Dying Breeds Released
Struggling to figure out word wrap with this new editing setup, so bear with me. Words below \/
My latest book, Dying Breeds, was released yesterday via Journalstone Publishing.
The idea for this book has been kicking around a long time. On the right-hand side of this blog, waaay down at the bottom, you’ll see the now broken link to “Dying Images,” that was published on the website Death Head Grin back in the early 2010s. That story was a very early version of the female protagonist’s first section in this book.
(Holy cow! Almost every story I wrote for the web is gone. Broken links abound. I wonder if I can find any of them on Wayback Machine . . .)
Anyway, prior to “Dying Images” I had written a story about a serial killer obsessed with silent film. He drove around New York with a corpse in his car while talking about really mundane aspects of silent film like subtitles and things like that. It was terrible. It was basically a place to info dump all the shit I’d learned while trying to get a film minor (ended up graduating with my B.A. 3 credits short of that coveted film minor). A few bodies ended up in there as well.
And the character Miles.
And a few photographs.
And a camera.
After that first story about Miles, I ended up using this camera that captures part of the essence of whatever it photographs as a MacGuffin to connect a bunch of different stories. The longer I was out of college, the less the stories became mechanisms for info dumping and more they became . . . stories.
I started weaving them together into what became Dying Breeds.
Then I started reading Goosebumps, and stumbled upon Say Cheese and Die.
Then I heard about Joe Hill’s “Snapshot.”
Stephen King’s “The Sun Dog.”
Then the film Polaroid was released in 2019.
I went through a brief rollercoaster ride then, shifting from “this has already been done” to “this has been done enough times to prove it resonates with people, and in each story, the function of the camera is a little different.”
We’ve reached a point where the mystification or deification of technology, in all its forms, has become an integral part of modern myth. It’s what Aetherchrist was all about. It’s what made me pick up Lucas Mangum’s Gods of the Dark Web. It is at the core of Black Mirror. When we look forward towards the technology that will be or the potential of technology that is, we see this beautiful intersection between horror and science fiction.
When we look back at technology that was and what it could have been, we see something a little different, beautiful, mysterious, and nostalgic in its own way.
I often found myself fascinated with what the genre of silent film could have become if technology had not rendered it obsolete so early. Technology advances so rapidly today that we rarely get to see hardware reach its potential. As such, we find people doubling back to see what could have been. We see new retro games pushing the boundaries of what the original NES or Sega Master System could do.
In this way, you start to see a practical, social value in nostalgia as a driving force. When society moves this fast, it is worthwhile to have a portion of its inhabitants looking forward while another portion looks back.
So yeah, there’s a camera. But there’s also the premature death of the silent film era. There’s the dissolution of the single-income household. There’s a detective trying to maintain relevance in a world where tech advancements might someday render him obsolete. And there’s a killer who in some strange way shares a symbiotic relationship with his potential victims. At a comfortable distance, they rely on each other (the crime fighter needs the criminal, after all). But if they get too close, harm can come to all of them.
So I embraced the legacy of the camera in horror fiction and film.
And I gave the readers a bit of wiggle room to weave the legacy together, should they choose to do so.
The camera in Dying Breeds functions a bit differently, depending on who has it in their possession. For some, the camera might allow you to revisit parts of your past. For others, you might be able to harm those you photograph.
In the stories from other, far more notable, authors than myself, their cameras all have unique features, but are they the feature of the camera, or the person who uses it?
It is up to the audience to decide if the cameras in these stories are cameras unto themselves contained within the boundaries of their respective authors’ mythos, or if they are all THE archetypal camera in every supernatural story involving this technology.
I’m really excited to share this book with all of you, and I hope you enjoy it.
Kirk
