There were four of them. They emerged from the lantern-smoked alleyways of the nameless port town, building themselves from shadows and burnt rags. Seven feet tall, their thin bodies wrapped in fluttering black cloth, they listed back and forth as they walked, their bones creaking like the rigging of ships. Their faces were open mouths drifting among the tattered ribbons and the gloom. Teeth glinted in the firelight like hard flint.

They stalked the narrow avenues of the town with measured deliberation, going unseen by most of the population, and sending those few that did see them shrieking and scattering like frightened gulls. Some of the more foolhardy among them turned and fired a few wild shots before running. The carrion angels were oblivious to all of it, their bodies accepting the violence they way a corpse accepts the worm. They swung their great heads toward each juncture of road and alley, lifting their snouts and huffing deep breaths as they tracked the scent.

They followed it to a darkened warehouse where they found the corpse of Thomas Thickett, the back of his head cratered and his brains splashed across the stacked crates and the packed earth. The stink of it made them drunk and they lost focus for a moment, hunched around this glorious fountain of scent, this unexpected confection. But they remembered their duty. Turning aside for the moment, they creaked slowly through the warehouse.

They knew almost immediately that the heads had been taken.

The trail resumed at the bay door, wending down toward the docks. But before they pursued it, they returned to the feast that had been left them. They surrounded the body of Thomas the Bloody and stooped to feed, lowering their heads into the bowl of his corpse. They ate with a grateful reverence, the sound of wet meat and cracking bone giving measure to an almost absolute darkness.

Outside, the town had erupted in a panic. Word of the carrion angels’ presence had spread fast and the narrow roads were choked with men fleeing for their ships. Pirates and sailors careened drunkenly, lurching, stumbling, trampling the fallen. Throughout the town panicked men shot and stabbed at shadows, and the road to the sea was marked by the bodies of the dead and the dying. Most of the women stayed inside, shuttering the windows and locking the doors; others, often the youngest and least experienced, followed the pirates to the docks, forgetting in the terror of the moment the temperament of these men, and remembering only when they were beaten back or shot as they tried to climb the gangplanks to safety.

The ships were alight with lanterns, riggings acrawl with sailors making ready for the sea. Boats were dropped from the sides and men were set to towing the vessels from the port. Gunsmoke hazed the air and the bloom of violence was a grace upon the town. They walked in their slow, swaying gait through it all, like four tall priests proceeding sedately through hell, confident in their faith.

The scent ended at the docks. The crate of heads had gone to sea.

It was a small thing to sneak passage aboard a ship. The carrion angels dissolved into rags and dust, blowing like so much garbage in the wind, carrying over the water and into the rat-thronged hold of one of the several pirate ships, settling amongst the refuse and lying as still as the dead.

The captain of this very ship, a hard old man called Bonny Andrew, who harbored a longstanding terror of these creatures yet misjudged their physical nature, waited until they had reached some distance from land and ordered his ship to turn about, offering its broadside to the town. At his command the ship fired its complement of guns in a poorly orchestrated yet devastating volley, sending cannonballs smashing through weak wooden walls and bringing whole buildings to the ground. Another ship took inspiration from this and fired as well.

Within moments the nameless port town and its luckless residents were reduced to broken wood, and smoke, and blood. The pirates, satisfied at their own efficiency, rounded out to sea, dark under a moonless night.

The carrion angels slept in the hold. The scent’s trail was a road, even over the sea. They were sure of their step.

(Art by Jeremy Duncan)

Alone in the first mate’s quarters, which had been surrendered to him without a twitch of protest by the one-eyed Mr. Johns at his captain’s order, Martin Dunwood lay in the cot suspended crossways across the tiny room and tried to acclimate himself to the deep pitch and tumble of The Lady Celeste as it pushed its way across the cresting waves, on its way to the open sea. Somewhere above him rain drummed over the ship, and its crew worked the lines and the sails with the precision — or lack of it — one might expect from a congress of pirates. Martin did not care to speculate on their abilities; he felt sick enough already. Instead he entrusted his fate to God and focused his attentions on better things.

Alice.

The promise of Alice pulled him across the sea, from his meager home in St. Giles to the polluted stink of London, and then to Tortuga and this wicked man’s vessel; he resolved that he would let it pull him across the whole of the world before he would ever give up his search.

The light in the lantern guttered as the ship plummeted down a steep trough. Martin snuffed it out before it could spill and light the room on fire. The darkness which fell over him was oppressive, as though someone had thrown a weight over him. The sounds of the water smashing into the hull, and of the raw voices outside shouting to be heard over the storm, became impossible to ignore. It seemed as though the whole ship’s complement had suddenly crowded into his cabin and begun knocking things about.

So he thought of Alice.

He remembered the first time he ever laid eyes on her: she had been standing on a corner outside a grocer’s shop. Her fine clothes and her red hair were disheveled and there was a horror in her expression, her face as pale as a daylight moon. Blood matted the expensive materials of her dress, caked heavily near the lower hem and arrayed in a pattern of sprays and constellations further up her body, as though she had just waded through some dreadful carnage.

Martin, who had been sent to London on his father’s errand the previous day, stood transfixed. He didn’t know what catastrophe had befallen her but it seemed she needed immediate help. He waited for a carriage to pass before he stepped out into the muddy thoroughfare, but immediately came up short — an older gentleman stepped out of the grocer and joined her at the corner. He too was well-dressed, though his clothes were free of blood. He threw an overcoat around her shoulders and hailed a carriage. Within moments he bundled her into it, and with a flick of the driver’s wrist she was whisked away, leaving behind her an ordinary corner on an ordinary street. The drabness of the image seemed to reject the possibility that she had ever been there.

It was not until years later that he saw her again. By that time his father had accrued some money through real estate, and had graduated into more elevated social planes. They had been invited to a party thrown by a local banker, and as Martin lurked unhappily in a corner of the room, resenting the pomp and self-satisfaction of the people around him, he saw her again.

She was standing amidst a crowd of men, young and eager for her attention. She smiled at one of them as he gestured to illustrate some point, and Martin knew at once that none of the fools had a chance with her, that she was wearing them like jewelry. He pressed his way through the crowd until he joined her little retinue.

If she noticed him as he approached she did not show it. He stationed himself in her outer orbit and just watched her. She stood stone still, and although she was properly demure and maintained the comportment of a young lady of her station, she was set apart from everyone around her. She seemed carved from stone. She was acting.

At the first break in the conversation, he said, “Didn’t I see you once outside a small grocer’s in the East End? It would have been a long time ago.”

Her eyes settled on him. They were a pale blue. “I rather doubt it.”

“You would remember this,” he said. “You were covered in blood.”

She betrayed no reaction, but even in that she revealed herself. No shock, no disgust, no laughing dismay. Just a cool appraisal, and silence.

One of the young men turned on him, his blond hair pulled back harshly from his forehead in a bow. “I say, are you mad?”

“Possibly,” said Martin.

“It’s all right, Francis,” she said. “He’s right. I do remember that day. It was quite dreadful. A horse had come up lame and had to be shot. It was done right in front of me and I think it’s the worst thing I ever saw.”

“I don’t remember a dead horse,” Martin said.

“Perhaps you weren’t paying attention,” she said. “So much goes on right under our noses.”

Within minutes she had dismissed her pretty men and Martin found himself sitting some distance from the party, talking to this remarkable woman who seemed to fit amongst these people the same way a shark fits amongst a school of mackerel.

“Why did you say that to me?” she said. “What did you think would happen?”

“I had no idea. I wanted to find out.”

“Hardly the right environment for radical social experiments, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say it’s precisely the right environment.”

She offered a half smile. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Martin Dunwood. My father owns the–”

“Are you some sort of anarchist, Martin Dunwood?”

“Would it make me more interesting if I said yes?”

In minutes they were in the banker’s bedroom, fucking with a furious, urgent silence. Thereafter they met often, and always clandestinely. She was even more contemptuous of the world than he, prone to stormy rages, and he got drunk off of that rage. It was wild and different and echoed his own sense of alienation from the world. Their illicit sex was as much an act of defiance as it was a hunger for each other. After a month of this she took him to his first Farm, and he saw what she did there.

It was when he watched the blood drip from the ends of her long red hair that he knew he was in love with her, and that he would break the world to keep her.

(Art by Jeremy Duncan)

When I lived in New Orleans I rode a motorcycle for about five years. It was a dark red Honda Shadow, VT600C, paid for with money I made as a bartender. I must have paced New Orleans and its surrounding areas several hundred times on that thing. My friend Sara taught me how to ride, and once I started it was hard to ever get off.

I remember very well getting out of the UNO newspaper’s office, where I was editor, at two in the morning on layout night, and driving across town through the empty night on my way home. I would come down Elysian Fields, with its pocked, rough roads, skirt the French Quarter where the music still played and you could smell the beer and the river and the cooking food, drive through the Central Business District and all the lights, through the Lower Garden District and smell the baking bread, and then up Prytania Street, where night blooming jasmine flooded the air with its scent. It was a direct engagement with the city at night, something that’s impossible to replicate in the shell of a car. Even in the heat of August, the wind cooled you as you rode.

I remember riding south into bayou country, the small ribbon of road carving a modest path through green crops of soybean or sugarcane,  huge and venerable oaks, the roadside seasoned with old, stormbeaten homes. I remember smelling the Gulf’s salty air and feeling the sting of blown sand on my face. Riding in the rain, the fear galvanizing, every nerve extended, every dip and chunk in the road a possible end, each finished trip a celebration of will, ability, and luck.

I sold it when I got divorced and moved to Asheville with Mia. I couldn’t justify the risk involved while I was a single parent. Sometimes it was hard to justify even when I wasn’t single. But I think about it a lot. Especially lately, as I close in on seven years here, and I find myself still working a job I thought would only be transitional, still single, still trapped in amber. And also as there are signs of forward progress at last, as my first book moves closer to reality and the first novel is underway, with a strong momentum. It’s a road novel, in some ways, and so naturally my mind returns to my favored experience of the road.

I won’t be getting one again any time soon. At least not while Mia still lives at home. But someday I will. I’ve always wanted to take a month-long motorcycle trip through Alaska. By myself, or in the company of someone else … it doesn’t matter. I can feel that day coming closer.

At Readercon this past weekend, I had breakfast with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press and we talked about the collection. First, we settled on a target date for the book’s debut: Readercon of 2013. That’s a year to play with, but — since they will be putting out several other books before then — the ball is already rolling. I’m told we have to get the cover art locked down in a month’s time, so we’ll be poring over possibilities in the coming weeks. This part, I must admit, is a lot of fun.

When choosing cover art, it’s necessary to consider the title. And the title to this collection has just changed for the third and, one hopes, final time.

When I sent Small Beer the manuscript, it was called Monsters of Heaven: stories. (I’ve never liked “… and Other Stories” as a part of a title; I prefer a book to have a single title, with the word “stories” close by, to avoid confusion (and sometimes I wish we could even get rid of that).) I told them I was also considering You Go Where It Takes You as the collection’s title, and that met with a much more enthusiastic response. I poled my friends, and opinions were pretty split between the two. Since I liked them both, I decided to go with the latter.

At Readercon, I was told that when they asked people they knew, reactions were decidedly in favor of Monsters of Heaven. More memorable, they were told. More likely to get picked up. “So we’re going with your original title,” they said.

Just one problem: the novel I’m working on now is called Map of the Lower Heavens. Though there’s no guarantee that will be the title when it’s finally on the stands, I have no reason now to think that it won’t be, and I don’t want each of my first two books to have the word “Heaven” in the title. So I suggested the third title, again drawn from a short story in the collection, which I thought could work for the book as a whole. This one, mercifully, everyone liked right away. (By this time the writer Jedediah Berry had joined us, and offered his approval as well.)

The book is now called North American Lake Monsters: stories. I like it because it sounds like a field guide, or a bestiary, and because lake monsters are necessarily hidden beneath a placid surface, which is a theme that links many of the stories.

This suggests an entirely different sort of cover art than either of the previous titles, and so I’m spending the evening looking for something strange and beautiful.

I love working with a press that cares so much about what the writer wants for the book. I can’t wait to see what we make.

First, there will be a minor delay in the next installment of “The Cannibal Priests of New England,” as Jeremy Duncan attends to personal matters. I do not anticipate the delay being longer than a week. The next installment — “The Darling of the Abattoir” — is one of the longer ones, in which we first encounter Alice and pick up a few hints about the Farms. Jeremy’s done an amazing job so far, and if he needs a little more time for this one I’m more than happy to give it to him. He makes me look good.

In the meantime, I’ll take the opportunity to offer some updates about other work.

“Wild Acre” is finally out, in Gary McMahon’s anthology Visions Fading Fast. This is a story I’m pretty proud of. It is, in a sense, a werewolf story, which I know some people find a little passe. I like to think this one is a bit different, though. It doesn’t go in a direction I’ve seen these things go. But I love werewolves. I’ve always found them pretty terrifying, and I was eager to take a crack at them. Here’s a money shot:

“Finally he reaches the top of the hill and looks inside.

Dennis is on his back, his body frosted by moonlight. He’s lifting his head, staring down at himself. Organs are strewn to one side of his body like beached, black jellyfish, dark blood pumping slowly from the gape in his belly and spreading around him in a gory nimbus. His head drops back and he lifts it again. Renaldo is on his back too, arms flailing, trying to hold off the thing bestride him: huge, black-furred, dog-begotten, its man-like fingers wrapped around Renaldo’s face and pushing his head into the floor so hard that the wood cracks beneath it. It lifts its shaggy head, bloody ropes of drool swinging from its snout and arcing into the moonsilvered night. It peels its lips from its teeth. Renaldo’s screams are muffled beneath its hand.”

I’m working on a longer story called “The Atlas of Hell,” sort of a fusion (I like to think) of Richard Stark and Satanism. It’s much more in the tradition of the Cannibal Priests, though: there’s no goal here but to have fun. It’s fast-paced, over the top, and, I hope, a good time. It features Jack Oleander, a walk-on character I used years ago in a small piece called “The Malady of Ghostly Cities,” written for Jeff VanderMeer’s first Lambshead anthology. I’ve considered revisiting that character many times since; it’s a pleasure to do so now, and to really give him room to move around. I’ll be reading from this one at Readercon next week.

Finally, I’m working on the novel, currently called Map of the Lower Heavens. It’s a bewildering experience, writing in this form. I’m excited, scared — all the usual things when writing a novel, I suppose. I’m going to resist the impulse to post an excerpt just yet, but I probably will eventually.

And, coming next year: You Go Where It Takes You: stories, from Small Beer Press.

In real life, Mia just turned twelve, and she’s back in Alabama for three weeks to visit her mom. Once again I find myself feeling unanchored and listless without her here. But there’s suddenly a lot more free time; let’s see if I can’t derive some measure of good from it.

The sailors called him Thomas the Bloody, because it made them laugh. Thomas Thickett was a small, slender man: stooped, balding, and constantly ill. He had a penchant for nosebleeds — they came without warning, and always with a gruesome vigor — and so he received his name. He was born thirty-seven years ago in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but fled to the islands after escaping one of the Farms in Boston. He kept a gun beneath his bed, and he slept poorly.

He had come into possession of a small, ramshackle warehouse, situated far from the docks, in a game of cards three years ago. He stored unmarked cargo for indefinite periods without asking any questions, and he provided sails and timber to the quartermasters who came to him when it was time to refit their vessels. As long as he did these things he was assured a livelihood here.

Even so, he knew that the time to leave was almost upon him.

Rumors and whispers grew like mold in this dank little town, and he was beginning to hear words that scared him. Words like cattle hunters. Prospectors. Carrion angels. Cannibal priests.

He was alone in the warehouse. It was densely packed with mildewed crates, rolled canvas, bags of grain. A single lantern, balanced precariously on a wooden barrel full of God only knew what, cast a shallow little nimbus of orange light, and threw strange, wide-shouldered shadows against the wall. A cool wind blew in from the bay, carrying the sharp tang of ozone, the promise of rain and thunder.

He wished it would start soon. In the quiet he could hear the hoarse whispers, a dozen or more voices attempting speech in the strange tongue of the dead. The voices crawled over the walls like cockroaches.

He heard a pair of boots trod over the wooden floor outside his office and he sat quietly as the door was pulled open. Captain Beverly shouldered into the small room, his first mate close behind him. The captain’s eyes danced quickly around the contents of the room before settling on him at last.

“Thomas the Bloody,” he said. “Bless my bones.”

Thomas nodded at him. “It’s been some time, Captain. It’s a fine thing to see you again.”

“You’ve met my first mate, Mr. Thierry?”

“I have, sir. Yes. I have the cargo right here, sir.”

Captain Beverly and Mr. Thierry exchanged a glance. “Right to business then, is it? All right, Tom, all right. Show it to me then.”

Thomas the Bloody guided the two men out to the main floor of his warehouse. There was a large door here which would swing open to admit carriages drawn by mules or oxen, but it was secured fast, shutting out the din of the town. He carried the lantern in one hand to light their path. The whispering voices were louder in here; he felt steeped in ghosts.

The voices came from the crate, about waist high, which sat in the middle of the room like a diminished little temple.

You think, at first, that it’s going to be funny. You think it’s a joke. Here’s the first line of the story:

“craigslist > hell > district unknown > personals > missed connections > d4hf”

Craigslist in Hell? Okay. I settled in for something light.

And then the first paragraph:

“human star, are u my gate to the world? – (central park west, August 2003)

it was the night of the blackout–do u remember? time is as one to me time is nothing to me time is nothing, but in ur linear existence it was Then, it was the night the city closed her hundred million eyes. one hundred degrees and still rising as heat bled up from the buildings and streets, anxious to escape into the cool of space, never again to be bound. u were walking up the western edge of that man-made forest in the hard pitch of night, humans stumbling all around, flailing and quaking under an unfolding sky of stars they had never before seen, or simply forgotten existed. humans, brilliant with the Creator’s life like star fire and u the brightest of all, but red and gold and white like my fallen Majesty, my sweet Prince, shining in the cesspools of earth he eternally spirals through, a necklace of diamonds crashing over shit-covered stone. and i? i was wandering to and fro upon and over the world, as our divine Prince taught us, and as i glanced down i caught the faint flash of a spark. that is what drew me down and in, the force and fuse of life that comprises ur soul. u felt it 2. do not deny: i know u saw the thick branches of the trees bend and toss in my wake, rippling and bowing before my unseen passage. i saw ur eyes widen, and the bright gold fuse of stargodfire coil in ur heart, darken and drop lower. u quickened ur pace, but u never stopped staring into the primal green mass, ur desire rising with the heat with the wind with every thunderous vibration of my coming. mystery power and the unseen currents of un-nature, revealed in the absence of confusion of un-light and machines–these things drew ur most inner self toward me even as u turned away walking up the long walled side of the forest, running ur hand against the ancient rock, fingers catching thick moss and small weeds, soft fingers scrabbling over hard cold granite sparkling-veined with the crushed bones of things long past. and the wall became my body my horns my mind and i lapped at ur creamy thoughts and the city shuddered in unease, and so did u.”

Even now, reading over that paragraph for perhaps the dozenth time, I get goosebumps. It’s one of the most audacious, commanding openings to a horror story I have ever read. The prose is a rough current: you step inside and you’re gone. We know immediately that this is the voice of something old, and dark, something to which time and space mean almost nothing as it is “wandering to and fro upon and over the world.” There is a sense of amoral entitlement: the disregard for the woman’s distress, the interpretation of that distress as an excitement, and an enticement. And there is a terrible beauty, conveyed both through language and through the sense of deep time: the city described in terms of organic life, shutting her hundred million eyes, unspooling its heat into the sky, like a thing dying; the woman dragging soft fingers across “cold hard granite sparkling-veined with the crushed bones of things long past.”

It is this beauty, I think, which gives this story its moral weight.

“and Love shall have no Dominion” is about a demon who falls in love with a woman. It never once succumbs to the temptations of camp, which it teases you with in the opening line, and flirts with throughout with the use of internet-conventional spellings and disdain for capitalization. Instead, it takes two brave risks. It plays the story straight, trying to imagine how such a love would manifest; and it tells its story from the point of view of the demon, who is genuinely in love, genuinely moved to obsessive action, but can only speak its love in the language of pain and debasement. It is unaware of this as a failing, or as a limitation. It’s the only language it knows.

“do u remember Catala, on the beach, thirty-six years ago, before it sank into the sands? u were only twelve, and u fell through the rotting deck of the beached ship while looking for treasure. i stayed with u for a day and night, until they found u. i made the cold ocean waters warm and kept the crabs and gulls at bay, and i put my hand on ur heart and held u ever so tight, my horns and wings ur shelter, my body ur bed. i thought u saw me, through the veil of your tears. i thought u smiled. i thought i kissed ur lips. i may be wrong.

no, that memory is gone. it never happened. i ate it away; and then i broke ur legs.”

I believe that horror fiction serves its function best as the literature of antagonism. It’s trite to say that it makes the reader uncomfortable, or that it attacks conventions of society. That is all true, but it’s easy to write about catastrophic violence or the degradation of the human body and mistake the feeling of disgust this causes in the reader as a successful assault on convention. This is a mistake too much self-desribed horror fiction falls into. Stories like that actually achieve the opposite of their intent: they bolster societal convention because the reader is not provoked into any kind of self-appraisal; the reader is only sickened, and the story is forgotten.

“and Love shall have no Dominion” succeeds in this regard because it takes its narrator seriously, and because it infuses the narrator’s intent and speech with a troubling beauty. The reader engages with the demon, apprehends its perspective, and is implicated. I don’t know if that was the author’s intent, and I don’t presume to speak to that. But this is how I read it, and this is what gives it so much of its power for me. This horror story offers no catharsis because it does not permit us the comfort of keeping evil separate from ourselves. It brings us into its heart, and though we are stunned and diminished by its cruelty, we are also entranced by its beauty.

And at the story’s end, when the demon performs the story’s final action, whether it is the ultimate cruelty or an act of breathtaking grace is an open question.

This is a ferocious story. It was published in an anthology edited by John Skipp, called Demons. To my knowledge, it hasn’t garnered much attention or acclaim. In some ways this is understandable. Reading it, like reading many of Livia Llewellyn’s stories, is an emotionally taxing experience. It offers the reader no consolation or catharsis. Llewellyn is also a woman writing in a genre which has an ugly history of being an unwelcoming place for women. There is still a thriving, troglodytic subculture in the field which will never take a woman seriously; the horror genre’s reputation for misogyny is not unearned, and will take time and effort to shed.

But there are more than enough of us out there who love powerful writing and who love the vast potentials of this genre to counteract all that. This writer, and this story, deserve your undivided attention. I hope it gets anthologized, recirculated, and read. It’s one of the best and most emotionally honest horror stories I’ve read. I don’t know how classics are made; but this one deserves the title.

“do u remember it, that single slow moment when our eyes met, when u truly saw me, when u touched and whispered to me as a lover? i think i no longer do. i think it was a human infection, a trick of the Creator, a cancerous dream.”