About “Black Dog” . . .
This story belongs to the Sorrows Hill universe of Appalachian witchcraft and faerie magic, which features the Merchant clan of dark sorcerers, whose powers are said to come from the Devil himself. Joss Merchant was the most notorious of them all.
Other stories in this series explore how the Merchants’ bargain with the dark side affects everyone in the family, whether they like it or not. “Black Dog” hints at this, with the implication that Joss’ daughter moved away and has only returned for her father’s funeral, with her own daughter who’s learning about her roots for the first time.
But this story also has an element of truth at its core. I grew up on Appalachian witch tales, told by my mother and aunt from the hills of West Virginia. My great-grandfather was known in those hills as a witchman, who could heal people with “a binding of red thread and a word” from the Bible, of course. They say that when he died, a black dog appeared, and sat outside the house where the wake was held. The dog stayed until he was buried, and then it disappeared, never to be seen again.
(Fun fact: the old folks said that you could tell someone was a witch because they had the witch mark — crooked little fingers. My grandmother had crooked little fingers on both hands. So did my mother. And so do I.)
In the stories, Sorrows Hill is a faerie mound, a gateway to the Otherworld. It’s inspired by actual earthworks like the Serpent Mound and Miamisburg Mound in Ohio, and of course the many legends of strange goings on in those remote hills and hollers over the years. Along with several stories playing with these motifs, I’m planning a more ambitious long project set in Civil War times that I hope to serialize here on Substack.
On Writing: An Update
In recent editions of Behind the Scenes, I’ve teased the addition of a new section of Black Moon Journal - one that’s devoted to “shop talk” about writing. That would leave the main BMJ publication a place for weird fiction and the building of those fictional worlds. But I’m not sure the world needs yet another writing blog/inspiration and creativity thing. So many writers are doing that very eloquently already.
So I think I’ll keep the craft comments here on Behind the Scenes for now, confining them to quick observations rather than long(ish) articles. You can choose to read them, or not - but you won’t have to navigate elsewhere if you are interested in that kind of thing.
Everybody’s a Lurker
Internet-speak is rife with brand-new and repurposed words. “Troll” perfectly describes the odious behavior of a certain kind of netizen, for example. But others — not so much. I thought of this after reading a recent discussion about “lurkers” — people who read online work without engaging in it through comments, likes or whatever.
Where there’s a void, something rushes in to fill it, so I imagine that the online content world needed a word to describe these readers. But “lurk” has connotations of skulking in the shadows, often with bad intent. And it implies that these readers are somehow less legitimate than the ones that do engage with a piece of writing.
But in the offline world, everybody’s a lurker. It’s not possible to interact with books, magazines or other physical texts, except in quite limited ways. Even in the digital world, people read many things and move on without taking time to pause and comment, like or otherwise engage, even if they loved the work. They aren’t lurking, they’re just reading - like readers have always done.
From a recent discussion on AI in writing: “If you want a reader to fall in love with your stories, everything should come from your own heart and mind.”
Till next time —
JM