The Horror Writer
THE KNIFE SLIDES IN.
It parts the flesh with ease and bites deep into the meat, a shallow pool of red leaking from the wound as he cuts, and cuts, and—
“Kenzo, how are those tomatoes coming?”
He looks up from the butcher block.
“Right here,” he says, dumping the diced beefsteaks into the pot where Priscilla has the onions and other veg already simmering.
Beyond the marble counter, Millie and Cate are setting the table.
There is a proper dining room, he knows, on the other side of the house—he found it earlier when he needed a break from reading and took himself on an impromptu tour—but the kitchen is large, and welcoming, and by some unspoken agreement they’ve decided to eat here.
Malcolm has appointed himself master of drinks, and is opening more wine, while Sienna ferries silverware and plates between the kitchen and the table.
And then there’s Jaxon, who has a tea towel slung over his shoulder and is giving orders like the head chef in a restaurant during busy service.
“You gotta cut the pieces smaller,” he nags as Kenzo chops a bell pepper.
Kenzo looks down at the knife in his hand, flexing his fingers on the polished wooden grip.
He’s spent a lot of time around weapons, par for the course, between his day job and his night one.
At one point, he even considered culinary school.
But he quickly discovered he wasn’t a fan of being ordered around.
Especially when he was holding something sharp.
“Like this?” he says, attacking the pepper.
He could have shown off his skills instead—he even knows a few tricks—but Jaxon strikes him as the type to turn it into a contest, and as far as he can tell, there’s no hospital on the island.
So instead, he hacks at the pepper as if he’s wielding a cleaver and not a santoku.
Priscilla’s mouth twitches in a smirk. But Jaxon gapes in genuine horror. Which more than justifies the massacre.
Kenzo adds the peppers to the pot, then blocks Jaxon’s way when he approaches, wielding cumin.
“Stop,” he says. “That doesn’t go into Brooklyn chili.”
“What the fuck is Brooklyn chili?” demands Jaxon. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
Kenzo waggles the knife. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Jaxon shakes his head like a wet dog. “What are you even saying?”
Kenzo doesn’t know. The truth is, he has no strong feelings about chili, but he is developing some pretty strong ones about Jaxon.
The ironic thing—and the one he won’t admit—is that he read the Lightspeed Saga.
And he loved it, unabashedly, from the worldbuilding, to the complicated leads, to what he took to be a nuanced portrait of class struggles.
When Jaxon first introduced himself, Kenzo was excited, even a little nervous.
And then the guy kept talking, and Kenzo’s enthusiasm collapsed a little more with every subsequent word that came out of Jaxon’s mouth.
Because those books might be amazing, but the author is an ass.
So yes, he’s a fan.
But he’ll die before he admits as much to Jaxon fucking Knight.
He turns his attention back to the chili, savoring the moment when the scent wafting from the pot begins to smell less like a collection of random ingredients and more like a meal. It’s a good metaphor for writing. Cooking and craft have a great deal in common.
Malcolm sidles over to Priscilla and asks her what it’s like, writing romance, with a notable emphasis on the word, condescension buried like a barb.
“I’ve heard it’s rather . . . formulaic?” he says. Kenzo tenses, but Priscilla seems unfazed.
“All genres have a formula,” she says, stirring the pot. “Mediocre writers simply follow it. Great ones, like Arthur Fletch, know how to bend it.”
“Ah,” says Malcolm smugly, “but why bend the mold when you can break it?”
“Because,” says Priscilla, nesting her pink glasses in her hair so they don’t fog, “the readers need something to follow. If you break the mold entirely, you lose their trust. And their interest. And then it doesn’t matter how clever you are. You’re only impressing yourself.”
“Hear, hear,” Sienna murmurs, before taking a very large swig of wine.
“Indeed . . .” Malcolm manages a brittle smile, and Kenzo can almost hear the man’s ego cracking like ice as Priscilla returns her glasses to her face.
Malcolm turns to his wife. “More wine?”
He goes to refill her glass, adds a weak splash before discovering the bottle’s spent.
“Uh-oh,” she says dryly, “not pulling your weight, are you?”
The two halves of Penn Stonely consider each other, the air thick with things unsaid, and Kenzo thinks, once again, how glad he is that he and Sam broke it off before things got like this. Before the charm of being with another writer, of merging life and love and work, could wear off.
Across the room, Millie is bombarding Cate with questions about how she got her start when Cate stumbles, and the bowls balanced in her arms go crashing to the floor.
Porcelain shatters against stone, a sound so loud and sudden that everyone else jumps, conversations broken off midword as Cate crouches over the mess, collecting the broken shards.
“Sorry, sorry,” she murmurs, half to the room and half to the crockery.
But the crash has altered something in the room, or maybe Malcolm and Sienna’s tension has simply spilled over like a pot. Kenzo clocks the stiffness in Jaxon’s jaw, the furrow in Priscilla’s brow, the nervous way Millie shifts her weight from foot to foot.
No one is quite as relaxed as they’ve been letting on.
Millie helps Cate pick up the pieces, patting her shoulder in a big-sister way, and Kenzo drifts over to Sienna, who’s clutching her still empty glass so tight that it might crack.
“Just so we’re on the same page,” he says, “I was joking earlier. About killing you.”
She brushes the dark hair out of her eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “I kind of figured.”
“Just wanted to clear that up,” he says. “Sometimes people don’t get my jokes. Not that it was a joke per se. It’s just what you say, isn’t it? I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you. Anyway, just to reiterate: I have precisely zero murderous intent toward you.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
He tips his head toward Jaxon, who’s trying to stealthily sneak cumin into the chili. “I can’t make any promises about him, though.”
Sienna smiles ruefully. “As long as you wait till the food’s ready, it’s all good with me.”
Kenzo chuckles, and Sienna laughs too, and Malcolm looks over sharply, as if they’re talking about him. Sienna clocks it and smirks, a poke-the-bear smirk, before leaning closer to Kenzo. “So how would you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Murder Jaxon Knight.”
Kenzo considers the man in question, who’s now wafting the steam from the pot toward his face in an ostentatious way. “How much time do you have?”
* * *
BY THE TIME THEY FINALLY SIT DOWN to eat, it’s after nine, and almost everyone is on their way to being drunk.
Malcolm, Jaxon, and Millie are leading the pack, their collective volume climbing with every glass, though the nature of their inebriation has taken different forms. Malcolm seems involved in a one-man name-dropping contest, while Jaxon goes on a rant about the subgenre of space epic within the umbrella term of sci-fi, and Millie devolves at random intervals into giggles.
Sienna’s face has taken on a rosy flush; at the more sober end of the spectrum, Priscilla has been nursing the same glass for the last hour, while Cate sips a soda and has the wide-eyed look of someone who’s just glad to be included.
Kenzo himself has traded his coffee for Scotch and is now in that pleasant lane of social lubrication between sober and sloppy.
The chili, for what it’s worth, is delicious. Maybe Jaxon was right about the cumin after all. Kenzo hates that.
“We need another icebreaker,” announces Millie when the bowls are empty. “You know, so we can get to know each other better?”
“Is that really a good idea?” asks Kenzo.
“Right?” says Jaxon, in a rare moment of agreement. “I mean, no offense, Mill, but this isn’t a Girl Scout trip. It’s a competition.”
“So?” she counters. “Doesn’t mean we can’t be friends!”
“Okay then,” he shoots back. “How about Fuck, Marry, Kill, famous authors edition?”
Kenzo can see the cogs already turning in Millie’s mind, but the rest of the table gives a collective groan.
“What?” he continues. “I’ll go first. Let’s start with J—”
“I have a question,” Priscilla cuts in, swirling the inch of wine in her glass as the collective attention shifts toward her. “I want to know . . . what’s your why?”
The table looks at her, confused.
“Our why?” asks Millie.
“Yeah,” she says. “Your reason for writing. For sticking with it, even when the deck feels stacked against you. After all, that’s why we’re here, right?
” She looks around, making eye contact with each of them.
“Not just because we’re good enough, but because—with the exception of Cate, who hasn’t really started—the rest of us haven’t given up yet. So, tell me why.”
For a moment, no one speaks, Kenzo included. Drinks are lifted to mouths. Eyes go down. It’s honestly not a question they get asked that often. Where do you get your ideas? Will you put me in your next book? Who hurt you? (But that one’s specific to him.)
Why do you write romance?
Why do you write crime?
Why do you write horror?
But not, why do you write?
“I like playing god,” declares Jaxon, to no one’s surprise. But while half the table rolls their eyes, Millie actually nods.