Steven Popkes’s work is found largely in the science fiction and fantasy world. His first sale was in 1982 to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Since then he has published three novels: Caliban Landing, Slow Lightning, and Welcome to Witchlandia. He is better known for his short fiction. Since 1982 he has published about forty stories. In 1988 his story “The Color Winter” was nominated for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award. Since then he’s been collected in several year’s best science fiction and year’s best fantasy anthologies. His novellas, Jackie’s Boy and Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected, placed second in the 2011 and 2013 Asimov’s Readers’ Award Polls. He lives with his wife in a Boston suburb, where he raises turtles and bananas.
• There are a couple of sources for this story. One is very personal. I was born in Southern California and lived there until we moved to Alabama in 1964. My parents both loved horse racing. I have many memories as a child hanging out with them in the stands watching magnificent animals run their hearts out for us. I remember my parents shoving me forward to shake hands with someone they said was Willie Shoemaker. I was probably around seven.
Another is more writerly. A number of years ago I wrote a novella entitled Mister Peck Goes Calling. This involved Cthulhu and the Boston Irish gang wars before Whitey Bulger got involved. It provided the character that ended up in “The Sweet Warm Earth.” I live in the Boston area now. After being here for over thirty years, it’s not hard to imagine an Irish mobster falling in love with California.
William R. Soldan received his BA in English literature from Youngstown State University and studied creative writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program, where his focus was fiction. He teaches Writing at YSU and is a board member of Lit Youngstown, a nonprofit organization focused on facilitating and nurturing the literary arts. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications, such as New World Writing, Thuglit, The Vignette Review, Kentucky Review, Jellyfish Review, Elm Leaves Journal, and others. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio, with his wife and two children.
• Stories often first present themselves to me in the form of an image or an ending. Or an ending image. But in the case of “All Things Come Around” it began with a situation and grew from there. My wife and I had decided to stop at Popeyes for some food on our way home one night—the same Popeyes in the story. Our son was about a year old then, and he was teething and miserable in his car seat, screaming and crying something fierce. So this element of the story—a fast-food chicken joint and a shrieking child in pain—was drawn straight from real life. As for the rest of the story, let’s just say it could have happened, or something close to it.
In my twenties I lived a reckless life and kept company with some rough individuals, some of whom did their dealings in the neighborhood my family and I found ourselves in that night. Some of whom still do, for all I know. As is the case anytime I find myself in a place where I used to run around during the darker days of my youth, I began to imagine what might happen if I crossed paths with someone from back then, back before kids and marriage and making other positive changes in my trajectory. That was when the idea began to take shape, while still sitting in the drive-through, waiting for my chicken. I must have had a faraway expression on my face, because my wife looked at me and said, “You’re writing a story, aren’t you?” She knows me well. Now, rarely does a story come into view fully formed, this one being no exception. However, the scenario and the players for this one came in a flash, and the rest was really a matter of organizing the content.
I originally started at the end, with Travis lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in his chest (I drew some inspiration for the scene from Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which he does some wonderful things with time and perspective). As Travis lay there, the events of the evening leading up to his being shot swirled through his mind, during which time the story slipped into flashback and came around full circle, ending where it began, more or less. I soon scrapped that idea, though, deciding it was better told in a linear fashion. Evidently my instinct was right, because Todd Robinson over at Thuglit, who had previously published another one of my stories, “The Long Drive Home,” loved it and included it in his journal’s farewell issue, Thuglit: Last Writes. I owe Todd a huge debt of gratitude for that. Now more than ever.
Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and four collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and its two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, ten Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards. In 2008 he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. He has won several lifetime achievement awards. His most recent publication is Interior Darkness (2016), a collection of selected stories.
• “The Process Is a Process All Its Own” is the first real product of a long, long meander through the interior of a novel very much in progress. It was short of tumble-dried on its way toward the finish line, so I was obliged to start over. From the first page. I wanted to see what I could come up with and, because neuropathy had buggered my typing, also wanted to experiment with dictation. The act of dictating into my phone somehow suggested the synesthesia that begins the story. Most of the middle came from material already written. The ending is the development of a situation that had been considered but not yet written. And not long after I started, I bought a large-key keyboard, because typing was easier than talking.
Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews called “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” He’s also written for Esquire Japan, BBC Radio 4, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Slant, Writer’s Digest, Inside Jersey, and other publications. A lifelong resident of the Jersey shore, he was an editor for thirteen years at the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, Tony Soprano’s hometown paper.
• When editor Patrick Millikin—a longtime bookseller at Arizona’s Poisoned Pen Bookstore—invited me to contribute to his collection The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads, my thoughts immediately went to that greatest of all road-rage stories, Richard Matheson’s classic “Duel.” I was intrigued at first with the idea of telling a similar story from the antagonist’s perspective—the hunter rather than the hunted. Once I began writing, though, the story veered off into unexpected directions, fueled by memories of my own long late-night commutes from a newsroom in North Jersey to my home at the shore. I began to riff on the idea of a cat-and-mouse game played out on a lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the night, with a driver so exhausted that his own senses are playing tricks on him, and where paranoia, fear, and danger are always waiting just up the road.
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2016
ARTHUR, BRUCE
Beks and the Second Notice. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, December
BEARD, JO ANN
The Tomb of Wrestling. Tin House, vol. 18, no. 2
COSBY, S. A.
Slant Six. Thuglit: Last Writes
DAVIS, ARTHUR
In Innocence and Guilt. Mystery Weekly, July
DAY, DENNIS
The Fixer. Midwest Review, Spring
DOBOZY, TAMAS
Steyr Mannlicher. New England Review, vol. 37, no. 3
DRISCOLL, JACK
Land of the Lost and Found. Prairie Schooner, Winter
FAYE, LYNDSAY
The Sparrow and the Lark. The Big Book of Jack the Ripper, ed. by Otto Penzler, Vintage
FLANAGAN, ERIN
The Rule of Three. Hayden’s Ferry Review, Spring/Summer
FLOYD, JOHN M.
Jackpot Mode. The Strand Magazine, October-January
GRAY, LUCAS
Eternity Met. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February
HANN, KEITH
The Last Man. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, February
HART, ROB
Last Request. Thuglit, no. 22
IDASZAK, JOSHUA
The Last Laz of Krypton. Boulevard, Fall
JENSEN, WILLIAM
A Quiet Place to Hide. North Dakota Review, Spring/Summer
KOZAK, CATHY
Dirty Girls of Paradise. The Fiddlehead, Spring
LAWTON, R. T.
May Day. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May
LIMON, MARTIN
The King of K-Pop. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June
LISS, DAVID
Me Untamed. Crime Plus Music, ed. by Jim Fusilli, Three Rooms Press
MARTIN, VALERIE
Bromley Hall. Conjunctions, Fall
McFADDEN, DENNIS
Tillie Dinger. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April
MERKEL, WARREN
Giddy. Mystericale, December
OPPERMAN, MEG
Murder Under the Baobab. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November
RICHARDSON, TRAVIS
Cop in a Well. Spinetingler Magazine, May
RUSCH, KRISTINE KATHRYN
Overworked. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, December
RUTTER, ERIC
Proof. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November
VLAUTIN, WILLY
The Kill Switch. The Highway Kind, ed. by Patrick Millikin, Mulholland
WILEY, MICHAEL
The Hearse. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, April
WILLIAMS, TIM L.
What We Barter, the Things We’ll Trade. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, April
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About the Editors
JOHN SANDFORD, guest editor, is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of forty-eight published novels, all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times bestseller list, among them the Prey novels, the Kidd novels, and the Virgil Flowers novels.
OTTO PENZLER, series editor, is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, columnist, and owner of New York’s The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore solely dedicated to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies.
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John Sandford, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017
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