Authors: Gary McMahon

How to Make Monsters (24 page)

ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE

This one started off with
me fooling around and turned into something more serious. I wanted to combine
some weird physical creatures with a sort of existential dread, and came up
with this idea of the dolls and relics being linked to whatever is preying upon
my lead character.

NOWHERE PEOPLE

I think this one speaks
for itself. It was inspired by a piece I read in a local newspaper about the
murder of an honest immigrant worker trying to make ends meet; a family man who
was killed by ignorant thugs simply because he was a foreigner.

FAMILY FISHING

This is another story
that began as a bit of a joke but ended up being deadly serious. The issues of
family and the traditions we hand down the line to our children have always
interested me, and the family name here should, of course, be familiar to every
reader of weird fiction.

SOMETHING IN THE WAY

I’ve tried and tried to
remember where this story came from, but cannot recall what specific thoughts
triggered it. I think I was looking for a new way to examine a familiar theme,
and the title (from a Nirvana song) would not leave me alone. The story came
slowly, painfully, but I was pleased with the end result. It’s certainly one of
my darker pieces, but in this case I feel the bleakness is more than justified.

A STILLNESS IN THE AIR

The title comes from an
introduction by Charles L. Grant to one of his Shadows series of short story
anthologies, and I guess in that case this one must be for him. I never met the
man, but his fiction had a great effect on me at an age when I was looking for
something exactly like it. Amid the bangs and crashes of modern horror, Grant’s
voice remains a constant background whisper: quiet, restrained, yet utterly
terrifying.

ONCE A MONTH, EVERY MONTH

Again, this one is about
family tradition and the monsters it can create. A lot of the families I know,
or have known, seem to hide the suggestion of something dark behind a façade of
seeming perfection, and this story is about one such group.

SAVE US ALL

Organised religion is
something I’ve always been dubious about, and this story goes a long way to
summing up some of my feelings on the subject. I’ve never been a big joiner; I
prefer to stand at the sidelines, watching, forming my own judgements. The
people in this tale are unable to do that for fear of being left behind. I’m
sure we’ve all felt that to some degree.

A BIT OF THE DARK

Fritz Leiber has always
been one of my favourite genre writers. I feel smarter when I read his short
fiction, and quite often he blows me away with the sheer genius of his
storytelling. I was immersed in reading Leiber when I started this story (hence
the referential title) and found myself with a day off work and nothing planned
to take up my time. So I sat down and challenged myself to write long
multi-viewpoint story: a first draft of at least 7,000 words over the course of
a single day. I succeeded in that task, but was left emotionally exhausted. I
put away the draft and only returned to it several months later, when I was
sufficiently removed from the thing to feel capable of editing it into some
kind of sense. So this one is for Mr. Leiber, and I hope that it’s not so bad
that he turns in his grave…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary McMahon lives in
West Yorkshire with his wife, son and monsters... lots of monsters. His fiction
has appeared in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic and he
is the author of the British Fantasy Award nominated novellas
Rough Cut
and
All Your Gods Are Dead
, a collection of short fiction,
Dirty
Prayers
(also nominated for a British Fantasy Award), and the novel
Rain
Dogs
. Forthcoming are more stories, and
To Usher the Dead
— a
collection of stories featuring the character Thomas Usher, a down-at-heel
psychic detective. Recently two of McMahon's stories were reprinted in
The
Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
and
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
,
which pleased the monsters greatly.