Scott Edelman: Short Story Writer
"The Hunger of Empty Vessels"
Bad Moon Books
I am "deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining." Well ... not me personally. Rather, it's my novella The Hunger of Empty Vessels, about the tortured relationship between a father and son, published in April 2009 as a chapbook by Bad Moon Books, which was judged so by Nick Cato. That review also stated that "Edelman really knows how to pack a knockout into a literary jab."
Meanwhile, over at the Horror Drive-In, reviewer Mark Sieber wrote: "The first thing I want to point out is how well written The Hunger of Empty Vessels is. The language is rich and each sentence is a beautiful construction. Clearly Scott Edelman is a solid professional. I urge readers to give The Hunger of Empty Vessels a chance." What more could I ask for?
And if those reviews aren't enough to make you give the tale a read, check out what David Mack has to say: "The Hunger of Empty Vessels is an unnerving work that peers into the darkest corner of the human soul and makes one fear what lurks at the bottom of that abyss—but also makes it impossible to look away. I dare you to try."
"Glitch"
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Three
I wrote "Glitch," a story about robot sex in the future (did I get your attention?) hoping to place it in an anthology with the theme of Artificial Intelligence.
Just to show that a) nothing works out as we intend and b) things can still work out well anyway even when they don't, I'll share that the story was rejected by the editor whose book had acted as a catalyst (and yes, I still get rejected), and that it was then purchased by George Mann for the third volume of the prestigious Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, which went on sale in February 2009.
Over at Fantasy Book Critic, Liviu C. Suciu reviewed the entire contents of the book and gave "Glitch" 4 1/2 stars ... which as far as I can tell, was on a scale of 1 through 5. (If I'm misinterpreting things, and it was instead on a scale of 1 through 100, please ... keep that to yourself.)
Suciu called the story "interesting, funny and dark at the same time."
"A Very Private Tour of a Very Public Museum"
PostScripts
You can thank Farah Mendlesohn for the creation of this story, though this she doesn't know it—this is the first time I've said so publicly. Farah had announced her intentions to put together an anthology titled Glorifying Terrorism, meant to protest a law proposed by British Government which would outlaw anything which might be read or interpreted as doing just that. Potentially, that could outlaw Macbeth.
So when I came up with a story idea about Earth robots, alien robots, and how they battled over the nature of our perception of art, I began writing this story with the intention of submitting it there. I didn't expect any problems with its creation, because I've always seen myself as in complete control of my characters, plots and themes. Once I sketch out a story's arc, I'm in charge, and my characters do not get to take control. I'm a puppeteer, and the puppets don't get to choose their destinies.
As I wrote this particular story, though, my characters took over in an extremely unsettling manner, refusing to enact the planned ending which would have made the story right for Farah's book. I could not force them to do what I'd originally thought I wanted them to do, which meant that the finished story was completely off-topic for the anthology that had originally sparked the concept.
Luckily, there was another editor for whom it did seem right. Pete Crowther has been very, very good to me. I've sold him six stories over the years, of which this was the fifth, and it appeared in Postscripts 15, which debuted in August 2008 at the Denver Worldcon.
"Petrified"
Desolate Souls
When I was asked by the editors of the 2008 World Horror Convention to contribute a story to the con's souvenir program book, I never expected that the piece would earn me my fourth Stoker Awards nomination, but that's exactly what happened.
(And in case you hadn't heard, that nomination resulted in my fourth Stoker Awards loss. But as they say, it's an honor just to be nominated!)
The only parameters I was given was that the story should take place in the desert, and so I chose to send a contentious couple out into the Petrified Forest. "Petrified" would have made a perfect Twilight Zone episode, I think, and I was pleased that a number of readers picked up on that and have told me so unprompted.
As far as I know, no copies of Desolate Souls were ever offered for sale, since they were handed out to all paying members of the convention in Salt Lake City in March of 2008 as part of their membership. So if you want to find a copy, it will be up to the second-hand market ... at least until I put together another short-story collection!
"Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man"
PostScripts
Rather than going on myself about this tale, which is currently a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, I'll just share what reviewer Val Grimm had to say about it at The Fixx. Here's an excerpt from her critique of PostScripts 12, cover-dated Autumn 2007, in which I was reviewed as favorably as one could ever hope for:
Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, "Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man" by Scott Edelman and "Ghost Technology From The Sun" by Paul Jessup, show thoughtfulness and literary craft that deserve special recognition and remembrance.
The unnamed narrator (I suspect his name is Walter) of "Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man" is a writer doing research who seeks refuge in the rare book vault of a library, which is attacked by zombies. Walled in with his books, he struggles to comprehend what is happening by telling stories, mostly of what he imagines is happening in the world outside the library. His meta-narrative is an exploration of the impulse to write and why telling stories is human. All the vignettes our male Scheherazade formulates to forestall and forget the inevitable involve affection or dedication of one kind or another: bonds between people, or between humans and zombies. Death doesn't part his husbands and wives in their love or hatred; mothers adore their strange children; priests attend to their flocks; and survivors seek other survivors. The unflinching mayhem of this story is heartrending rather than perverse or disgusting, as life is destroyed and, tattered, continues in unlife. Again and again, our narrator imagines a man on a mountain, who has never heard a whimper of the chaos below, poking in the dirt with a stick and talking to his son, a darkly hopeful image which recalls the torturer's horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree in W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts."
That's the first time I've ever been favorably compared to W.H. Auden!
"The Awful Truth About the Circus"
Zencore!
I've just had a short story published in a British anthology with the complex title of Zencore!: Scriptus Innominatus, which could also be considered the seventh issue of the intriguing magazine Nemonymous, the publisher of which believes that readers gain something by reading short stories that have lost the names of their authors. (Scroll down for information on a story of mine that was included in a 2005 issue of Nemonymous.) So even though this volume was released in June 2007, it will be at least another six months after that before I'll be able to tell you exactly which of the 17 stories inside is mine. [Updated to reveal which story is mine.] All I can say is that it's one of these:
"Torsion"
"MMM—Delicious"
"Undergrowth"
"Fugly"
"The Nightmare Reader"
"The Secret Life of the Panda"
"Upset Stomach"
"The Awful Truth About the Circus"
"Red Velvet Dust"
"The Coughing Coffin"
"Terminus"
"Mary's Gift, The Stars & Frank's Pisser"
"Blue Raspberries"
"Berian Winslow & the Stream of Consciousness Storyteller"
"The Plunge"
"England and Nowhere"
"Word Doctor"
The story titles on the table of contents are not bylined, but the names of the authors appear on the book's back cover, though not in the same order. If you do happen to read these stories before the masks are removed, and you have a guess as to which was mine, please let me know! Not that I'll be able to tell you whether or not you're right until the end of the year when the [TK] above can be replaced by an actual title ...
"The Man He Had Been Before"
The Mammoth Book of Monsters
I've always found the end of the world appealing. (Well, the idea of the end of the world. I could do without the real thing, which unfortunately seems closer each day.) There's something attractive about wiping the slate clean and getting back to basics. It's almost as if the apocalypse represents a beginning rather than an ending to me.
Add monsters to that mix and you've really got my attention.
The monsters in my story for the Stephen Jones-edited anthology The Mammoth Book of Monsters (published May 2007 by Carroll and Graf in the U.S. and Hutchinson in the UK) represent my favorite supernatural creatures. (Again, in idea only. Though they have often been the stuff of my actual nightmares, I have no desire to run into them in real life.) As is usual with my stories of monsters, it can be a little unclear who the real monsters are, us or them. But luckily, at the end of the world, we might have a shot at that question being answered.
"Survival of the Fittest"
Summer Chills
My wife and I went to the Galapagos Islands in September, 2001. We'd made made plans earlier in the year that we were going to fulfill that particular lifelong dream as a way to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Then came the events of 9/11. We were supposed to fly out of the Washington, D.C. area, where two of the three airports were still closed, only two weeks after the towers fell. But we had no intention of letting terrorism getting in the way of our trip. Not only did we figure that there would be no safer time to fly, but we also believed that at such a time, it was more urgent than ever to step outside the world we knew.
So we went, and I came as close as I'm ever going to get to visiting a prehistoric world. I was surrounded by dozens of species which exist nowhere else on Earth. The creatures among which I walked showed no fear, because they had never been hunted, at least not by man. And because they were not behind bars, caged in a zoo, instead of meeting them while they were trapped on my turf, I was meeting them on theirs, as equals. I not entirely sure whether it was the contrast between the nightmare of the real world and the calm of the islands that made the place seem so much like the Garden of Eden, but I suspect that it would have seemed that way whenever we happened to visit.
When I heard that Stephen Jones was looking for horror stories in vacation settings for his anthology Summer Chills (published May 2007), I knew it was finally time for me to get back to work on an idea I'd had for a story set there. A number of the story's scenes have been snatched from memories of that trip. We did stand over a baby Albatross, watch as a newly born sea lion nursed, step gently over nesting blue-footed boobies who didn't seem to mind at all, and meet Lonesome George. But we also snorkeled with turtles and sea lions, stepped up to branches to stare into the eyes of birds from only a few inches away, and wandered through the jungle seeking out wild giant tortoises. As for the supernatural aspects of the tale, well, those belong to the story alone ...
"A Judgment Call for Judgment Day"
A Dark and Deadly Valley
Editor Mike Heffernan took the title for his WWII horror anthology A Dark and Deadly Valley (published April 2007) from the statement made by Winston Churchill on January 22, 1941, about the bleakness of the battles to come:
"Far be it from me to paint a rosy picture of the future. Indeed, I do not think we should be justified in using any but the most sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley."
Churchill may have envisioned the horrors of war, but none quite like these. In my own tale, a weary soldier on the streets of rubble-strewn Berlin during the final days of the war finds himself the object of a tug of war between emissaries of Heaven and Hell. Other writers took Hiroshima, Dresden and Dunkirk as their settings, populating them with everything from ghosts to radioactive mutants. The other 19 authors include Brian Keene, Rick Hautala, Elizabeth Massie, Graham Joyce and David J. Schow, and the book contains an introduction by John Skipp. Each story also features an illustration by Alex McVey.
"What We Still Talk About"
Forbidden Planets
In the far future, four posthumans take a trip back to the place where the human race was born ... and discover that Earth isn't quite what they expected. My contribution to Peter Crowther's anthology Forbidden Planets, published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the classic film of the same name, takes the position that our own planet might eventually turn out to be quite forbidden itself.
The title of this tale (and the story as well) tips a hat to one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories, "What We Walk About When We Talk About Love." But I think it's still a good title even for those who don't catch the allusion.
Though I have copies on hand now, the official release date of Forbidden Planets isn't until November 7, 2006. The book includes stories by Matthew Hughes, Jay Lake, Paul McAuley, Alistair Reynolds, Paul Di Filippo, Stephen Baxter, Chris Roberson, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Alex Irvine, and Adam Roberts, plus an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Baxter.
Short Stories: 2000-2005
Short Stories: The 1990s
Short Stories: The 1980s
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