The September Special Guest Poet is Graham Masterton
Please feel free to visit Graham HERE
THE SONG OF THE WANDERING ZOMBIE
If I should rise
If I should rise again
To walk the paths where once I walked alive
And see the sun again and feel the wind
And where the summer starlings wheel and dive
I’ll have no greed for viscera or bone
I’ll have no hunger for another’s flesh
My life is past
My days are gone
They have their life ahead of them to live afresh
But—
Slow and unsteady I will climb their stairs
Dragging the sheets I’ve carried from my grave
Even if they awake I will be masked
My grey skin, and my grimace, and my eyes like caves
And I will lie
And I will lie so close to them.
I’ll cup their exhaled breathing in my hand
So I can share the day they’ve had—the kisses
And the laughter and the wine
The breaths that I could take, when I was living in the land
THE CAKE AND THE CLOCK
“At five the clock strikes five
And, just as yesterday, the cake is cut
And handed round amid the conversation and the smiles
The cake is like the clock and each slice disappears
Like time, and life, and all the passing miles.”
“At ten the clock was speechless
Not yet wound up and waiting for its key
The showers had passed and sunlight glistened on the path
The clock was like a friend who chose to wait
When we caught up, and we caught up at last.”
“At four the clock struck slowly
Its spring so slackened it could barely chime
I woke, and heard it like a warning from the years to pass
‘Your bed will soon lie empty and your bones
Will soon be sleeping underneath the grass.’”
“At two the clock struck two
Just as the christened child began to cry
And cake was cut and passed around to family and friends
The cake is like the clock and each slice disappears
Until our plate is empty, and it ends.”
A YOUNG WOMAN’S LANGUAGE LESSON
“You came home last night.
My love, my lover.
You came up the stairs and I opened the door wide to welcome you.
You hit me.
You said not a single word, not even that you hated me.
I sit here now, watching you sleep.
My love, my lover.
Trying to understand what you were telling me.
It’s three AM.
On the other side of the room hangs a portrait of me
An oval portrait that moves when I move.
And writes, whenever I write.
A portrait that shows what you have done to me by hitting me so hard
Both of my eyes are crimson, like a clown’s, and my lips are split
My love, my lover.
I always believed you when you said you loved me
So, when you stopped talking to me—
When you started hitting me instead
What was I to think?
You didn’t leave me, so you must have found
A new way to tell me how you cared.
A new language of love, called ‘hit.’
I am trying so hard to learn it
My love, my lover.
But, please give me time.
No other language, as you learn it, makes you cry like this.”
Graham Masterton's debut as a horror author began with The Manitou in 1976, a chilling tale of a Native American medicine man reborn in the present day to exact his revenge on the white man. It became an instant bestseller and was filmed with Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, Michael Ansara, Stella Stevens and Ann Sothern.
Since then Graham has published more than 35 horror novels, including Charnel House, which was awarded a Special Edgar by Mystery Writers of America; Mirror, which was awarded a Silver Medal by West Coast Review of Books; and Family Portrait, an update of Oscar Wilde's tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger in France.
Three of Graham's stories were filmed for TV in Tony Scott's horror series The Hunger, and 'The Secret Shih-Tan', starring Jason Scott Lee, was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association. Another short story, 'Underbed', about a boy finding a mysterious world underneath his blankets, was voted best short story by Horror Critics Guild.
Graham's latest horror novels to be published in the United States are Spirit (Leisure, December, 2001); Trauma, (Signet, January, 2002) and The Chosen Child (Tor, January, 2002). Motion picture rights in Trauma have been optioned by Jonathan Mostow, who directed U-571. The Chosen Child, set in the sewers of Warsaw, was named Best Horror Novel of the Year by Science Fiction Chronicle and highly praised in Publisher's Weekly.
Altogether Graham has written more than a hundred novels ranging from thrillers (The Sweetman Curve, Ikon) to disaster novels (Plague, Famine) to historical sagas (Rich and Maiden Voyage - both appeared in the New York Times bestseller list). He has published four collections of short stories, Fortnight of Fear, Flights of Fear, Faces of Fear and Feelings of Fear.
He has also written horror novels for children (House of Bones, Hair-Raiser) and has just finished the fifth volume in a very popular series for young adults, Rook, based on the adventures of an idiosyncratic remedial English teacher in a Los Angeles community college who has the facility to see ghosts.
A critical biography and bibliography, Manitou Man, was published in 1999 by the British Fantasy Society.
Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946. His grandfather was Thomas Thorne Baker, the eminent scientist who invented DayGlo and was the first man to transmit news photographs by wireless. After training as a newspaper reporter, Graham went on to edit the new British men's magazine Mayfair, where he encouraged William Burroughs to develop a series of scientific and philosophical articles which eventually became Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys. At the age of 24, Graham was appointed executive editor of both Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines. At this time he started to write a bestselling series of sex 'how-to' books including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. His latest, Wild Sex For New Lovers is published by Penguin Putnam in January, 2001. He is a regular contributor to Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Woman, Woman's Own and other mass-market self-improvement magazines.
He lives in Surrey, England (sadly his wife, Wiescka died in April 2011). He has just finished writing a black thriller featuring Ireland's only female detective superintendent, Katie Maguire, set in the Cork underworld; and a dark fantasy, Jessica's Angel, about a girl's search for five supposedly-dead children.
He has written several new short stories and is currently working on a new horror novel, as yet untitled.
Go to Graham Masterton's official page HERE
Graham says:
"BLOOD SISTERS is my newest crimed shocker featuring Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire; DROUGHT is a new disaster novel in the vein of my earlier epics FAMINE and PLAGUE, and PLAGUE OF THE MANITOU which is another outing for fake fortune-teller Harry Erskine in his never-ending steruggle against vengeful Nastive American spirits."
