Plow the Bones
Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
PLOW THE BONES
Douglas F. Warrick
Apex Publications
Lexington, KY
Apex Voices: Book 1
This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Plow the Bones
Copyright © 2013 Douglas F. Warrick
Cover art © 2013 Saber Core
Cover design by Danni Kelly
Interior design by Jason Sizemore
“Behindeye: A History” © 2010,
The Drabblecast
; “Her Father’s Collection” © 2009, Tales of the Mountain State 3 (Woodland Press); “Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation” © 2010,
Dark Faith
(Apex Publications); “The Itaewon Eschatology Show” © 2011,
Apex Magazine
; “Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy” © 2009,
Murky Depths
; “Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist” © 2010,
The Drabblecast
; “Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon–Headed Girl” © 2012, DailyScienceFiction.com; “Rattenkönig” © 2013,
Vampires Don’t Sparkle
(Seventh Star Press); “Stickhead (Or… In the Dark, in the Wet, We Are Collected)” © 2006,
MudRock
; “I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me” © 2012,
Dark Faith: Invocations
(Apex Publications); “Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band,” “Drag,” “Old Roses,” and “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl” are original to this edition.
“Introduction” © 2013, Gary A. Braunbeck
“Apex Voices: What Do You Hear” © 2013, Jason Sizemore
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
First Edition: May 2013
ISBN Trade Paperback: 978–1–937009–15–1
ISBN ebook:
To Gene Milner,
who taught me how to love stories.
To Don Warrick,
who taught me how to tell stories.
And to Mary Louise,
who taught me how to respect the act of telling stories.
Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.
— Camille Paglia,
Sexual Personae
The only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment
— Marc Maron
Apex Voices: What Do You Hear?
Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation
Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy
Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist
Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band
Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon–Headed Girl
Stickhead (Or… In the Dark, in the Wet, We Are Collected)
I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me
Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl
Not so long ago, I accosted a handful of the Apex faithful with an important question.
“What comes to mind when you think of our books?”
The answers were varied, but thematically, they bore a striking similarity. Terminology like “genre–bending,” “smart fiction,” “surreal,” and “unconventional” were mentioned repeatedly. As a publisher, I was quite pleased and couldn’t help but smile. My goal with Apex has always been to bring entertaining fiction to genre fans who like to have their perceptions and imaginations challenged. To a degree, I appear to have met that goal.
But hold on! I have a second major goal, as well. As a publisher and editor, I derive no greater sense of accomplishment than bringing a fantastic new (or underappreciated) author to the attention of genre readers. That’s why this book exists. Thus the Apex Voices series.
From 2006 through 2008, I ran a monthly online feature called “The Apex Featured Writer Program.” It was quite popular, and I don’t recall why I stopped doing it. The writers appreciated the opportunity and exposure. Our readers enjoyed finding talented new writers. A win–win for everybody. Let us consider the Apex Voices series a delayed continuation of the long–lost featured writer program.
Here’s how I envision this series working out. Two, three, maybe four times a year, Apex will bring you the work of a writer who we feel has a unique writing voice. Often, these writers will be someone you have never read or heard about. And often, after reading their Apex Voices book, these writers will be people you’ll notice being published more and more often — because they’re just that damn good.
Apex is pleased to offer this collection of work by Doug F. Warrick as the first book in the series. Doug is a unique individual and fantastic author… well, Gary A. Braunbeck does a great job describing Mr. Warrick in his introduction, and I would hate to spoil that pleasure for you (okay, I have to mention the sideburns, because they’re awesome).
Sit back. Enjoy. And let Doug Warrick’s voice take control of your grey matter.
Jason Sizemore
Publisher/Editor–in–Chief
Gary A. Braunbeck
“…he pours and pours and pours…”
Try this on for an opening paragraph:
“I knew a girl who tied a hot air balloon envelope to her shoulders, just in case her head should ever burst into flames. It was homemade, sewn together from stolen scraps of Dacron, mottled and gaudy. It was as wide as her shoulders and it hung down to the small of her back like a pair of folded oil–slick dragonfly wings. She pierced the thin, tender skin of her shoulders with four strong surgical–steel rings, two just above the delicate cliff of her clavicle and two over the twin plateaus of her shoulder blades, and to these she anchored the envelope.”
Beats the hell out of, say: “It was a dark and stormy night,” doesn’t it?
It also drapes your brain in a cloak of surreal imagery that somehow manages to still anchor itself to the mundane, making it all the more puzzling, challenging, and, well…
fascinating
. It’s not only an example of a writer with a full–tilt bozo
luxuriant
imagination warming up, it’s an example of what can be accomplished when a writer tosses off the manacles of traditional thinking when applying that imagination to the structure of a traditional short–story narrative — and as Borges–esque as that paragraph may seem, the story from which those lines are taken (as well as all others in this mind–bender of a collection) is, ultimately, respectful of the traditional short–story form, and adheres to it insomuch as the story itself needs to; that is to say, the guy writing those lines knows the rules, so he also knows when and how to break them.
The writer is, of course, Douglas Warrick, and to meet him in person you’d never suspect that he’s capable of producing the kind of mesmerizing, head–spinning, and often incendiary work which graces the pages of this book you have the good sense to be reading.
Let me see if I can describe Doug to you: he is not of what you would call “towering” stature — I stand a little over 5’10” and the top of his head almost reaches my nose — his facial features can best be categorized as “delicate” (my wife put it like this: “he’s a very
pretty
man.”), he’s a quite soft–spoken sort of fellow, usually sporting a pair of the thickest, curliest, this–side–of–a–70s–porn–star
bitchin’
sideburns you’ve ever seen, and if it weren’t for his feet being too small to qualify, you’d almost think he was a Hobbit. He is a citizen of the world, knows a great deal about so–called “foreign” cultures, and for as young as he is has a wealth of human experience that makes you feel like you’ve been standing at a bus stop making tweets since you were eleven years old.
He is also one of the most painstakingly
precise
writers I’ve ever encountered. Obsessively painstaking, to be exact. This book you’re holding? It not only almost didn’t almost happen, it almost didn’t happen
three times
. I’ll spare you the details, but the whole shebang reminds me of a (probably anecdotal) story concerning Margaret Mitchell and her novel
Gone With the Wind
: the story goes that Mitchell was so hell–bound determined to make sure the book was as perfect as she could make it that her publisher had to literally yank it out of her hands via a strenuous tug–of–war. I don’t know if Jason Sizemore and the gang at Apex had to go to that length to finally get this book out of Doug’s hands, but I
do
know that I threatened him with physical violence if he pulled it from publication again — and you’ll recall I’m taller than him.
Was it worth the wait(s)? Damn right it was.
Plow the Bones
is hands–down the finest single–author collection I’ve read in a decade. I had the pleasure of hearing Doug read “I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me” (and damn if I don’t wish I’d come up with that title) at an Apex Day gathering a few years ago, and it was something of a minor revelation to me; that story — a beautifully–rendered extended metaphor tale about urban paranoia and personal isolation carried to phantasmagoric extremes — forever destroyed any preconceptions I’d had about the man and his work: Doug Warrick was the Real Thing. Most writers are well into their fourth or fifth decade before achieving the level of skill and craftsmanship he’s already reached. (I should mention here, just to keep everything above–board, that I am 53 and I hate him. Talented little toad’s work makes mine look like it’s been running on fumes; I think I shall rip those sideburns from his delicate face whence we meet again. Digression endeth here.)
I am tempted to compare Doug’s work to that of Harlan Ellison, and while that might not off–base (you’d have to be clinically brain–dead to not see the Ellison influence in some of these pieces), it’s far too easy and obvious an association, and trivializes both writer’s work; I do feel that there are echoes here of Kobo Abe, Donald Barthelme, Gertrude Stein, Borges, a touch of Kafka and Angela Carter, and a dash of Richard Brautigan — but even those comparisons look trivial now that I re–read them. It comes down, methinks, to a matter of how a writer approaches language, whether it is something he or she
works
with or something she or he allows to
possess
them.
Warrick is most definitely possessed. He is acutely aware of language in all of its colors, textures, lyricism, and subtleties; he uses words the way composers use musical notes, and understands the undercurrent of the words’ vibrations like a physicist understands the intricacies of String Theory. Once you’ve finished reading “Her Father’s Collection” (a remarkable story that left me shaking with something akin to awe) or “Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band” (a piece both hysterical and heartfelt), and find yourself finished off with the closing novella, “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl” (a masterpiece, a story that should win many awards), you will know, as I did, that Douglas F. Warrick has at last arrived on the scene on a Big Way, and that the incandescent cyclone of his imagination is overpowering.
Yeah, I kinda liked this collection, if you haven’t figured it out yet.
I can think of no better way to characterize Doug Warrick the writer than to quote a line (arguably my favorite line in the book) from one of the early stories contained herein; a line that should serve as something of incantation for all writers to perform when that damned story just
has
to be released from your head and set upon the page: “…he pours and pours and pours until that sad and noisy world behind his eyes is eaten by a great white flood.”
Welcome to the sad, noisy, mind–bending worlds of Douglas F. Warrick. You have no idea what you’re in for. As it should be.