"TEKELI-LI!" accepted in OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

"Tekeli-Li!" (my adaptation of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS into a 1963 Twilight Zone screenplay by the late, great Charles Beaumont) will be appearing in OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, an anthology Robert M. Price has put together to coincide with the release of Guillermo del Toro & James Cameron's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS movie.

Just got cleared to shout about this from the rooftops. The anthology is now closed. It's on.

A few words:

The great horror writer Joseph M. Pulver was skyping with me from Berlin a few weeks ago. We were talking about an anthology he and the British artist/editor/writer/decent oul'skin Ivan McCann have put together,AKLONOMICON, also Lovecraftian and closed.(Some big squishy hippie named Alan Moore or something is reading that one over their shoulders, I hear.)

AKLONOMICON took two of mine, which I am also clear to blog about now: "House of the Rising Sun"
a Universal Horror Pictures parody about two bouncers named Larry Talbot and Frank Steiner who drive a stake through their boss' heart. That one was my just revenge for every minute I ever had to spend anywhere near Gus Pollizos or his Marathon Taverna. Only difference between Gus and Stoker's Dracula is that Dracula had more class.

The second story, "If Company Should Come", was inspired by three great Lovecraftians: Caitlin R. Kiernan, Stanley Sargent and Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. Without any spoilers, I will say that Stan's story "The Black Brat of Dunwich", Caitlin Kiernan's font of knowledge and understanding concerning the central premise of the story, and Wilum Pugmire's galvanizing live reads, were all responsible.I put Lovecraft into an alternate-history timeline I had used other places, and caused him to attack the one horrid thing he never could on paper: His own life, without frills or embellishments. A great psychiatrist named Max Rinkel at Boston Psychopathic Hospital is responsible for this... but not directly. Howie does it on his own. "Whatever this is to be, it must not be a Letter to the Editor written by a boy. This must be written like a *man...*"

So Joe Pulver asked me if I had an 'At the Mountains of Madness' riff to run past Bob Price. I did. It was an old poem called "Beringya" I always wanted to turn into a story. It came from a nightmare about a boat trip to much colder climes, and an island full of people who were no longer human. Kind of proto-"Lost", in a lot of ways.

I had to make that click more with Lovecraft's story, to fit in the anthology. I thought. It was so much like AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (which I have read many,many times since I was a kid) that I thought a splice could work. It did.

I needed a gimmick. Joe told me Bob was looking for adaptations. I had been watching my way through every Charles Beaumont episode of "The Twilight Zone" that I could track down, following last year's H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

At that Fest, I had my heart torn out of my chest by a couple of documentary filmmakers named Jason and Sunni Brock. Charles Beaumont built a great deal of a world I take for granted too much, and posted and blazed the trail for so many other people it makes my head hurt just pondering the list. He also died of a very complicated form of dementia brought about by meningitis and aluminum poisoning. He was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in front of that Torpedo typewriter, and while I obviously never met him, that documentary made me miss him more than I can put into words.

But I could. I decided I could. They said no one could mimic Beaumont's style. I didn't try. I mimicked the whole man, as I have mimicked voices with scary accuracy since I was old enough to read sheet music. I took the screenplay up off the page and out of the form, and I wrote about Chuck, too. And his son Christopher, whose eidetic reminiscences of life at "The Tudor Manse" made "TEKELI-LI!" no stretch at all to tell.

I wrote about Beaumont adapting AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS into a Twilight Zone episode. Then I wrote the fake episode itself. It's not such a stretch; I saw in the documentary that Beaumont adapted 'The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward', which I hadn't noticed the three other times I watched the docu. But there it is, about a third of the way through if you watch the background, a screenplay with "BASED ON THE STORY BY H.P. LOVECRAFT" in 12-point Torpedo bold, covered with Chuck's scribbled notes in pencil. It gave me a chill when I saw.

The story took several weeks to write. While recovering from a collapsed lung, I decided I wanted to have writing workshops here at our space, and that has taken off well. I have a good group, and the electricity of what we do is dizzying. Much like Beaumont's group.

One of the cornerstones of Beaumont's writing workshops (which everyone who was there remembers,), came to my workshop last week. This man's name used to leap out at me just about every time I brought an SF/H short story anthology home. He and Beaumont always exhorted young writers to crank out lots of material and "know how to shift gears."

William F. Nolan heard the first two pages of "Tekeli-Li!"... and started nodding his head immediately. "Yeah, yeah, you *got* him," he told me when I took a breath. "The way you talked about him rubbing his forehead in the very first sentence. Chuck used to do that all the time." I didn't know that. For some reason, the whole night left me kind of speechless.

But now the story is in, and the movie will be out when it's out. So I get paid when everyone else gets paid... but I didn't do this for the damn paycheck. It was the toughest piece of Mythos fiction, the toughest piece of metafiction, that I have undertaken since Dr. Munk down at Scripps took me to research boot camp for JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.

I had to do it that way. For Howie. And for Chuck.

Here's a snippet of Tekeli-Li. They've just gotten to McMurdo Station, Anarctica. For this scene, for some reason,in my head I had made an impossible cast. Paul Petersen from "The Donna Reed Show" as Howie, Darren McGavin as Dr.Derleth... and, before I knew I was doing it, Michael Emerson from "Lost" as 'Bill'...



BILL glances at CLARK, who is busy removing layers. BILL glances back at HOWIE with flat, dead squid-eyes.

BILL

Your Pop gonna take you to see the South Pole?


CLARK answers for his son before HOWIE can get the words out.

CLARK

If he toughs it out down here long enough. We're dug in for a whole trimester
of research, bought sold and paid for. If we work through Midsummer, we can
be done by March and be out of your hair before the midnight sun. Not like you
have too many extra hands down here anyway.


BILL

No, Doctor. We do not. A lot of old faces are... gone. We … we miss the Russians, too.

BILL incongruously, unaccountably giggles, then hides it like a belch. CREW of various denominations are milling all around them, stomping off boots, unloading various equipment, proceeding in to the inner sanctum. LOCAL CREW act strangely stiff, wooden, emotionless. LOCAL CREW look sick, their skins off-human hue.

DR. DERLETH

Who are the new people?

BILL

Like I said, we rotated out just after the nuke plant's one-year
anniversary.After it had been running for a year, things...changed. People...
took notice.


DR. DERLETH

What people?

BILL's dead eyes fall on HOWIE again.


BILL

You'll..all... be briefed... soon enough.