Van Dyne’s Zuvembies

“When hate makes life worth living…”

Cryptozoology is the study of cryptids: those creatures of myth, folklore, legend, and imagination that science sniffs at, and yet may in fact exist. Much like the coelacanth, thought extinct for 65 million years, only to be found alive and well in 1938. Seems science doesn’t know everything.

Writers of the paranormal love cryptids. They are their stock in trade, their bread and butter. Yet, of the hundreds of cryptids available, relatively few find their way into the tales of the paranormal writers.

Way back in 1934, Robert E Howard wrote a story titled, “Pigeons from Hell”, which was published in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales, two years after Howard’s death.

The story is a superb example of Southern Gothic horror, and features a creature of Howard’s invention, although drawn from Voodoo myth — the zuvembie.

Given the current zombie craze, I would’ve thought someone would’ve made use of the zuvembie before now. To my knowledge, no one has.

So you may be asking, “What the heck is a zuvembie?” That’s a good question, and I’m glad you asked. Let me satisfy your curiosity with a scene from Van Dyne’s Zuvembies:

“Can someone please tell me what the hell a zuvembie is?” NicAskill asked.

Dr Heber cleared his throat. “A zuvembie is a creature that is often classed as one of the undead.”

“You mean like zombies and vampires?” NicAskill asked.

“Yes. Although technically speaking, a zuvembie is not dead. Simply changed.” Heber paused a moment to clean his glasses. He put them back on and continued.

“In traditional voodoo, a bokor, that is, a magician, creates a zombie from someone who is already dead. A zombie is a re-animated corpse that does the bidding of the bokor. A zombie is essentially a slave.”

“So there’s no zombie virus?” Jones asked.

“No. That is the stuff of cheap pulp fiction and B-rated movies.”

“So no zombie apocalypse,” Jones said.

Heber shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“So if a zombie is a slave, what’s a zuvembie?” NicAskill asked.

“As I said,” Heber explained, “a zombie is a slave of the bokor, created by powerful spells that are cast by the bokor. A zuvembie, on the other hand, has never died. The creator of a zuvembie may or may not be a bokor. However, the creator of the zuvembie has gone through the necessary rituals and been taught the secret of making the Black Brew, which, when drunk, will turn a woman into a zuvembie.”

“Only women can become zuvembies?” Jones asked.

“That is correct,” Heber replied. “Only women.”

“Why?” The question came from NicAskill.

“Because hate and revenge are the motivators and the required emotions to become a zuvembie.” Heber shrugged. “It seems women, as a sex, have so often been viewed as inferior that they and they alone possess the necessary hatred and desire for revenge to become a zuvembie.”

NicAskill sat back in her seat. “Wow.”

Heber, a smile on his face, continued. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The zuvembie is the personification of female hate and revenge.”

“So what’s this thing like?” Jones asked.

Heber explained, “According to the lore, ancient lore that predates voodoo and goes back to West African snake religions, once a woman drinks the Black Brew she ceases to be a human. She becomes one with the denizens of the Black World. Friends and family cease to exist. A zuvembie has command over some aspects of nature. It can control owls, snakes, bats, and werewolves to do its bidding. The creature can summon darkness in order to blot out a small amount of light.

“Unless killed by lead or steel, it lives forever. Time means nothing to the zuvembie; it exists, as it were, outside of time. It no longer eats human food, and dwells in a house or a cave much as a bat does.

“The zuvembie cannot speak, at least not as humans do, and it does not think as humans think. However, by the sound of its voice it can hypnotize the living and summon a person to his or her death. And once the thing has killed a person, it can control the lifeless corpse until the corpse grows cold and the blood ceases to flow. The corpse becomes the slave, as it were, of the zuvembie and will do whatever the zuvembie commands it to do.”

“Good night,” Jones said. “It’s a good thing women don’t know about this zuvembie thing.”

“Shut up, Jones,” NicAskill said.

“One more thing,” Dr Heber said. “The zuvembie has but one pleasure in life.”

“What’s that?” Mostyn asked.

“To kill human beings.”

So now you know what a zuvembie is. Pretty scary stuff, coming as it did from the stories REH’s grandmother told him. Nothing like folklore to scare the bejeezus out of you.

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies is at the beta readers, and I’m looking to publish it late June or early July.

In the meantime check out the other Pierce Mostyn adventures. They’re filled with monsters, daring-do, and will convince you to keep the lights on at night.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Original illustration from Weird Tales for Pigeons from Hell

On the Shortness of Life

A little over a week ago, I learned of the death of a fellow indie author. I did not know Laila Doncaster, except in passing. We exchanged a few words now and then on Twitter, occasionally retweeted each other’s tweets, and that was that.

Her first book of a projected series was published on May 1st. Her bio on Amazon speaks of looking forward to an early retirement. And now she’s dead.

I am saddened. Very much so. A person looking forward to the future, an exciting future, and now there is no future. She’s gone.

Every now and again someone will chasten me for my attitude towards my writing. The sense of intense urgency I have to put pen to paper.

I am driven to produce as much as I can, as fast as I can, and get as many copies of my books into as many hands as I can.

I’m told I shouldn’t feel so driven. I’m told I shouldn’t be looking over my shoulder for the Grim Reaper, while my pen is scratching out page after page of words.

All I can say in response to these well-meaning folk is to quote Seneca: “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Or to paraphrase: I might die tonight — I need to write today. After all, only I can write my books; and I have many score begging to be written down.

Seneca’s essay, On the Shortness of Life, needs to be required reading. It is the antidote to the carelessness with which most of us approach life and live life — which is the most non-renewable of resources.

I’m 67 years old, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve wasted most of the time given to me in this thing we call life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. However, it wasn’t until I was 37 that I actually, in all seriousness, began to act on my desire instead of just dabble. And it was another 11 years before I began to see the fruit of that action.

According to the actuarial tables, I have another 10 years to live. That’s not a lot of time. And anything can happen between now and then to shorten those 10 years.

Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

There’s some comfort in that advice, yet how many of us know how to use our time and not waste it? I confess I’m still struggling with that one. But here, too, Seneca has some advice for us:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

In other words, it is unproductive busyness, unproductive worry and anxiety, unproductive lack of focus, unproductive preoccupation with things that don’t matter that rob us of the one thing that does matter — irreplaceable time.

It is the life lived deliberately that is the fruitful life. It is the focused life that is the productive life. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young poet: once you’ve decided you must write, then you must structure your life so that nothing gets in the way of writing. Harlan Ellison put it more cryptically: “Writers write.”

I might beat the actuarial odds. My mom was 80 when she died. My dad is 87. His mother died in her 90s, although the last few years she was debilitated by a stroke, and his father died a month shy of his 103 birthday. But I can’t bank on it. Which means I have to write today.

As Seneca noted:

…the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man, who is already full and satisfied, food which he does not want but can hold.

Living deliberately is the key. And when we do, life — no matter how long or short — is time enough to accomplish great things.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy and productive living!

Fiction Is People

Fiction is all about people. At least good fiction is. That’s why good fiction stays with us. Why it’s memorable.

Theodore Sturgeon once said, “Good fiction is people. And people are people you know.” Which is probably the point of the old writing adage: write what you know.

It’s all fine and dandy for the writer to show off his or her knowledge about cars, or cooking, or stamp collecting, or orchids — but if those things don’t touch people, so what?

Of late, I’ve been watching Colombo. The lieutenant is a wonderfully drawn character, and certainly went a long way to contribute to the show’s popularity. What I find of even more interest, is that Colombo knows people. He knows what makes them tick. What is likely and unlikely behavior. He’s a shrink masquerading as a police officer in a rumpled raincoat.

Columbo is all about people: their greed, their habits. And how it is that in the end, who they are is what ultimately trips up their attempts to get away with murder.

Good fiction is about people, because without people there is no story. How can a story exist without people? Sure, we can substitute animals for people, but that’s just a camouflage. The story is still about people, and still tells us something about the human condition. It is as Ray Bradbury noted: create your characters (the people), let them do their thing — and there is the story.

There are writers who get hung up on plot. They have to detail each little action in the story. Too often, what gets lost along the way are the people in the story. And the reader knows it. The characters are flat, lifeless paper dolls.

Now some readers don’t care. They devour the story and move on to the next one. Those readers are kind of like junkies just looking for reading fix.

However, I think most readers want a quality reading experience. They want to read about people like themselves, or about people they would like to become, doing wonderful and amazing things.

Tarzan is memorable because he personifies the best in us and is ultimately someone who we’d like to be.

Rex Stout gave us the sedentary eccentric genius, Nero Wolfe, and the wisecracking man of action, Archie Goodwin. I find myself drawn to both of them, but particularly to Wolfe. Why? Because I would like to be the master of that brownstone. Good food, good books, the big globe, beautiful orchids. I’d just sub tea for the beer.

I can’t recall any story that I remember solely because of the plot. I do, though, remember many because of the characters. Bilbo Baggins. Hercule Poirot. Sherlock Holmes. Carnacki. Rona Dean (from RH Hale’s Church Mouse). Tony Price and Chris Allard (from Richard Schwindt’s two mystery series). Carol (from Steve Bargdill’s Banana Sandwich). The Zombie from Ben Willoughby’s The Undude. Tatsuya (from Crispian Thurlborn’s 01134). And more. So many more.

Fiction is all about people. Fiction is us.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Reading Indie

I am surprised by the number of authors on Twitter who say they don’t have time to read, or who don’t read books by indie authors.

Don’t Have Time To Read

This one just boggles my mind. How can a writer say he or she doesn’t have time to read?

That’s like a painter saying he doesn’t have time to look at art.

Or a woodworker saying he doesn’t have time to look at other examples of woodworking.

Stephen King has noted that if one wants to be a writer, he needs to do two things:

1. Read a lot
2. Write a lot

And Mr. King is not alone in his sentiment. Every writer who makes a living from writing says the same thing.

Reading the writing of other writers not only provides enjoyment for the reader — but it is a seminar on how others approach the art and craft of storytelling.

Writers need to be readers.

Don’t Read Indie

This too boggles my mind. How can an indie author not read the words of his or her fellows?

That’s like an eye doctor never talking with other eye doctors. How is that going to work? I would not want to go to that doctor.

It saddens me to see indie authors not list an indie book when they play those Twitter games of list your current favorite reads. Or an indie author when they’re tagged to list current favorite authors.

I read an average of four books a month, along with a bushel basket of short stories and novelettes. I also sneak in some nonfiction. And most of my reading is of indie authors.

Mind you, I don’t read bestsellers. I find bestsellers, for the most part, not the best books. I scour the bottom of the barrel and maybe the middle of the barrel. That is where I find the real talent. The writers who truly know how to tell a good story. And I find it a shame that those writers are the ones who deserve to be bestsellers and are not.

Indie April is over. But that doesn’t mean the adventure has to stop. Those indie authors are still there waiting to be discovered. Go out and discover them. Find those books that are not in the top 300,000 on Amazon’s paid list. That’s where you’ll find the good stuff.

Writers, if you are serious about your craft, read lots and write lots.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!