Greetings, friends and fans!
“Panic! Horror In Space” is several different things at once: a sci-fi horror series, and also a parody of all the horror movies and paranormal investigator TV shows you can think of – good or bad, all scrambled together to make for very clever, entertaining reading! There are the obvious horror plot twists and plot devices, silly airheaded blond people whose hover-cars won’t start in the parking lot after midnight, or who try to run away on impossible high heel shoes, and the dashing brave young skeptics overdue for a date with the hungry entities in the basement of the abandoned mental hospital. Panic! has a whole universe of nasties at its disposal, as well as tangible tension and suspense!
I thought I’d revisit this series for a moment, and share with you a little more information: why I wrote it, how the series came about, and what each of its stories means to me on a personal level.
Why did I write the Panic! Horror In Space series?
Back in 2017 I already had two sci-fi series to my name, “Galaxii” and “Quantum“, and to be frank, I really wasn’t looking for a third. I had enough on my plate just getting done with both these series, which were mushrooming on their own and didn’t need any competition for my attention!
The “Panic!” all started sometime in 2017 when I was reviewing some of my older short stories and stumbled across a really old short-short story I’d written while still at high school, entitled “the Curse”. At the time I was looking for older material I could update, rewrite and include in future anthologies or collections of short stories, and “the Curse” sort of fell into that broad category. It was pretty terrible to be honest – after all, I was just 14 when I wrote it – and technically it was only a draft really, but something about it grabbed my attention and nagged at me – it wanted to be more, it wanted to be better – and above all, it wanted to be really, really horrible. That is, in the most genuine, entertaining sense of the word!
So a little later, with the original handwritten sheets in one hand, I sat at my laptop and began to type…
A few days later, I had completed the first draft of “Mercury Rising” and was feeling pretty proud of myself. I’ve always wanted to write some sort of space sci-fi horror story – and here, I felt – I’d finally done it! Yes there was horror, there was fear and terror and suspense – but there was also my trademark warped sense of humor that helped frame the story as a sort of real horror-cum sci-fi parody.
I loved it – and so did a number of test readers! Among some of the things said were:
- “I loved the suspense and thrill of Mercury Rising; I felt like any moment was going to break into horror. Zombies in space on a small, dead ship in the middle of nowhere is an utterly terrifying thought. I felt claustrophobic, like I was in that derelict with them.”
- “The scene of Flane and Vic walking the hull was brilliant in reference to the title. That brief moment of hope before the characters’ devastating disappointment is cunning. I liked that you didn’t put too much emphasis on the hope aspect; it felt like a natural hope from what you’d expect out of the perspective of two exhausted people going through an adrenaline crash.”
- “I thoroughly enjoyed the contact scenes; full of action and anxiety. The ending was a blanket of dread that fell over me. My heart sank to my stomach. I suspected the Mercury was infected but I wasn’t fully prepared for the confirmation.”
- “I have questions; like what the contagion is, how it spreads, how it affects lifeforms, but they’re best left to my imagination I think. So the vague clues were well placed. I felt like there should be more after the S.O.S, though I can’t think of a better way to end it. The unhappy ending is beautiful! So much despair.”
- “It’s refreshing to read some old-school action sci-fi that works more on the story than the plausibility of the sciences in it.”
Very much to my delight, “Mercury Rising” was met with a positive response. I felt chuffed – people liked it! So too did my other half, Kay – who really is to blame for there being a Panic! Horror In Space series at all! She pushed, prodded and encouraged me to rework the story and its characters and its sci-fi-horror-paranormal mash-up premise into a series. A series?! Hmmm…
You see, until then, I’d thought of “Mercury Rising” as a standalone story – perhaps the first of many unconnected sci-fi horror parodies… now though, I began to think of the feasibility of a series using the same ship and characters and just thrusting them into a series of amusing, entertaining and horrible conundrums featuring paranormal entities, fears and terrors. This inspired the series title “Panic! Horror In Space” in the first place – and yes, it sounded witty and humorous, because from the start I intended it to be a parody of all the legit horror movies, teen screams and space crisis I’d read, watched, loathed – and loved, all in a sci-fi setting.
Gettin’ Spooky With It
I began to consider the practical aspects of continuing the story of “Mercury Rising”, but I couldn’t easily see a way to do that without ruining the ending I’d so carefully crafted. Considering the cliff-hanger, desperate ending of “Mercury Rising”, that left me with a few challenges! I had to start at the beginning – right where “Mercury Rising” left off – a hopeless situation I hadn’t planned any way out of, and had to figure a way out for the unhappy crew of the starship Mercury (or at least, just a few of them)! Then I had to also find a plausible explanation for the crisis they found themselves in. To cut it to the quick, I’d spent a few days writing my characters into a mess their was no way out of – and now I had to write about how they got out of that mess without changing the original story to match! No pressure, then! Furiously revising the working premise as I went, I dove in and began writing “Mercury Resurgent”, sort of a part 2 of “Mercury Rising” – and when done, I felt I’d done the original story enough justice.
The next thing I realized was that even with both these short stories, each of which was long enough to be a novella on its own, I needed more stories to fill out a volume – the first volume of “Panic! Horror In Space”! After that, I realized I now had to think up new challenges for Captain Flane, Vic Chapman, Dr. Killian and the rest of the oft ill-fated crew of the Mercury! I delved into a bit of paranormal and supernatural research, reading up on cursed objects, hauntings, poltergeists and the like, and ended up binge-watching a couple of seasons of paranormal investigative TV shows – including “Ghost Adventures”. After a few more weeks of research and mulling over everything, I delivered the third story, “Dead Center”. In this episode, Flane – still very much a skeptic – and the crew of the Mercury, must escort the investigators and TV crew of the paranormal investigation show “Specter Adventures” to Floridia-7, the most haunted abandoned mining outpost in the galaxy! Shenanigans do ensue, as one might expect, and poor Flane ends up having to figure out how to explain losing the entire cast of the galaxy’s most watched paranormal network program to his frowning superiors – one of whom had developed a habit of chasing him all over Starbase 43, while taking wild swings at him with a golf club.
I will go on the record at this point to admit the characters of “Specter Adventures” were loosely based on the “Ghost Adventures” crew, up to and including descriptions of their physical builds and even plays on their names, but it was all in good fun and intended to be something of a tribute. While I may not necessarily agree with everything Mack Sagans – I mean Zak Bagans and co. say or do, I still enjoy the show and try to keep up to date with the newest episode. “Dead Center” is where I started to really cultivate and know the main characters of the series, stuck my feet deeper into the pants-legs of this fuzzy new world and wiggled my toes a little.
A little while after doing “Dead Center”, I finished “Through A Dark Glassy”, which revolved around a freight-carrier (or loderunner) crew getting hijacked by the preternatural stowaways in its cargo bay. I really lost myself in this story and have to admit that I took a shine to the tough space-pilot Able, and the little spook Johnny with his rugged old soccer ball. Both made a later cameo appearance in vol 3, and may again later too. I also laughed a lot during the writing stage, and laughed until I nearly split my sides – something which had become a habit while writing these stories!
At that point, once completed, I felt I had enough to fill the first volume of the series, and so it went to the publisher’s under the name “Static” before the end of 2017.
Almost immediately, I went on with vol 2, entitled “Life Signs” and began working on multiple new stories. The first one was “Miora”, which struck a deep emotional chord with me. It’s probably the most romantic story in the series so far, not that I usually go in for writing romance at all, but this was – as with everything I write, something different! There was something truly noble about Miora as a character, in the face of the total annihilation of her world and the lonely terror represented by the post-apocalyptic horror that framed her existence.
I’d wanted to write a story called “the Big Rain” for a very long time, inspired by the term used by science fiction writers to describe the phase in terraforming a planet where the process reaches a tipping point and the lifegiving rains begin and last for years and years. This was the next story I worked on for vol 2, but it involved a whole lot more than that – it also featured a cursed object left behind by a long-dead alien civilization, which had wrought havoc on the colonists since being unearthed by archeologists – and a Sheriff who said “feck!” a lot, and then a raid by a few rogue space pirates perfectly timed to occur right in the middle of poor Captain Flane’s attempt to unravel the mystery of the “Jug of Death”!
Volume 2 wasn’t quite thick enough yet, so I needed a third story. At that point I still had a story called “Lange’s Legacy” which was keeping the dust off part of my shelf. I’d previously published the original version of it as a standalone novella called “Space Vacation”, which I’d taken down after a few years and extensively revised and lengthened. I also for a time considered publishing that as book 4 in Galaxii, but it really didn’t fit there very well – it seemed to me like the other stories in that series were keeping it at arm’s length and eyeing it suspiciously!
After the redraft, it was long enough to be a novel, but there were other issues: it was also somewhat different from my usual writing style because it was written entirely in the first person, in the format of a really long letter – and besides, it seemed a bit more supernatural than that series demanded.
Instead I set it aside for a while until I waited for the right circumstances to present themselves – and before too long, they did. Given the premise for “Panic!”, I decided “Lange’s Legacy” would fit very well into that series, and decided to accommodate it by writing fore and after parts to frame the story nicely in the context of the shuttle in the story having been discovered and recovered by the I.S.S. Mercury. Fortunately, as anyone who’s read “Lange’s Legacy” can attest, they were not the first to discover it! “Life Signs” was first published some time in late 2017 or early 2018 I think, and before I got around to working on vol 3 I got side-tracked with other projects. I also did one or two revisions of vol 1 and 2 in the meantime as well, and that might be partly the reason for my murkiness on giving precise dates!
Above: illustrations I created to promote “Lange’s Legacy”.
Whatever the reasons for the delay, I started the first story in vol 3 (then titled “Dust”) sometime in early 2020. This story took Captain Flane and his sidekick Vic back to their roots – trying to figure out how an early space explorer vessel, which had gone missing 63 years prior had just turned up one day on a collision course with a starbase – given that it’s crew had seemingly vanished without a trace! And everywhere, the surfaces of the ship were coated with a fine, ubiquitous dust. In the decrepit shuttle bay, an unfamiliar word had been carved into the bulkhead with a screwdriver – “PARITINIAN”. The awful explanation Flane is presented with at the conclusion of his investigation is spine-chilling indeed.
By the time I finished “Dust”, I’d also only just started “The Song of the Drillipede”, and the next story “Hotel No-Tell” was just barely a notepad file with ten or twenty lines of notes in it! Because “Dust” seemed long enough to publish as a novella, I thought (in one of those moments when it seemed like a good idea). That’s how “Dust” came to be published as vol 3, containing only the one shorter story. I soon regretted doing that though, because compared to the previous two volumes it looked smaller – and it was. Even though I was immensely proud of “Dust”, it’s premise, plot and storyline, it still felt a bit like a cheat, honestly. I decided to revise it as soon as I’d finished the other two stories, to include them, but that process took until mid-2022.
I finished “Hotel No-Tell” before “The Song of the Drillipede”, but of the former I can truly say I had a blast of a time writing that story. It was one of those tales that flowed easily and virtually wrote itself! I went to town on the haunted hotel scenes, and delighted in contriving Commodore Link’s gradual, progressive breakdown from a staunch paranormal skeptic and harsh critic of Captain Flane, to a blubbering, resigned, fatalistic grump who’d been forced not only to publicly admit that Flane and his mission reports had been honest and on the level, but that he himself had issues confronting and dealing with paranormal events in his own life. By this time, aching sides seemed to have taken the place of writer’s cramp in my life, and no mistake! In summation, I found the ending of that story particularly satisfying, both for the sake of Vic and Flane’s honor (and their careers)! I had one more to complete for vol 3’s update, and I admit, I found it a daunting story to write!
“The Song of the Drillipede” was a good reason for me to do more paranormal research to brush up on people’s fears of clowns, or in the case of this story, mimes. Not only that, I also had to work out how to explain Captain Flane chasing after an entity into an antique 1890’s photograph landscape (not easy, I can tell you!). All in all though, it was good fun and I thoroughly enjoyed describing all the thrills, frights and adventures of Captain Flane, Vic Chapman and the variable crew of the starship Mercury! Once both the new ones were done, it was re-released in 2022 as “We All Fall Down“, containing “Dust”, “The Song of the Drillipede” and “Hotel No-Tell” – and best of all, vol 3 is also longer than either of its predecessors!
Books 1-3 were also released as audiobooks, narrated by Darla Middlebrook.
In 2023 I wrote and published book 4 in the series entitled “Terror In The Outblack“, which contains five different adventures of the intrepid crew of the I.S.S. Mercury. Here’s the blurb for the book:
“The Outblack: that treacherous swathe of under-explored space at the fringes of the Terran Empire, the very cutting edge of civilization – also known as the ass-end of space… a place where good fortune is almost as common as death, and the dead don’t always stay that way. These are the stomping grounds of Captain Stuart Flane and the crew of the starship Mercury – a shipload of jaded cynics who know from experience that there’s more to life than meets the third eye.
Braver than the harshest skeptic, Flane, his EXO, Vic Chapman, and Dr. Fred Killian, must face all sorts of terrors, from paranormal possession, to shadow figures from the lost starship Jacoby, to mysterious alien life-forms that ate the scientists at the research station on Tangerine-178, and a mysterious force that lobotomized the colonists on Ramus-12. Will they succeed? Or will they succumb to the terror of the Outblack?”
The story “Nine Tenths Of The Law” refers to the old idiom “Possession is nine tenths of the law” – a pun on the topic of supernatural possession. This story also represents the second time in the series that Starbase 43 has been the setting for a story. Parts of this story were inspired by and based on my own paranormal adventures, including an exorcism I participated in, in 2011. I enjoy taking the mickey out of religious fundamentalists – so for me, writing Nine Tenths Of The Law was side-splittingly cathartic. The surname of the zealot Paul de Sol, meaning “of the Sun” was a play on the zealotry of that character. It’s no secret that I often laugh out loud while writing, even while in company. It’s the best therapy I can think of, and the best part is, it’s free! Szandor Station’s name was inspired by the middle name of Anton Szandor LaVey. There was no particular reason for the name, it was originally going to be just “Sandor”, but “Szandor” just seemed way cooler. The theme of the final story, subtitled “Dysfunction”, is dehumanization – in the form of losing one’s basic identity in accordance with what defines a human being. I find that notion pretty damn terrifying.
Every time I finish a new “Panic!” book, I think “this is going to be the last one” – and then I get inspired to do another later on! So yes, there probably will be a fifth book!
In Conclusion
It’s been very much something like a roller-coaster ride writing “Panic!”, but I have to say I’ve enjoyed it a heck of a lot! Writing in serial format, approaching something like writing in episodes is also something I’ve grown to appreciate since embarking on this journey. I’m also very glad (and grateful) that I took my muse’s advice and started down this path.
With four volumes now in print (and three audiobooks narrated by Darla Middlebrook) Panic! Horror In Space is only getting warmed up! What the next story will be about, or what Flane and his comrades will face in volume 5, I can’t say as yet. As usual, time will tell.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my recollection of why I created this series, how it came about, and my reminiscences of the stories and what each of them mean to me!
“Panic!” is on sale at Smashwords in eBook format, and via Amazon in eBook, paperback and hardcover.
Further Reading: