6/24/26
Women In Horror Year: Day 64
Close To The Bone by Lucy Taylor
This erotic horror short story collection was Nominated For Best Collection from the Horror Writer's Association. Available in a completely new edition features original wrap-around cover art and completely re-typeset.
STORIES FEATURED: Close to the Bone, Animal Souls, The Best in the Business, Virgin, Cages, Knockouts, Fear of Phobias, Slips, The English Teacher, and The Family Underwater.
Originally published as a signed limited edition hardcover in 1993 by John Pelan’s Silver Salamander Press, Close To The Bone was Lucy’s first short story collection released just two years into her full time fiction writing career (after a long time spent as a journalist and travel writer, and selling fiction to the zines and semi-pro outlets). Marketed as erotic horror, and it is indeed that, but there is a deep vein of Southern Gothic running through them, and the stories themselves are unflinching and unapologetic. As Edward Bryant says in his Introduction: “Think of someone with the punch of Richard Laymon and with the seductive soul of Clive Barker. But still very much herself. Her own writer.” That sums up the stories in this collection better than anything else I could say. Available in paperback and eBook from Overlook Connection Press.
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As the clock switched from December 31, 1986 to January 1, 1987, Blumenthal and I were stuck on fire watch underneath the ship while in drydock, bemoaning the fact that we’d pulled this duty on New Year’s Eve, and wondering when Ops (our department) would get some new recruits to replace guys like Page and Pitts and others no longer with us. Turned out, we didn’t have to wait long.
They sent us Grant Riffle and Jay Sharpes, fresh out of boot camp and their A and C schools. Both were nervous and green, and how could they not be? They’d pulled duty onboard the Austin. As one warren officer, deep into the tequila once put it: “If the Sixth Fleet is Faber College, then the Austin is Delta House.” Sharpes’ nervousness was a visible thing. He jumped at his own shadow. (That changed pretty quick). Riffle was nervous, too, but he didn’t let it show — a laconic, laid-back Southern boy partial to Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. We hit it off pretty quick.
Riff didn’t ask for much. A Coke and a burger during one afternoon of some much-deserved R&R which we spent taking intertubes down the Jordan River, and he was alright with the world.
Grant Riffle, Israel, 1987 - Photo by Brian Keene
Another pic from that day. That’s me bottom left, and Riffle behind me to the left.
Ops Department, Israel, 1987 - Photo by Dan Blumenthal
Last Saturday night, our group chat text was active as those few of us left alive were debating where to meet up this year. Riffle sent us some pics of the sunset from his place in Florida, and suggested we should all come there.
What he didn’t know — what none of us knew — was that this was the last sunset he’d ever see. As far as last sunsets go, he couldn’t have asked for a better one.
Sunday evening, he was hospitalized. Apparently, his heart gave out. We, his shipmates, learned about it Monday, and by then his organs were shutting down and he was in a coma. When I spoke to his sister yesterday evening, she said it was a matter of hours. When I woke up this morning and got my coffee and sat down to write this, I watched the sun come up over the Susquehanna outside my office window.
Nobody else we served with — the few of us who are still here in this world — will be awake yet, so I’ve not heard anything, but I’m assuming he’s gone.
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My 2010 novel, A Gathering of Crows was dedicated to Riff. He also has a one-sentence cameo as the President of the United States in the forthcoming Falling Angels: The Labyrinth Book 4 (which we were all laughing about in the group chat last Saturday).