If you had to list the demographic attributes of the sort of friends I have, these probably would not be among the characteristics you'd suggest: Southern, Jewish, radical (yet Zionist), "of a certain age", pro-smoking, pink-drink-drinking, NASCAR-watching, oft-married, and deceased. And yet, that's Kelly Goldberg.

I met Kelly via the Horror Writers Association, which in the early years of the 2000s was undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. It was a professional association for a professional field which, to be blunt, no longer exists. No major publisher has its own dedicated horror line, and the horror that is published is generally published as something else (fantasy, SF, thriller, mainstream, romance) or is released in PBO format with a six-week shelf life. The magazines of the genre come out at more or less arbitrary intervals and at the time three cents a word was considered a "professional" rate. Let's put it this way: coming out as a mass market original in, say, the mystery field is considered a bit of a black mark against the book, and possibly even the author. In horror, hundreds of writers aspire to mass market original deals.

Kelly, being a real writer -- travel, sports, you name it -- knew this, and she also knew that HWA was fanboy central. Fanboy, especially, as women can't write horror and vampires mean fruity romance, and real horror is all about the blood and guts and assrape. Girls don't like assrape. So Kelly engaged in her favorite hobby: Fucking With People For No Reason. She'd mess with anyone, and back in those days even a question as basic as "So, you want to start a magazine and not pay anyone to work on it?" was akin to pointing at someone and screaming "Child molester!" Kelly herself had fallen for the hype a few times, and let some good stories go to venues with circulations in the double-digits. So it became our little mission to professionalize the HWA through the healing power of obnoxiousness. We did well too. Now the pro rate is 5? a word, and would-be members actually have to sell something in order to join. Plus, occasionally women members are taken seriously!

I got to chatting with Kelly frequently. We talked about politics, writing, and whether NASCAR or professional wrestling was more Triple-A (Authentic! Awesome! Americana!) She interviewed me for the website Dark Fluidity (now sadly defunct) on the occasion of the release of my first novel Move Under Ground, and asked insightful questions about being the child of immigrants and mastering English for the family, as Kerouac (the protagonist of my novel) had done decades before for his. It takes a subtle mind to tell an author something about his own novel that he doesn't know.

Then she asked if I could come down to North Carolina and visit her and her husband. We could get some BBQ and take in a local wrestling show. Nothing beats fat guys in sequined onesies stomping around the local VFW pretending to be heroes. I said, "Sure", as one does when one is living in a basement unsure of whether or not to declare personal bankruptcy, and didn't think much of it. We chatted on AIM all the time and also thought nothing of her degenerating typing skill. I just thought she was drinking one of her pink drinks while at the keyboard. "In the South, a woman can drink 'til she's shit-faced, but she's still a lady if she's drinking pink drinks," she'd say.

Kelly Goldberg was dying. Cancer. Tumors in the brain. She kept a blog, and in posts filtered from the eyes of the general public, she would write, "had another super-great day where i was insulting and rude to innocent bystanders, obstructionistic to well-menting sysatems and --of course-- did all i could to insure that all i encountered experianced as much angst or guilt as possible." Her last post was titled "even more fun with terminal illness." She didn't have sufficient control to hit the shift key and capitalize anymore. Shit luck for a writer. January 2005, she died.

I had moved to California by then, and got the call very early in the morning. I called my girlfriend at the time, who was on the East Coast and sleeping, and then my friend Tim at Locus to make sure the magazine ran an appreciation, which I wrote. Then I got a message from Ron, Kelly's widower.

Kelly had stories, and a collection's worth. Horror, women, and travel were the themes. It was, at one point, supposed to be published by Lone Wolf, a small press that specialized on publishing horror on CD-Rom, but that publisher -- hell, that whole medium -- went belly-up. Could I edit the files he had, and get a book together. Kelly had specifically instructed Ron to put me in charge of this, as I would do right by the work. Unfortunately, the publishers of Kelly's novels, Time Warner's iPublish and Design Image Group, had both gotten out of the business, so I had to come up with something else.

First there was a title. Consulting with Kelly's friends the novelists Karen Taylor and Scott Nicholson, I came up with a title, Queen of the Country, after Kelly's wish that one day she'd be declared queen of the country where everyone sleeps till noon. The HWA, now much more amenable to actual working writers, dedicated its anthology Dark Arts to Kelly's memory. Kelly was everywhere! I wanted to release Queen of the Country as a signed, limited edition, and people were hungry for it.

It took a while. Sean Wallace at Prime was to do the book in time for World Fantasy 2005. Editor Eliani Torres donated a free copy edit, and we overnighted the ms to him just a week and a half before the convention. There were so many changes that needed to be done -- the files had been in very rough shape, and Kelly's typing wasn't what it had been in those final days -- that Sean couldn't do it in time to get the book out. Then Prime's business model changed, so Sean was busy launching other imprints. He also got married and for a time lost the copy-edited manuscript. Ron, who had also promised Kelly that the book would come out, was ready to self-publish, which I knew Kelly didn't want. My own life had turned upside down: I'd moved to Vermont, and finished a book, and my own publisher went bankrupt, and I returned to graduate school and then moved again, to Boston. World Horror 2006 came and went, as did World Fantasy 2006, and Readercon 2007. Life was conquering death in its own sick way, as the business of making a living pushed Queen of the Country further out of our minds.

Well, not Ron's mind. He remembered the promises and made sure I stuck to them. We decided to go with a trade paper original, reasonably priced, using digital short run technology.

Finally, we found the manuscript again, and writer Seth Cully tirelessly entered the thousands of corrections necessary to create a manuscript worthy of Kelly. A few days ago, I got a box. Queen of the Country is here. Bow down to this!

EDITOR'S NOTE: We're all grown ups here, but if you're easily offended by strong language, this is the time to move on. Kelly pulled no punches, which is why so many people loved her. While I have everyone's attention, you can and should order Queen of the Country from Prime Books.


From "Melungeon Moon": Gertrude Gertrude Stein Stein. A fuck is a fuck is a fuck.

"Lamed Vov": The beautiful young woman was so pale, she twinned an albino. Her mouth was a wound in her dead white face: words bled out.

"Another Vietnam Story": Hail Mary, full of grace. An FNG. An FNG he did not even know, bawling like a beacon in the suddenly silent forest. Welcome to Happy Valley, FNG! Friendly fire, that's what got you. Now die quiet soldier, Charlie can hear you cry.

"Tea in Kensington Garden": The late Princess jerked on my arm until I swiveled to face her.

She leaned very close, her eyes trapping mind. I'd have felt her breath if she had any. "I want your body. I want to eat piles of cereal, and have sex, and feed squirrels. You don't really have a life; you're just a drab little wren flitting through the streets. Why should you get to live?" She shook me by the shoulders; my head flopped back and forth as though I were in a car crash. "Why? Why? Why?"

"Moral Ambiguity Between Malta and Sicily": The Mediterranean is a hurting blue, a molten sapphire so gorgeous it burns my eyes when I look upon it. Have you seen it? No -- well then I can't describe it.

"Last Exit to Darlington": "Did you ever shove a beer bottle up a girl's cunt?" Wayne asked. His tone was bored, polite-conversational, just making talk.

"Whatever Happened To?": Not much feels good when you're poor.

Even less when you sense, when you know that Them Next Door are doing something horrible and you're too bored or too weak or too self-obsessed to stop them.

"The Forty-Third Moment of Death": "I'm going to kill myself."

"Not now."

"Don't get your hopes up, bitch."

"Eventually, in the last moment of my death."

"Answer the phone!"

"Why should I go on living?"

"Who's living?"

"Baby Trey's Daddy": He was staring right at you with bedroom eyes in a cologne ad, gulping diet soda and sweating on the TV and weraing nothing but his drawers all over every women's magazing in the Kwik-Pik.

"Pity Fuck": In the near-death light of predawn that turns all colors to ash, I lay listening to the soft breathing of the anonymous young man beside me.

"Catchfence": The waitress put the plate before the redhead, who near purred in anticipation before she began eating a human heart. The redhead shimmied a bit, and her breasts threatened to spring from the top of her scoop neck sweater. Hank Williams was on the jukebox. "Your Cheatin' Heart."

"Party At The End Of Time": I've always liked Inquisition themes and Nazi parties, as well. But this one will have to do."

"Shades": I hate waking up next to a corpse. That's not true, you know. That's just what I told Dr. Freaky.

"Martyr's Music": Within three weeks, everyone except his mother and a few webmasters crouched before their monitors plastering virtual reality with photos of Palestinian martyrs forgot he ever existed.

Nothing had changed.