So, my week in the limelight at Pseudopod is over. It’s been amazing to read all the positive comments people made about "Hometown Horrible."
I’m sure the majority of the positive response is due to the spectacular performance by Elie Herschman and the creepy, crescendoing closing monologue by host Alasdair Stuart.
And because the ghost-meme of Helmut Finch compels the commentors to lure others into listening as well. Now that most everyone who is going to get an infestation of cornstalk witches probably has one, I would like to say a few things about the story.
First off, unlike my usual writing process where I barf up some text and then never change it, this story went through several radical transformations after visits to the Cryptopolis and Tryptophan writing groups, and a final transformation after some insightful suggestions from the Pseuopod editorial staff. I won’t bore you with the details, but it involved swallowing my pride and removing various stylistic affectations that simply didn’t work.
The origins of this story come from two places, the first being Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind. I took notes the entire time I read it. Although to be perfectly honest, I think that meme-theory is way too vague to have any real-world value.
The second origin is at the Austin World Fantasy Con a couple years ago. I only went to one panel discussion (I spent most of my time getting drunk at room parties, woohooo!) and that was the panel on Robert E. Howard literature studies. My colleague Mark Finn, author of the definitive Robert E. Howard biography, Blood and Thunder, was there, as was the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHupa, pronounced ‘reh-hoopa’). Listening to that panel I was fascinated by how closely a love of Robert E. Howard was tied to a Texas identity. It made me wonder what a similar pulp-fiction figure from Wisconsin would be like. I was so lost in this wondering that I showed up late to the panel I was on with Lou Anders, Stephen Dedman, and Sharyn November. Sharyn mocked me in front of a packed conference room of about three hundred people, ensuring that the panel was the hit of the con.
In the spirit of Wisconsin jingoism, almost everything in "Hometown Horrible" that relates to Wisconsin is true. For instance there really is a Norske Nook and it has the most amazing pies in the world. I work as a baker, so I ought to know. If people are properly nice to me, I’ll bring my own imperfect re-creation of their sourcream raisin pie to the Space Squid room party at Armadillocon.
There also was a Zona Gale public library in Portage, which is roughly where I grew up. The library used to be the mansion of Portage’s only literary star, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ms. Zona Gale. For the past couple of years I’ve been reading the novelization of her prize-winning play, Miss Lulu Bett. It is breathtakingly dull.
As Bruce Sterling pointed out in his critique during Tryptophan, "Hometown Horrible" is just another version of "The King in Yellow." I like to think of it as "The King in Yellow" meets Fargo. (And for another King in Yellow esque meme story, you should check out "Meme" by Jeff Carlson, published here at RevSF.)
One more thing, just to put it out there for the record. I wanted the naming scheme to be vaguely reminiscent of pulp fiction writers without being directly analogous. The name Helmut Finch comes from the thought process that "Lovecraft" always made me think of lovebirds, which are not unlike finchs. And "Albert ‘Prof’ Jaqueline" comes from E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, through the intermediary of my favorite artist of all time, Jacqueline Smith. Make sense now?
