Aftertaste & Other Stories: Horror That Lingers

For Mrs. Margaret Kreter, Who believed in me. For my wife Laura, who always has. VELOX BOOKS Published by arrangement with the author. Aftertaste copyright © 2023 by Brett O’Reilly. All Rights Reserved. This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Preface When I was young, I dreamed I’d be a novelist. That I’d write these amazing page-turners that would hit #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, and I’d be rich and famous (famous being more important to my young self) and have all my books turned into movies, and so on. Clearly, the universe had other plans for me. To date, at least. I won’t go into the details of the last 30+ years and what happened to that original dream—that you can find on my website. What you will find here is what came as quite a surprise to me—my love of short stories. I’ve always loved reading short stories—as much as I’ve loved reading novels. The thing about short stories is I tended to view them as “lesser”—especially when it came to writing them. Short stories were a means to an end—that end being becoming a successful novelist. Writing and selling short stories like Stephen King did was the path to getting the eventual soon-to-be-bestselling novel in front of a literary agent. It’s one of the things I remember from when I was first attempting to become an author in my late teens—in order to get published, you had to be published. The Catch-22 of being an author in the 80’s. Of course, back then I didn’t realize selling short stories to magazines or anthologies was the way to do just that—nor just how much money was paid out for short stories, back then. I’m much more knowledgeable now. Also a little late to the game; self-publishing has dropped those payouts considerably. The most I’ve received for a story to date was $20 USD; not the $2,000 Stephen King got paid when he was still up and coming. Now I could talk on and on about how the advent of self-publishing has upended the publishing world and pushed aside the gatekeepers, for better or worse—but that’s a talking point that’s been done to death. Besides, I want to talk about what I learned starting out—that I LOVE writing short stories. There are those authors who prefer to be novelists. They like the opportunity to flesh out a world, to have characters with depth who enter into complex situations and deal with layered conflicts. I may be one of those authors, one day—in fact, my debut novel is about two-thirds written. However, I have to admit that for me, short stories are magic. Being able to convey character—both physical and personality—within two to ten thousand words is a fun challenge. Typically, I provide clues as to what my characters look like and let you fill in the rest. I believe that giving you a bare sketch of what characters look like may help readers such as yourself identify more strongly with the characters, as you fill in the blanks with the physical characteristics of yourself or people you know. When you fill in the blanks of my bad guy and they happen to look a lot like your evil boss, well, you’ve just become a little more invested in the story, haven’t you? There’s also an element of brevity in short stories that can make them exciting. As an author with a limited word count, one has to be able to “trim away the fat”—also known as “murdering your darlings”. This means not only is there no room for any of those clumsy adverbs, but adjectives are also getting tossed out. Novelists love adjectives; so do short story writers, we just don’t have a lot of room for them. As such we use them sparingly. So sparingly… What this translates to for you, the reader, is that a good short story is lean, tight, and engaging. Hopefully, as much as that three-hundred-page-plus novel sitting on your nightstand. What it means for us writers is a challenging, often intense writing experience. When we don’t have a dearth of words to play with, making the allowed word count work can induce its own sense of euphoria as we strive to write that riveting tale in ten thousand words or less (actually, it’s usually far less than ten thousand—seven thousand at the higher end, two thousand at the lowest—at that’s not getting into flash fiction or micro-fiction). It’s literally a high, I kid you not. Some people like jumping out of planes, others off cliffs. Some people like being chased by bulls, others take on white water rapids. Myself, I write short stories. I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, too. That’s not to say I’ve necessarily achieved heights of literary magnificence or ground-breaking horror in these stories. Tales like “Closet Space”, “Dinner Bell”, and “One Hundred Yards” are meant to be more taut and edgy, while “Aftertaste” and “Orpheus Wept” are what I like to think of as exploratory, a brief but engaging look into the characters that populate them. Others may fall somewhere in the middle—for example, many readers I’ve spoken to regarding “Sanctuary” have described it as being like an 80’s horror movie. For a horror buff like me, whose teenage years were the 80’s, that is high praise. Indeed. Still, not everyone may find these stories to be their cup of tea. Too much gore. Not enough gore. Nice slow burn. Too slow of a burn. Just as every story is different, so is every reader. I can only hope that this collection of stories provides everyone with a little