“FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT”

There are seven stories still to go in the Major Arcana, and I’ve promised artist Rick Berry that I’ll write them one day, and then he can paint them.

“FEEDERS AND EATERS”

This story was a nightmare I had in my twenties.

I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is not story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold into leaves, from silk to cobwebs, on waking.

Still, there are things you can bring back with you from dreams: atmosphere, moments, people, a theme. This is the only time I can remember bringing back a whole story, though.

I first wrote it as a comic, illustrated by the multitalented Mark Buckingham, and then later tried re-imagining it as an outline for a pornographic horror film I’d never make (a story called “Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture”). A few years ago editor Steve Jones asked me if I would like to resurrect an unjustly forgotten story of mine for his Keep Out the Night anthology, and I remembered this story and rolled up my sleeves and started to type.

Shaggy inkcaps are indeed wonderfully tasty mushrooms, but they do deliquesce into an unpleasant, black, inky substance shortly after you’ve picked them, which is why you will never see them in shops.

“DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP”

I was asked to write an entry in a book of imaginary diseases (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts). It seemed to me that an imaginary disease about making imaginary diseases might be interesting. I wrote it with the aid of a long-forgotten computer program called Babble and a dusty, leather-bound book of advice to the home physician.

“IN THE END”

I was trying to imagine the very last book of the Bible.

And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means “that thing over there.” (“Quick, brave Himalayan Guide-what’s that thing over there?”