SPLIT SCREAM Volume Six is out now. Purchase it here, or wherever you buy books from.
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The SPLIT SCREAM series goes to its darkest corners yet with these twin novelette odes to horrible parents!
COME TO DADDY by Ryan T. Jenkins
A damaged man endeavors to put the pieces back together after a lifetime of destruction; to reckon with his wife and son leaving him; to attend to the dreams of his dead mother’s well-manicured hand scuttling around at night; and the impossibly large garlic bulbs growing in his backyard; and the haunted movie poster of a B-list actor coming to life before his eyes.
It’s time, now, to confront how his marriage of eighteen years went to hell, all because of a trip to the store to buy avocados for his son’s college going-away party…or was it something more?
There’s nothing more punk rock than being a deluded, strung-out, forty-four-year-old dad forced to face the helter-skelter truth. Distilled from the classic Gothic haunted house narrative comes this twisted ode to punk rock and fatherhood.
MOTHER IS COMING HOME by David Corse
When Otis discovers an undulating, flesh-like portal near his barn, he believes he’s finally found a way to escape his hometown and travel the world. All he has to do is sell the oddity to the highest bidder and leave home for good.
His plans crumble when, during a drunken argument, he tosses his sickly and cruel mother through the portal. The momentary elation is brief, and quickly swallowed by a gutting reality. Otis must rescue his mother and protect the strange opening from prying eyes, no matter the cost. The lengths he will go to to hold onto hope are endless in this tale of toxic relationships, failsons, and cowardice.
David Corse Interviews Ryan T. Jenkins
DAVID CORSE: What inspired you to write your novelette, Come to Daddy?
RYAN T. JENKINS: It started in a generative writing group, the Muckheads, where, every month, each member writes their own story based on a prompt. This prompt was to use pop culture—anything from a celebrity to a genre to a specific work—as an element of horror. I chose three elements: Elijah Wood, punk music, and the haunted house trope.
DC: When did you first realize you had to write this story? What made you say, “hell yes!”?
RTJ: I wrote a scene where the MC gets pelted with exploding rotten avocados by his wife. It was horrifying, funny, and peculiar all at the same time. Something about it—the cocktail of emotions it explored—dislodged a piece of my brain where this weird-ass story came pouring out.
DC: The movie Come to Daddy by Ant Timpson is integral to your novelette. How did you end up incorporating it into your story?
RTJ: It’s a little strange because it’s not the movie so much as the movie poster that inspired me. Yes, the movie explores fatherhood, but, in fact, I wrote the first draft of the story before watching the movie. Growing up a millennial, I always perceived Elijah Wood as the kid from Radio Flyer, Flipper, and LOTR. I’m not a movie buff by any means, and I don’t know all of Wood’s oeuvre; it’s just how I remember Wood. I found him to be a childhood companion, a brilliant actor. So it jarred me when, recently, I stumbled across the Come to Daddy movie poster online and saw Elijah Wood presented in a radically different way. His eyes are bulging out in horror and he’s holding a devil’s fork. I was like, Damn! Facing that version of Wood was confronting a part of myself that I’ve avoided thinking about: I guess some form of middle-agedness.
DC: Your MC is a middle-aged punk rocker. Were you involved in the punk scene growing up? How did that influence your story?
RTJ: Being a social outcast and a white dude growing up in the nineties, chances were very, very high that I dabbled in punk music at some point. And I did! I more than dabbled. For a short time as a teenager, punk music was my religion. The braying guitars, the bad-ass cover art, the chain wallets, the moshing, the mohawks. In seventh grade, I broke my arm at a Green Day concert! I loved it all and even played in a band or two myself. In hindsight, punk offered me so much: a way to confront aspects of my emotionally stunted masculinity, to challenge the conservative environment I grew up in, to question authority, etc. But it also came with a minefield of potential pitfalls, where sometimes the rebellious nature of punk makes a young man eschew his privileges and responsibilities. The MC in this story falls into these traps. He uses punk music to avoid his problems and to avoid the truth about himself. Exploits the chaos of punk to block all the other noise out, which becomes more complicated the older he gets.
DC: What was the most challenging part of writing Come to Daddy?
RTJ: Finding the MC’s voice. I think he’s a real asshole, mainly in how out of touch he is. He’s a lousy parent, if you ask me. But he also struggles with addiction and was neglected as a child, which feeds into this lousiness. I had to continuously find ways to bridge these two tentpoles, between unlikability and sympathy. Humor was a way to do that. But also writing from his POV seemed essential. Being around this guy you would think he was living in a different reality. But—or at least this was my goal as the writer—I wanted to create an experience for the reader where this unlikable dude’s internal life yields at least some complication to how he may seem from the outside.
DC: What’s the vibe of your story? How do you want readers to feel reading it?
RTJ: I honestly don’t know! I’ve heard different reactions. All I know is I want the reader to feel something, whether it’s nostalgia for nineties movies, or anger at how obtuse men can be, or sadness because it reminds them of their own failed relationship with their parents. Any emotion—anything but numbness. The MC in this story suffers from numbness, and it rots him from the inside out. As writing this story showed me, emotional numbness is one of the loneliest and destructive places that a person can be in.
Ryan T. Jenkins interviews David Corse
RTJ: Your story explores the figure of the overbearing, toxic mother. What are some of your favorite unruly mother characters in film/books, and did any of them influence your writing of the mother in this story?
DC: Where to even begin? There are so many bad moms I could talk about, but my favorites are Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, Margaret White from Carrie, Beth Jarrett from Ordinary People, and Mary Brady from Sleepwalkers. I’m a huge fan of Friday the 13th, so I have to throw Pamela Voorhees into the mix, too.
To some extent, all of the moms I mentioned influenced the creation of Regina. She is overbearing like Mama Fratelli, a perfectionist like Beth Jarrett, and deeply in love with her son like Mary Brady.
However, the biggest influence on the character is Annie Wilkes from Misery. Annie is a force of nature who uses twisted logic that only she understands. Regina is similar in that she’ll gladly hurt someone she loves to get what she wants.
RTJ: When conceiving the story, did you start with the characters or the portal first?
DC: The portal, of course! Most of my stories start with a compelling image. Characters and motivation come later. Sometimes much later. I’ll get an image stuck in my head, and I learned over the years that I can exorcise the image by asking questions. Sometimes, I ask enough questions that the image is no longer compelling, but other times, a story reveals itself.
Mother is Coming Home started with an image of a white glowing orb next to a red barn. Once I realized it was one of those images that wouldn’t leave me alone, I started asking questions. Why was it there? Where did it come from? Who owns the barn? Would they go inside? Would anyone miss them?
As for characters, I start by asking what they are terrified of and why. Then, because I write dark fantasy and horror, I throw them into a situation where they must confront their fears.
RTJ: Was the portal always flesh-like? And why so much ooze?
DC: No, it wasn’t. In the first draft, the portal was like the wormholes in Sliders and Farscape, two sci-fi shows from the ’90s and early ‘00s that I adore. As I developed the novelette’s themes, I thought it was important to drop hints about the opening and what it can do to people. I can’t say too much without spoiling the ending, but the opening is a thematic extension of motherhood and conception.
As for why so much ooze? Why not? If I thought the story could have handled it, I would have added even more slime and gunk. But my real answer is that I unabashedly love ooze. Slime offers a unique tactile experience. It’s sticky and stretchy and squishy. It can be all sorts of colors, from milky white to neon green. Because of this, it’s more fun to write about than blood. Blood is always red and smells like iron. It’s always in a pool. Ooze, on the other hand, is whatever you want it to be.
RTJ: At one point, the narration describes Otis as a “possum in a steel trap.” The small town—and the inability to escape from it—becomes a horror device in your story. How much did you use the influence of your own hometown/background to hone elements of this story?
DC: I pulled on a lot of influences to create the sense of claustrophobia that’s present in the story. Mother is Coming Home takes place in a fictionalized version of Pulaski County, Kentucky. My extended family lives there, and while I don’t remember it well, I do remember stories my mother told me about how she felt judged when she visited.
I added my mother’s stories to my own experience in high school. I attended a small, private Catholic school and felt constantly surveilled. My moral and political beliefs didn’t align with a significant portion of the curriculum. I’m liberal and skeptical of religion. There were many days when I contorted myself into a shape I didn’t recognize just to get by.
The greatest influence, though, is from my experience living in San Francisco. I moved there after earning my Master’s degree and struggled to find a job. When I did find work, it was for a shady start-up that barely paid a living wage. I took the job because my partner and I were dead broke and eating oatmeal and canned green beans for more meals than I’d like to admit. It was a toxic situation I was trapped in for years.
RTJ: Was this your first time working in the novelette length, and what, after writing one, did you find useful writing in this form?
DC: It was! Mother is Coming Home is my first novelette, and I loved the experience so much that I’ve drafted several more. What I love about novelettes is they are the perfect balance between character development and length. Speaking as a reader, novelettes let you inhabit an in-depth story and world for an hour or two in a way that short stories rarely do.
As a writer, I love novelettes for two reasons. First, they let me write more dialogue. It’s one of my favorite parts of telling a story. Second, writing novelettes allows me to share more stories than writing novels. Don’t get me wrong, I love novels, but they take a long, long time to write. I can write two or three novelettes in a year, but only one novel—if I’m lucky.
RTJ: What was your favorite part of crafting this story?
DC: Adding the ick factor. The first few drafts of Mother is Coming Home were sterile and lifeless. I believed in the story, but something wasn’t clicking. It wasn’t until a conversation with Alex (Woodroe, Tenebrous EIC) that I figured it out. She told me to stop holding back, embrace being weird, and not give a fuck about what other people think.
I went back through the novelette and made it filthy. I added ooze, sweat, dirt, and blood. There were days when I’d finish a scene and laugh to myself while imagining someone gagging a little bit while reading my story. For the most part, all the gross stuff I added made it into the final draft. There was only one thing that Split Scream’s fabulous editor, Alex Ebenstein, asked me to remove, and I think he made the right call. I don’t want to share what we took out, but you’re free to guess!
RTJ: What was the most challenging aspect of crafting this story?
DC: Mother is Coming Home is fun, but it’s also dark and disturbing. The hardest part of the process was putting myself in the right headspace to channel the main characters. They are the opposite of who I am, so writing them was challenging. I kept wanting to make the characters better people, but I had to remind myself that wasn’t what the story needed.
I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t: I felt physically lighter after I submitted the final draft of Mother is Coming Home. Now, all of you get to carry Otis and Regina with you instead of only me.
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SPLIT SCREAM Volume Six is out now. Purchase it here, or wherever you buy books from.
