Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from fiction writer Dave Housley’s new novel, This Darkness Got to Give. In the vein of character-driven contemporary horrors like Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps and A Questionable Shape by Bennet Sims, Housley engages with and subverts what readers may already know of vampires and horror tropes as he introduces you Cain, a vampire who’s also a Deadhead. The novel finds Cain following the Dead on their 1995 tour, playing it cool, drinking a lot of sheep’s blood and generally avoiding notice and trouble. A strange and lovely hybrid of a novel, This Darkness Got to Give is a nostalgic look back at the final moments of the world that immediately predated our digital age: one in which newspapers were read on paper, phones were attached to walls or perched on side tables, one where your average vampire might find cover in the hullabaloo of a Grateful Dead show. First are Housley’s thoughts on writing and editing the manuscript, followed by an outtake from the manuscript.
—
The editor’s note was innocuous and polite: “Pete is doing a lot of walking around the parking lot for a book like this.”
At first I ignored it. Well, yeah, sure this character is doing a lot of walking around the parking lot. He’s at a Grateful Dead show in 1995! He is twenty four years old at a Dead show in 1995, and he doesn’t have a cell phone to check, email to read, friends or colleagues texting to say come meet us at the bridge by the drum circle next to the big pink balloon. So he walks around. He drinks beer. He bums cigarettes. He shops and eats grilled cheeses and watches the freak show. I am old, and I remember: this is what one did at Dead shows in the mid-Nineties.
Then I started to think about that second part of the editor’s note: “for a book like this.” A book like This Darkness Got to Give, the book I’ve been referring to as “my weird vampire Grateful Dead book” for the past five years, a book my publisher might prefer to describe as “a paranormal noir set on the last Grateful Dead tour,” or that my friend and writer Max Ludington described as being “as if Anne Rice and Hunter Thompson had met tripping at a Dead show and decided to reimagine Scanners.”
This Darkness Got to Give follows a vampire, Cain, who long ago dealt with his situation (he’s a vampire) by retreating into the insular and predictable world of the Grateful Dead, and the book is set on the last dates of the last Dead tour, starting on June 24th in D.C. and ending in the last Jerry Garcia show on July 9th at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Trailing Cain are several federal agents and one new college graduate, Pete Vandenberg, who has been recruited into a shadowy group known as “Invasive Species,” which purports to track vampire activity in the US but turns out to be a holdover from the CIA’s Sixties era experiments with LSD and mind control, the real life Project MK Ultra.
They all wind up following Cain and the Grateful Dead, and so the characters spend a lot of time at Dead shows, and in particular at the D.C., Pittsburgh, and Chicago shows that marked that last tour (Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist died soon after that final Chicago show).
If you’re going to write a book set on the last Dead tour, the characters are naturally going to spend a lot of time walking around the parking lot. But still, that note from the editor: “a book like this.”
I had spent the past fifteen years trying to write what you usually see in magazine’s like this one: “literary short fiction.” I had been lucky enough to place a number of those stories, and by the time I was reading that polite note about parking lot loitering, I had published four books of short stories.
So, what’s the difference between literary short fiction and “a book like this?” It’s a lot. I like to think, of course, that I brought my background into paranormal noir, and the book is, like my short fiction, focused first on characters. Everything that happens happens first on that level—what is this doing to this character, to their wants and needs and the things they don’t even know they want and need yet?
I could write ten short stories about characters walking around Dead shows where not much happens other than a slow revelation, a slow denial, or a slow realization about one of those wants or needs (don’t call me on this: I’ve already written a book of short stories based on television commercials, and a book of short stories that all end in the same way: a massive cleansing fire). It is a joke among many short story writers that, in most stories, not much actually happens. A character folds laundry while remembering something that took place long ago. Eventually they stare out the window at the passing moon. There you go: that’s a short story for you.
But a book like this is supposed to be a thriller. It is supposed to move. If somebody is walking around a Dead show, they should be walking toward something—something that moves the plot along (like, for instance, getting their throat ripped out by a vampire). In a book like this, I needed not only to kill my darlings, but make sure the darlings that remained were more or less racing toward a conclusion, all the time. There is a laundry folding scene in this book, actually, and it ends with Pete maybe kind of experimenting with the idea of killing himself by piling laundry over his head until he can’t breathe. A near suicide will move the plot along. Staring at the moon will not (unless, of course, our character is a werewolf; perhaps next book).
So: less walking around. Less me cracking myself up. Less following one character only to be handed off to another character and then another. That’s literally what happened in the early draft of this book, and the section below is the middle part, Pete following an old hippie to a younger hippie who will eventually lead him to somebody who he thinks he’s going to buy drugs from. If that last sentence sounds painful, take solace in the fact that it is 2,160 words shorter than the other sections I eventually wound up cutting.
Reading these sections over again, there are still parts I like, parts that were pulling some weight in the story: Pete’s sense of confusion with his duties, his frustration with his lack of training, the sights and sounds and smells of the Grateful Dead parking lot. Those things are present in other places in the book, and their placement here was just not enough to merit all that walking around. Walking around is cool. It is a thing people did at Dead shows. Still, two thousand words worth of walking around was not working in a book like this.
The part that hurts is Janeen. She was one of my favorite characters. She’s funny and weird and specific and in my mind she looks exactly like the actress Kathryn Hahn. As a writer, I’m a hoarder: I cut, but then I paste, into another document, or an email, or a note that says “use this some other time.” That last exchange will certainly turn up somewhere else, maybe even a short story. “There be monsters,” indeed.
—
Outtake from This Darkness Got to Give
Pete had followed the old hippie called Sherlock through the market of Shakedown and over toward the corner of the parking lot that was crowded with buses and campers painted Day-Glo, with dancing skeletons or bears or peace signs. The sun was down and dusk was settling in. It was clear that these buses had been here for days. Here, there was a different vibe. More communal. More permanent. It felt like a retirement home or a summer camp—people who knew one another and were doing something a little more than camping for the night.
What had they told him? God, he’d forgotten almost all of it, had just latched on to the girls and followed where they led. Now, clearly, it was time to get to work. Look for vehicles with blacked out windows, they said. In the heat, look for closed windows, a van or car sealed up tight as a tomb.
All of these vehicles were wide open, windows down, in many cases missing, as were doors. People meandered in and out. A pack of small children in tie-dyed t-shirts and cutoff shorts chased one another through the obstacle course of the buses and vans and cars, playing tag. The one in the lead, a larger boy Pete guessed was twelve or so, stopped abruptly. “Hold on!” he said, and the pack behind him slowed to a halt. He picked something off the ground, put it into his back pocket, whooped in a way that seemed to indicate the game was back on, and sped along a series of parked vans until he disappeared behind a bus painted orange, the pack trailing behind.
Sherlock was unfazed by any of it. He sipped at his beer and led Pete trudging steadily along, every now and then nodding or waving a hand to indicate that they were continuing. Pete smelled dust and weed and incense, the faint whiff of grease carrying along from somewhere. His stomach turned and he realized he was hungry. It had been awhile since breakfast. He wondered where Sunny was, if he would ever see her again. The note“Find me.” said she’d be back, but now he’d gone and left the car with no fallback plan.There were maybe a hundred thousand people here and she had written “find me.” He had spent enough time with her already, though, to know what she would say: if it’s meant to be, it will happen.
He wondered if he needed to embrace that philosophy more fully, or abandon it altogether and devote himself to detective work. People were dying and he was—was what? Following this shambling, tripping hippie even deeper into the belly of the beast. There was a way to look at it that made very little sense.
The old hippie turned and made a noise that seemed to indicate that they were getting closer. Pete finished his beer and stopped to buy a Beck’s from a young girl who was sitting next to a cooler. He handed her a dollar and she popped the top off a green bottle and held it up. He nodded, and she went back to her tarot cards. A perfectly good transaction, he thought. He would miss this place, the whole thing, he realized, if he ever completed his mission.
Sherlock turned into the row of traffic, counted cars with his hand out to the right as they walked by – one, two, three. He seemed to be running out of gas, and Pete was reminded of a wind-up robot he’d had as a child. It would buzz briskly across a surface, its internal motor whirring with efficiency, and then almost immediately stop, tip, and land smack on its face. Sherlock did the same now, falling face-first onto a Mexican blanket, his arm encircled protectively around a sleeping woman, who lay on her back, arms across her chest like a mummy.
She opened her eyes, looked left, then right. She stuffed a hand into her jean shorts and pulled out a small satchel, looked inside, and then closed her eyes again.
Pete sipped his beer. There were something like fifty thousand people inside the show, another ten or twenty outside. And he was supposed to do, what again? Find somebody with blacked out windows and…what?
Find a fucking vampire and execute a citizen’s arrest?
The woman opened her eyes again and sat up. She looked at Pete, then turned and put a hand on Sherlock, who was snoring gently, as if to make sure he was really there. She was younger than Sherlock, maybe thirty, with a broad nose, thick lips, and matted hair. She stood slowly, wobbled on her cowboy boots. Pete held out a hand and she took it, righted herself, and stretched. “Are you real?” she said. “You’re real, right?”
Pete nodded and finished his beer. “I am,” he said.
She looked around. “Pittsburgh?” she said.
He shook his head.
“Wednesday?”
“Sunday. Deer Creek.”
She smiled, rubbed her eyes. She rolled her neck, lifted her arms up toward the sun and stretched like a cat.
“Sunday,” she said. “What the fuck happened to, like, Friday? Friday we were…” she trailed off.
“Pittsburg,” Pete said.
She paused, cocked her head to the side. Pete watched her wheels turn. “Well,” she said, as if she was wrapping up a meeting. “We’re here now, right?”
“I’m Pete.”
“Janeen.” She held out her hand to shake. Her grip was firm. “We’ve been . . . I don’t know.”
“Tripping?”
“Something.”
“That’s what I was going to talk to him. Sherlock. About,” Pete said. They both regarded the sleeping hippie.
“No shit?” she said.
Pete wondered if he had misunderstood how these transactions were arranged. He’d seen plenty of them in the past several days–quick, almost wordless handshake deals. Sunny had taught him to follow the hands, watch the exchange of bills and baggies or joints or pills.
“No shit,” the girl said again. “Get it? Like, no shit, Sherlock?” She punched him in the arm and giggled. He wondered what it was that they were on. Something pretty good, from the looks of it. “Jesus, you’re stiff,” she said. “Follow me. I know what you’re looking for. The Doctor is in. Or, will be. When we find him, which shouldn’t be hard.”
She reached into Sherlock’s pants and came out with a woven pouch, what he assumed was the Sherlock equivalent of a wallet. She stuffed it into her own shorts and started walking.
“Wait,” she said. “You’re not a fed, are you?”
Pete froze. He felt the blood rush to his face and wiped at his forehead. Was he?
Janeen laughed and punched him in the arm again. “Jesus, you’re stiff,” she said. “Try to keep up, man.” She looked around the perimeter of the parking lot. Her eyes were blue and her hair was brown and honeyed in spots. He guessed her at twenty five around thirty, although he’d also learned that it was hard to guess figure anybody’s age correctly on tour. Recent estimates of his own age had ranged from high school senior to federal agent.
“There,” she said, pointing at an orange helium balloon floating maybe fifty yards over a stand of trees.
“What’s there?” Pete said. She started walking and he followed.
She stopped and put a hand on his bicep. She squeezed. “There be monsters,” she said.
This Darkness Got to Give is Dave Housley‘s first (published) novel. He is the author of four story collections, the most recent being Massive Cleansing Fire and If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home. His work has appeared in Booth, Hobart, McSweeneys, Mid-American Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. He is one of the founding editors and all around do-stuff people at Barrelhouse, and the primary organizer of the Conversations and Connections writer’s conference, which is held in DC in the Spring and Pittsburgh in the Fall. Sometimes he drinks boxed wine and tweets about the things on his television at @housleydave.