I miss the internet. The old internet. That weird wild west of flying toaster screen savers, dancing babies, 56k modems, the screechy dial-up sounds, and landfills full of AOL internet CDs (okay maybe not that part). I miss the highly curated, highly individualistic movie fan sites like AICN, CHUD, Dark Horizons, IGN, and Coming Attractions. God help me I even miss the message boards, trolls and all.
I miss the egalitarian days of the personal Geocities and Livejournal and Angelfire. Of webpages like, well, like this one. Ever since Facebook burst onto the scene in 2007 we’ve seen a gradual, steady death of the free and open internet with quirky personal websites and personality, in exchange for a blandly corporate community fueled by sponsored posts, advertisements, and updates from people you never remember following in the first place. It’s become the equivalent of those boxy new luxury duplexes blocks popping up in neighborhoods near me; blandly corporate structures in place of charming small homes that once resided there.
yes, Netscape Navigator was Peak Internet and yes I still miss it okay?
Along came Instagram, and Twitter/ Xhitter, and Tik Tok and all sorts of negative energy-fueled apps and time-sucks that despite claiming to bring us all together have served to drive us all further apart. Before we occupied these personal spaces for our own creativity and enjoyment. Now engagement is everything and if negative content gets more engagement than positive, well, we really have built the world we truly deserve. We chase algorithms, troll for clicks and likes, and focus on Building The Brand and hoping one day to become someone other people listen to.
And the supposed “saviors” of this algorithmic mess like Threads and Mastodon and yes even BlueSky aren’t making things any better either. Despite their claims of a smaller, more intimate, more friendly experience I have to wonder if another social media platform is really what we need right now when, frankly, we’d all probably be better off without social media, period. We once allowed our minds to roam free, to walk without distraction, to dine without need of a little rectangle filled with information to keep us locked in a cell of our own making.
[In point of fact I *did* take BlueSky for a brief spin but after barely a month I decided that social media and yours truly just aren’t compatible. At all. And rather than try and force it to be a component of my daily life I was pretty well content to just cut the rope and let it drift off into the big blue sky above never to return. So for those of you wondering no you will not find me on BlueSky at this time.]
It’s enough to make one despair, but it reinforces my focus on keeping this little patch of internet real estate alive and kicking. I update fairly regularly, I post long-form pieces (for free I might add), and I require nothing other than you reading it and maybe commenting on what you like.
But to do all of the above … has been very draining lately.
It’s been a challenging year for me I’m not going to lie. I’ve been querying three different manuscripts, one of which is the Celluloid Heroes book. There has been some mild interest so far, but no takers. The fact is I need an audience much, much bigger than this website has been providing me with. While mine is probably one of the more heavily trafficked ones, it still pales in comparison to the traffic a popular Facebook or Instagram page will get.
Forget pale: we’re talking anemic here.
So what do I do? I find a new way forward. Two of them actually.
Some of you are aware but for those who aren’t I’ve been a semi-regular guest on GI Joe: A Real American Headcast. Once a month myself and a crew of regulars discuss an issue of the classic GI Joe: A Real American Hero Comic, an episode of the iconic 80s TV cartoon, and various other GI Joe related ephemera.
And it was here that I realized the solution was there all along. More on that in a bit.
The other thing came last month, November 8, when I hosted the first in an ongoing series of GenX films at the West Newton Cinema. The movie was John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. Joining me was author Susannah Gora, who years back penned the authoritative book on the Brat Pack/GenX/John Hughes era:
I reached out to Susannah in New York, who was thrilled to attend and brought her equally lovely family – husband, daughter, parents, mother-in-law, and best friend – to the screening. A screening which, I am happy to add, was a packed audience of young and old but mostly those of us born between 1965 and 1980 – Generation X. We watched, we laughed, we cried, we cheered, and we pumped our fists like John Bender at the end of Club.
Then I took to the stage, microphone in hand.
I’m not going to lie when I say being up there before a packed audience with that microphone I felt pretty damn good. Both for the attention because I’m nothing if not needy, but for the fact I could stand there, talking about John Hughes, GenX film, 80s cinema, then conduct a discussion with Susannah and field questions from that audience, and feel totally in my element.*
It turns out I actually do know some thing. A lot of things.
About movies. About culture. About life.
Things even repeated viewers of The Breakfast Club did not – like how janitor character Carl (John Kapelos) – is seen in a high school graduate photo at the beginning, implying that this Shakespearean clown figure, the guy who sweeps the halls and fixes the leaks, knows everything that goes on inside Shermer High School because he used to be a student there.
Or that Shermer High is the same high school seen in the movie Hughes would release the following year: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Or that “Don’t You Forget About Me”, the Simple Minds song that opens and closes Club wasn’t a song they wrote or even wanted to record until forced to by their record label and management, and the song ended up becoming both their biggest hit, but also has been forever enshrined as THE Generation X anthem, with Smells Like Teen Spirit a close second (I’m sorry but you know that’s also true).
Standing there, I remembered things. That I love movies. That I love watching them. That I love writing them. That I love writing about them. And I love talking about them.
So beginning next month, January, I will be taking a step back from this website to focus on the launch and updating of:
I spent October through December teaching myself audio recording, editing, and mixing on the Audacity App and more or less have it figured out enough. Because what the world clearly has a dearth of is podcasts featuring aging GenX-ers talking about the movies of their youth. Only, to be fair, I feel my take is different than the norm. if you’re a regular reader of the Celluloid Heroes entries on this website you have some idea what this will entail. For those of you unfamiliar, I encourage you to check them all out.
Presently I’m in good shape; I have six full episodes ready to go and those will unspool monthly. My goal was always to be six months ahead of the curve to allow for things like life events, technical foul-ups, fire, theft, and other acts of Dog.
What to expect? Well, let’s call them spoken-word performances of the Celluloid Heroes essays, chapters, and otherwise. Interspersed with music clips, trailers, commercials, and some surprises along the way. Some will be familiar as they are expanded versions of the essays I’ve posted here. There will be some new ones as well. Mostly new ones.
Now while I will be taking a step back from posting regular updates to this website I won’t be abandoning it entirely. I will be posting show-notes and annotations here on a monthly basis with the arrival of each episode. There will be some other writing here and there as well.
For me my reasoning behind this decision is two-fold. Maybe three.
One, to put the Celluloid Heroes story to audio and hopefully reach the audience you need to have to get a non-fiction book about film published in this day and age; I fully admit that. If it sounds mercenary, well, it kind of is. Having a book based on a (hopefully popular) podcast won’t hurt the cause. It may even help it.
But at the same time the very real prospect of a Celluloid Heroes book never being published would be just as disappointing. With a podcast (hopefully a successful one) the stories get told whether a publisher bites or not.
For me that’s more important: telling the story. That’s number two. the worst fate to befall any creative is to create something you genuinely toiled on and just as genuinely believe is quite excellent, then find out nobody’s buying or worse, nobody’s interested in taking even a look at it. This podcast allows me to circumvent the tastemakers and gatekeepers and out the Celluloid Heroes story out into the world.
The third thing? Well, I won’t lie when I say that the writing game has been a tremendous strain these past several years. Both with the endless querying and piling up of rejections, but also with a general lack of motivation to write when I know just to put pen to paper for the first time means to embark on a months-to-years long effort until I have something read-ready that will in all likelihood get passed on with a stock rejection.
And frankly, I don’t have that much time left in me. Not is a specific “I have bad news for you Mr. Abraham” way; just that my age being what it is there are fewer miles ahead of me than there are in my rear-view. That I am nearer to the end of this movie than I am the beginning This is not any sort of pessimism: these are just facts. I’m not whining or begging for your sympathy. Short and sweet of it is that I want to devote what time I have left on creative projects that will actually get out in the world to be seen, or in this case heard.
I thrive best when I have an ongoing thing to work on, to engage with, to create. With The Celluloid Heroes Podcast I have that; I can write, record, edit, mix, and release a new episode every month that’s out in the world for everyone to see and hear while still having time to pursue other things. There are no agents, no editors, no gatekeepers to drop the portcullis and say “sorry but we’re going to pass on this one.” I’ve spent/wasted far too many days, months, weeks, and years waiting for people to give me an answer e it thumbs up or thumbs down. Here I get to bypass them entirely and get my work into the world.
So that’s where I leave things this 20th of December 2024. New episodes will be available on Apple and Spotify, and I will post links to the shows (with some show-notes here as well). I see the podcast being a component of this website and vice versa.
To that end regular non-Heroes updates maybe a little sparse here, but I do hope to continue with the regular updating of this site to justify your return visits. I will still aim to pen some non-podcast stuff here as well. Who knows? It seems anytime I think I’m done with something, that something finds new inspiration to barge itself back into my life.
So until January I bid all of you a fond holiday season, and I hope all of you will tune in to the first episode of The Celluloid Heroes Podcast. It will be the ultimate trip, I promise.
This is an old paperback. It’s been with me for what seems forever, accompanying me through ten different moves between cities, provinces, states, and countries. It’s an essential relic of my teenage years; specifically that moment when I began the first steps to seriously consider becoming a writer. Every time I open it for a re-read it always reveals something new about its contents, about the time it was purchased, and about myself.
It was spring 1987. I had been first bitten by the Stephen King bug the previous August when I saw Stand By Me, based on his novella The Body (already detailed in Celluloid Heroes Part III). I purchased this particular paperback at Leeds County Books, then one of only two bookstores in Brockville. The other, a Smithbooks, was situated in the Thousands Island Mall in the city’s north end, and a second-hand store, Seekers Books, was, like Leeds County, situated on the main downtown thoroughfare of (ironically) King Street. Of those three bookstores as far as I know only Seekers remains, having stopped there on a swing through Brockville back in 2022.
I don’t remember what prompted me to go shop for my first Stephen King that day though I suspect my Grandmother, herself a big horror fan, had something to do with it because she’d liked his books (I recall being morbidly curious of the garish paperback cover for Cujo on a visit a few years previous). While I had read The Body in the Different Seasons collection I borrowed from the Brockville Public Library (the basis for “Stand By Me”) I hadn’t yet spent my own money on a King book. In 1987 there were plentiful options: that day alone I scoped everything from Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining, to then recent offerings like Pet Sematary, Christine, and Misery. But my eyes gravitated to The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. I gave the back cover a read. These were four short novels written by King and published post-The Shining by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman drawing its nomenclature from author Richard Stark – itself a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, one of King’s favorite writers – and Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a song from which was playing on the radio when King was brainstorming surnames.
The idea, as King outlined in his introduction “Why I Was Bachman”, was simple; he was worried about oversaturating the market with his books so he and his agent devised Bachman, to publish small runs of some early novels written by King while still in High School and later College. To King these for short novels were “pretty good” but clearly not horror. Two of them, The Long Walk and The Running Man were Dystopian sci-fi, both centering around nightmarish gameshows in a futuristic fascist America (indeed they could have been set in the same universe). The other two were suspense/character studies; Rage, which centered on a high school student who shoots his math teacher and takes his class hostage, and Roadwork, a bleak tale of a man who’s lost everything – his wife, his son – but his house and soon find himself embroiled in a fight to keep that as well.
I decided to take the plunge, figuring four novellas for the price of one book (with taxes, around $7 and change Canadian) a deal too good to pass up. I paid, dropped it into my backpack, and biked home. I cleared the homework deck, stretched out on my bed, opened the book and began to read.
Of the tales in Bachman, Rageleft the strongest impression on me as its protagonist, troubled teenager Charlie Decker, was only a few years older than I. Because it was the oldest of the books – written by King while he himself was a high school senior – its voice felt closest to authenticity in all of King’s work especially in its capturing of the teenager’s voice (contrast that with the teenaged protagonist of his more recent Fairy Tale who feels like a 75 year-old man writing a teenager which, frankly, it was). Rage is all anger and self-righteousness; Decker, already facing suspension if not expulsion and possible jail time for attacking a teacher with an adjustable wrench, decides one day to “get it on”, brings a gun to school and shoots his math teacher in the head. Another teacher is shot trying to stop Decker. Then the door is locked, the school evacuated save for the other occupants of his math class. Over the next several hours Charlie will hold court, airing grievances, the whys and wherefores of who he is and what he’s done, and the other students will do the same with their own messed up, miserable lives.
Rage also left an impression I think because of my age. We’d moved to Brockville the previous August after a horrible year and a bit in Greensboro North Carolina (detailed elsewhere on this website; click the “Greensboro” tag for all the gory details). While I’d been friend-less in Greensboro, Brockville was almost the flip-side. Within the first few weeks of eighth grade I’d been invited to the cool kids’ parties, I landed my first (lame eighth grade) girlfriend (she wasn’t lame; just the idea of having a girlfriend in eight grade) shortly after, and was pretty much welcomed. By springtime things had settled, I was no longer the mysterious new kid, and while still abundant with friends and well-liked overall, could sense storm clouds on the horizon.
Those storm clouds? High School. You see, in Greensboro I’d been in a more typical middle school environment, where in Brockville eighth grade was pretty much like kindergarten through seventh; the same class of kids, the same classroom, the same teacher, the same school. These were kids who largely had been with each other since kindergarten; these were friendships and relationships going on nearly a decade in some cases. But with high school, a new building, new faces, teachers, classes, and classmates that was all about to change and change dramatically. I knew from the Greensboro experience what high school was; an alienating world of cliques, popularity contests and conflicts. I knew it was going to be rough and expressed as much to the friends I did have. They scoffed; things wouldn’t change that much, right? Well, I won’t go into all the details but it was once of those instances where the new guy was right on the money.
Rage was notorious for many reasons; perhaps the biggest was King’s decision to pull the book from publication following a string of school shootings that the perpetrators had either owned copies of the book or spoken glowing of it. Even today it’s a tough one to track down unless you head to eBay where a paperback identical to the one I own will set you back thirty dollars at least (some listings go up to fifteen hundred dollars, with a rare paperback of Rage in its original release asking an astounding eight thousand dollars). I would wager the inclusion of the hard-to-find Rage the main reason for such prices. As for King’s explanation for Rage (initially titled “Getting It On”) being pulled from print, well, the debate is ongoing, but any book involving a school shooting was inevitably bound to hurtle into the unyielding brick wall that is Life in America, one nation under gun, at some point. [1]
But if Rage was the primer then The Long Walk was the detonator. It was the characters; the interplay between all of them. With nearly a hundred named and numbered participants on the Walk naturally some fade into the background but King manages to juggle well over thirty speaking parts and have them all register on the reader. It’s also the world-building; the half-track, its stone-faced soldiers, the numbered participants, the three warnings, and the “ticket” delivered from the barrel of a carbine rifle. The premise is simple: the hundred participants of The Long Walk do just that, beginning at a marker on the Maine-new Brunswick border, traverse Maine, and enter New Hampshire before it all comes down to two finalists outside of Danvers Massachusetts. Set in an alternate version of 1970s America, John Travolta references and all, the history woven through the tale – oblique references to an East Coast blitz during the dying days of a World War II that continued into the 1950s indicate a much different outcome – remains part of the scenery familiar enough to us in the here and now (or in Walk’s case, there and then) while just skewing slightly off-kilter. The second longest tale in the collection after Roadwork, of all the Bachman Books it remains my favorite, as well as a top ten-top tier King for me.[2]
So I was all-in on King but after finishing The Long Walk I needed a break myself. School was winding down, I had assignments to finish, tests to pass. I shelved The Bachman Books with the intention of getting back to them when summer arrived. And that indeed happened, though the circumstances of that revisiting felt, in the moment, like something out of a King story.
Because the summer of 1987 would go down in my memory as the summer my face fell off.
We’d visited my cousins that July, and I had plans to be dropped off at my buddy Mark’s home to accompany him to their timeshare up in Muskoka. The visit went well but the night before leaving I started feeling under the weather. Like, really under the weather. I sparked a fever, I went to bed early, and when I awoke my face was covered in pockmarks.
Yes, friends, at the ripe old age of fourteen I had my first case of the Chicken Pox; late for most kids but right on time to fuck up my summer vacation handily. My four year-old cousin had just gotten over a case and was highly communicable and so I got it. Bad. Obviously there’d be no visit to Muskoka. There’d be no summer vacation at all. Instead I got to go home and get used to both the itchiness, and the smell of calamine lotion.
I was miserable. Trying to avoid any scratches or breaks that would leave me scarred. I was semi-successful – one pox formed under a pimple already formed on the bridge of my nose leaving a scar that’s still there to this day – but the worst part of it was the monotony. Being hit with the pox left me highly contagious so I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. Our house wasn’t air-conditioned either so that just added to the uncomfortable misery. I took to hiding out in our basement where it was cool and comfortable, like some hideous monster from, well, from a Stephen King story (or a Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont one; two writers whose work I would discover through King and his non-fiction book Danse Macabre).
In the basement there was distraction aplenty. There was the TV and all that a wonderous 13 channels could afford me which in the daytime pretty much meant game shows in the morning, soaps in the afternoon, and nothing else until roughly 4pm when Video Hits on CBC would begin its daily run.
To be fair Samantha Taylor was 50% of why I watched Video Hits and I’m not alone there either.
My parents’ old record player and stereo was down there also, so I got acquainted with their music collection; Gordon Lightfoot, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, The Guess Who, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were in constant rotation along with a freshly acquired copy of U2’s The Joshua Tree . Seeing as the basement was the most comfortable place in the house that summer I asked if I could sleep down there on the fold-out couch. For July into August I pretty much never left except to go to the bathroom and meals. To keep myself distracted as I slowly recovered, I exercised and I read. The exercise was to keep moving, and keep active. That combined with the sheer amount of weight shed while fighting off the pox meant I really slimmed down. The reading thing; well, since bitten by the King bug I had found increasing interest in the strange, the unusual, and the unexplained. My birthday gift earlier that year had been a subscription to the Time Life Enchanted World series of books; a must have after seeing the iconic TV commercials featuring Vincent Price.
Those Enchanted World books remained with me in the basement, but having read through Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Night Creatures, and The Fall of Camelot enough times over my brain craved more stimulation and with not much else to do I once again picked up The Bachman Books and read the second half of the stories.[3]
Of the remainder Roadworkwas probably my least favorite, not because it’s a bad story (technically speaking it’s the best of the bunch being the then most recently written of the pack), but because its story of middle-aged Barton Dawes fighting back against a world that seems determined to grind him to dust were the most remote from myself and my life at age fourteen. Identification with the protagonists of Rage and The Long Walk was easy when you were within three years spitting distance of them, and The Running Man’s schlocky enjoyment was bolstered in large part by just how different it was from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “adaptation” released that same summer.
But Dawes’ dilemma in Roadwork was too distant for me to really appreciate; a father grieving the death of his child, estranged from his wife, unable to function outside of his own self-destruction and finding himself increasingly out of touch with a world racing to profit at all costs was too remote. Reading it in 2024 though I was shocked to find how prescient King/Bachman was in our modern age of late-stage capitalism, “enshitification”, the loss of our third places, homes, bars and nightclubs, movie theaters and bookstores bulldozed to erect more stacked shipping-container luxury condominium boxes. The interstate about to be rammed through Dawes’ home is itself a big con; relentlessly constructed without actual need so the unnamed state can continue receiving federal funding. Even knowing the outcome on my later reread I almost wanted the resolution of Roadwork to find Dawes triumph at the end, but it was not to be. While in the present day one empathizes with Dawes’ situation, the guy remains an unrepentant, unlikeable asshole. Not even the revelation all of this has transpired in part because of the death of Dawes’ young son from cancer humanizes him.
All the Bachman stories share one common thread in how bleak they are.[4] Two end in the deaths of their protagonists (I won’t say which ones), two end with their protagonists alive but quite possibly driven insane from their separate ordeals (again, I won’t say who). In point of fact Roadwork hews closer to King’s run of crime stories like Billy Summers, and the Finders Keepers series; taut suspense thrillers with vivid characters and pages that self-turn. Roadwork’s biggest problem though remains in its protagonist himself; while his story is a compelling narrative Dawes is just too miserable to enjoy spending time with. It was reassuring in a way to see that even in the early 80s King was still learning his craft as well.
Thanks to the pox I couldn’t see The Running Man in the theater and had to wait for video before I could. The movie and the story it’s based on are night and day. The latter is a glum, grim, very serious dystopian nightmare whose protagonist Richards must compete in a grueling game-show that sees him pursued across the northeastern US in a fight to the death, all to be able to afford the life-saving medical treatments his sick daughter needs. Contrast that with the garish Arnold flick where he squares off with just as garish gladiators in a hellish Los Angeles while Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays a nightmare version of his genial real-life game-show host. Corny, campy, and contrasted with that same summer’s far superior Predator, The Running Man, with its cameos from musicians Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, and wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a retired gladiator turned color commentator seems to be having more fun than I did watching it. As for the Bachman book, the relentlessness of the tale culminated in a fiery climax that while spectacular – and inevitable – left a sour taste in my mouth. In it I can easily see why Bachman never really took flight. What “Bachman” never learned, having died of “cancer of the pseudonym” when he was finally outed by an enterprising journalist, is what King did; that even the darkest of stories need some glimmer of hope in the end. Yes, even Pet Sematary.
The most interesting thing about these Bachman books is they all feel of the very same world. The Long Walk and The Running Man could share the exact same (“what if the Nazis won WW2”) universe, and it’s easy to see a kinship between Charlie Decker of Rage and Barton George Dawes of Roadwork: two unyielding objects who refuse to bend and end up broken as a result. I think though what makes these grim, gloomy Bachman protagonists fascinating is how believable they are. Who hasn’t driven past their own childhood home and found it re-painted and landscaped beyond recognition or torn down and rebuilt into a multi-unit modernist monstrosity? Who, in their teenage years, hasn’t felt like a misfit unable to fit in anywhere? Where the characters in these two more grounded in reality Bachman Books leap off the page is in the violent means in which they resist the roles thrust upon them; Decker kills two teachers and takes a classroom hostage. Dawes undermines his place of employment, shatters his marriage, and uses violent means to disrupt the eminent domain about demolish his home for a freeway extension that was unnecessary to begin with.
When finished with Bachman that first read in 1987, and still dealing with the pox (which was just beginning to fade), I asked my mother if she could go to Seekers and see if any Stephen King books were available I didn’t have any specific titles in mind so when she came home later that day with lightly used paperbacks just dropped off paperbacks of Cujo and Carrie I was set. Later that summer came Different Seasons – the book I’d already read from the library – but now a copy I could call my own and still own to this day. Cujo was lost when lent to someone who I legitimately can’t recall, but this copy of Carrie – a rare first edition paperback as it happens – is the one I still possess.
This copy, as it happens …
While I probably would have become a die-hard horror fan eventually, it was that summer my face fell off that really sparked my interest and my fandom of King; being stranded and temporarily disfigured at home was certainly an identifiable catalyst for that fandom. Neither horror nor King have really left my life either. There was a period in the 90s I drifted away from him, until 1997 – a decade on from that fateful summer of 1987 – when, working a dull as dishwater summer job I found myself hitting up the local used bookstore where I purchased and finally read the doorstops that are The Stand and It respectively. That return to Castle Rock, and Derry, soon led me to Jerusalem’s Lot, Dark Score Lake, and Little Tall Island; fictional locations very familiar to King’s constant readers and Greek to everyone else. After 1997 I never stopped gorging on King and while my interest has waxed and waned now and again every new King book is a must-read for yours truly. He’s in his 70s now and I hope he’s still writing when I’m in mine.
Sitting poolside this past summer I dove back into The Bachman Books for a month-long re-read and found those familiar names and characters waiting for me, ready to perform in my theater of the mind yet again. I held court with Charlie Decker in Rage, took The Long Walk with Garraty, McVries, Stebbins, Olson, and mad, mad Barkovich. I holed up in my house with Dawes in Roadwork, and followed The Running Man on his nightmarish journey through a New England landscape familiar to me now after six years as a transplanted Yankee. I’m nearly forty years removed from that teenager who picked The Bachman Books off the Leeds County bookstore shelf and decided to take the plunge, but reading those stories again made me feel fourteen all over again.
There remains a particular alchemy in re-reading some old favorites; treading familiar ground yet discovering something new every time. That’s why stories are important. That’s why they resonate, echo and ripple through our lives.
That’s why they matter and why they always will.
ADDENDUM: a reader asked if I was familiar with The Stephen King Book Club on YouTube. The answer is yes, and it was their step-by-step “broadcast” reporting on The Long Walk that inspired me to pick up the Bachman Books again for a summer reread. I recommend the channel and the first episode of their Long Walk Recap, linked right here:
[As an addendum, this will be the final website update of 2024. I’m busy on a couple of other projects, one of which I hope to formally announce here in January. Until then …]
[1] I have one myself – a thriller titled Underneath – that begins with an act of gun violence in a high school and gets even bleaker from there. Small wonder agents have given it a hard pass without even reading the thing. A pity too, as it’s one of my better efforts.
[2] The remaining ten (in no particular order) are ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Bag of Bones, The Stand, The Body, Apt Pupil, 1963, The Mist and, of course, On Writing. Honorable mention to his non-fiction book Danse Macabre; a big inspiration for my Celluloid Heroes book and web series.
[3] I still own that complete set of 21 books by the way and they remain one of my most prized collections.
[4] The Bachman books not included in this collection – Thinner, Blaze, and The Regulators – are all similarly downbeat. Small wonder Bachman wasn’t a blockbuster of an author …
Everybody has that one magical, occasionally momentous summer: the one that lingers in your memories decades later. For me that was the summer of 1994: the first summer I spent the totality of in Toronto. I was living in a house on Ossington Avenue with a bunch of other Film School nerds – Alex Boothby, Marcus Moore, Warren P. Sonoda, and a theater student named Jason Jones (later of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart among other impressive credits). I served as production coordinator and unit manager on two music videos Warren directed that summer for a Nova Scotia band named Fire Rooster:
Summer 1994 was also the last great summer of the Lollapalooza line-up, which I attended at Molson park in Barrie Ontario just north of Toronto.
And I did …
Owing to the fact I had money in the bank and a loose schedule with work it was in July post Lollapalooza that my buddy Mark, whose family was away on an Alaskan cruise, to come stay at his place in my old Scarborough stomping grounds, to grill burgers on the barbecue, to partake of the in-ground swimming pool, and to just enjoy being twenty-one years old. To this day exactly thirty years later the summer of 1994 remains the best summer of my life. Possibly because – and I have reflected on this before – it was probably the last truly care-free summer of my life which would become more complicated as the decade wore on. In my mind and memory the years of 1989-1994 reflect a certain moment in time and in my life almost diametrically opposed to the 1995-2000 stretch that was a lot less fun by comparison (though it had its moments as well).
In a strange way the summer of 1994 was a reflection of Generation X as well; we’d enjoyed a pretty good run the preceding decade or so as we moved to the forefront of the cultural focus. Our music, our movies, our media was dominating the marketplace with no signs of slowing. But as always on those clear summer days and warm summer nights you often miss the storm clouds gathered in the distance. But at the time t hey did feel distant to me. I was having the time of my life. Hanging out, hitting the bars, and watching movies. lots and lots of movies.
If there was jewel in the crown that was the Toronto movie theater scene back in the 1990s the Uptown Theater on Yonge Street just south of Bloor had claim to the prize. The Uptown, specifically “Uptown One” was the largest, most cavernous space with the largest screen short of the IMAX one at Ontario Place, and accompanied by earth-shaking THX-certified sound. For years it was the theater for the Toronto International Film Festival, hosting premieres, and the entirety of the Midnight Madness Film Series where my film school pals and I gorged ourselves on horror, sci-fi-suspense-action films during the glorious ten days of TIFF that kicked off that first week or so of school. It also hosted regular Midnight Movie screenings every Saturday; big-screen movies you needed to see on the big screen to fully appreciate them. Here was an opportunity to catch those movies we missed in theaters the first time around like Jaws, Die Hard, and The Shining.[1] And we availed ourselves of that opportunity every chance we got.
Front row, center, resting your feet on the apron were the best seats in all of Toronto by the way …
The great thing about these midnight screenings was they were almost always packed. Not just a few weirdo movie random types; these were large, diverse movie going crowds willfully denying themselves a good night of sleep to spend two hours beginning between 11:30 pm and 12:00 am to watch a movie they could have easily rented on video because they loved film. I will never forget the bloodcurdling shrieks of one woman sitting a few rows down from me during a screening of Aliens, as a face hugger was slowly picking its way towards an unawares Newt during the Med lab sequence. Same as I’ll never forget that moment in The Shining where I knew (through repeated viewings on video) which column Jack Torrance was hiding behind with his axe as hapless Dick Halloran approached and just had to wait for the audience to jump in their seats and scream.
The Uptown felt like a movie theater; a Movie Palace to be exact, for the main auditorium was enormous, dwarfing everyone who sat inside. The people who ran the Uptown seemed to genuinely enjoy their work too; so much so that on occasion they would surprise audiences with performances from local busker/fringe mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who once serenaded a packed crowd of filmgoers with a song written for and about the Michael Bay film we were all there to see; Armageddon. The Uptown casts such a long shadow over the collective memories of all who went there that even today there are those in Toronto who mark its closing and eventual demolition (for a condo tower, natch)[2] as the beginning of the decline of Toronto’s movie going scene. All of the great – and to be fair not-so-great – theaters began to fall like dominoes in the early 2000s. The Uptown. The York. The Eglinton. The Hyland. The Hollywood. All replaced by glossy and garish multiplexes that promised Big Screens, Big Sounds, Big Experiences but always felt less special than a movie at the Uptown. Sure they had stadium seats, and state-of-the-art sound. But their lobbies were noisy, garish places with video games and attractions that cheapened the theatrical experience.
Put simply: The Uptown was the theater you went to when you wanted the best possible movie-going experience. When a highly anticipated movie was scheduled to play there, the line to get in routinely stretched around the block, which is where I, along with elementary school friend Mark and high-school/college friend Nathalie and hundreds of others found ourselves on Saturday August 29, 1994 as we queued near the front of that line to see a new Oliver Stone film called Natural Born Killers.
Outside of John Carpenter has any filmmaker has had as impressive a consecutive run of movies as Stone? Beginning in 1985 and ending just ten years later he directed Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Stone was very much a filmmaker of his time; that mid-80s to mid-90s run. In that decade he had his finger as firmly on the pulse of the movie-going public as Spielberg and Lucas had from 1975-1985; not as a box-office juggernaut but for sheer gallons of ink spilled in discussing the controversial filmmaker’s body of work.
Controversy has been Stone’s thing pretty much from the start of his mainstream career. He had a spotty, unremarkable run as a low-budget schlock director in the 1970s before breaking out with his screenplay for Midnight Express, followed by ones for Conan the Barbarian and Scarface sparking that now perennial conversation of whether movies have become too violent. But his landmark Platoon put him on the map and again courted controversy with its depiction of soldiers doing less than honorable things in the jungle, most notably in the film’s central My Lai-inspired village massacre. But it was also a powerful metaphoric tale of seduction, of the embodiments of good (Willem Dafoe’s Christ-like Sgt. Elias) and evil (Tom Berringer’s brutal Sgt. Barnes) vying for the soul of wide-eyed youth Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Platoon, which I saw in the theater in Lake Placid NY while on a ski trip with my parents, knocked me on my ass. I wasn’t the only one: as the credits rolled my dad and I stood up to leave and realized we were the only ones in the packed cinema who were standing.
Stone seemed to dial back on that aspect of his work, and what’s remarkable about his subsequent films is in how tame they are. The heroes and villains of Wall Street (greed), Talk Radio (racists), Born on the Fourth of July (an indifferent government) and even The Doors (excess) are both conventional and easily identifiable. Nobody in a Stone film is an innocent though; all of them are tainted by their original sins, even Born’s paralyzed vet turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic, who joins the army to fight the commies in Viet Nam and is “enlightened” by a single VC bullet to the chest.
Stone dealt in broad strokes drama; subtlety was never his strong suit nor was it his intent. His messaging was graffiti sprayed over the steps of the US Capitol; a message best communicated by being shouted to the masses. How well that worked for you was all a matter of opinion. Some hated his proselytizing; others embraced it because it was so clear-cut obvious. It was blunt, straight-forward, lacking in nuance. It was an internet-era filmmaking before the internet really took hold.
But audiences were unprepared for 1991’s JFK; his propulsive, occasionally convincing, always thrilling deep dive into conspiracies revolving around the assassination of the president on November 22, 1963; a date that loomed as large in the Boomer psyche as September 11, 2001 would in the memories of subsequent generations. JFK was unforgettable both for the subject matter but also for the way the film was presented, in a dizzying montage of varied film formats, aggressive narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage including the famous Zapruder film showing the back of the president’s head blown out over and over and over (“Back and to the left … back and to the left … back and to the left”) again.[3]
Had JFK been a sluggish historical drama it might not have garnered much notice; to that point Stone’s films had earned respectable dollars at the box office but never blockbusters. JFK changed that with its top-flight cast a virtual murderer’s row of talent; Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O Sanders, Sally Kirkland, Wayne Knight, Tony Plana, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bob Gunton, Donald Sutherland (in one of the greatest single-scene performances in film history), and Joe Pesci. The $40 million dollar JFK earned $200 million worldwide, making the three-hour plus film a genuine success. In late 1991 it was the movie you had to see; I recall attempting on two separate occasions to see it in Kingston, and the film being sold out by the time we got to the box office window.[4]
But even to my impressionable teenaged mind Stone’s JFK was hokum, albeit entertaining hokum; a mix of narration, fast cuts, mixed media, all of it creating a propulsive story that’s convincing because it moves so fast. And had I seen JFK in the theater in 1991 (it wouldn’t be until 1994 that I, along with Warren, went to see it at the Paradise Cinema not far from the rental we were sharing) I would be writing about it and not Natural Born Killers, which came along barely than three years later and proved to be an even more controversial film. As though Stone himself was saying: “You want controversy!? I’ll give you controversy!”
Natural Born Killers feels born from the response JFK received in the mainstream press and the often vicious, vitriolic attacks Stone himself received from politicians and pundits, not to mention what I am sure were many angry letters sent to his production office. Stone was personally affronted by the JFK backlash and identified the news media as the main culprit, accusing them of whipping up negative reviews and creating controversy all at the behest of their corporate masters. The news media who, in Stone’s mind, had for three decades perpetuated the “myth” of Kennedy’s assassination, toeing the Warren Commission’s line about Oswald being the lone gunman.
And yet Stone himself even identified that while the old guard hated JFK, it tested and played very well to the filmgoers born after the assassination: Generation X. The ones much more willing to cast a wary, distrustful eye to their governments, their leaders, even their parents. Like he too saw this next generation as more willing to ask tough questions of what the news deigned to show them.
If only there were a project he could make to draw from that audience …
It took a little while to figure out what that project would be. Stone followed JFK with Heaven & Earth, the “third part” of his loosely connected Vietnam trilogy, this time focusing on the experiences of a Vietnamese woman caught up in the war. The film’s mixed critical response and box office failure seemed an additional rebuke. Here was Stone addressing his critics and attempting to tell a woman-centered story about the horrors of war, only to have it be soundly rejected, presumably as an additional punishment for stirring the conspiracy pot. The failure of Heaven& Earth seemed to light a fire in Stone. All he needed was the right project.
Then producers Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher passed Stone a screenplay they’d optioned by a young writer on the up-and-up named Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers was an incendiary black comedy about two thrill-killers, married couple Mickey and Mallory Knox, and how they become media superstars, aided and abetted by the same tabloid news media that depends ratings-wise on their exploits. The 90s saw the rise of tabloid and “Reality TV” which was another “only in the 90s” innovation that would rise to dominance beginning in the early 2000s beginning with MTV’s The Real World – a “documentary” about a group of 20-something GenX-ers cohabitating in a NYC loft – that made minor celebrities out of “normal” people (until the next season’s cast came along, and the next, and the next …)
“Reality TV” extended to the actual real world, and incendiary criminal acts became daytime news fodder as well. Court cases like Eric and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbitt and – in a bit of real-life-to-showbiz synergy nobody saw coming, OJ Simpson, captured the public’s attention whether we wanted it or not. You couldn’t avoid knowing who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were because the nightly news blasted you with every bit of information about them. The Goldman-Simpson Murders occurred earlier the summer of Natural Born Killers’ release, prompting Stone to add in a shot of OJ – still a year away from his trial – at his arraignment to the film’s closing montage weeks before release. With the first Gulf War resolving itself too quickly for the news media to really make bank it was looking for something – anything – to draw in viewers and keep them there as 24-hour news network CNN made its bid for dominance and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was waiting in the wings, lunching its 24-hour channel in 1996.
Stone loved the script. It represented his chance to take some retaliatory shots at the media who had eviscerated him and make them, not the killer couple, the true villains of the story. In Stone’s mind (and in his massive rewrite, aided by Richard Rutowski and David Veloz, of Tarantino’s screenplay – the budding auteur only got a story credit), Mickey and Mallory are victims of the same trash media and insidious reach of television that made Stone himself Public Enemy #1. Mickey’s fleetingly glimpsed childhood is one of abuse and murder and suicide. Mallory lives in a home under constant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her domineering father (Rodney Dangerfield) and doormat of a mother (Edie McClurg); that flashback plays out as a deranged sitcom with laugh track called “I Love Mallory”, filmed on a soundstage with big bulky TV cameras. Mickey’s entrance is to audience applause, and tasteless jokes get the laugh-track treatment.
Mickey and Mallory were young punks (and killers, let’s be clear) but are simultaneously the only three-dimensional characters in the film. The rest of the main cast – Tom Sizemore’s media-savvy super-cop Jack Scagnetti, Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden Dwight McClusky, and Robert Downey Jr.’s trash tabloid reporter Wayne Gayle – are all cartoon characters played to an even more cartoonish hilt. The only actor who comes close to projecting any sense of gravitas is activist turned actor Russell Means, who cuts a sympathetic, short-lived figure in his brief role as a Native American who takes Mickey and Mallory in during their desert wanderings.[5]
Natural Born Killers is a surreal road-trip through the American psyche, or at least that’s how I imagine Stone described it. Everything in it is played to the nth degree, from teenage serial killer groupies proclaiming Mickey and Mallory “the biggest thing in murder since Manson” to the Superbowl Sunday prison post-game broadcast interview an incarcerated Mickey gives to Gayle that ends up stirring the prisoners to riot by speaking some hard, harsh truths about America, about human nature, about life and how all of ours are exploited by wealthy parasites who get rich off others’ miseries. It’s a crude film in violence, in action, in dialogue, but it is never boring. Viewed in the present it sometimes feels and looks like the pre-internet-pre-cell phone-pre-social media outrage cycle world that it definitely is. Yet it also reads as a warning about where America was heading with its obsession with fame and fortune and celebrity. Gazing about the current hell-scape of influencers and social media stars and provocateurs stirring up outrage in an attempt to go viral and boost their own SEOs, the world Natural Born Killers prophesized has become our reality.
But in one particular area Natural Born Killers genuinely stuck the landing and one must give credit to producer Jane Hamsher, who assembled a series of mixtapes for Stone to listen to while driving around scouting locations through the US southwest. Tapes loaded with the crème of the crop of angry, aggressive GenX-centric music. The idea being this was the music and these were the bands people like Mickey and Mallory would have grown up with, who expressed the rage of a generation crying to be heard. Stone responded with genuine enthusiasm; despite being nearly fifty years old, the film he produced was squarely dropped into GenX territory. Its soundtrack, produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, was an exercise in audio overload featuring L7, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Dr. Dre, Leonard Cohen, Rage Against The Machine, Diamanda Galas, Marilyn Manson, The Specials, The Melvins, and Duane Eddy that played out in the film and on its accompanying soundtrack album as one long uninterrupted fever dream of music, like an Adderall-addicted teen scanning through the radio station settings. And it was that soundtrack that led to Natural Born Killers becoming one of those “of the moment” movies that captured the imaginations of its intended audience; GenX.
As to why it hit so hard, one has to look at Natural Born Killers in the context of the year in which it was released for 1994 was a volatile year for GenX beginning with the suicide of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Alternative Nation had been shattered to pieces and it was looking for something to grasp onto with the same spirit Nevermind had brought to the mainstream. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Green Day tried to fill the void and while soon to become megastars in their own right, they all lacked that rage Cobain delivered in his guttural howl so well; unlike Cobain, these artists wanted to be superstars.
TV was no help either, at the time preoccupied with the ongoing OJ Simpson saga. The movies of that summer had also been a bit of a letdown. Yes, there were megahits like The Lion King and Forrest Gump and Speed, but for young adults culturally immersed in nose-rings, tattoos, dyed hair, and loud aggressive music they were all pretty safely mainstream. While Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction, astounded everyone by winning the Palm D’Or at that summer’s Cannes Film Festival it wasn’t due to be released until that October. That was the environment Natural Born Killers was about to cannonball itself into.
Seeing Natural Born Killers on opening weekend truly felt like participating in an act of generational rebellion. The film was already being called “dangerous” and “incendiary” and “irresponsible”; naturally we had to see it in the best theater possible. As already stated the line to get into Uptown 1 stretched around the block but Mark, Nathalie, and I were near the front. We had tickets, but what we didn’t have were the best seats in the house. That was my job to secure and I knew, from numerous screenings at the Uptown that they were in the first row. Normally the first row is where you don’t want to sit as it’s right up against the screen, but the Uptown’s design was as such that the first row put you up against a lengthy apron leading to the screen further back, and you could put your feet up on the edge of it and stretch out (if there was one failing in the Uptown’s design it was the lack of leg-room).
So I was ready to do my part, and once they tore our tickets and let us inside the building I was off like a shot, racing up the long staircase while the rest crowded onto the escalator. I was in the theater, bounding for the front row, and managed to secure the three seats in dead center before either Mark or Nathalie knew what had happened to me. On locating me right where I said I would be, they were amused, but appreciative for having the best seats that night for what would be an epic experience.
And to be fair, if the experience of seeing Natural Born Killers was better than the actual movie, you couldn’t fault it or us for feeling that way. We did enjoy the movie because we were all the right age – in our early 20s – for its blend of satire, violence, humor, and anger. The audience was fully on-board, laughing at the blood and gore, cheering when the villains got their just desserts, and just tripping out on the truly wild visuals; even compared to JFK, Natural Born Killers looks and feels like no film Stone – indeed anyone – had made before or since.
There was a definite split in reactions to it as well and the split happened right along generational lines: in short GenX loved Killers and Boomers loathed it. In hindsight it’s not difficult to see why in both cases. What the movie and Stone seemed to be saying was this is the world we’ve created for ourselves. A world where ratings, where profit, drives all, and as long as Mickey and Mallory promise Big Ratings and Ad Revenue they’re not only safe but dare we say necessary to keep that spice flowing even if it means a few people get killed along the way.
Stone’s film ends with a roll-call of then sensational media figures Erik and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding, and the Big Kahuna himself OJ Simpson – at the time just arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her friend – everybody in that audience at the Uptown recognized them because we’d been inundated with news stories courtesy of the tabloid culture that came to infest mass media discourse in the 1990s and never really went away. Every week a new outrage, every year another Trial of the Century and on and on and on. Fiction became fact by sheer repetition. TV gurus like Oprah elevated shills like Drs. Phil, Oz, and for all I know Frankenstein as well.
In short, the world Natural Born Killers depicted was a Boomer Creation, and a world GenX had no choice but to live in. What Stone and company were pointing to was something we all had come to realize; that the media was not our friend. That the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather were coming to an end. Truth was less important than ratings, allowing the Rupert Murdoch’s and Clear Channels and Sinclair Broadcastings of the world to buy up the competition was a genuinely bad thing that was just the first salvo in a decades-long decline in independent voice and independent everything.
Natural Born Killers marked the end of the Stone Decade. Never again would the filmmaker capture the public’s imagination and ire in quite the same way. His post-Killers output of Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, (multiple cuts of) Alexander, W., World Trade Center, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, and Snowden, while all possessed of their own merits just didn’t have the same zing as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Those movies put him on the map, and simultaneously made him the punchline to many lesser types’ jokes.
Viewed through the passage of time though he was a filmmaker unlike any other working at the time with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese. But whereas Scorsese’s obsessions were of the rot in the human soul, Stone’s was the rot at the heart of American Identity, extending to his early 2000s documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” which blames American interventionism for every ill and evil of the twentieth century (while simultaneously hand-waving away the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as aberrations of rather than features of totalitarian communist ideology).
In a similar way Natural Born Killers ended up marking the end of the GenX era as well – the angry, volatile brand of it anyway that had dominated the discourse and culture for that first half of this tumultuous decade — which was always a minority, albeit a vocal one. That rage of being a rat in its cage which began in 1989 had lost its way by the end of 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead, the economy was improving, things were looking better than they had at the beginning of the decade. Britpop took the wheel and promised happier, bouncier times. Grunge would soon become a footnote; an outsized one in GenX memory to be fair, but still a footnote. Music was becoming lighter, brighter, peppier, and spicier.
Yes, GenY was making its voice heard and they had the internet as their megaphone. The next five years would look very different from the previous five. Grungy black and white was becoming Gen Ys boy bands and pop princesses. It all made NBK feel like the last hurrah for Alternative Nation as well. I would go back to see the movie in the theater two more times, and I’ve since seen it numerous times more on DVD. Somehow we (my roommates and I) acquired a big bus-shelter sized NBK poster for the living room wall where it hung pretty much until we all moved out at the end of 1996. I’ve revisited in times since but I’m a much older man now and it doesn’t posses that lightning in a bottle it did in 1994. Life looks a lot different in your fifties than it did in your twenties and while I’m still angry at the state of the world I work hard on my side to improve it in whatever ways I can. Certainly not through the barrel of a gun. Definitely not by staring at a screen.
And despite 1994’s summer weighing outsized in my mind there have been great summers to follow, not coincidentally all of which have occurred since my son was born. Nothing makes you appreciate summers more than your child to share them with you. His experiences become your re-experiences, from summers on Cape Cod (1982 and 2024 respectively) to relaxing poolside (1994 and 2024), movies, museums, activities and adventure. Life is what you make it and that applies too to summer.
Looking back today, as dangerous, incendiary and irresponsible as Natural Born Killers may have seemed one cannot deny that it was onto something. What seemed an exaggerated cartoon portrayal of American life in 1994 has sadly become more prescient now as we’ve hurtled into the third decade of the 21st Century. There’s a full laundry list of atrocities – Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Tr**p – that have come to pass since Natural Born Killers’ release to be met with a largely benumbed gaze as “just another day in America ending with Y”. Mass media has given way to social media and its amplification of everyone’s voices to little benefit. Because of algorithms always seeming to hand a bullhorn to the very worst aspects and voices in society it keeps people watching and sharing and scrolling. It makes celebrities of stupidity and ignorance, it platforms cruelty and delivers hatred to an audience addicted to its flavor. If Killers was made today Mickey and Mallory would have been social media stars, broadcasting their crimes on TikTok to millions of adoring fans and spurred countless of copycat murderous couples killing for Internet clout.
In one of life’s many ironies the then-present day critics of Stone’s film would likely admit now that as offensive to their sensibilities the film was then, in the cold hard light of today it looks positively quaint compared to the daily outrage and insanities we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s a shame Stone is more or less retired from filmmaking; he could make a hell of a movie about our present day nightmare.
[1] The Uptown staff were also big movie fans, so much so that the tickets for that screening of The Shining were deliberately misspell to read “The Shinning” in reference to a popular spoof from The Simpsons TV show.
[2] The reason the always profitable Uptown closed? It was sued for not being wheelchair accessible. When the court ordered them to make it compliant, the prohibitive cost of a retrofit led the Famous Players chain to shutter the building and sell the property to a developer. In a tragic twist to the story, during the demolition of the building a wall collapsed onto an ESL school housed next door, killing one.
[3] So mainstream was JFK that it was parodied in an infamous episode of Seinfeld.
[4] Think of that: a three-hour plus film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination selling out multiple times. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or not. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the mid-90s I finally saw JFK on the big screen, at a rep screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theater with my roommate (now president of the Director’s Guild of Canada) Warren Sonoda.
[5] In this post-The Doors film Stone hadn’t quite let go of his obsessions with Native American mysticism.
ADDENDUM:
A reader asked about the significance of this entry’s title. It comes from a great song by the great 90s hip-hop group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television, The Drug of a Nation”, the message of which might just as well apply to the internet culture of today.
October is my favorite month of the year. The month where the blast-furnace heat of summer has finally departed, where the days are shorter, the air crisper, the autumnal colors exploding everywhere. Where I can wear that jacket that makes me look cool.
And of course, October is Halloween month. Not day – month. That’s when I turn my personal preferences in media – film, TV, books – changes to the strange, the dark, the unusual. Halloween is the one holiday-that-isn’t that everyone is free to celebrate in his/her/their own way.
I would argue that to know the truly inherent kindness of people, look to Halloween. That one night of the year where people will decorate their homes and give out candy to children with promise of nothing in return other than spreading about a little bit of magic and wonder before the long, dark onset of winter. Unlike Christmas and Easter and the religious holidays Halloween is for everyone. There’s no agenda, no moralizing – well, except for the religulous (NOT a typo) types who loudly – always loudly – proclaim we’re going to hell for giving some snack-size M&Ms to a kid dressed as Peppa Pig.
Halloween month for me is always a magical time. It always has been, from when I was a young tyke in a home-made Darth Vader costume cobbled together from Glad trash bags and a store-bought mask, to a teenager whose Halloween night meant watching horror movies with friends, to the now parent of a child who anticipates Trick or Treating with almost as much delight as his father does.
Yet October represents another seasonal moment in my life, recurrent since I was around twelve going on thirteen, as October is the month I will inevitably drag out my old paperback copy of this book for an annual reread:
Something Wicked This Way Comes is the book I’ve read more than any other. Something Wicked may be my favorite book solely because it’s had an outsized influence on my own writing. Not directly (though it is referenced in Magicians Impossible) but thematically.
Looking at my work (Mixtape in particular), Something Wicked is the one that’s left the deepest mark. Not for the magic and mystery, nor the terrors of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, its hall of mirrors, its Dust Witch, its cursed carousel.
No, it’s for the central relationships in the novel.
I’ve been thinking of Something Wicked a lot lately for many reasons, not the least of which was a trip back home over the summer that saw us driving through the small town where I lived out my teenage years (the same town that became basis for Garrison Creek – the town where Mixtape is set). There’s something about revisiting the places of your youth; the places you couldn’t wait to leave, only to now wish, in some small way, you could return to. As Teo Stone in my own novel Magicians Impossible described it, “You spend half your life trying to run away from home and the rest of your life trying to run back to it.”
Seeing my old stomping grounds was an experience. A sad one in some ways. The old town hasn’t done so well in the years since I lived there. Factories closed, people moved. Indeed it is one of a select number of small-to-mid-sized towns in that part of the country that experienced negative population growth. When I lived there in the late 80s and early 90s its population sat at around 21,000 people. Today in 2022 its population sits at … around 22,000 people. That’s thirty years of negative growth. People grew up, they moved away, and the aging population just … left. Some relocated, some moved, some passed away.
In a way I wish I hadn’t visited it at all. I wanted to preserve the memory of what it was, not what it had become. The same feeling carried itself with me when I was able to reconnect with some high school friends during that same holiday, the six of us convening at a patio in Toronto’s west end. It had been years since I’d seen any of them – one I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly 25 years. The last time that group had all been together at the same time in the same place would have been the night before we all left that small-town for the big city, for college, for the beginnings of our adult lives. THAT particular night had occurred almost 30 years earlier to the date we met again on the Danforth.
It was a fun gathering but again, a little sad. Thirty years ago we were all teenagers at the beginning of our adult lives. Thirty years from now, well, the odds are good we won’t all be here anymore. Hard and sad but true. The fact that over the past year a good half-dozen people I’ve known or known of have passed away really hits hard. People I went to school with. Spouses and parents of friends and colleagues, and people even closer than that
Something Wicked is about that impulse as stated by Teo Stone – that we spend half our lives trying to run away from home and the rest of those lives trying to run back to it in some fashion, right down to those childhood touchstones – the movies, the books, the music – that got us through those sometimes difficult times. It’s about looking past the borders of your home, your neighborhood, your small little piece of the world, anxiously stepping over that threshold, only to look back and see that single step has carried you miles from there. In distance. In years. In experience.
On the surface, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story principally of two thirteen year-old friends, Jim and Will, and their harrowing experiences with the mysterious and enigmatic Mr. Dark of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. However, the novel also touches on several of the townsfolk of Green Town, Illinois, who all must struggle with one of the oldest conflicts known to humankind; a deal too good to be true. A devil’s bargain. It’s the story of Faust, set in Depression-era America. A place that, at the time of Something Wicked‘s publication in 1962 was as far removed from that present day as the 1990s are today. No doubt there were some in the early years of the space age who looked back on the 1930s with a wistfully golden nostalgia; Rod Serling’s work on The Twilight Zone in particular demonstrated this in stories like “Walking Distance” (my personal favorite TZ story) and “A Stop In Willoughby”. The shanty-towns, dustbowl, and Hoovervilles of the dirty thirties never made an appearance. In Bradbury’s case he both looks back at those childhood years with fondness but also acknowledges the darkness of an insular small-town upbringing. It’s the flip-side to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”, and the current waves of nostalgia masquerading as content we see today on Disney Plus.
Curiously the so-so filmic adaptation is *not* on Disney Plus despite being a Disney film …
That’s the premise. The story, however, is of these two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, both thirteen, both unaware that life is already pulling them apart. Will (whose last name – Halloway, recalls both Halloween and “away” meaning he’s destined for greater things) born just before midnight on October 30. Jim, born just after 12:01am on October 31st is the Nightshade; the Dionysian opposite of his friend. the troubled kid. The kid who’ll never amount to anything but trouble (and yes, the kid knows this). Yet these two are friends for life, but life is, as always, far too fleeting and much too brief.
Second, more importantly, is the relationship between Will Halloway and his by then middle-age father Charles. The book is written as a reflection from an adult Will, meaning by the time of its telling Charles is no doubt long in his grave. Charles is old for a parent to a thirteen year-old and knows it, like Will knows himself. He’s janitor at the local library (the so-so 1984 film adaptation starring Jason Robards – a movie which led me to seek out the book – re-cast him as the town librarian, presumably because janitors couldn’t be heroes in the 1980s). Charles mourns his youth, and fears the coming years of his health failing while his only son is still young. Charles of course, is the real hero of the tale, which becomes as much about defeating the insidious Mr. Dark as it is in Will saving Charles, and Charles saving everyone else. Something Wicked is about the end of childhood, and the realization that not every friendship stays with you. It’s also about the realization that your parents will someday pass on and make you truly an orphan.
I think of this book at this time of year, every year. But this year in particular its bite is a little deeper. Death has been making more frequent appearances in my life. This year in particular has reminded me of autumn, of final goodbyes before winter’s onset. The older generation, my parents generation, the Baby Boomers passing away.
It echoes what I wrote about back in August, about the movie Stand By Me and the novella it’s based on. Stephen King’s work is full of Bradbury’s influence – note the blurb on the book cover further up – though perhaps a little less whimsical; the depression era Green Town Illinois, replaced by the vampiric ‘Salem’s Lot and the haunted Overlook Hotel. King, that master of horror, made a career of charting childhood innocence and the loss of it, in Gordy, Chris, Vern, and Teddy from The Body but also Danny Torrance from The Shining and the Losers Club from It. I started reading King because I was a fan of horror. I became a fan of King because of his writing so succinctly captured life’s little triumphs and tragedies. Of being young, and seeing the adult world encroaching like a freight train on a railway trestle. Of those four friends – Gordie and Chris, Teddy and Vern – and that one fateful weekend in 1959 and how it represented the beginning of the end of that once close friendship.
Something Wicked now reminds me of myself and my relationship with my son, who’s at that age now where he’s able to take his bike and go riding with his friends, to have adventures in our little suburban corner of the world. I watch him ride off and hope he’s careful and mindful of traffic, but also that he not ride his bike too quickly. To not make those wheels spin so fast that sooner than either of us realizes it he’s left home. The carousel at the heart of Bradbury’s novel can make the old young and the young old, but only on the outside; the mind remains the same. A child could age into an adult but posses none of the wisdom of adulthood. An elderly woman can return to their youthful self, though plagued by the loss of memory, the slowing of thought, the onset of dementia and senility. Bradbury’s warning here is to enjoy where you were in life, be you child, middle-aged, or elderly.
Being the older-than-the-average parent to a child still in his single digits weighs heavy on those 3am wakeups. At the same time I think of all the experiences yet to come and realize the key to remaining young at heart is to be in the presence of the young. The ones who still taking delight at the sight of a bird, or an inch-worm, who still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, that this heartbreaking world of ours can still contain some magic.
I often wondered what became of Will and Jim. Will was clearly not long for Green Town. You could sense he was destined for greater things, and the fact that the book is written as a recollection an older Will is making of that fateful October many years before. Jim, however, probably stayed. Living, working, aging, and dying in that little patch of rural Illinois. Maybe he lived a long life, certainly long enough to see his town, his world change. Maybe he met someone, married, and started a family of his own. Maybe he lived old enough to see his children and their friends grow up, grow older, and move away. Left behind as one of those people who just stayed there, to age and watch the town he knew change, and the people he loved pass on and pass away. Living in a town and a time rapidly becoming another phantom, another shade of what once was.
And Will? Well, he clearly became a writer. He became Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles, A Sound of Thunder, The Halloween Tree, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451. But I wonder if Ray too, in his later years, thought back to the friends he had, the people he knew, that small town of his that grew and changed so much it wasn’t his anymore. Just a place occupied by shades of memory.
It’s the same reason my old hometown still holds a piece of mental real estate for me. Not a grave, but a memory of what once was. It was shocking and a little sad to see and hear second-hand through an old acquaintance how the town had fallen on hard times after we all left. This friends’ mother was a teacher who witnessed first-hand generational poverty, in the faces of the kids she taught before her retirement, the off-spring of the children she’d taught at the start of her career. Still trapped in that vicious circle.
There’s a song by the Kinks (naturally) I keep coming back to, called “Do You Remember, Walter?” In the song Ray Davies’ narrator recalls an old school friend, wondering what became of him. Ray wrote the song at age twenty-three; quite prescient for a rock and roll song. But the lyric that jumps out at me is the one that goes —
Do you remember, Walter, how we said we’d fight the world so we’d be free? We’d save up all our money and we’d buy a boat and sail away to sea But it was not to be I knew you then but do I know you now?
Walter. Jim and Will. The Losers Club. Gordy and Chris, Teddy and Vern.
My old friends. Some still here, still friends in the day-to-day, but many more of them forgotten. Some not here at all.
The people you share that ride on the carousel with for a time, but eventually they climb off and resume their lives, the common experience of being together fading as you move off and move on with your life.
But memories still remain, whispers in the night reminding you that we’re all on the same journey. Unlike Cooger and Dark’s carousel there’s but one way forward; a journey every one of us takes. But what we do on that ride … that’s up to us.
ADDENDUM:
So a commenter – Hi Bailey! – asked if I was doing the “31 Days of Halloween” Movie-TV challenge (in which you attempt to watch one movie or horror-themed TV show a day for the 31 days of October. As it happens this year was the first year I attempted it. But to make things more challenging I decided to watch only horror-spooky movies and TV I had NEVER seen before so it was all new. I did all of that, my reward would be a viewing of John Carpenter’s The Thing on Halloween night (a movie I have seen and numerous times). As of this writing I did it – 30 never-before seen spooky entertainments in 30 days:
It’s hard to believe, especially for me, but it was a half-decade ago that my first novel Magicians Impossible entered the world on September 12, 2017. It was a busy time. The stresses of fatherhood, of working while promoting my first ever novel all combined forces to end up making 2017 a pretty hectic year overall.
[As to the status of my next novel, that’s on hold for the time being as I’m up to my neck in the Mixtape TV series. We film the pilot teaser later this month with everything being delivered to the network in early December, so just by typing this paragraph I’m now two weeks behind.]
The book tour for Magicians was loads of fun. Hollywood Boulevard. Orange County. San Diego. The Mysterious Bookshop. Bakka Books. And many other points in between. Podcasts, interviews, guest articles, reviews both glowing and, er, not so glowing. “Best Debut” according to Suspense Magazine. Starred reviews in Booklist, Library Journal, School Library Journal. Thanks for all of this and more go out to my editor Brendan Deneen, himself an accomplished author, as well as publicists, marketers, designers, and overall great people at St. Martins Press/Thomas Dunne Books for all their hard work in getting Magicians Impossible into the world.
That was five years ago today.
And in those five years since its publication , the question I’ve been asked more than any other about Magicians Impossible – in interviews, in reviews, on podcasts, and many years after the fact is “will there be a sequel”.
I’ve long been cagey about it, citing the usual “if there’s interest, if the first book does well enough bla bla bla-de-bla.”
But I’ve had a secret I’ve hidden from the world ever since the promotional cycle of Magicians Impossible began
There was never going to be a sequel.
There was never intended to be a sequel.
That’s because, in a way, you already read it.
Magicians Impossible was conceived, written, and released into the world as a one-and-done story. I never planned for there to be a sequel or continuation of the published novel.
The original version of the novel was much different after the midpoint. Following the events in The Louvre, the story originally went in a completely different direction, culminating in a grand Battle Royale atop the various levels of the Eiffel Tower where The Invisible Hand and The Golden Dawn squared off in an epic conclusion that set the stage for more stories in the series, and a continuation eventually leading to the equally epic Battle of the Citadel.
The fact that we reach The Battle of the Citadel in the third act of the published story (and not say in in book six or seven of a multi-year series) would indicate that things changed. It was my decision too – not Brendan’s, not anyone else’s. I wanted to get to The battle of Hogwarts, essentially, in book one. Point of fact I called my illustrious editor and said “hey, I have a new idea to pursue” which was basically me taking all those wild and crazy ideas for later in a proposed series and moving them up into Book One and Only. I wanted to make Star Wars when it was just Star Wars. Not Episode IV, not A New Hope, not one of nine installments in “The Skywalker Saga”. Just a one-and done story with no promise of more to come.
“But Brad, with everything fantasy expected to be part of an overall epic story, didn’t you essentially shoot yourself in the foot?”
“Yes. Yes I did. And I’d do it again.”
For me the best stories, the ones that resonated most with me as a child, as an adult, were the ones that were one and done. Ray Bradbury never wrote a sequel to Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stephen King never penned a follow-up to The Body (a.k.a. “Stand By Me”) although that story’s teenage hoodlum nemesis Ace Merrill did pop up now and again in subsequent King novellas and novels, most notably in Needful Things. My favorite novel by my favorite contemporary author, the great Joe R. Lansdale titled The Bottoms, was a one-and done with a definitive conclusion which makes that book so much more precious to me (spoken as a ride-or-die fan of Lansdale’s own Hap & Leonard series of crime novels)
Magicians Impossible, the book, ends with Jason Bishop’s rejecting his calling. The eons-old battle between The Golden Dawn and the Invisible Hand continues but Jason refuses to be a part of it. He’s discovered his past, he’s discovered himself, and by the time he connects with the greatest mystery in his life – spoiler alert; his father – he’s found his place in the world. The place he’s spent his life searching for. His arc is concluded. The story of Magicians Impossible is, essentially, a character-driven tale. With Jason’s journey as a character complete there really isn’t anywhere for him to go that wouldn’t be a retread of a story already told.
That’s the end of the story. The end of his story.
Thanks for buying and reading and leaving a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads.
Now … that being said …
As I finished the last final round of edits and sent the book off to my publisher I asked myself what did happen next, on that train, when Damon and Jason were sitting across from each other? I didn’t go so far as to plot out a whole second novel, but I did let ideas stew as I asked “what if there is a little bit more in the tank?”
Enough to push us over that next rise in the road to see what’s on the other side?
So today, on Magicians Impossible‘s fifth birthday, I have a little gift for everyone who read the book, enjoyed the book, befriended me because of the book, and constantly asked me “will there be a sequel”.
This is not that sequel.
But it is a bit of a coda, detailing what happened between father and son on that long train ride back to Manhattan.
So without any further ado I give you …
SPITE THE DEVIL: A MAGICIANS IMPOSSIBLE STORY
1
The gentle rock of the train had driven Jason Bishop underwater, into a dark, warm calm that reminded him of death. It was peaceful there. It was quiet. The considerable cares of the world but a distant memory. It was a wonderful dream, but the tricky thing about dreams was you always awoke from them in the end. And so when Jason’s eyes opened the first thing he noticed was the deck of playing cards on the seat next to him. The next was the figure sitting across from him. Jason studied the man quietly, like he was running every possible scenario through his head. That was good, and smart as well; in a world of magic you never could be too certain the person sitting across from you was the person they seemed. Finally, Jason settled back in his seat.
“You owe me a hell of an explanation, you know that?” he asked.
“A good magician never reveals his secrets,” Damon King replied. “But I should probably make an exception in your case.”
“We’re an hour out from New York. Will that be enough time?”
“Should be,” said Damon. “Though to be fair I’m dying for a drink.”
“I know a place near Fort Tryon.”
“Time enough for me to answer some of those questions of yours?”
“Time enough to answer all of them.”
Damon settled back in his seat. He tented his fingers and flashed a grin.
“So where would you like to start?”
Jason raised the deck of cards. “How about a magic trick?”
Damon nodded, slowly. He knew what came next. The question was; did Jason?
“You sensed them too?” Damon asked.
“From the moment I stepped on the train.”
“Describe them.”
“How?”
“You tell me; you’re the Mage.”
Jason stared at Damon silently. Then, he closed his eyes.
Damon leaned forward and could see his son’s pupils darting back and forth behind his eyelids. Seeking was a simple enough trick for a Mage; not unlike REM sleep. It was like those moments in bed, when you could sense someone else slip inside the room before you opened your eyes.
“First one’s three rows in from the rear doors,” Jason said. “You know the type; the Alpha Male with the bushy hillbilly beard they think makes them look like some Special Forces badass but in reality hides bad skin and a weak fucking chin?”
Damon nodded. Not bad. Not bad at all. “Who else?”
Jason shook his head. “Quid pro quo, Clarice; you ask me something I ask you something back.”
Damon checked his watch.
“We have time,” Jason said.
“We’ll be to Spuyten Duyvil in twenty minutes. We have time, just not a lot of it.”
“Twenty minutes?!” Jason shook his head. “We’re nowhere near close to – ”
“This train is about to go express. But you were saying …?”
“Last fall, at Murder Hill. I scattered your ashes there, like you requested. I poured them in, I waited. I expected … something to happen. Only ‘something’ never did.”
Damon smiled. That had been the last test of Jason’s training; the one Carter Block, leader of the Invisible Hand, had failed to anticipate when he’d hatched his plot. He’d thought Jason would be just another pawn, a powerful Bishop on his chessboard. But Carter hadn’t anticipated that Jason was a King and the son of a Queen.
“What were you expecting?” Damon asked. “A big pillar of water, a puff of smoke, your dear departed dad returning to save the day?”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
“Well, to answer your question, yes, returning my ashes to the water was what I needed for you to pull me back out of the Pocket. But returning from death isn’t a simple matter. It’s … painful. Exhausting. Even when I did return I didn’t know who I was, where I’d come from. I was just a shadow, struggling to manifest a corporeal form. It took months to return completely.”
“But what I don’t understand is –”
“Uh-uh, my turn. Who else?”
Jason leaned back in his seat and furrowed his brow. The train was rocking faster now. It didn’t slow as it rolled through Ossining, leaving confused commuters and conductors and dispatchers in its wake. It accelerated as it raced to meet and blast through the next stop.
It was beginning.
And they were running out of time.
“The woman, midway-down, window seat,” Jason said. “Hitchcock blonde. Business professional. Very well put-together. Why’s she on her way to the city and not out of it?”
“Lots of people reverse commute,” Damon offered.
“Not on a Tuesday afternoon and not carrying a Gucci handbag they don’t. The genuine article, not a Canal Street knock-off. I could tell that when I boarded. The bigger give-away were the shoes. They look fresh-out-of-the-box. Never worn before today. That’s a hell of a gamble on the Metro North no matter where you board. Clumsy feet, scuff-marks –”
“Then how did she board the train?” Damon asked.
“My serve.” Jason picked up the deck, opened it, and slipped the cards out. “Our little chess-game. That was all real. It happened. But where was it? You mentioned a ‘Pocket’?”
Now it was Damon’s turn to lean back.
“Carter didn’t tell you everything.”
“I gathered.”
Jason began to shuffle. Marking the cards. Making them his. An extension of his own self. That was good; he was going to need them shortly.
“Pockets are Way-Points between this world and the magical,” Damon began.
“A Soft Place,” Jason interrupted. “How Mages move instantaneously to points on a map. Or moved – past tense.” He smiled, awkwardly. “I, uhh, kind of broke all that last time ‘round.”
“That’s why we’re on a train.” Damon continued. “With the destruction of the Citadel, Soft Places have become much harder to access, but they still exist. Soft places are how we traveled between worlds, how we opened a door in Los Angeles and walked out into Moscow. Way-Points are kind of like highway rest stops. Some are massive; some are only the size of a sitting room. They’re a place to catch your breath; a place where the rules of Magic don’t work. A place where the Mages of old could meet to parlay without threat of battle.”
“When the Temple of Bones collapsed, I remember falling …”
“Was that a question?”
“An observation.”
Damon nodded knowingly. The Temple of Bones had been a hiding place for the Golden Dawn, beneath the Paris Catacombs. It had been destroyed by Damon’s protégé, Allegra Sand, with Jason in the middle of it. He’d been struck unconscious, but the rending of the Temple had opened a Soft Place, and deposited him in the Pocket where Damon could reach him.
“It’s no coincidence the phrases ‘falling to sleep’ and ‘falling unconscious’ employ identical adjectives.” Damon said. “Unconsciousness is not quite dreaming but it is close enough. All the unconscious mind needs is someone already inside a Way-Point to pull them in. That’s where I was and that’s where I was waiting. I couldn’t reach you in the Citadel; not awake, not in dreams. I could only do so when you were outside, in the mundane world. Now, who else?”
The train rocketed past Scarborough. Angry shouts filled the car, from passengers facing a longer-than-usual commute back north, from crew just as confused as their angry patrons. The only two who weren’t perturbed were, notably, Special Forces and Hitchcock Blonde. The noise made Seeing more difficult. It wasn’t until they were on the approach to Irvington that Jason was able to isolate the third.
“The Influencer,” Jason said.
On the opposite side of the car a few rows back, a raven-haired woman in designer shades, designer dress, was clutching a designer phone case and flashing an alluring expression for the benefit of her iPhone and who-knew-how-many social media followers.
“She’s not complaining to her followers that the Metro North just blew through the last two stops,” Jason continued. “Influencers live for that shit. They wither and die without attention.”
“Well done,” Damon said. “But we’ll have to continue the quid pro quo portion of the conversation another time.” He tented his fingers and stared into space. “We’re approximately fourteen miles from where this train makes the curve at Spuyten Duyvil; where the Harlem River meets the Hudson. At a normal rate of speed, that trip takes twenty-seven minutes–”
More angry shouts sounded as the train accelerated past Irvington, now bound for Dobbs Ferry.
“At the current rate, this train will take that bend in fifteen minutes. It’ll hit the curve at over one hundred twenty miles an hour. I don’t need to paint a picture of what happens if that happens, but if I do, it will utilize a lot of red.”
“I suppose that means someone has to stop this train,” Jason mused.
“Which means stopping the four Mages aboard it first.”
“Four?”
“Two cars up. The one manipulating whoever’s manning the controls in the locomotive.”
Jason pocketed the deck of cards and cracked his knuckles.
“Well let’s get this done.” He moved to stand. “I’ll take Special Forces if you want to –” “There is one other thing…”
Jason stared at Damon, and then sunk back into his seat.
“There always is …”
“Ley Lines. They’re conduits between Soft Places. Not as powerful; more like tributaries feeding into a river. The entire world is crisscrossed with Leys. They’re how the first Mages were able to map Soft Places in the beginning.” Damon tapped his arm-rest with his finger. “This particular line intersects with a Ley just below Greystone. It runs straight south from there to just above Spuyten Duyvil. While we’re on that particular stretch of track, magical abilities will be amplified.”
“So we hit hard, it lands harder?”
“And the inverse. This particular Ley is powerful. Short but strong. Any magic utilized while on it will be amplified tenfold. Bad for us, bad for anyone on this train not a Mage.”
“So what you’re saying is we need to stop these four before that happens.”
“In five minutes, at current rate of speed.”
“Sounds impossible,” said Jason.
He raised hands over his face and slowly dragged them down and as he did his visage changed as the Enchantment did its work. Gone was the face not so dissimilar to Damon’s own. In its stead was that of a much older man’s; the shell Jason had worn to his uncle’s funeral earlier that day. The same he’d boarded the train with. His sandy-blonde hair went silver-gray, his taut face muscles went soft, his cheeks jowly, his eyes sunken into recesses of tired flesh. He looked, Damon reflected, exactly what you’d expect to see at a funeral.
But still, Jason’s youthful eyes glittered from his now aged face.
“Fortunately, ‘Impossible’ is our specialty,” he said.
2
Ramon Santos was so busy getting an earful from seemingly everyone in the car he barely noticed the old man in the black suit until he was right in front of him. The Metro North conductor was just as confused, just as angry, as everyone else. Maybe even more so, because he sensed that this was all going to land on his head and hard. Bullshit always ran downhill, and Ramon was at the bottom of the ramp. Just his luck; his first week on the job and he already had his hands full with a speeding train not making its scheduled stops, no response from the engineer, dispatch screaming at him through his walkie, and a baker’s dozen passengers throwing their Noo Yawk attitudes in his face, the same they did every time something went wrong. There was nothing that he could recall in the manual or months of training that told him what to do in case of a speeding train other than tucking your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye. So he was well and unprepared for the old man as he grabbed Ramon by the lapels, and pulled him close.
“On the floor! NOW!” he shouted
Almost simultaneous, Ramon felt something heavy press down, like a blast of air had hurtled down upon him and the other passengers milling about. They all hit the floor hard and stayed there. Ramon was the only one facing down the car, so he was the only one on the train outside its participants, to watch a battle unfold.
The old man pivoted and thrust his hands out, and a blast of … something … catapulted a muscular, bearded passenger out of his seat and into the reinforced glass of the window beside him, cracking it under the force of the blow and splintering the glass lengthwise. The shock of this moment was doubled as the passenger recovered and crouched on the window itself. He yanked his shirt sleeves down to reveal tattoos comprised of words and symbols crisscrossing his powerful forearms. He slammed those arms together. A shockwave hammered the air and propelled the old man into the seats opposite. The old man’s skin disappeared in puff of smoke, dissipating and revealing a thirty-something man Ramon didn’t remember even seeing board the train.
Further down a well-dressed man stood, and faced one, then a second woman opposite. The two women seemed to be in league with each other because the ice-cold blonde made a pushing motion with her hands that propelled the second girl at the other man. As she rocketed at him she disappeared in a burst of smoke that split the air with a thunderclap and shattered windows all down the length of the car. The glass splintered but held, thanks to its engineering but the cracks widened with each jolt of the train as it rocketed down the tracks. The Dobbs Ferry station was an indistinct blur of grey and green through fractured glass.
And impossibly, the train was still accelerating.
The second girl erupted from a blast of smoke behind the well-dressed man. Her hands clenched into fists that glowed red, then white-hot, then nearly translucent. Ramon felt the hairs on his arms and neck stand rigid. He could smell ozone in the air.
What the hell was happening?!
A hand grasped his. The thirty-something man’s face was inches from Ramon’s.
“Get everyone off this car!” he shouted.
He swiped left with his hand. Behind Ramon, the door leading to the next car up slid open. The man then pushed with that same hand and Ramon felt himself slide backward along with the other screaming passengers. Ramon didn’t wait for further instruction; he scrambled to his knees, grabbed the nearest passenger, and hauled them back with him.
“C’mon people let’s MOVE!” he shouted.
Further down, Ramon saw the younger woman thrust out with her hands. White-hot energy erupted from her palms. The well-dressed man either saw them or sensed them because he pivoted smoothly, and redirected the energy with his hands, sending them slamming into the blonde woman and catapulting her backward with a pained, surprised yelp.
Something slipped from the younger man’s jacket sleeve. It was a deck of cards.
“What the fu –” Ramon began.
“Sorry. Trade secret,” the younger man said.
He swiped his hand right. The door slid shut, and there was a harsh metallic rending sound.
The passenger car shuddered and screamed –
Then there was just the clatter of wheels on the track. Ramon stood and stared out the window to see the front two cars of the train and its locomotive screaming ahead, doubling the speed the tail of the train was diminishing by, slowing with each clatter of rails under its wheels. By the time the Metro-North’s five rear cars had come to a gentle stop Ramon Santos could only wonder what the hell had just happened, and what was still happening somewhere down track on that runaway train.
3
The card deck in his hand felt like an extension of his own being. It had been months since he’d last wielded one in battle but it had been a long winter and he’d had plenty of time to practice. He parted the deck swiftly and pivoted as Special Forces propelled himself off the window and landed in the aisle mid-way down. Special Forces thought this would be easy.
Special Forces was about to learn a hard lesson.
Jason dealt the cards in a flurry, sending them on their deadly path. Special Forces quickly cast a defensive spell, scattering the cards, sending them wild. The bulk buried themselves in seatbacks and ceiling, but the ones that remained the most found their carefully-aimed marks, slicing Special Forces’ arms, slashing a groove across his cheek, and giving his bushy beard a trim. He retreated, trying to cast spells by mashing the tattooed markings on his arms together in an attempt to form a word, a command to unleash hell back on Jason.
Special Forces wasn’t looking so “special” now.
Further down, Damon had his hands full with the twins, as he was calling the two women he was facing off against. He recognized their magic, but not them, even though they were natural-born Mages; not conjurers like the Golden Dawn, presently getting his ass handed to him by Jason. They must have been Carter’s acolytes. Or maybe new recruits. Either way, they were definitely –
“Invisible Hand, huh?” Damon asked. “I guess this means I’m off the team.”
“It’s a new world now, old man.” Influencer smiled. “And you’re history.”
“Your time is over,” Hitchcock Blonde added. Her clenched fists crackled with malignant energy. “Our time is beginning and we will –”
Damon unleashed the full deck. Not at her but past her, striking the glass behind her, widening the cracks, tearing the opening wider, wider still. Air rushed in and that coupled with the speed of the train did the rest. The entire window exploded outward, the wind howling its way inside. It was enough distraction for a quick jolt of a push from Damon to catapult Hitchcock Blonde out the window and off the train entirely.
He turned to face Influencer. The cards swept back through the air past her, and filled his waiting hand with a perfectly shaped deck.
“First rule, kid? Show, don’t tell, and certainly don’t talk when you should –”
Something lurched. But it wasn’t the train, it wasn’t the compartment; it wasn’t even Damon. He wasn’t the only one who felt it too. He could see it in the stunned expression on Influencer’s face. In the brightening glow on Special Force’s tattooed arms.
The Metro North had crossed over. They were riding the Ley Line.
“You feel that?” Special Forces asked. “Yeah, you feel that; that vibration in your fillings? Those hairs standing on end. That electricity in the air, that …” He sniffed dramatically. “… that burnt-metal aroma? That’s power just waiting to be tapped.” Special Forces’ tattoos burned white hot, and Jason had to avert his eyes from their brilliance. “Unlimited power.”
Jason unleashed his remaining cards. They cut their deadly path through the air with Ley-fueled lethality, but Special Forces merely gave them a disgusted flick of the wrist, scattering them and embedding several into the walls, floor, and seats of the passenger car.
Special Forces raised his hands. With a mighty rending the passenger car shuddered as chairs and tables were wrenched from their mounts and brackets and catapulted at Jason. He had a moment’s grace and took it, focusing on a point further down, and blinking towards it, past Special Forces, past the debris hurtling at the empty space Jason was standing in a heartbeat before. He got clear of it for the most part; a glancing, painful blow across the shoulders from the last of the seats twisted him about and sent him crashing.
Special Forces raised his hands again. The debris piled about him lifted off the floor.
“Remember what I told you!” someone behind him shouted.
A man’s voice. Damon’s voice. And a reminder.
That the Ley Lines amplified everything.
Special Forces directed the wreckage full-blast at Jason, who raced forward and thrust his hands out at the precise moment of what would have been impact. The fragments stopped on a dime and blasted back at their thrower, slamming arms and legs and chest, pinning him to the door and holding him as the remaining projectiles crashed into him and burying him beneath their ruin.
Jason could feel the energy pulse through him. His muscles, his very veins trembled with white-hot adrenaline. He felt like he could do anything.
Anything.
The train car began to roll, like it had uncoupled from the tracks. Jason lurched, staggered, and fell against a wall. He was going over. The entire train was going over. He slid up the wall to the roof, felt himself dragged across that by the incredible force of the barrel roll.
Influencer was standing on the ceiling, now the floor, perfectly perched and seemingly unaffected by the warping of the compartment. She had her hands cupped before her, like she was cradling something round and precious in her hands. As she twisted her hands, manipulating the unseen shape, her movements were matched by the rolling of the train car.
This wasn’t a derailment. This was magic. Unlike anything Jason had seen or experienced.
And by the looks of things, neither had Damon. He was pinned against the same ceiling as Jason, only he was trying to push himself back off it. Influencer countered, sending the train and its occupants, save her, careening and falling with the movement of the train.
One-eighty degrees. Three-sixty.
And around again.
This isn’t real, Jason thought. It’s an illusion. She’s enchanting us, destabilizing our equilibrium.
He fell to the floor, bouncing hard off a chairback and landing harder on the ground.
Feels pretty damn real to me …
A hastily discarded iPhone tumbled across the floor between them, as they held on. The phone slid up the incline, up the wall, and was sucked out the window as it rolled over the tracks. Twin beams of steel were briefly visible, then there was the embankment, houses and high-rises racing by, the blue sky above. The train was corkscrewing again.
Jason could sense the crash of debris a moment before he could hear it. Special Forces was freeing himself from his prison. A quick glance confirmed it; the conjurer was bruised, battered, bloodied, his eyes burning hatred.
“Jason!” Damon shouted above the crashing din.
They were going over again.
“Get ready! I set him up you knock him down!”
Jason braced himself between two seats as Special Forces stood, the tattooed markings on his arms burning angry. He tightened his fists, and brought his arms back. As he slammed his forearms together Damon reached out and grasped Special Forces and yanked him towards them. Special Forces was caught off guard by the sudden pressure and was mid-way to Jason when Jason pushed.
The force of the blast threw Special Forces out the shattered window just at the moment the train rolled, and he was out and under the train a second later. There was a pained scream, then a wet crunch of bone and blood and meat as the side of the train mashed him to pulp along a mile-long stretch of rail.
“Told you,” Jason muttered. “Bushy beard and a weak fucking chin.”
The passenger car slammed down hard on the tracks. Jason and Damon were thrown up to the ceiling, hard-bounced off it and collapsed to the floor.
Pain stabbed at Damon’s side; a cracked rib. Jason managed slightly better.
Influencer set down on the floor. Her tear-streaked cheeks glistened against the harsh glow of her hateful eyes. She and Special Forces clearly had been more than just team-mates.
“At least we outnumber her –” Jason began to articulate.
The roof of the Metro North unzipped from end-to-end with a rending sound. The metal peeled back and away, like it was just a strip of aluminum foil. Through the opening they both could see a figure standing, her white-blonde hair whipping madly in the ferocious wind.
Hitchcock Blonde was back for round two.
Influencer smiled, pushed against the floor, and levitated herself out of the passenger car. As she did the entire compartment began to shudder. Metal screeched, walls buckled, glass shattered. The entire car was being crushed, like it was an empty aluminum can being squeezed.
Jason locked eyes with Damon.
“After you, Damon said.
“Age before beauty,” Jason replied.
Damon grinned, but there was no joy in it. This was life-and-death now. The train raced past Glenwood. After that would be Yonkers, then Ludlow. Then Riverdale.
Then Spuyten Duyvil
They were running out of time.
4
They were clear of the passenger car a moment before it imploded. It was as though the unseen hand of an angry god had brought itself down upon the eighty-five foot long, ten foot wide, one hundred forty-four thousand pound metal tube, the train car was crushed flat. It slammed against the tracks and held there with such force it trailed sparks for a full three miles of drag before Damon and Jason were able to uncouple it from the train. The mangled debris came to a shuddering, smoldering stop just at the edge of Yonkers.
The train roared into the city and Jason and Damon alighted upon the first passenger car. Glass and steel skyscrapers vaulted above the rail line, jockeying for space with the 19th century brick and mortar buildings still awaiting redevelopment. Facing them were three Mages. Hitchcock Blonde and Influencer, by this point, needed no introduction.
But the third was familiar to both Damon and Jason.
In the latter case intimately so.
“Hello lover!” she shouted above the howl of wind.
Jason’s blood went molten. His fists clenched. Anger began its slow steady build.
Katja.
A name and a face from the not-so-distant past. Jason’s “ex” had survived Murder Hill. Jason knew there’d been a split in the Invisible Hand’s ranks following the destruction of their Citadel; that Allegra Sand and Katja Eis were warring with each other. Clearly Katja had enlisted some outside help. But Golden Dawn involvement was another matter; one he’d have to ask his mother about the next time he saw her.
“You are looking well,” Katja continued. “Much better than our last meeting.”
A flash of memory intruded. Of a car sinking beneath Hudson river waters. Of Carla’s terrified face. Of Noah’s alarmed cries. The two people in the world Jason die to protect, facing their own deaths at the hands of Katja Eis.
Jason took a step forward. He felt Damon’s hand rest on his shoulder.
“Focus,” he muttered. “Don’t let anger get the better of you. You do and she’ll exploit it.”
Damon gave his shoulder a squeeze, then released. Jason felt the anger simmer.
Katja held steady against the hurricane
“I had to see it for myself,” she said. “Wherever you’d been hiding yourself, it was truly out of the way. But when I saw the news about your dear departed uncle I knew you wouldn’t be far.” She shifted her hateful gaze to Damon. “And look who else you brought to the party! Damon, you are looking surprisingly spry for a dead man your age!”
“It’s not the age; it’s the miles,” Damon shouted back.
Katja’s smile was like jagged ice. “Girls … ?
Influencer and Hitchcock Blonde took position, legs planted, hands at the ready. Spells on their lips, just waiting for the order. Despite the rush of wind howling, Jason and Damon could hear the cries emanating from the passenger car beneath them. Dozens of lives were in their hands; if they failed, those dozens would die.
“Prove him wrong,” Katja said.
There was a thunderclap cloudburst. When the smoke parted Katja was gone, and Hitchcock Blonde’s hands were glowing translucent. Influencer cupped her hands for another go-round.
“I’m open to ideas –” Jason began.
He didn’t get a chance to finish; the world went upside-down again.
Jason and Damon dropped to the train’s roof and grabbed onto its recessed handholds as Yonkers and all surrounding it went upside down. Jason felt himself slipping, his legs dangling into open space. If he fell off he’d keep falling, up, up into that beautiful blue sky. Until the world righted itself that is; then he’d fall all the way down.
Ahead of them the two Mages stood unaffected. Hitchcock Blonde cast her spell. Electricity spilled from her upturned hands and fell to the train’s metallic surface. It sparked there and surged across the roof, spilling along towards Jason and Damon like water from an overflowing sink.
“Those shoes of yours. Rubber soles?” Damon asked.
“What?!” Jason gasped.
“Rubber soles?”
“Yeah – sure, I guess!”
“Don’t guess!”
“Yes!”
“Focus on Influencer. On her center of mass.”
“But –”
“FOCUS!”
Jason focused on Influencer. The world around her was rotating, sweeping around like the runaway second hand of an analog clock. As he set his gaze on her and concentrated, the world surrounding became less distinct, more blurred. Then, it stabilized. It was still spinning but the train felt unaffected. As the electrical charge reached them, Jason and Damon stood. The electricity licked at their shoes but did nothing else. Like a stream of water split against the toe of an insulated boot, it parted. For the first time since this ordeal began, Hitchcock Blonde and Influencer looked less certain of themselves. Like they didn’t know everything after all.
“After you …” Damon said.
Jason crouched, and blinked.
He was on Influencer a moment later, pushing her with a blast of concentrated magic. She slid and staggered backward to the edge of the train where it was coupled to the engine. Jason skidded to a stop as Influencer teetered on the precipice, her eyes registering genuine fear for the first time.
“This is your stop,” he said.
He flicked his wrist. Influencer was wrenched off the train and sent crashing through the plate-glass window of a passing condominium tower. Not enough to kill, but certainly enough to sting.
Further behind, Damon and Hitchcock Blonde faced off. The shattering of glass directed them momentarily to Influencer’s exit from the stage, but only momentarily. The train was screaming through Yonkers and now actually and impossibly accelerating towards Ludlow.
“Get to the engine!” Damon shouted to Jason. “Stop it!”
Jason nodded. There was a blast of air and smoke and he was gone.
“He won’t be able to stop it,” Hitchcock Blonde said. “And he won’t be able to stop her.”
“You’re awful confident for one so young,” Damon replied.
“And you’re quite arrogant for someone whose time’s long passed, old man.”
“You know, a lot of people say I look a bit like Cary Grant.”
“Who’s Cary Grant?” she sneered.
Kids these days … Damon thought.
The train cleared Yonkers. Further down through a break in the trees the GWB loomed closer.
Hitchcock Blonde’s hands blurred. Damon felt the blast take him square in the chest. He staggered and slipped, tumbling hard to the roof. He felt that cracked rib break. The pain was so sharp, so jarring, it almost ended everything.
But he was wounded now, and Hitchcock Blonde couldn’t resist assuming the role of the cat.
She approached calmly. Slowly.
She held her hand out and Damon felt the fingers enclose him. They squeezed, sending paroxysms of pain tearing through him as he was slid backwards, to the rear edge of the train. Hitchcock Blonde’s mouth curled into a sneer as she pushed him the last way and released him. He fell, grasping the edge of the train, holding on as best as he could. But his hands were damp. Sweaty.
And slipping.
She stopped to loom imposingly over him.
“So, ‘Cary’; any famous last words?”
“Just one,” he said with a pained grimace. “‘Duck …’”
Her brow creased in confusion. Then she turned.
The bridge overhang Damon had spotted thirty seconds prior slammed into her body with lethal force. It was so fast, so brutal, so final. Hitchcock Blonde was there one moment, gone the next. The train passed beneath the bridge and was out the other side a three-count later. Damon pulled himself painfully to the roof and collapsed there. His side was throbbing. Just to breathe sent fresh pain cutting through him. He could feel the bones grinding against each other. Setting a broken rib was something he’d done several times before. To others. To himself.
But in his defense he was a lot older now.
He just hoped Jason could handle the rest of it.
He closed his eyes, reached inward with his magic, and snapped the rib back into place.
5
Prying the door to the engine compartment open proved a challenge courtesy of the hurricane intensity wind pressing against it. Inside the cab, the first thing Jason noticed was the eerie calm. Like the cab was the eye of a particularly violent storm. Everything vibrated; the floor, the walls, the front-facing windows. Through those he could see Ludlow station approaching, slow at first but closing the distance rapidly and blasting past the train a short intake of breath later. So fast you could barely see the commuters, the station employees, the police. Emergency cherries flashed against the window but they disappeared as quickly as the station had.
Riverdale next. Then Spuyten Duyvil. Then …
He turned his attention to the engineer. It was a heavy-set man with a bushy mustache and a beer belly resting on his thick thighs as he sat, staring benumbed at the monitors displaying the forward and rear views of the train. His eyes were glazed over, his meaty hand was on the throttle, pressing it all the way forward. His arm was rigid, as he was rigid.
Jason moved to the engineer and grasped the throttle. He struggled against it almost as much as he had with the door. The engineer was not letting go.
“Think, think,” Jason muttered. Was there a sleep spell? Something he could cast that would break the connection, the enchantment, the whatever Katja had done to –
The engineer’s hand was on his throat a second later. His grip was like frost-bitten steel. He threw Jason, catapulting him back into the cab door. The wind pressing against it, thankfully kept him from falling through it but it still hurt. He shook the pain away and stood as the engineer’s fat potato of a body evaporated like mist.
Katja stood in his place.
“It was never going to be that easy, Jason,” she said. “I’m disappointed, but not surprised. You always chose ‘easy’ over literally anything else.”
“Well, I did choose you didn’t I?” he replied.
Rage flashed across Katja’s face. There was a barely perceptible ripple and for a momentary gasp, Jason could see the scarred visage beneath. The scar bisecting her from eyebrow to lip, clean through the mangled nub of a nose; Katja’s true face. The one she hid from everyone at all times, most pointedly, from herself. Then it was gone.
“Where’s the engineer?” he asked.
“He went under the wheels south of Cold Spring. I’m certain he is many places by now.”
“Why?” he asked. “What’s the point? To all of it?”
“You went to ground, Jason; too well, in fact. I needed to flush you out. The world has changed, you see. And we need to know where you stand. You and your father.”
“I’m retired. You and Allegra want to squabble over the pieces, do it without me.”
“Oh Jason …” Katja’s sigh was almost disappointed. “You cannot hide from what’s coming.”
She raised a hand, and clenched it slowly into a fist. Beside her the control console of the train crumpled, into a mass of twisted steel and crackling electronics. It all enclosed over the throttle, locking it in its forward position, shielding it from anything Jason could do.
“So consider this your warning,” Katja said. “Next time there will not be one.”
She snapped her fingers. The forward windows her imploded. Wind shrieked into the cab. There was a crack of air and smoke, then Katja was gone.
Damon arrived a moment later. He was clearly in pain, but hid it well.
“Where’s Katja?” he asked.
“She dumped me. Where’s the Hitchcock Blonde?”
“She had a hot date with an immovable object,” Damon replied.
“Well, there’s bad news and there’s bad news,” Jason said.
“Oh, there’s bad news?”
Jason gave him the low-down on what Katja had done, but Damon waved off her warning dismissively. Like he already knew what she’d told Jason. Or maybe because they were still on a speeding runaway train and that took precedent. In either event, Damon had eyes and could see for himself. He took a moment to consider their limited options.
“Alright, we need to cut the passenger car loose. Then we deal with the engine.”
“Why?” Jason asked. “The track bends at Spuyten Duyvil. Just let it derail. I know the area; it’ll land in the river. Big splash, end of story.”
Damon shook his head.
“Too risky. If a Circle Line boat is sightseeing or there are track workers on the line? They’re long-shots but not ones I’m willing to take. You uncouple the train. I’ll slow the engine.”
Damon blinked out of the train compartment. A moment later, Jason followed.
The wind whipped his hair, his suit and tie, but as Jason crouched at the front of the passenger car and focused on the train coupling below he felt calm surround him. The wind diminished. His clothing ceased their flag-in-the-wind flapping. Silence descended like a shroud as he studied the coupling for a moment, then reached out with his thoughts, with his magic. It was slightly more elaborate than a padlock but the principal was the same. Because Damon had done the lion’s share with the previous car, it took Jason a few attempts before he was able to separate the lock lift assembly from the knuckle. There was an audible clank of metal separating, then the rattling passenger car steadied. The engine pulled away, speeding forward as the remainder began its gradual slow-down. Jason crouched there watching the locomotive and Damon atop it racing down the track until both had disappeared from view.
The passenger car screeched to a stop at Riverdale station. Those watching, dumbfounded, from the platform were so focused on the lone train car delivered without aid of the locomotive that had raced past moments before they didn’t notice Jason atop or the puff of smoke as he blinked away a second later.
Spuyten Duyvil station was approaching rapidly. The waters of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, where the Harlem River joined the Hudson were unoccupied. Beyond it, the forested springtime green of Inwood Hill Park gleamed in the afternoon sun. Trees had begun to bud, leaves unfurling. Rebirth was well underway.
Crouching atop the locomotive, Damon tried to slow the accelerating train but Katja’s enchantment kept that throttle buried in the forward position. It would have been simple enough to disembark and let the train derail to plunge into the waters, but he wanted to send a message to whomever may be watching; that Damon King was back, and ready for anything his multiplying adversaries had in store for him and his son.
Damon raised his hands.
At the curve a half-mile ahead, there was a metallic rending as one, then a second train rail was pried off of the ground. Ties popped loose with a ping-ping-ping of clattering steel. The rails squealed as they bent backwards, their twin blades pointed at the locomotive rushing to meet them.
When the moment did happen Damon was already off the engine, blinking from the locomotive to the safety of the platform at Spuyten Duyvil station. Nobody on the platform noticed his arrival; their attentions were directed to the locomotive as it was impaled through the front of the cab by the bent steel rails. There was a titanic groan of metal loud enough to be heard in Hoboken as the locomotive upended, catapulting end over end, landing with a crash that set off the alarms of automobiles parked up on Edsall Avenue. The locomotive landed on its back, tearing deep furrows in the ground as it slid across that last length of land … and stopped at the water’s edge. The rumble sounded over Upper Manhattan – a mighty roar not unlike the death throes of a dying prehistoric beast.
It was over.
Almost.
* * *
Jason stood on the small peninsula that jutted from Inwood Park out into Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Across from him, the wreckage site swarmed with emergency vehicles and crew. Sirens screamed through the air, nearly drowning out the beat of NYPD and network news choppers circling like angry flies above.
He heard the approach of footsteps behind him. He didn’t need to turn to know who it was.
“Not exactly how I’d envisioned my return to New York,” Jason said.
“I’m sure it isn’t how you envisioned a lot of things,” Damon replied
For a moment or several, father and son just watched the unfolding action across the smoothly flowing waters of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Then Damon turned to Jason, and smiled.
“So … how about that drink?”
TM and (C) 2022 by Brad Abraham. All Rights Reserved
