A Dreadful History
My name is Bill Hughes, and I’m responsible for this mess.
In the fall of '97 my wife and I were living in an up-and-down apartment, sort of a row house deal, on South Hague Avenue on the west side of Columbus. In '95 or early '96 I had completed my PhD generals at Penn State and by this time was most clearly not working on my dissertation in American literature. It was a marginal neighborhood—economically depressed Hilltop behind us, the more gentrified Westgate area before. My clearest memory of the place now is when I was told by the resident ten-year-old ne’er-do-well, who had a habit of smashing car windows, that he was going to go get his brother’s gun and shoot me.
Such was the cheerful backdrop of my life. The apartment was compact, but it had three bedrooms, the middle of which I used as a study. At some point the pressure of avoiding dissertation work must have started to wear on me. I began writing horror stories. For this, I can try to blame my old friend D.A. Kellough, not because he suggested or even encouraged me to write such things, but because he always had Halloween parties and had introduced me, over the years, to many low- and no-budget horror movies. Since he also had been known to shop at a semi-legendary and slowly-decaying newsstand/bookstore called Monkey’s Retreat and to purchase there things known as zines, I’ll try to blame him for what happened next, too.
I started publishing a magazine.
I had absolutely no clue, of course, of what I was getting myself into. I suspect that people who do things like that often don’t. Thank goodness. The world would be a poorer place if people always looked before they leapt.
But anyway . . . since I did not have an art department and was hobbling along on a desktop printer, I styled Dread: Tales of the Uncanny and Grotesque an “Antholozine” and just published stories (pretty clever, eh?). That meant that I only had to cobble-together something that resembled an illustration for the front cover. Through the good offices of Scavenger’s Newsletter I managed to get submission guidelines out there before possible contributors and, before my unbelieving eyes, stories began to appear.
Looking back, I think I was incredibly fortunate with that first issue, because right from the beginning I stumbled into some talented people who helped Dread along the way. I’m not going to start naming names at this late date, because I’ll forget two deserving people for each one I remember. Suffice to say I made a number of friends and had a lot of fun during Dread’s three-year run. I also got a lot of good help from D.A., who’s no slouch as a writer or an artist, and who helped save readers from the specter of more covers designed by me. Some things are, after all, too dreadful to contemplate.
After three years, though, the hours of effort take their toll. Fun’s fun, but, boy, it’s a lot a work, too. I hung it up. D.A. did a wonderful cover for our 12th and final issue . . .
But, you know, sometimes they come back. Which brings me to dred.
Fast forward to 2005. My wife and I—and baby made three—had escaped the wild, wild west side of Columbus for a (really, equally marginal) neighborhood on the city’s North side, where we had settled into the small house on the tidy street where we still live today. Then my imitation of adulthood faltered a bit, and dred came into cyber-being.
In keeping with its status as a thoroughly modern, twenty-first century project, dred was a web-only reincarnation of Dread that really bore little resemblance to its print predecessor. It had a lot more going on: non-fiction features, book and movie reviews, and an ongoing serial (created by myself and the ever-dependable D.A. Kellough) about a haunted inn in rural Ohio. He and I were hardly alone. We had lots of help for dred. You name it—assistant editors, reviewers, slush-wranglers, artists, etc. My limited abilities as a webmaster were, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, generally invisible. Or so I hoped.
And so another three years of fun and interesting new friends and relations sped by. Then we stopped and, like so many other sites, dred sank without a trace. Because, in the immortal words of Samuel Beckett, that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.
It’s just as well, of course. There’s enough clutter in cyberspace, as well as in our minds. Time has passed. Parenthood has kept me busy and rewarded me far beyond my desserts. But sometimes the old itch starts up again. I’m still writing a bit. Still creating weird clutter.
Take a look.
In the fall of '97 my wife and I were living in an up-and-down apartment, sort of a row house deal, on South Hague Avenue on the west side of Columbus. In '95 or early '96 I had completed my PhD generals at Penn State and by this time was most clearly not working on my dissertation in American literature. It was a marginal neighborhood—economically depressed Hilltop behind us, the more gentrified Westgate area before. My clearest memory of the place now is when I was told by the resident ten-year-old ne’er-do-well, who had a habit of smashing car windows, that he was going to go get his brother’s gun and shoot me.
Such was the cheerful backdrop of my life. The apartment was compact, but it had three bedrooms, the middle of which I used as a study. At some point the pressure of avoiding dissertation work must have started to wear on me. I began writing horror stories. For this, I can try to blame my old friend D.A. Kellough, not because he suggested or even encouraged me to write such things, but because he always had Halloween parties and had introduced me, over the years, to many low- and no-budget horror movies. Since he also had been known to shop at a semi-legendary and slowly-decaying newsstand/bookstore called Monkey’s Retreat and to purchase there things known as zines, I’ll try to blame him for what happened next, too.
I started publishing a magazine.
I had absolutely no clue, of course, of what I was getting myself into. I suspect that people who do things like that often don’t. Thank goodness. The world would be a poorer place if people always looked before they leapt.
But anyway . . . since I did not have an art department and was hobbling along on a desktop printer, I styled Dread: Tales of the Uncanny and Grotesque an “Antholozine” and just published stories (pretty clever, eh?). That meant that I only had to cobble-together something that resembled an illustration for the front cover. Through the good offices of Scavenger’s Newsletter I managed to get submission guidelines out there before possible contributors and, before my unbelieving eyes, stories began to appear.
Looking back, I think I was incredibly fortunate with that first issue, because right from the beginning I stumbled into some talented people who helped Dread along the way. I’m not going to start naming names at this late date, because I’ll forget two deserving people for each one I remember. Suffice to say I made a number of friends and had a lot of fun during Dread’s three-year run. I also got a lot of good help from D.A., who’s no slouch as a writer or an artist, and who helped save readers from the specter of more covers designed by me. Some things are, after all, too dreadful to contemplate.
After three years, though, the hours of effort take their toll. Fun’s fun, but, boy, it’s a lot a work, too. I hung it up. D.A. did a wonderful cover for our 12th and final issue . . .
But, you know, sometimes they come back. Which brings me to dred.
Fast forward to 2005. My wife and I—and baby made three—had escaped the wild, wild west side of Columbus for a (really, equally marginal) neighborhood on the city’s North side, where we had settled into the small house on the tidy street where we still live today. Then my imitation of adulthood faltered a bit, and dred came into cyber-being.
In keeping with its status as a thoroughly modern, twenty-first century project, dred was a web-only reincarnation of Dread that really bore little resemblance to its print predecessor. It had a lot more going on: non-fiction features, book and movie reviews, and an ongoing serial (created by myself and the ever-dependable D.A. Kellough) about a haunted inn in rural Ohio. He and I were hardly alone. We had lots of help for dred. You name it—assistant editors, reviewers, slush-wranglers, artists, etc. My limited abilities as a webmaster were, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, generally invisible. Or so I hoped.
And so another three years of fun and interesting new friends and relations sped by. Then we stopped and, like so many other sites, dred sank without a trace. Because, in the immortal words of Samuel Beckett, that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.
It’s just as well, of course. There’s enough clutter in cyberspace, as well as in our minds. Time has passed. Parenthood has kept me busy and rewarded me far beyond my desserts. But sometimes the old itch starts up again. I’m still writing a bit. Still creating weird clutter.
Take a look.
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