13 Tales of the Weird

I love musical theatre more than anything else in the world. But I also really love horror. New Line has brought the two together on several occasions, with Night of the Living Dead, Sweeney Todd, The Rocky Horror Show, In the Blood, Lizzie, and The Zombies of Penzance. Depending on your definition, I might include on that list Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, Love Kills, Sweet Smell of Success, and Assassins.

Even before the pandemic hit, but especially now, I'm always looking for new writing projects. New Line actor Zak Farmer and I are almost done with a Dr. Seuss style book called Shellie Shelby Shares the Spotlight, about a high school girl doing her first musical. I can't wait to share it with you all. Stay tuned.

I can't remember exactly what triggered me, but I got the idea for Night of the Living Show Tunes quite a while ago, a collection of short horror fiction connected to musical theatre. We had done a concert years ago with that title, and I realized it was perfect for this project.

So before going any further with it, I laid out a course of study for myself. I've been reading horror since middle school, but now I was going to study it, see how horror fiction operates. I bought an amazing book called Classic Tales of Horror from Canterbury Classics, a huge volume chock full of classic horror by Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft, Washington Irving, Arthur Conan Doyle, Honoré de Balzac, Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, M.R. James... you get the idea. It was a wild, wonderful, eye-opening ride. Then I read a 2017 collection of all new short horror fiction, by current horror writers. I also started watching lots of anthology horror movies.

Then I turned to the King. Stephen King. New Line's Associate Artistic Director Mike Dowdy-Windsor is a fierce Stephen King fan, so he loaned me all of King's short story collections, a few of which I had already read.

I also read quite a few books about horror, including King's two amazing nonfiction books, Danse Macabre and On Writing. So brilliant, so much fun to read, so helpful!

By now, my original idea had been percolating for a long time. I realized I had several paths to choose, and ultimately, I'd choose all of them. Some of the stories I wrote took some element of a famous musical and redirected it down a darker, weirder road. As one example, my story "Time Steps" starts with a reunion in an old theatre, very much like the beginning of Follies, but in my story, the building and its ghosts begin to fight back.

Another path was to select one thing from the real world and reset it in an unreal world of horror. One example of this is my story "The Flibbertijibbet," set during the original run of a famous Broadway show in 1959. Two of the girls playing children in the show have come to believe the rumors, that their leading lady Mary is actually a vampire. So they decide to find out. Another story is about a demon-possessed keyboard creating havoc -- and injuries -- in the middle of a performance.

The third path was High Concept. One story in my collection, "Requiem for Musical Comedy," is a murder mystery and the deceased is Musical Comedy. And my story "Over Finian's Rainbow" is a story about musicals and race.

Here are the chapter titles:

“Tomorrow, Daddy”
“Nothing More”
“Night of the Festival”
“Scarily We Roll Along”
“Time Steps”
“Requiem for Musical Comedy”
“Happy Birthday, Robert”
“I Had a Dream”
“The Spellbinder”
“A Little Fight Music”
“The Farm Hand!”
“Over Finian’s Rainbow”
“The Flibbertijibbet”

For the last several years I've been fascinated (obsessed?) with the idea of making art from art. It started when I wrote and then we produced The Zombies of Penzance. Of course, many musicals are based on plays, novels, movies, etc., so my beloved musical theatre has a long history of art made from art.

Today, one subgenre of art made from art is the mashup. I love the mashup, the idea of mashing together two things that really don't belong together. Like the images that go around Facebook of the Scooby-Doo gang dressed as the Rocky Horror characters; or one of my favorite examples, the musical Bukowsical, which mashed up the dark, vulgar writing of Charles Bukowski with the bright and cheery form of old-school musical comedy. My own Zombies of Penzance similarly mashed together a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta with George Romero zombie movies. The great masterpiece of the mashup is Todd Haynes' underground film masterpiece, Superstar, using Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter's eating disorder. Watch it and have your mind blown.

For me, Night of the Living Show Tunes is a mashup of my two favorite things, and it was a joy to write it. I hope the stories in my collection are fun for the horror fan who knows nothing about musical theatre, and also fun for the musical theatre fan who isn't into horror. If you're a fan of both, like me, I think the collection will offer you even more dark delights.

N.B.: If gory horror makes you a little queasy, you might want to skip a few of the stories, "Tomorrow, Daddy," "Time Steps," "I Had a Dream," and "The Farm Hand!" None of those are for the faint of heart.

I hope you'll join me for these "13 Tales of the Weird." Just click here! And yes, there will be a second volume. Stay tuned!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott