Howdy! This is just a little behind-the-scenes essay about my latest short story, The Hide-Hunter- here I’ll cover the research, inspirations, the cover art, writing process, and a bunch of other stuff that went into the story.

Obviously spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read it already you can do so below:

Research & Inspirations

This story came to me in the shower. It was completely, fully-formed in a single instant as I lathered my hair in shampoo while thinking about passages from two books- the chapter on the senseless slaughter of the American Bison related in Dan Flores’ Wild New World, and the American Indian traditions of “stinging men” and “buffalo calling stones” reported by Adrienne Mayor in Fossil Legends of the First Americans.

The story was born in that chance criticality event where I wondered- “what if a former hide hunter was cursed to be killed by a ghost herd of the same buffaloes he so greedily consigned to extinction?” Even before I climbed out of the shower and dried myself, the creative gears where already spinning at full speed, and I wrote down a quick plot outline which rapidly matured into the story you’ve just finished reading.

From that point, all I had to do was reread the relevant passages from those books, as well as a chapter of Flores’ preceding book American Serengeti, and certain chapters of Charles Hazelius Sternberg’s autobiography The Life of a Fossil Hunter. Below, I will recount in brief the main historical elements of the story.

Fossil Hunters

The most natural protagonist for a story involving cursed fossils is of course a paleontologist; indeed, this might be the only sort of individual on the planet capable of delivering such a curse’s dramatic consequences upon its victim, no matter how accidentally this was accomplished.

The character of the fossil collector Joseph Yarnall was largely based on Charles Hazelius Sternberg, a Kansan fossil collector whose career spanned from 1876 to 1928. For brevity’s sake I must limit my remarks, because I could wax for many lines on what a remarkable man he was. Suffice to say, Sternberg was the sort of man whom you instantly recognize as your better, in the best possible way. One is almost tempted to put aside his voluminous scientific discoveries- and without him, many of the prehistoric creatures we know and love today might never have become as justly famous as they are now- just to admire him as a man. He was brave, he was kind, and he was deeply passionate about his love for the wonders of Creation and all the worlds that came before us, even at considerable risk to his own health and safety.

I highly recommend reading his autobiography, The Life Of A Fossil Hunter. Perhaps the most remarkable incident of heroism recounted in those pages is when he and his team were caught in the crossfire of the Bannock War in 1878, an Indian uprising in Idaho. Sternberg, in an odd, paleontological twist on Horatius’s defense of Rome from the Etruscans, valiantly insisted on dragging his heavy crates of fossils to safety even when the Red Man was bearing down upon his camp, because he believed preserving that wealth of the ages for the benefit of future generations was more important than saving his own hide. He was an incredible man and a total badass.

I found the strong biophilia Sternberg evinces throughout his autobiography not only deeply commendable, but also a perfect contrast to the greed of Hedgepeth and the real-life hide hunters who inspired him, which I tried to adapt somewhat into Yarnall’s character-

If I ever had any feelings of disgust or fear toward any of God's creatures, I lost them upon a knowledge of the animals as revealed to me by this master naturalist, who saw beauty even in lizards and snakes. He believed, and taught me to believe, that it is a crime to destroy life wantonly, any life. Of course the first law of nature is self-preservation; we must, in order to live, kill our enemies and protect our friends; but this superstitious fear which men and, even more, women have of snakes, lizards, and bugs, how cruel it is! Why should they rejoice when some poor little garter-snake, which has gone as a friend into the cellar walls to destroy rats and mice, is dragged out and cut to pieces? My heart bleeds when I think of the brutal way in which people take life, something they can never give back, and with the great Cope, I cry out against this crime, which is exterminating some of our most beautiful and useful friends. No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys His creatures.

Another relevant passage-

What is it that urges a man to risk his life in these precipitous fossil beds? I can answer only for myself, but with me there were two motives, the desire to add to human knowledge, which has been the great motive of my life, and the hunting instinct, which is deeply planted in my heart. Not the desire to destroy life, but to see it. The man whose love for wild animals is most deeply developed is not he who ruthlessly takes their lives, but he who follows them with the camera, studies them with loving sympathy, and pictures them in their various haunts. It is thus that I love creatures of other ages, and that I want to become acquainted with them in their natural environments. They are never dead to me; my imagination breathes life into "the valley of dry bones," and not only do the living forms of the animals stand before me, but the countries which they inhabited rise for me through the mists of the ages.

What a beautiful mindset. Sternberg’s profound appreciation for the gorgeous, unfathomable scale and complexity of Creation is deeply inspiring, and it is this sort of spirit which I wanted to bestow upon my character of Yarnall.

I must admit here that do not think I achieved this goal, and for that I am regretful. There was a lot more I could have done with Yarnall, but he remained a rather simplistic narrator figure throughout. In that role he is serviceable, but I feel I could have “worked” the character so much more. I held back mainly because I didn’t want Yarnall to come off as an ideological mouthpiece, and wanted more for Hedgepeth’s words and deeds to speak for themselves in the mind of the reader. Still, think I could’ve done a lot better.

Aside from this, the details of Yarnall’s expedition to the Red Beds were also inspired by Sternberg’s narrative. He was there several times. The Red Beds are real, they are of Permian vintage, and they really are that inhospitable to life. The descriptions of the detestable clay-water requiring boiling in cacti to be remotely palatable, and the cows attempting to eat cacti for moisture, are all real details gleaned from Sternberg’s narrative, as is the terrible intensity of the norther, one such of which Sternberg suffered with only a tent over his head.

Hide Hunters

The antagonist of the story, of course, is Hedgepeth. Hedgepeth was written to be as unlikeable as possible even apart from his former occupation; yet, he’s also a tragic figure. You’re not really supposed to root for him- though, if you do, I as the author am dead and have no say over that- but you can kind of see the confluence of events that led him to where he was.

This leads us directly to the real-life inspiration for Hedgepeth, Frank H. Mayer. He wrote a short autobiographical pamphlet titled The Buffalo Harvest, which you can read here.

If ever there were a contrast to Charles H. Sternberg, it would be Frank H. Mayer. Like Hedgepeth, he was a Civil War veteran- Union, not Confederate- who went out west to seek his fortune in hunting, as he had no other marketable skills.

Mayer was the kind of caricature of a ruthless hunter you’d see in old Disney movies; the furthest possible thing from the generally more conservation-aware hunters in America today, who desire to preserve game populations from season to season. Mayer- and all the other hide hunters- just killed as many buffalo as they possibly could with gleeful abandon, solely for their personal enrichment. Every word Hedgepeth utters about the buffalo being “gold pieces” and “what was good for me was good for America” is true to how these men felt and wrote in their own words. I encourage you to read The Buffalo Harvest- it’s a rare glimpse into the mind of a disgustingly greedy man who didn’t care a fig about posterity. He died two months short of his 104th birthday in 1954, outliving the market hunt by 71 years, but the bison thus far have outlived him by 72 years, and may they continue to do so for many more.

Unlike Hedgepeth, and even many real hide hunters, Mayer evinced absolutely zero remorse for his actions-

It wasn't long after I got into the game that I began to realize that the end for the buffalo was in sight. I resolved to get my share. I went into the business right. I invested every cent I owned in an outfit. I have no apologies for my participation in the slaughter. I hope that answers the question.

One thing about Mayer’s narrative that inspired Hedgepeth’s speech is that it is chock-full of contradictory justifications for his role in the demise of the bison. I don’t know that he was ever remorseful for it in his heart of hearts, or if he was only trying to deceitfully convince others that he did the right thing. I think his concluding remark is correct, however-

Maybe we runners served our purpose in helping abolish the buffalo; maybe it was our ruthless harvesting of him which telescoped the control of the Indian by a decade or maybe more. Or maybe I am just rationalizing. Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours, and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, and anyone else, just so we kept our scalps on and our money pouches filled. I think maybe that is the way it was.

He was a truly repulsive man, but perhaps not as repulsive as John Cook, another former hide hunter who crafted an elaborate and enduring lie to justify his part in the murder of America’s most charismatic mammal- he is the one who first claimed the army was secretly behind the slaughter, out of a desire to destroy the Indian commissary. He claimed the US military was so invested in this goal they would hand out free ammunition to hide hunters, a claim repeated by Mayer, and, in the story, Hedgepeth.

There’s just one small problem with this- it’s complete fiction, about as real as my own story.

The goofiest part of it is that Cook claimed the Texas legislature, of all governing bodies, was contemplating a bill to outlaw bison hunting, only to by thwarted by an impassioned speech by General Philip Sheridan arguing for the extermination of the bison. The real Sheridan was an early proponent of bison conservation, specifically cabling Washington in 1879 to try to stop the slaughter, in order to prevent starvation and uprisings on the reservations occupied by friendly Indian tribes. His exact words were- “I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the Buffalo should be stopped.”

So, no, the hide hunters really were just a lot of greedy barbarians who didn’t care one iota about preserving the bison for the future. The government did nothing to stop them, of course, but this inaction does not have any relevance to the moral dimension of their own individual choices. They still made the choice to consign an entire species to extinction solely for personal financial gain. It was only thanks to the dedicated efforts of a handful of people1 that any bison are left alive at all today.

As for the actual hide hunting experience as described by Hedgepeth, I kept it as close to reality as possible- buffalo running outfits really were mostly after cows and yearlings2, they would only kill as many as their skinners could handle in a day, they would leave the meat to rot3, and it was really quite profitable compared to the living one could back “back East” for the meager handful of years it lasted.

Quoting Dan Flores, whose opinion on the matter I fully endorse-

There are two perfect words for their kind of callous disregard for life, for an attitude that regarded two or three years of returns worth leaving behind a putrid desert of rotting carcasses and blowflies and a deprived posterity.

Fucking pathetic.

Stinging Men

Gnaski, aka Crazy Buffalo, is a real, highly malevolent figure from Lakota folklore. He was supposedly the son of Unktehi, the Water Monster who ruled the world before our present age, and he is where the tradition of “stinging men” originated. Quoting from Fossil Legends of the First Americans-

Long ago, goes the story, Gnaski came upon a band of the First People traveling west along the Niobrara River to the springs. As they passed Carnegie Hill, Gnaski “grabbed up a piece of bone from the long-dead Unkte’gi monsters that laid buried there” and magically projected it into the body of a young man. Then he showed the man how to use the fossils to make powerful medicine.

Back among his people, the young man stung by the fossil bone began behaving frantically and violently, like a crazed bull. The first Lakota medicine man, Wata, managed to cure him and removed the fossil splinter from his body. Wata warned the people not to follow Gnaski’s stinging ceremony, in which a wizard could “enchant, bewitch, or cause sickness” by ritually shooting a sliver of fossil bone into another person.

If you’re unable to procure a copy of this book- which I highly recommend you do- this article from Distinctly Montana magazine is a decent summary of Plains Indian fossil traditions, also drawing from the book.4

Just like The Bone Baby, this story heavily features “fossilomancy”- a word I just made up to describe global traditions of magic revolving around fossils. The Lakota were no strangers to this sort of magic, but their traditions were a bit unusual in that they included evil fossil magic. How precisely such magic works is wisely left unstated by the Plains Indian elders, and even if I did know I wouldn’t tell you.

The location where Hedgepeth is cursed is also a reference to this legend- the Agate Springs fossil beds, preserving rich deposits of Miocene mammals, are located on the Niobrara River. The Lakota knew it as A’bekiya Wama’kaskan s’e, or “Animal Bones Brutally Scattered About” and they studiously avoided the place because the fossils there were considered wakan sica- bad medicine- to the point that they erected stone tumuli specifically to mark the boundaries of this forbidden zone. The only ones who would venture into this dark place were the H'munga Wicasa- Stinging Men- so they could go on their own malignant vision quests and gather fossils to “sting” their enemies. Even in modern times, the place supposedly retains something of a sinister energy.

In my narrative, I of course portrayed Gnaski as something more of a vengeful spirit figure. He’s not a “good guy,” per se, but while he does place a curse upon Hedgepeth, he’s not outwardly villainous either. Here, he personifies the Plains Indian zeitgeist as the bison herds vanished and the species orbited perilously close to an extinction spiral- they viewed it as the complete end of history, a nearly eschatological event with the caveat being that no one was anointed or saved. Everything just stopped when the bison died. As Crow leader Plenty Coups put it- “After that, nothing happened.”

I mean, imagine a sin so hideously evil that even the most reviled figure from your religion slithers out to lay down a curse upon its perpetrators. That’s how I wanted to portray Gnaski here. He may well have been an evil man, but he was also a Sioux, who lived by the bison, and would have missed them had they been so cruelly murdered in his own time.

Calling Stones

The fateful calling stone is a real part of Plains Indian folklore, and they really are little fossils, as you can see above. The description of them as impressions of the internal core of a baculite- really a subtype of ammonite- is accurate.

Quoting again from Fossil Legends of the First Americans-

Because the internal structure and patterns of these cephalopod marine fossils sometimes resemble bison shapes, the Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes invested baculites with an ability to summon buffalo herds. Buffalo-calling stones, known as Iniskim among the Blackfeet bands of northern Montana and Alberta, have also turned up in archaeological sites across the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada, indicating that the Iniskim tradition goes back at least a thousand years (fig. 69).

According to Blackfeet legend, the sacred power of the fossil with the form of a buffalo was first discovered long ago by Weasel Woman, who was picking berries at a constantly eroding cut bank called "Falling off without Excuse," probably the big fossil deposition the Bow River in Alberta now known to rock hounds as "Baculite Beach." After she taught the ritual of the curiously shaped stone to her husband, Chief Speaking, Blackfeet and other northern tribes began to collect the fossils, which they rubbed with red ocher and placed in medicine bundles. Iniskim were used to draw buffalo herds over cliffs before the arrival of horses. As Chandler Good Strike—a Gros Ventre artist at Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana—told me later that summer, "We used to collect the fossils to call the buffalo each spring." People also kept personal Iniskim fossils for luck, healing, and other powers. Charlie Crow Eagle, a Piegan (Blackfeet band of Canada), owned an interesting buffalo-skin medicine pouch in about 188 0 (fig. 70). It originally held nine Iniskim: two Baculites compressus, four Placenticeras ammonites, an Acanthoscaphites ammonite, a Paleozoic coral, and a Corbicula clamshell, all coated in red pigment.

I offer no comment on the efficacy of using fossils to try to summon a herd of bison to your location. However, just looking at the shape of the Iniskim, I certainly understand why they believed it would work.

Cover Art

The cover art for the story is a cropped portion of this magnificent painting by Dutch artist Eveline Kolijn, showing the full process from ammonite to iniskim to living, breathing bison. It’s beautiful, I love it. My only regret about using it as the cover art is that Substack’s autocropping prevented me from using the full painting for the cover.

The piece depicts Iniskim as originating from a coiled ammonite, rather than the straight-shelled baculite from my story. This isn’t incorrect- ammonites share the same sutured chambers as baculites, and many other types of fossils such as corals, shells, and even dinosaur bones could be considered Iniskim.

Writing Process & Analysis

This story was written at a fair clip. I started writing it on December 22, and finished it February 15. I don’t think the story actually took more than a week and a half to complete, excluding all the days I ignored the manuscript to work on other projects. Over half of it was finished before January 1st, with the most outstanding element remaining being the bulk of Hedgepeth’s speech recounting his life as a buffalo hunter. This naturally took longer due to the need to properly convey the gravity of what he had done, and his own inability to confront his wrongdoing despite his deeper awareness of it. It was tricky to write.

I’m still not quite sure if I conveyed it correctly. Hedgepeth’s ranting was supposed to come off as nearly bipolar coping- “I needed money, but also the army wanted the bison gone to fight the Indians, but also the bison had to go anyway because of civilization, but also… I really, really needed money!”- to smooth over his true recognition that he did something he knows was deeply wrong. I’m mostly satisfied with the rest of the story, but as this is the scene on which the entire narrative hinges, if it fails the rest of the story would as well.

As is, I think it’s a serviceable short story. It may have benefited from another couple hundred words or so words, expanding on Yarnall’s and maybe even Gnaski’s character and perhaps giving Hedgepeth some more breathing room to tell his backstory. But for what it is, it’s alright. Someday I may return to this one and write that little expansion, and republish it in its proper perfection. We’ll see.

Overall, I find the story sort of wishful thinking. It’s something I think we all would like to have happened- the bad guys who robbed us before we were even born get their supernatural comeuppance. But, ultimately, out here in the real world, they didn’t, and the outcome was the same even in the story. Regardless of whether the hide hunters were punished, the bison are still gone. We are still deprived forever of the vast herds that drove John James Audubon to exultant conniptions when he first explored the Great Plains- “In fact, it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now, and feed on these oceanlike prairies.”

In one respect, Hedgepeth may have been right- the bison’s time is gone. They aren’t coming back, at least not while any of us draw breath. Nearly all of their former grazing grounds are either under the plow or occupied by cattle. Progress, as defined by that repugnant painting by John Gast, came, and saw, and conquered, and in its wake left behind a wasteland of corn and cows, built upon the bones of those nobler creatures who came before.

I hope- for those of you who made it this far- that this wasn’t too boring a read, or that it felt overly indulgent. I always enjoy when other writers and artists discuss their own techniques and inspirations, so I figure there’s a small chance you guys might enjoy hearing a bit about mine.

That’s all. You can go home now.

Minor Shopkeeping Note- I used to post these “writing of” essays over on my other blog, Poquessian, however I’ve decided to switch to publishing them here on my main blog. The first few of these will be free “taste-testers” but I am planning to eventually paywall such behind-the-scenes content, while the stories themselves remain free to read by all. Cheers!

Howdy! This is just a little behind-the-scenes essay about my latest1 short story, The Bone Baby- here I’ll cover the research, inspirations, the cover art, writing process, and a bunch of other stuff that went into writing this.

Obviously spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read the story already you can do so below:

Inspirations

The Bone Baby was directly inspired by the Twitter post below-

My immediate response to this, aside from “That’s awful” was “This is the start of a horrible old-timey fairy tale.” Because I’m a writer whose Muse went mad long ago, and I can’t help but see story potential in even the worst real-world tragedies.

I followed up this initial thought by writing the following one-sentence horror story:

"- and after the Bone Baby burst out of his mother's belly, he traveled all over the countryside, peeking into all the cradles in all the cottages, looking for more baby bones to steal."

The story crystallized instantly from this into the tale you’ve just read.

Setting

The Bone Baby is my second attempt at writing an “American fairy tale”, with my first try at this being The Severed Head. Similar to The Severed Head, The Bone Baby is set during the pre-Revolution colonial era in Pennsylvania, this time in the Philadelphia region, where I was able to blend all kinds of local geography, history, and folklore into the tale you’ve just read.

The story starts out in the southern environs of Philadelphia, specifically in the region once known as “the Neck”. This was the swampy, southernmost part of the Philadelphia peninsula back in the day, and remained a very poor, rural area focused on raising pigs right up until the 1920s. I won’t get all into the history of the region here for brevity’s sake, but Hidden City Philadelphia had a fantastic series on it some years ago, which provided the backbone of my description.

Today, it’s mostly a sea of parking lots, warehouses, and railyards, and is home to all of Philadelphia’s sports teams. So nothing’s really changed I suppose.

The bulk of the action in The Bone Baby, however, occurs in a place known as “the Timber Swamp”, in what is today Northeast Philadelphia. This is also a real location, described briefly in the book A History of the Townships of Byberry and Moreland, written in 1867 by Joseph C. Martindale-

Timber Swamp. This is a large tract of wood land reaching from the west corner of Byberry near Andrew Ervein’s, northeast along the Moreland line almost to the Somerton road. This was formerly one vast tract of woodland, the largest in the vicinity, and was a noted hunting ground. Raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and birds were found there in abundance, and even bears were sometimes seen. The last Bruin found there was in 1780, and was shot by Jersey Billy Walton. It was formerly a great place for ghosts, &c., and many marvellous tales have been narrated as occurring in the “timber swamp.” Much of the timber has been cleared off within a few years, and its limits thereby greatly contracted.

The Timber Swamp, at least some fraction of it, still exists today, not terribly far from my own home. Only about 93 acres of it are left, but it is some of the “wildest’ land left in Philadelphia, with no neatly paved park trails to navigate by. It’s a fun- and somewhat dangerous2- place to explore, being hemmed in by a residential neighborhood, the terribly congested Byberry Road, and the CSX tracks running like a spine through the northeastern half of the city.

While the Timber Swamp itself may survive for now3, to my knowledge tragically none of the tantalizingly alluded “marvellous tales” are still extant. The Bone Baby thus is my attempt to, in some small way, revive this old, hyperlocal ghost-tale tradition.

Today, I can lay claim to the dubious title of being the most recent person to tell a “marvellous tale” set in the Timber Swamp, and perhaps I am also the most recent person- possibly only person in the 21st century- to even think about the marvellous tales of the Timber Swamp.

Research

Very little original research was required for this story, which expedited the writing process considerably. Mostly I just had to brush up on stuff I’d already read a long time ago, as an avid fan of local history and folklore.

We’ll go over the research which went into some of the individual characters first, before going on to the origins of the magical items in the story, and finally the Bone Baby itself.

Ape Boy

The Ape Boy in the first third of the story is a real character from Philadelphia-region legend. I hesitate to call him a “cryptid” due to his supernatural origins, but he is still seen occasionally to this day. I’ve written about him at length before in the essay linked below, and this probably won’t be the last time he shows up in one of my stories.

Mellow Brick Road

The Ape Boy of Tinicum and Red Dog Fox

Chester, Pennsylvania is the spot where William Penn first landed in North America, disembarking from his ship the Welcome on October 28, 1682. At the time, the town was known as Upland, and it was the most populous town in the new Pennsylvania colony by virtue of being the…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · ❄️ Pongo ❄️

tl;dr this gangly redheaded boy was bullied so viciously that he ran away into the swamps and turned into a Bigfoot. The End4.

For storytelling purposes, I transplanted his “habitat” a bit eastward into the Neck, which as stated was still really swampy at the time the story is set. Assuming the Ape Boy existed, I could see him having ventured over into South Philly at least occasionally, but from a purist folkloric standpoint this was a bit of artistic license on my part.

The main divergence from the real-life tale of the Ape Boy is he did not have a witch mother and is not known to have romanced any poor country girls. He just ran off into the woods and mutated into a Bigfoot-esque monsterman. I added all of that in as tragic backstory for the Bone Baby’s accursed existence.

The Ape Boy’s mother is just a typical fairy-tale witch, though Philadelphia does have a couple of real witch-stories- Mom Rinker, Margaret Mattson- which helped to lend a level of verisimilitude to this unnamed fictitious one.

Nathan and Samuel

Nathan was very straightforward to write- he’s just the typical, plucky child protagonist of folk and fairy tales the world over. A bit unsure of himself, but by the end of the story he’s confident and skilled enough to face the Bone Baby one-on-one.

Samuel required a bit of research into childrearing in early America. Firstly, this was set long before baby formula existed, so it was a bit of a hassle trying to figure out how he would be fed on the multi-day journey to Bristol without mother’s milk. The solution turned out to be pap.

Pap was formula-before-formula- a soft mush made out of bread or flour soaked in either milk or water, sometimes flavored with honey. It was delivered to the baby via a pap boat, which was basically just a gravy boat meant to be tipped directly into the baby’s mouth. Usually these were made of pewter or bone china, but wealthier families could have their cast from sterling silver. Nathan’s family, being on a lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder, likely would have used a pewter one, similar to the ones below:

Some further reading on pap and pap boats can be found here and here.

I was also uncertain about how colonial Americans carried babies around over long distances, and had to research this a bit. Apparently the English tradition brought over was swaddling, carrying the baby over one’s back in a grubby looking cloth sack or sling.

I much preferred the American Indian style papoose over such haphazard-looking sackcloths, and chose to have Samuel carried around in one of those instead. It made for a somewhat tighter narrative, with the papoose being an easily removable backpack rather than a complicated sling, and it also fit well with Nathan’s mother being in contact with the Lenape, whom she could conceivably have picked up the idea from. I don’t know if any real colonial American women ever did this- it seems improbable that none ever did- but it fit within the framework of the story.

Rattlesnake Joe

Rattlesnake Joe was based on several historical figures- chief among them being… Rattlesnake Joe, whom I read about in a book titled Forgotten Tales of Philadelphia, by Thomas & Edward White.

Joseph Martin, nicknamed Rattlesnake Joe, was a hermit who lived in the rugged ridge-country of Cameron County, Pennsylvania in the mid- to late-1800s, where he trapped the region’s abundant rattlesnakes to render them into snakeoil, which was used for medicinal purposes and as a mechanical lubricant. This mysterious old man would only ever come out of his mountain abode on rare occasions to sell his much-renowned snakeoil. We only have record of his existence due to one such trip he took to Philadelphia in 1882, disembarking a train at Broad Street Station looking to all the world like an antebellum version of Rip Van Winkle- his clothes thirty years out of date, his long white hair and beard all disheveled, and carrying nothing but an old tin can full of vials of amber rattlesnake oil.

The real Rattlesnake Joe was a teetotaler, and was also rumored to have once been very rich due to the profitability of his snakeoil business, only to lose it all when his sweetheart absconded with all his hard-earned treasure. I considered including a lost fortune and lost lover in the story to flesh out my fictional Rattle, but there simply wasn’t room for such backstory without interrupting the narrative flow.

Oddly, while following up on the blurb from Forgotten Tales of Philadelphia, I came across another Rattlesnake Joe- or maybe the same one, and one of the reporters just got his facts wrong? This one, identified as Joseph Hoffman of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, was reported in November of 1882 as having visited the then-new Philadelphia Zoo, to donate a bunch of rattlesnakes he had captured over the years.

This Joe was not as much of a hermit as Martin, collecting the rattlesnakes with the aid of his brothers and a neighbor, and prior to this visit to Philadelphia had made his money not from the snakes’ oil, but by playing with them as a sideshow at county fairs. He was reported to have had iron nerve while handling them, and that’s all he said is needed to manage the reptiles- maintaining a cool confidence so as to not provoke their own fear. He did, however, say the sport might eventually result in his own death, and since there’s no followup article we’ll probably never know how things turned out for him.

Another rattlesnake-wrangler from Pennsylvania- it seems to have been something of a national pastime- was Rattlesnake Pete, from Erwinna, Bucks County. I learned about him from a blurb in Forgotten Tales of Pennsylvania, also by Thomas White. Pete was also an old hermit, who lived in a shack in the hills above Erwinna, alone save for his dog and a bunch of pet rattlesnakes which roamed freely around his shack.

According to an article in the New York Times, as a child Pete lived in Sussex County, New Jersey, where the rattlesnakes were “thicker than bees in honeytime,” so he had to learn real quick how to read their body language and kill them if necessary. He lost a friend to a snakebite, and nearly lost his sister and his own life in one hair-raising encounter where the pair had to contend with half a dozen rattlers at once while they were out picking berries. Later in life he learned how to tame rattlers, and had no fear whatsoever of his scaly pets, which he loved as dearly as his dog.

Followup research on Pete mostly led to dead-ends. Apparently he made a bit of business out of two caves he’d discovered on his property, one containing white clay and the other a big clot of ice- priceless in a time before refrigeration- but beyond this there were only two articles from the New York Times locked away behind paywalls.

One final Pennsylvania rattlesnake-wrangler was… another Rattlesnake Pete, this one from Oil City. His overall life story wasn’t that relevant to Rattle’s character- he became internationally famous running two very successful dime museums in Oil City and Rochester, New York- but his origin story inspired how I wound up introducing Rattlesnake Joe in my own tale:

He would later claim, that, while a boy hiking in the local hills, he had come upon an old Indian woman from the Seneca reservation. Dragging behind her on a rope a big dead rattlesnake, she explained to Pete how she would extract the fatty oil, which was used to treat rheumatism, stiff joints, even earache—among other afflictions. Impressed by the boy’s interest, she even gave him the snake’s skin. Pete later learned from the Indians how to capture the rattlers, and from the medicine men how to use them for various folk remedies.

- The Story of “Rattlesnake Pete” by Joe Nickell

These four figures composed the main “brew” of Rattle’s character. Aside from these real men of history, the characters of Puddleglum from Narnia and the Shaggy Man from The Road to Oz also were of notable influence in developing Rattle’s character, with his introduction containing a shoutout to the Shaggy Man specifically. Both of these odd, kindly loners are my favorite characters from their respective series, and it was a lot of fun writing my own version of such a character.

In hindsight, I do wish I had been able to include more backstory for the character, but regrettably there wasn’t anywhere to put it.

Magic & Talismans

The magic and talismans present in the story are all rooted in real legends and traditions.

Rattlesnake Joe mentions his rifle being “blest” by a powwower- this was not a reference to American Indian powwows, but rather to the Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic system of braucherei, also confusingly referred to in local vernacular as powwow. Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, the use of magic was highly structured and wasn’t considered always evil like in most other parts of Europe and America. There were good magic users, the braucherei/powwowers, while hexerei/witches were evil magic users. Brauchers regularly gave battle to hexers with… mixed results. I’ll certainly be returning to this magic system in future stories, as it’s criminally underexplored in fiction.

The idea of Rattlesnake Joe’s bullets being enchanted is also a real component of traditional American magical lore. There are at least two stories I’m aware of where blessed silver bullets were used in an attempt to destroy a witch- one by Loop Hill Ike up in northern Pennsylvania was successful, while another by Webb White in Crisfield, Maryland comically wasn’t. Both of these stories involved killing witches directly, but I figured it wouldn’t be that great a stretch to use enchanted bullets to destroy a monster created via a witch’s magic.

The biggest difference between my narrative and these two is that the real witch stories involved shooting an effigy of the witch first- Loop Hill Ike shot a voodoo doll fashioned after the witch’s likeness, while Web White shot a drawing of her. In my story, Nathan just shoots the Bone Baby directly. This was artistic license on my part.

Parenthetically, this was also my attempt to introduce firearms into a fantasy setting- I don’t understand why we still have basically no fantasy whatsoever with guns. There are plenty of ways to work firearms into a fantasy setting without removing one iota of magic, as I hope I’ve successfully demonstrated here.

Each of the three talismans Nathan’s mother5 gives him were inspired by real magical artifacts.

The Blue Bottle was based off of a real enchanted bottle carried around by an Irish “cunning woman” named Biddy Early. This bottle, which really was blue, was purportedly used to observe far-away events, almost to the point of comedy- it was said that if a traveler had come to meet Biddy, she would spy his approach in the bottle and go out to meet him halfway. The bottle had many other powers too, but for The Bone Baby’s purposes only one was necessary to the plot. The whole “and the bottle can only be used once by a muggle” thing was artistic license on my part.

The real Blue Bottle was never seen again after Biddy’s death, and a few different legends have sprung up around this- one version says that the bottle was on loan from the faeries, who took it back upon Biddy’s demise, while another claims that an irate priest hurled the “bewitched” bottle into a lake, where it waits to this day for someone to find it.

The Snakestone Amulet was an ammonite. Ammonite fossils were commonly unearthed in medieval Europe, and were called snakestones because they were believed to be proof of the actions of saints- for instance, Saint Patrick, or Saint Hilda of Whitby who allegedly turned a bunch of snakes to stone.

Ammonites were also used as talismans by North American Indian tribes, most commonly out in the “old west” region, which once was the shallow Western Interior Seaway. They went by many names- bacoritse to the Crow, kaittcolcooko to the Hopi, iniskim to the Blackfeet, etc.- and were used extensively in magical rituals and as talismans. Many of the chiefs at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, for instance, wore ammonite talismans to protect them from their enemies.

I’m not aware of any specific fossil-lore regarding ammonites among eastern Indian tribes, but you can find ammonites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey if you look in the right places, so it’s certainly not impossible for there to have been a legend or two about them. My thinking was that the ammonite talisman came from out west via long-distance trade networks- such a rare and unusual item would obviously be of high value, and it would make sense for Nathan’s superstitious English mother to trade for one. I considered this a cool way to “link” European and Amerindian fossil lore together.

Rattle’s knowledge of the true identity of the snakestone was artistic license on my part- I very much doubt any living person at the time had an inkling of how vastly ancient fossils truly were. I put that scene in there as a deconstruction-cum-reconstruction of magic. No, the ammonite is not magical because it was once a snake that was petrified by God in the Flood. Yes, the ammonite is magical because it is the sacred ghost of a created being that existed in this world long, long before us, preserved for us “as perfect[ly] as if a Divine hand had stamped [it] in yielding wax.”6

Finally, chalk is of course well-known for its “sealant” properties in magical lore and has appeared in a plethora of other media for the exact reason Nathan uses it. Smearing the circle ruining the enchantment is also something that appears in the lore, and that detail made for a delightfully tense climax.

Chalk is also technically a fossil- it is composed entirely of prehistoric marine microorganisms like plankton and diatoms that sank down to the bottom of the sea and were crushed over the ensuing eons into something we can use to draw on sidewalks or blackboards. I considered this another neat way of linking prehistory to folklore.

Ultimately, the tools Nathan uses to defeat the Bone Baby are also the bones of things, and his weapons prevail partly because they are an older and deeper and purer magic than what the witch used to create the Bone Baby.

All in all, this was the most fun part of the story to write- setting up specific rules for the usage of magic and then working within these confines was a riot, really enjoyed that challenge and think it turned out swell.

Real Bone Babies & Other Skeletal Horrors

Finally, the Bone Baby itself was inspired by a couple of grotesque medical conditions, the first of these being the aforementioned CT scan of the ossified fetus. That isn’t the first time such a thing happened- it’s common enough that such “stone babies” have their own medical term, lithopedions. The most recent one on record, per Wikipedia, was in 2020. The oldest known lithopedion was dated back to 1,100BC, and was discovered during an archaeological dig at a sinkhole in Texas7.

The condition is quite rare- only three hundred cases are known over the past four centuries of medical research. It requires several “just right” conditions to occur. One, lithopedions can only form during an abdominal pregnancy. This rare subtype of ectopic pregnancy- wherein the baby develops in the abdominal cavity completely outside of the uterus- has a roughly 1 in 11,000 chance of occurring. Then of these already small odds, less than 2% of these are predicted to result in lithopedion formation, because the fetus has to develop enough in this hostile environment that it is too large to simply be resorbed into the mother’s own body.

The lithopedion itself is the calcified remains of the fetus. The mother’s immune system reacts to it as a foreign intruder and basically transforms the deceased baby’s body into bone, to protect her from any septic infection that might be wrought by the decaying baby’s tissue.

What’s really creepy is women usually aren’t aware of having a lithopedion inside them for years to decades after. They’re often only detected accidentally, usually during X-ray or CT scans after complaints of persistent abdominal pain. On average, women carry lithopedions for 22 years before realizing something isn’t right, with a mean diagnosis age of 55. The oldest woman to have a confirmed lithopedion was a centenarian; nine women carried their calcified babies for over fifty years. There certainly have been many others which went completely undiagnosed, so there are caskets in cemeteries right now which, unbeknownst to any but God, contain two skeletons.

Also, several women with lithopedions went on to have several successful pregnancies too, after the lithopedion formed! That’s incredibly creepy! Imagine growing in the womb, listening to your mother’s heartbeat, learning her laugh before your eyes even opened, and the whole time you are blissfully unaware of the ossified grimace of your elder sibling leering at you through the thin uterine wall, envying the safety and comfort which they were so cruelly denied…

Another condition which inspired my description of the Bone Baby’s appearance is fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. This absolutely dreadful genetic disease causes all connective tissues in a person- that’s the muscles, tendons, and ligaments- to slowly ossify. Your muscles and joints fuse into bone. It’s a terrifying and heartbreaking illness- life expectancy for victims is usually only around 40, and the victims will often try to find comfortable positions to spend the rest of their lives in once the disease reaches its dreadful conclusion.

The most famous victim of FOP is probably Harry Raymond Eastlack, who died of the disease when he was 39. He donated his skeleton to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. I was regrettably unable to visit the museum in preparation for this story, but there are plenty of photos of him online which were very helpful to the visual design of the Bone Baby.

I didn’t want the Bone Baby to just be a menacing skeleton, like the ones so excellently portrayed by Ray Harryhausen in Jason and the Argonauts. I wanted the Bone Baby to be truly monstrous, and the disconcertingly ossified muscles and tendons of FOP was perfect to this end. It also enabled me to show what exactly the Bone Baby was doing with the baby bones it was stealing- growing more bone for itself!

Some other visual references for the Bone Baby’s design included the skeletonized witch Roleil from Fire & Ice, the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Fair-Haired Child from Masters of Horror.

With all this in mind, this is how I imagined the Bone Baby looking:

The circumstances of the Bone Baby’s birth are of course reminiscent of another famous local legend, the Jersey Devil, with both originating in curses, both being born monstrous, and both immediately going on killing sprees.

The main difference is that the Jersey Devil’s curse was self-inflicted by his mother- he was her thirteenth child and, according to who’s telling the story, either when she found out she was pregnant again or in the midst of her labor pains she exclaimed “let this one be a devil!”, and that’s all she wrote. The Jersey Devil also, depending on the telling, either did or did not kill his mother8, but he most definitely did kill all of his siblings before flying up the chimney. Just his siblings though; he did not then go on a rampage against all the children of the region as my Bone Baby did.

And no, I have no interest in describing how the Bone Baby steals baby bones. I know you were dying to know the entire story, and the answer is no. I have my own idea of it, but whatever you’ve imagined is surely far worse.

Analysis

I loved writing this story. It was honestly the most fun I’ve had writing a story in a long time. Combining so many aspects of local history and folklore- both deeply passionate interests of mine- was a romp, and even though the finished story is far from the greatest thing I’ve ever written, I like it for what it is.

Specifically regarding its fairy tale style, I think in certain ways it’s an improvement upon The Severed Head, and in others a regression. I don’t know; it’s a very difficult style to pull off properly. It transitions from more traditional fairy tale prose at the beginning, with Patience and the Ape Boy, into more of a folk-tale style for the main action, and concludes in almost Baumian fashion at the celebration. That’s three different styles throughout. I’m not entirely satisfied that I blended them effectively, but the story stands well enough.

Most likely, I will not write another fairy tale for some time. None of my currently planned projects are fairy tales, but we’ll see. This one came to me all of the sudden, and so may another.

I hope- for those of you who made it this far- that this wasn’t too boring a read, or that it felt overly indulgent. I always enjoy when other writers and artists discuss their own techniques and inspirations, so I figure there’s a small chance you guys might enjoy hearing a bit about mine.

That’s all. You can go home now.

Obviously spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read the story already you can do so below:

Research & Inspirations

Dead Rabbit, Listverse, et al

As stated in the postscript, the primary source which inspired me to write this story was an episode of Dead Rabbit Radio- Episode 119- The Guytrash: The Shape-shifting Horror of Britain!

A brief aside- this is now the third story I’ve written based on something I learned from Dead Rabbit Radio, the first two being Proriger and The Severed Head, and I assure you it will not be the last. Once again I am compelled to state what an inspiration the show has been to me, both in matter of content and the pure creative drive of Jason, the show’s host. I’ve been listening to Dead Rabbit Radio since the show started way back in 2018 and he’s never skipped a beat. Truly the best paranormal, conspiracy, and true crime podcast out there, and I cannot recommend it enough. If you enjoy my writing, by extension you enjoy Dead Rabbit Radio.1

Episode 119 is where I first heard of the creature known as the Gytrash, one of the many, many iterations of the “black dog” phenomena, and in my view the most interesting. I’ll get into the details of the Gytrash as a creature a bit more below, but my most important takeaway was that it is a creature of crossroads, of borderlands. This features heavily in The Gytrash. They were also very commonly sighted across England at least into the 1880s, which brings me to the next and most immediate inspiration for the story.

While foreknowledge of what a Gytrash is was essential, the most immediate source that kicked off my creative drive to write this story was an article on Listverse- 10 Paranormal Mysteries That Are Not Paranormal Mysteries by Garth C Haslam.

Entry #4, Heaven Help Us, was what got my imagination rolling. Here the author recounts some faxlore where a young woman walking home at night decides to take a shortcut through an alley, and to her despair she sees a sinister-looking man standing at the other end. She prays to God to protect her from harm and, suddenly, a strong sense of comfort and safety washed over her. She didn’t feel like she was walking alone at all, and managed to get past the man without incident. The next day in the newspaper the girl read that another woman was raped in the same alley not half an hour after she herself passed through. Of course the girl goes to the police and is able to point out the suspicious man from a suspect lineup. She points out the guy from the alley, he breaks down and confesses, and when asked why he didn’t bother our protagonist, he replies that she wasn’t alone and had two “tall men” walking on either side of her. These “tall men” are suggested to be angels, sent by God to protect the girl from the rapist.

I first heard this story YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEARS ago, it is a very old urban legend. So imagine my shock at finding out this story is true… with a canine twist.

Haslam did some exemplary detective work and managed to connect this tale back to turn-of-the-century England, where the following event was reported:

Early in the 20th century, a lady [the mother of an acquaintance of Ms Rudkin] had walked from her home in Old Crosby towards the nearby village of Scunthorpe to do some shopping. All of that went normally, but when she was returning alone much later in the day, a large black dog suddenly trotted up to her and began walking alongside. Very shortly she came to a place on the road where some roughian laborers were standing around. They made little attempt to conceal their feelings and the lady heard them say that if she didn't have that @#%#(@ dog with her, they could think of a few things to do with her. The dog accompanied her all the way to her home gate, and she called to her husband to come see the fine companion --- but it had disappeared.

This is a great story in its own right. I much prefer it over the angel faxlore one, for the simple reason that it addresses the glaring question of why didn’t the other girl get an angelic bodyguard? Did she not pray hard enough? In this version, there is no other girl, and the dog arrives for this specific situation. It’s also a bit more up in the air if it was really a paranormal phenomena- it could have just been a particularly friendly stray who was aware of the danger that lay ahead. I enjoy that sort of “maybe magic, maybe mundane” vagueness in stories.

But, though great on its own, this one simple paragraph BEGGED to be turned into a proper story, and soon became the 12,000 word saga of The Gytrash.

Adapting The Story

With all of this in mind, I decided to include a bit of both versions in my own telling. The tension was ratcheted up considerably by making the hooligans a known rape gang with several prior victims, and the reason the Gytrash didn’t intervene in those other cases is simply because they occurred outside of his territory. He’s just a dog- a paranormal dog, to be sure, but not an angel, and he isn’t able to be everywhere to help everyone. He helps Denali specifically because she wandered onto his turf and he chose to aide her.

The police part of the faxlore story, where the rapist is identified directly by the protagonist, was also modified quite a bit. Instead of a police lineup, the rape gang is busted by one of their number being bitten by the Gytrash. Part of the lore of the Gytrash is that if you are bitten by one, the wound will never heal, so he just keeps bleeding and is readily identified from the bite. Not patting myself on the back necessarily, but I thought that was a pretty clever way to weave folklore into detective work, small though that part of the story may be.

Other Inspiring Tales

Before we get into what exactly a Gytrash is, I do want to briefly go over some other inspirations for the story. H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Street was hugely influential. It’s one of my favorite short stories, and its core concept of a place itself having a soul and being able to embrace or reject changes imposed upon it is plainly echoed in my own tale. The Gytrash is far more personalized than The Street, of course, being an individual paranormal guardian as opposed to Lovecraft’s more distributed genius loci, but they are otherwise quite similar.

The tone of the piece was also hugely inspired by The Street, especially the scene where the Gytrash rakes his memory to recall what the hell exactly happened to his home. If I’m being perfectly honest, The Gytrash might best be considered an homage to The Street, and there are a plethora of references to this great story in The Gytrash. Highly recommend it.

The Taking by Dean Koontz was another influential work. Two particular elements were on my mind while writing this story- the claustrophobic fog that smothers the town and conceals all manner of threats from the heroes, and the character of the dog Virgil. Without spoiling anything, Virgil and dogs in general play a major role in The Taking and are strongly implied to have a sort of connection to the unsettling phenomena at the center of the plot. This higher awareness of the situation was something I wanted to instill in the Gytrash, though their roles are totally reversed- Virgil is a normal animal up against very alien forces, whereas the Gytrash is an explicitly paranormal entity going toe-to-toe with normal criminals.

Finally, the novels Thor by Wayne Smith and Snow Dog by Jim Kjelgaard were great inspirations as well, specifically with the scenes from the Gytrash’s point-of-view. These authors both excelled at getting inside a dog’s head, writing the world as a dog would actually see it, and that’s something I’ve always wanted to try my hand at in my own writing.

Temple University

The story takes place in and around Temple University’s campus, in North Philadelphia. I attended Temple for a short stint, so I was able to impart a little bit of my geographical knowledge of the area into the story.

One thing Denali alludes to in the story is her father taking her for “The Drive.” That’s something my father took me on, and many other Temple students from the Philly region- more specifically those of us in police families- went through as well. Basically, he took me for a drive around Temple’s immediate environs. Sounds simple enough, until you realize Temple University is a nice school in the middle of one of the most crime-ridden urban areas in the United States. The whole thing is basically meant to ask “are you sure about this?” and to make you aware of the perils of going off-campus.

The Gang

The rapist-killer gang which the Gytrash knows as “The Hurting Men” were largely inspired by the Central Park Five and the Zebra Killers. The first of these were just opportunistic savages- who WERE guilty beyond reasonable doubt, despite that ridiculous, politically motivated miscarriage of justice by the New York court- and the second was a vicious gang of serial killers who targeted white people specifically and killed at least fifteen people, possibly over seventy.

The gang was initially written to be far more explicitly racially motivated- see the deleted scene below- and I still envision them this way. They specifically targeted white female students, and would have gotten Denali too had it not been for the Gytrash’s timely arrival.

All The Pretty Gytrashes

So what is a Gytrash, exactly?

Well, they were a kind of supernatural dog described most commonly in English folklore, but could also be found in other parts of Europe and, naturally, transplanted to America by European settlers. They were usually very large, associated with storms, and live in desolate, liminal spaces like crossroads, gateways, ruins, churchyards, bridges, wilderness regions, or county lines.

They really did make a weird sound when they walked- variously described as like stepping on wet pebbles, jangling coins, and dragging a chain- and they really were purported to have used puddles and other bodies of water to instantaneously teleport between locations2. The very name “Gytrash” is supposedly an onomatopoeia of the sound they’d make when diving into or emerging from a body of water, supposedly similar to dropping a rock into a pond- Gy-trashhhhhh!

It also had a strange relationship with humans. Firstly, they were extremely common- nearly every town in England had its own local Gytrash. Unlike many other types of ghosts or faeries or cryptids3, it didn’t really harm people, but rather was simply a mischievous trickster spirit, following lone travelers from the shadows and sometimes teasing them by running directly at them and then performing its signature disappearing act right at their feet. It was often associated with bad luck, but also counterintuitively, as we’ve seen, occasionally protected people, acting almost like a sort of guardian angel.

The most famous depictions of a Gytrash, and similar such black dogs, are found in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Notably, in neither of these stories does a real Gytrash actually make an appearance- Jane mistakes in quick succession a horse and a dog for a Gytrash, and Holmes’s Hound is (spoiler alert) a normal dog broken into bloodlust by a cruel master. It is largely thanks to these two works that the memory of the Gytrash was preserved at all.

You may have noticed by now that I’ve been referring to these spectral dogs in the past-tense, and that’s because the Gytrash is one of the rare instances of a spirit/cryptid which has- probably- gone extinct. And due to anthropogenic causes no less! As England became more densely populated during the Industrial Revolution, and towns and cities spread further and further out into the countryside, the Gytrash’s preferred liminal haunts were subsumed by the urban sprawl. Additionally, they were highly intolerant of the new electric lighting. These two factors led to a near-total cessation of spectral black dog sightings in England. They were creatures of a much older world of Faerie, and couldn’t persist in this new order of copper and silicon, so they vanished4.

Every ounce of this made it into my story’s depiction of the animal. It is, as near as I can tell, 100% true to folklore.

I scattered little hints throughout the story that the Gytrash’s power was unusually strong on the night of the story. The journey includes multiple successive thresholds- it’s near midnight when Denali meets him, right after a storm, they’re in a particularly forlorn area with plenty of crossroads and ruins, and the neighborhood is on the border between the university and the ghetto, which is not only a boundary between knowledge and learning, but also wealth and poverty. And let us not forget too that Denali herself is at a crossroads in life, slowly moving out of her grief and back into some kind of normalcy. This confluence of events all helped to keep the Gytrash’s power from waning despite the sprawl and electricity ruining his home. Not sure if it carried through in the actual telling, but that’s what I was going for.

One exceedingly odd bit of trivia I learned as I was writing the story is that the Gytrash’s place of origin- that is, the location where spectral black dogs were actually called Gytrash- was the West Riding of Yorkshire. Completely coincidental to this, the British Midlands region of which Yorkshire is a part also had the highest concentration of Quakers in England, and was the preeminent source of settlers in Pennsylvania. The Gytrash being born in the West Riding and hitching a ride to Philadelphia completely fits both the region’s history and folklore. This was a total accident, I did not structure the plot around this in any way and only learned it after the story was mostly complete.

The actual appearance of the Gytrash is a bit vague, besides being a large, black dog. In a way this makes sense- dog breeds as we recognize them today did not properly exist when the Gytrash was running around, and dogs were instead categorized by their role. So, there were herding dogs, coursing dogs like greyhounds, mastiffs, scenthounds, and lapdogs… and that was about it. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that distinctive dog breeds like Yorkies and Alsatians and Dalmatians really came into being.

With a rather wide canvas open to me, I decided to mix a few different dog breeds into my Gytrash. The main one was the Irish Wolfhound. This is a rather old type of dog- the Romans reference them, and they feature rather prominently in Celtic mythology, so they are no stranger to supernatural associations.

It was a bit ironic to give the wolfhound a wolf’s eyes, since they were bred specifically to hunt wolves, but the Gytrash is a bundle of contradictions so it fits in an odd sort of way. This yin-yang synthesis of wolfhound and wolf also oddly fits the breed’s history. When the last wolf in Ireland was killed in 1786, the wolfhound was instantly rendered obsolete and soon descended into an extinction spiral from which it only barely recovered- and not quite in its original form- thanks to the efforts of Royal Army officer George Augustus Graham. Not only does this fit with the Gytrash’s own sad apparent extinction, but it also shows the necessity of preserving both dark and light, wild and tame forces in the order of the world. The wolfhound needs the wolf to live. The Gytrash is a synthesis of the two, a personification of this exact balance which has been thrown out of whack by the cancer-like march of civilization across all the wilderness of the world.

Getting back to the actual appearance of the animal, real wolfhounds tend to have very thin, ropy tails- some indeed appear nearly hairless. This look didn’t really appeal to me, so I gave my Gytrash a far bushier, “featherduster” tail like that of a Newfoundland. Finally, I gave him far larger paws, more akin to a Great Dane’s, which seemed more able to cause such a jangling gait.

Also, the description of the Gytrash’s immense size was not any sort of exaggeration, to either the folkloric dog or the real wolfhound. Irish Wolfhounds really do get big enough for a mite of a girl like Denali to look one in the eye.

Writing Process

This story was a complete mess to write, even though I am generally pleased with the final result. Despite seeming rather straightforward- girl walks home alone at night, meets strange dog, dog protects her from rapists- this story unfortunately took many moons to write and was a lot more work than I’d anticipated. I actually started it way back in March, when the story is set, and was expecting it to take maybe two weeks to write? In reality, it didn’t wind up being ready until mid-July, whereupon it was shelved for several months to age before hauling it out to make some final revisions taking place the day before publication.

The main issue with it was simple character motivation. Why was Denali out and about despite being aware of the imminent danger of the rape-gang? Why did the Gytrash decide to help her? These were issues that I didn’t resolve until almost the final draft- the story has been mostly written with these elephants still lingering in the room.

The Gytrash’s motivation was easier to solve. Being a paranormal entity, he basically soulgazed Denali and found her worthy of salvation. More than this, though, he saw in her shades of the world he’d lost, and hope for its eventual restoration in the future. This tugged at some very deep, precious philosophical concepts of mine which I don’t have space to elaborate on here, and they’re better left up in the air anyhow.

It seems like such a simple thing in the story you’ve just finished reading, but it really troubled me coming up with a motivation for Denali. Obviously she would be a complete idiot to just wander around that neighborhood for no reason, which is more or less what she did in the initial draft, and this idiocy had the effect of making her a rather unlikable character. Rereading the initial drafts, I thought that as a reader I would not care what happened to her.

I went through a few variants of motivation for her, none of them very compelling- the one I kept coming back to was that she had just gone through a bad breakup and wanted to walk home so she could mope to herself. This wasn’t terrible, but neither was it a good story. It did not account for the insane danger Denali was willing to subject herself to on that walk, and it was only by the inclusion of loss into Denali’s character that the story finally fit together. The whole rest of the story is defined by losses of various degrees- the loss of the Gytrash’s world to the tide of progress, the loss of innocent lives to Selim’s gang, the loss of old Philadelphia to both of these, and now, finally, the personal loss of Denali’s sister.

Here now Denali and the Gytrash’s motives were at last in concordance- Denali had lost her beloved sister, while the Gytrash had lost his entire world. Of course they would find each other and work together.

As for the rest of the story, the basic plot beats were easy enough to write. I must confess that I may have overindulged in one of my decadences- ornate scenery descriptions- but I did at least try to make it all serve the story in setting the mood and building tension.

Deleted Scenes

Being so long in the shipyard, The Gytrash went through many drafts before publication, and there were quite a few deleted scenes. This was another thing about the story I regret- many hours wound up being wasted tidying up these scenes that just didn’t work and wouldn’t make it into the finished cut. So, to perhaps gain something back for the effort which went into writing them, I include them here for your enjoyment/amusement.

As stated, one of the issues I had was with character motivations for Denali and the Gytrash, and several scenes related to this were deleted from the final cut. One such scene was an introduction showing Denali in class, her mind wandering in a depressed fugue due to her recent breakup with her boyfriend-

Up on the tenth floor of Gladfelter Hall, Denali Brinton watched such a storm roll over the city from where she sat by a broad window facing the Delaware River. Her calculus professor’s words were as formless in her ears as the chaotic patter of rain upon the glass. It was a scene from Lenape legend- the forces of the sky waging war upon the broad, glassy sheet of the river- and it seemed a perfect match to the melancholy maelstrom roiling about in her own heart.

“Denali, how would you denote this derivative?”

The professor’s voice skewered her ruminations and she jolted up and away from the window. One of her classmates stifled a giggle, like this were third grade and not a college course. Denali glared at her. It was Nicole. She didn’t dislike the girl but she had the same stupid hairstyle as stupid Brynley, a stupid dirty blonde ponytail with stupid curtain bangs. Denali’s narrowed eyes only made her giggle more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Denali brushed a loose chestnut wisp away from her face and glanced discreetly down at her notes. What did he ask? Something about derivatives? Define? No, denote. There, that’s it- how do you denote a derivative?

“Well, under Leibniz’s notation,” she answered rotely, twirling her hand and sprinkling in random bits of emphasis to make it seem less canned. Later on she wouldn’t recall the rest of her answer, only that somehow she arrived at the conclusion of three over five.

“Very good,” her tutor nodded. He turned towards the giggler, “Now, Nicole, how would you calculate the slopes of the secant lines?”

“I- uhmmm…”

Denali sighed. With the spotlight off her, she rested her chin in her hand and once more stared out into the fury of the storm, indistinct as it was through the rainspattered window. She should’ve paid attention. Her grades had been in the gutter all semester. But in her heart she knew the true cause of her academic cliff-dive, and it wasn’t any inability to understand the material. It was Justin. She thought back to their last date together. Hand in hand, prancing around the Christmas Village at Dilworth Plaza. They’d gone ice skating together. Rode the ferris wheel. She’d dropped her bratwurst right out of her mouth when it was too hot, and he’d given her his without a second thought and gone back to get another. She couldn’t understand it. She thought he’d loved her. Well, maybe he had, but his camera roll showed he was busy loving Brynley too. She’d thrown him out and he’d left her only with the eternal why- why could boys break hearts?

I am not a romance writer- nor, for that matter, a mathematician- and I think that is very apparent in this excerpt. The last paragraph is painfully cringeworthy- I managed to salvage a few sentences about her academic decline in the final draft, but the rest about her boyfriend deserved to be scrapped even if I had managed to fit it into the narrative somehow.

My main issue with writing romance and breakups, in my estimation, is that I have thankfully never experienced the heartbreak of a relationship ending on awful terms, while I have had more than my share of bereavement. With that in mind, I decided to venture back to more familiar waters and change Denali into a grieving sister- this had the twin benefits of a) being far cleaner to write, and b) finally giving Denali an understandable reason to be skipping curfew and sneaking around through such an insanely dangerous “hood.”

Another, shorter scene outlined Denali’s relationship to her friend Angie, who in the final cut is only alluded to briefly, and included a description of her neighborhood-

She cursed herself once more for not staying the night at Angie’s. Angie, one of her fellow night owls taking remedial calculus, lived in a swanky two-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of Morgan Hall. Her father was a banker. Denali’s father was an auto mechanic, so she lived in a rented rowhome seven blocks off campus that she could afford by waitressing at a Center City steakhouse. It was a nice home in a slag vat neighborhood that teemed with all the wretched refuse of humanity. All of North Philly was like that, a sea of darkness only occasionally broken up by gentrified atolls, little white islets sometimes composed of but a half block of houses. The rent was cheap, the danger high. Her four roommates were pleasant, but they had the common sense to be home before dark.

Well, you should’ve known better, she thought, Dad gave you The Drive before you enrolled. Everyone told you Temple is in a dangerous neighborhood, even before all this started. You take your life into your hands every time you go off campus. Well, here it is. In your hands.

Again, this interrupted the story’s flow and was superfluous to the other lavish descriptions of the decay in North Philadelphia. I’d already shown the rot, I didn’t need to tell you again that she lived in a crummy neighborhood.

There was also a lengthy scene immediately following this, after Denali mentally notes- “You take your life into your hands every time you go off campus. Well, here it is. In your hands” in which I, as the narrator, explained at length the background of the rape-gang running amok in North Philadelphia-

The great terror started back in October. That was when they found Tiffany Carvallo dead in a gutter the morning after a Halloween party- beaten, then worse. Fists and kicks and at least one lead pipe, per the coroner’s report. She was dressed as Catwoman and her blood alcohol content was point-two-eight. Grainy security footage showed her staggering down West Norris Street, eight blocks off campus, closely tailed by five masked and hooded jackals. The police investigated, the campus mourned, and the funeral was held. Life went on, or at least it was supposed to. But it didn’t.

In quick succession, three others were killed- Jill Pevensey, Erica Gaines, and Amelia Deane. All slaughtered in the same appalling fashion, all by night, all by the same five men, per the DNA and camera footage. They were bold as hyenas, black of skin and blacker of soul.

After Erica was killed, the police had swarmed upon Temple like a nest of angry hornets. Their blinking sirens a new, incessant feature of campus life, as regular as the rhythm of chirping crickets. Anyone who looking remotely suspicious was stopped and questioned, and a drone overwatch was established over an eight-block perimeter around the university, with the aim of giving police ample alert to any groups of young men prowling after dark.

Of the constellation of gangs surrounding Temple- the 6ixers, J Street Crew, Zoo Gang, Da Jungle, Reezyworld, et al- the law said much but could prove little. There were many tips given and warrants served and nighttime raids; once a gunfight in the wee hours had awoken Denali from a fitful, pre-exam slumber. But the gangs were great in number, and whenever one of their ranks was detained, he invariably professed no knowledge of the slayings, beyond what had already been heard on the news.

For its part, the school organized safety convoys for girls who had to venture off campus, while strongly encouraging them not to do so for any nonessential reason. It brought sneers from some of the students- how patronizing, the big strong men with their guns coming to defend the helpless, naive girls! And let’s not even talk about the racial angle of it all!- but nevertheless, not even the most vociferous of the deriders strayed out past dark. Denali herself didn’t hold any strong opinions on the matter, so preoccupied was she with exams and her deteriorating relationship with Justin. She only hoped the police would catch whoever was responsible quickly so campus life could return to normal.

There was a dry spell over winter, but then like clockwork the killings resumed on March 14, during a fierce snow squall that grounded the drones and confined even the most diligent policemen to their squad cars. That morning, Kelly Byrne’s body was found in a vacant lot at 10^th and Oxford, and spring break ended with a bleak lockdown of the campus. The police went back to on-foot beat patrols like it was the 1890s. Young women were told not to wander after dark for any reason unless in a group, and rape whistles were provided free of charge by the university. Denali had picked one up and had it dangling round her neck now, next to her Rosary, but she doubted it would do her any good.

Here again you can plainly see the influence of The Street upon the narrative, basically to the point of aping it. Despite rather liking it even unpolished, it had to go because it interrupted the story’s flow and felt far too preachy. Even if there is often a political undertone to my stories, I never want them to come off as lecturing the reader. First of all, it’s not enjoyable for readers, and secondly it’s patronizing when authors try to tell you what to think, rather than nudging you a certain direction and letting you figure it out for yourself. I think the final version of the story avoided these issues.

What I replaced this TED Talk with were more “showing, not telling” scenes, such as when Denali meets the policemen, her mention of the curfews and drone overwatch, her having a rape whistle, the newspaper being sucked down the gutter, Denali’s own mounting terror of the Hurting Men, and of course the men listening to insidious antiwhite gangster rap and outright mentioning Denali’s race being a factor in their targeting of her. This made them into far more ominous villains, rather than just splurging all info about them in one go. I do kind of wish I had been able to include a little more info about them, but there are enough clues there for the reader to figure it out.

One other oddity that wound up not making it into the final draft was toying with the idea of making the Gytrash’s scenes first-person; ultimately decided against this because the whiplash of changing perspectives in such a manner seemed too much, and for a story such as this I preferred the third-person anyway.

Cover Art

To help ground my descriptions of the creature, I actually made the Gytrash in Gimp, taking a stock photo of an Irish Wolfhound and giving it a wolf’s eyes. Also fiddled with the brightness and contrast to make the coat darker than the actual dog’s. The result was a pretty cool, eerie looking animal. I then took the dog out of the original photo background and fitted it over a stock image of a Philadelphia alley scene. Then, for the final touch, I fed the image into Grok and prompted it to transform the image into a “dark charcoal sketch.” I then layered this AI edited version on top of my original Gimp composition and turned down its opacity until the dog had this weird, half-illustrated half-photographed look to him.

Th AI version included a cool effect, with the Gytrash’s body kind of fading out into sketched lines at the bottom, which I kept in the final composition. I did not specifically prompt it to do that, but it fits with the notion of the Gytrash having only one paw in our world at any given time, while he really dwells someplace more transcendent.

I’m not overall happy with this. The final result is visually pleasing, sure, but I don’t like that the key component that makes it work was AI-generated. Even though it was mostly my own effort in Gimp, relying any amount on AI just doesn’t sit right with me. Would much rather have had a proper illustration for the cover, but my drawing skills just aren’t there yet to achieve the kind of creative self-sufficiency I crave. Someday soon they will be, but not yet.

I hope- for those of you who made it this far- that this wasn’t too boring a read, or that it felt overly indulgent. I always enjoy when other writers and artists discuss their own techniques and inspirations, so I figure there’s a small chance you guys might enjoy hearing a bit about mine.

That’s all. You can go home now.

Minor Shopkeeping Note- I used to post these “writing of” essays over on my other blog, Poquessian, however I’ve decided to switch to publishing them here on my main blog. The first few of these will be free “taste-testers” but I am planning to eventually paywall such behind-the-scenes content, while the stories themselves remain free to read by all. Cheers!

Howdy! This is just a short little behind-the-scenes essay about my latest short story, In Bride’s Clothing- here I’ll cover the research, inspirations, the cover art, writing process, and a bunch of other stuff that went into writing this. And squids. Lots and lots of squids.

Obviously spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read the story already you can do so below:

Inspirations & Research

Very little research was required for this story. Mostly it was just taking stuff I already knew and found cool or interesting, and throwing it all together into a blender.

The most immediate inspiration for the Brides was the biological concept of aggressive mimicry, the specifics of which will be discussed a bit further down in the Jorite Biology section. Suffice to say for now, aggressive mimicry is ubiquitous across the whole spectrum of life- most famously in the anglerfish and Venus flytrap. The very title of the story is a reference to the innumerable parables and fables warning of this deceptive evolutionary and social strategy, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The story’s original working title “Mimicry” was a bit more blatant about its origins in this creepy strategy.

Old Celtic faerie lore was also a huge influence- I mean the Brides are outright referred to as Changelings1, and their reproductive strategy, while not identical to Celtic changelings, does resemble it a good deal.

As far as fictional references, the Jorite ranks of Jemark and Jella were inspired by the Tharks and their Jeddaks from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Tars was actually named after Tars-Tarkas himself, though it is precisely here that any similarities between the proud warrior Tharks and deceptive predatory Jorites ends. Jellia, one of the Brides, was named after Jellia Jamb from L. Frank Baum’s Oz series- and I should note that Jamb is really a sweet girl and nothing at all like the monstrous predator in my story… I just liked the name.

One minor detail from later on in the story which I deliberately fudged was the inclusion of a Spanish mission as the spot where poor Joey meets his end. There is not and to my knowledge never has been any Spanish mission in Phoenix, Arizona. The closest one is San Xavier, in Tucson. It’s a tiny detail but I thought it worth noting, it is not factually accurate and was just a bit of artistic flair on my part.

The Jorite Homeworld

The Brides’ home planet of Jora was named after Jor-El, Superman’s father from Man of Steel.

The very brief environmental descriptions of Jora, having seas pooled in craters and purple vegetation and green skies, are all plausible descriptors of an alien environment, specifically a sparse, toxic world revolving around a red dwarf star-

• Mars once had big “tubs” of water filling its craters, and these were likely some of the last places on the planet which had liquid water. Thus we can infer that Jora is a small, dry world whose remaining water is confined to large- when compared to the planet’s surface area- craters.

• Purple vegetation would likely thrive better under the lower light conditions present around a red dwarf compared to green ones. There’s also a theory that the Earth’s own photosynthesizers were originally purple, and our current green plants only exist because they exploited the only part of the light spectrum not in use before the purple photosynthesizers went extinct. All fascinating stuff, possibly deserving of its own essay…

• The planet’s green sky would be the result of a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide- this compound has caused hideous mass extinctions on Earth in the past, but there’s no reason an alien biosphere couldn’t be better adapted to it.

These details are of basically no relevance at all to the story, but it’s little stuff like this which in my view lends some verisimilitude to the otherwise silly premise of alien beings coming to Earth to digest its inhabitants as part of their breeding cycle. Which brings us to…

Jorite Biology

The biology of the Jorites was specifically modeled after three types of animals- spiders, cephalopods, and gastric-brooding frogs.

The references to spiders were pretty sparse, limited to the face, dentition, and genitalia (“palpal bulbs”), but cephalopods and the frogs were very influential to their designs.

Regarding octopi, the Jorites have tentacles obviously, but also their ability to change color depending on their emotions, and the plot-central ability of the Brides to so thoroughly mimic human females, were both directly inspired by octopi.

Octopi in general are extraordinarily good at camouflaging themselves from predators, but the mimic octopus specifically is the Earth’s indisputable master of disguise.

Here are some pretending to be, variously, a piece of coral, a sea snake, a stonefish, a lionfish, and a skate:

It’s scary how well they can blend in, and how intelligently and consciously they manipulate their forms.

Now these are all examples of defensive mimicry, adaptations to confuse or hide from potential predators. But it wasn’t a far leap at all to turn this into something very predatory, and from this the Brides were born.

The idea of the Brides having hypnotic eyes was taken from another cephalopod, the cuttlefish, which really do change their skin color in rapid succession in order to effectively hypnotize their prey.

I was at a loss for words when I learned they could do this- it’s so creepy and terrifying and ingenious; a beautiful testament to the unfathomable creativity of our Maker.

Since in humans the eyes are the main focus of attention and the windows to the soul, I thought it would be more fitting to limit the crazy color changes just to there. This was one of the key elements to making the story work, since it’s how the Bride lines up for the attack after carefully deceiving her prey.

The concept of the Brides having toxic skin was borrowed from the blue-ringed octopus, as well as poison dart frogs. The difference of course is that while these animals use their toxins to kill potential predators, the Brides use them to dull the wits of potential victims.

Mostly this element was inspired by legends of succubi and other supernatural temptresses, as well as just the general lust of men. I think most guys with a long enough “report card” have a story of that one girl who was able to completely disarm him- without neurotoxins!- and then proceeded to screw him over royally. The Brides are just that on steroids.

The Jorites’ very bizarre reproduction method, using an upper stomach chamber as a brooding pond for larval “tadfries”, is actually a real method used by certain frogs. Or at least, it was until the 1980s. Both species of gastric-brooding frog, native to Australia, are now extinct, likely due to habitat destruction via pollution. These bizarre amphibians really did carry their young in their stomachs until they were ready to hop out of their momma’s mouths and face the world. They had a chemical in their egg gelatin which turned off production of the mother’s stomach acid, turning the organ into a safe little “kiddie pool” for the babies. The mother would not eat while the young developed in her stomach, but would still move around at least a little bit to avoid predators and such.2

One thing I changed pretty late in the game was the descripton of the Jorite Bride’s mouth- the line “Her ghastly tallow mouth opening wider and wider, til it seemed her jaws were splitting apart at the seams” was initially “Her mouth opening wider and wider til it seemed her jaws were hinged like a treasure chest.”

This much better edit came about thanks to the following AI-generated tiktok video, posted by a friend of mine on Twitter, who used it to make the high-probability claim that LLMs are going to completely destroy the iPad generation’s perception of reality via disturbing and unreal imagery which will haunt them long into adulthood.

(And yeah that Heads Up in the intro was for this video, final warning)

As far as my friend’s point is concerned, I think another friend put it best- “I very much did not like seeing this, yet nothing could illustrate your point better.”

As far as I was concerned, however, this was almost precisely what I was thinking of with the biology of a Jorite female, and immediately went in and altered that one sentence to include her sickeningly pale mouth splitting open. This was the only “major” edit to be made to the story after completion of the first draft.

With all of this in mind…

These very rough and not-to-scale sketches, taken professionally from my phone3 are what I had in mind with the Jorites. Note that they do technically have eight tentacles, just like real octopi- two of them are intertwined to form a columnar leg, with snail-esque “diplopods” upon which they ooze along. The Brides use their uppermost set of tentacles as their arms, while the others are kept hidden and used to enhance the disguise’s bust and hips, making them that much more enticing to any poor saps who encounter them. The entire face is pure disguise, with eye and lip spots, and the whole head is considerably squished in to mimic the dainty nose and cheek and bone structure that men go crazy for.

Some of this biology didn’t make it into the final story- it was too short and tight to include everything- but I had a lot of fun designing these repulsive buggers.

Cover Art

This excellent- and oddly untitled- painting by John Brosio is what initially inspired the story. I saw it in the galleries on his site and immediately began wondering “Why would a bunch of brides be disembarking a flying saucer?”

Naturally, it became the cover art.

There are two other great “paranormal bride” paintings by John in the gallery which do have titles. The first is titled The Seed, the second Bride in Headlights. As of now I have no intention of writing a sequel to In Bride’s Clothing, but if I ever do get an idea decent enough to warrant one, at least I won’t be wanting for more cover art.

Writing Process & Analysis

This story was so efficiently written it makes me feel bad about my other projects. I began on April 17 with a very loose plot outline, which read as follows:

• aliens skinsuit as human women dressed in bridal gowns because this is the “mating garb/garment” of humans, and they need human seed to replenish their race.

• the aliens actually look like disgusting crosses between frogs and cuttlefish

• one of the alien women approaches a young man in Phoenix and uses hypnotic cuttlefish eyes to seduce him

Almost immediately the premise was altered from the female Jorites seducing human males to feeding upon them instead. Per the draft history, I began writing the story at 8:11AM on April 18, and was finished the first draft by 12:18PM. That first draft was about 90% of what actually wound up being published; very little editing was required, as it wasn’t the usual “first draft dreck” we writers all love to complain about.

Around 200 more words were added the next day, mostly at the front end of the story to add a bit more to Coll and Tars’ father-son relationship, anthropomorphizing them to make what was coming seem even more awful. The goal was to initially present the aliens as, while suspicous, nonthreatening, only for the audience to be confronted quite suddenly with the disgusting reality of their mission.

I then proceeded to sit on the story for months, as part of my effort to build up a backlog of finished works which I can publish at leisure while working on other projects. This was the first of them to be released. I hauled it out of the archive the day before publication, made a few minor edits during the final onceover, and published. Presto. Would that I were able to write all of them as neatly as this…

I hope- for those of you who made it this far- that this wasn’t too boring a read, or that it felt overly indulgent. I always enjoy when other writers and artists discuss their own techniques and inspirations, so I figure there’s a small chance you guys might enjoy hearing a bit about mine.

That’s all. You can go home now.

Minor Shopkeeping Note- I used to post these “writing of” essays over on my secondary blog, Poquessian, however I’ve decided to switch to publishing them here on my main site. The first few will be free “taste-testers” but I am planning to eventually paywall such behind-the-scenes content, while the stories themselves remain free to read by all.