Descent Into Madness

Did you ever wish the dead would just stay dead?

My second short story won second prize at the National Honor Society's 1981 Florida State Convention. It appears in Descent Into Madness as Chapter Six.

Descent Into Madness explores the same ideas that my early career did. The same ones I've never entirely let go of, actually. Death, fate, free will, good and evil, the meaning of life. It contains the only sex scenes I've ever written, but fear not -- they're horrific rather than erotic. I believe my concept of the devil, who I call Ahriman, is unique. And yes, I'm aware of how crowded that particular field is.

Also, I used to work on a hog farm with a big ol' lesbian who could break Xena in half and she said Descent Into Madness scared the shit out of her and gave her nightmares. I watched Hellraiser 3 with her. Great film. Nothing at all like Descent Into Madness. Just some random trivia for you.

Of all the stuff I ran through Zoetrope, only one got a consensus. A positive consensus, or I wouldn't be mentioning it in a sales pitch. Yeah, it was Descent Into Madness. It can be philosophical, but it's also got the fast pace that I was known for even before Twitter transformed me from a novelist into a three-panel cartoonist.

There was talk of making this into a movie. Like all such talk, it was an agent who was full of B.S. But during those brief heady weeks, for the part of Ahriman, I cast Andreas Katsulas. I'd seen him in one role, the KGB agent in The Death Of The Incredible Hulk. No Babylon 5 or Star Trek yet. The part of Clyde Windham was to be played by Dennis Franz. No, I wasn't aware of any budget on this thing.

When I wrote Descent Into Madness, I was pulling 16-hour shifts at the aforementioned hog farm, 12 days on and two days off. I obviously didn't have the good sense to sleep when I got home from work. Instead, I wrote this. It helped keep me sane. At that farm, the rules of reality changed daily. In Descent Into Madness, the rules of reality change daily.

Descent Into Madness is set in the fictional towns I use in several of my novels. The actual setting is Burgaw, North Carolina. I know most of the people in Descent Into Madness. I was living in the house where most of the freakiest stuff happens. I wrote the final scene in that house, with pen and paper, by candlelight, during a power outage in a hurricane. The absolutely perfect way to do it.

Did you ever feel that your life was but a series of experiments being conducted upon you by forces unknown and unknowable? Does the nature of reality change almost daily, as if someone wanted to see how you'd react? Are there things you knew in very core you'd never do, until you discovered you were wrong and you did them? Did you ever wish the dead would just stay dead?