Welcome back to part two of my exploration into influences and events that led me on this path to becoming a horror writer.
There are a ton of books that helped plant the seed that would eventually bloom into wild desire to write horror. I’ll try getting to all of them in time. But perhaps—just perhaps—Ghost Stories of Old Texas by Zinita Fowler is the most important.
I don’t remember where I got the book originally. If I had to guess, I would say my mom probably picked it up at the local Walden Books. Ghost Stories of Old Texas was published in 1983, but I’m certain I didn’t receive it that early, when I was three. As tame as the tales are, I don’t think my folks were reading those to me before bedtime. But I do remember reading from the book in elementary school, when I was eight or nine. I remember showing the book to my friend Michael, who I used to draw monsters with at that early age.
Ghost Stories of Old Texas is geared toward children, like I was then, telling in simple prose ghostly legends and all around spooky stuff about Texas. I remember El Muerto, about a headless horseman, being particularly scary. All the stories were supposedly true or at least based on truth, so that gave me the willies and delayed my sleep on, no doubt, many nights.
But the book itself isn’t what makes it perhaps the most influential in my life. It was meeting Zinita Fowler in 1993 that did that.
As you can see from that last picture, I met Zinita Fowler on September 11, 1993 (yeah, 9/11 of all days, which is my dad’s birthday too). Zinita Fowler was at the local mall selling and signing her sequel to this book, Ghost Stories of Old Texas 2. My mom took me and, I think, my little brother Phil to see her, buy the newest book, and get the original one signed. (I have the second one around here somewhere but can’t seem to locate it; lots of books to sift through in this house, believe me.)
Zinita Fowler was well into her seventies when we met her, already having lived an accomplished life as a librarian, children’s book author, and poet. Her age didn’t matter in the slightest to me. Here, before me, was a real flesh and blood writer. I was thirteen by this point and had already moved on to Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but this was the first time I remember realizing there were actual people behind the books I read. This elderly woman with arthritic hands and a slight bend to her back was suddenly, oddly, someone I wanted to be like, in the same way I wanted to be like Roger Clemens and Stephen King and Mort Drucker.
I don’t recall what she said to me and my family. I don’t recall if I said a single word to her when she handed the now signed Ghost Stories of Old Texas back to us. But I remember thinking that if a little old lady from small town Texas can be an author, so can I.