MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS accepted for publication: A Few Words About Improbable Mashups

"MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS", four short stories written by Lou Antonelli and Edward Morris, has been accepted for publication by Yard Dog Press This marks the third collection Lou has sold, and me (SHOCK THEATRE and BEYOND THE WESTERN SKY have been 'bought' by Wildside Press, publishers of my BLACKGUARD series.)
I first met Lou Antonelli in a 2006 ASIMOV'S, (brought to me in a stack of same by Big Jim Willig, my idea generator since college,hetero life mate and hired thug.We get to Jimbo in a minute.)
Lou's short story "A Rocket For the Republic", which had to do with a feller inventing liquid oxygen fuel in Sam Houston's time, made me laugh and cry and hoot and stomp.It was so good...especially the ending...that I thought it was Joe R. Lansdale writing under a pseudonym. Lou was tickled pink by this, and asked me immediately if I wanted to collaborate.
For more about Lou, who came late to the table and covered the SFnal country in his own guns anyway, go HERE.
We have corresponded ever since that day in '06, and I feel that both of us are the better for it. We are from as opposite sides of Life as you can get, and yet... The stories we produce in any capacity are something much more than either parent.In one title, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nailed the concept. MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS. Here are the concerti that made it in:

"SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES":(originally appeared in THE FIFTH DIMENSION)
I miss Ernie Kovacs.I was never even around when the show was on, and I miss him SO much. Even Chevy Chase agrees that Ernie is a big part of the glue holding modern Comedy together. Lenny Bruce, Cheech and Chong, Rodney Dangerfield, and so many other great comedians have given props to Ernie over the years for the shoestring innovations that made his show so beloved to so many.
Dr. Allan Barber, one of the tougher...and better...Film profs I ever had, turned me on to Ernie's show, which was a huge hit in Philly when it was on. I was absolutely entranced by someone taking that many risks with live video while "drinking and smoking tea... er, uhh, drinking tea and smoking."
Kovacs used to sit in the sauna wasted out of his skull on liquor and verbally compose material. And it worked. He did things no one had ever done before, and he redefined Funny. I believe it was Dave Chappelle who said that greatness means that everything that came before you is obsolete and everything that came after you bears your mark. So it was with the Madcap Magyar.
This one was Lou's idea. Blame him. I was able to drop a lot of standup knowledge into the work, while Lou kept me mindful of the history of television comedy, and several key players that gave the work a much more harmonious tone.
And yeah, damn it, every time we get to the Yul Brynner moment, I cry like a little kid with a skinned knee. I was able to tone that part up, too, thanks to the ghoulishly spot-on oeuvre of another great comedian who left too soon, Bill Hicks.

"OFF THE HOOK" (originally appeared in DARK RECESSES PRESS #16; Bailley Hunter, ed.)

The first two stories in MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS have to do with comedians. Comedy is one bond that Lou and I definitely share (especially his great suggestion to use The Three Stooges in marathon form as an anti-depressant.)
"Off The Hook" came from the idea mill that is BIG JIM Jim Willig and I met at Temple University, part of a phenomenon there in the late Nineties that can best be described as a kind of anti-fraternity designed by Ken Kesey, the Bastards of the Universe.
Jim is always claiming that he can't write fiction, because he's dyslexic and he's better at composing Comedy, you're the writer, I'm the comic, blah blah, heard it. While I think Jim is selling himself entirely short, I'll take every idea he throws me.We are the authors of each other's careers,in many senses.
But one day Jim goes, "I don't know if you can use this or not..." ( a staple line from idea mills, which he remembers me parroting at him from my old friend, the late Blair County Coroner Charlie Burkey.) His IDKIYCUTON moment for the day was a riff about a comedian making a deal with Death.
I tried it. It didn't sell anywhere. Lou and I were trying all sorts of collaborations then
("Eva", which he coughed up the idea for but didn't have time to work on, was one such piece, and does not appear here, but will be in my own collection SHOCK THEATRE from Wildside Press in the very near future.)
So Lou asks me if I had one that was fully formed but blocked anyway. Like one that wasn't selling and I didn't know why. I sent him [insert original title here, I have forgotten]. Lou realized exactly what was wrong with it, almost immediately...
And forthwith coughed up the slipperiest little bit of comedic secret/almost-alternate history I ever did see. Especially at the end. SPOILER ALERT: In talking of the synergistic nature of collaboration, and moments in these works that make my eyes leak, the idea of Rodney Dangerfield making his roommate Lenny Bruce clean up...Yeah. Not a dry eye around here any time I read that one. Lou Antonelli Is Not Afraid. :)

"ACROSCAPHE" (originally appeared in PULP SPIRIT; Shelby Vick, ed.)
Again, this one started out as Lou's idea, and he did most of the fleshing and composition. I dug into the crates of influence, from sources from Robert Ludlum to Cody Goodfellow, to figure out what flavor I could add to the story. Soon enough, we had something that wasn't quite a Fifties big-bug story but moved like one, though with a certain global sensibility I found I liked. I can't say too much about this one without killing the goose, except to say that I still call it "The Jumbo Shrimp Story."

"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN" (originally appeared in ENCOUNTERS #1)
Lou sent me a Christmas card this year with a clipping in it about the "McKenzie House" becoming an historical landmark.I believe he has reposted this article on his blog.
This one truly became more than both of us... but started reminding me of my friend Trent Zelazny, and his father who understood the Sixties much better than I ever could. I gave his father a brief cameo in this story to illustrate that, rephrasing Lowell Cunningham, "Roger is NOT dead, he just went home."
I show this story to people I don't know who want to see my work, or Lou's. It's that good, and it was that much fun to write. The time-traveler is unapologetically based on my dear Serena, who endorses this message.:D

From the Introduction:
The moon is high, full, nearly ready to drop, to hatch…
You wake in your bed, knowing you can’t stay inside one minute more. There’s already a big flashlight under your pillow, young Diogenes. ut in the moonlight, canvas flaps and rustles and Klezmer music like nothing you have ever heard in your life whomps and wallops from boxcars boxcars boxcars, their sides mostly open to the breeze.
The snare drums speak Hebrew, Romani and mediaeval Italian as interchangeably as the sinuous sibilant hiss of the conjoined fire-dancers doing the kind of high-temperature contact juggling that people who share organs shouldn’t be able to do…
Louder than the howl of the Strongman, the accordion is trashed beyond all hope of coherent speech. A wild Gypsy fiddle pierces the still air as the Calliope starts up its mad bone carousel of song. For the second time in your life, the Sideshow has come to town.
To every light in every cage here, a darkness. The darkness outside of Town along the hidden carny circuits behind America, between her, tiny back- alley strings that reach to paralell Whens, and Whys, and Whats …
The Sideshow is here, the Shakedown Street that landed the last time downtown, when you were five, so late at night that you’d never have been allowed to see. The Indian-pins of the jugglers disappear and reappear, substituted with noses and hands and … other things, someone’s watch, an old lady’s wig, a wand of spun cotton candy that makes a child yawp right by the curb, all objects replaced quicker than the eye…
“Quicker than the eye, or your money back…” the Ringmaster solemnly guarantees, laying a finger upside his nose, upside his fabulous mustache and those deceptively sleepy eyes that never miss one juggler’s pass in any freak-tent. “STEP RIGHT UP!!” he roars, “INTO THE TENT, LADIES AND GENTS, FOR A MAGIC SHOW THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN OBSERRRRUV…”
The Ringmaster makes his rounds. Follow at the heels of his high boots for a glimpse behind the canvas, when opposite poles of the freak-tent tread the boards of the main stage for an unholy duet upon concertina and Appalachian saw.
The Ringmaster is taking off his coat, tossing it to a flippered stage-hand who grabs it and tumbles away like an acrobat beneath the cobbled-together stage.
The stage is empty, but for a folding card-table and two chairs. On the table is a blank hornbook, an inkwell, two Palmer pens and a Ouija-board. Meanwhile, in the front row Ethyl and Methyl the Siamese Burlesque Queens are keeping the groundlings more than entertained …
The Ringmaster takes the chair opposite the Crooked Man from the freak-tent. Both of them have removed their top-hats, and bow.
What happens next is hard to describe…

New story "Gregor" out now!

In THE RED PENNY PAPERS, issue #2. Click the title to enjoy...