Chapter 8
Part II
Mr. Devil Blues
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part III
Dry Bone Shuffle
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Ghost Road Blues: An Introduction
BY JONATHAN MABERRY
Ten years.
That’s how much time has passed since my first novel, Ghost Road Blues, was published.
In some ways it feels like ten minutes, and in others it feels like this is the sort of thing I’ve always done. Write fiction, I mean.
It’s not, though. When I sat down to write this novel it was my very first attempt at fiction. I had no idea if I was going to be any good at it. Hell, I didn’t even know if I was going to like writing novels. Prior to that I’d written nonfiction going all the way back to my college days. Thousands of feature articles and how-to articles for magazines, mostly on topics like jujutsu, selfdefense, travel, bartending, skydiving, relationships, science, music. I did reviews and op-ed pieces, then I shifted gears and began writing college textbooks (on judo, archery, martial-arts history, etc.) and mass-market nonfiction, again mostly about martial arts. Until something odd happened in 2000.
That was the year I published a book on a subject I’d never before written about, although it was a subject that had always fascinated me.
The supernatural.
I wrote a huge nonfiction book on the folklore of supernatural predators from around the world and throughout history. It was the final book in a four-book contract with a small press. And since the first three books had been about—you guessed it— martial arts, the editor assumed that’s where I’d go again. I didn’t.
You see I’ve always been fascinated by the things that go bump in the night. Monsters, in all their varied aspects and guises, filled my young dreams and my waking speculations. That process started with my grandmother, who was a wonderfully spooky old lady. She believed in everything. All of the monsters, spirits, devils, demons, ghosts, and faerie folk were part of what she called the “larger world.” That was her world. She read tea leaves for the other ladies in the neighborhood—a fiercely blue-collar, low-income part of Philadelphia. The stuff she believed in scared the bejeezus out of my siblings and, quite frankly, a lot of her neighbors. She was the crazy old woman down the street.
I loved her.
She taught me to read tarot cards when I was eight, told me stories about ghouls and goblins . . . and vampires. Werewolves, too. Because of her, I knew the folkloric versions of these monsters long before I saw the Hollywood versions and before I read the literary takes on them.
So I wrote a book about it. The Vampire Slayers’ Field Guide to the Undead. My publisher feared that my martial arts readers would think I’d lost my marbles; he insisted I publish it under a pen name. And so it came out with Shane MacDougall as the author.
Suddenly Shane MacDougall was getting more attention than Jonathan Maberry. More people were talking about his vampire book than had about the dozen or so nonfiction books on other subjects I’d written previously.
It was because of that book that I met some of the people in the horror community—other writers, but also readers. It encouraged me to go back to reading horror fiction, which was something I’d drifted away from over the years. I rediscovered old favorites: Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Peter Straub . . . so many others. And I encountered the newer breed, among them Graham Masterton, James Herbert, Brian Keene, Bentley Little . . . well, the list goes on and on.
I read everything I could get my hands on, and the more I read the more I loved the subtlety and variety in the genre.
Somewhere along the way—I think it was around 2002—I began toying with the idea of trying my hand at horror fiction. Although I’d written plays and poetry, which are a kind of fiction, I’d never tackled prose fiction with any enthusiasm. I always assumed I had too orderly a mind, a journalist’s mind. Fiction was something magical that only other, better writers could manage and who the hell was I, anyway?
While I mulled over it, I began scouting around for horror fiction that drew on the folkloric monsters rather than retreaded the Hollywood versions. I looked and looked, and found very little. I began grousing about the paucity of such fiction. I became vocal about it. Which is when my long-suffering wife, Sara Jo, finally said, “Well, stop complaining about it, and write the damn thing.”
Which I did.
Ghost Road Blues was written to get it out of my system. In part. Mostly, though, it was written because it was a story I wanted to read. It was real people in a practical and pragmatic version of the world encountering monsters. And the monsters in question were variations of vampires, werewolves, and ghosts that appeared in old legends. I wrote the book that was conjured in my boyhood dreams and fed by my love of horror.
In the writing I realized a couple of things.
First, it became very apparent that the story I wanted to tell was not going to fit in one volume. Not even in one very large volume. I love stories with ensemble casts, stories that have an epic feel to them. So I broke the story into three parts, set at the beginning, middle, and end of one very unlucky October.
The second thing I realized was that I rather enjoyed writing fiction. It felt natural, comfortable. It felt right. It felt so right, in fact, that I had to wonder why I’d waited so long to try it. I sold my first magazine features in 1978. My first nonfiction book was published in 1991. Why had I waited until almost the new millennium to try writing a novel?
No clue at all. Maybe I just wasn’t ready.
The third thing I realized was that I had to get an agent. When you write articles and textbooks you don’t need a literary agent. You do need one—and ought to find a good one—when you write novels.
I did my homework and I found a good one, Sara Crowe, originally of Trident Media and since then of Harvey Klinger, Inc. Even though Sara is not a fan of horror, she saw something in Ghost Road Blues that made her want to take it, and me, on. She shopped it and surprised the living hell out of me by selling it—and its two sequels—to Michaela Hamilton at Pinnacle, an imprint of Kensington Publishing.
The first of what was to become the Pine Deep Trilogy debuted in June 2006. I doubt any of us had high expectations. It was a paperback original, and a horror novel, published during a period of tragic decline in horror fiction. I was warned that the book would probably enjoy a few months on the shelves and then quietly fade away. Maybe it would sell a few extra copies when each of the sequels came out, but maybe not.
Something different happened.
People started buying Ghost Road Blues. Reviewers began talking it up. There was message board chatter about it (this was way before Facebook and Twitter). Jonathan Maberry began getting invited to speak at the