Burn the Plans

INTRODUCTION

Picture a young man in his early twenties, just out of college, at the start of his adult life. He’ll be hunched over a paper-back book, sitting outside a café or in a pub, or perched on stairs in lodgings or backstage at a provincial theatre. If you want to imagine what he’s wearing, see a half-assed version of late 1980s fashion. His hair confirms the period. He'll almost certainly be smoking.

Why am I asking you to do this? I’ll tell you in a minute.

I won’t bury the lede. I’ll tell you right here at the top: this is one of the best collections I’ve ever read.

That’s not me being nice. Yes, I was asked if I’d write an introduction, but I wasn’t asked to write that. Tyler and I have never met in person. I don’t owe him money. There are a hundred ways of being kind about a book, of encouraging the reader to make up their own mind, of ushering a volume into the world without committing your own blood. You can introduce it without nailing your colours to the mast. But I’m not going to be cautious, and neither will it be generalized praise based on familiarity with the author’s previous work, a breezy assumption this will be of that quality or thereabouts, and so anyway, what are we eating tonight.

I’ve read every word of what you’re about to read. Just finished it, in fact. Personal circumstances meant I read it on planes, trains, and automobiles, on subway journeys, and when sitting on the stairs of an Airbnb. Re-opening this book and turning to the next page was like gratefully falling back into story-world, a strange dark place that was nonetheless home.

It strongly took me back to my early twenties (that’s me, up there in the first paragraph), first discovering this kind of fiction, grabbing a break in random places during a long theatrical tour, and devouring the voice writers who first made me want to write—Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Joe Lansdale, Nicholas Royle, Shirley Jackson, H. P. Lovecraft. Discovering their heady worlds, famous to others but new to me. Being transported from my present location into the places where their fiction happened, as if I’d become a shadow standing to one side, watching events unfold, a minor character in all the tales, one the authors simply happened to never mention.

You want to live in these stories. They feel like places. Even though the outcome may be horrendous or unnerving or disconcerting, they seem like home—and for that, you need both quality and consistency. You can’t inhabit a collection if, once in a while, there’s a story that knocks you out of absorption, which reminds you this is all made up by some person frowning over a laptop. There is no such tale here. No bum notes, no stories that don’t make the grade, nothing that makes you think, okay, in general, this is working, but that one lost me, or I’ve seen this idea done better before, and actually, what are we eating tonight?

I’d have to reach way back to those first encounters with Stephen King to think of a group of stories that, one after another, left me this satisfied.

It’s remarkably, undeniably, and unusually good.

How do you achieve this?

There’s a confidence in good writing. There has to be. Prose is performance, like all art, and just as you know within moments whether a stand-up comedian will be funny (often before they’ve even told a joke) a secret and subtle part of the job of making stories is communicating to the reader, quickly and very firmly, that they’re going to be engrossed. Their time, attention, and imagination are about to be well served, and this writer knows what they're doing. That you’re in safe hands. And once you’ve sold the reader that idea, you’re naturally free to do very unsafe things with those hands. You need the skill and confidence to beckon the reader forward and say: Okay, I’m going to tell you something, and you’re going to listen. And they do.

Tyler’s narrative confidence is not pushy, however. It’s never look at me, and nor does it strive for effect. It’s simply assured. So incredibly assured. He already shows mastery of evoking a world within a few paragraphs or even lines, so you feel bedded and comfortable living there for a while without questioning its reality. However uncomfortable that experience may eventually turn out to be.

It’s like the grizzled dad you call round when your furnace is being weird and you know it’s out of your league, and he knocks it with a knuckle and reaches for the levers with the quiet confidence of someone who’s spent decades convincing these things to behave. It’s the mom who’ll immediately text you a recipe when you ask, and you know it’ll work. It’s the teenage daughter who’ll lean over your dumb laptop and press a couple keys, and suddenly, it’s not being an inexplicable ass anymore.

These comparisons feel appropriate because family is a common undercurrent in Tyler’s stories. How they work, how they don’t work, what happens when they break—the effects on children of that breakage, the slow-bleeding trauma of adults when they feel life slipping out of their grasp as everything stops making sense—and how these aftermaths play out in worlds where the symbolic and metaphoric can become disturbingly real.

Family is often where the horror starts. And though these stories deal with the unreal, they’re embedded in places you believe in. That’s why they hurt, but also why they sometimes warm.

Then, too, there’s the writing itself.

In Corporation, the very first story, Jones leads you in with an engaging, casually compelling voice. You think you know where you are, and then suddenly, you’re somewhere else entirely, and only when you’re thrown out the end of the piece—blinking and unsettled—do you realize there was a sly clue to your destination in front of you all along. That someone skilled built this rollercoaster and knew what they were doing from the start.

There’s a mature sparseness in many pieces, too. The concision of A Sharp Black Line—superb, fast, and lean, sketching character and horror of genuine depth with a few deft strokes—and Crate 42, where a few pages evoke a story big enough to bring down the entire world. Knowing when enough is enough is supposed to be a life’s work. Apparently, Tyler’s already done that work. Another story, Lion’s Den, though longer, proves the same point: achieving more in a short than many writers will attempt in a novella or even novel—then tossing in a couple of small but eye-opener ideas at the end, just in passing, as if they’re free. As if ideas like that drop from trees.

But as any writer will tell you, they really don’t.

Finally, there’s variety. There needs to be variation in subject and voice in a collection, or it feels like one long note. On the other hand, you can’t skip all over the place, or it begins to seem like you’ve stumbled into an anthology of multiple writers instead.

Tyler balances it perfectly. Some stories start in normality and swerve into horror—the standard journey in this genre. Some sneakily do the opposite. Others walk that line like tightrope artists, determinedly never committing themselves and encouraging you to do the same. How We Learn, for example, tells a story that feels incredibly real and yet has an unexamined unreality at its core. Tyler poises it there in a way that makes it feel uncannily credible and true.

Variation in tone is also important. Some stories here feel very modern, imbued with a twenty-first-century uncanniness. Others, like Warlock, resonate as if they’ve always been true and merely been waiting to be told, something the brothers Grimm decided not to include only because they knew it would freak people out. Deep Down comes on like the kind of black-and-white movie that would have starred Peter Lorre, but then unexpectedly, an idea takes it to a whole other and very contemporary place. And there’s White Glove—another seemingly folkloric tale, where as soon as it starts, you sense where it’s going, and there’s a comfort and dark pleasure in that dread-laden walk into old woods—yet it still manages to punch you in the face at the end. That’s why we have folklore. It doesn’t age. And when it’s updated like this, it’s delicious. It also reminds you what a broad church this thing called horror is, and why it’s not a diminishing term. People call fiction horror when it’s too big yet subtle and profound—and cuts too deep—to be contained anywhere else. That’s something to be proud of.

I’m not going to name-check every story—I don’t want to risk giving anything away, and this is your town to explore, dark side streets for you to wander down without someone sketching you a map—but I will mention where we end: on Full Fathom Five.

A treat and promise are hidden away in this story, but again, I won’t tell you what. Just be reassured that this collection ends on a story that seems to gather up and re-present all the best qualities of the fiction you’ve just read, suggesting that this collection, however good, is but a precursor to what Tyler Jones is capable of. It’s a high note. But honestly, they’re all high notes. I would have been proud to have written any story here... but I’d give half a dozen of mine to have written this one alone.

One of the nice things about being a writer is it’s not a zero-sum game. You can take simple pleasure in another’s work without feeling diminished or in competition. Any really good writer does what they do, not what you do, and so where’s the fight? The best ever is when someone’s stories are so good, they make you want to write.

That’s what I found in those writers thirty years ago, and this collection did exactly the same thing. It viscerally reminded me of how wonderful and true dark fiction can be and made me want to go out and once more hunter-gatherer the scary words into some disquieting pens. After all these years, it took me back to be that younger guy sitting somewhere with a great collection, and when I'd finished it, I decided: I want to tell stories like that.

I can’t give it higher praise.

I’m done. An introduction is not a sales job. You’ve already bought the book. I’m just saying... good choice. I’ve either made my point by now, or (hopefully) you got the gist a while back and bailed from this part—and went straight to the stories.

Burn the Plans would be stellar as a selection of tales from any writer at any point in their career. As a debut collection, it’s genuinely extraordinary. If there is any justice in the world—I accept there's plenty of evidence to the contrary, but I dare to hope—then Tyler Jones will soon become a household name.

That starts with you turning the page.

Do that. Do it now.

Michael Marshall Smith

London & Santa Cruz

CORPORATION

Sunlight blooms in the sky, rising from behind all those glass and steel buildings. It burns away the dark blue. The windows are still tinted from yesterday when I dimmed them. I touch the tablet to wake it up, then press the office icon. A new menu opens. I push the square with curtains. A control panel appears, and I drag the fader down.

The glass grows clearer, letting in more light.

A shudder moves through the building. Framed awards, signed photographs of CEOs and politicians rattle against the walls. A golden apple paperweight shivers across the surface of the desk. The window vibrates, warping my reflection.

Work here long enough you get used to this, this shivering building.

I’m always the first to arrive because I still have something to prove.

My dad taught me that. He said, The moment you think you’ve made it, is the moment someone is waiting behind you with a knife.

The building I’m in, you know it if you live in the city. The tower at the center of everything is made of rust-colored stone. Some people say it gets redder every year.

I grew up walking past the tower every day on my way to school. There would always be a limousine, a Jaguar, or a Bentley parked in front, letting out some CEO or investor dressed to the nines in a suit that cost more than my dad made in a year.

I didn’t know what they did in the building but I wanted to be there. Someday. Away from the single-bedroom apartment with stained carpets and mold-covered walls. The kitchen window looked out over an alley that always reeked of rotting food and dead animals.

My dad also used to say, Anything worth having requires sacrifice.

But we didn’t have anything, in fact, we had less than nothing. Mom died when I was still too young to remember her, and Dad worked as a machinist not because he wanted to but because he couldn’t do anything else. And after forty years of never calling in sick, all he had to show for it was a hand missing a finger and a mind that couldn’t remember which day of the week it was. The dementia stole him in pieces before it took him away for good.

He told me sacrifice was the only way to succeed. He told me this while I practiced basketball in the street. I didn’t want to, Dad made me. He made me drill every evening while he sat on the stoop and smoked cigarette butts other people had dropped on the ground.

Everything was a lesson with my dad, but the ones that stayed with me were the ones he didn’t even know he was teaching.

The foundation of the building was laid back when this massive city was only a small collection of farmhouses and fields when horse-drawn carriages rumbled down the dirt roads, and when the world seemed a lot smaller.

The foundation is still here, buried way down deep beneath the basement.

There used to be a name above the rotating glass doors leading to the lobby. But those letters rusted and fell off. You can still see the ghost letters on the stone, but they are so faded now that no one can read them. All that’s left is the word Corporation.

Dad hated being poor, but he never said it. He didn’t have to. He just always told me how being rich would be better. 

For me, it was the constant embarrassment of being dressed in clothes that other kids in my school had donated to the thrift store. It was not being able to buy a car at sixteen, which meant no dates. Or never having the money to go to the movies with my friends.

I would have done anything to have more. And the red tower represented everything I wanted. Sometimes, I'd walk by after school and look up at all that stone, imagine what it would be like to work in a place where you had to wear a suit and tie.

But no one knew what the Corporation did. I asked around and all I got were vague answers about finance and political campaigns. Some said it was stocks, others said it was international trade. Everything and nothing, is what I got.

Dad told me that everything hurts in two ways. Your momma gets sick and goes to the hospital, now you’re not only worried about her, but you also can’t sleep because you don’t know how you’re gonna pay for her meds. Two ways—the pain of the thing and the money you lose taking care of that pain.

Every night, I’d lie on my sleeping bag in the living room with walls so thin you could feel the winter wind squeeze through the particle board, and promised myself I’d never be poor.

Dad told me my height was the only way it’d happen. Said God gave me a gift with my long arms and legs. I told him I didn’t like basketball, and that was the only time he ever smacked me. His cracked and callused hand struck the side of my face. His fingers burned on my cheek even after the hand was gone.

Breathing heavily, he pointed one greasy finger at me and said, You don’t get to choose, boy. The finger moved and pointed at our apartment building. This where you want to be? This the future you see? No, I didn’t think so. You practice and you practice hard, because it’s the only way you’re gettin’ into college.

As always, Dad was right.

Basketball got me a scholarship. I majored in business, and a few weeks after graduation, I’m standing just outside the red tower, waiting for Mr. Winters, the Corporation's vice president, to interview me for a job.

A few minutes before eight, a sleek black car pulled up. The driver got out and opened the back door for a tall, skeletal man with slicked white hair. So thin he looked like a skeleton draped in skin. He wore a navy blue, pinstriped three-piece suit. The gold chain of a pocket watch hung from his vest. He smiled with teeth that looked yellow because of the stark whiteness of his hair.

Mr. Winters shook my hand, his skin soft and cold. I wore a suit that didn’t fit and still smelled like a thrift store because I couldn’t afford to have it cleaned. My scalp itched under a fresh, slightly crooked haircut I had given myself the day before.

He held my hand for a long time and looked into my eyes. Instead of letting go, Winters moved my hand and lifted it to the building's stone. My fingers flattened against the cold, rough granite, Mr. Winters's skeletal hand on top of mine.

Do you feel it? His spearmint breath and aftershave filled my nose.

I tried to move my hand, but Winters pushed his down on top of mine harder. I was about to jerk my hand away when the stone under my skin shivered. I had to crane my neck to see the whole skyscraper, but I swear it swayed a little. The edges of the building blurred. From the roof, birds took flight and scattered into the sky.

Mr. Winters smiled, and I saw those yellow teeth again.

Our shoes clacked and echoed over the polished lobby tile. A security guard watched us cross and nodded at Mr. Winters as we waited for the elevator, the doors of which looked like they were right out of an old black-and-white movie.

Mr. Winters remained silent until the bell rang, and we stepped inside. His finger hovered over the twenty-four buttons. Hmm, he said, let’s start at Asset Management, shall we?

His thin finger pushed the button, and we rose with a shudder. The numbered buttons went all the way to 58, but the last floor’s button only said CEO.

Will I meet him? I asked, pointing to the button.

Mr. Burke doesn’t much like visitors, Winters said. His concern is running the Corporation, not meeting new employees.

The elevator creaked and groaned as it moved. When the doors opened, we stepped out into a large open space. Doors lined each side of the room. A few young men in suits much better than mine walked back and forth, their faces serious and focused. One man came closer. His blonde hairline was slick, and sweat dripped from his nose.

Good morning, Mr. Winters, he said.

Winters nodded.

The sweating man moved on, limping as he did. His face tightened in pain with each step.

Doors opened and closed. More young men crossed the large room, passed folders to other men in other rooms.

Notice anything? Winters asked.

One man opened his door to accept a file from someone who lurched across the room. The hand that accepted the folder was missing a finger. A white bandage covered the stump where his pinky finger should have been.

Winters patted my shoulder. Let’s move on, shall we?

In the elevator, Winters pressed button 32, and once again the cage jerked a little.

The doors opened onto another floor that looked almost exactly like the other, only the men and women who moved through this space did so with an increased level of efficiency. None of them had sweat soaking the backs of their shirts. An overweight guy with a mostly bald head laughed as he talked with someone holding a tablet. One of the sleeves of his starched white shirt was pinned up at the elbow, just an emptiness where the rest of his arm should be.

An attractive woman in a black skirt and jacket walked by. Her dark hair swayed as she passed, and when the hair moved, I saw a twisted patch of scar tissue where her ear should have been.

I thought it was a joke, a prank-the-new-guy trick, but I couldn’t stop the blood from rushing through my head.

A young man, not much older than me, hobbled over on a pair of crutches.

Good morning, sir, he said to Mr. Winters.

One leg of this guy’s pants was just dangling cloth.

Winters, hands folded in front, nodded slightly and asked, Are you ready?

The smile disappeared from the young man’s face. He adjusted the crutches and nodded, then hobbled into the open elevator.

Questions tumbled through my head, but I couldn’t find the right words to ask.

Mr. Winters lifted a chain from around his neck, a key dangled at the end of it. He inserted this into a slot near the bottom of the panel. When he turned it, three buttons glowed red. One marked LL, another TL, and the one below that, FOUNDATION. Winters pushed this last one and the elevator rumbled to life.

Is that the sub-basement? I asked.

Winters showed his yellow teeth. Lower than that.

Crutch guy stood military straight, eyes closed, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. I tried not to look at the empty space under his knee.

The air got warmer as we descended. Deep, low sounds shook outside the elevator walls. The cables that lowered us thrummed as though plucked by a giant hand.

Mr. Eisele here has made an important decision today, Winters said. He has worked hard and proven himself to be diligent and dedicated. But today, the elevator caught for a moment and lifted my stomach, today he takes the next step. Today he secures his place on floor 45.

Eisele’s breathing came out even faster as the bell rang off each floor. 7, 6, 5.

It’s important for you to understand how one advances within the Corporation, Winters said, looking at me without any hint of a smile.

Of course, sir.

4, 3, 2.

The air got so warm it hurt to breathe. It felt like being suffocated. Now Eisele started to sweat. Little beads of moisture formed on his nose, his forehead. His fingers squeezed the rubber handles of the crutches with damp squeaks. The smell of his sweat filled the elevator.

1, TL, LL.

At the FOUNDATION level, the doors slid open, and a blast of warm air hit us. Eisele crutched out into a long stone hallway. Winters and I followed.

There were no lights in the low ceiling, but a red glow came from the far end of the hall. It pulsed on the walls. Walls made of stacked stone that looked like what you’d imagine a castle was made of.

Metallic sounds echoed where the red light came from. Loud clanking noises, mechanical and rhythmic, filled my head. I walked behind Eisele, following his sweat-drenched jacket and the nervous reek of him.

At the end of the tunnel was a large circular space. I stopped walking when I saw what was at the center of the room, but Eisele and Winters kept going.

A massive hole in the ground, and from this hole rose a machine that looked like something out of a clockmaker’s dream. A metal framework of pipes and joints twisted together to create a senseless shape. Gears, large and small, spun smaller cogs that pulled giant chains in and out of the hole. And that hole was the source of the red glow, the heat. So much stronger now. Pistons pumped deep into the brightness. Thick pipes ran from the machine and into the walls. Dark liquid leaked from around where the metal connected to the stone.

The whole thing looked like some metallic creature that just clawed its way up from the center of the world. Steam burst out of pipes above us with a loud hiss. The room filled with fresh heat.

Eisele made his way to a piece of stone that stood at the edge of the fissure. Eisele made his way to a piece of stone at the edge of the fissure—some kind of pedestal with a long trough that led down into the red light. The machine grew louder as he approached. A shudder moved through the floor. Black exhaust spewed from other pipes, a choking odor that smelled like burnt meat.

I could hardly breathe, and not just because of the steam and heat. This massive machine, whatever it is, I know it saw me. It sensed me in the room. I felt it as clearly as when the curtains of Dad's dementia pulled back a little whenever he saw and knew me. All those gears, pipes, and chains around us—something was aware at the center of it.

Red light glinted from something hanging above the bowl-shaped top of the pedestal—something I couldn’t quite see.

Winters put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and whispered something to him, before stepping back.

If you want to advance within the Corporation, Winters said in a firm voice, you have to make sacrifices.

Eisele let his crutches fall to the ground. He unbuttoned the left sleeve of his shirt.

The more you sacrifice, the higher you go.

Eisele pushed the sleeve up past his elbow and rested his bare arm on the pedestal. Even from where I stood, I could see his chest moving faster and faster.

I followed Winters all morning, and the man hadn’t limped once. He wasn’t missing any fingers.

What have you sacrificed? I asked the man.

Winters smiled with rust-colored teeth. He reached out and grabbed my wrist then pulled my hand closer. I tried to pull back, but Winter’s grip was stronger as he forced my hand toward his pants. His eyes never left mine. At the last moment, he twisted my hand until it opened and pushed my palm against his crotch.

My fingers touched a smooth slope between Winters’s legs. His eyebrows went up. I couldn’t help but press my hand against him, feeling for something that wasn’t there.

I gave up what no one else was willing to, he said.

Eyes closed, Eisele’s head hung down, his mouth moved. Praying, no doubt. He unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his upper arm, and tightened it.

Burke, I said, the CEO. What did he give?

Winters turned his attention to the machine. Burke gave more than any of us.

Eisele moved his other hand to a wooden lever sticking out of the pedestal. The machine continued to whir and clank, and the light from the hole glowed brighter.

Burke opened himself here, Winters made a line across his stomach. He cut through his intestines, fed one end to the gears, and let the machine pull from him as much as it wanted.

Eisele’s hand opened and closed on the lever. The metal rattled and shook, pipes clanged together. Gears screeched and turned faster.

Winters nodded to the machine, It left him just enough.

Red light glints above Eisele’s head.

Burke has led this Corporation for over twenty years, Winters says. But he has wasted away. It is almost time for me to take his place.

Eisele looked over at us. His face was covered in beads of red sweat.

Winters took a small walkie-talkie from his pocket and pressed the button. Make the call.

A sad voice came through the speaker. Yes, sir.

Winters nodded at Eisele, who clenched his teeth together and pushed the lever down.

The glinting thing above his head fell, sliced through the air, and a large, rusty blade slammed into the pedestal with a loud crack. A moment of silence. Steam hissed, swirled around Eisele’s feet, then he screamed. It echoed through the room. He fell to his knees, one hand held over the stump. Blood spurted from between his fingers. He writhed on the ground, still screaming, his one leg twitching.

I could not stop myself from moving closer. Eisele’s arm slid down the trough and slipped off the edge. Blood flowed into the machine and ran into the gears. I saw the slickness as they turned, glistening on the teeth, pressing the blood deep into the shafts

Mr. Winters went over to the pedestal and pulled the lever. The blade slowly rose, pulled on a thick, oiled chain, until it hung in the shadows once more.

Eisele’s screams became weaker until they were just whimpers. His face had gone stone grey, and his lips were pale blue.

Help me get him upstairs, Winters said.

I lifted Eisele by the shoulders while Winters grabbed hold of the man’s pants, and we hoisted him up.

In the