Boxset - Discount

  The Sorrows

  The Sorrows (#1)

  Castle of Sorrows (#2)

  Standalones

  Children of the Dark

  Wolf Land

  House of Skin

  Exorcist Road

  Dust Devils

  The Nightmare Girl

  The Darkest Lullaby

  The Clearing of Travis Coble

  Old Order

  Bloodshot: Kingdom of Shadows

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