Bewildering Stories introduces and welcomes...

Curtis A. Bass

Curtis has published short fiction extensively in the genres of science fiction, horror, mystery and young adult. He says he’s also working on a second novel.

“Johnny’s Got a Gun” seems to qualify for all of Curtis’s working genres at the same time. The high-school characters make it young adult; the origin of the ghosts isn’t really a mystery at Halloween, but the setting and restaging of a high-school massacre certainly qualify as horror. And the telepathic communication sometimes figures in science fiction dramas.

Some readers will object that a story depicting a high-school shooting massacre is not in good taste. Point taken; no, it isn’t. But that’s precisely the point of the story: its ending emphasizes that one has to be crazy to see it as some kind of thriller experience. And as we like to say, Bewildering Stories is definitely not all Halloween but, at Bewildering Stories, it can be Halloween at any time.

In terms of 20th and 21st-century U.S. culture, “Johnny’s Got a Gun” is a kind of war story, one of a country in which society is permitted to arm itself against the mentally ill, who are also permitted to carry guns. And high-school shootings there have become so commonplace that a survivor of one said, “I expected it”: a strong way of saying she wasn’t surprised.

Curtis A. Bass’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Curtis. We’re glad to have you with us.