Karen Hintz was noticed regularly on her blog where she would post links to her fan fiction of different horror fandom, but she knew very little of the writers she would write fan fiction off of. Her life was ordinary – a house wife who got bored so she started playing with a body of work known as fanworks.
        “My newest fan fiction story, take a look,” she blogged.
        She didn’t know that she was about to step into nightmares imagined by author, Richard Matheson, and they were going to take her into dark emotional places. She often posted stories using real people as characters, and would write them into plots that would be that of a writer who happened to be smoking mass amounts of pot excessively – there were comments on her blog saying, “get the hell out of my fandom.”
        When she stepped away from the word processor, outside of her door was a stranger with an invitation – it was a strange occurrence but he was friends with a fanzine where they printed her real person fandom entries on a regular basis. But the stranger was one who could pass for a character in an Edgar Allan Poe short story.
        “That was weird.”
        She went to the kitchen to pour her some coffee and then went back to the glow of the word processor thinking what celebrity would be her next fandom plaything. The morning started out normal enough, but it got weird really fast – it was if she wandered in the pages of a grotesque night gaunt.
        “I am living out a Cthulhu Mythos fan fiction story,” she said getting a bit weirded out. She went to her blog and started typing then opened up word to create her next fan fiction effort. In her mind was something dark, grotesque as it was something watching her from deep in her emotional psyche.
        “God damn I’ve been hanging out in the horror fandoms too much. I have been having weird nightmares,” she adds. While racing her fingers across the keyboard she felt there was a darkness plaguing her, and e-mails from pissed off horror writers because she was doing fucked up things to their characters. She sometimes borrowed from sit-com fandom and wrote weird fiction stories from the characters, the entries appeared on fanfiction.net but she felt like she was going to be the subject of A.J. Poe’s manuscripts because of her willing to slash the characters.
        “I feel like that I made the pages of his story The Fandom Writer,” she adds, “I don’t want to piss him off.”
        She got a blog comment after they clicked on her link featuring a fan fiction story based off of “I, Madman” and it was a bit cryptic.
        “A.J. Poe is pissed.”
        “What do you mean?” She typed back in a comment.
        “You took two of his characters and wrote them into an all male romance plot,” the person commenting is named Hellen Willow, no relation to the ex-gay that a small press publisher published in the pages of his magazine.
        “Is he a homophobe?”
        “No you are dealing with a controversial born again Christian who writes with dark spiritual warfare themes,” Hellen typed to her in an instant message.
        “Oh he is a religious fanatic. I hate those kinds,” she replied.
        “He tried sharing his faith with an openly gay writer who just came out of the closet who appeared with him on a nonfiction story he wrote,” the stranger added as he typed.
        “Not a religious fanatic but a fierce critic of anything gay oriented, he calls it on his blog ‘gross gay shit’ – a lot in the business want his blood and the blood of his publishers for running him,” the stranger continued in the IM. She read the IM and thought, Jesus this Christian is going to really go over the top and preach fire and brimstone. I’ve heard of these particular kind of bloggers collecting their ideas before except he does it in a dark and menacing way.
         “Another right wing nutjob throwing scripture at you in blog comments after reading your fanfiction,” the stranger replied.
        “Yeah” she answered back.
        “He says in the comment that I need Jesus in my life – fucking nutjob,” she then adds, “he get’s pissed off when fan fiction writers slash his characters. I’ve slashed his life. I got noticed on fanzines for actorfic and authorfic.” It was about an hour later when the door bell rang.
        “Just a minute, I am coming down.”
        She was nervous.
        There was another at her door, and they had something in their hand.
        “What do you have in your hand?” she asked.
        “The Necronomicon I’ve read your blog and noticed you have a lot of occult under tones in your fan fiction, do you practice voodoo?” the stranger asked as he presented the blasphemous book to her.
        “I dabble” she replied.
        “I do have a voodoo doll of a writer who turned me down from a magazine,” she adds.
        “Are you interested in summing something that no one will fathom?” he had asked with some dark curiosity.
        “What is your name?”
        “Michael Tillemans, I am the publisher of a weird fiction fanzine of writers who do real person fiction,” he said introducing himself.
        “Real person weird fiction you say?” she inquired.
        “I break them out there, sometimes weird things happen to the writers and they share their experiences – sometimes they experience things that would be in the imagination of the fringe genre called bizarre,” Michael replied as he reached for a smoke.
        “There was a blogger who submitted stories lifted from the original creator’s titles and stole his concepts for stories. The author had said to this blogger that he needed an anally inflicted death sentence,” he added.
        “I think I crossed this author, and really pissed him off. He made me a character in his first novel then had me drawn and quartered by semi-trucks,” she replied.
        “Nicholas Kane, the author of the story Spectral Exile – a story about a nightclub that fucked up things happened in there. It was compared to Hell House,” Michael replied.
        “Wait, that horror story he wrote – it was true ?”
        “Every graphic detail right down to the severed hands,” Michael replied while inhaling on a square.
        “The blogger lifted this story’s idea and made it sexual,” he added.
        “Would you like to come in?”
        “Could I offer you something to drink? I do have a fridge full of MGD.”
        Michael stepped inside, it was growing deathly cold as his breath was able to be seen outside and the days waned into night.
        “I don’t mind having a beer.”
        It was quaint. Ms. Hintz was a bit of a weird recluse who played around with real people for characters in her writings, putting them in situations that would have read in the pages of The Bizarro Starter Kits. She was inspired by those writers when she wrote her real person fiction entries and posting them on her website. But she was going to experience a world so damn weird, no one can find the words to define it.
        “Have you ever experienced Déjà vu?” Michael asked as he cracked the top of the beer bottle. He pulled out a copy of the fanzine and showed her samples of what he ran in the pages.
        “What do you mean?” she replied.
        “Like you been there before,” he answered.
        “Almost like you were a character in some of the stories that were written in the horror fandom,” he added.
        “Sounds like you know your horror fandom,” Hintz replied.
        It was a few hours later when Michael finished his beer and smoked his last cigarette.
         “I am going to a diner to get something to eat. You are welcomed to join me.”
        She took him up on the invitation. In her mind it was a dark surreal imagination of what she would do with an actor she worshipped thinking what kind of nightmare she could dream up – it was a surreal place that is fandom and the writers like A.J. Poe who would get pissed when he sees his characters into situations that are truly bastardized.
        “I will join you. I might show you a rough draft of an original horror story I am working on. The real person fiction is something I do just to get a readership,” she replies.
        In her mind, there was a fear of the unknown almost if she had no idea what she was stepping into when she went with Michael Tillemans to the diner – she was thinking, I am going to be discovered finally after a few years of keeping a blog of weird real person fiction.
        “I could use the company. Sometimes running a zine such as this you could get more than plenty of strange people. A lot of angry horror writers who write you into a story and kill you off or drive you mad,” he adds.
        “So this is a bit taboo writing weird fiction stories with actors and authors as characters then doing perverse things to them,” she replied.
        The night grew much colder, and the atmosphere echoed the writings in the horror fandoms—almost if would be out of someone’s nightmare after they took some hard drugs.
        They walked over to Michael’s 1980 Cutlass Supreme and drove somewhere to grab a bite. Michael spoke that the world of fandom is a weird, dark place where stalkers would lift the concepts and plots of original horror writers and do unauthorized stories based on the storylines of the original tale. Then the blogger would call the original author’s entire catalog fan fiction based off his key influences.
        “I’ve published some weird people over the years,” Michael said as he was driving.
        “What do you mean by weird?”
        “They actually put a curse on the original author because they caught them stealing his concepts and title for a story similar and making the character he created into something they are not,” he replied.
        “Jesus, I think I heard of this blogger. He is part of the circle that would lift the author’s characters to pick on his work,” she responded. She thought about that blog and the circle, then would realize the publishers of one of her original short stories was the people who ganged up on A.J. Poe because he was writing with Evangelical Christian characters in fucked up horror settings.
        “There is a real horror story of what goes on behind the scenes,” Michael added as he reached for the CD player putting in November’s Doom.
         “They would threaten his publishers if they published him and organize a media blackout just to have him blacklisted. One E-Zine blogger wrote accusations how he stole manuscripts for anthologies he published,” he continued.
        “This A.J. Poe, what is it about him?” she asked.
        “He sent a slash fan fiction writer to hell in a story, she went into a diabetic coma and never woke up,” Michael related, “They say his work actually has supernatural powerThe Fandom Writer?” she asked with an uncomfortable tone.
        “That story was every slash fan fiction writer’s nightmare,” he replied.
        “The horror community wanted to draw and quarter him because he wrote that one. It caused shit storm among the horror circles, the mass market counterparts would edit his comments to make him look like a homosexual fan fiction writer of sit-com fandoms,” he continued as he drove.
        He reached for a cigarette and lit up, took a long drag and released some smoke in the air.
        “They wanted to draw and quarter him with semi-trucks just because he did a story that blasted the critics forcing their propaganda down his throat. Talk about some real Twilight Zone shit,” Karen relates and thought, talk about some things that would be in the imagination of Rod Serling.
        “Tell me about this e-zine that did the blog,” she inquired.
        “The e-zine was fronted by an up and coming horrotica writer who was washed up after a year of being a publisher. She played tug-a-war with two contributors of his publication because she released two of theirs on her imprint. His contributors wanted to send real person fiction of her getting killed off as submissions for a prank.” Michael related about the e-zine and publishing imprint that failed after a year.
        “I was slated to appear in the E-zine. I never got paid. It was my first sale, and she had my entry posted on her blog. As far as I know now the only readership she is going to get is by writing fan fiction off the author’s work she attempted to leak,” he added.
        “Sounds like that e-zine editor played the dirty politics,” Karen replied.
        “She lifted the title of one of his planned anthologies, the cover looked like she jacked off all over it and called it art.”
        “The horror stories of the small press wander around all the time – they boil over into the horror fandoms with journalfen users picking apart a published authors work. A.J. Poe was one of their favorite targets,” he said as he took another drag.
        “Why did they bully him?” Karen asked growing a bit disturbed.
        “He was a writer who voiced a hard line view in the industry. A writer of all male romance take on horror wrote on a message board to avoid him at all costs, and he did this after the shocking story of him urinating on a rival editor’s photograph uploading the aftermath to his now defunct blog,” Michael continued into the narrative.
        “Horrific displays of bullying from the rest of the community are common place. I think A.J. Poe yelled at me on my blog at one time,” Karen replied.
        “The horrors that were in the industry that happened to A.J. inspired his best friend and correspondent Nicholas Kane. People on a site called Somethingawful.com would lift him and write fan fiction passing him off as a flaming homosexual,” Michael inquired, “it was almost the plot of a psychological thriller what was happening to both of them. Goons had harassed Kane over the phone and via the mail.”
        “Jesus I think I heard of this. The author who nearly published Kane dropped him because he criticized gay horror. That author who dropped him got published with a vampire take on an all male romance, and Kane caught wind of it. Wrote on his blog it was gross and disgusting,” Karen replied.
        She was staring into the darkness at this point, and in her mind were bugbears that were dark, surreal and wandered within her emotions. She kept thinking about the publisher who was going to run her work. They became infamous for the bullying they would do to self released authors in the industry then harass magazines into dropping them from consideration. She thought, is there a God out there?
        Michael continued to drive until they reached their final destination.
        The diner was named for a publisher of razorwire fiction named Misty Bobe, and she broke A.J. Poe out as a nonfiction writer. It had a lot of stone gargoyles and the atmosphere was that of a Horace Wapole novel—it had a charm of that being from the imaginations of writers from the dark romanticism period. Misty Bobe opened the diner to finance her magazine.
        “We’re here. This is where I get my inspirations for Real Weird. The waitresses would dress all in black with black lipstick,” he commented.
        “This diner, is one of the creepiest damn places I ever seen,” Karen replied as she felt the goose bumps crawl up her flesh.
         “It looks like it was decorated by R.L. Stine,” she added.
        “That is part of the charm. It inspires me to do a gothic publication featuring real person fandoms from writers who like to scare people in the vein of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” Michael laughed as they entered the diner.
        “That’s it I entered The Twilight Zone,” Karen laughed uncomfortably.
        “Yeah people have that feeling when they walk in here. The proprietor is a publisher of razor wire fiction – broke in some seriously twisted imaginations in the industry,” Michael entered.
        The waitress came up to them.
        “I will give you a booth. Will that be smoking or non-smoking?” the waitress greeted them.
        “Smoking please,” Michael answered as he put out the last cigarette before lighting up another.
        “This place is where I meet other real person fiction writers looking for an outlet for their fanworks, they write ActorFic in weird fiction settings – they put them in scenarios echoing the stories from the bloody pulps,” Michael added, “They come here because they want the Gothic atmosphere.”
        “Sounds like the stories about the thing that comes out of the diner,” Karen said as she was sitting down in the booth. Her imagination was going insane at this point. She kept thinking she was stepping into the works of A.J. Poe and Nicholas Kane of they were co-writing a story together. The diner was that out of a dark, and macabre imagination almost could have been a fit within the setting of a weird tale.
        There was as sense of sheer goose-flesh invoking horror growing in her imagination. Almost like when someone’s most twisted nightmare became flesh and bone where ghosts of abortions torment a doctor after he finds God.
        “This diner had inspired some really twisted weird fiction. The dark real person fiction that could be written by H.P. Lovecraft,” Michael responded as he was looking over the menu.
        “What can I get the two of you?” the Goth waitress asked greeting them.
        “I think I will take a burger and coffee, black.”
        “Coffee and a steak for me,” Karen replied.
        “This place, it reminds me of the imaginations of the bloody pulps,” she inquires to the waitress.
        “Our proprietor always a fan of weird fiction, she wanted the place to echo the horror stories that appeared in Weird Tales.” The waitress replied.
        Karen read the name tag, “Okay Lisa. What other weird shit happened here?”
        “Well the paintings on the wall were by Lilith Skeezix, who painted detailed pictures of the horrifying deaths of contributors of a dark alternative magazine in Chicago.”
        Lisa replied, “I will be right back with your orders.”
        Karen was whistling the theme from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps because she was getting the creeps from the atmosphere of the diner. The atmosphere was that of a really twisted Nightmare On Elm Street fan fiction story – how they would imagine really dark, disturbing and sick things with copyrighted characters.
        “Scared?” Michael asked.
        “I felt like I stepped into a horror fandom writer’s nightmare,” Karen replied.
        “Yeah it can feel like that. They are some of the most fucked up out there when they borrow copyrighted characters or write with real celebrities as characters,” Michael said as he reached for another cigarette. He felt the dark thick sense of horror growing in the air within the diner. The atmosphere echoed something that would appear in the pages of his fanzine.
        “Fandom is a weird and dark thing. The writers in fandom will write just about anything in any fandom,” he added.
        “So you know the nightmares that are within different fandoms then,” Karen relates as she looks at the copy of the fanzine.
        “Fan fiction writers who would lift the titles and concepts of original fiction writers the write fan fiction off the story doing perverse things with the characters,” Michael relied.
        “They would harass Evangelical Christian writers. They created pages about them and accuse them of monstrous things. Then would try to fuck them out of publications,” he added.
        “I think I was one of the people wanting A.J. Poe blacklisted because he took a swipe at slash fan fiction writers,” Karen added.
        “A.J. Poe is the biggest critic of fan fiction being done off his work, and people starting to make slash stories based of him and his son. One blogger called him a retard and he challenged this blogger to a fist fight,” Michael added as he was explaining the things he considered for the fanzine.
        “Jesus!” Karen gasped.
        The diner is where many small press publishers gathered and hung out, compared notes and talked shop. One of the publishers considered a story where a controversial writer was comparing notes with Charles Beaumont and H.P. Lovecraft with his nonfiction story that got him published. The magazine published him under a name he used in the Navy. The writer got his start in trading manuscripts on newsgroups in the mid 1990s.
        “Because some writers were threatened to be blacklisted in the genre for having outspoken views, they started to self-release their material,” Michael said as he was taking a bite from his burger.
        “I think I was guilty of trying to fuck over his credits early on,” Karen added as she took a sip of her coffee, “I used to be active with a group blog called Fandom Wank who would make fandom out of his original works posted on a journal that used to be on diary-x.com.”
        “I think I heard about that, some editor who rejected one of his short stories calling it a work of fan fiction when it was Lovecraftian Horror,” Michael said as he was reading over the pages of his fanzine, “That editor proved to be a hypocrite when it came to self-publishing because he turned around and published his novel same way the author put out his anthologies.”
        “I think I read his true crime story on another website, he blew up at some of the people calling him a hack – the owner of the website called him an ‘art-fag.’ The author sent some angry e-mails to him and suggested he died of AIDS,” Karen responded.
        “That author proved himself over the years, driven by his faith in god and a strong Conservative stance. I’ve heard of him. He refused to play games with him because some of the writers in the fanzine were ushered in by him in the small press,” Michael added.
        “What ever happened to that editor?” Karen asked.
        “The controversial author got him fired for bullying. He looked up the phone number of the owner of the magazine and got really nasty with them,” Michael related the story of the controversial writer, “There were people who cried for his blood for some of the things he wrote about. The bullying wasn’t just targeted at him but towards the publishers who ran him, some of the magazines dropped him because of The Other Dark Place.”
        “The industry has its horror stories then,” Karen replied.
        “The anthologies that the controversial writer helm carries an urban legend,” he adds.
        “Wait, I think I heard of the curse. Whoever fucked with the project after it got published would see their career turn to shit,” Karen related, “Those stories give me the creeps.”
        Time went on as they’ve talked. The nightmares they shared and spoke of the weird stories that were born out of fandom. The dark, perverse world it is as they were sitting in a diner inspired by a publisher’s macabre nightmares.
        “The fandom writers that came up in my fanzine were published by washed up editors who would try to get writers not to work with the rival publisher,” Michael related.
        He started to point out the darker side of fandom where bloggers lifted characters of the authors and created blogs blasting them, or appear as the author’s titles to bully him out of the business. One author lifted the title of the science fiction short story and his pen name as a main character then fucked with his personal life. He would edit his response to make him look like a sit-com fan fiction writer after he was pissed off that the writer appeared in a magazine along with an interview with that author.
        “The hazing, that is terrible,” Karen said in shock.
        “Yeah that is common in the small press when it comes to mass market assholes. I was published along with the writer he would rape on his blog when he posted a personal ad looking for a girlfriend, his ex-fiancée joined the bashing bandwagon,” He related as he took another bite of his burger.
        “I noticed you have a weird fiction fanzine. Mind of I take a look at it?” the waitress asked as she offered the check.
        Michael invited the waitress to sit down, “No go ahead.”
        “What fandom do you explore in the fanzine?” she asked.
        “Real person fiction with a weird horror slant,” Michael replied.
        “That is interesting and a bit taboo. Sort of like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” the waitress added as she graced her black fingernails across the pages.
        “Meta Horror is something I explored myself as a writer,” Michael implied.
        Karen pulled out her money to pay the tab and was intrigued by the Goth waitress because she could been a character in Misty’s novels.
        She kept thinking about the nightmarish atmosphere that Lilith Skeezix would portray – graphic displays of demise and death become the things that wander in her imagination.
        “This living out a Gothic short story that is in the mind of that controversial writer A.J. Poe,” Karen replied.
        “You read A.J. Poe?” the waitress asked.
        “I read his blog. I don’t like what he portrays in his work – sending slash writers to hell,” she replied.
        “A.J. Poe is one of the angriest writers out there,” Michael replies.
        “I heard he’s been in a lot of fist fights with rival publishers trying to lift his titles,” Karen adds as she looked over the pages of the fanzine.
        “He smashed an editor’s car with a sledgehammer charging $10 per hit,” Michael added, “he then walked into the bookstore where the editor was doing the book signing and said, ‘see this motherfucker. This is my royalties you fucked me out of. Take a look at your car; you will be riding a bicycle to every book signing you go to. You are nothing but motherfucking cocksucker.’”
        “He did that?” Karen asked with a shocked look on her face.
        “He did even more notorious things. He took a massive shit on a rival editor’s photograph and uploaded the aftermath. S.E. Cox leaked one of his rejected stories and on a blog called him a fan fiction writer,” Michael responded, “He wiped his ass with the rival editor’s manuscript. In a video uploading the aftermath of wiping his ass, he suggested to her to go back to having her breakfast on a mirror.”
        “Goddamn!” Karen responded a bit horrified.
        “The magazine publisher who published him owns this diner,” he responds.
        “Didn’t he tell a gay author to wrap a rainbow flag around his ass and light it?” she asked.
        “He did because he was bullied by the gay publishers because he wouldn’t accept gay content in his magazine. On the blogs they wanted to burn an effigy of him because he voted for Sarah Palin,” Michael added.
        “A Hardline Republican, that is rare. Conservatives have a darker imagination because they explore subject matter such as a liberal’s nightmare and see it from a nightmarish way,” Karen replied. She looked around the surroundings of the diner thinking about the dark, menacing nightmares that are conveyed within the works of author A.J. Poe.
        “Publishers would be hazed and got death threats for publishing A.J. Poe, some magazines caved in but other publishers refused to back down,” Michael inquired, “one washed up editor blogged that A.J. was a public figure.”
        “Jesus!” Karen shrieked.
        “The story gets a lot darker,” Michael added.
        “How do you mean?” Karen added.
        “One of the editors who tried to bury his career was found beheaded in a car accident with a manuscript of his with their byline on it,” he replied.
        “A true life horror story that would be more twisted than any writer in a horror fandom can imagine,” Karen replied as she was reading through one of the stories.
        “The beheading of the editor inspired his correspondent and table of contents mate, Nicholas Kane. Nicholas drew his macabre imaginings from his life,” Michael responded.
        “Goddamn – that would give anyone nightmares,” Karen gasped. The atmosphere of the diner heighted to the horror that Michael related, “had any of your contributors written anything about this?”
        Michael let out a sigh then lit up a cigarette.
        “They drew from Nicholas’ life for ideas.”
        "Also drawn from him writing about settings of stories set in real haunted places like one of his correspondents, Nicholas Cicerone, who wrote a Gothic horror story that was set in his old apartment in Justice, Illinois. He drew inspiration from living with a promoter,” Michael said as he related stories of the two authors, “Nicholas encouraged real person fiction writers to draw from his memoir and blog for ideas. He said he would publish an anthology of these writers just to break them out there.”
        “Nicholas Cicerone, I heard of him. I read some his nonfiction in a few small press magazines – one disturbing individual because you can’t believe that the horrific things he relates are real,” Karen relates as she took a sip of her coffee.
        She kept thinking of Cicerone’s dark nonfiction stories relating his horrors dealing with his health, acute cases of bronchitis where he was vomiting vast amounts of blood.
        “Looking at your fanzine here, any of the contributors wrote real person fiction stories based off either writer?” she asked.
        “They wrote stories based on Kane’s actual nightmares. Sometimes drew from A.J. Poe’s controversial antics in the industry for inspiration, both are sick individuals. They drew inspiration from the bullying that A.J. Poe gets from the authors who want to see him blacklisted,” Michael relates as he was pointing out the pages of the fanzine and showing Karen some of the more macabre stories in the pages.
        “A.J. Poe drew from the inspiration of the disappeared writer from the bloody pulps, Robert Blake, from the short story Haunter In the Dark by H.P. Lovecraft. He sometimes contributed to the Dream Cycle,” Michael adds.
        “H.P. Lovecraft,” Karen replies with a chill down her spine.
        “He was influenced by the books Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark and a magazine that was published in Illinois sometime in the 1990s that didn’t publish gore, sex or swearing,” Michael replied, “the magazine was sent to him by a reader who read his works on newsgroups. He was part of the manuscript trade with Nicholas Cicerone.”
        “He was first published when he turned nineteen years of age on his birthday,” Michael inquired. While observing the surroundings he realized he was sitting in a dark, surreal nightmare from a razor-wire imagination.
        “Some of the writers in the fanzine were fan fiction writers from A Nightmare On Elm Street fandom – they drew more from New Nightmare because of the original idea that the movie conveyed,” Michael related. He thought about the surroundings of Skeezix’s nightmarish paintings.
        “Talk about some Night Gallery shit here. These paintings give me the creeps,” Karen commented. She felt that her nightmares were coming to life as she thought about the paintings on the wall.
        “The world of fandom is a dark, frightening thing – blogs from people who have obsessions with wanting to ruin the careers of writers who criticize fan fiction writers based off their work. They called themselves fans but they are really not – just trolls who lift titles and characters of the writer and do things really perverse to them such as having them birth a baby out of their ass,” Michael relates as he was looking around, a sense of horror was growing stronger like he was the subject of a really twisted Twilight Zone episode.
        “Sort of like the people who are regulars on the group blog, fandom wank, where A.J. Poe called them ‘slash writing fags’ on video,” Karen replied.
        “They wanted his blood for that. A.J. Poe was just getting published when they would bully him. Some of the contributors of the fanzine lifted his life for a few stories then killing him off by having him burned to death,” Michael added as he sipped on his coffee.
        “What is the name of the contributor?” Karen asked.
        “She went by her real first name and a fake last name. Brucha Beresford. She was better known for inserting herself in comic book fandom,” Michael answered.
        “Didn’t she have a gossip blog that stole from his column?” Karen inquired.
        “A.J. Poe said that there is a special place in hell for that cunt,” Michael added as he thumbed out the story that Brucha contributed, “She wrote this just after
        A.J. told her off – ‘The Hack Fanatic’ which the ideas were lifted from his blog. She really hated Evangelicals with a passion, and portrayed him as someone who was the subject of a mass witch hunt because of the pro-Conservative stances he has. She had him in the story get graphically raped in the ass and was graphic with the detail of rape.”
        “Sounds like he struck a nerve,” Karen responded with a shocked look on her face.
        “These stories appeared on a journalfen.net community. They would take turns writing real person fiction off A.J. Poe and lift his titles, plots and ideas for the storylines,” Michael added.
        The waitress walked in listening on to the narrative.
        “You read A.J. Poe?”
        “We heard of him. I published a real person fiction writer who wants him drawn and quartered,” Michael replied.
        “Damn.” The waitress replied.
        “Wasn’t his testimony published?” she asked.
        “There was one real fiction writer who did a story based upon his Christian testimony. They were too freaked out to relate the details because the testimony revealed the dark side of the publishing world,” Michael replied.
        “Really they actually lifted his testimony?” the waitress asked with a shocked look on her face.
        “Writers in fandom will write just about anything,” Karen replied.
        “I believe it,” the waitress laughed.
        “A.J. Poe is a controversial figure,” Karen commented.
        “His world is some of the darkest and most frightening ever seen,” Michael commented as he spoke to the waitress while she graced her black fingernails across the fanzine.
        “Some of your contributors, do they dabble in the occult?” the waitress asked while getting unnerved at some of the submissions.
        “Black magic or Satanism, one of them tried to put a hex on Nicholas Kane,” Michael laughed.
        “Jesus! That is really fucked up. I pray to God that none of your contributors has a voodoo doll of me -- I keep a blog that follows Nicholas Kane, A.J. Poe and Nicholas Cicerone. I am good friends with the owner of this place, and she allowed me to illustrate their submissions. A.J. Poe gave me nightmares for weeks,” the waitress added as she looked at one story.
        Michael asked, “what is the story with Lilith Skeezix?”
        “She illustrated for a controversial magazine that has an urban legend called In The Depths,” the waitress answered with a sense of horror I her voice, “those illustrations leave a frightening sensation in me.”
        “Some of the contributors from the one magazine died off in horrifying ways, one was found nice and crispy,” the waitress added.
        “The fucked up world of the small press where magazine publishers go at it and have tug-a-wars over contributors they have in common,” Michael added, “One E-zine tore A.J. Poe a new one for criticizing queer horror writers.”
        “The editor got pissed off and publically called him a ‘Bible thumping bigot’ and blacklisted him from submitting,” Karen inquired, “The things that A.J. Poe says in the industry is the shit of internet legend. Fan fiction writers are deathly afraid of him because he did send a slash writer to hell. She fell into a coma and never woke up – the nightmare she was greeted to was a dark surreal hell where it was a lake of burning piss and rotted fecal matter.”
        “Now that is frightening, the retribution of an angry dark fiction author who is an Evangelical driven by righteous anger,” the waitress replied.
        “The story in here, was that written by his wife?”
        “Mrs. Poe why yes – she did an actor story featuring the ghost of Vincent Price haunting Old Hollywood. She echoed the works of Peter Straub and Richard Matheson’s A Stir Of Echoes,” Michael answered, “She didn’t get published like her husband did in major magazines but got noticed in real person fandom.” “Here’s the money for the food,” Karen said as she passed the cash to the waitress.
        “Thank you, and pleasant nightmares,” she replied.
        “This diner, charming but still gives me the chills. I could see where writers in the horror fandom and original writers would see inspiration – it is just really fucked up.”
        Karen and Michael both got up at the same time. Slowly exited the booth, but unnerved and greeted the waitress goodnight.
        “I wonder if the author of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark got his ideas from this place,” Karen inquired as she exited.
        They said nothing as they exited the diner. Just were left behind with experiences of horrors beyond their surreal nightmares.