Commercial Book / Margaret Freeman

As many of you will be aware, my short story collection, "Commercial Book", was recently published by The Eyeball Museum via Psychofon Records. The collection features 40 short stories of exactly 1000 words in length, and these stories are based on the 40 songs of exactly one minute in length that featured on "Commercial Album", released by The Residents in 1980. "Commercial Book" is fully endorsed by the band.

I'm aware that some of my readers will be unfamiliar with The Residents, and fans of the band will also be unfamiliar with my writing. As the book can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of the music, I've decided to post one of the stories here in full, so readers can get an indication of what the collection is like. Without further ado, I present "Margaret Freeman". A link to the song concludes this post. Incidentally, "Margaret Freeman" is guest-sung by Andy Partridge from XTC.

Margaret Freeman

Wanted: skeleton key.

To begin with she was just a girl I knew growing up.

Then she became a girl everyone knew.

And then a girl no one knew.

I didn’t call her anything. Some of us called her Bones. Later she was known as The Skeleton, or Skeleton Girl, although oftentimes the moniker was rendered as Skellington Girl which tells more about the company she had to keep than the rest of my story. Those she travelled with were illiterate, often vicious taskmasters who had little concerns over those in their care other than their capacity to make money. When I caught up with her the second time around I saw those exchanges that occurred when they thought no one was looking. Large men would enter her tent with anticipatory smiles, and it was barely a comfort when they left that those expressions were twisted into something unfamiliar: shame wrought on their faces.

Yet my first memory is of her moving next door. We lived in Tulsa. For a time it was known as the Oil Capital of the World. My father was a roughneck on the oil fields. He would return home slick. There was an iridescent ring of starling-feather discolouration around our tub that could never be shifted. Honest work. This dirt – this black gold dirt – was in complete contrast to the buildings that had sprung up around town, their art deco architecture of relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements seemed an extension of the machine: that marvel of the modern age. Will Rogers High School, the Philtower, Boston Avenue Methodist Church: they still stand today should you care to view them.

Of course, Tulsa had a darker history. The race massacre was a recent memory. It wasn’t that anyone spoke of it but it was another stain that couldn’t be shifted. Some times I think folks seek different targets to take their minds off atrocities, which possibly explains why they talked about her but never intervened.

I was sat on the stoop, whittling, when they pulled up to the house. She had no father with her. Her mother was a hook-nosed woman who picked the wrong side in fights. The girl was paper thin. Jokes came that she had to walk with a stick sideways in her mouth in case she fell through a drain cover. This is not what I saw that day. I saw a body that appeared to echo internal thought – a manifestation of a soul. She was a few months younger than me but older than her years. I expected to befriend her.

It was the holidays, so in those first weeks there was no school. I saw her rarely, but so exact was my initial impression that I had become fixed to the stoop, surrounded by shavings, silently shaking my head when friends invited me to go to the lake or on rabbit shoots. It was as though she had found a way to capture me with barely a look. I was hollowed from the inside out whilst for her it was the outside in. That’s how I describe it now, although maybe it was no more than morbid curiosity, an affinity for the strange.

I’d kick a ball in the vicinity. She might come out to hang washing, her arms as thin as the line. We’d exchange a look but the howdy stuck fast in my mouth. There was a tension there that only now I might define as sexual. We were thirteen. Buds on the tree of life. She’d return inside. The backs of her knees concave. In my daydreaming I saw her legs bend wrongways like those of a stork.

If there was an innocence to my observation then this collapsed when school resumed. My closest friends catcalled her. They’d forgotten about me when I stepped out of the game. The most inventive was Coathanger, but Bones was common. They’d crowd behind her back in the playground like leaves caught in a dust devil but no one would touch her. She wasn’t brittle – there was fibre in her being – yet you imagined she might collapse like a folding chair. I could see they were afraid of her. Their whispering a barrier, a defence.

There was something thrilling in becoming a voyeur. I’d observe this cruel behaviour, admire her restraint. By not participating I considered myself an accomplice: aligned myself to her over my friends. I’m sure that unspoken bond was in my head. Yet this suggestion of intimacy granted me permission to observe her inappropriately, from ever-decreasing distances.

I took to watching her window after dusk: an illuminated square that she would extinguish as she entered her room. Her form in subsequent shadow as thin as the light cord dangling from the ceiling, whilst she reached down to pull her dress off over her head. I could write music to it.

One afternoon I enacted a cherished fantasy. I approached her house with a handful of hen’s eggs. A faux-neighbourly gift. I knew her mother was out. The back door was open. I said nothing as I entered the house. She stood by the sink, naked, washing dishes. It was then that I saw her mother’s sodden ways had rubbed her rib cage raw. Her body was as manipulated as a Chinese woman’s feet or the extended necks of the Burmese Karen tribe. It wasn’t natural. It was abuse.

I can still hear the sound of those eggs smacking on the wooden boards. Still see that slight turn of her head.

When I pressed my hand to my chest the hammering remained.

I didn’t run. She watched me unashamed. Her body as ridged as an art deco monument. I stepped forward.

By winter she had joined the freak show. I charted its progress through advertisements and word of mouth. As I aged, I took to following it around. The Skeleton. The Skellington Girl. Bones.

I saw that no one called her Margaret.

But I did.

*  *  *

"Commercial Book" was available in a special limited edition version with CD and chewing gum, however this has sold out. The regular paperback is still available HERE although copies are also limited.

And here is the song, my inspiration (only the song, I hadn't seen this accompanying video before I wrote my story):

Betaville

My short story titled "Betaville" has just been published in the anthology Unauthorised Departures edited by Rick McGrath for Terminal Press, and as usual I'm blogging a few words discussing how the story came to be written. There may be spoilers within.

"Betaville" is one of twelve stories I've recently written which takes French New Wave Cinema as a starting point and then runs with an alternative version of it. There will be no surprises here that the inspiration for this story comes from Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 SF movie, "Alphaville".

The conceit in my story is somewhat based on real events. In 1978 Deborah Harry and Chris Stein from Blondie were considering filming a remake of "Alphaville", with Amos Poe directing, Deborah in the Anna Karina role, and guitarist Robert Fripp in the role of the detective, Lemmy Caution. Some publicity stills were made and rumour has it that Deborah and Chris bought the rights to remake the film from Godard for $1000 however the rights weren't Godard's to sell. True or not, for whatever reason, the remake never went ahead. In "Alphaville", Lemmy Caution journeys to the eponymous city where Alpha 60 has outlawed free thought and emotion. There is a dictionary in every hotel room that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion are banned. In my story, "Betaville", Deborah journeys to the eponymous city governed by Beta 60 (Godard) in order to buy the rights to make their movie, however finds that Beta 60 is on a mission to exclude popular films from future history, so that movies subsequently disappear from the listings in Halliwell's Film Guide. The story works both as a playful accompaniment to "Alphaville", containing references which lovers of the film and of Blondie will connect with, as well as standing alone as a short story in its own right. It was a blast to write, and hopefully readers will engage with it too.

Deborah Harry & Robert Fripp 

Here's an extract: 

Deborah wears a black gabardine trench coat with a removable sherpa lining. The expressway is lit yellow both sides. Her foot is down hard on the accelerator of the 1967 Chevrolet Camaro coupe. Occasional overhead lights strobe her face. She is alone. A gun may or may not be in the glove compartment. She seems to have come from nowhere.

Chris has stayed in New York. It is her mission to buy the rights from Godard. An assignation has been arranged. They’ve done some preliminary photoshoots with Fripp. She’s wearing a black one-piece, her hair all 50s starlet, star lit. He’s donned black slacks, a black jacket. Not quite a suit. White shirt punctuated by a black tie. The larger end of the tie is higher up than the shorter end, as though knotted in the dark. There’s footage too. A screen test. Fripp can’t keep a straight face. Deborah wears dark glasses, pulls at her cheeks as if getting into character. Head shots.

The photographs have been printed and reside in a brown manilla envelope on the passenger seat. Collateral or a statement of intent.

She grits her teeth.

Godard has suggested they meet in the past.

There’s a junction somewhere in sidereal space.

She keeps her eyes to the road. Traffic merges at all angles, entering the stream on zipwires. Getting mighty crowded. The Camaro reverberates to a different timbre. The road surface deteriorates. Up ahead a lump of tarmac resembles a sleeping policeman. When she hits it, something triggers. The sultry voice of Paco Navarro on WKTU-FM is lost to crackle. Potato chip radio. There is a flash of darkness, an antithesis. It picks her up and spits her out. She maintains a steady fifty. Everything is black and white.

Beta 60 broadcasts. The recognisable voice mechanical, as if comprised of the aforementioned crackle.

< I am trying to change the world >

Regular readers of this blog will know I usually listen to music through headphones whilst writing, and this entire story was written to the mostly instrumental (and futuristic) song, "Europa", from Blondie's 1980 album, "Autoamerican", on continual repeat.

To reiterate, "Unauthorised Departures" is published by Terminal Press, and in addition to myself features stories from the following: Maxim Jakubowski, James Goddard, Hunter Liguore, Rhys Hughes, David Quantick, Paul A. Green, Ana Teresa Pereira, Tom Frick, Eugen Bacon, Lawrence Russell, Lyle Hopwood, Elana Gomel, D. Harlan Wilson, David Paddy, Andrew Frost, Don MacKay, and Paul H. Williams. Buy it here. The book comes in both paperback and hardback editions.

Commercial Book

My eleventh collection of short stories, "Commercial Book", has just been announced for pre-sale over at Psychofon Records. This is my second book to be written in association with the legendary San Francisco anonymous avant-garde art collective known as The Residents, following my book on the Mysterious N Senada, O For Obscurity, Or, The Story Of N. Those familiar with the band will be fully aware that in 1980 The Residents released “Commercial Album”, a collection of 40 songs each of exactly one minute in duration. I always thought these were similar to story prompts, and I wondered whether the band might be interested in furthering that idea. Contacting the Cryptic Corporation - and after consultation with their representative, Homer Flynn - I was given the go-ahead to write this book. The idea was to apply a similar restriction to the fiction as it had been to the songs. I felt that forty short stories each of exactly one thousand words in length would be an appropriate method, with those stories named after the corresponding song title and using the lyrics – where there were some – as inspiration. Homer confirmed that The Residents had considered telling me their own interpretations of the songs, however they had then decided it was better to give me free reign. The resulting stories are therefore a product of my imagination, distilled through Commercial Album, but do not directly represent the band members’ views of the source material. I imagine many of these stories differ quite considerably from the inspiration behind the songs, although I have invoked several motifs that those who are familiar with the band will be able to identify.

Myself with Homer Flynn, Leeds, 2023

After catching a couple of shows with the band early last year I began to write the stories. I did this in order of appearance on the album, without thinking too much about them beforehand. Whilst writing each song I played it on a loop - meaning that I heard the tracks on average about one hundred and fifty times before I'd finish the story. I always finished each story in one writing session. Whilst it's fun to see how the stories sprang from the songs, I want to stress that you don't have to be a Residents fan to appreciate the stories. These are genre tales which wholly stand alone in their own right.

Once written, I sent the manuscript over to The Residents who approved. They were able to provide me with the original artwork for the album together with permission to include the song lyrics. As O For Obscurity had done well being published by Psychofon Records it was agreed we would continue that relationship. The pre-sale included a limited edition of the book where the first hundred are hand-numbered and come in special Psychofon packaging with the complete Commercial Album Radio Ads CD that was intended for Ralph Records promotion in 1980 as a bonus. At the time of writing, those limited edition copies have already sold out, however the standard paperback remains available.

The pre-order information regarding the standard version can be found on the Psychofon Records website.

Meanwhile, here's some pre-press reviews:

With little to no exception, The Residents found the stories to be absolutely delightful.

- Homer Flynn, President, The Cryptic Corporation

They may be miniatures, but Andrew Hook’s globe-spanning, genre-hopping tales conjure entire worlds within 1000 words. His lonely, haunted characters are immersed in dreams and steeped in film and music. ‘Commercial Book’ is another essential collection from one of our most gifted storytellers.

- Tim Major, author of Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives

A dissonance of the near sinister thrums inside each beautiful tale- Eugen Bacon, twice World Fantasy Award finalist and British Fantasy Award winner