It won the 2003 Locus Award for Best Short Story.
“THE HIDDEN CHAMBER”
Began with a request from two editors, the Nancys Kilpatrick and Holder, to write something “gothic” for their anthology, Outsiders. It seems to me that the story of Bluebeard and its variants is the most gothic of all stories, so I wrote a Bluebeard poem set in the almost empty house I was staying in at the time. Upsettling is what Humpty Dumpty called “a portmanteau word,” occupying the territory between upsetting and unsettling.
“FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES IN THE SECRET HOUSE OF THE NIGHT OF DREAD DESIRE”
I started writing this story in pencil one windy winter’s night in the waiting room between platforms five and six of East Croydon railway station. I was twenty-two, going on twenty-three. When it was done I typed it up and showed it to a couple of editors I knew. One sniffed, told me it wasn’t his kind of thing and he didn’t honestly think it was actually anybody’s kind of thing, while the other read it, looked sympathetic, and gave it back explaining that the reason it would never be printed was that it was facetious nonsense. I put it away, glad to have been saved the public embarrassment of having more people read it and dislike it.
The story stayed unread, wandering from folder to box to tub, from office to basement to attic, for another twenty years, and when I thought of it, it was only with relief that it had not been printed. One day I was asked for a story for an anthology called Gothic! and I remembered the manuscript in the attic and went up to find it, to see if there was anything in it that I could rescue.
I started reading “Forbidden Brides,” and as I read it I smiled. Actually, I decided, it was pretty funny, and it was smart, too; a good little story—the clumsinesses were mostly the sort of things you’d find in journeyman work, and all of them seemed easily fixable. I got out the computer and did another draft of the story, twenty years after the first, shortened the title to its present form, and sent it off to the editor. At least one reviewer felt it was facetious nonsense, but that seemed to be a minority opinion, as “Forbidden Brides” was picked up by several “best-of-the-year” anthologies and was voted Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Awards.
I’m not sure what we can learn from that. Sometimes you just show stories to the wrong people, and nobody’s going to like everything. From time to time I wonder what else there is in the boxes in the attic.
“GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS,” “THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE”
One story was inspired by a Lisa Snellings-Clark statue of a man holding a double bass, just as I did when I was a child; the other was written for an anthology of real-life ghost stories. Most of the other authors managed tales that were rather more satisfying than mine, although mine had the unsatisfying advantage of being perfectly true. These stories were first collected in Adventures in the Dream Trade, a miscellany published by NESFA Press in 2002, which collected lots of introductions and oddments and such.
“CLOSING TIME”
Michael Chabon was editing a book of genre stories to demonstrate how much fun stories are and to raise funds for 826 Valencia, which helps children to write. （The book was published as McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.） He asked me for a story, and I asked if there was any particular genre he was missing. There was—he wanted an M. R. James–style ghost story.
So I set out to write a proper ghost story, but the finished tale owes much more to my love of the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman than it does to James （however, it also, once it was done, turned out to be a club story, thus managing two genres for the price of one）。 The story was picked up by some “best-of-the-year” anthologies, and took the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 2004.
All the places in this story are true places, although I have changed a few names—the Diogenes Club was really the Troy Club in Hanway Street, for example. Some of the people and events are true as well, truer than one might imagine. As I write this I find myself wondering whether that little playhouse still exists, or if they knocked it down and built houses on the ground where it waited, but I confess I have no desire actually to go and find out.
“GOING WODWO”
A wodwo, or wodwose, was a wild man of the woods. This was written for Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Green Man.
“BITTER GROUNDS”
I wrote four short stories in 2002, and this was, I suspect, the best of the lot, although it won no awards. It was written for my friend Nalo Hopkinson’s anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories.