Category Archives: Guy Anthony De Marco

Happy Halloween!

halloweenselfiesThe dead arise
with a skeleton sheen.
Be careful when you’re out
on Halloween!

October draws to a creepy close, full of little witches, ghosts and goblins out to fill their pillowcases and plastic pumpkins with tooth-decaying treats. Remember not to take a selfie in the moonlight or you may discover you don’t look as well as you did this morning.

We hope you enjoyed our October theme of dark fiction with a twist of pulp history tossed in for good measure. There are plenty of long-deceased authors whose works survive in tattooed dead-tree format and electronic mediums. Several of our Fictorians have dark fiction works for sale, or you can even check out Gutenberg.org and search for “ghost” to find scary tales from folks like Algernon Blackwood and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  If you prefer to get a nice collection, perhaps consider Ancient Terrors Volume 1, since both authors are contained therein.

Everyone here at the Fictorians wish you and yours a delightfully scary and fun Halloween. Above all, be safe, be warm, and make sure you brush your teeth after gorging on sweets!

Adventures in Zookeeping

Adventures in Zookeeping, an anthology that will support MileHiCon Denver with the net proceeds, was released on October 28, 2016.

Adventures in Zookeeping CoverAt MileHiCon 47, several authors, publishers, and editors headed a panel called So You Want to Be in an Anthology? The audience selected the theme for the anthology, and only the people who attended the panel were eligible to submit short stories for publication. The authors would experience having their manuscript run through the editing process and receiving a contract.

ISBN: 978-1-62225-198-8
Cover design by Sam Knight
Available on Amazon now, with other markets and eBooks to follow.

The Contributors:

Edited by Sam Knight

  • Foreword – Sam Knight
  • Zookeeper’s Dilemma – Beverly Coutts
  • Eternity’s Ark – J.L. Zenor
  • The Jeweled Black Quaver – C.S. Peterson
  • Bound by Death – Ashley Vasquez
  • Picket Line – Sheila Hartney
  • The Corpse Flower – Carolyn Kay
  • So Who Would You Tell? – Aylah Foureste & Deena Larsen
  • The Niwotlei Fund Raiser – Ian Brazee-Cannon
  • Nightmare Menagerie – Jessica Lauren Gabarron
  • Plant a Zoo & Watch It Grow – Aaron Spriggs
  • The Menace of Markenshire – N. Alan Miller
  • Love Hunters – Rod Spurgeon
  • Ari’s Song – Rick Duffy
  • All in a Day’s Work – Tonya L. De Marco
  • Sanctuary – Susan Adams
  • A Tale of an African Zoo – Sean Jones
  • The Glass Fairy – Sage Gabarron
  • The Lost Phoenix – Jodi M. Franklin
  • The Looking Glass – Patrick F. Smythe
  • The ReligioZoo – Lisa Mahoney
  • The Fourth Lemur – Sarena Ulibarri
  • Monsters of Yesterday – Alicia Cay
  • Afterword – Guy Anthony De Marco

Creating Dark Creatures

AD&D Monster ManualBack in the late 1970’s, I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons two or three nights a week. Wait, I should correct that. I worked at AD&D because I was always the Dungeon Master. I had to come up with new quests, places, characters, and even creatures. All of my players had access to copies of the hardcover books like the Monster Manual. The problem with that was even if a party had never seen a Bugbear before, they all magically knew how to defeat one and knew the ballpark of its statistics.

Eventually I had to come up with lots of unique dark creatures for my players to fight. I always enjoyed when I described something weird yet totally outside their experience. Their characters then had to react in a realistic manner, which elevated gameplay. Later on, I would use the concepts I developed when writing stories.

Dark creatures, like villains, need to have a method of sustenance – even if it’s a supernatural method. They also need reasons for evolving, waste management, etc. Many times I kept creatures neutral, with a capability to be either a benefit or a burden, depending on how the characters interact with the unknown beast.

As an example, I had a rare creature called a dunnasae (pronounced “dunna-say”). They dwell in damp caverns at least one mile underground. At first glance, they appear to be thick oil slicks on the walls. They eat primarily silicon, and that’s what they’re doing on the wall. Dunnasae can be peeled off and saved in glass containers for up to one week, wherein they digest their way out of the bottle.

Dunnasae appear to be rather innocuous creatures, about a foot in diameter. They do not talk as far as anyone can tell. They move very slowly, and do not fight back if attacked, although they will do their best to eat any metallic weapons used against them. Fire kills them rather quickly – and it is always a good idea to have an idea of what their weaknesses are before bringing them into a story.

So, what good are stupid oily sheets that cling to walls, you may ask? They do have one interesting property – they live in multiple dimensions. If one comes in contact with a human, it will instantly merge with their tissue. They can swim rather quickly to any portion of the human. It will tend to sink to the soles of the feet, wherein it will feast on the dirt and sand the human walks on.

As I mentioned – it is a multidimensional beast. The main benefit of merging with a dunnasae is it can act as a living portable hole, storing any non-organic material up to five cubic meters. As long as the host allows the creature to eat (and having a small pouch of sand comes in real handy), it will respond to human thought and instantly appear at any portion of the body when directed. The beast can make any stored item emerge from anywhere the host wishes, like a sword “magically” erupting from one’s hand or an eight-foot metal quarterstaff bursting from one’s colon, if the the user wants to impress everyone around them.

As with all things, there must be a risk involved for having such a useful creature. The first one is in order to remove the dunnasae, you must will it to a part of your body and then proceed to burn that body part off. The second is that you must never put organic material into the dunnasae, as it will learn that you are organic and will try and absorb you. This event will drive it crazy and force your body parts to attack things around them (and each other). Organic extends to rope, leather, rations, etc. Wooden scabbards or sword hilts are also not allowed.

I’ve used these creatures in a couple of short stories. One of the darkest ones involved tricking a character into placing organic material inside their dunnasae’s storage space. The rest of the story had the main character getting slowly digested from the inside out and having fits of uncontrolled random violent movements as she set off to get vengeance. It was a quirky tale and was published in a ‘zine around 1983.

If you’re a gamer and you write dark works, sometimes it’s a fun idea to combine your talents from both fields. Just make sure your unique dark creatures are well-rounded and explained thoroughly before deploying them on the unsuspecting public.

 


 

About the Author:DeMarco_Web-5963

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award® nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, third-party D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Journeys

This is a short story which I’ve used in workshops to point out that one does not have to write blood-and-guts or pure horror to qualify as a dark tale. This was published in a literary journal many years ago, and it originally appeared in a shared writing project on Everything2.com where a new person would write the next chapter of The Walking Man.


It was a dark and stormy night…

The Walking Man found that the clouds from the south were outpacing him as he trekked over the narrow ribbon of fading asphalt through fields of corn. He pulled his jacket closer to his body, willing himself to build up body heat before the first tickles of water splashed on his thinning pate.

All hopes of a quick sprinkle evaporated when he heard the roaring of the downpour approaching, savagely tearing at the cornstalks and blasting them with gusts of freezing air. As far as the eye could see, the road obliviously stretched itself east and west. There was no shelter, and he knew he would be in for a miserable night.

The howling fury of a storm rocked him when it caught up with his plodding body. In seconds he was drenched and cold; the joints of his hands began to ache with the sudden temperature change. The wind whipped the pebbles and decaying vegetation from the last harvest into a stew of stinging projectiles. The Walking Man tried to shield his eyes, but the absolute darkness that had descended on him, combined with the airborne flotsam, made it impossible to see the road. Only the change between the asphalt and the soil kept him from wandering too far off his course.

He knew it was living when he tripped over the yielding body. It was some form of animal, and it made a small gurgling noise when he crawled back to it. His bruised knees protested painfully and his hands were further injured from pebbles burrowing into bloodied palms. He gingerly reached out and touched a broken cat, run down on the roadway hours or days before. He scooped the cat up as best he could, turned his back to the wind and opened up his jacket to shelter the animal, whose head lolled about from pain and lack of strength.

They bundled together against the shrieking gale, the man shivering from the cold and the wetness and the cat shaking from spasms of pain. The jacket made a decent shelter for the cat, and it stopped gurgling enough to look up and let out a stuttered mewling of thanks.

The Walking Man began to assess the cat and discovered it wasn’t alone. A dead bird had been hidden underneath the matted cat body. Perhaps the cat had been hit when it went after the starling, a bloody chain of events as the killer was himself the victim in one ironic fell swoop. The bird had died suddenly; the cat was paying for its salvation with suffering and time.

The storm kept battering the Walking Man for the better part of the night. The cat rarely made a sound – it was several hours before he realized the cat had died in his arms. Dragging himself to the stalks of corn creating a natural fenceline on both sides of the road, he used several flattened beer cans he found on the way to dig a small hole in the rich earth. He carefully placed the two bodies in the void and thought about erecting a temporary cross until he figured the cat and bird were atheists at best. He placed two flat rocks over the gravesite, wished them well on their journey as he soggily stood up to continue his own.

squish flop…
squish, flop…
squish, flop…

 


 

About the Author:DeMarco_Web-5963

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award® nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, third-party D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.