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Tucked away behind an unassuming warehouse façade at the far eastern end of the San Fernando Valley is one of the most gleefully horrific places in Southern California: Dapper Cadaver. Founded in 2006 by husband and wife team BJ and Eileen Winslow, Dapper Cadaver is a horror prop shop that services the film and television industries, haunted attractions, amusement parks, carnival sideshows, private parties, and even disaster preparedness training courses.
A “skins” role is one in which the performer acts, either singly, or, as in the case of Syd and Peggy, doubly in an animal skin. I myself performed a skins role when I played King Rat in the pantomime DICK WHITTINGTON. There is something peculiar and distinctive about performing a “skins” role. It is when such recollections and preoccupations merge in the imagination that a story begins to form itself.
Lauren K. Cannon is a fantasy and horror artist. She was born in 1986 and lives in southern New Jersey, on the edge of the Pine Barrens of Jersey Devil lore. She has a BFA but considers herself self-taught, as her college proved to be an expensive waste of time. Working as a freelance illustrator primarily in the publishing industry, she is best known for her work with authors Peter V. Brett and Mira Grant, and for a long tenure contributing to ImagineFX magazine. Lauren’s influences include strange beauty, the brutal elegance of the universe, and creepy dead things.
I spent five years in university research labs, coding and analyzing surveys. That probably sounds boring to a lot of people, but the analytical part of my mind really loved it, and I thought it would be fun to write a piece with a psychology questionnaire as a framing device. It took a while and a couple false starts to find the right story to tell this way.
Every house is haunted. The question is, by what? Walk into a new house; some are happy, some are not. Like a fine wine, old houses are much more complex. In the summer of 2013, I was sent to Ireland to serve as the resident faculty member for the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program. I was grateful for the chance to travel and eager for the experience, but I have to confess that prior to arrival, Ireland had never been on my bucket list.
I’m a runner and its endorphin trance gives rise to ideas. During a very long run, I began to think about the nightmarish film version of THE RED SHOES, based on Hans Christian Anderson’s bizarre fairy tale. I was also thinking about obsessive types who run 100-mile marathons and about the toxic ambitions that fuel much of L.A. The story began to fall together.
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I wanted to write about a particular time and place, but in a short story you don’t have space to actually explain the history and if it’s not one of the handful of historical contexts you can generally expect a broad anglophone readership to be familiar with, then you might as well write it as an SFnal secondary-world fantasy. So I did.
Most people never expected me to go back to Pinhead in literary form; the expectation was that I would go back to him in a movie. That never felt right to me. Pinhead is a rather literary figure. He speaks with a Shakespearean cadence, so I wanted to make sure that was in the performance, if you will, of his farewell, and I couldn’t do that on a movie screen.
“Qi Sport” is set in the same world as my novel VERMILION, and shares a character — Lou Merriwether. Lou’s a professional psychopomp, which is rather like being a Ghost Buster, in that she escorts, or compels in some cases, lingering undead to leave our world and move into the afterlife. She deals with ghosts and shades, and also geung si, which are a Chinese monster sort of somewhere in between a vampire and a zombie.
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