Jellyfish Babies, Severed Arms, and Soviet Paranoia: The 14-Year Journey of Mushroomhead
Cover Art by: Kevin Mowatt
Author Spotlight: Stephen Toman
Here's a little thing about the writing of the novel:
The premise of Mushroomhead was first suggested to me by a friend way back in 2009. I hadn't really written anything proper before, mostly just talked about ideas for films I'd never make or drew the first page of a comic before losing interest. I dabbled with a chapter here and there, a few false starts, then a more focussed effort over several years in bursts of inspiration. I'd write a section in a flurry, then lose confidence and abandon it for something else. In the mean time I wrote my first novel, Milk Lemonade Chocolate, an over-the-top, somewhat humorous tartan noir crime novel, followed by the trilogy of folk-horror acid western novellas that became Badwater. (Perhaps another time I can go into the convulated process of writing those, which involved publishing the middle book first before rewriting book one from scratch...)
At various points I came back to Mushroomhead. I liked a lot of it but it had several problems. One of which was that the novel kept expanding outwards instead of forwards. Following a process I used for an earlier novel that wasn't working for me in its supposedly finished form, I printed out everything I had for Mushroomhead, got out the scissors and the glue and started pasting it into a notebook. I reckon I threw away another 60,000 words of meandering but in doing so I was able to find the path of the story and could 'see', more or less, the shape the book would take. The first half would be Frank's story, ten chapters counting down from ten, followed by an interlude (a flashback and the introduction of a framing device of a journalist interviewing a KGB agent), then the escalation and climax of Frank's story after he is 'activated', ending with the conclusion of the framing narrative. Coincidentally, part one ends exactly halfway through the finished book.
Then I tried to find a publisher. My previous publisher, the tiny independent collective, Malki Press, had gone on hiatus, so I spent a good year or so trying to find somewhere or someone that would take it. Lots of nice feedback, lots of form rejections, even more no replies, but no-one wanted it. Genre-wise, it wasn't really anything specific. It wasn't sci-fi, wasn't historical or a spy novel, and didn't have any Lovecraft fan service that would help sell it to the Weird fiction crowd. I did receive the most wonderful rejection email from a small press that was both helpful (I'd forgotten to put page numbers in my document), whilst also being massively passive-aggressive and unprofessional, reminding me that these 'gatekeepers' are just normal people too. (I did also begin to find it strange the way rejection letters took the form of, "Your book is very good but I am not good enough at my job to be able to sell it. Perhaps if something similar happens to sell, through no efforts of our own, we might be interested.")
Figuring I would rather get the book out and move onto something else rather than spend the next year or so sending emails, I decided to self-publish, with help from my talented friends, editor, Euan McBride, who helped me polish the manuscript, and artist, Kevin Mowatt, who provided the cover and illustrations. I am immensely proud of the book in its finished form but unfortunately was not able to promote it due to a family bereavement that occurred shortly after publication. Since then, readers have been few but the reviews are beginning to trickle in. It's not for everyone, but for people who like their fiction slippery and non-genre specific, who would rather piece things together for themselves rather than have it all spelled out for them, and who can forgive me for not using speech marks around dialogue, perhaps they will get something from the experience.
At the back of the book I mentioned a few things that influenced the novel, though these are more like reverse-influences, in that they tended not to provide ideas upfront, but offered reassurance that I was on the right tracks while writing and editing. These include By the Time We Leave Here We Will be Friends by J. David Osborne, Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, Strange Telescopes by Daniel Kalder, Zero by Ales Kot, and the video game Disco Elysium. If you like these, you might like Mushroomhead. If you like Mushroomhead, do yourself a favour and check these out too.
Blurb:
After ejecting from a stolen plane, test pilot Frances Novgorod awakens in a motel room with a bag of clothes, a wallet full of cash, a severed arm, and only a vague memory of who he is. Soon rumours of jellyfish babies, animal mutilations, random killings, and a one-armed man who seems to be following him, lead him to believe that a Soviet invasion of the USA is underway. Meanwhile, Lena and Simone, two undercover KGB agents, must find a way to escape the ensuing chaos.
Book Excerpt:
Part One: Dead Hand
In the mouth of the tunnela pilot dangled from a tree, not unlike a child in a bungee harness clipped to a doorframe, still strapped into his ejector seat, the cords of the chute wrapped around a spastic tree whose red limbs did not seem to know which direction the sun was, no more than a couple feet off the ground, more or less, breathing too, just, though the driver of the truck did not know this at the time, not seeing him properly until after the windscreen had been smashed and the pilot, seat and all, tumbled over the roof of the cab and along the container, bounced a few times on the asphalt and came to a stop, blue face down, the front of his helmet on the ground.
The driver stopped, eyes on the right-hand wing mirror, on the crumpled figure on the road behind her. Fingers slick with sweat. She wiped them on her jeans. Placed them back on the wheel.
God damn, she muttered and hit the steering wheel with her palm. She did not check whether the man was breathing, assumed he was not, but cut the lines wrapped around his neck anyway. Leaves and twigs fell elegantly around them like crumbs of a corned beef sandwich in a spaceship. Blood trickled from beneath the pilot’s helmet. She prodded him sharply in the kidneys with the toe of her boot. No response. She pushed the chair onto its side. The pilot inhaled once, sharply. Alive. Barely. A bruise around his neck from the chute. She took hold of the shoulder straps of his harness and dragged him, still strapped into the ejector seat, towards the truck, and loaded him like a pallet into the otherwise empty container. She drove to a checkpoint, exchanged some shrugs with the guards at the gate, and left the pilot there, despite their questions, their protests.
Who the fuck is that? one of the guards had asked when she swung open the door of the container. The pilot sat slumped in a bloody heap in his ejector seat. Is he even alive?
He was.
Help me get him inside.
Lena climbed into the container and pulled the pilot by the shoulder straps onto the loading platform and lowered them both to the ground.
Where did you find him?
In a tree.
That’s a parachute.
Certainly is.
He’s from the outside.
What was he doing in a tree?
And you hit him with your truck.
He’s American, she said, acknowledging the patch on the pilot’s uniform.
That’s why I brought him to you.
Training?
Can’t you see I’m working? she said and got back in the truck. The guards brought the pilot through the gate, still strapped in, head lolling lifeless from the harness. A sleeping toddler in a car seat.
Back home she poured a glass of vodka and checked in on Simone, asleep. She poured another and closed her eyes for just a moment and woke almost an hour later with the glass still in her hand. A couple outside were putting on a performance. The wife was tossing the man’s clothes and belongings from a balcony down to the car park below, where the man stood in his underwear apologising and swearing. Lena yawned and stretched and carried her glass to the bathroom, showered and brushed her teeth and swallowed minty vodka.
A few days later she got the call telling her to locate the crash site.
You took your time, she said.
Chain of command meant they were always behind. Every decision had to be run up and down a series of ladders. Nobody had any autonomy. Also, they were all fucking liars.
Pilot ejects from a plane? Got to be a wreckage somewhere.
We have someone on the inside, they told her. They said there is no record of this one. There are, so he says, suggestions that the plane is stolen.
You believe that?
I believe that is one version of the story. Plausible deniability. Truthfully, I think whatever they are doing is top secret. No record. You’ve got to find that plane. Find out what they know, what they are looking for.
On the way downstairs, she patted the gun in her pocket like she was checking it was there, that the butt of it digging into her ribs wasn’t an illusion. Concealed, though she was permitted to have it. She shielded her eyes from the glare of the early sun—something wrong with the sky—and climbed into her too-shiny pickup. Needed a layer of dust on it, a few dents, some rust.
She drove back out to where she had found the dangling pilot. At the mouth of the tunnel were scrapings on the road from where the pilot had skidded in his seat, a brown patch that might be dried blood and the black skid marks of rubber from the truck. The sky shuddered and blinked out momentarily. She shielded her eyes. The sun a black hole burned white on the back of her eyelids.
Further on, the road was blocked by hastily parked cars with their doors still open. A small crowd gathered in a circle, attention fixed on something on the tarmac like a handbag on a dancefloor.
Lena got out the truck and edged through the crowd. The source of their fascination: something red and blue and brown, shards of white, a burst bag of skin, wide-open eyeball come loose. What was it this time? Cattle? Deer? A sporadic but reliable form of entertainment for the locals.
The crowd whispered rumours. There’d been a spate of them, these killings, mutilations. Someone’d been sneaking around at night, turning the farm animals inside out.
It’s the radiation, someone whispered.
That’s a new theory, thought Lena.
Hushed murmurs of agreement. Jellyfish babies, cancers . . .
Careless talk.
More’n likely an animal did it, announced one of them. A man in distressed bib overalls, clutching the clasps at his chest. Embroidered name tag said his name was Hiram.
What kind of animal could have done this?
Not the first time neither.
The man scratched his jaw.
Doesn’t just have to be the one. One to bring it down, several foxes to chew it up.
Or dogs.
Could of even died a natural causes.
Aliens, said a person, settling back into their role. No doubt about it.
To Read More:
Amazon UK: https://amzn.eu/d/03oF4m0Z
Amazon US: https://a.co/d/01NxUa9V
Goodreads: Mushroomhead by Stephen Toman | Goodreads
Author bio:
Stephen Toman is the author of the acid-folk-western trilogy, Badwater. He lives in Scotland with his wife, son, and three cats, and teaches high school English. He plays guitar in the maudlin lo-fi folk duo, Horseman, and makes noisier experimental music as Death Hilarious.
Stephen’s Music: Horseman: Horseman / Death Hilarious: Death Hilarious
