Scott Edelman's Short Story Appearances: The '90s

Scott Edelman's Short Stories: The '90s

"The Last Man on the Moon"
Moon Shots

Though editing Science Fiction Age had its undeniable rewards—it was the greatest toy anyone could ever ask for—it wreaked havoc on my own writing. Reading 10,000 submissions per year overtaxed my short-story muscles to such an extent that I was left with little energy for any of my own. One result of this was that for several years I had been passing up opportunities to write stories for anthologies. After seeing several anthologies come out which could have contained stories of mine, I decided that the next time I learned about an opening, I would somehow find the time to take advantage of it, even though at the time, I was editing four bimonthly magazines.

I had learned through Paul Di Filppo that Peter Crowther was pulling together an anthology intended to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, and I decided to crash the party. Since the inspiration for the book was the first man on the moon, I pitched a story idea about the doings of a purported final visitor to the moon. Once of the things I did to pull off the story was to track down the complete transcipts of the Apollo 11 mission, which as it turns out, had been annotated by the astronauts themselves.

After the story was released in Moon Shots in July 1999, a few readers came up to me at conventions, stunned. "I didn't know you also wrote," was the message. Sigh. I had been away from the keyboard too long.

"The Last Wish"
"Picture This"
Horrors! 365 Scary Stories

When Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Marty Greenberg decided to put together a horror anthology containing a short story for each day of the year, they spread the news widely throughout the field. After all, they had the unenviable task of gathering 365 tales in one volume. And in order to fit them all in a single book, these short stories had to be very short—their requirements were that no story could be longer than 750 words. Though swamped with magazine-editing work, I figured even I could find time for that.

It was hard to believe that stories could be told in that amount of space, true stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, but when I tried, it turned out to be possible. My two stories each had different origins. One began as a story of mine that had been previously unsold at 1,200 words—I carefully pared away all the fat, sentence by sentence, word by word. The other story was originally written as a treatment pitched to Tales from the Darkside. That treatment had never sold, but no idea is every wasted, and so a decade later it was reborn as a short, short story. Horrors! 365 Scary Stories was published in 1998 by Barnes & Noble.

"A Plague on Both Your Houses"
Best New Horror #8

I normally don't recommend that writers self-publish, as the results are very rarely taken seriously, but this is one case in which it worked out. Back in 1992, I had written a story in the form of a five-act Shakespearean play, sort of a cross between Romeo and Juliet and Night of the Living Dead. The play opens with a prologue in which a gravedigger, who now spends his days unburying newly born zombies rather than burying the dead, sets the scene:

Diseased New York, the setting for our play
Has lost its glitter, trading it for grue.
Cold dead come back, in graves they will not stay.
The living bear no young, and dwindle few.
I am an old man. I've seen many things:
A walked-on Moon, democracy again,
The death of tyrants, privilege, nations, kings.
Now hope is weak. I fear the end of men.
I plant them deep, yet somehow they thrust up,
As if Spring's breath has touched their wint'ry souls,
Enticing them to once more grasp life's cup,
and mount the stage, demanding their lost roles.
Is this a fate mankind deserved to earn?
Watch, and listen, and perhaps you'll learn.

After four years of being unable to place this story (one editor even rejected the piece not because he didn't like it, but because he said he didn't care for Shakespeare!), and wanting it out in the world, I printed it up as a Halloween pamphlet that I circulated to friends and colleagues. Editor Stephen Jones liked it so much that it ended up being published in his 1997 collection of the best horror of 1996, and the piece was also nominated for a Stoker Award.

So it turns out that self-publication sometimes pays off after all ...

"Getting a Grip on Things: A Love Story"
Proud Flesh

There are times when it seems that in search of creating a moving story, I not only ignore the marketplace, I often write against it. "Getting a Grip on Things" is a pornographic anti-pornography story, a crazy thing to try to write, as it likely was unsuitable to any publication. The harshest anti-pornography zealot would have agreed with the theme of the story, but would have been horrified by the execution, while Penthouse would have been perfectly confortable with its prose, but aghast at the story's point. But that's the way I needed to play with the reader's mind in order to put over the premise, and so that's the story that got written.

Luckily, editor Chris DeVito was looking to push the envelope with Proud Flesh, attempting to put together a magazine of dangerous visions, and so the story was published in the Fall 1994 issue.

Chris illustrated the story with a photo of Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara and a quote from J.G. Ballard: "I think we're seeing a new kind of prudery. There isn't as much pornographic material available to us as the modern communications landscape could, and should, provide—I think there should be far more."

"The Revenge of the Stolen Library Book"
Eldritch Tales

Sometimes, the smallest sins receive the harshest penalties. That's what was so pleasing about Stanley Elkin's novel The Living End, in which a good man who loves God is still sentenced to be punished forever because he once opened his store on a day of rest.

So it is in this story of mine, printed in Eldritch Tales #29 in 1993. Whatever good my protagonist may have attempted to accomplish in his life is wiped away because of his theft of a library book that he plans to give to his son as a birthday present. Many horrifying things happen in this story, but the unfairness of it all may be the most horrifying.

To those who think that this character's fate is out of proportion to his crime, I'm not sure that the bibliophiles out there would agree.

"Are You Now?"
MetaHorror

Even though I lived through the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate, the era of 20th Century American history that has always fascinated me the most came before my own time. The McCarthy period, when friend turned against friend and many artists were silenced, captured my imagination, and over the years I buried myself in accounts of those dark years, as well as the raw transcripts of the hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I always knew that I would someday use that background to flesh out a story. What I did not realize was how few remembered the details of that time, and thus were unable to reference my many allusions, which occurred in almost every sentence of this story.

When I wrote that my protagonist's "life's purpose seems as absent as Larry Parks' career," or commented of his search to remember a past event that "it would be easier to find a spool of microfilm in a pumpkin patch," it never occurred to me that there would be many who had no knowledge of Larry Parks, or would fail to catch the reference to Alger Hiss. What astonished me the most was that there were even those who did not note that the title of the story came from the first half of one of the most ominous questions ever asked.

Luckily, sometimes all a writer needs is an audience of one—an understanding editor. And I found that editor in Dennis Etchison, who also has the details of that Blacklist period etched in his heart. He published "Are You Now?" in the Dell Abyss paperback anthology MetaHorror in July 1992. (And if you're finding it difficult to make out the words on the cover, that's because the title and the authors' names on the front cover are in silver foil, which does not scan easily.)

"An Idea Whose Time Has Come"
Figment

Looking back on it now, this story was perhaps a bit too influenced by the opening chapter of Italo Calvino's wonderful If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, but the editors didn't seem to mind. In fact, in their editorial note, they wrote:

"We have no idea what genre this one should be classified as, but Scott's nailed us regardless—a story beyond our genres that just begged to be published. Anyone who has hung around writers, perhaps at conventions or seminars, where invariably are found tribes of hungry wanna-bes interrogating the pros, will be able to appreciate Scott's sardonic wit."

This tale told from the point of view of the ideas behind the stories appeared in the Apring 1992 of Figment.

"The Suicide Artist"
"The Kindest Cut"
Necronomicon Press

Published by Stefan Dziemianowicz's Necronomicon Press in 1992, Suicide Art is a 36-page chapbook containing two of my short stories. Both were previously unpublished at the time: "The Suicide Artist" and "The Kindest Cut." I later chose to reprint "The Suicide Artist" in my short story collection These Words Are Haunted. Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell also chose the piece to to appear as the lead story in their best-of-the-year anthology, Best New Horror 4. In their introduction, they wrote, "We lead off Best New Horror with one of the most powerful stories in the volume."

"The Kindest Cut," on the other hand, received no such accolades. When I presented my original manuscript to Spacecrafts, a monthly writers workshop I attended in Massachusetts (other participants included Geoffrey Landis and Resa Nelson), the story was savaged. I had looked forward to hearing what our guest instructor for that session, Samuel R. Delany, would have to say, since the story dealt with alternate sexuality, the transgendered, and a very bizarre haunting. As with all writers entering a workshop situation, I said I was hoping for insight, but what I was really hoping for was a pat on the head. I didn't get it. Unfortunately, Delany hated, hated, hated the story, and felt it showed a complete lack of understanding of human sexuality, which just goes to show, be careful what you wish for.

The cover art and two interior illustrations are by Robert H. Knox. I've always found the cover particularly chilling.

"10 Things I've Learned About Writing"
Nexus

We've all heard the standard rules of writing—always start with a sympathetic character, always show and never tell, don't shift points of view in short stories because there isn't time, and so on. I wanted to write a story that broke all of these rules of writing that have become cliches by now.

I had submitted this story to Interzone, and so was surprised to receive an acceptance letter from Paul Brazier, an editor there, who instead wanted the piece for a new magazine called Nexus. Nexus was to cover a broader range of stories than Interzone, including horror. "10 Things I've Learned About Writing" appeared in the magazine's second issue, dated Spring 1992.

This is the story of mine that receives the most mixed reactions when I read it at conventions. Some members of the audience laugh hysterically, while others walk out disgusted. I guess that means it's working.

"These Words Are Haunted"
Weirdbook

For writers trying to sell horror fiction in the '80s and early '90s, there were two magazines dear to our hearts—Stuart David Schiff's Whispers and W. Paul Ganley's Weirdbook. Oh, there were other markets at the time, but these magazines were defenders of the faith.

I felt as if I'd made a leap in my writing with "These Words Are Haunted," in which a modern-day man is sucked into the pages of a gothic novel. Plot, character, setting ... it all seemed to come together. (If only the members of my writing workshop had agreed!) I was extremely pleased when Paul Ganley published it in the Spring 1992 issue. As for cracking Whispers, that will forever be a fantasy, as it is no longer with us. (By the way, the final issues of each magazine were published together back in 1997, bound back to back.)

As soon as I wrote this story, I knew that I wanted These Words Are Haunted to be the title of my eventual collection of short horror stories. And so it was.

"Apartment 6-D"
Nightside

It is said that time heals all wounds, but I don't think it does, not really. What time seems to do instead, for me at least, is erase the emotional memories of those wounds. And so I have mixed feelings looking back at the publication of this story about a man who moves into an apartment building only to come to believe that he can hear his parents living a floor above and decades in the past.

That's because "Apartment 6-D" was split in half and run in two consecutive issues of Nightshade. You'd think that the events of 1992 wouldn't seem so far away ... but they do. And so I can no longer remember whether or not I was upset by the story being bisected, or just happy to finally see it in print. I can't even blame this on the editor, because I can no longer remember whether or not he got my permission first.

Unfortunately, I am sure that there are readers walking around out there who only read one half of the story and wondered, what the heck was that?

"The Last Pig in the World"
Science Fiction Review

My original title for this story set in a research facility during a future in which all of the animals in the world are dying was "Everyone Suspected Susan." The editor, Elton Elliot, pulled his prefered title from the tale's first sentence:

"After the last pig in the world disappeared from the lab, we all suspected Susan."

Although I didn't object to the change back in the Summer of 1991, when this was published, when the time comes to reprint the story in a collection of science-fiction stories, I'll restore my original title. I prefer being a little less in-your-face about the story's subject matter.

Science Fiction Review was an interesting magazine that should have lasted longer than it did. It was killed, I think, by its attempt to grow too fast too soon. It increased its distribution drastically, and imploded under the weight of magazine returns.

"I Think That I Shall Never See"
Haunts

Driving home from the cemetery where he had just buried his wife of six years, Anton Jervik, still dressed in black, stopped at Harriman's Hardware. From behind the counter, old man Harriman stepped out to greet him. Anton bought a steel axe, sharp as a lover's lie that she would stay forever. ...

Anton Jervik returns from burying his wife, convinced that the tree in his backyard was responsible for her suicide. He begins to attempt his revenge in many ways, with drought and poison and steel, but things don't go as smoothly as he had hoped ...

Editor Joseph K. Cherkes published the piece in the Spring 1991 issue of Haunts. This is yet another magazine that is no longer with us, though he did manage to publish 33 issues through Winter 1997.

"True Love, and How It Ruined My Credit Rating"
Deathrealm

When we go to buy a house, the bank runs a credit report to decide whether we are worthy of our loan. If there are errors, it's up to us to correct them.

When we die, God supposedly does the same thing. He takes a look at our history to decide whether we go to Heaven or Hell. But what if there's an error there?

It's difficult enough to convince a credit reporting agency that we really did pay that doctor bill. But what happens when we have to convince God that mistakes were made?

"True Love, and How It Ruined My Credit Rating" was published in the Summer 1990 issue of Deathrealm

Recent Short Story Appearances

Short Stories: 2001-2005

Short Stories: The 1980s

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