Panyfancer Publishing is proud to present a Halloween treat for 2023:
A “shockingly short graphic novel” of Michael A. Arnzen’s shockingly short story "Beyond Undead." Adapted by Eric Hoffman.
Michael A. Arnzen - Four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning horror author, poet, and English professor.
Eric Hoffman - Mr. Show writer and author/artist of Pancyfancer’s I Am Become Murder.
Read the original short story "Beyond Undead" in Arnzen’s best-selling book, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. From Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Find more Michael A. Arnzen at his official site gorelets.com
A “shockingly short graphic novel” of Michael A. Arnzen’s shockingly short story "Beyond Undead." Adapted by Eric Hoffman.
Michael A. Arnzen - Four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning horror author, poet, and English professor.
Eric Hoffman - Mr. Show writer and author/artist of Pancyfancer’s I Am Become Murder.
Read the original short story "Beyond Undead" in Arnzen’s best-selling book, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. From Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Find more Michael A. Arnzen at his official site gorelets.com
BONUS MATERIAL
Beyond Undead, The Graphic Novel Adaptation: A Shockingly Short Interview
Artist Eric Hoffman in conversation with author Michael A. Arnzen
EVH: Hi Mike, and welcome to Petrified Prattle, a phrase I never dreamed I’d ever utter. The original story "Beyond Undead" is from your best-selling book 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, which I love. What inspired you to create a book of very - sometimes very very - short horror stories?
Artist Eric Hoffman in conversation with author Michael A. Arnzen
EVH: Hi Mike, and welcome to Petrified Prattle, a phrase I never dreamed I’d ever utter. The original story "Beyond Undead" is from your best-selling book 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, which I love. What inspired you to create a book of very - sometimes very very - short horror stories?
MAA: Tough question, and I think my answer will be longer than any of the stories! The old cliche "less is more" has always spoken to me, and I try to write for the impatient reader inside myself. I dig shorter poems, like haiku, and am a fan of "flash fiction" that you can swallow up and digest over a cup of coffee. There's 100 stories in 100 Jolts -- maybe 1/3 of them were previously published. A point came where I realized I had been writing a lot of shorter fiction for webzines or posting paragraph-length tales and dark quips to my own social media outlets as a kind of exercise, and as the number of these tales grew, I got the impulse to assemble a whole book of them, so I started purposely writing more and more of them, and this made me experiment more consciously with the form, seeing what kind of terrifying ideas I could shape in a short, sharp shocker. I think the rise of the internet as a reading space is partly responsible for all this brevity; no one likes to scroll down pages forever when reading, so less really IS more when writing for that medium.
EVH: How did your shockingly short story "Beyond Undead" come about?
MAA: I’ve long been a fan of vampire stories, and I keep coming back to them to mess around with the tropes and see what turns up. “Beyond Undead” was almost a poem, more than a fictional piece -- I think I just mused over what a vampire's memories must be like -- and realized that we almost always think of them as a kind of innocent time before they "turned" vampire. The twist ending occurred to me as soon as I started writing about that, and it just “clicked” for me in an “ah-hah” moment that I wanted to encapsulate for the reader, too. So I just tweaked the structure, focusing entirely on that ending. I love that you added a frame narrative and amplified the beginning of the story in your adaptation... it opened the story up, made it darker, and implied so much more. So thank you!
EVH: (laughs) Well, as you may remember, I agonized a bit over not starting the adaptation exactly where you start things, which is a fantastic jumping off point for a story. I really wanted to begin there. But I didn’t want that crucial moment to have to be shared with the traditional comics splash-page credits. I could have presented the credits on the following page of course, but then you’re already into the story and at that point I don’t like to slow things down. Anyway, the stuff I added in the beginning isn’t really needed, other than to provide a small context and location. A tiny indication as to who’s doing the stake-driving. The beauty of the original short story is that you allow the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. There are so many ways to interpret this short story, which is why I enjoy your book 100 Jolts so much. For a moment, I toyed with presenting the character as a more classic, handsome, evil vampire who’s perhaps more deserving of his eventual fate. Art wise, for this adaptation I really wanted to do it in a style that reminded me of the old Warren black and white magazines from the 1970s. Titles like Creepy and Eerie.
EVH: How did your shockingly short story "Beyond Undead" come about?
MAA: I’ve long been a fan of vampire stories, and I keep coming back to them to mess around with the tropes and see what turns up. “Beyond Undead” was almost a poem, more than a fictional piece -- I think I just mused over what a vampire's memories must be like -- and realized that we almost always think of them as a kind of innocent time before they "turned" vampire. The twist ending occurred to me as soon as I started writing about that, and it just “clicked” for me in an “ah-hah” moment that I wanted to encapsulate for the reader, too. So I just tweaked the structure, focusing entirely on that ending. I love that you added a frame narrative and amplified the beginning of the story in your adaptation... it opened the story up, made it darker, and implied so much more. So thank you!
EVH: (laughs) Well, as you may remember, I agonized a bit over not starting the adaptation exactly where you start things, which is a fantastic jumping off point for a story. I really wanted to begin there. But I didn’t want that crucial moment to have to be shared with the traditional comics splash-page credits. I could have presented the credits on the following page of course, but then you’re already into the story and at that point I don’t like to slow things down. Anyway, the stuff I added in the beginning isn’t really needed, other than to provide a small context and location. A tiny indication as to who’s doing the stake-driving. The beauty of the original short story is that you allow the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. There are so many ways to interpret this short story, which is why I enjoy your book 100 Jolts so much. For a moment, I toyed with presenting the character as a more classic, handsome, evil vampire who’s perhaps more deserving of his eventual fate. Art wise, for this adaptation I really wanted to do it in a style that reminded me of the old Warren black and white magazines from the 1970s. Titles like Creepy and Eerie.
EVH: What goes into determining whether an idea will become a short story or a novel-length story or a poem? And, was "Beyond Undead" ever considered for a larger story or a poem?
MAA: Sometimes shorts like “Beyond Undead” work well in poetic or prose-poetry form, because they’re almost more about delivering a stunning image (or vignette) or raising a unique idea conceptually rather than dramatizing character-centered events, like you’d get in a longer story or novel. If I write longer pieces, they're usually more about the psychological landscape of characters or expoiting the tension of suspense. "Beyond Undead" we're kept at a distance from the vampiric main character; if it were a novel, we might be asked to feel more sorry for the vampire, I think. But I didn’t want to go there. Besides, novels, too, are like a collection of short-shorts in an abstract way (for instance, my novel Play Dead is structured like a deck of cards, with 52 chapters, divided into four “suits’ or parts). I like exploring the boundaries between all these given forms, because readers assume a lot about what the writer will do, where the story logic will go, what we’ll get with setting and character. I like to push around those boundaries, and horror lets me explore, discovering what I hope are new approaches to disturbing the reader or surprising them along the way.
EVH: I’m also a big fan of Play Dead. And I can’t say I’m aware of many other horror writers today who experiment as much as you do. Mike, thanks again for giving your blessings for this adaptation. And Happy Halloween to you and all of our readers!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the original short story “Beyond Undead” in Arnzen’s best-selling book 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. From Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Find more Michael A. Arnzen at his official site gorelets.com
MAA: Sometimes shorts like “Beyond Undead” work well in poetic or prose-poetry form, because they’re almost more about delivering a stunning image (or vignette) or raising a unique idea conceptually rather than dramatizing character-centered events, like you’d get in a longer story or novel. If I write longer pieces, they're usually more about the psychological landscape of characters or expoiting the tension of suspense. "Beyond Undead" we're kept at a distance from the vampiric main character; if it were a novel, we might be asked to feel more sorry for the vampire, I think. But I didn’t want to go there. Besides, novels, too, are like a collection of short-shorts in an abstract way (for instance, my novel Play Dead is structured like a deck of cards, with 52 chapters, divided into four “suits’ or parts). I like exploring the boundaries between all these given forms, because readers assume a lot about what the writer will do, where the story logic will go, what we’ll get with setting and character. I like to push around those boundaries, and horror lets me explore, discovering what I hope are new approaches to disturbing the reader or surprising them along the way.
EVH: I’m also a big fan of Play Dead. And I can’t say I’m aware of many other horror writers today who experiment as much as you do. Mike, thanks again for giving your blessings for this adaptation. And Happy Halloween to you and all of our readers!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the original short story “Beyond Undead” in Arnzen’s best-selling book 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. From Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Find more Michael A. Arnzen at his official site gorelets.com