A Public Service Announcement from Grady Hendrix

A Public Service Announcement from Grady Hendrix

If you write books, people often ask what inspired you to become an author. If you write horror people are even more curious, probably because they want to know the danger signs to watch out for in their own children. In an attempt to help parents nip potential authors in the bud, I’d like to take a moment to share the story of my own personal disease that turned a bright, happy child into the writer I am today.

When I was six, we moved to England for eighteen months because my Dad got a job at Guy’s Hospital in London. We rented an enormous Victorian pile in Dulwich that had room for myself and my four sisters, a photographer living in the attic named Archie, and a hippie living in the basement named Helen who grew herbs out back. The house was always damp and cold, which felt like a thrilling novelty after living in the humidity of South Carolina, and it had a vast library on the first floor. One of the books stashed way high up on a shelf was a Reader’s Digest edition called Folklore, Myths, and Legends of Britain with a forbidding black cover bearing an embossed gold mask in the middle. I loved this book with all the passion in my tiny body. Full of woodcuts of witches being burned, traitors being hung, Catholics being tortured (Queen Elizabeth I was a big fan of torturing Catholics), and people hanging in gibbets, it served as my guide to this new, drafty land full of gracious homes standing in the middle of drizzly parks we were forced to visit every weekend in the interests of improving ourselves. Suddenly, England made sense to me because obviously the entire country was haunted.

When we came back to the States I fell under the influence of Rhett Thurman, one of the moms who drove carpool. She would keep us quiet by telling ghost stories that were, for the most part, standard issue ghost stories culled from books with the serial numbers filed off and local names and locations substituted in to make us think they had happened nearby. I thought they were the most amazing things I’d ever heard, full of unquiet spirits dragging themselves back from the grave and seeking revenge (a whole lot of revenge was sought), lovers committing suicide, people getting lured into cemeteries and...killed? Eaten? It was all a little unclear but it was definitely unsavory and I loved it. Everyone in carpool had their own personal favorites and we’d request repeat performances, and each time we heard the stories Mrs. Thurman changed them slightly to hold our attention and to keep us from tearing holes in the seats or setting the car on fire. It was storytelling designed to distract us from being small children, and they were a masterclass in holding an audience rapt.

Around the same time, I became addicted to Edward Gorey’s opening credit sequence for the PBS show Mystery! My parents allowed me to stay up late every Sunday night to watch it — not the show, just the credit sequence. The show itself had too many old people talking about too many boring things to hold my interest anyways, but the opening credits with its bolts of lightning, masked poisoners, and gleeful air of gothic gloom hypnotized me. It led me to Charles Addams and pretty soon I was getting a collection of his morbid horror cartoons almost every Christmas morning.

I had the normal reading habits of a small child, tearing through The Hobbit (I never could get into Lord of the Rings however) and The Great Brain series. If it had words, I loved it, from The Saturdays to From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Before VCRs, movie novelizations were the only way to play and replay your favorite movies, and it was even better that they came out a few weeks in advance of the films they existed to advertise. I owned as many as I could, from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Return of the Jedi. I read Choose Your Own Adventure books and all their various knock-off series: Twist-aPlot, Taletwisters, Infocom Books, Endless Quests, and Which Way Books. But the one book that I’m truly thankful for, the book that saved me, the book that made me who I am today, the book that turned me into a writer was, of course, Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Star Wars Spectacular.

I inherited the magazine from one of my older sisters and it was already battered when I got it, but even creased and stained and with the staples ripped out it still promised to tell me “All About the Most Fantastic Adventure Movie Ever Made!”A padded-out promo rag printed on pulp paper designed to cash in on the Star Wars craze, it was barely fifty pages long, slathered with black and white stills from the movie that it's cheap paperstock turned into grainy, high contrast Weegee snaps. The first six pages were a gallery of characters, filled with stilted, grandiose text that electrified my eight-year-old eyes. Luke Skywalker “...takes off for outer space to increase the pace of his living.” Grand Moff Tarkin possessed the Death Star that is “capable of volatizing an entire planet!” Larded with references I couldn’t understand, it hinted at a bigger world around me. Harrison Ford “has 2 sons, Willard & Benjamin — reminding one of a double horror bill of several seasons ago!” It does? Tell me more!

A short section about the special effects written in a kind of telegraphic Variety shorthand (“Miracles! The filmagicians have been performing them before our startled eyes!”) preceded a synopsis of the movie dripping with purple prose (“They have survived the Star Wars with flying colors. The stars now are in their eyes and the eyes of the Princess. Most of all, the stars are in the eyes & the hearts of the universally dazed audiences.”) and then came the most important section of all: “The Best Science Fiction Film Ever Made.”

Apart from novelizations and whatever was playing at the local triplex, it was impossible for a kid from South Carolina like me to see old movies, but here were fifteen I’d never even heard of, boiled down to short, 200 word descriptions that were little more than punchy lists of marvels, a word-drug injected right into the base of my brain. The Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe entry read, in its entirety: “The Buster Crabbe serials. Featuring almost more marvels than the human mind can remember: The Sharkmen of the Underwater Kingdom. The Tree Men of Mars. The Octosac...the Gocko...the Clay Men. The Hydrocycle, the Spaceograph, the Gyroships, Nitrogen Ray Machine. The Lion Men. Hawk Men. Monkey Men. The City in the Sky...The Bridge of Light. The invisibility ray...the tigrons...the fire dragons...the zebra-striped bears... The magic of Azura!”

So many nouns hinting at so many things! No connective tissue, no boring plot, no tedious story, just one amazing thing I’d never heard of after another, flying at my face as fast as I could read. They covered Planet of the Apes (“The mummified astronaut!”), Silent Running (“The toggles, the monitors & the waddling droids.”), This Island Earth (“The war with Zahgon...the guided meteoroid missiles...the splendid saucer ship.”) and most amazing of all, Metropolis (“The incredible Super City of 60 million. The Massive Underground Machinery of Moloch. The Human Clocks...the Old Dark House of the anachronisitcally alchemical genius...The submergence of the subterranean city. The flames consume the Metal Maiden.”)

I had no idea what they were talking about, but I wanted some.

I never saw most of these movies, but I studied their descriptions until I knew them by heart. I knew that 2001: A Space Odyssey was about a starship full of hibernating space vampires. I knew that Things to Come was about a war between underground mole men and surface dwellers who were addicted to PBS. Buck Rogers was about space fighters in blimps getting mail order ray guns and robots out of a catalogue and maybe also something about scuba diving.

With no access to these movies, and not allowed to see anything rated R, I began convincing adults to buy me movie magazines like Fangoria, reading about movies I would never see, making up the plots in my head, tossing off phrases like “Atomigeddon” and “The Sphinx of Far Futurity” the way other people talked about “beach towels” or “grapes.” Years later, I finally saw 2001:A Space Odyssey and was disappointed and confused that there wasn’t a single space vampire in sight. Reality didn’t live up to the dreams I received from this cheap, crummy chunk of newsprint. And that’s when I realized that if I wanted to see those stories, I’d have to write them myself.

And that’s how I started down the long and sad road that led me to where I am today, trapped in a tiny office, typing for my life. I hope my story helps you steer your own child away from this course, and allows them to live rich and fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, the symptoms of becoming an author are different for each and every budding writer but fortunately, in every case, the cure remains the same: law school.