Jeffrey Thomas [Thomas - Worship the Night

Worship the Night

Jeffrey Thomas

Copyright 2015 Jeffrey Thomas

All rights reserved.

Worship the Night was originally published as a limited edition hardcover and trade paperback by Dark Renaissance Books, 2013.

Cover photo: Dai Nam Van Hien, Vietnam. From the authors collection.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Lost Family

Counterclockwise

The Holy Bowl

In Limbo

About the Author

The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo

Children of the Dragon

The Sea of Flesh

About the Author

Publishing Credits

The Lost Family first appeared in the electronic anthology Vivisepulture , Anarchy Books, 2011.

Counterclockwise first appeared in the anthology Aklonomicon , Aklo Press, 2012.

The Holy Bowl first appeared in the anthology Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster , Eraserhead Press, 2011.

In Limbo is original to this collection. Reprinted in Years Best Weird Fiction , Volume 1, Undertow Publications, 2014.

About the Author is original to this collection.

The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo first appeared in The Lovecraft eZine , 2012.

Children of the Dragon first appeared (in German translation) in the authors collection Geschichten aus dem Cthulhu-Mythos , Festa Verlag, 2012.

The Sea of Flesh first appeared in the book The Sea of Flesh and Ash , Terradan Works, 2011.

Introduction

When I see short story collections from writer friends of mine that feature incisive introductions by scholarly folk like Matt Cardin or John Langan, I sometimes feel jealous. But then, who better to introduce my work than me? Especially since Id like to say a few words about each of the stories in this collection giving each its own sub-introduction, as it were.

So lets begin with...

The Lost Family focuses on the protagonist of my novel The Fall of Hades , which is set in Hell two thousand years after an apocalyptic war between Angels, Demons and the Damned. The events of The Lost Family dont take place prior to, or after, the events of The Fall of Hades , but somewhere in the middle of the protagonists travels in the novel. For that reason, I might just as well have titled this story The Lost Chapter. But it is also meant to work as a stand-alone story, if you havent read that novel.

Counterclockwise is set in my futuristic milieu of Punktown. I thought it best to allow my favorite stamping ground at least one manifestation here...lest it grow vengeful. The setting has been good to me and I dont take that lightly, since Punktown is not often kind.

The Holy Bowl was written for an anthology about that mightiest of deities, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Since I suspected most of my fellow contributors to that book would go for broad humor and the extreme bizarre, I decided to play my story a bit more straight.

In Limbo was written especially for this collection. The premise for it came to me one late October night in 2012 as Hurricane Sandy, Halloween, and Life itself bore down upon me.

About the Author makes the observation that sometimes a writer is more fascinating, and stranger, than anything they may have written. Its also about my general preference for innovative horror as opposed to tropes that have been done to death...or undeath.

The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo is a Lovecraftian piece that features actual alleged gangland personalities and events. (Notice I said alleged, so no one need track me down and whack me.) My brother Scott and I have long been intrigued with the fascinating and charismatic Joe Gallo.

Children of the Dragon is another Lovecraftian piece, this one set in modern day Viet Nam. I have quite a love affair with Viet Nam...largely because I have had a number of love affairs with Vietnamese women. Subsequently, my beautiful daughter Jade is half Vietnamese. Since my first trip in October of 2004, and to the time of this writing, I have traveled to Viet Nam eight times. Children of the Dragon incorporates actual places I have visited in that country, which is not nearly as ominous (these days, at least) as I portray it here but it often serves a dramatic purpose to set a character down in an unfamiliar environment in which, a fish out of water, he can become thoroughly disoriented. Ah, the deliciously disorienting Orient!

Viet Nam also has its influence in The Sea of Flesh , in that a number of its characters are Vietnamese, but this story takes place in another of my favorite locales: Salem, Massachusetts. This long novella (or short novel?) was written for a book called The Sea of Flesh and Ash , which was long delayed with its original publisher and therefore withdrawn from them, finally released by another publisher to a very limited readership. The premise of The Sea of Flesh and Ash was that my brother Scott Thomas and I would both write a novella based on the same beautiful piece of artwork by Travis Anthony Soumis, which would serve as our cover. Thus, I wrote my dark fantasy The Sea of Flesh , and Scott wrote The Sea of Ash ...a brilliant work that has recently been released as a standalone book by the Lovecraft eZines imprint, to greater exposure and much acclaim.

The title of this book, Worship the Night , was inspired by a kind of loose theme at work in these stories: the notion of deities, hereafters, or otherwheres beyond the mortal plane. As I say, The Lost Family involves angels and demons, if not quite in the traditional sense, while Counterclockwise offers a glimpse into an alien belief system. The Holy Bowl invokes the aforementioned Flying Spaghetti Monster as convincing a deity as this world has to offer, and much tastier than most. The title of In Limbo evokes the dismal way station said to lie between the two more definitive afterlives, and hence literally or metaphorically between damnation and salvation. Similarly, the protagonist of About the Author believes she has torn through a barrier between this world and the netherworld. If your spiritual calling leans less toward Judeo-Christian conceptions and more toward the eldritch, you might want to become an acolyte of the Cthulhu Mythos, as addressed in The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo and Children of the Dragon . Finally, the main characters of The Sea of Flesh interact with a mystical alternate realm.

With a theme of this nature, one might well wonder what the authors position on religion could be.

Dont ask.

Okay, that probably isnt fair. Better to say, then, that I despise religion. That is, religion as practiced by those who wish for eternal torture to be inflicted on others for not sharing their particular brand of superstition. Which isnt to say that I dont necessarily believe in mysterious forces at work in the universe. My personal jury is still out on that one. I am in awe of the unknown, with a capital Un, and I hope that sense of wonder translates into some of these tales. But in regard to my disgust, Im not talking about spiritual matters...Im talking about physical matter, matter shaped into the things we call people, human effing beings, who can be credited with other such hateful inventions as guns and money. Perhaps money will be the theme of my next collection. God such as He, She or It might be forbid.

Anyway.

With our introduction and sub-introductions behind us, let us now allow these stories to speak for themselves...

Jeffrey Thomas

THE LOST FAMILY

Please be careful not to dislodge me, madam, Jay said, riding across the womans back. If I fall from this distance Ill surely break.

Vee paused in her climb to glance downward, into the shaft through which she ascended. They had entered the vertical service shaft through an access hatch on Level 119, but the shaft ran deeper than that. Maybe all the way to the basement?