Toxic Shadows

PREFACE

What you hold in your hands is a dream and possibly a nightmare, but most certainly the first horror novel I ever had published.

There was one other book before this, a crime novel called Street Rats. Though I had been publishing horror stories for some six or seven years, when I sat down to write what would be my first published novel, I decided on a hardcore, violent gangster novel which became Street Rats. In the bizarre world of writing, my third novel, Skull Moon, was actually written before either of these and originally called Wolf Moon. After Toxic Shadows, it was rewritten and retitled. And, to make matters more muddled, I had written six novels before any of these, all of which were rejected by publishers. There’s actually a seventh, too, but I threw it out long ago (imagine, if you can, Catcher in the Rye with a psychosexual predator as its protagonist and you’ll know why).

Confused?

Yeah, me, too.

Let’s stay on topic before this gets too fucked up. Toxic Shadows. I wrote this in 2001 and it was published in 2003 to absolutely no fanfare. It made not so much as a ripple in the world of horror fiction. Part of that was the fact that even less people knew who I was than do now. Another part was that TS wasn’t exactly The Stand, if you catch my drift. And the biggest part was that it was put out by a certain apex shit publisher, bottom-of-the-barrel swill collective which shall remain nameless. If you don’t know who I’m referring to, consider yourself fortunate. If you do—and I can hear the moans of disgust even way up here in the Michigan woods—then you know who I’m talking about. Suffice to say, this unnamed organization was (and is) notorious for putting out any piece of shit sent to them. To prove this point, a group of science fiction writers once submitted a novel to them in which the first three chapters were the only chapters—they were repeated until the end of the book. They were promptly sent a contract.

Enough said.

Back to 2001. I decided I wanted to write a post-apocalyptic novel where my characters had to survive the night in a town full of germ-infected psychopathic monsters. Sounded fun, I thought. As inspiration, I kept Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies in the back of my mind, as well as Italian zombie movies and books like I am Legend, Earth Abides, and James Herbert’s The Fog most particularly. My mechanism of infection was to be a mutant strain of the rabies virus, one that had been weaponized during the Vietnam War and “accidentally” let loose in a small Michigan town of my creation, Cut River (the river exists, just not the town). The story would easily spring from that and it did.

These days, of course, using a mutated rabies-type virus is hardly original. Dozens of zombie books and movies have used it ad nauseum… but, in my defense, it was pretty much wide-open territory in 2001 and not the shopworn cliché it has since become. I give myself credit for that anyway.

One more interesting bit here. Back in 1985 when I first began my collection of rejection slips (I was told to piss-off by every mag from the Twilight Zone to The Horror Show, missing very few stops in-between), I wrote a story called “The Nature of the Enemy.” It concerned a guy in the Vietnam War who discovers that a biotoxin called Laughing Man is being sprayed on enemy and, accidentally, friendly troops, creating subhuman, yellow-eyed vampire/zombie monsters that begin to wipe out village after village. The story was pulled into Toxic Shadows and forms the basis of Johnny Davis’ nightmare recollections of the war and is pretty much the foundation of the book itself.

When I sat down to read this, I was hesitant.

I hadn’t actually even looked at it since it came out originally. Reading through it, editing out a few of its excesses, I was struck by the fact that the theme of Toxic Shadows is very much like that of The Devil Next Door, though the latter is a better book with a much more interesting explanation for regression and the monsters are really just people like you and I (hence the title). But here in the world of Cut River as imagined in Toxic Shadows, the monsters really are monsters. Regardless, when I read through TS, I discovered it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. Surely no worse than the reams of weak post-apocalyptic fiction flowing monthly down the old literary drainpipe. No, it wasn’t as good as it could have been, but not as bad as it might have been.

So there you have it: most of what I remember about writing this one… at least that which I don’t mind confessing to. Understand, this is not a great novel. There are flaws in it, inconsistencies, you name it. The characterizations aren’t bad, but neither are they striking. The story itself holds up pretty well and there’s a whole hell of a lot of action, so the book manages to leapfrog its own weaknesses with great bursts of bloody energy. It has that going for it. Just keep in my mind I was pretty green when I wrote it and probably had a lot more ambition and confidence in my abilities than common sense or experience.

With that, I leave it in your hands.

Good or bad, it’s up to you now.