Gravediggers: Respecting Death

Photo 1: A stone with a flying skull design. "Sept. 22, 1745."
Photo 2: A crypt with its own gate and descending stairs.  "No, please, after you."
Photo 3: A stone with a flying angel head design."Feb. ye 25th, 1785."

All photos taken from the same cemetery in Wentham, MA.  All designs are typical of the years on the stones.

I see Gravediggers working on many levels, especially how close the living are to the dead.  Death is all around us, psychically, emotionally, psychologically--but also spatially.  Has anyone noticed how many historic cemeteries there are out there?  We don't see them as we ignore Death, and the dead--the living equivalent of sending the elderly to their own slow demise in facilities.  These historic cemeteries are everywhere in New England--beside homes, next to Wal-Marts, behind churches, in the woods--everywhere!  They're also torn down and removed, like the one that used to be on a raised plot of land on the corner of West Shore and Buttonwoods, not where there is one now, in front of a small plaza, but where the senior care facility is now.  (So I guess that at least is an appropriate replacement; shows that we're not completely shunting Death aside.)  Also cemeteries are crudely vandalized these days; one on my father's street is now a pot den, as the descendents put up tall hedges that hid it from the road, and someone knocked down all the stones and piled them in the corners.  No respect for the living or the dead, there, and it shows you again the lack of respect for Death itself.  We do that all the time: the dying end their days in hospitals and only rarely at home (a parent and two grandparents of mine died at home); the elderly and soon-to-be-dying get shipped to facilities.  Hell, even the Eskimos used to do better: when short on food, they'd place the oldest on ice floats and chip away at the ice until they floated away by themselves into the distance, never to be seen (or fed) again.  Is what we do to our elderly really that much different?

Unabashed Self-promotion: Upcoming Works

"Hide the Weird"--a short story


Please look for this story in a forthcoming issue of Space and Time Magazine: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction. I think this issue will appear in 2011, but I'm not totally sure. I'll keep the situation updated. Please visit them at www.spaceandtimemagazine.com--especially when my story appears. (But even now, too.)

"Shadows"--a short story

A brief story (about 20 pages) of a teen who (barely) escapes a mass disappearance. It's on this site, and on my website, and it's written in a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland-at-A-Houseparty style. Hope you like it. Let me know!

The Gravediggers, a novel

Kicking up steam with a new novel WIP, The Gravediggers. This could possibly be the first of a trilogy, maybe not. We'll see. About 70 pages of present-day chapters and 10 pages of past chapters have been done so far. Outlines and character sketches and charts are being filled out. Please see past blogs for details.

"Cribbage"--a short story

A short piece of how a father and son bond over games of cribbage, especially after the death of the wife/mother. This one is hitting a little too close to home right now, but I'm hangin' in there. An update of a piece written as an undergrad. and never before published. Doing this kind of thing with a past story worked with "Hide the Weird."

"Everything's Connected" and "Pink Lemonade"--short stories

Both of these are app. 10 pages; both are short mysteries starring the main character of my MS.-Looking-for-An-Agent, Cursing the Darkness. These two short stories are currently making the rounds. Wish them luck!!!

Cursing the Darkness--Completed Novel

Private eye Brad Foster comes up against a powerful mobster, a morality-driven killer, a hitman with an itchy trigger-finger, crooked cops, his Alzheimer's-ridden mother and his own depression and past failures (which led to a child's death) as he searches for two missing teenage girls and a runaway wife.  The first chapter and prologue of this work appear on my website, www.stevenbelanger.com. Check 'em out, lemme know what you think! This MS. is currently making the rounds.

"So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season"--a short story

A writer returns from a long, overseas book tour, on Christmas Eve, to hear that his wife is leaving him after the holidays and going with the neighborhood pharmacist for a long, island vacation. This story is currently making the rounds of the magazines.

Graves and Gravediggers

Photo: Crypt, in West Greenwich Cemetery #2, where bodies were placed until the ground thawed.

Please click on the Flickr link above to see 75 photos (many of them creepy) I took to go look at for locals, descriptions, and just the overall feel for some scenes in The Gravediggers.  Of particular interest, and use for the story, is the crypt you'll see from a distance and close-up.

I made sure not to stand directly in front of any stone, so that I wasn't standing directly over somebody.  And any graves knocked over, or etched into, or otherwise defaced were not done so by me.  I take particular care with such things.  I am seriously offended when I see defaced or knocked-over graves.  This happened in a little cemetery on my father's street.  The descendants of the buried people had giant hedges planted in front of the cemetery, thereby hiding it from the little side street.  Sure enough, local teens entered, knocked them all down, piled them all in one or two corners, and used it as a pot den.  If I ever catch any of the ones who did that...

The work on the WIP is coming along really well.  I've decided that it's to be epistolary: third-person shifting POVs, past, present, diaries, journals, newspaper articles, etc.  I'm very excited about this work.  I've done a ton of research, with more to do, but it's coming along well in concept and in actuality.  (They don't always.  First, yes; latter, no so much.)  I look forward to working, editing, writing, researching, or reading about this project every day.  It's been a long time since I could say that about a novel.  And for those of you who read this blog consistently, you know I'm never at a loss for novel ideas.  But following one all the way through...

A shout out to Joe who helped with the pictures, and to Bry and Erika who helped with some reading and critiquing.  I'll put you all on the acknowledgements page...

No, really.  I will.

Gotta be positive.

Manuscript Info. Garnered from More Free Stuff

Okay, for this as of yet untitled ms.--maybe The Gravediggers?--we'll start with the exhumation of 6 or 7 bodies in 1888 RI, as the father of these people had had a disturbing dream, that he'd had an orchard (which he had) but that half of the trees in his orchard would soon die.  He recognizes this as an extended dream-metaphor, thank you, Freud, and this makes him listen more to his family's eerie complaints.  His wife has been getting sick, and 5 or 6 of their children had already died.  Sarah had been the first, about 19 years old; another daughter was next, though this daughter complains of seeing Sarah, at night, sitting with her (on her?) in bed, causing her pain.  This daughter dies, another gets sick, and has the same complaint.  The last straw comes when the mother gets sick, and a son, who is of age and about to marry a girl in a neighboring town.  The mother complains of the same thing about Sarah.  So all of the bodies are exhumed, and all have their hearts burned on a nearby rock in the family cemetary, and all the problems stop. The mother recovers, but the son, after marrying the girl in that neighboring town and becoming a promising young farmer, dies. 

Nothing is ever recorded about his death, so, ah ha!, that's how "it" spreads.  Vampires, consumption (tb), or plague, I don't know.  But I'm hoping for all three.  Other isolated cases (one family member) will be mentioned also, but only in the form of consumption, to highlight the panic, but to also show how the panic and ignorance of others hides the true demon.

This all sounds like the hokey local superstition and folklore that it is, but I can make this work in fiction.  I'm pretty sure.


This summary of information was obtained through the materials gathered from the free e-books in my free e-Google.  Though I understand that Google may one day soon take over the world--the entire company would make a decent James Bond villain--I have to admit that it is incredibly convenient and useful.  I've got a couple of emails, my other blog site, and my free books all there.  And when I write, I save that writing to a flashdrive, to my emails, to my harddrive, to my Scrivener, and to my free Google documents storage.  I do not work for Google, I swear.  Not only did I get the above composite information from those free books, but I can also get the clothing, speech, beliefs, etc. from the very old books that I saved for free there, too.  My goodness is this convenient and useful.  I repeat: I do not work for Google.

So this is the beginning of yet another new work.  Wish me well, everyone, as I have a tendency to start new stuff with really good ideas and then stop them cold when I get bored with them.  This stuff here, for example, is the root of WIP 7, all novel-length.  I hope to do some combining and shuffling, but, boy, I don't know.

On the Fire

Photo credit: Olympus Imaging Corp./ Philippe Giabbanelli/ DoctorPete

A few things on the fire right now:

1.  Can you imagine being the one person immune to a disease wiping out your entire family?  Everyone's dying around you, no known cure, lots of wild theories and rumors, and, after everyone dies off and you survive, you walk out of your home--which had been quarantined--only to find that your whole village had been wiped out.  Sound crazy?  Look at this link, about Eyam, Derbyshire, England, a village that suffered for 14 months with the plague in 1665-6 and deliberately quarantined itself.  About 25% of the village survived; entire families were wiped out.  (Look at the pic of the Rose Cottage, about the Thorpe family.)  Some people in the village, like a woman who buried her whole family, and the town gravedigger, survived, though they came in touch with countless of the infected.  Imagine being that woman, who survived as all of her family died around her?  Or being that gravedigger?  What happened to his family?  How did he feel burying all his friends?  Working on this now; setting either in 1665, or present day, I don't know.  Leaning towards present-day.  Novella or novel.

2.  The other short story I'm excited about because it's my first non-genre piece, called "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season."  It's about a writer coming home from a book tour at Christmas Eve, to a wife he knows is cheating on him and wants to divorce him.  His internal struggles on the plane ride home, in the airport with a fan as his wife approaches, and then on the ride home, when his wife tells him that her parents are already there, and that she's leaving him after the holidays for the guy she's been having the affair with.  Both pieces are ready to ship out.

3.  News, soon, about a short story recently accepted.  TBA.

4.  I have to send out two new short stories, one of them a Brad Foster short, called "Pink Lemonade."  There's another short story of Foster out there right now, knocking on doors, looking for a home.  (Foster is the main character and 1st person narrator of Cursing the Darkness, the prologue of which is below, with Chapter One waiting in the wings at my website.)  A poem is out there, too.

5.  Follow-up to Cursing the Darkness.  Leaning towards a prequel.  Writing decisions are hard.

6.  Finishing "Cribbage," a short story about a father and son (wife/mother has recently died) who bond over a game of cribbage; the boy has an adult-consciousness epiphany at the end.

7.  Novels: The Observer and Apocalypse.

8.  Novella that needs and wants to be a novel: The Gravediggers.  An existentialist/horror/vampire tale.  I began it in the mid- to late-90s, before everyone wrote vampire stuff.

9.  My day job.

10.  Spending less time at the computer.