A Terrible Beauty Is Born

I just finished the first draft of a Cthulhu comic script I’ve been working on with my buddy Josh Wagner (whose comic book Fiction Clemens is appearing this month, and you need to go buy it, or I’ll totally kick your ass). It’s the first real piece of fiction I’ve finished in a long time. It’s an 8-pager, a short story we’re submitting to an anthology of Cthulhu stories, but I like it.

It’s called “Spindletop”, it takes place in the mid-1920s, and it’s about WWI, the oil boom in Texas, vengeance and Elder Gods. It opens with a paraphrased quote from Tom Waits and it ends with Yeats:

He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resiged his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

And there are at least two jokes about milkshakes in it. And a mummified man with a party hat to cover the gunshot wound in his head. Fun stuff.

The supporting characters are two Texas Rangers who belong to a very special branch of the outfit. They are the main characters in a mini series (and, hopefully, continuing series) that Wagner and I are developing.

I don’t know if it’ll get approved for the anthology we’re sending it to; if not, I’ll post the final draft here so you can see it, at least.