“the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul”

If you’ve been following me on social media, you probably saw that my story “The God of the Overpass” is in the June issue of The Dark. I’ve published a lot of short stories over the years, including a couple of others at The Dark, but this one is kind of a big deal for me simply because it’s the first new story of mine to be published in quite a while. Even the new stories that were in How to See Ghosts & Other Figments have already been out in the world for several months now.

Since the start of COVID, I’ve produced less original fiction than I used to. This is due to a variety of factors, with the chief one being that freelancing as a writer full time means more time writing lots of other stuff, and less time spent on my own fiction. So it’s a bigger deal for me than it used to be when something sees publication.

Over on Twitter, I called this story “Clive Barker-inflected,” which is true enough. It’s one of what I think of as my “Kansas City stories,” those explicitly set here in the metro where I live. It’s also of a piece with some of my other stories which have explored the kinds of gods and monsters that have developed out of the post-industrial world in which we live. Stories like “Shadders,” an original in my third collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales, or “Black Hill,” originally published in Historical Lovecraft all the way back in 2011 and the story that first got me the attention of Ross Lockhart, who has become my most frequent publisher.

As much as and maybe more than Clive Barker, “The God of the Overpass” and those other stories I mentioned owe their inspiration to Fritz Leiber’s classic story “Smoke Ghost,” which I quoted in the title of this post. (That’s also an Edd Cartier illustration from the story’s original publication off to the side there.)

Leiber is best known for his sword-and-sorcery stories featuring Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser (and perhaps rightly so), but his weird fiction accounts of the modern supernatural had an enormous impact on me and my work. From stories like “Smoke Ghost” and “The Glove” to short novels like Conjure Wife and, perhaps especially, Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber had left an outsized impression on me when I was beginning to write seriously, and he remains one of the voices I most long to be able to emulate.

In “Smoke Ghost,” in particular, Leiber conjures “a ghost from the world of today,” the sort that “would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.” His depiction is a ghost not of one person, but of the “tangled, sordid, vicious” things that make up our “rotten world.”

“I don’t think it would seem white or wispy or favor graveyards,” Leiber’s protagonist muses. “It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?”

Ever since Leiber revitalized the ghost for what was then the modern world of 1941, plenty of other writers and creators have updated these spooks and specters for an ever-changing world, with some of the most successful being the analog and digital ghosts that have crawled their way out of TV screens and modems in a deluge of Japanese horror tales going back at least as far as The Ring.

“Smoke Ghost” is, itself, an oddly written story, strangely more stilted than some of Leiber’s other classics. But the idea of that modernized ghost, a projection of a world built by humanity, rather than the spirit of the dead, or something from the ancient past, was important, and it has remained important through all these years.

At this point, 1941 is almost as distant from us as the Industrial Revolution was from Leiber’s original writing, depending on how you measure. But the idea of that ghost still holds resonance, and it’s ripe for plenty of other writers to try their hands at similar things.

“The God of the Overpass” is just one of my attempts at doing so. A story about hubris and the gods that we create without ever meaning to. “Monsters that chewed up the earth to make new earth, to build roads and bridges, ditches and canals. Flattening mountains here, building mountains there. So much power, so much motion – how could it do anything but create something more than just inert stone and steel?”