Where The Attraction Came From:





When I was in my thirties, I found a roadside attraction that completely spooked me. It was off the 10 Freeway in Arizona. For all I know, it will be there for years to come. It was a big gas station emporium and, past the snowglobes and mugs, past the Country Crafty birdhouses and cactus cowboy figures, was an entry into darkness.



Well, it only seemed like darkness—it cost about 75 cents to get in, and then you enter this long corridor behind the gas station. Images of torture chambers abound. Twisted desert wood, painted like devilish creatures on shelves rest along the walls. A rich man’s car from the 1930s, supposedly once owned by a Nazi commander from Germany, is parked in one section. And then...the main attraction, a mummified woman who might’ve been real or not. I don’t know.





It looked an awful lot like a real mummy.



It was creepier seeing the Nazi car and the torture chamber wood-carvings than seeing the mummy, which might’ve just been a dead person, dug up in the 1930s,’40s, or ‘50s.





When I got out of the show area, I asked the owner of the store about it and the other stuff, and he told me that he bought it all from a guy twenty years’ before, and he didn’t know anything about the origins of any of it.





Now, a lot of people have gone to that particular roadside attraction (it’s still there—go see for yourself). But for me, it stuck, because there was something completely insane about the contents of that 75 cent tour. And something not quite right about those of us who paid the three quarters and went down to see it all.





But what can you complain about with something that cost under a buck?





It stuck with me, and I put a brief roadside attraction in a novel of mine called The Halloween Man. Just a brief moment near the beginning of the novel, where a man and a kid stop to see a place off the road in Virginia, on the way up to New England.





But other ideas began forming, and somehow, I wanted to write a mummy book.





Not a regular mummy book.





Certainly not an Egyptian mummy book (maybe someday).



When I write a novel, I have to have some kind of personal connection to the material. I can’t just think, “Hmm, I’ll write a werewolf book because werewolves are cool.”





I have to find some truth within the lie of the story. I have to know where my understanding and knowledge can be found within the tale. Where I’ve been, where I’m from, where I’m going.





I went to a small college in Virginia, somewhat similar to the college mentioned in The Attraction, although it was very different, as well. I used to take off on Spring Break for road trips to various places, and so I knew that a road trip had to begin this story. I have driven across the United States at least ten times since I was 19. Usually, I linger in the Southwest, because I love the desert so much. I felt that if I were going to imaginatively travel, it would be across the desert. It would be to an off-center place in Arizona—a no man’s land of sort, where anything can happen.



I’ve always felt this way about the desert—that whatever slithers there, slithers alone. Or at least, wants to slither alone.





And so, this particular road trip was born, with a group of so-called college friends who might not be that close at all, brought together by their attractions for each other.





******





When I was about a kid, my family took a prolonged trip to Mexico. We landed in Mexico City, and managed to get a driver for the entire trip so that we could stop in towns all over the place. Mexico remains one of my favorite countries, and I hope to revisit it again, soon.





What I remember the most about that trip are two things: first, the Archeological/Anthropological Museum in Mexico City that detailed the Mayan and Aztec past. Second, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, in the ancient city of Teotihuacan. As a kid, I only made it halfway up the Pyramid of the Sun, but I will never forget it. It fueled my lifelong fascination with the history of the Aztecs and of the Mayans.





I’m still on the fence about whether or not I believe the sacrifices attributed to the Aztecs by the Spanish were genuinely what the Spanish believe they were—savage and horrible blood sacrifices of terror to their gods. Given that Europeans had their own not-so-neat Inquisition still going on in the home country, involving tortures that make the stories of Aztec sacrifice seem nearly humane, it’s hard to believe the group who came to destroy the Aztec empire.





But it’s all great background for a horror story.





Just as Voodoo has been twisted fictionally to serve the horror genre, so, often, other old religions are also depicted as dark and devilish for the sake of modern entertainment. There you are—so, I drew upon my research of a particular person in ancient Aztec society called the Flesh-Scraper, whose main function seems to have been to, well, scrape flesh off the dead human sacrifice, and distribute it as meat. I combined this with a god who is something of a horror icon: Xipe Totec: The Flayer of Men. Nothing creeps me out more than the
idea that someone might skin a guy and then wear that skin. Ed Gein did it with women’s skin. I think that’s what enhanced the horror of his true-life tale of murder and grave-robbing.





There was one final ingredient that I needed for this tale to catch fire, for me to believe it enough to write it.





I had to find out what these five people—Josh, Bronwyn, Griff, Tammy, and Ziggy—were all about. I found it through the idea of attraction. How we’re attracted. To whom we’re attracted. How we lose our attraction and our attractiveness—the mysteries of chemistry and magnetism as applied to our dreams and wishes when we’re just starting life as adults.





Once these college students came alive -- once I knew them as they got on the road to head West, to head toward the place of their destiny, the tale of The Attraction began writing itself.





And the creature in the back room of that rundown gas station emporium on the edge of a desert hell came to life.

 

"Attraction can really fuck you up," so says Josh.

Josh is into Bronwyn, Griff is into Tammy, Ziggy's into weed, and Dave Olshaker wants to get his girl back from Griff. But that's not all they have to worry about. It's Spring Break, and Bronwyn needs to get to L.A. for reasons that piss her off, Griff and Tammy want to go to the beach and party, Ziggy wants to score, and Josh just wants a reason to get out on the road.

When they end up with a flat tire, stuck out in an Arizona hellhole, they find out about the real attraction.

The signs all over the desert highway: "Come See the Mystery!" "You're Near the Mystery!" "The Mystery of the Universe is Two Miles Away at the Brake Down Palace Gas and Sundries!"

It's a new kind of attraction for them.

There's this legend, only maybe it's not even true, and it's about how the Aztecs in ancient times used to sacrifice human beings. They had this priest called the Flesh-Scraper whose job was to scrape the skin off the bones of the sacrifice.

Now, because Charlie Goodrow, who runs the Brake Down Palace Gas and Sundries, tells this story to anyone who stops for a fill-up, he's sold a lot of tickets to the back of his shop, where the Mystery of the Universe, the Mummified Remains of the Ancient Flesh-Scraper, is there for all to see.

Behind curtains, in a glass case, this small, dessicated corpse with long fingernails. Above it, tacked on the wall: "Please Do Not Touch Glass. We at the Brake Down Palace have nicknamed this special ancient mummy, Scratch, and he has been good luck for us all these years. We must warn any who view it that there is a legend that once Scratch gets fresh human skin under its fingernails, he'll come back from oblivion to reap the human harvest. Do Not Touch. Do Not Feed."

"Some freak put this together," Ziggy says.

"That's nothing but some little kid mummified and they stuck fake longer fingernails on him," so says Bronwyn.

"Let's feed it," Griff says.

And then, the nightmare begins.

PLUS a bonus novella! The Necromancer by Douglas Clegg

The man who created Harrow had a secret history, and in The Necromancer, Douglas Clegg explores the story of Justin Gravesend's youth and his induction into the organization known as the Chymera Magick.