I have first known Kent Gowran as the editor for the terrific Shotgun Honey (who published my first story, by the way), but during the last weeks I am discovering his twisted imaginary in stories like A SMALL THING AT THE DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL and SEA LEGS. I was curious about how he came to write such amazing stories, so I asked him to do My Dark Pages and he accepted...
This probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me even just a bit, but it wasn't a book that first turned me onto the dark stuff. Nope, it was Johnny Cash.
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
That did it. The first time I heard "Folsom Prison Blues" but it gripped my young mind like nothing before, and like nothing would again until, oh, probably the day my grandpa dropped a stack of Penthouse and Hustler magazines on the floor in front of me and said there was probably something in there I'd like.
Now, when I was a kid, I took the song to be the truth. I thought Johnny Cash was relating a true story about himself; that he'd shot that poor sonofabitch in Reno on a lark and got his dressed in black self sent of to Folsom Prison. I don't think I labored under that misconception for long, but it didn't matter. The seeds were sown.
I learned to read early. By the time I was in the first grade, I'd read the Bible cover to cover (and had been required to memorize large sections of it), and quickly enough I found myself hooked on comic books, fantasy novels, and a lot of science fiction. As I got older, I turned to horror novels and mystery novels. In the mid-80s, I got hooked on a series of novels about a Florida cop named Hoke Moseley. These quickly became my favorite novels, and the name Charles Willeford became one I kept an eye out for.
Some years later, I came upon a new edition of a Charles Willeford book I hadn't read. I paid for Wild Wives and went to a deli to eat. It might've been a place called Max's, it was probably Max's, sure seems right, but I couldn't swear to it. Anyway, I got a Coke, got some food, and cracked the cover.
And I sat there and kept reading Wild Wives, kept drinking Cokes, until I finished the book. It's a short novel, but it had flipped my switch like nothing I'd read before. Hoke Moseley had been an interesting guy to read about, but Jake Blake was something else. He wasn't unlike Hoke, not totally, but he sure wasn't as nice (I realize that might be a strange way to describe Moseley). There was just something so wild and real and true about the novel. It was tight and concise, and I bought into every word Willeford put down.
I walked out of that deli feeling like I'd just found the best drug on the planet.
I read all of Willeford I could find after that, and I got turned onto more writers, more great books and stories that tripped me up, knocked me over the head, kept me grooving on the same dark signal I first found listening to Johnny Cash.
The Big Combo: Cash and Willeford.
They changed my life.