(Derek Ford’s amazing piece for the interior of the Last Drink Bird Head anthology)

1.

I dreamt of a falling apart hotel in some tropical location. It was on the side of a mountain and it swayed on stilts like something alive trying to break free of its restraints. Ann and I were staying there on holiday. The help staff had all been former members of the government in that country, but deposed during a coup. They had established their own form of Marxism within the hotel, which meant that the guests had to do the cleaning up along with the maids, help cook the food, etc. At night, the staff became hideous animals that roamed the halls, their cries indistinguishable from the gusts of wind. So you had to barricade your door. For some reason, perhaps because we had no choice, we would pretend we didn’t know that they became animals, even when their mouths were blood-smeared in the morning. We would relax by the pool when we weren’t helping with chores and talk like nothing odd was happening. Some of the other guests couldn’t keep their cool and went mad, so dinners became a strange mix of amazing food, curt staff, and people who could not control their nervous tics and their stammering from the stress of it all. Meanwhile, we could tell that the hotel was losing its bearings–that it was coming closer and closer to just breaking apart and falling down the side of the mountain. There came a day when we knew the end was near. The staff had begun to go feral during the mornings, too, so we couldn’t have breakfast until noon. The varnished wood of the floors had begun to snap and crack. We stood on the edge of our hotel room, now with the whole outer wall having slid down the mountain. Behind us the insane guests and the staff stuck in transformations between animal and human. I asked Ann what we were going to do. She laughed and said, “we’ll just fly away.” I said, “how are we going to do that?” She just cawed back at me, flapped her wings, and then we did indeed fly away, never to return.

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“The characteristic feature of this strange art is that it attempts to depict the extrasensory, to provide symbols for the mysterious forces to which we are subjected in our daily lives but which we do not know–indeed, that is revealed to us only in wild dreams and fantasies, in states of clairvoyant nervous strain….[Such art] may be born from feelings of anxiety, of isolation, of floundering horror. With a self-tormenting love, it seeks the nocturnal sides of life; it is at home in twilight, in torment, in the wild, in the uncanny, and the ghastly…” – 1903 Berliner Illustrirte (a painter of the invisible).

So…I posted this piece on Alfred Kubin on Omnivoracious. My excuse? China Mieville’s new novel is apparently influenced by Kubin, and he’s guest-blogging on Omnivoracious. Also take a look at these prior posts on Kubin and on Dedalus and the Decadents.

Kubin led to Franz Blei and his description of Kafka: “The Kafka is a magnificent and very rarely seen moon-blue mouse, which eats no flesh, but feeds on bitter herbs. It is a bewitching sight, for it has human eyes.”)

Kafka led to Max Brod, and Brod led to memories of City of Saints & Madmen and “King Squid,” which lovingly ransacked Dedalus Decadent editions for much of its influence (it was a way of remembering the books I’d read), including in the bibliography–in fact, to this day, I keep calling Franz Blei Frank Blei and Max Brod Maxwell Brod because of it…which led to remembering China’s contribution to the bibliography, heh (Vielle, C.M., Naughty Lisp and the Squid: A Poly Diptych). Which led to Max Brod’s “The First Hour of Death” in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000.

I encountered the title in the TOC while finishing up the appendix sections of City of Saints, read the first sentence (”The odd incident occurred as the minister was leaving…”), realized I wanted a different story for the title, and promptly sat down and wrote my own “In the Hours After Death,” presented in City of Saints as having appeared in the neo-Decadent Burning Leaves journal. If it reaches past that context of affectionate nod to its predecessors, it’s because I wrote it in a moment of utter and devastating sadness, and I offer it up here as a sacrifice to this week of ongoing decadent-surrealist-literary fantasy that I’ve got going.

(Oh, and go vote for or against Last Drink Bird Head in SF Signal’s cover contest…)

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(More alien baby in Antarctica, general alien baby here…and Henry Kaiser’s penguin tricked out with critter cam and decomposing amphipod-eaten seal head, for good measure.)

A FEW NOTES UPON FINDING A GREEN ALIEN BABY FIGURINE IN A SPECIMEN TRAP AT LONGITUDE ___, LATITUDE ___, ANTARCTICA

Dr. Larry Gilchrist, Ph.D.

To be honest, my first thought as research leader was: I’m not prepared for this. Then the relief poured over me as Dave and Sandra pulled the object free of the trap and I understood it was plastic. It could not have been more plastic had “Made in China” been tattooed on its posterior. Still, something about its sightless eyes mocked me. I demanded Dave and Sandra explain its presence in the trap. For several weeks, I had begun to believe they doubted my abilities as research leader, a well-deserved promotion due to my twenty-two years of seniority. I was almost certain Dave resented it—and if Dave, then Sandra.

“How did it get in there?” I asked. The trap had been empty when I had sent it down through the hole in the ice, down into that endless dark blue penetrating the seamless white.

Dave shrugged, denied culpability. Sandra merely raised her eyebrows. I could feel the heat of their disdain, but decided to ignore it. The walls of our “research station”—shack, hovel, tin-plated survival square, whatever you wish to call it—were more than usually claustrophobic.

“Where could it have come from?”

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Er, of his art, that is. Eric’s just about done with the rough sketches that match up to the script I wrote and turned in to him last week. After this phase, once it’s all been gone over and approved, Eric will begin inking for real. (Here’s more info on the project, which is for Tor.com, and Eric’s blog.)

Here are four samples, with the text that roughly corresponds to the image. I really love the looseness of these drawings. Also note that the story itself has changed quite a bit in dramatizing it visually. I’ve had to write new scenes, discard some, compress and expand. It’s been a wonderful experience, because it’s made the story fresh for me again.

Mord and Wick in the strange elevator, but now Wick is facing away from Mord, and you can see Wick is wearing a slug on his back, in the slit in his uniform. Possibly we get closer in to Wick while they’re talking.

[Dialogue:]
Mord: Does it hurt?
Wick: No. It itches.
Mord: Like fleas.
Wick: No. Like a slug. It’s wet.
Mord: Wet’s better than dry, Wick. Dry crackles.

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(Two of Eric Orchard’s sketches for The Situation)

Work progresses on the graphic adaptation of “The Situation” for Tor.com. The artist and general mastermind is Eric Orchard, but he needs a detailed outline to work from–something that has enough flexibility for him to bring his own ideas and imagination to the project but structured enough to provide focus.

So, something that isn’t really like your normal comics script, as I understand it–a hybrid of sorts. Beneath the cut you’ll find an excerpt from what I’m turning in today, with the caveat that the final version of both the text and the finished comic may be vastly different. This part is like drawing a rough map.

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When I posted about Conjunctions and my story “Predecessor” the other day, I didn’t realize they’d also put the story online, along with a few others. Here’s the link to the main page, and to the individual stories.

“Predecessor”
“The great man’s home lay within thick woods, beyond a churning river crossed only by a bridge that looked like it had been falling apart for many years. The woods were dark and loamy and took the sound of our transport like a wolf taking a rabbit. The leaves passed above us in patterns of deep green shot through with glints of old light. There was the smell of something rich yet suspect in the chilled air.”

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Woken by a sudden shifting of shadows. A vague awareness of a figure. A sound like a thousand soft gun shots. Dreamed he’d gone down the hole behind the station’s curtain. Into the underground. Found the gray caps there. Sleeping on their sides. Heads down like resting silverfish. Heretic and the skery lying peaceful on a mattress made of curling ferns. Finch went to join them and immediately exploded into spores. Was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

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UPDATE: I forgot, blurbs are beginning to come in… “Jeff VanderMeer’s stunning Finch opens with a claustrophobic interrogation and with a reluctant detective forced to solve a double-murder. Finch quickly expands beyond genres and beyond the edges of Ambergris–its complex history, its many apocalypses–while remaining a deeply affecting and personal story. Told in a pitch-perfect voice and steeped in the unrelenting menace authentic to the best works of noir, Finch is a wonderful, sad, brutal, and beautiful book. A tour de force.”–Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep

Long before I began to work seriously on Finch, my latest novel, I had fragments of something called, er, Fragments From a Drowned City, which was about a detective who comes to Ambergris seeking a girl apparently abducted and brought to the city. (I worked on it from 1999 to 2001.) It never really came together because I couldn’t at that time imagine the city of Ambergris with the subterranean gray caps in control. I also didn’t really know what happened to the detective. However, in reviewing all of my notes about Ambergris when beginning work on Finch, I realized that hidden in Fragments were many scenes and elements that belonged in the novel–just not in the same style or from the same perspective. In Finch, for example, I knew Finch’s partner, Wyte, had gone through the same experience ascribed to my nameless detective in Fragments. But that same experience needed to be rendered in a totally different way. So, here’s the more-or-less finished anecdote in Finch, followed after the cut by what appeared as “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose” in my collection Secret Life. I make no claims for which is better, just which is better for Finch. In many ways, it is a complete transformation–an example of the intial spark of imagination leading nowhere, and then another spark coming along to reignite the original material and re-purpose it in a totally different way. The original, including other scenes that didn’t fit in Finch, now reads like Ambergris in an alternate universe. – Jeff

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This excerpt seems pretty indicative of the first quarter of this year for me. Anything could happen going forward. Cue: The Black Keys “Goodbye Babylon” for this bit.

An hour later, Finch stood on the ridge and stared down. Far below, the dull blue snake line of a canal. Two detectives in a boat. Slowly making their way northeast. Finch was about three hundred feet above them. Wyte was a large shadow with a white face, the boat a floating coffin. Dapple had been reduced to a kind of question mark. Not a good place to be. Anyone could’ve been on the ridge, looking down. Lucky for them it was just him.

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Mord’s reign on Facebook has come to an end, but here are the highlights from yesterday, following up on my last post. (Mord is a [nonspeaking] character in a short novel I’m working on, fragment from which can be found here.)

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