After the People Lights Have Gone Off

PRAISE FOR
AFTER THE PEOPLE LIGHTS HAVE GONE OFF

“If I’ve read better horror writers than Jones, I’ve forgotten them. He’s at the apex of his game.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off
is the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream. And it’s just going to be there, forever.”

—
LAIRD
BARRON
, author of
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Stephen Graham Jones is a true master of the horror short story. Inventive, quirky, unexpected and masterful.”

—
JONATHAN
MABERRY
,
New York Times
bestselling author of

Fall of Night
and
Bad Blood

“Stephen Graham Jones is a great devourer of stories, chewing up horror novels and detective stories and weird fiction, ingesting literature of every type and pedigree, high and low and everything in between. His stories betray his encyclopedic knowledge of genre and of storytelling, but what makes
After the People Lights Have Gone Off
unique is how Jones never rests among his influences, going beyond what other writers might dare to craft terrors and triumphs all his own.”

—
MATT
BELL
, author of
In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

ALL
RIGHTS
RESERVED
.
NO
PART
OF
THIS
BOOK
MAY
BE
REPRODUCED
IN
ANY
FORM
OR
BY
ANY
ELECTRONIC
OR
MECHANICAL
MEANS
,
INCLUDING
INFORMATION
STORAGE
AND
RETRIEVAL
SYSTEMS
,
WITHOUT
PERMISSION
IN
WRITING
FROM
THE
PUBLISHER
,
EXCEPT
IN
THE
CASE
OF
SHORT
PASSAGES
QUOTED
IN
REVIEWS
.

THE
STORIES
CONTAINED
IN
THIS
ANTHOLOGY
ARE
WORKS
OF
FICTION
.
ALL
INCIDENTS
,
SITUATIONS
,
INSTITUTIONS
,
GOVERNMENTS
,
AND
PEOPLE
ARE
FICTIONAL
AND
ANY
SIMILARITY
TO
CHARACTERS
OR
PERSONS
LIVING
OR
DEAD
IS
STRICTLY
COINCIDENTAL
.

PUBLISHED
BY
DARK
HOUS
PRESS
,
AN
IMPRINT
OF
CURBSIDE
SPLENDOR
PUBLISHING
,
INC
.,
CHICAGO
,
ILLINOIS
IN
2014.

FIRST
EDITION

COPYRIGHT
© 2014
BY
STEPHEN
GRAHAM
JONES

LIBRARY
OF
CONGRESS
CONTROL
NUMBER
: 2014945162

ISBN
978-1-940430-25-6

EDITED
BY
RICHARD
THOMAS

COVER
ART
BY
GEORGE
C
.
COTRONIS

INTERIOR
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
LUKE
SPOONER

DESIGNED
BY
ALBAN
FISCHER

MANUFACTURED
IN
THE
UNITED
STATES
OF
AMERICA
.

WWW.THEDARKHOUSEPRESS.COM

I no longer remember what I first read by Stephen Graham Jones, but it knocked me for a loop. Perhaps it was
Demon Theory
, which is about movies in a way, written in what some would call an experimental style, and I would call the correct style for the story. That may well have been my first read of Stephen’s work, or perhaps it was one of his short stories, but whatever that first discovery was, I thought, wow, that was good, and it led me to his other works, and pretty soon his was a name I was watching for. I began to gobble his stories and books like a chicken gobbles corn, and if you are unaware of that activity, find a chicken, toss some corn on the ground and watch it work. If you want to be polite, put it in a pan. You’ll get the idea.

Stephen had novels, short story collections, experimental stories, horror and crime, memoir-style tales, and…a little bit of everything, and I was happy to discover that he had a lot of it. No grass grew under his feet, he was constantly moving, writing, creating new worlds for me to enter into. Unexpected worlds, not just a rehash of something he had already written, which in the literary world can be both a blessing and a curse. For most, a curse, as editors and agents love it when you do one particular thing and they can sell your next book as a clone of the previous. That’s a pretty dull writing life, if you ask me.

As I’ve said, I don’t know the first thing I read by Stephen, but I do know when he first came on my radar. It was on a Robert E. Howard panel that we both shared. I liked what he had to say, and I think he liked what I had to say, because afterward we spoke a little, and at some point in time I was invited out to a class he was teaching in West Texas. Not only is Stephen a fine writer, he is also a PhD, a professor, and a good one. Then teaching at a West Texas University, now teaching in Boulder, Colorado.

While out visiting him in Texas, I talked to him about some of his work I had read, and we had long talks about other things, and I discovered we had a lot in common. One of the main things we had in common besides an intense love for our families and stories about Neanderthals (it’s a weakness), was that we liked to read a lot. We are both fanatic devourers of words.

He liked books and stories and comics and film. He read everything from pulp to high literature, experimental fiction, cereal boxes and the ingredients on an aspirin bottle. Okay, maybe I exaggerate. That’s me. I’ll have to ask Stephen about that. You name it, we enjoyed it. It sounds like a simple thing, and most writers like to read, of course, but not all are as widely read as Stephen, nor are they as gifted, nor are they as hard a worker as he is. He does not mess around, friends, as you can see by his long list of books and stories.

Stephen liked to do what I liked to do with the books he read. He liked to measure each on its worth, not its supposed position in the literary cosmos due to genre branding. He also liked to blend genres to such a degree that you can’t really separate any one thing out enough to call it securely by any label. Literary intent moves through the crudest of horrors, the darkest of crimes and mysteries. Stephen is a real writer, and the thing I admire most about him is that he’s not doing it to show he can blend his work, he’s doing it because it is his work. It comes from some pulsing passion inside of him. He loves writing. He eats and sleeps it. But most importantly, he actually writes.