American Nocturne Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  An Introduction by Jonathan Maberry

  American Nocturne

  Midnight Bogey Blues

  Gomorrah

  Bone Daddy

  Phantom Hill

  Murmur of Evil

  Nurture

  To Judge The Quick

  Mugwumps

  Cold Service

  BONUS STORIES

  Natural Selection

  AB-IV

  AMERICAN NOCTURNE

  Hank Schwaeble

  Cohesion Press

  Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum,

  Beechworth, Australia

  AMERICAN NOCTURNE

  Hank Schwaeble

  “American Nocturne” copyright © 2015 by Hank Schwaeble.

  “Midnight Bogey Blues” copyright © 2007 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Five Strokes to Midnight, Haunted Pelican Press 2007)

  “Gomorrah” copyright © 2007 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Five Strokes to Midnight, Haunted Pelican Press 2007)

  “Bone Daddy” copyright © 2007 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Five Strokes to Midnight, Haunted Pelican Press 2007)

  “Phantom Hill copyright © 2014 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Dark Discoveries Magazine Issue #26)

  “A Murmur of Evil” copyright © 2015 (recurring Kolchak characters are the property of Jeff Rice and the Jeff Rice Estate, used by permission).

  “Nurture” copyright © 2015 by Hank Schwaeble

  “To Judge The Quick” copyright © 2010 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Horror Library Vol. IV, Cutting Block Press 2010)

  “Mugwumps” copyright © 2005 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Alone on the Darkside, ROC [New American Library] 2006)

  “Cold Service” copyright © 2015 by Hank Schwaeble

  “Natural Selection” copyright © 2015 by Hank Schwaeble

  “AB-IV” copyright © 2014 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in ZVR: No Man’s Land, IDW Publishing 2014) (the Zombies vs. Robots concept appears courtesy of IDW Publishing, used by permission)

  Cover Art © 2016 Dean Samed/Conzpiracy Digital Art

  Interior art © 2016 Alex McVey

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. All people, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.

  This book is a work of fiction. All people, places, events, mugwumps and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cohesion Press

  Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum,

  Beechworth, Australia

  www.cohesionpress.com

  Acknowledgements

  IT WOULD BE nearly impossible to acknowledge all the people who’ve helped me during my first decade as a writer – which, in many ways, is what American Nocturne represents to me, even in the original stories written just for it – so I will not feign an attempt to do so here. Suffice to say, there are a great number of people – friends, peers and colleagues – who have provided me with varying degrees of assistance and encouragement along the way.

  Among those, first and foremost I wish to thank my wonderful wife, Rhodi (herself quite an accomplished author), who has never wavered in her support and whose approval I cherish more than any other’s. I would also like to thank the rest of the members of the Candlelight Writer’s Group to which we belong – Joe, David, and Robert, for their friendship, constructive criticisms and professional comradery. I am also deeply indebted to Jonathan Maberry, who graciously agreed to pen the Introduction to this collection and whose kind words regarding my writing always bring a smile of pride to my face. Special thanks are in order as well to Geoff Brown and Amanda Spedding of my publisher Cohesion Press for all their vision, support and assistance in bringing this work to press. I would also like to thank my agent, Rachel Sussman, simply for putting up with me.

  This being my first collection, there are two living writers who bear mentioning for their enormous influence. As a boy, Stephen King’s Night Shift had a tremendous impact on me, with stories like ‘Quitters, Inc.’ convincing me that the potential of the horror short story was limitless. I’m sure the seeds for this collection were planted deep in my psyche while devouring that book in my room until dawn started to break and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. A few years later, I came across Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, and I recall that vividly sealing the deal and filling me with a resolve that someday I would write horror stories, too. So, my heartfelt thanks to those two men. At the risk of it sounding like gushing hyperbole, this collection is as much a “but-for” product of their imaginations as it is my own.

  Finally, I want to make a special mention of the late Jeff Rice, with a shout of gratitude to his son, James. There is an authorized Kolchak: The Night Stalker story in the pages that follow, and while I explain more in a preface to the story that appears later herein, I would like to dedicate this collection to Mr Rice’s memory, in gratitude for the innumerable thrills his creation gave me as a child. The character of Carl Kolchak opened my mind to an appreciation of all the possibilities the genre we call “horror” has to offer – if only we are willing to follow the trails it leaves down those dark alleys, assuming the mantle of a nosy reporter locked onto the scent of something too unbelievable to ignore, the sounds of people, of cars, of all the comfort and safety of the familiar receding into the night behind us as we take a moment to fill our lungs and steady our nerves and press forward, never quite sure of what awaits, but knowing in our guts, not to mention our hearts, that the search for it is what life is all about.

  Hank Schwaeble

  Magnolia, Texas

  January 2016

  An Introduction by Jonathan Maberry

  I’VE BEEN READING horror, mysteries and thriller fiction, pretty much in equal measures, since the late sixties. Science fiction and fantasy, too, but not as much.

  In 1968, when I was ten, some of the new novels I bought with allowance money included the great, sadly-forgotten James Blish novel, Black Easter, which dealt with the illegal arms trade, magic and demons from hell. It was the first horror-thriller I’d ever read, and I was hooked. That year I also read the politically charged Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch; the moody, picaresque Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy, Pale Gray for Guilt – a Travis McGee novel by the great John D. MacDonald, the Nick Carter spy thriller Temple of Fear, the YA novel House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton, the horror-thriller about snuff films, The Image of the Beast by Philip José Farmer; The Menacers, a Matt Helm novel by Donald Hamilton; Fred Chappell’s wonderfully creepy horror-thriller Cthulhu Southern Gothic novel Dagon; and the delightful purpose prose of Conan of the Isles by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.

  In all, a good year for weird.

  It was in 1968 that I became a ‘reader’. Sure, I’ve been reading since I could understand words, but in ’68 I began deliberately going out and finding novels that were not part of a reading list, were not recommended by friends, and were wholly of my own choosing. It was also in that year that my preferred tastes began to emerge. It was the first small step in the process of going from gourmand to gourmet in terms of literary consumption.

  Thrillers, mysteries and horror are the three pillars of my reading temple. The fourth pillar is comics, but that’s a different discussion.

  I was, on the whole, a weird kid. Large, prematurely hairy, moody, introspective, intellectual, and strange. It would be years before I recognized many of these qualities as components of the ‘writer’ being assembled inside my head. Yes, even the hairy part, as evidenced by my being one third of the Three Guys With Beards pop culture podcast.


  With those qualities working their alchemy it’s no surprise that I continued to look for books that spoke in the language I could hear. And, at first it was the book, not the author, which drew me.

  Later – I was twelve by that point – I began following the writers. Books had undergone a process of change for me. The inciting incident was meeting Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson. Yeah. The introduction had come about via my middle school librarian (bless her saintly soul) who was the secretary for several clubs of professional writers. Because of my love for books and my avowed desire to one day write my own books, she got permission to drag me along to the meetings. Over the course of three years (7th-9th grade for me, late 1970 through spring ’73) I got to meet dozens of writers. Some of them have no names anymore in my middle-aged memory, alas. Others have names written into the walls of our literary landscape in letters big enough for everyone to read. James Blish, Gene Roddenberry, Avram Davidson, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Robert Sheckley, and so many others. And, of course Bradbury and Matheson. Those two gentlemen, upon learning that I was a devout reader, a budding writer and poor as a church mouse, would bring shopping bags of books for me. At first they were bags of their own books. Later those bags contained the works of writers they insisted that I read. Robert E. Howard, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Sheridan Le Fanu, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Horace Walpole, Sir Walter Scott, John W. Campbell, Edgar Allan Poe, Mrs. J. H. Riddell, Henry James, William Peter Blatty, Edgar Rice Burroughs…

  Oh, I could go on and on. They helped me fill my shelves with books.

  Matheson in particular encouraged me to read outside of my comfort zone, or read what he called ‘unclassifiable books’ – something these days we tend to label as cross – genre. And he loved a good disaster story. It was Matheson who gave me a copy of The Andromeda Strain, a novel that had come out in ’69 but which I passed on because I thought it was a medical drama and they weren’t my thing. He insisted I read it. And he brought me stacks of apocalyptic fiction. Mary Shelly’s The Last Man, Richard Jeffries’ After London, The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Path to Savagery by Robert Edmond Alter, and many more.

  My tastes did broaden to embrace science fiction, fantasy and pulps including Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, G-8, The Avenger and many other series that blended apocalyptic science fiction with elements of horror and action.

  I’m often asked what draws me to this kind of stuff, particularly when there are so many kinds of thrillers and so many different subgenres of horror. The answer is somewhat personal. I have always been a thinker, a problem solver, an open-minded skeptic who wants answers. And I want to know that the darkest of problems can be solved. How would a rational, logical person confront – and defeat – something like a vampire? Or a werewolf? How would a practical person cope with an invasion of alien beings or the demonic possession of a loved one? What is the pragmatic response to an outbreak of a weaponized pathogen or an AI computer system gone rogue?

  Science fiction and horror push a lot of the same buttons. And often both are metaphors for the things in our lives that scare us. A teen facing down a violent bully or a woman being terrorized by a sexual predator burns along on the same frequency as a parent confronting a vampire who is preying on her children or a scientist trying to stuff the devil back into its bottle after a hot-room accident.

  Supernatural thrillers and weird science thrillers and horror thrillers are all thrillers. They push our buttons and make us participate in the story because there is a fear, however irrational, that the hero won’t survive or save the day without us helping them. It’s not as narcissistic as it sounds. No. It’s part of the magic of storytelling when the author invites the reader to collaborate on the process of telling and resolving the fictional crisis.

  Those kinds of stories work for me better than everything else, and they have ever since I read – at the author’s urging – I Am Legend when I was twelve years old.

  So now we roll forward a bunch of years to 2006. My first novel, Ghost Road Blues comes out in paperback from Pinnacle Books. Despite all the good advice I got from Bradbury and Matheson, I did not leap into writing fiction. Instead, beginning in 1978 while I was still in college, I began selling magazine feature articles, of which I wrote a couple of thousand. Then I took a swing at greeting cards and sold some of those. Then it was college textbooks and how-to manuals for the martial arts market. Then I wrote a whopping big book on supernatural folklore, The Vampire Slayer’s Field Guide to the Undead, written under the pen name of Shane MacDougall. Why? Because my nonfiction editors were afraid that writing about monsters would damage my credibility.

  Geez.

  Writing about the myths and legends of supernatural predators led directly to my trying my hand at fiction. Ghost Road Blues was the result. It was a horror novel, but in the mid-2000s you couldn’t put the word ‘horror’ on the spine of a book and expect to sell copies. Horror was still reeling from the bad rap it had gotten when the general public confused horror fiction with the kinds of movies marketed as horror. Slasher flicks, torture porn. Like that. So, what did we call my novel when we sold it?

  Supernatural thriller.

  And, yes, it’s a more accurate description. It is a novel that takes various supernatural elements – ghosts, vampires, werewolves, serial killers – and welds them onto the framework of a thriller. It was less an homage to Stephen King (as the early reviewers all claimed) and more so to Richard Matheson.

  I did not expect Ghost Road Blues to sell, but it sold. I certainly didn’t expect it to be nominated for any awards, but it was. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. I wasn’t just shocked, I was – to use that delicious British expression – gobsmacked.

  Here’s why...

  Despite writing nonfiction for a lot of years, my leisure reading was still largely built around horror, mysteries and thrillers, and any combination thereof. I was still reading Matheson and Bradbury (though they were slowing down in their declining years) but also Peter Straub, Brian Keene, Charles Grant, Bentley Little, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, Tom Piccirilli, John Connolly, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder, L.A. Banks, Clive Barker, and others. There were so many great horror novelists out there. And they were having a hell of a lot of fun moving between straight genre (ghost stories, vampire stories, etc.) and cross-genre.

  I wound up winning the Bram Stoker Award for Ghost Road Blues. Something happened, though… because I was nominated in the category for ‘Best First Novel’ I read the other nominated books, and found that they were awesome. Not entirely sure how I beat Joe McKinney’s Dead City (which remains my favorite all-time zombie novel), Sarah Langan’s The Keeper, or Nate Kenyon’s Bloodstone. Not only did I love those books, but I’ve since become friends with those authors. Discovering them, and being there at the launch of their novel careers has been a true joy.

  From then on I’ve kept an eye on the books in the Best First category. Joe Hill won that award a year later for Heart Shaped Box. The following year it was Lisa Mannetti for The Gentling Box.

  And in 2009 the winner was this guy I’d never heard of before named Hank Schwaeble. The book was not just a horror novel… it was a genuine, no doubt about it horror thriller. And yes, it was a mystery, too.

  Damnable introduced the world to troubled hero Jake Hatcher.

  I fucking love that book. I’ve read it three or four times now, and when its sequel, Diabolical came out in 2011, I devoured it.

  When I dig an author’s work – and when I really dig the ways that author’s mind twists and turns – I start digging around for more. In a better world there would have been a dozen Jake Hatcher novels as well as mountains of other materials. But the guy’s got a damn day job as a lawyer, no less (which is scary in a whole ‘nother way). He can’t writ
e fast enough for me. I’m considering going all Annie Wilkes on him.

  And that brings us to American Nocturne.

  Not every author of books can be an equally fine writer of short fiction. It’s a different skill set. It requires a different kind of thinking and accesses other parts of the creative mind. When a writer is capable of turning out superb works in both long and short form it is a time to celebrate.

  So, yeah, I’m celebrating.

  American Nocturne collects a delicious dozen tales that trace the range of Hank’s career. From his first-ever short story, Mugwumps, it was clear that Hank had a lot of shocks and surprises. After reading these stories it’s not unreasonable to say that the man has issues. But, like all good horror writers it’s a ‘better out than in’ thing. If these are the thoughts cooking in his brain, we can all be glad he seeks a useful catharsis by writing them down. If they disturb someone else’s mind, well… that’s the way it goes in the horror world.

  One of the trickiest parts about writing an introduction to a collection of short stories is that it’s too easy to drop spoilers. I won’t do that. I’ll tease instead. (Mind you, I’d love to geek out and dissect these stories with you after you’ve read them. If you meet me at one of the many conventions I frequent, let’s have that conversation. By then anything we say would be troubled by a fear of spoiling juicy details.)

  So, on the actual stories I’ll be brief. I have my favorites, of course. Natural Selection is a clear topper for me, for many reasons but initially for the enigmatic line: “I wish the choice was between men and goats, but I’m afraid it’s goats or nothing at all.” How much would I give to have written that damn line? And, it’s not a throwaway. It’s a clue, it’s foreshadowing. And it’s a terrific story that would have made one hell of an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s very tough to stick the landing on a Twilight Zone twist. Most writers injure themselves trying. Hank doesn’t.