HEY SO. I am beyond pleased to announce that I have a story, ‘The Evaluator,’ in Martian Migraine Press’ ‘A Breath From the Sky’ anthology!
This looks like it’s going to be really interesting. The ‘seed’ for each story was intended to be ‘The Colour Out of Space,’ one of HP Lovecraft’s more vague cosmic horror stories. There’s definitely something down there, but what? There’s a dead kid and a dead dog at the bottom of the well for sure, but how did they get in there? What’s causing the bioluminescence? Why can’t the meteorite be properly studied? What’s going on? The unanswered questions leave a lot open to interpretation, and a lot to spin off, riff off, continue the story, write a prequel, all sorts of stuff.
Initially, I thought about prions – how when the meteorite comes, it begins to turn things around it into things that resemble itself in some weird way. Probably, observers think, the things that are happening to the crops and the water resemble things that exist on the meteorite’s homeworld, wherever that is. All it had to to was show up. It’s the same with prions – once a prion shows up, the potential is there for it to cause other proteins to turn into prions simply by proximity. But I discarded that idea (reluctantly) because I wanted to express the cosmic horror of the original story – something scary, something unknown, something bigger than the participants. Prions lack motivation, you know? It’s not that they lack the ability to scare; it’s that they lack the ability to target.
So I thought about it for a while longer, and all of a sudden the entire story plopped into my fingers, as if (gasping!!!!!!!!) they too had been possessed by something not of this world. A world-weary employee of a questionable company; a jaded little kid in a trailer park; the darkness and silence of the woods; the shake-up of what we know to be sacred and what we guess to be profane. And, like ‘Willing’ in Principia Ponderosa, a world where the gods wander around with their hands out for a treat or a slap, depending on whether they feel sufficiently respected.
Anyway, again. Don’t know if it’s any good. Really like it. Hope others like it too!
Related: Love the ‘Breath’ cover. Very professional.