Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

Another time, while returning to the US from a business trip in Japan, my coworkers and I learned that the police officers accused of beating Rodney King had been acquitted, setting off riots in Los Angeles. We were supposed to change planes there, but we decided to reroute through San Francisco after hearing unconfirmed reports that people were shooting at airplanes landing at LAX.

In July 2017, prior to the Bangor premiere of The Dark Tower , Richard Chizmar and I were in a restaurant (across the street from Bangor International Airport, as it happens), when Stephen King approached us. “I just had an idea,” he said. “An anthology of stories about all the bad things that can happen to you when you’re flying. I’ll introduce the stories.” To Rich, he said, “You’ll publish it.” He suggested a couple of titles, then said, “Someone needs to help me find some more stories.” He turned to me. “That’ll be your job.”

So that’s how this anthology came about. I immediately thought of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and I set to work looking for other examples of scary stories involving airplanes and flying.

There are plenty of novels and films with terrifying scenes on airplanes. The gold standard is probably Arthur Hailey’s 1968 Airport . Hailey started his writing career with a script called Flight into Danger , which sounds like a good title for a companion to this anthology. I read the novelization, Runway Zero-Eight , as a teenager, and I’m pretty sure I also saw the TV movie based on it: Terror in the Sky . Airport was, of course, turned into a feature film that spawned several sequels during the 1970s, but the hilarious spoof version Airplane! is probably better known these days. And who could forget Air Force One or Red Eye or Snakes on a Plane ? There’s no end to the kinds of disasters that can occur when you’re trapped in a metal tube five, six, seven miles up.

The sub-sub-genre of scary airplane short stories is much smaller, I discovered. Finding good candidates took some work. Google search results were dominated by real-life scary anecdotes about bad flying experiences—much like the one Steve relates in his introduction. I also sought suggestions from the “hive mind,” posting a query on Facebook, and was rewarded with recommendations for stories I might not have found otherwise. So, hive mind, many thanks!

While searching for candidates for the anthology, I was working on an essay for the Poetry Foundation and was reminded that one of Steve’s favorite poems—one he has mentioned several times in interviews—was inspired by the real-life story from 1962 of a flight attendant who was sucked out of an airplane when the emergency door popped open in flight. I asked Steve if he thought we should include it in the anthology. As it turns out, he was thinking the same thing. Thus we end with a real-life tragedy made poetic and metaphorical.

I was also reading Joe Hill’s novella collection Strange Weather while working on this book. “Aloft” starts with an anxiety-ridden young man trying to impress a woman by going sky-diving. Nerves kick in and he tries to back out at the last minute, but he ends up having to bail out of the airplane when the engine quits. We were pleased when Joe told us that he had another—deeply disturbing—idea for a story that was a perfect match for this book. Owen King brought Tom Bissell’s story to our attention.

Does this anthology cover everything that could possibly go wrong on a flight? Absolutely not. As I was writing these notes, an alert went out about a passenger who went through Chicago O’Hare while suffering from the measles. So even if your flight makes it safely to its final destination, what other passengers might you carry home with you? The possibilities are endless. Something to ponder as you pack for your next journey.

Although this anthology consists mostly of previously published stories, I suspect there aren’t many people out there who’ve read more than a few of them before. I had only read four of the works before I embarked on this project. It has been a voyage of discovery and we are very pleased with the group of stories we’ve assembled.

Once we had a table of contents mostly established, I revisited “The Langoliers” for the first time in years, and found unexpected connections between this novella—novel, really; it’s as long as this entire anthology—and the other tales we had selected. This is the Stephen King universe, of course, where a character named Jenkins in “The Langoliers” muses that “you can’t appear in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination,” so such things shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did.

Consider, if you will, the self-same Jenkins, an author who at first describes their plight in terms of “locked room” mysteries. One of the stories I’d found was a locked room mystery that takes place in an airplane bathroom. Jenkins goes on to say that a real-world mystery wasn’t an appropriate metaphor for their predicament. “It’s too bad Larry Niven or John Varley isn’t on board,” he says. Wait…what? Who did we have in the table of contents other than Mr. Varley himself?

And then there’s the discussion about how to get back through the wormhole. Their solution could conceivably “turn the plane into Jonestown,” Jenkins says. And where does the cargo in the opening story in our anthology come from? Uh-huh. Jonestown.

It was like it was all meant to be. I love that kind of discovered symmetry.

And now, an important message from your two pilots up here in the cockpit. We would like to thank the passengers on this flight. We know you had a choice of carriers and we appreciate very much that you agreed to join us on board. We hope the flight wasn’t too rough, but you knew what you were getting into when you boarded this plane. Maybe one of the passengers helped smooth out the rough patches. These things happen, you know.

Thank you, too, to their travel agents, who arranged their journeys and made sure they arrived at their final and intended destinations. Many of the passengers in these stories were not quite so fortunate.

We would also like to thank our cabin crew, led by Chuck Verrill, for helping ensure a smooth trip for everyone involved, and the ground crew at Cemetery Dance Publications, who maintained this airship and made sure it was in working condition—in particular CD’s crew chief, Rich Chizmar, and operations agent Brian Freeman.

Now, if you’ll please obey the lighted signs, return your seat backs and tray tables to their full, upright and locked positions, stow any items you may have brought out during flight, turn off any electronic devices you have been using, we’re about to land. It might be bumpy, so brace yourself—this is your co-pilot’s first flight. Remain seated until the aircraft is parked at the gate and the seat belt sign is extinguished. Be careful opening the luggage bins as items are guaran-damn-teed to have shifted during flight and those heavy bags are just waiting to conk you on the head.

Oh, and if you ever see someone reading this book at an airport or—better yet—on an airplane, please take a picture and send it to us. That would be awesome!

Bev Vincent

The Woodlands, Texas

March 8, 2018

Ambrose Bierce(1842-1914) is perhaps best known as the author of The Devil’s Dictionary and the frequently anthologized short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” He worked as a printer’s apprentice and enlisted during the American Civil War, an experience that informed much of his subsequent writing. For a quarter of a century, he wrote and worked for newspapers on both coasts. In search of further wartime experience, he disappeared while traveling to Mexico to observe the revolution led by Pancho Villa. His fate is unknown.