The Clayton Chronicles

IntroductionOnly to be read by my fans (The Three of You) By the time the two novellas within this book finally see the light, they will have traveled a really long distance indeed; not only in space, but also in time. They started their bizarre life during the 90s, in a completely different medium than the normal fiction narrative all readers are accustomed with: they began breathing and walking as screenplays. At this point of the intro, I was partly tempted to just do a straightforward cut-and-paste operation in my word processor about why the screenplays in question were tossed unceremoniously into my fabled writer's trunk, but you can read about it in Cuentos, my short story collection. There's a rather short passage there, working as preface to one of my Williams/Clayton short stories, describing my reasons why I mothballed them… and the obscure reason on why I dusted them off in the end. Let's concentrate on the inception of the tales themselves. In Caracas, Venezuela, my home city, they used to cut off Boyaca Avenue from the main traffic grid during Sunday mornings, blockading it so bike riders, skaters and people could use it as an outlet for leisurely entertainment. Considering how stressful Caracas is, with a murder rate nearly four times worse than Manhattan (with one-third of the population), this is certainly one of the brightest ideas the dimwitted morons in charge of my country's government could have ever devised. One Sunday morning, I was riding on my eight-speed bike along Boyaca Avenue, enjoying the view. Since Boyaca is a four-lane concrete strip (two going west, two going east, duh!) that skirts along the foothills of the Avila, one of our main National Parks, and it sits a hundred meters above the tallest building in the city, the view of Caracas was breathtaking. Birds were chirping and a slight mist had risen and was hazing the horizon. There was someone riding along with me; it doesn't matter now who it was, the guy in question showed his true colors years later as a treacherous bastard and he still is, so let's not bother unduly about his identity. This traitorous S.O.B. made an off-hand comment about The Blob and an assorted line up of old movies of the 50s (most of them of the American-International crop), and I was frankly amused at his total ignorance on the subject. He got all the plots wrong and some even mixed up, but it was funny to hear him rambling in his blissful stupidity. Then it struck me that the sheriff in all those movies is always the skeptic, who is a true unbeliever when the teenage kids storm his office, trying to warn him of the impending danger after the monster/vampire/outer-space creature (take your pick) shows up during the final half of the first reel or the beginning of the second. I made a comment to this certified moron/asshole/creep (make your pick) on how funny it would be if there was a major reversal of the roles, and the sheriff was the one who was the true believer. He received the notion enthusiastically, and he started swinging the idea back at me with his opinions and suggestions. Now, if this had been a tennis match, you could say that I was practically serving him nice clean shots with the deadly precision that my writer's mind was capable of at the time… while he was shoddily tossing them back in childish rebounds… with the ball covered with the slime of his thoughts, thinking himself clever enough to be providing me with ideas. Well, eventually the day's ride was over and I went back home with an idea bouncing inside my head. I guess that by the end of the day this jackass only had the foggiest notion about what we had talked about during the bike ride, and he probably forgot all about it by Monday, but let me tell you that I didn't forget. I wrote down that strong central image of the monster-believing sheriff (after polishing it with the mental equivalent of a Brillo pad: that guy's scummy notions were like wet clay; they really stuck to my lovely mental tennis ball), and stashed it into my idea file. Just as plain and easy as that—I wrote a yellow Post-it note with those words scribbled on it: Monster-believing sheriff. Weeks later I unearthed my ideas file and went through it. I usually leave stuff there to molder: sometimes they just self-destruct (what the hell was this idea of a gargantuan lizard opening a deli shop? Huh?) but if the concept is very strong and truly good, they sparkle as well as a rare jewel, even after months of storage. The Post-it note no longer stuck to anything; its halfway-sticky glue had dried out and was no longer clear and translucent: it was as gray and dusty as a recently unburied mummy, but the idea jotted on it still shone. I set down to write the screenplay (which was fairly decent, as these sort of things go), adding to my believing-sheriff a vampire buddy of sorts, creating the troubled small town of Nosfort and the strange happenings that occur there, and in the end there were plenty of ideas left over for a sequel. So I practically wrote a movie and its sequel, one right after the heels of the other. Now, my love/hate relationship with Hollywood is something I don't really like to publicize, but a small studio optioned the first screenplay. Regrettably, these dudes let a year pass by and the option wasn't renewed; any further inquiries about the whereabouts of this particular group of filmmakers yielded no results; it was as if a voracious creature of another galaxy had swallowed them up (and considering the sort of beast that Hollywood is, I'm seriously considering that this may have been the case: don't worry, I cashed the optioning check, heh-heh) I also wrote a few short stories about Sherwin Williams and Clayton Harris, some more about the town itself, Nosfort, and some bizarre things that had occasionally happened to its inhabitants, and one final Sherwin Williams story that wraps up the entire story arc that includes A.I. Rebellion and the A Timed Mess, books I never got around to write. Years later, an event that I tell about in the aforementioned preface in Cuentos, forced me to stash the scripts back in my Writer's Trunk. (Sigh) I wish to make a few comments on the process of turning the screenplays into novels. First, I consider novelizing a movie the dastardliest deed that a writer could ever perform, so I'd be pretty offended if you ever suggest that I did that to my own work. I don't think that it even applies, since actually no movies were made out of the scripts (picture me blowing a raspberry at any reckless accuser). The first Clayton Harris Chronicle goes exactly as the original script went. Something strange happens in Nosfort; Harris meets Williams and they team up to fight the menace. But I had a lot of surplus ideas after I finished the first Clayton's screenplay. I put into the second one lots of stuff that didn't make sense and, regrettably, that little darling was suffering a severe case of 'sequelitis' (the medical term for 'swelling of the sequel'). It was good and fun, but it was like any other second part of anything: pretty much the same. And it was basically an excuse to rocketsled the characters to the final confrontation. So you must realize by now that I was pretty reluctant to try turning that travesty of a screenplay into a novel, but something happened when I began to search for the original script, just to check my notes about it. It was nowhere in sight. I'm a guy that lives his life immersed in an organized mess, which means that there are piles of manuscripts, notes and magazines all around me. You only have to mention a certain piece of paper to me, and most probably I'll dig up the document in five minutes or less, for in most occasions only I know where the hell I should look. This time, zilch. Niente. I practically turned my entire house upside down. Finally, after two weeks of searching, I chalked up the loss to a typical moving fluke. Now, it was a good thing that the script got lost: what follows is a tenfold improvement of the original screenplay. Its title is as cheesy as ever, and its end is faithful to the central image that dominates the way our heroes prevail at the conclusion. However, while trying to flesh up the plot a bit, I stumbled upon a happy twist of fate. The true horror writer must occasionally step into taboo territory to horrify his audience. I think I managed that in chapter six on the second Chronicle. There, I temporarily set foot over the boundary of Taboo County… and then I quickly withdrew, as if I had dipped it into scalding water. It's not every day that I get the chance to write something that shocks the hell out of me (and believe me, I have a pretty nasty imagination). I had to rewrite that entire chapter from the ground up to tone it down; it was too explicit, too graphic, so I reworked it out to cleverly suggest, only allowing the reader to see the faint shape that his mind suggests behind the gauzy curtain of imagination. You see, I was rummaging through the psyche of a serial killer that kills small girls, knee-deep into the unpleasant stuff that I found there. And I stumbled into this teensy-weensy notion that's the central idea of the whole chapter. I immediately recognized the idea for what it was; as a fan of the genre (and an aspiring writer) I've read Stephen King's 'Danse Macabre' and I knew that I had stumbled upon a Taboo idea that I could easily work upon. Okay, so if you're wondering what I'm rambling about, I suggest you grab a copy of Mr. King's brilliant exposition on horror, because his concepts of Taboo County are well beyond the scope of this introduction. It's okay, I'll wait here while you check. Now, the possibilities for a horror writer to horrify are shrinking with each passing decade, because taboos are constantly crumbling down these days; things that would turn the stomach of a 50s housewife now only elicit some tittering laughter. I suspect that Bart Simpson got it right in the first 'Treehouse of Horror' episode, commenting on the first Friday, the 13th movie: “It's pretty tame by today's standards”. However, I think I managed to stumble upon a notion that will be always a taboo, as I imagine it will remain so in the future. It's just an itsy-bitsy thing that happens in chapter six on the Second Chronicle, but I know that once it is found and interpreted (or misinterpreted as you see fit), I know a lot of people that will make a very big fuss about such a little thing. Well, to wrap this intro up, the stories you're about to read are time travelers from an age in which there was no Internet, cell phones were wet dreams and The Simpson's were just a twinkle in Mr. Groening's eyes. So I guess that my initial statement that they had traveled long and hard to reach your hands is a true one. Truly Yours Edwin Stark