I can hear you saying wh-a-a-aaaaaat, the introduction gets its own story note? It does, but only to mention that it’s the expression of some thoughts I’ve been thinking for a few years now. Elements of “Who’s Your Daddy?” have appeared in somewhat different form, in essays such as “The Truck” (from Road Rage, IDW Publishing) and “Bring On the Bad Guys” (which first appeared on Goodreads). I’m sure I’ve also talked about Tom Savini’s influence on my work elsewhere. It’s probably just as well that I stick with fiction—I’ve got only so many stories to tell about myself and only so many different ways to tell them.

THROTTLE

Richard Matheson came home from World War II, sat down at his typewriter, and rattled off several spare, savage masterpieces of suspense: I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Legend of Hell House among them. Although he was genre-fluid—he wrote crime, westerns, war, and sci-fi, including one of the very best episodes of the original Star Trek—he left the deepest imprint on the horror genre. A good Richard Matheson story moves like an eighteen-wheeler, thundering downhill with no brakes, and God help anything in the way.

In fact, one of Matheson’s most famous stories, “Duel,” featured a runaway tanker trunk as the antagonist and was the inspiration for that Spielberg film we discussed back in the introduction.

In 2008 I was asked if I wanted to write a story for an anthology honoring Matheson’s work. The idea was that each contributing writer would take one of Matheson’s concepts and reinvent it, take it in a new, unexpected direction. No one had to twist my arm. I had hardly finished reading the e-mail before I knew what I wanted to do. I had instantly imagined a short story about a faceless trucker taking on a gang of outlaw bikers, in a chase that would soon devolve into a war in the sand.

I saw pretty quickly that I was going to have one problem writing the story, which is that I had never ridden a motorcycle in my life. But my dad had—he’d been hauling around on hogs since he was a teenager. So I pitched him my idea and asked if he wanted to write it with me. He said yes. And there we were, playing Truck again, twenty-six years after our last game.

The summer after we wrote “Throttle,” I got my motorcycle license and wound up buying a Triumph Bonneville. My dad is more of a Harley guy. One summer we went out for a ride together, me on my Bonnie and him on his Fat Boy. That was a good afternoon. When we got back, he said, “You got a decent set of wheels there—even if the engine does sound like a sewing machine.”

DARK CAROUSEL