My thoughts on the conflict with the Horror Writers Association
I have grown more and more disturbed over the recent turmoil in the author’s organization, The Horror Writer’s Association. I have been an active member for a few years now. Joining it, meeting its obligations as a professional author, was a dream. Last night, I seriously considered washing my hands of the entire group. Many allegations have been raised—and I am sorry to anyone who was hurt. If I had known, I would have helped. We blame our leadership. We raise grievances that aren’t heard. I have been dissatisfied over time that they failed to protect us or provide us with the support we required. But then I realized, the blame is not with our leaders. They are just the lightning rods. The real issue—the real power is with us, the core membership. We have looked too often to the top when we are also the problem.
Writing is an insecure business, especially when the competition is so numerous and the substantial markets dwindle. We all want to succeed in that great notion of both accolade and recompense. But dreams can also make us selfish, especially the fear of not having them fulfilled. Every author—every artist suffers and nurtures the secret insecurity that they have no real talent, and this makes us desperate. We struggle, compete and fight for limited venue, and this inherently sabotages the hope of union, of a collective force of artists helping one another. Then we cut corners. We sacrifice too much. We empower bad publishers, leaders, chimeras, as I called them in Atlanta, when they tap into this insecurity. How many of us in that need for validation have compromised our professional ethics even just a little, accepting terms and behavior in the hopes of putting a crack in that wall that holds us back from our dream? This infects the Association, rotting it out from the core. Yes, our trust was misplaced, and some of our influential members have let us down; however, we allow too much unprofessionalism because of it. Now the castle is falling.
My point. Blame isn’t an arrow or a finger pointing. It’s a circle. The HWA must become a guiding light to its members, providing support, facilitating communication. But we as its members must also rise above temptation and act like professionals, creating better standards to form a collective bargaining force. Look to yourselves to create something better in your own actions. And to those who have always been professional, I salute you, but don’t be too hard on others. They have not had the chances and luck you have had. Help them. We need to help each other more.
“Part medical horror, part supernatural suspense, MERCY is a hard-hitting fever dream of a novel. I enjoyed the hell out of it!”
~ Tim Waggoner, author of The Way of All Flesh and Eat The Night
“Pain and poetry flow in equal measure through these pages. Dunham's prose strikes deep and hits all the right notes. MERCY is unforgettably vivid.”
~ David Dunwoody, author of Hell Walks and The 3 Egos
William Saint is dying of cancer. On most days death seems like a humane alternative to the treatment. Stricken with fever, William is rushed to Mercy—notorious as a place to send the sickest of the poor and uninsured to be forgotten—and finds the hospital in even worse condition than his previous visit. The grounds are unkempt, the foundation is cracking, and like the wild mushrooms sprouting from fissures of decay around it, something is growing inside the hospital. Something dark. It’s feeding on the sickness and sustaining itself on the staff, changing them. And now it wants Willie.
In Dunham’s prose and imaginative sequences, engaged readers will no doubt frequently find a mirror for their own hopes, fears and searching. His horrific ordeal is channeled into a beautiful gift he shares freely in MERCY—if only after he’s given you a taste of the terror required to properly appreciate it.
In 2013, I traveled down to New Orleans to attend my first World Horror Convention as a member of the Horror Writers Association. I joined Jay Wilburn as my partner at the Hazardous Press table. On the left of us was Blood Bound Books. On the right, PostMortem Press. Eric and Marc were two of my targets for that event, the reason I had come: to find a solid publisher for my next major work, a publisher who had foundation, not one of the new shooting star firms who burn fast, bright and then sizzled out. I had already sold an story to Blood Bound Books which was similar to my novel concept, so I spent the next day reaching out to them. Finally, it was Marc who pitched my idea to me, and I played it cool, containing my excitement.
Never let them know how much you want it.
I ran home and wrote the novel. It took me 14 days, and I confess I wrote it too fast without enough editing. Marc was patient, and after a year of waiting, he sent it back with some core edits. I was still learning how to write long fiction then, working on my book for Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing-- Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality or Searching for Andy Kaufman. Marc took his time and helped me create a powerful and solid horror novel, based on my experience with a rare cancer and painful treatment that followed.
Reading the book now, I realize:
I AM ANGRY.
I AM VIOLATED
This book is about my death. I hope if I write enough books about my death like Andy and Mercy it will satisfy the debt, though Tony Rivera at Grey Matter Press has named me DEATH as part of the Dark Five. We'll be reading on Friday April 8th at 6.45PM at the KGB Bar in NYC.
This is just one of the many events I'll be reading at in the next 6 months.
It's not enough to write fantastic work if no one knows it exists. You have to get out there and fight, spending energy, blood and time. Once you've cast the book out onto the sea, you need to give it everything and never give up. Sometimes you must reach one reader at a time until finally the pod you've grown germinates in the chest of your audience. Until then, you are one brilliant and fulgent star in a sky of spilled salt on a black canvas. It is your voice, your appearance, eye contact that makes your book unique. Doing events that reaches your audience is vital.
Click below to see the amazing trailer.
That's the video trailer for the reading on Friday, April 8th in NYC. We will be following it up in Philadelphia. The Dark Five will rise. I'm hosting with What Are You Afraid Of? #Horror & #Paranormal #Podcast will be hosting and featuring a special episode based on the reading. John Foster will be reading from his new book, Mister White, now out from Grey Matter Press. I'll also be reading from The Last Elf and other dark stories from anthologies in which I've been included from Grey Matter Press. This is just the first of many. The Dark Five cometh: John Foster, Shawn Macomber, J. Daniel Stone, Daniel Braum. Organized by Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson from Grey Matter Press.
I will be featured in Dread, a reader-voted anthology of the best of Grey Matter Press, with some of the greatest horror authors currently writing featured within its covers. I was honored by this and thank all my readers. I came up with the subtitle: A Head Full of Bad Dreams.
This photo was taken from my reading at the Society Hill Playhouse, Final Curtain for Noir at the Bar. I read from the Street Martyr, my first novel. The book has slept for a year, but after my reading, it jumped in sales. The movie script is done, and now Throughline Films is attaching a director. I just need to hold on, have some faith. It has been a thrill having a movie made from my first book--and certainly a great surprise. Now, I must be patient as they create a great project. Now that MERCY is published, I am moving back to writing crime thrillers set in Philadelphia. I have been studying the history of crime in Philly, and I've been busy writing potential crime series and another novel, American Monarch. More about that in the future. First, I must swim in the darkness and drown on the oil.
MY MERCY TO THE WORLD
So we're building an audience for MERCY. Many reviewers have copies, and in the first few days of release, it's started to build more reviews--a few on Amazon and Goodreads. We have others coming, including some from major magazines. This is an important story. It is my story, and I'm tweeting it, using relevant hashtags to get it to the right audience. I will sing it until it is heard. Will it entertain or upset? There is a difference. A good story upsets but must never disturb. It still must entertain, even if it is not telling all the truth. This has been a difficult distinction for me.
How do we do we make a sell well? I believe the book is good. So how do we up our numbers? Is it just luck, or can you find a current in the great ocean of indie publishing?
The book is my darkness. The burned me, torture me, cut pieces off my body. Doctors are still doing it. I just had a chunk of my neck cut out in September. Doctors are the enemy, and I've never met a loyal physician. If it gets bad for them, they will cut you loose, even if you are in agony. Doctors sacrifice nothing to protect you, and you end up in debt for the rest of your lives when most of the time they're using guess work to cure you.
In my adolescence, I was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. This was after battling for a year with Lyme Disease that had been misdiagnosed for two years, thus leaving it to dominate my body. When finally, it had caused severe damage to my brain, heart and nervous system, the unimpeachable college of physicians over-treated it with intravenous antibiotics, driving pick-lines into my arm and a Hickman into my chest. The Hickman nearly killed me when it infected two gram-negative infections into my blood. They never finished treating the Lyme Disease. After trying a blood toxic anti-seizure agent, a golf-ball grew under my ear. After another three months of misdiagnosis, they determined I had suffered a rare kind of blood cancer--Composite Lymphoma. It was two kinds of lymphoma--Hodgkins & Large Cell. Large Cell always kills. And no one had ever survived this complex blood cancer before. My oncologist warned me that the treatment would leave me crippled and in terrible pain if I did miraculously survive. Still, I decided to fight--not for me, but for those around me who needed me to fight. And I would suffer, more so in the soul than body. So many others suffering a similar cancer I would come to love, as my nature dictates They died, just vanished from this world sans divine justification. I suffered intense chemo therapy and 5 months of daily radiation up and down my upper body. They tortured me, stabbed my spine and bone marrow, burned and seared me. It was all medicine, all to get better. I feature all of this in the book. The suffering Willie undergoes was taken directly from what I felt.
I internalized what they did to me to endure it in hopes that one day I might have a life, though they
told me the chances of my survival were minimal. I fought--well endured it--in hopes that I would one day meet someone like Allison and we would have children. That day has finally come, and I am thankful that I suffered so much. Still, it possessed me with many demons.
Mercy is my attempt to purge what I suffered, my PTSD. I took the darkness and manifested it in monsters. The scariest horror in our lives comes not from zombies or vampires. It comes from true life, which is why we turn to fictional legends. One cell of lymphoma can devour a century of Cthulhu stories, and this has been the source of my horror.
MERCY is the story of a dying man's journey. Willie can't let go, yet he's brought to a hospital that is transforming into a great spore, ready to spread its demonic infection to the world. Willie is haunted by his failure in love, a love that could never happen. He lives in the fantasy of it and ignores the real love that has come to him. He is still quite selfish even though he is dying. Dying makes us more selfish. While he struggles with real and fictional delusions of love, he must endure a menagerie of creatures who feed upon his illness and process him like lamb into veal, preparing his soul to be devoured by an ancient dark god who is gaining entrance to Earth.
If it comes through the door, all souls are on the menu.
The book is available from Blood Bound Books. My favorite reviewer so far has said the following:
Mercy is wonderful/horrible and beautiful/sick. Its fevered exaggerations alongside shouted sanity that will make you lose yourself in the slipstream of vivid descriptions and noxious horror, then force you to plummet to earth when the moments of truth rip the beauty away to see the ugly underneath. It feels like a much longer read than it actually is (not that that’s a bad thing in this case), and I have very little to critique about it...
From a **** (4 STAR) REVIEW of MERCY
Read the book. Know 'our' pain, what waits for you. Death waits for us all--and you will suffer. However, there is hope.
THERE IS HOPE.
(My wife Allison.)
(She is my hope.)
Know love from the need of love. Know when life loses its value and living only perverts it. This is my truth told in metaphor.
“Life was an addiction, and he felt desperate for every second. But would it mean anything?”
T. Fox Dunham, Mercy
And leave your thoughts as a review. We authors need this to survive.
Close out Choosing Death Fest weekend in Philadelphia
with a afternoon of dark fiction readings and interrogations hosted by
Shawn Macomber.
Guests include...
*John Foster, author of the fantastic new grisly thriller, MR. WHITE, contributor to SAVAGE BEASTS
*Sean Fraiser, Decibel scribe, Despumation 2 contributor, and
screenwriter of the forthcoming Cloud Burst feature length film HIPSTER
MASSACRE
* T. Fox Dunham, author of MERCY -- a tremendous
surreal supernatural hospital thriller based on his extensive treatment
for a rare form of lymphoma -- and THE STREET MARTYR (soon to be a major
motion picture), contributor to SAVAGE BEASTS
*Adam Cesare, author of such bizarre and beguiling novels as ZERO LIVES REMAINING and TRIBESMEN
*Dutch Pearce, Decibel scribe, Despumation 2 contributor, and death metal frontman
*Scott Cole, rising bizarro standout and author of SUPERGHOST
*Shawn Macomber, Decibel/Fangoria/Shock Till You Drop mainstay, contributor to SAVAGE BEASTS, DESPUMATION 2, SHROUD
