Houston can be terrifying, but you’d never know it from horror movies. The city lacks a defining monster like Chicago’s Candyman or the endless screen vampires of New Orleans. The best Houston has managed is the jinn from the 1987 cult classic The Outing (sometimes called The Lamp), but author Mike James is looking to change that.
James, 45, has spent the majority of his adult life in various Houston bars or the DJ setups of its most infamous strip clubs. When he talks, it’s with a soft, world-weary drawl vaguely reminiscent of Townes Van Zandt. Living in the dark and grimy shadows of Houston inspired him to pen horror stories about the city he loves. His latest collection, Houston As F*ck, comes out October 13.
“I was hanging out in Poison Girl and Cecil’s, talking about horror movies with strippers, and I thought it would be a great selling point to set [the stories] here, get some eyeballs on them,” he says. “When I was younger, I had film aspirations, but being a broke kid, I couldn’t afford film equipment. I could afford pens and paper, though.”
Houston As F*ck is a wandering series of horror vignettes mostly set around James’s beloved Montrose. He has a granular style like his literary hero, Bret Easton Ellis, that hyper-focuses on locations and settings in the city. A reader can chart an entire story on foot from James’s descriptions, enjoying a walking tour of Houston’s seedier parts in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In “$ome People Just Need Killing,” two hitman kill their way though the no-tell motels off Bissonnet and U.S. 59, stop off for some inspiration from samurai flicks at the River Oaks Theatre, and end up taking a mass murder job at the Sky Pool. It’s a rambling tale of grisly assassination and pop culture debates that could have walked fully formed out of a Tarantino flick, but the twist ending is something few will see coming.
James wrote the story in a fugue during a battle with COVID.
“When I finally contracted COVID, about Day Six, the little voice told to write to take my mind off the pain,” he says. “I don’t even remember writing it, but there was a completed story and all the notes for two more.”
Throughout the story, most of James’s stories in fact, there is a love of the dirty side of Houston. Readers can feel the ghosts of long-closed clubs and the atmosphere of Westheimer and Montrose after sundown before the neighborhood became sanitized and gentrified.
“Houston has changed since I was a kid,” he says. “It’s crazy how this town has evolved over the years. I remember this city being ugly and grimy. Now you see art everywhere. When I was younger, I had a zeal for trying to figure out the pulse of the city while working the bars and clubs. It was like doing therapy, but in print, which is way cheaper.”
James’s work is also unashamedly queer. Most of his protagonists are bisexual, though being a horror author not all of them are heroes. While there remains a hint of the institutional oppression from the days before Lawrence and Obergefell, he reminds readers that Houston has always been a place where queer people thrive in spite of threats. There are almost no fictional stories in any medium that capture Houston’s LGBT scene from these important time periods, and James’s books are a welcome, if gruesome addition to the culture milieu.
One local fan of James’s is Joanie King. She and several friends became regular customers of James’s as he pours drinks at Warren’s Inn on Saturdays. King admits that she’s not much of a horror fan, but was instantly taken with James’s stories after reading them.
“My feelings are hurt whenever I drive through Montrose because everything I grew up with is gone,” she says. “Reading him is a nostalgia trip. I lived in Hyde Park for many years next to the 611 club. He did his homework. He took the things that no longer exist and made them real again.”
James definitely knows his history. His 2020 novel Houston Texas Blood draws heavily from one of H-Town’s most notorious murders. In 2010, Lydell Elliott Grant stabbed Aaron Scheerhoorn. Scheerhoorn ran to the Blur Bar bleeding from wounds, but was denied entry. Grant attacked him again at the door, and Scheerhoorn died later at the hospital.
“Some homophobe stabbed the guy and no one in the club would help him,” says James. “That did a number on me.”
Grant was eventually sentenced to life in prison. There’s a lilac tree planted near the site of Scheerhoorn’s attack in his memory. James does his best to capture that sense of closure and justice in Houston Texas Blood and other stories.
“He’s the last romantic,” says King of James. “The last guy on the planet who thinks there’s going to be a happy ending to every meeting.”
James has plenty of plans to continue telling dark Houston stories. He was here for Hurricane Harvey and thinks that would be an ample place in which to mine plots. As he works behind the bar at Warren’s he adds to his collection of stories from customers, dropping them in with his own experiences spinning at strip clubs and adventures running themed nights at the long-gone Fitzgerald’s.
“Reading my books, you’re going to see feel and hear Houston in a way you’re not from anyone else,” he says. “It’s a challenge and a chore to keep these scenes alive, but I love it.”
Houston As F*ck is available Friday, October 13 from Amazon. Self-published. 320 pages. $16.99.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
