Ghost Road Blues. Джонатан Мэйберри

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      Epilogue

      Ghost Road Blues: An Introduction

      BY JONATHAN MABERRY

      Ten years.

      That’s how much time has passed since my first novel, Ghost Road Blues, was published.

      In some ways it feels like ten minutes, and in others it feels like this is the sort of thing I’ve always done. Write fiction, I mean.

      It’s not, though. When I sat down to write this novel it was my very first attempt at fiction. I had no idea if I was going to be any good at it. Hell, I didn’t even know if I was going to like writing novels. Prior to that I’d written nonfiction going all the way back to my college days. Thousands of feature articles and how-to articles for magazines, mostly on topics like jujutsu, selfdefense, travel, bartending, skydiving, relationships, science, music. I did reviews and op-ed pieces, then I shifted gears and began writing college textbooks (on judo, archery, martial-arts history, etc.) and mass-market nonfiction, again mostly about martial arts. Until something odd happened in 2000.

      That was the year I published a book on a subject I’d never before written about, although it was a subject that had always fascinated me.

      The supernatural.

      I wrote a huge nonfiction book on the folklore of supernatural predators from around the world and throughout history. It was the final book in a four-book contract with a small press. And since the first three books had been about—you guessed it— martial arts, the editor assumed that’s where I’d go again. I didn’t.

      You see I’ve always been fascinated by the things that go bump in the night. Monsters, in all their varied aspects and guises, filled my young dreams and my waking speculations. That process started with my grandmother, who was a wonderfully spooky old lady. She believed in everything. All of the monsters, spirits, devils, demons, ghosts, and faerie folk were part of what she called the “larger world.” That was her world. She read tea leaves for the other ladies in the neighborhood—a fiercely blue-collar, low-income part of Philadelphia. The stuff she believed in scared the bejeezus out of my siblings and, quite frankly, a lot of her neighbors. She was the crazy old woman down the street.

      I loved her.

      She taught me to read tarot cards when I was eight, told me stories about ghouls and goblins . . . and vampires. Werewolves, too. Because of her, I knew the folkloric versions of these monsters long before I saw the Hollywood versions and before I read the literary takes on them.

      So I wrote a book about it. The Vampire Slayers’ Field Guide to the Undead. My publisher feared that my martial arts readers would think I’d lost my marbles; he insisted I publish it under a pen name. And so it came out with Shane MacDougall as the author.

      Suddenly Shane MacDougall was getting more attention than Jonathan Maberry. More people were talking about his vampire book than had about the dozen or so nonfiction books on other subjects I’d written previously.

      It was because of that book that I met some of the people in the horror community—other writers, but also readers. It encouraged me to go back to reading horror fiction, which was something I’d drifted away from over the years. I rediscovered old favorites: Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Peter Straub . . . so many СКАЧАТЬ