Five Early Pieces

"Scary Parent' Joe Schreiber wrote this great post last week about the first five horror stories he wrote while in junior high. During my high school years, I was pretty much doing the same thing. From 1987 to 1989, I wrote a dozen or so stories, hoping to place them at magazines such as The Horror Show, Grue, Thin Ice and any other markets I could dig up. This was pre-Internet, of course; these kinds of markets were only discovered in places like the Fiction Writers' Market books or the odd horror fiction newsletter (such as Donald Miller's "Nocturnal Express").

I wrote the earliest stories on a Commodore 64 with a pirated word processing program. Karma soon caught up with me, though, and the program died. So I switched to an electric Smith Corona and typed most of the rest. (Thank God for the correction tape built into the ink cartridge.) I used whatever paper I could find; a lot of it was blue and pink, for some reason. But I wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote and came up with stuff like...

"The Posers" and "Some Dead Stories" (1987, 1988): Heavily inspired by The Lost Boys, this was about a pack of Satanic undead teenagers who terrorize this other teenager one night. The first installment took place over 24 hours, and was incredibly gory. The second installment was a prequel, where I detailed the origin story of each of the undead teenagers. Looking back on it now, each of these three mini-stories were actually hardboiled crime tales, with a demon at the end. Weird.

"Coffee Clutch" (1988): This came right from the E.C. Comics playbook. It was about a loser named Reggie who works in a deli, too shy to ask anyone out. He has a funny way of showing his affection, though. Whenever he digs somebody, he'd slip a little rat poison into their coffee. But one day he meets a young hottie who seems to thrive on the poisoned coffee, and comes back demanding more and more and more... until a grisly climax featuring a lunchmeat slicer and a really lame joke that makes me cringe even today.

"Submission" (1988): I'll admit it; I used this title because I thought it would be fun to write in a cover letter: "Dear Editor, enclosed is my submission, 'Submission'...." Ahem. It's about a kid whose father has been murdered in their trailer, and the kid tries to work up the nerve to walk over the body to go find help. My God, did I write upbeat stuff or what?

"Harmony" (1988): An English teacher is droning on about the year the English language was invented, when all of a sudden a monster named BABEL, hiding behind the number "1066" in a textbook, jumps into the poor guy's mind and threatens to unravel it, with a goal of undoing all of human language itself. Bonus points if you can guess the class I was sitting in when I wrote this little gem. (Sorry, Mr. Oliver.)

"Shed Led" (1988): A hack horror writer dies, goes to Hell, and discovers he's been reincarnated into the tip of a lead pencil. What's cool is: he can control whoever holds the pencil, and starts writing from beyond the grave. What's not so cool: when someone goes to sharpen him.

Surprisingly, two of these found homes.... kind of. "Shed Led" was published by HorrorFest, which was a convention program book. It even had a cool illustration. And "The Posers" was accepted for a new novella line called Nocturnal Classics, but it had folded by my freshman year of college, before it had a chance to see print. And another story called "Best Friends" was accepted at Tense Moments, which specialized in horror and suspense short-shorts. (That appeared in the special "J.N. Williamson Issue.")

It's coming up on 20 years since I first started writing these stories. My God.