INTRODUCTION

How would a writer feel if he came back to his chosen profession after being absent for ten long years? I mean, totally absent. No contact with fellow authors and publishers. No writing of any kind for the span of an entire decade.

Scared shitless I would think.

That’s about how I felt when I decided to return to the horror genre in the summer of 2006. After my own personal 9/11 in the fall of 1996, when Zebra Books closed their entire mid-list horror line without warning, I had grown bitter and discouraged. In turn, I completely distanced myself from anything concerning horror and the macabre. No horror reading, no horror movies, no horror writing for one hundred and twenty long months. I went as cold as cold turkey could get.

Then in July of 2006, my good friend Mark Hickerson called me up and said “Hey, Ron. Folks are on the internet, ordering your old books on eBay and asking about you on the message boards… wondering if you’re dead or not.”

Well, that got me to thinking. In a sense, I was dead. I had to admit that I missed the writing and I missed the darkness of the genre, too. The sudden interest in my work fanned the flame of horror-writing desire in me. I began to remember what had motivated me in the first place; those cherished childhood days when I was a monster freak watching “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, and putting together those cool Aurora glow-in-the-dark monster models. And I got the urge to get back into the game again… catch up where I’d left off all those years ago.

But I had a problem. I was scared half out of my wits.

You see, I didn’t even know if I could write any more.

Sitting in front of that blank computer screen after such a long hiatus was like a drowning man regarding an empty ocean around him, with no sign of dry land. I was scared half to death. Here I’d committed to my fans, telling them I was coming back, and I wasn’t even sure that I could.

As it turned out, writing horror was like riding a bike or having sex. I was a little rusty, but it all came back to me. And I seemed to have a polish and an edge to my fiction that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps those years away had done me some good after all; maybe recharged my batteries and given me a renewed appreciation for ghosts, goblins, and things that went bump in the night.

The following seven stories are the first tales I sat down and wrote after coming back. “Cumberland Furnace” was one of the first of the bunch, thus the title of this collection. And “fear-forged” is right on the mark. Fearhad a lot to do with the writing of these fables… an emotion that goes hand-in-hand with stories that are intended to horrify and generally gross one out.

So here they are… the first seven of the comeback stories. Got alot to choose from here. A couple of old-fashioned ghost stories, some monster tales, and even a bit of sick comedy thrown in for good measure.

Ronald Kelly

Brush Creek, Tennessee

February 2010