INTRODUCTION:
THERE ARE NO MIRACLES IN MILESTONE
Being an Irishman--right down to the accent and dubious dental
work--I'm often asked why I don't write more stories set in my
homeland, despite having done so many times, most notably with
my short novels The Hides, Vessels, and numerous short stories.
But I get the point. The question isn't so much why I haven't
set more stuff there, but why I haven't set all of it there, and
the answer is a simple one: Yes, I'm from Ireland, but I don't
live there anymore, and I tend to draw inspiration from whatever
I see around me. These days Ohio is my home, and not a sprawling
ever-growing metropolis like Columbus or Cincinnati, but a rural
out-of-the-way area called Delaware, a place few people have heard
of. It's a quiet place, with quiet people and little crime. Drive
through the heart of it and you'll see staunch sturdy buildings
that look like they've been there since cowboys swaggered down
Main Street. There's the bustling center of town, and, on the
other side of the train tracks that bisect Delaware, the dilapidated
areas where old houses and businesses have been left go to seed.
Everything you'd expect to find in any small town in the Midwest
is present and accounted for. And while I have written many stories
about the rural areas in this state, I've never really tackled
Delaware, or a town based on it, directly, despite it striking
me on many occasion how heartbroken and besieged many of the people
you see on its streets appear to be.
After a night spent in one of the bars in town, popular mostly
among older folk who all sit at a long counter with their stained
baseball caps on, staring into their drinks as if the key to time-travel
might be found within, enabling them to go back and fix whatever
led them to this apparent impasse in their lives, I decided it
was high time I explored the mechanics of a town in which the
dreams of all but the powerful appear to have been crushed. Now
this is not to say that Delaware is a great big bowl of depression
and misery. It has its good and its bad, just like any other place,
but unlike big cities, in small towns you get a better view of
the people who make it tick, and the people who don't.
And so Milestone was born. But to say my town in Currency of Souls
is a mirror image of the real-life Delaware would be absurd, of
course. I very much doubt, other than metaphorically, that any
such place exists. If it does, then it's a place I'd rather avoid.
Delaware simply provided me with a basic architectural model for
Milestone, and a desire to explore that glimpse of hopelessness
I'd seen in the eyes of some of the people. I imagined, back in
that bar, what would happen if, at the end of the night, everyone
had to pick a set of car keys from a jar, much like the old wife-swap
parties in the '70's, but instead of choosing a sexual partner,
these guys were choosing weapons, namely cars they would then
use to end someone's life. And all to save themselves from Hell.
That seemed a bit muddled to me, but I worked on it, then promptly
forgot about it, only for it to insinuate itself into the novel
right when I needed it.
Other contributing factors to the birth of the story were Norman
Partridge's The Crow novel, Wicked Prayer (a great modern day
crime-noir/horror/western which was later made into a terrible
film), and the late and lamented Jack Cady's The Hauntings of
Hood Canal, both of which I had read in the weeks prior to sitting
down and writing "Saturday Night At Eddie's" -- the
novella I would later expand to Currency of Souls. Another influence
was Shaun Cassidy and Sam Raimi's TV series from the early nineties,
American Gothic. From these sources I came away with the voice
of Sheriff Tom, our narrator and...hero. (I hesitate to call him
that because I'm not entirely sure it's what he is. In fact, it's
quite possible this is the first book I've written that doesn't
have any good guys at all.)
My objective with the book was to write about the last days in
a near-dead town full of people who wanted out, but who were condemned
by their own guilt, not only to remain in the town, but to kill
to redeem themselves. Yes, it's a grim book, perhaps the darkest
piece of fiction I've ever written despite the occasional flashes
of humor and regular flirtation with the absurd, and yet there's
an element of hope that runs through it all the way. I also did
my best to cast out the old tried and true tropes that riddle
a lot of modern supernatural fiction, and by doing so ended up
with a book I consider more dark fantasy than horror with strains
of "gonzo" fiction, made popular by the work of Tim
Powers, Norman Partridge and Joe Lansdale in particular. It required
me to dismiss out of hand the first plot developments that occurred
to me almost every step of the way and replace them with something
unusual, and by unusual I mean, for the most part, insane. As
a result, few of the people you'll meet in the book are average
Joes and Joannes, and very little of what happens to them is in
keeping with real life, or the traditional rules of a horror novel,
though the presence of almost every fantastical element is justified
in the world of Milestone. Such flagrant disregard for the rules
by which I have operated for the past God knows how many years,
made Currency of Souls a difficult book to write. It also made
it the most fun I've ever had with a story.
It is my sincere hope that you find it as much fun to read.
* * *
Back
