At the very first performance of the Rolling Darkness Revue — Dark Delicacies bookshop, Burbank, California, October of 2004 —a thoroughly competent former student of mine showed up with a digital camera and a cinematography-minded companion from USC film school. A year later, at the kick-off event for the 2005 tour-Mystery and Imagination Bookshop, Glendale, Ca. — a correspondent for National Public Radio arrived with microphone gear and snazzy digital deck. In between and afterward, at more than half of our shows, there've been other cameras, cassette recorders, even one guy with a mini-disc.
And yet.
Two years into its existence, barely a frame of film or thread of tape or byte of digital whatever exists to prove that the Rolling Darkness Revue was ever there. In 2004, my former student called me a week after our debut, baffled and embarrassed, to say that all she'd shot were shadows. Our radio correspondent (the dedicated and extraordinarily helpful Rick Kleffel, about whom more later) realized only after the 2005 launch event that he'd somehow arrived with the wrong mic, and gotten only murmurs that couldn't quite be clarified enough for NPR.
It seems that capturing the Rolling Dark in action is a little like recording EVP (that's Electronic Voice Phenomena, as in the floating, disembodied voices of the dead). There are those who swear they've heard it. A few who can claim they saw it. For the rest of you, it's going to have to come down to faith.
At least until we can sucker some unsuspecting shop in your town into letting us roll through…
Creation Myth
Dennis Etchison, indisputably one of the Rolling Dark's co-founders and its eminence grise based on bristly Hemingway beard alone (never mind the multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards, decades of stunning stories, blah blah, yeah yeah), still thinks this was his idea. He bases this claim, as far as I can tell, on two occurrences.
First, he refers repeatedly to a 1997 event at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles, California, at which he and the great Ramsey Campbell regaled a justifiably rapt club audience for more than two hours with recitations of four of their best-loved stories. There is no denying the existence of this event; unlike the Rolling Darkness Revue shows, there are tapes to prove it, and I'm the proud owner of a set.
Second, he reminds me of a conversation he and I had the second time we met, reading in a sort of line-up at Mystery and Imagination in Glendale at their annual Saturday-before-Hal-loween extravaganza. We were talking, he reminds me, about how oral storytelling played a crucial role in luring both of us into the field. We talked about favorite readers, about Ramsey Campbell huffing up like a cartoon dragon and breathing terror in slow, scorching bursts from the armchairs he prefers onstage. We also talked about wrestling, which has nothing to do with the Rolling Dark, but if you talk to Dennis for more than a minute or two, you're going to talk wrestling.
Somewhere in there, Dennis claims, he told me we should set something up. A touring cavalcade. A company of terror-players traipsing the countryside, pulling up in local bookshops or better still, little clubs and theaters, telling tales with low-key theatrical and musical accompaniment, slipping out of town again, doing the Halloween season right.
Maybe he's correct. I remember it a little differently, and in a different order. And I have no idea who broached it first. Maybe not me, because what had I done, to that point in my career, to make me think Dennis (or Ramsey, with whom I'm certain I'd had a similar conversation at the World Horror Convention the previous spring) would want to come traipsing in my wagon?
Doesn't matter. What matters is this: For Dennis, it was old-time radio. For Ramsey, it was films, I believe, at the very first. For me, it was Perry Berkeley (I think that was his name). He was my counselor at Camp Wil-loway (I think that was the camp), and one night, when I was eight years old, he told our cabin the story of the Tent Monster, which scared me so badly that I fled into the dark weeping, and ignited my feverish little brain so ferociously that I woke Perry in the middle of the night and made him tell me the story again.
At the opening of the original John Carpenter version of "The Fog" John Houseman, in the role of Mr. Machen (wink-wink nudgs-nudge) claps a pocket-watch shut, stares around him at the firelit faces of a group of mesmerized kids, and says, "11:55. Almost midnight. Time enough for one more story. Just to keep us waaarm."
I can't tell you exactly the moment when the Rolling Darkness Revue was born. But every single person who has performed with us has longed, at some point in their lives (or, in my case, most of my life), to be that guy. The one with the watch in his hands and that look on his face as he or she settles in to tell the last story before twelve…
Enter Pinhead
Cheap joke, it's true, although he did write not one, not two, but three of the Hellraiser movies based around that Clive Barker character, and he has worn his hair in bristles ever since I've known him. But the truth is that whoever thought up the Rolling Darkness Revue, Peter Atkins' entrance on the scene went a long way toward ensuring its eventual existence.
A longtime friend of Dennis' and well-liked companion of pretty much everyone who has written a word of horror in the past twenty years, as far as I can tell, Pete brought some essential qualities to what had somehow become a planning committee. Urbane and relaxed, he proved equally at home chatting about glam rock with Dennis, about crazed American noir author Harry Stephen Keeler with both of us, and about actual tour details with me. He has a winning, understated Liverpudlian accent that had me imagining scores of helpless American listeners leaning eagerly forward for his tales (even Dennis practically curls up in his lap). And he has a crucial knack for phrases like, "Uh, fellas, we're now one month from showtime, and I still feel like I'm about to stand up in school with my trousers at my ankles."
Plus, like me, he plays music. Or, as both of us would say, plays at music. He has a band — quite rockin', very fine — called Invisible Cinema, appropriately enough. (My own band is called Momzer, and if you want to know what that means, ask a Yid-dishe friend, but make sure you're not calling your Yiddishe friend that.) Gradually, almost miraculously, an actual performance concept began to cohere out of our collective, perpetual writers' fogs…
Punk Rock
I found the voice-alteration unit in a closet in the band room at the high school where I teach. The fact that its accompanying power supply adapter had a frayed connecting wire and cracked back cover that melted a little more every time electricity surged through it just gave the whole thing that appropriate patina of risk.
After several hours of jamming, Pete and I discovered a chord on which we could both improvise for thirty or even sixty minutes (it was D). Two hours into our lone officially scheduled run-through, Dennis looked up from WWWhatever-letter-goes-here on the WB long enough to announce that he had a passage from his book, The Death Artist, that would make an ideal introduction to a night of storytelling, particularly if delivered through the voice-alteration box, which, incidentally, he would not be plugging in, that was up to us young'uns.
I bought a cheap fog machine and experimented in the living room and made my two small children happier than they've been since the last time our cat jumped on my head while I was sleeping.
Somehow — dreaming big dreams of a new horror era, in which dozens of Rolling Dark-inspired caravans left home and crisscrossed the nation, bringing the art of scaring people silly back into the intimate, face-to-fog-machine venues where it has always belonged, and still with that metaphorical trousers-about-ankles feeling — we arrived at opening night. October 16th, 2004…
The Grand Opening, or, Where's Dennis?
It was a rare error in judgment from Mr. Atkins.
Alternately inspiring and panicking each other, we'd gotten to Dark Delicacies a good five hours before showtime. We'd tested the fog (still foggy), mic-checked the voice-alteration box (still sparking and lethal), even tuned our instruments. Best of all, Pete had swung across town and picked up Dennis and chauffeured him to the store, just to insure that the ceaselessly inquisitive Etchison brain didn't leap off down some wrestler-haunted corridor.
And so it was, overconfident and fog-soaked and food-deprived, that Pete somehow agreed to let Dennis take the car and go get his good pal George Clayton Johnson.
Terrific writer, Mr. Johnson. Author of "Logan's Run," Twilight Zone episodes, lots more. Wise conversationalist, too (get him going on Robert Louis Stevenson's efficiency sometime; most productive eighty seconds I've had on the craft of writing in twenty years). A snappy addition to any audience in his straw hat that so nicely accentuates his wise, white beard. Bound by few time constraints, however, and unlikely to constrain Dennis.
Our start time approached. Actual human beings turned up, some of whom we didn't even know. 15, maybe 25 people, a hefty turnout for an experimental reading event. Student, with cameraman. No Dennis. Pete stepped outside to smoke and stare hopefully down Burbank Boulevard across the San Fernando Valley. I sat and played with the power supply to the voice-alteration box.
I don't even remember the moment Dennis actually reappeared, or where he came from. Suddenly, there was his voice, dropped four octaves by the box, intoning, "You do not have to find him. He has already found you." I flicked on my keyboard, glanced toward Pete, who'd also scurried into place at his guitar. I stepped on the fog pedal, blasting poor George Clayton Johnson, who just stood in the onslaught, not even blinking, a bearded, straw-hatted cypress who'd be there, blissfully watching, decades after we'd gone.
I read "Mr. Dark's Carnival," the story I'd originally invented to tell my students on Halloween years before and that had somehow, miraculously, established me as a writer at long last. Pete read a creepy section from his novel, Big Thunder. Dennis read "The Dog Park," the same biting, hilarious, quietly vicious story he'd employed on that seminal 1997 evening with Ramsey Campbell. The fog billowed, the music stayed on D, someone took George home. Somehow, we were launched.
Snapshots, 2004
At what point did we realize that what we were doing meant something, at least to the three of us? I think it was on the second day of that first tour, at a Denny's in Santa Cruz in the pouring rain.
We'd meant to drive together — that was part of the allure. But we didn't. Long story, Pete with a movie conflict, Dennis wrestling with deadlines, etc. I drove alone, stopped midday in the misting wet at Pacheco Park and walked up an empty, grassy hillside toward a lone, twisted tree and marveled for the thousandth time at the variety of California, got lost somewhere on the transition to the 1, and wound up parked right next to my companions, who'd pulled into the Denny's lot moments before.
Pete and Dennis weren't hungry— they'd stopped at Harris Ranch, where the cows really may be slaughtered out back when your steaks are ordered — and I was cold and exhausted. And yet we were at that Denny's for hours and hours, talking Harry Stephen Keeler and Kenneth Patchen, Roxy Music and doo-wop, novel-writing vs. story-writing, wrestling. Gentleman Pete went outside for a smoke and came back with the life story of the prostitute huddled under the awning to stay out of the downpour. Dennis went out for a smoke and disappeared by himself God-knows-where and came back.
The next morning, we did an interview with Rick Kleffel, insightful critic, publisher/editor of The Agony Column website, co-host of a fine book program on the local public radio station. Under Kleffel's gentle, enthusiastic questioning, our collective enthusiasm spilled out. None of us even had new stuff to plug at the moment, we pointed out; we weren't in this for the money (never mind the box of T-shirts in the trunk, the piles of books and CDs and memorabilia we'd lugged hopefully north with us). We dismissed the notion that the purpose of horror literature was catharsis, and then, one by one, reinforced it. We carefully positioned ourselves as between genres — classic horror? Mainstream literary? Something else? — then reaffirmed our loyalty to the field. Dennis told a story about Stephen King roaming the halls of a 1970s World Fantasy Convention in a computer-geek T-shirt and boxer shorts. Afterwards, none of us could remember quite what we'd said. But we were pretty certain we'd meant every word.
Dark Carnival, Berkeley, CA
10/20/04
A late arrival — the accomplished, laughing, frighteningly bright woman who, as a girl some thirty years before, had provided the inspiration for the desperate and possibly psychotic Theresa Daughrety character in my novel, The Snowman's Children — saved us from the ignominy of an event with more performers than attendees. We left the shop happy, anyway, because the friendly Dark Carnival people had made us these really nifty magnets and bookmarks with our book covers and the event dates on them.
Evidence. Maybe we'd been there after all.
Borderlands, San Francisco,
10/21/04
Many more people, startlingly enthusiastic crowd, fog machine seemingly kicking up extra-thick mist in response and nearly choking the extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful staff. Good thing, too, since we basically had to park in Oakland and walk the amps and equipment miles down Market Street, waving that mutant power supply-cord before us like a cobra on a leash.
Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, 10/22/04, or, Where's Dennis II?
Actually, where are Dennis and Pete, since somehow our gypsy caravan got itself separated in the Orange Crush freeway strangle, and I arrived at the shop a good ninety minutes before my colleagues. We left the fog machine in the car, did the show dry. A woman came whom I'd taught at a Writer's Conference two years before. The fact that she even remembered who I was gave me that gorgeous, surprising making-at-least-a-little-dif-ference feeling I only really get from the teaching part of my writing life.
Rolling Dark 1 1/2, or, Someone Wake Those People Up
and Tell Them We're Done…
Hilton Hotel and Convention Center, Burbank, CA June, 2005
When the people running the 2005 Horror Writers of America convention called and asked if we'd like to do an encore of our Rolling Darkness Revue performance as the featured Friday night entertainment, we got a little proud, I think. Or maybe just overenthusiastic.
We knew we'd loved the previous fall enough to do another round, despite the fact that we'd raked in almost enough money on T-shirt sales to cover gas expenses between Santa Cruz and Berkeley. So we looked at this rare summer opportunity as a chance to reprise what had worked and try out some new elements.