Backstage: Everybody's Happy As The Dead Come Home (Patreon)

Backstage for Everybody's Happy As The Dead Come Home.

I am not actually a giant fan of Shriekback. I loved the really quiet stuff they did for the Manhunter soundtrack, but I'd actually never heard "Nemesis", the song that the story title comes from, before. Someone I knew in college must have, though, and their contribution to a comic book fanzine I was editing was called "Everybody's Happy As The Dead Come Home", which was a perfect title for this.

This isn't a horror story. It's a spooky story, but not horror.

My mother died in 2015. Since then I have had many, many dreams where I'm with her, and I remember she's dead, but I don't want to say anything about it because it feels rude, or because I'm afraid she might say "Oh, that's right" and vanish. I wanted to capture that feeling.

This is very autobiographical, but I do not really have a third youngest sibling and I have no sisters. Stephanie is entirely fictional. Which, I learned while writing this, hurts. I started to cry because I did not really have an autistic sister or any autistic family members from the nuclear family of my childhood, and that left me feeling alone and misunderstood back then, even though none of us knew I was autistic. I knew I was different and I wasn't like my family members. Nowadays I have a definitely autistic son and a maybe-autistic enby child, but it still hurts to have spent so much of my life with no one who could understand me.

The story turned out to be bigger than my head, a thing they advise you against eating in the Evil Overlord list. I could not get it to a genuine resolution in the time I had; it's more like the opening chapter of a novel. Maybe I will write that novel someday.