Hi all! I'm pleased to introduce you to today's guest, who, if you haven't encountered him before, has been an absolutely delightful recent addition to the horror genre. Sean Seebach is the kind of pleasant, supportive, genial person that improves the genre as a whole so much so that you don't even care if his work is good - but trust me, he's no slouch in that area. Let's meet him and then jump right into the guest post.
About Sean Seebach:
Influenced by Stephen King and Rod Serling, Sean Seebach has written three books: A LOOKING IN VIEW, AUTUMN DARK, and OUR MONSTERS ARE REAL: THE PIG MAN.
When Sean isn't writing or managing a wonderful barbecue joint with amazing people, he enjoys reading, cooking, and listening to rock n' roll.
He currently lives in Ohio with his wife, daughter, and son.
Guest Post:
The magic of transcendence into story is why I am a
reader first. Have you ever been reading a story and completely forgot about
where you are, who you are, the rent payment that’s due in two days or the
argument you had yesterday lingering around your conscious like a bad smell?
Have you experienced that?
I have.
The first time I transcended into story I was reading "Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut" by Stephen King. I rode along in that convertible of hers with the wind in my hair, cloaked in the aroma of crispy leaves around us. I even had to adjust my eyes to the long shadows of the trees as we laughed together, shortening each trip by cosmic proportions. Although I laid comfortably in an easy chair with the book tucked into my lap, consciously, I wasn’t there at all.
When I put the book down my hands trembled. After my future wife came home from her shift that night, she heard all about my new friend Mrs. Todd and my thoughts about being admitted to the nuthouse because of the experience.
Transcending happens often to me when I read a great story. Most recently, the following stories come to mind: "The Mime" by MarySanGiovanni, WIDOW'S POINT by Richard and Billy Chizmar, DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN and END OF THE ROAD by Brian Keene, KIN by Kealan Patrick Burke, and your blog host, Stephen Kozeniewski, wrote a book called THE HEMATOPHAGES that sent me to a world far away from my own home here on Earth.
Stories like those mentioned above are why I’m both a reader and writer. I get to experience both sides of this unexplainable phenomenon.
Peter Straub confirmed story transcendence when he spoke at The Borderlands Press Writer’s Bootcamp this past January.
One day, he said, he sat in his office in Manhattan after he finished doing something fictionally horrible to some poor guy in a dark alley in New York. Recalling being transported into the scene as he wrote it, he stood against the alley’s brick wall and watched brutal things happen to some guy he conjured from his own imagination. After writing the scene, he gazed from his window as people crisscrossed across the street, bustled into shops and delis, and loaded delivery trucks. In that moment he gasped, and thought, these poor suckers only get to live one life.
Whether you’re a reader, a writer, or both, I think you can agree–he couldn’t have been more right.
And sometimes, when my car windows are down and I’m
travelling down a twisting rural road, a warm September breeze rustles up dry
leaves and I hear Mrs. Todd’s laughter echo with my own.
About A LOOKING IN VIEW:
Take a look inside a world of the fantastic, strange, and macabre:
Lillian witnesses the death of her undead mother…
A hitman has one last favor to pay…
Frustrated with his mother’s boyfriend, ten-year-old Nathan runs away from home in an attempt for a better life…
A nursing home has a strange visitor with more to offer than battered paperbacks for the residents…
Comprised of thirteen eerie, mysterious tales, A LOOKING IN VIEW is the first collection by author Sean Seebach and features a bonus novella, Blue Collar Diesel, where a man searches for manual labor in an attempt to win his fiancé back, but finds something much darker within himself.
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