Portions formerly published as “Terrible Truth” Hoodrat Halloween: Dedication with additional thoughts on the inspiration for Skulker Jones.

Hoodrat Halloween is a tribute to Robert E. Howard, who, when I was a boy adrift among meat marionettes dangling spectrally as they lurched across the world—never knowing, that in their sleep, they had been bought and sold—pried my eyes and thrilled my soul with wonderful lies...told in the still voice of terrible truth.

This crooked tale was inspired by Howard’s works Black Canaan, The Pool of the Black One, Beyond the Black River and Kelly The Conjure-Man. It formed in my mind during a walk through the back streets and alleys of the Cedonia section of Northeast Baltimore one autumn night, and from the memory of a meeting in the Pennsylvania woods between two girls and “The Ugly Man” of Moger Drive.

-Wednesday, October 5, 2015

Note: In my dedication to Robert E. Howard above, I was the Ugly Man, who my female classmates saw, bearded, sitting in the woods at 14, and thought the most hideous thing they had seen and ran away, screaming “The Ugly Man is in the woods!”

I had no thought—when writing A Hoodrat Halloween—of doing a sequel. As a matter of my profession, I leave any story open for a sequel should the desire, inspiration or need arise to write one. The original story was inspired by the experience of waving green weeds towering over me among the ruins of my native city in autumn, the autumn after the summer reading of the above mention Howard tales of dark deviltry. Today, as I recharged my mind for the second half of the writing day through a reading of People of the Black Circle, I received a call from a fellow writer whose favorite season is Autumn. His call was not about that, but about the fact that he has, since boyhood, been profoundly affected by his experiences and impressions of sunsets, of the darkening hour that precedes night.

Dusk was the primal moment of Mankind’s terror rising, the coming of the darkened time stalked by the great cats who sought his throat in the night. It was also the moment of his triumph, once he harnessed fire and began making his way here. I too have been profoundly affected by sunsets throughout my life. I have chosen that theme for my longest work, The Sunset Saga, and incidentally, as a person who has worked overnight most of his life, I typically lay down with the sunset and wake up with the rising moon.

This discussion with S.L. James also centered on the appreciation of beauty being the sign of a higher mind, a mind that has risen above pure utility. That ideal fits well with Howard’s theory that barbarism, “alienated ethical actionism,” is superior to civilization “submission of the individual human mind to a system of domestication for the benefit of the human body and its collective.” Although some civilizations favor beauty in architecture, the more “advanced,” the further from our primal state, overwhelmingly prefer ugly utility. Our current civilization is essentially a dualistic exercise in submission and alienation in the shadow of a universally hideous mode of ephemeral building. Within this horrendous complex of concrete and steel shacks and towers, some of us are lucky enough to know fear at sunset, to know we are hunted by enemies, sought by predators who hold no commonality with us. This at least provides us a psychological link to our ancestors, from whom the vile lies of Civilizations “histories” have forever severed us.

Autumn, is the sunset of the year, when war has often been made, rulers often anointed, for, just as our ancestors knew they faced death at dark, our rulers know that their kind and the ugly, artificial edifices they build to commemorate their triumph over us, all fall to dust and that somewhere, in defiance of the Evil that is Civilization, their remains an unbroken human being standing at dusk.

So, I dedicate Skulker Jones to my Brother against Civilization, horror writer S. L. James

-James LaFond, Wednesday, October 5, 2016