In Delirium II Excerpt

I wanted to share the introduction to this anthology. This and In Delirium I are the jewels in my career here at Delirium for obvious reasons. I’d like to once again thank Brian Keene for editing volume 1 and for John Everson for editing the second. Both of these were gifts to me and very cherished ones at that. And I’d like to thank all the authors and artists who took part. I’ve sent everyone a special thank you earlier this year for this, but I wanted to publicly state this again.

Introduction:
Coming Home Again

by John Everson

© 2007 by John Everson
All Rights Reserved

They say: you can never go home again. I’m not sure exactly who they are or what that means; I go home every night. And every year for the past seven years, I’ve sent Shane Ryan Staley a new manuscript. Whether it be short story, novella or novel, those manuscripts have enjoyed the same home—between the bindings of a Delirium hardcover. Every year, I have gone home again.

Seven years doesn’t sound like that long of a time when you just spit it out there. Seven years. You can’t get through grammar school in that amount of time. The Summer Olympics are only played once in that span. But if you broke a mirror, seven years could feel like an eternity of mishaps. If you’re in the U.S. and you voted for Gore in 2000, seven years has been an eternity.

Seven years ago, I lived in a different house and still had all my hair. Seven years ago, I had just signed on as a fiction editor for Dark Regions Magazine and as the music columnist for Talebones, and I was recording spoken word audio readings of my newspaper music column for a dot-com venture called audiohighway.com (these days, that would be called a podcast…but there was no such thing as an iPod seven years ago.)

Dark Regions, my Talebones column, audiohighway.com, and a great deal of my hair…all of those things are gone now. So in that sense, I can’t go home again.

But in that tumultuous yet seemingly short span of time there has been one constant in my life, aside from my wife’s ever-tested patience. That constant has been Delirium Books. Back in the second half of 1999, after Shane Ryan Staley launched his publishing venture with Kurt Newton’s The House Spider and Other Strange Visitors, I sent him a batch of stories and queried about possibly publishing some of them as a chapbook collection of my work. A year later, that query ultimately yielded Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions, my first—and Delirium’s sixth—hardcover short story collection. In the intervening 12 months, I became entrenched in Shane Ryan Staley’s exciting no-holds (or holes!) barred world of horror fiction that held out both middle fingers to the world while hanging on the edge of a cliff from its thumbs and pinkies.

Long before my first book ever hit the shelves, I realized that I had found more than just a publisher in Shane. I had found a kindred spirit, an amazingly talented fellow writer, a fan of my work, and most importantly, a friend.

In those early months of Delirium, since my full-time gig was publication layout and editing, I spent many hours on the phone with Shane, guiding him through the foibles of QuarkXpress (the program all the books are typeset in). We traded hundreds of e-mails, and joked about cocks and cockatoos in the too-short-lived Sunday night Delirium online chats.

I played Delirium webmaster for awhile after Kurt Newton, and served as the copyeditor on many of the early Delirium titles.

My wife sometimes asked why I gave away all of this time. She asked why, whenever this stranger from Indiana—who I’d never even met—asked for something, his request went instantly to the top of my to-do list?

Why? Because Shane’s energy and passion for the genre we both loved was infectious. I respected him and his dreams for the press and, for both our sakes, I wanted Delirium to succeed. And I had great reason to fear that it wouldn’t.

Consider this: between 1994 and 2004, I published fiction in more than three dozen different magazines, including venerable small press stalwarts like Terminal Fright, Bloodsongs, Dead of Night, Grue and Black October. Not a single one of those 36+ titles exists today.

Seven years is a long time in the small press. For most, it’s more than a lifetime. Publishers sprout, produce a book or magazine or two and then go to seed and disintegrate like dandelion flowers on a summer lawn. Small press publishing is a dream for most. Dreams don’t last.

But right from the start, Delirium Books seemed different than the rest. I can remember early on, talking to Shane about the press and his latest idea for a new line; maybe it was the Ultra editions. He told me on the phone that he intended to turn Delirium into a full-time operation. Something he could support his family on.

I think I probably laughed at first. Told him he was crazy. And then, when I realized how serious he was, I got scared. The idea of turning a fledgling small press into a business that had to support a family sounded like suicide to me. For most, it would have been.

When Shane called me not so many months later and said he’d officially quit his job and Delirium was moving full-speed ahead, I thought…well, there goes my fiction’s home. In a few months, he’ll be forced to end this crazy Don Quixote gallop when the ground falls away, and he’ll have to go find a real way to make money to feed his kids.

Thank God (or Satan), I was wrong.

While most publishers in the small press get into this business for love, and quickly find out that while you can buy love, you can’t eat for free, Shane did not open his doors blind. He tested the waters, established a business model that worked, and stuck to it. He grew Delirium one book at a time, testing different lines and styles along the way, keeping those that worked and walking away quickly from those that didn’t.

In short, Shane became a canny businessman, as well as a publisher who loved horror and did his damnedest to take care of his authors. He was smart enough to realize early on that while he got into this business to expose and support new writers, if he didn’t also publish some established bankable authors, his press would capsize. He also realized that while his first love was short story collections, those just didn’t sell as well as novels. You’ll note that while all of the press’s early output revolved around short story collections, the majority of its 2006 releases were novels or novellas. Shane and Delirium adapted.

Along the way he built a formidable stable of writers, new and old, who broke the boundaries of the genre at any opportunity. His class of 2000, the first full year of Delirium’s operation, included Jeffrey Thomas, Charlee Jacob, Michael Laimo and Gerard Houarner, all of whom went on to score mass market publishing deals. Over the next couple years, he published the early work of Brian Keene and J.F. Gonzalez, alongside established names like Tom Piccirilli and Jack Ketchum. Those newcomers now stand proudly next to the old guard in the paperback sections of your Borders.

Shane not only had good business sense, he had good horror sense.

As I write this, Delirium is about to issue its 100th book, an amazing milestone for a small press. And an astonishing output in just a little more than seven years.

Over that period, Shane’s dedication, humor and drive have inspired a devoted legion of both authors and fans. Delirium has been awarded both the Shocker and the Stoker awards for its support of the horror genre. I was honored to be able to stand in as Shane’s representative to accept the Stoker on his behalf last year in Burbank, California. All of which brings us to the book you hold in your hands now.

At Horrorfind 2004, Brian Keene broached the idea of the first In Delirium anthology to me. “I’m putting together an anthology of Delirium authors called In Delirium,” he said. “It’s a secret – we’re going to present the manuscript to Shane at Christmas. He’ll keep any profits from publishing the resulting book as our gift. It’s to be a true ‘thank you’ from his authors for all he’s done in supporting our work. Soooo, are you in?”

Of course I was in. And my first thought was…damn, what a great idea – why didn’t I think of doing that?!

Almost two years later, after In Delirium had been published, Brian and I sat down at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco and he said, “you know, you could still do that. There doesn’t have to just be one volume. There are lots of Delirium authors who weren’t in the first one.”

And there were. In the coming pages, you’ll hear from many of them. By the end of that day, with Brian Knight’s help, we had an initial list of contributors for In Delirium II scrawled down on a scrap of paper.

Six months later, I had a stack of edited manuscripts, a cool gold foil illustration and some damned fine creepy cover art. The artwork dares you to open a book with stories that run the gamut of fantastic fiction, from surreal spec-fic, to unexpected ghost stories to gritty dark fantasy to melancholic bleak humor to a melange of fable and visceral horror. Like the first volume, In Delirium II ably demonstrates the breadth and depth of Delirium and its authors. And just to make it complete, Deliri-phile H Michael Casper took the Delirium bibliography a step further this time around, offering prices and a list of “firsts” for those keeping track of such things.

All of this work – the book you hold in your hands – is our gift to Shane Ryan Staley, for all the risks he’s taken to publish our work. For all the heart he’s given to make Delirium our home. With the exception of Mike Oliveri (who has a co-author credit with Brian Keene here and a solo offering in In Delirium), none of the other authors represented in ID2 had fiction in the original In Delirium. And the amazing thing is, after canvassing 41 authors between the two books, all of Delirium’s authors still have not been covered by these anthologies. That’s not by design; there simply hasn’t been enough space to publish pieces by everyone in these two volumes.

On behalf of all of Delirium’s authors, past and present, we offer this book with our most sincere thanks to Shane. For his vision, passion, loyalty, humor, and, for many of us, his friendship. We also thank Brian Keene, for the inspiration to show our appreciation in this uniquely Delirious way! Thanks especially to you, the loyal Delirium Books readers, for supporting Shane—and our work. If you didn’t read our strangely twisted tales… none of us would be here, in this moment, right now, waiting for me to quit rambling and let the fun begin. So I will. I’ll close with another clichéd “they say” for you: They say, Home is where the heart is.

My dark heart calls Delirium home. And as long as Shane and Delirium exist, I hope that I’ll always be coming home again. I hope that Delirium remains a home to horror for seven more years to come… and then some. And I write this in a room without mirrors.

—John Everson
Darien, IL
December 3, 2006