James R. Benn On Finding Inspiration in the Strangeness of Everyday Moments

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Inspiration can come from the strangest places. Or sometimes it creeps into your imagination from simple, ordinary events. Recognizing those everyday moments as inspirational is often the key to discovering a story idea. This is accomplished by observant awareness combined with the facility to squirrel away notions and ideas in your own mansion of memories.

My short story collection, The Refusal Camp, includes two speculative tales, a bit of a departure from my historical fiction wheelhouse. Both came about via everyday inspiration. 

Cemeteries are great places for name hunting, and during a stroll through the aptly named Riverview Cemetery in Essex, Connecticut, my wife, Deborah Mandel, and I noticed a headstone with an intriguing name.

Guy Tupper. I can’t articulate what attracted me to this moniker, but as soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to write a story featuring one Guy Tupper. In what role, I had no idea.

Then we went to the movies. 

In 2019, the film Yesterday was released. It had an intriguing premise. What if you woke up to discover that everyone else but you had forgotten both the music and the very existence of the Beatles. But you’re a musician, and you can recreate their songs for a world in which they are brand new. In Yesterday, the struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik (nicely played by Himesh Patel) becomes the unexpected heir to the Beatles’ music, leading him to a life of fame he’d only dared dream of.

All does not work out well, culminating in a performance of Help! which Jack sings from a rooftop. This anguished version of that song, delivered with pain and longing for a vanished life, leaves the viewer in no doubt that Jack is indeed begging for help. But what grabbed me most in the movie was the overall concept, and how close it came to an oddball daydream/fantasy I’d nurtured myself. 

I’d read science fiction heavily as a teenager, leaning into a fascination with tales of time travel. If one were catapulted into the past, I wondered, what advantages could be taken? Buy Microsoft and Apple stock early? Sensible, but far too mundane. 

What could one take on this journey? Books, of course. My books? Sure, but why not think big? Current bestsellers would do well twenty, thirty, or more years ago, right? All these notions fell flat due to logistics, if not the actual absence of a time travel machine, but Yesterday reawakened the idea. The film wisely sidesteps the how of the world’s forgetfulness (a planet-wide blackout is alluded to) and goes right into the implications.

It was time to write my time travel story. And I knew Guy Tupper was going to be the lead character. The time travel mechanism? That was still murky.

Then I recalled the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland which consists of a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets with accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. The purpose of the collider is to study cosmic rays and black holes. But skeptics have wondered about the possibility of a catastrophic runaway fusion reaction.

Perfect for my needs.

Then I discovered that a Superconducting Super Collider was to be built in Texas (of course) which would be 87.1 kilometers around and be the world’s most powerful and energetic super collider.

Even better.

It was never built, which is fine since in my short story Glass it is thoroughly destroyed by the collision of a proton and a sterile neutrino. The cosmic blast sends an iPad through a micro black hole, and it ends up alongside a desert road in 1965, with an attached, but severed, power cord.

Oh, and it’s loaded with the complete works of Stephen King.

This mysterious object is found by the down-on-his-luck Guy Tupper, who is driving out of Waxahachie after being fired from his job. He calls it “Glass” and is determined to figure out what it is.

Cue Help!

But wait, there’s more to the story of Guy Tupper. After writing a time travel story with Guy center stage, Debbie and I grew curious about the real Guy Tupper. My wife’s friend is a genealogist, and through her research we discovered that Guy’s wife, Mary Durham, had worked in service to a family in Essex. They paid for the plot and gravestone for both husband and wife when Mary died while in their employ. 

She also found out that Guy Tupper is not in his grave!

Where is Guy Tupper?

When is Guy Tupper?

And will he ever make another appearance? Time travel is a tricky thing. Proximity to the aftermath of a black hole may have strange side effects.

And if I ever disappear, along with my collection of books by Philip Kerr, don’t ask too many questions.

While Glass is clearly science fiction of the closed-loop time travel subgenre, The Secret of Hemlock Hill is a ghostly tale of the Gothic variety. Ever since reading Shirley Jackson’s masterful The Haunting of Hill House, I’ve been fascinated by how ghost stories are constructed. What Jackson did was to focus on the interactions of the human characters. The true horror of Hill House is not contained within the haunting by ghostly specters but in the deeply buried secrets of the living residents. While Hill House itself is close to being the protagonist of the novel, the men and women who inhabit it bring out the real terror in this tale. Ghosts are scary. People are terrifying.

When it came time to create my own ghost story, I took my inspiration from a source close to home. My wife, to be exact.

Or to be even more precise, a ghost named George who befriended her decades ago.

Debbie was a freshman at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, when a group of students invited her to go along on a grave-robbing jaunt. They’d somehow discovered the burial site of a Civil War soldier and intended to dig up his remains. Whether it was for souvenirs or simply for the macabre value, she doesn’t recall, but she declined to go along, protesting that it was a violation of the dead. 

Late that night, the pay telephone in the hallway rang. (If that doesn’t make sense to you, ask someone who went to college before the cellphone era.) Awakened, Debbie answered it. It was the dorm’s house mother, whose residence was directly below, telling her to stop all the noise, accusing her of moving furniture around. Another phone call followed with the same complaint hours later. All was quiet in Debbie’s room, but the house mother still insisted she heard noises.

More odd occurrences followed. Records stacked on a record player were found unaccountably flipped. Objects left in one place ended up elsewhere amid other strange doings. Mystified, Debbie and her roommate decided to do some research.

This was pre-Google, so they got out the Ouija board.

That’s when George Smith revealed himself. George was the Civil War soldier whose grave was violated, and he’d taken up physic residence with Debbie the night of the noise complaints because she had tried to talk the others out of their graverobbing. Later, when she asked the offending students if they had gone through with it, they readily admitted to it, proud of their foul deed. She asked for the name on the gravestone.

It was George Smith.

A common enough name. Research (of the modern-day type, not via Ouija) shows that dozens of men by that name in Maryland served in the Union army. But George stayed with Debbie for years, a benevolent haunting presence. He was never frightening, unlike the ghouls who dug up his remains. George hasn’t made himself known for quite a while, so perhaps he is at rest once again.

In my story, George Smith and Lucinda Morrow are a doomed couple who, when they cannot spend their lives together, decide to never be separated after death. As souvenir-hunting scavengers threaten their peace, it is up to Deborah Collins to protect the secret of Hemlock Hill.

I hope my reimagining of George in The Secret of Hemlock Hill hasn’t disturbed his slumber. But I do wonder why Debbie is moving furniture around in the other room . . .

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