Somewhere around five miles above where the Titanic hit the iceberg our plane was nearly holed by a jet travelling in the opposite direction. Something tells me that there'd have been no time to hear the (taped) band play "Abide With Me" if we went down. Nor any time for romance with any Kate Winslett look-a-like. Only a filthy great splash around ninety seconds after impact. But the pilot personally reassured the woman that we weren't on a collision course with the plane. And that we were perfectly safe.
Even so, we did run into the other plane's slipstream and the plane juddered and bounced energetically as a bomber going through enemy flak. It was turbulent enough for the airhostess to pour a bottle of water over my legs and exclaim: "Oh my, sir, you've gone and wet your pants!" It was water. Believe me it was only water.
In any event two or three hours later came an uneventful landing at Atlanta's international airport, then a fairly eventful passage through customs. But then again I'm a virgin when it comes to transAtlantic flight. Of course the metal detector port bleeped when I went through it and I had to assume the position for frisking. The customs officer was just beginning to think I was packing a nickel plated magnum, perhaps concealed snugly where the sun don't shine when he found what was activating the detector – a foil-wrapped cough sweet in my shirt pocket. As cough sweets are a commodity that don't require protection in the USA the customs officer invited me to continue on my way.
Which I did. Only to find myself sharing a hotel shuttle bus with a gentleman I thought I recognised. In fact we both eyed each other, probably both thinking, "Now, I know that face, but do I want to make a prat of myself by asking are you so-and-so?" and finding out I'm mistaken. The following day it turned out I'd shared a bus with none other than Richard Laymon, his wife Ann, and daughter Kelly. And seeing as we share the same publisher, at times the same cover artist, and the same agent, this was no mean feat of coincidence.
Later. Dog tired, I wrote postcards, phoned home, watched a little TV, fiddled with the Czech-made coffee maker, then crumbled into bed at nine local time (but my body was screaming it was still three AM). Yet somehow I continued to hear traffic on the Interstate rumbling as clearly as if it were running through my skull.
I got around six hours sleep. It didn't seem much at the time; but by heaven, I made that few hours stretch for the next few days. So much so, I wondered at times why I bothered booking a room at all. My kingsize bed and I were going to remain relative strangers.
The convention kicked off in earnest the following day around lunch. Soon there was a flood of horror convention delegates to overwhelm attendees of other conventions such as that of the Atlanta Valve Fitters and the Accountants Symposium. Within hours that hotel really started to hum.
I'd gone there half expecting a morbid, subdued affair which would largely be nothing more than a wake for the horror genre. After all, hadn't people been proclaiming loud and clear that horror was dead? The convention in Atlanta well and truly blasted that notion out of the water. The hotel crackled with optimism and energy. Small press publishers were riding the crest of a wave. Dollar upon dollar cascaded into their cash boxes. As quickly as stock was brought out to the dealer tables it was snapped up by a book hungry convention.
For me a memorable moment was walking into the dealer room and seeing a high stack of Salt Snake & Other Bloody Cuts, its green foil lettering gleaming richly as emerald. This was the first time I'd seen the book. Apparently someone had to make a huge detour to collect a consignment from the binder. But here it was. I ogled the pile. Then I picked up the book and gingerly flicked through, not wanting to crease as much as a single page. And, by God, it looked good. So, John Pelan, editor and publisher of the book (and not forgetting Fredrik King, illustrator, and Brian Metz, design), if you're reading this you did me proud. Thank you.
On the panels, too, there was every sign that the slump in horror was coming to an end. Don D'Auria, the astute senior editor at Leisure Books, is masterminding a new line in horror fiction, with new titles, new-look covers, and a new-look marketing policy which is definitely working. Don made no bones about it. Horror is popular with a new wave of young readers, and it is one of Leisure's eminently profitable lines.
Indeed, horror writers at the convention looked anything but glum. Jack Ketchum was on rattling good form, Mark McLaughlin was stunning at the gross-out competition (even though, as one of the judges, I did deduct around ten thousand points for his incredibly hammy German accent); Ramsey Campbell was ebullient as ever; Neil Gaiman was the prince of cool if Caitlin R. Kiernan was the princess of cool, and – oh heck, you should have been there: there were more horror writers, artists, editors and publishers than cornstalks in a field.
What struck me so forcibly about the World Horror Convention was the sheer friendliness of the crowd. I'd no sooner arrived than I was being whisked by Jim Argendeli for a behind the scenes tour of CNN, then on for a superb meal with Jim and his wife, Cindy, then back to the convention. The next day Paul Allwood, a fellow Brit, drove me with unerring accuracy along the tangle of interstate highways (now, that's scary) to a couple of shopping malls. Another Cindy (North Carolina Cindy) and I talked about the mysteries of Sufism, the creative power of the unconscious and how to handle a knife and fork American style. "You hold the fork in your right hand while you rest your left hand on your knee; that's the American way," she told me. Being a south paw anyway it took me years to master the knife and fork the Brit way. Cindy also had to show me how to fathom the mysteries of the American pay phone. Even as I struggled to differentiate the coins I could almost hear her murmur under her breath, "He's learning, bless his heart."
To mention everyone would mean the rest of this article would become a long, long list. So, to everyone I haven't mentioned (Newton, Bill from Chicago, Dave H., Keith, Chris Smith, Sandford (long lost cousin?) Clark and many, many others, well, we'll get together and chew the cud again one day.
Now I didn't have too much trouble exchanging 'elevator' for 'lift', 'shop' for 'store' and so on, but one huge advert in a local newspaper did catch my eye. "SOD ATLANTA" it hollered. How rude, I thought until I saw that the sods the advert was talking about was lawn turf. Now the word 'sod' this side of the water has quite a different meaning...
Back to the convention. The dealers' room was book heaven. The Overlook Connection Press have produced some Jack Ketchum and King related books to die for. While Richard Laymon's A Writer's Tale (Deadline Press) is a must for fans of Richard Laymon and anyone wanting to write fiction. It's an extremely candid portrayal of being a writer; the pitfalls, frustrations – as well as a few of the pleasures. Highly recommended. There were some new kids on the block, too. Look out for Ross Campbell's chapbook Full Circle from Gargadillo. It's a mean and dirty tale that pulls no punches. Now there's a writer to watch.
Few people slept in the Marriott hotel during the convention. There were times I sat in the lobby talking until dawn. Then there were the all night balls. Now these were something else. Vampire erotica, Atlanta's Goth club, music that was Gothic and Darkwave, a concert by The Changelings – all this and live body piercings (some of the tenderest parts of the body were skewered), and, good God, the blood, the blood! The aftermath of the concert looked like a chainsaw massacre with people dripping real living red gore. If there are such things as vampires they'd have come flapping from miles around for a bloodfest such as that.
A night flight home, no near misses (as far as I could tell). I'd slept only a handful of hours in the last five days. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to sleep at all (now there's a wacky thought inspired by sleep deprivation if there ever was one). I was on such an adrenalin high that I didn't feel remotely tired; I didn't feel jet-legged; I was on a roll that felt as if it was going to last forever.
But a day after returning home the adrenalin petered out, that's when I did crash. Sitting over a pile of manuscript pages that needed correction, I drifted in and out of sleep; my head drooped like some drowsy hounddog. Then I noticed a flyer for the World Horror Convention in Denver next year; my pulse quickened. Afterall, I've got fifteen months or so to catch up on my sleep. Then I can do it all over again, can't I?
So, until next time, cheers.