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  SEEING RED

  David J. Schow

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / David J. Schow

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY DAVID J. SCHOW

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY T.E.D. KLEIN

  RED LIGHT

  BUNNY DIDN'T TELL US

  INCIDENT ON A RAINY NIGHT IN BEVERLY HILLS

  THE WOMAN'S VERSION

  LONESOME COYOTE BLUES

  NIGHT BLOOMER

  ONE FOR THE HORRORS

  VISITATION

  PULPMEISTER

  COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

  THE EMBRACING

  BLOOD RAPE OF THE LUST GHOULS

  NOT FROM AROUND HERE

  AFTERWORD: CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

  CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Exactly thirteen months ago, seeking a weekend retreat from the city, I bought myself a cozy little house in the Catskills. Immediately after I moved in, two things occurred: real estate prices began to drop, diminishing the house's market value, and Lyme disease suddenly became the scourge of the East Coast, making me afraid to set foot outside.

  And now, having read the last story in this collection, "Not From Around Here," I'm going to be equally afraid to stay inside the house. It won't be so bad when someone's there with me, but whenever I'm alone I'll be listening for a furtive scratching at the window and the patter of feet on the floorboards. It'll probably be hard to get to sleep, and taking a shower without someone standing guard by the door is going to be out of the question. I mean, the house is pretty much ruined for me.

  Nice going, Dave. Thanks a lot.

  Actually, "Not From Around Here" is extreme even by the standards of this book. It's an authentically nightmarish story that, as they say, pushes the envelope a bit, and it's (as they used to say) Not For The Squeamish. I gather that it's already offended a few people. I doubt I'd have bought it for Twilight Zone.

  I did, however, buy a number of the stories you'll find here, and Twilight Zone, I'm proud to say, is where they originally appeared. The first of them, an earlier version of "Pulpmeister," appeared in our December '82 issue, along with an explanation by the author: "I spent a goodly chunk of 1981 writing six violence novels under a pseudonym, more or less exactly as described," he wrote. "Both the series and the publisher shall remain nameless." The photographs he'd sent us showed a strange-looking guy with a moustache, soulful-looking eyes, and an indecently long ponytail; he looked as if one of the Kean children had mated with a tomcat. In one photo, for reasons unknown, he was about to smash a bottle on his desk with a hammer and was smiling bemusedly. After comparing him to L.P. Hartley, S.J. Perelman, and George Gissing (Twilight Zone was nothing if not high-toned), I informed readers that Schow would soon be reappearing in our pages with a four-part nonfiction series chronicling The Outer Limits.

  By the time it was over the series had grown to twice that length, Schow had become a familiar name to TZ's readers, and chattily introducing him had become something of a habit. His face, too, had become a familiar one in the magazine, though now, thanks to a new photograph, it looked simply Mephistophelian. So prolific was Schow—and so much more talented than the competition—that during the course of the series we also ran two more of his short stories, "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You" and "Lonesome Coyote Blues," and I later bought another, "The Woman's Version." In doing so, I violated four of my most sacred unwritten rules:

  1—No stories about Viet vets.

  2—No stories about rock musicians.

  3—No writers appearing twice in the same issue.

  4— No violence so excessive as to turn readers' stomachs.

  I've got nothing against veterans, but stories hearkening back to the bloody days of Vietnam have a way of bringing out the worst in many writers; "all too often," I once wrote, "they are just excuses for macho chest-thumping and a curious kind of in-the-know elitism" that I've always thought of as "Nam-dropping." Still, "Coming Soon" was just too good to pass up; as I said in TZ, it was "both horrifying and humane enough to overcome my prejudices."

  The same goes for "Lonesome Coyote Blues," one of the most haunting stories in this book. Rock-and-roll fiction usually leaves me cold (maybe it's all that smug music-industry jargon), but "Blues" is an absolute stunner, at once hip, spooky, and tender. Each time I read it, I'm moved.

  Both "Blues" and "Coming Soon" also violated Rule #3. It doesn't look good for a magazine to depend too openly upon a small coterie of writers (though I think The New Yorker once featured an Updike story and a book review in the same issue), and I was reluctant to publish these stories while the Outer Limits series was still running. True to his pulp-writing roots, Schow was willing to appear pseudonymously as "Oliver Lowenbruck"--the hero, incidentally, of "Pulpmeister."

  As for Rule #4, "The Woman's Version" comes awfully close. There are some descriptions in it, like that of the "dry cinnamon odor of flesh to which rot was but an ancient memory," that may make your nose wrinkle, and a few that may make you want to wash your hands, such as this one of a landlord who hails from "some unfathomably strange Middle Eastern country":

  Gnomelike and dull-eyed, he exuded the smell of stale dates and sour sweat. There were brown gaps between each of his teeth, and the lips of his slicked-back hair were perpetually gravid with droplets of an opaque liquid.

  Phew! Not someone you'd want to spend the night with which is precisely the point, since Schow is writing from the perspective of a nasty-minded man-hating spinster whom sex both repels and obsesses. The world is filtered through her sensibility, and it comes out ugly. While for the euphoric young family man of "Not From Around Here" the moon is "a hard silver coin, its white brilliance . . . shimmering on the sea-ripple," for this woman it hangs in the sky "like a slice from a spoiled orange."

  The fact is, Schow is something of a chameleon at this game; in story after story he adopts widely varying points of view, and does so convincingly. One story, striking an attitude so determinedly punk that it makes the thugs of A Clockwork Orange sound like preppies, gives the middle class a thorough trashing. ("Fat-assed visitors with their squawking brats and plaid and cellulite and cameras clogged the walking pace . . . None of the men looked stiff; none of the women fuckworthy. They were the missionary position missionaries of America. They were doughy and dissipate.") Another celebrates, those same bourgeois values—the nuclear family, the joys of homeowning, the gorgeous wife and adorable kid and harmless little "marital spats"—with the fervor of a genuine family man (albeit one whose family winds up dead).

  Yet there's one quality that nearly all the stories share, for in each case Schow writes with the confidence of a somewhat jaded insider who's seen it all, knows the score, and knows the way things really work. He com
es off, in short, as almost preternaturally knowing. In "Red Light," which leads off this collection, his narrator, a photographer, sounds like a genuine pro; so does the narrator of "Lonesome Coyote Blues' who can speak familiarly of the rock hits of the past, as well as of some "cheezoid garage band called Abduction." You can hear the experience in his voice, the affection and the contempt.

  In "Pulpmeister," of course, Schow's hero is an authentic insider, our tour guide to a modern-day Grub Street where hacks churn out "prestige soft porn" and "books with numbers instead of titles." Yet in "Night Bloomer" he's an insider too, perfectly at home in the soulless world of the corporation, where the goal of sex is "a good technical orgasm" and adultery's just "a squirt of randiness" and where thinking you're happy is as close to true happiness as you're ever going to get.

  The ultimate insider's picture is probably the one offered by "Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills": the vision of a nationwide conspiracy so loonily ingenious that you almost believe it might be true. (The story also offers, among other pleasures, a novel explanation for why Hollywood makes so many bombs, why Star Wars was so popular, and why it's so hard these days to get real butter with your popcorn.) The analyst in the story sounds genuinely analytical; his screenwriter friend sounds capable of actually turning out a clever script. Indeed, the one thing Schow's heroes have in common is sheer intelligence; no matter what their station in life, their talk is invariably hip, self-aware, cleverly metaphoric, and just plain knowledgeable.

  Most of all, it's a knowledge about film. In fact, after savoring tales such its "One for the Horrors," "Coming Soon," and—wait for it—"Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls," you're half convinced that Schow himself must have spent at least twelve hours a day since infancy in the fleapit cinemas described so lovingly in his fiction, taking in movie after movie, and the rest of his waking hours thumbing through movie magazines or watching TV. Even if you've never read The Outer Limits Companion, Schow's astonishingly detailed, painstakingly well-researched book-length retrospective of the classic TV series, these stories alone would suggest a writer unusually savvy about film.

  And why not? Schow is a longtime denizen of Hollywood, and peered at from the safety of the opposite coast, the world of his stories seems very much a Hollywood one, where "the past" means old movies and a plot to control the United States is enacted through the movie screen. That staple of traditional fantasy, the quaint little shop full of books left unwritten or uncompleted, has here become a theater showing legendary "lost" films or a mysterious radio station. It's a world where pop culture reigns and where that East Coast icon, Lovecraft, must get by with only two passing references (one of them to a man wearing "a hangdog H.P. Lovecraft face"). When a character in "Visitation" mentions Poe and observes, "All this place needs is a tarn," he seems to have stepped out of an entirely different universe, for out here the cultural coordinates are right off the screen: a woman doesn't kill herself, or get murdered by her boyfriend, or go mad; she "pulls a Marilyn Monroe" or has "a Dorothy Stratten pulled on her," or goes the way of Frances Farmer. While there are nods to TV's Twilight Zone and Leave It to Beaver, almost everything else reminds Schow's characters of a movie they've already seen. The sinister hotel in "Visitation" is "Gothically overstated" and (for reasons made clear in the story) resembles "a Hollywood set for a horror film." A man's heroic death in a fire reminds him, as he dies, of the climax of an old movie. A sidewalk encounter with his neighbors reminds someone else of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and, in a further Eastwood reference, a ticket-taker's voice, "strepthroat dry," reminds another character of "a bad parody of the Man With No Name."

  The "strep-throat dry" points up another one of Schow's strengths, an irrepressible sense of the comic. He's too bright, and probably too impatient, to turn out the sort of straight, plodding, journeyman's prose that suffices for so many writers in the genre. His wit is arch and knowing. Why say "smart enough" when you can say "possessing enough intellectual candlepower"? Why opt for a "sickly smile" or some other cliché when you can offer "the smile of a terminal cancer patient laughing at a tumor joke"? Writing "unless you've been out of touch" would be too dull; Schow prefers "unless you've spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback." Down a Hollywood street comes not merely "a car" but "a rented LeBaron full of townies from some Texas hog wallow." A character inhabits "the West L.A. smogscape" and another, with mottled complexion, is "a victim of a spill in the birthmark department." A professional skeptic describes his ambition as "to put a bogey in the paranormal plumbing." The main characters in a sleazy horror film are deftly summed up as "the teen hero and his plucky bimbo squeeze"; and as for the film itself, consider the reaction of a critic aptly named Hackamore: "He'd hated it going in. Coming out, he wanted to fuck it till it bled." Whatever you want to say about David Schow's prose, it ain't colorless.

  And he can't resist a throwaway gag; he's overflowing with them. He likes to make up mock newspaper headlines, lurid book titles, and parodic names for bands; when you're cursed with an overfertile imagination, it's hard to hide it under a bushel. In "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" the literary equivalent of a Jack Davis E.C. comic, full of ragged texture, raffish detail, and wild caricature, someone isn't merely the wife of a millionaire, she's "married to a toilet-paper tycoon"; a would-be grave robber enjoys a quiet moment to pick his nose, and a series of gruesome gravesite killings becomes an exercise in slapstick horror. In another, grimmer story, a coughing smoker, "with the attitude of a true nicotine addict, puffed his cigarette with relief." Even in a tale as unrelievedly bleak as "Not From Around Here" with its images of bloody bed sheets and broken glass, Schow can't resist a fiendish pun involving a severed limb and his comment on a retarded neighbor: "I've seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of goldfish."

  I know that it amuses Schow to think of himself as something of a punk horror writer, a founding member of the "Splatterpunk" school (a name he invented) whose mission in life, like that of a punk rocker, is épater le bourgeois. But judging by the intelligence of his writing, I suspect that he's wrong about his own work. In truth, I think, he's a practitioner of something far more interesting than Splatterpunk and considerably rarer: call it Smart Horror. He's certainly too smart for some of the schlocky paperback originals he used to produce under house names, and for the gory scripts he's turning out today. Personally, I think he's too smart for the genre altogether.

  Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care. But when you're really good at it, and as smart as David Schow, your language does more than merely carry the reader along; it becomes a joy in its own right.

  Nice going, Dave. Thanks a lot.

  - T.E.D. Klein

  New York City, June 1989

  RED LIGHT

  Tabloid headlines always make me laugh. You know: I ABORTED BIGFOOT'S QUINTS, or SEE ELVIS' ROTTING NUDE CORPSE, or EXCLUSIVE ON JACK THE RIPPER'S GRANDSON! Earlier today, while passing one of those Market Street newsvendors, I saw similar hyperbolic screamers, and I laughed. I did not want to laugh; it came out as a sick coughing sound.

  TASHA VODE STILL MISSING

  Terrorist Kidnapping of International

  Cover Girl Not Ruled Out

  What the hell did they know about her? Not what I knew. They were like vampires; they sucked. Ethically. Morally.

  But what did that make me?

  At the top of the dungheap was the good old National Perspirer, loudly thumping the tub. A four-color cover claimed all the hot, steaming poop on Tasha's disappearance, enumerating each of her three Juicy, potential fates. One: She had pulled a Marilyn Monroe. Two: She had had a Dorothy Stratten pulled on her by some gonzo fruitbag lover. Three: She was tucked away in the Frances Farmer suite at some remote, tastefully isolated lunatic asylum.

  Or maybe she was forking over richly to manufacture all this furious controve
rsy in order to boost her asking price into the troposphere—in a word, hoax time.

  It was pathetic. It made my gut throb with hurt and loss, and downtown San Francisco defused behind a hot saltwash of welling tears. I blamed the emissions of the Cal Trans buses lumbering up and down the street, knowing full well I couldn't cop such a rationalization, because the buses ran off electricity, like the mostly defunct streetcars. Once, I'd nearly been decapitated by a rooftop conductor pole when it broke free of the overhead webwork of wires and came swinging past, boom-low, alongside the moving bus, sparking viciously and banging off a potted sidewalk tree a foot above my head, zizzing and snapping. Welcome to the Bay Area.

  I had no real excuse for tears now, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. My left hand; my good hand. I was still getting used to the weight of the new cast on my other one.

  One of the street denizens for which Union Square is infamous had stopped to stare at me. I stared back, head to toe, from the clouds of gnats around his matted hair to the solid-carbon crustiness of his bare, black feet. He caught me crying with his mad prophet eyes, and the grin that snaked his face lewdly open suggested that yes, I should howl with grief, I should pull out a Mauser and start plugging pedestrians. I put my legs in gear instead. I left him behind with the news kiosk, the scungy, sensationalist headlines, and all those horrifyingly flawless pictures of her. The bum and I ceased to exist for each other the moment we parted.

  I know what happened to Tasha. Like a recurring dream, she showed up unannounced on my doorstep just four days ago. Like a ghost then, like a ghost now.