A Girl, a Gun, and a Monster

 

The newest issue of Underneath the Juniper Tree is out! In it you’ll find all sorts of creepy stories and poems designed to give children (and adults) all sorts of new nightmares.

One of them is my short story Taiga, about a brave girl named Gerty who goes off into Alaska’s boreal forest to hunt down the grizzly that killed her horse… but comes across a creature much more terrifying instead.

You can read Taiga here: http://issuu.com/underneaththejunipertree/docs/spring_2013/68

And here’s a cool video of artist Ken Lamug (aka Rabble Boy) drawing one of the illustrations from Taiga, showing Gerty with her gun as she heads off into the woods.

It’s Alive! It’s Alive!

The Underneath the Juniper Tree 2012 Anthology has at last taken physical form and will soon be slouching towards mail boxes across the dark confines of the earth (including those of horror masters Wes Craven and R.L. Stine).

Marjorie Merle and Tex, the mysterious and terrifying ghouls behind Underneath the Juniper Tree, have done a fantastic job of collecting the scariest and sickest art and stories from last year’s issues. And I’m proud to say that my story The Monster and Mab Ipswich is among them.

The anthologies are a limited print run, so get your claws on one quick by sending an email to: tex.junipertree [at] gmail [dot com]. Copies are $13 a pop. The Anthology collects some truly amazing artwork and stories by award-winning artists and writers from all over the world, so do your inner-demon child a favor and order one today! Your inner-demon child will thank you, just before setting your brain on fire.

Ermahgerd!

So, the Underneath the Juniper Tree print anthology is a go! Thanks to generous donations from various contributors and Goosebumps author R.L Stine, a print edition of the magazine’s best macabre stories and artwork will soon be released upon the world. It’s especially exciting that Stine, the godfather of scaring American children via the written word, is helping to fund the anthology.

And my short story “The Monster and Mab Ipswich” will be appearing in the book! Thanks to all who voted for it, I appreciate your support! The anthology should be out by the end of February. I am eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on it and seeing Mab on the printed page. So excited that, in fact, that I will probably shout… well, you know…

Scarily Shameless Spooky Story Halloween Extravaganza

The Monster by Marcela Vargas

It’s Halloween. The veil between our world and the Other World has been rent. Dark things are stirring in dusty corners. The shadows are creeping into this petty place.

Allow me to get you in the mood.

As you probably know, I tend to write a lot of Halloween-esque stuff. Witches and spiders are my bread and butter, and nothing tickles my twisted fancy more than an especially creepy and deranged Japanese monster. I plug away at my dark stories year round, even in the bright and cheerful summer sun, but today is the day of all days when they seem most fit for reading. The day when the world is draped in cobwebs and monsters prowl the streets.

You see, it’s always Halloween Underneath the Juniper Tree. What better way to get in the spirit of Samhain than reading the creepy, spooky, and macabre tales in its dark pages? The full issues can be read here: http://issuu.com/underneaththejunipertree.

Now, if you like your Halloween spirits more mischievous and magical, then you’ll enjoy the misadventures of the wicked witch Mab Ipswich that have been published in Underneath the Juniper Tree over the past year. It all begins with Mab Ipswich: The Wickedest Witch, continues in Mab Ipswich & The Stinking Storm, gets especially monstrous in The Monster & Mab Ipswich, and comes to a chilling, thrilling conclusion (so far) in Mab Ipswich Vs. Principal Goblinson. 

Those of you more into pure horror of the fanged, eight-legged, Japanese variety, should chill your bones with my story published earlier this year in Juniper Tree, The Web at the End of the Woods.

And though Halloween isn’t a Japanese holiday, the Land of the Rising Sun has a rich tradition of monsters (as you’ll find if you read the cell phone ghost and spider stories above), some of whom I have chronicled on this blog. Click on the Japanese Monsters tag below and you’ll find where they lurk.

Even if you think I suck, definitely check out all the scary, spooky stories in the issues of Underneath the Juniper Tree! They’re the perfect thing to read tonight as the ghosts and ghouls come a-calling.

Season of the Witch

“Mab Walking to School” by Marcela Vargas

As the monsters, ghosts, and ghouls crawl out the shadows to drink blood red cocktails and eat bite-size bits of candy this weekend, I’m marking the birthday of my favorite wicked witch, Mab Ipswich.

Two years ago today, I sat in the Piper’s Alley Starbucks, before the inaugural meeting of the NLB, and scribbled out a short story about a wicked young witch. The story was inspired by the spooky, supernatural Halloween spirit in the air, and especially by memories of a particularly mischievous elementary school student I had in Japan named Yuka.

A few days shy of a year ago, that story, “Mab Ipswich: The Wickedest Witch,” was published in the November 2011 issue of the children’s macabre magazine Underneath the Juniper Tree. Since then, three more Mab stories have been published in Juniper Tree, along with a couple on this blog. The published stories have been illustrated by amazing artists from around the globe, and Mab even has merchandise now.

I’ve managed to write 19 Mab stories in these two years. And I’m currently working on a full Mab Ipswich book, a novel-in-stories about Mab’s magical misadventures at school, told from the perspectives of Mab’s teacher, her best friend, the boy who has a crush on her, the school bully, and finally Mab herself. My goal for the book is 19 stories (not including some of the stories I’ve written which aren’t set at school, and may go in future books) and at least 30,000 words. I’m currently at 13 stories, with 3 more in progress, and over 20,000 words. I have the remaining stories sketched out. There’s still a lot writing and revising to do, but for the first time in a long time on a writing project, I feel like I’m close. And I’ll raise a glass of pumpkin ale and a fun-fized Reese’s to that.

The Monsters That Dwell Underneath the Juniper Tree

Over the past 10 months, I’ve had the privilege to be part of the wonderful, demented group of writers and artists at Underneath the Juniper Tree. The magazine gave me my first fiction publishing credit and is where Mab Ipswich and Kuwa Ibukishita made their wicked debuts.

Underneath the Juniper Tree is first and foremost a macabre children’s literary magazine dedicated to traumatizing the world’s young with, as the motto goes, “the stories your grandpa wouldn’t tell you.” Think of the stories that frightened you as a kid – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Edward Gorey, or Dr. Seuss’s infamous snuff book Horton Hears a Who Being Brutally Murdered with an Chainsaw, and Enjoys It!

But it’s also a great community of like-minded weirdos, people who like to lurk in the shadows and pick up rotted logs to see what crawls and squirms in the dark earth. Not only do we have similar, twisted tastes, but Majorie Merle and Tex, the shadowy caretakers of the Juniper Tree, have cultivated a wonderful network, and sense of support and camaraderie among the many contributors.

It’s a truly global community, too. Just the stories I’ve had published in Juniper Tree have been illustrated by artists from the U.S., Grenada, Colombia/Canada, and the Philippines. It’s a great group of truly creative people and I feel very lucky to be among their dark number.

Now, after a year of being an online only magazine, Juniper Tree is ready to make the leap to the printed page.

Majorie and Tex are putting together an anthology of the best of the best art and writing from the past year of issues. The anthology will be printed in book format with a beautiful embossed cover. What I’m saying here is, it’ll be snazzy. They haven’t said what stories will be included, but I’m guessing/hoping/blackmailing that Mab will be among them.

As Juniper Tree is a free, non-profit, all-volunteer publication, we need your help to get the anthology on the page and on the shelves. To that end, Majorie and Tex have launched an indiegogo (like Kickstarter) campaign to raise money to make the anthology a reality. Contributors will get goods based on their donation: art postcards, posters, a Juniper Tree calendar, a signed copy of the anthology, ad space, etc. There are even discussions of the anthology being promoted by Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts, bringing me one step closer to achieving my life goal of having sullen Goth preteens putting Mab stickers on their hover-boards.

The campaign website is here: http://www.indiegogo.com/UnderneathTheJuniperTree

If you’ve enjoyed my Mab and Kuwa stories and the amazing art that has come with them, I’d humbly ask that you make a donation and make this anthology a reality. With every dollar you give, a child in desperate need of being traumatized will be traumatized. Your generosity will inspire nightmares for years to come.

Where Fun Came to Have Fun, and then Tragically Died

Last night, I finished reading Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago that introduced the ferris wheel, alternating electrical current, Shredded Wheat, and Juicy Fruit, and gave Pabst Beer that blue ribbon they’re still so proud of. Also, it’s about a serial killer.

I am about eight years late in reading the book. I feel like I’m one of the last people to have picked it up, which is strange since it’s set largely in parks and neighborhoods with which I am quite familiar. I have my dumb reasons. When I first moved back to Chicago in 2006 and was engaged in a bout of e-dating, everyone’s profile listed their most recently read book as The Devil in the White City. Everyone on the L was reading it on the way to work. And I am enough of a stubborn, myopic literary contrarian that I refused to read it on principle (this may partially explain why none of my online dating attempts ever went past the third date). It’s the same reason that I won’t be reading The Hunger Games until roughly 2034.

But then my parents and sister came up to Chicago a few weeks back and, having all read the book, wanted to see the sites mentioned therein. Fortunately for them, I used to live mere blocks from the site of the World’s Fair, so we trekked down to Jackson Park and walked the same grounds where, 119 years ago, the Fair’s famed and fabled White City stood gleaming by the lake.

Next to the White City ran the Midway Plaisance, which is where the more carnival-esque attractions were located (and which is why, to this day, the main thoroughfare of any carnival or state fair is called “the midway”). Anchoring the Midway was George Ferris’s Wheel, an almost 300 ft. tall revolving wonder that could take over 2,000 people into the sky at a time (the London Eye is only slightly larger than the original Ferris Wheel). It was to the 1893 World’s Fair what the Eiffel Tower was to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris – the central engineering marvel. Both achieved immortality: Eiffel’s tower by remaining right where it is and becoming the preeminent symbol of Paris; Ferris’s wheel by spawning millions of imitators across the globe.

I was curious what the first Ferris Wheel looked like, so I went Google Imaging and found the photo at the top of this post. What surprised me most about the photo wasn’t so much the size of the wheel, as the gray gothic building in the foreground on the right side. It’s Foster Hall at the University of Chicago. It surprised me because I once had a class in that building, in the very tower whose witch-hatted spire stabs toward the Wheel.

The photo presents a weird juxtaposition to me. The founding Ferris Wheel and fair Midway in all their gaudy glory right next to an institution (but three years old at that point) widely known as the place “Where Fun Comes to Die,” a school whose name and image conjure in its students and alumni not “fun!” but “suffering” (followed by “good friends,” and then “further suffering” [incidentally, while "Where Fun Comes to Die" is the University's unofficial nickname, its official nickname is "The Gray City," a moniker that both attempts to claim the legacy of the White City and also manages to somehow sound even more depressing than "Where Fun Comes to Die"]).

The White City and the first Ferris Wheel are over a century gone. The Midway Plaisance is now just a long, infinitely quiet expanse of grass running beside the University. This is a view of that building and the Midway as they are now:

These days the common complaint among Hyde Park’s denizens is the lack of anything fun to do in the neighborhood. It’s strange to imagine what it must have been like as a U of C student in those days, at a school so new it must have smelled it, trying to study with the greatest and gaudiest collection of entertainment in human history right out your window.

It’s a wonder anyone got anything done at all.

A Pretty Little Dungeon

The world’s best bookstore is not closing, but it might as well be. The Seminary Co-Op, the famed and infamous academic bookstore of the University of Chicago, is moving across the street. Worse, it is moving above ground. What was once a dank, dark, confusing, claustrophobic place that smelled of moldy paper and ancient farts, will soon be bright, airy, clean, and well-ordered. This is a tragedy.

The Sem Co-Op is where U of C students have bought their books for decades. It is a labyrinthine series of what I can only guess are former utility tunnels buried beneath the Chicago Theological Seminary’s gothic enormity. The ceiling is low and pipe-spangled. The stacks are narrow and confused, twisting around and leading to sudden dead-ends, or other, darker tunnels. Some shelves are hidden around blind corners or behind one of the mysterious, old turbines (see photo above) that lay rusting in odd coves.

People often say they get lost in bookstores, but the Sem Co-Op is the only bookstore where I have gotten legitimately lost and not known where I was or how to get out. In most good bookstores, the pleasure is in randomly stumbling across a rare signed first edition or something. In the Sem Co-Op you stumble across those, plus the weird old rusted machinery, random furniture, and the cobwebbed skeletons of ’70s grad school students who wandered in looking for the Chinese translation of Phenomenology of the Spirit and never found their way back out.

The selection, though, makes the danger and frustration worth it. It feels as if you can find any book down there. That, like in Borges’s Library of Babel, if a book can possibly exist, then it must exist somewhere in the dark recesses of the Sem Co-Op. And it’s yours, if you dare to find it.

So, the news that the Sem Co-Op would be moving above ground came as a blow to all of us who have happily plumbed its depths.

The NLB went back to Hyde Park this Saturday on a sort of dark nostalgia tour, revisiting the places where, eight years ago, so many legs, hearts, dreams, and brains were broken. And knowing that the Sem Co-Op’s subterranean days were numbered, we paid a final visit.

The bookstore isn’t closing, but there is a sense of mourning with its move. A documentary is being filmed about the place. A photographer was on hand to take pictures of people perusing the shelves. And a large poster invited the public to record their thoughts on what “the Seminary Co-Op is” on flyers that were displayed in the cloisters. There were dozens already out when we stopped by. The best one, written in pink marker, summed up the place perfectly: “The Sem Co-Op is a pretty little dungeon.”

The Sem Co-Op is coming up into the light. It will still be a great bookstore. But I think I will always fondly remember it as the endless, terrifying catacomb it once wondrously was.

We Are Not Batman

We are still trying to come to terms with the mass shooting at the Dark Knight Rises premiere in Colorado. All of us will spend the next few weeks stumbling around trying to find reasons and answers for the tragedy and the senseless loss of life, and none of us will come to any satisfactory conclusions.

My friend Todd on Facebook made the point that neither the fantasies of the right (a well-armed citizenry), nor the left (an unarmed citizenry), will completely stop madmen from killing other people en mass. If guns won’t do the trick, cars, knives, and improvised explosives will.

I met Todd in Alaska last year during our camping tour. Alaska is a stockade. I’ve never seen so many people with guns, and I grew up in the South. Every fisherman on the river has a pistol strapped to his or her chest, and I’ll never forget the image of our horseback riding guide cocking her pistol (“my engagement ring,” she called it) when she saw signs that a grizzly was nearby. That, of course, is why the fishermen are armed, too. The forests of Alaska are fairy tale forests. They are dark and full of monsters. But unless you are an expert marksman, a gun will not stop a grizzly bear. If it wants you dead, you will die. Shooting it will probably just piss it off and hasten your demise.

I see madmen like the Columbine murderers, or the Aurora murder, as something like an angry grizzly. There is not much you can do to stop them if they are determined to kill. There are precautions we can and should take, and we can minimize the danger through smart policing and policy, but we will never be free of these threats. Now, an angry bear probably has its reasons, whereas these shooters are just the world’s worst assholes, who deserve no sympathy or excuses (due process, on the other hand, yes).

I think we all know this. So, why are we all so shaken by this incident? Probably because previous shootings were limited to places most of us do not spend a lot of time: schools, post offices. Horrifying as those shootings were, they weren’t terrifying for most of us, since we don’t spend every day at school. But most of us go to movie theaters. Millions of us were in Dark Knight Rises premieres at the same time. It could have been any of us. Even those of us who fantasize that, “If I’d been there and had a gun, I would have stopped it.” Because, no. You would not have. If anything, in a dark, tear gas-filled theater with people running everywhere and screaming and gunshots coming from the screen and an unseen madman, you would have just shot innocent people. Nobody could have stopped what happened. Nobody except, maybe, Batman.

And perhaps that’s another reason why this tragedy hits a nerve more than similar shootings. By taking place during a Batman movie, during a film about the nigh-mythical badass of badasses,  it exposed our fragile fantasies. We are all vulnerable. We are not superheroes. We are not badasses. We are not Batman.

We know we are not, but part of us likes to think we are. I do. Our pop culture is full of stories of accidental gods. Ordinary people who discover they are, or accidentally become, powerful. Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Spider-Man, Superman. These are powerful wish-fulfillment fantasies. And there is nothing wrong with them. The problem comes when we buy into it, when we believe that with the right combination of mysterious parentage and radioactivity, we might become invulnerable and right the wrongs of the world.

Freud theorized that every kid at some point fantasizes that someday they will discover that their boring parents are not their real parents, and that their real parents were royalty and that they then will be whisked away to their kingdom, their true home. It’s a theme echoed again and again in our culture, from Oedipus to Oliver Twist. Now, of course, we’ve added superpowers to the bargain. You’re not just a prince, kid, you’re the Wizard-prince. It’s a powerful fantasy, and one we no longer leave behind with other childish things. We carry it with us even into adulthood. It’s the wish, the fantasy, at the heart of so much of our pop culture.

Of course, Batman is one of our few modern myths that inverts that trope.* Batman is born a prince and never leaves his kingdom. He just loses his parents. He doesn’t just discover his powers, he earns them with blood, sweat, and tears, through years of torturous training. We all want to be Batman, terror of the night, but none of us want to be Bruce Wayne, despite his wealth. None of us want to be the man so lonely and broken that he becomes a dark knight. If anything, Batman demonstrates the high cost of becoming a hero. Still, we fantasize, we live the adventure vicariously, on page and on screen.

We are not Batman. We never will be. We shouldn’t try to be. Instead, we should try to be more like his father, Dr. Thomas Wayne. A man who can’t stop bullets, but who heals those who are hurt. A man who, when his son falls into the darkness, reaches down and picks him back up.

 

*This is why the Star Wars prequels were so disappointing. The idea of taking the Family Fantasy/Man with a Thousand Faces tropes that the original Star Wars helped popularize and subverting them so that the orphan who discovers he’s special ends up becoming the Dark Lord is awesome. But instead, they just sucked.

Super Happy Pink Cherry Blossom Tropical Wedding Death Spiral

It’s been a while. The cobwebs have grown thick over this blog. Just opening the page to write this post has sent a cloud of dust into the air, turning the light grainy and sepia. A small family of mice has nested in my dashboard. There is a dead cricket lying in the cracks beneath the Kumiko page. Fittingly.

Where have I been? you ask. Well, I’ve been busy.

April 2012 was the month that tried to murder me. What two years on an isolated island in the East China Sea and one year at a university not-at-all jokingly called “where fun comes to die” could not do, April 2012 nearly did. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. It damn near done me in.

I will dispense with the self-pity party in a second, but suffice to say that if in the future you are ever presented with the opportunity to plan a 10-city, Midwest-wide major diplomatic series of events, while also having your normal job hit one of its busiest seasons, while also planning a wedding halfway around the world that involves two languages, do not take it. It’s a bad idea.

In the end, though, all the sturm and stress led to great things. Cherry trees were planted where they were supposed to be planted. More importantly for me, our wedding in Maui went off beautifully. Having our friends and family from all over the world join us on the ocean shore as Ayako and I pledged our love and devotion was wonderful. It was the best day of my life.

Also, I got to see a manta ray. That was cool.

In spite of the craziness stemming from what I like to call my “Super Happy Pink  Cherry Blossom Tropical Wedding Death Spiral”, I still managed to get a lot of writing done. Five new Mab stories have been written recently, and the first Mab book is starting to take serious shape.

I did some calculations last night and I’m currently clocking in at around 15,000 words. Middle-grade books usually run from 20K – 40K words, and I’m aiming at around 30K for the first Mab book, which puts me roughly halfway home. The end is a ways to go, but for the first time in my writing life, I feel confident that I’ll get there. That’s a nice feeling.

With the wedding and cherry blossom insanity largely over, I will dig in and write more here.

So, keep your eyes on this space. April 2012 may have tried to kill me, but as the Joker says, what doesn’t kill you just makes you stranger.