They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Troy Harkin, whose twisted poetry collection, Casting Shadows, was released on April 16th from ChiZine’s imprint Kelp Queen Press!
What does Troy love when he’s not writing about scalpers, neck bags, and nocturnal sheep that hate you? Spoiler alert: influential authors, all things anthology, and stories beyond the fifth dimension. Curious? Read on to learn more!
A friend of mine used to chide me, “You say you’re gonna show me something but then you show me three things. Every time!” And he was right. Luckily here at Speculative Chic I don’t have to tell you about just one of my favorite things. I can tell you about two or three or EVEN MORE. (And how boring would that song have been if Julie Andrews only sang about one favorite thing like “Raindrops on roses”? PERIOD. End of song.)
So let’s talk a little about formation. What is it that makes a grown man write about neckbags and funeral pants and a worldwide battle of the sexes? In my defense I will begin by pointing my finger at one man (to start with) — that man is Rod Serling. But also in Serling’s gang is a guy named Bradbury, and mug named Ellison and another who calls himself King. They are the real culprits I tell ya. It’s not really my fault. Is the junkie or the drug to blame?
Rod Serling: The Twilight Zone
I will say before I go much further that I am likely the world’s oldest kid. Pretty much exactly like Shazam. A kid in a big man’s body. OK, no power of flight, or super-strength but still pretty much exactly like Shazam (né Captain Marvel …. but that’s another story. End of digression.) Many of my favorite things I first latched onto before I was 25. I would say likely 90% or more of my favorite things came to me by the time I was 25 and a vast majority of those things likely presented themselves during my high school years.
OK! Right, get on with it. So … high school. You know the tropes — jocks, preps, beauty queens, yada yada. Well I had a few close friends and we were all outsiders lucky enough to find each other, and oddly enough we would all wind up in the arts. We all observed the others, the Breakfast Club types, and we created art about them, skits, comics, films, stories. Wait. Who cares? Favorite Things for Christ’s sake!
Alright. The Twilight Zone! CKVR, the tiny cottage country television station north of Toronto began airing The Twilight Zone reruns one summer in the early 1980s. I was mesmerized. This was the original TZ, with the unforgettable theme music and the mesmerizing narration, “There’s a door up ahead…” I was hooked immediately.
The Twilight Zone, “Living Doll”
As an anthology show you never knew what to expect except the unexpected. Each episode was different from the next. One would be pure sci-fi about stranded astronauts on a strange planet, the next could involve ghosts or nightmares. Even the tone of the show varied. Some episodes were funny, some were melancholy, and others were horrifying (Talking Tina from “Living Doll,” and a mute Agnes Moorehead chasing alien invaders come immediately to mind.) Now remember (or consider if you will, if you’re too young to remember) in the early 1980s television was safe (like baby-proof safe), formulaic and BORING. Sitcoms were pure formula. Nothing EVER changed. But with The Twilight Zone the viewer was always off balance. The cast changed, the sets changed, the stories changed. The only thing that was constant were the O. Henry endings. What was frequent were the allegorical morality plays that Serling, along with writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, weaved into their teleplays. Almost all of my earliest short stories featured a Sering-esque narrator setting the scene with a pastiche of “Consider if you will…”
(If you’re interested I rank my 25 favorite The Twilight Zone episodes on my blog The Buzz Terminal.)
And so I fell in love with all things anthology. Clearly, I was not the only one. I think the powers that be knew that there was a legion of fans waiting to lap up these deliciously bent tales. Television soon gave us George Romero’s Tales From The Dark Side, Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, The Ray Bradbury Theater, and a CBS relaunch of the The Twilight Zone with Harlan Ellison on board as story director.
Yep, I ate it all up like a good boy. And miracle of miracles, I even started reading thanks to a high school teacher named Mr. Wood who taught an English class on Science Fiction. In that classroom I read my first favorite novel, John Wyndham’s The Crysalids, and an anthology collection, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume I that was edited by Robert Silverberg and featured Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers For Algernon.” For the first time I was reading something I really wanted to read. Something I could sink my teeth into and something that was like watching The Twilight Zone.
And then I wanted more. I found story collections of Harlan Ellison (Shatterday and Stalking the Nightmare) and Stephen King (Night Shift and Skeleton Crew). I got a buzz from their writing. Their stories were filled with such energy and irreverence. That’s what I wanted to do, so I did. We had a typewriter at home, and I started writing on it using What If? as a starting point and writing until I answered the question. In the meantime I kept reading.
I discovered Ray Bradbury.
I feel Bradbury would create a stand alone paragraph like the one above so I will too. Hell, Ray was known to create a one sentence stand alone chapter. It was monumental this discovery of Bradbury. Yes, all of his short fiction was amazing — and I could see how it had influenced Serling, as well as King and Ellison — but it was Something Wicked This Way Comes that was a major influence on my formation as a writer. This is likely my all-time favorite book. Definitely top five. My original copy was thoroughly underlined, highlighted, dog-eared, and filled with marginalia with words like THIS scrawled throughout it, and HOLY FUCK. Some sections were circled in red. Some sections were even circled in red, underlined, and highlighted. That book still staggers me. It moved me as an adolescent, and it still moves me as a greying middle-aged father. It is potent. Truly, you will laugh, and you will cry, and you will read it over and over again trying to figure out how this alchemy was achieved in such a tiny novel.
So the building blocks of my formation were in place in that golden era of the early 1980s. Bradbury, King, Ellison, Matheson and Serling. To this list of influential short story writers I would add Lovecraft and Poe, and two essential female writers — Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor. And there was one outsider. Not only wasn’t he a genre writer, but he wasn’t even a fiction writer. Actually that’s a matter of opinion, I suppose. Either way I latched onto the notorious Gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, and I would not let go. The essential takeaway from Thompson for me was this: Don’t Ever Be Boring. Keep it moving. Punch a nun in the back of the head if you have to, but keep it moving. Chop chop, Asshole. And really this is what I loved about great short spec fiction. There was a get in and get out urgency that appealed to me. Even if a story was a disappointment you hadn’t spent the better part of a week with it. Short stories were a lot like speed dating.
And so I started writing and submitting for publications to genre mags like Grue, Horror Show and The Twilight Zone. Yes, there was a The Twilight Zone magazine edited by Carol Serling. It really was one of my favorite things. Along with new fiction, it included reviews of all thing speculative as well as scripts from the television show and interviews with those who were a part of the original series. The Twilight Zone was a top notch magazine that ran from 1981 – 1989.
Meanwhile I kept writing and submitting my work. And then the rejection letters came. Luckily I was forewarned by the likes of Bradbury and King not to be fazed by rejection letters.
Troy Harkin and Dave Watts (1986)
I’m sure all of my earliest stories could easily be identified as being derivative of one or more of the above mentioned writers. I had all kinds of stories that fell under the spec umbrella. There was the one about a 19th century New England paranoiac writer who hears ancient voices calling him to his demise, there was the one about a war hero who thinks his neighborhood is peopled by witches, the one about Disneyland as Hell, the one about the killer Hide-a-bed, which by the way was my first taste of quasi-success (i.e. it wasn’t returned with a rejection letter). I submitted the story, “When The Hand of Glory Rocks The Cradle of Doom Everybody Sleeps” to The Twilight Zone magazine’s short story contest. I did not win the contest. I did not even place. But I was given Honorable Mention. Not just mentioned in passing, but Honorable Mention. And I was the only Canadian among the other listed winners and honorees. It really was what it was — a start. But you can look for it if you care to in the April 1986 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine.
I can tell you that the works of all of the above writers are still some of my favorite things even though newer tales and other writers have joined their ranks. In recent years I’ve become a fan of Black Mirror, and I have good reason to think that Jordan Peele’s 21st century take on the Twilight Zone will keep me riveted for a long time to come. But for me it all goes back to late summer nights of the early 80s, a small black and white TV set in a suburban basement, and the voiceover of a man saying, “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.”
Troy Harkin was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He attended the University of Toronto studying English and Film. He spent a good deal of his early days as a playwright and poet, performing his works in and around Toronto. His poems have been published in a variety of literary journals. He has written many short stories as well as the novella, Funeral Pants. His novels The Dark Stars of Morning and Red Rover will be published by ChiZine Publications. Casting Shadows is his first poetry collection.
Author Photo by Gavin Harvey
Would you like to write about YOUR favorite things for Speculative Chic? Check out our guidelines and fill out the form here.
No Comments