H.C. Duryea — The Man Behind the Forge
Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not a young writer finding his voice. I found my voice decades ago. I just kept it locked in a drawer.
Since the fourth grade I’ve been drawing. Since my early teens I’ve been writing with the kind of obsessive passion that makes sensible people nervous. Somewhere along the way, I realized writing had an edge over drawing — you’re not trapped in one image for weeks. Every day you can wake up in a different world, fight a different war, bleed a different kind of ink. When life got heavy, the stories were the escape hatch. Scribbled in margins, scratched out on breaks, hammered out late at night when the rest of the world had the good sense to sleep.
The influences?
Pull up a chair.
I came up on pulp science fiction — Asimov, Bradbury, Dick, Silverberg, Dickson, Anderson, Foster. The kind of writers who understood that a good idea poorly dressed still beats a bad idea in a tuxedo. Then Tolkien cracked the door to fantasy open, and Tolkien being Tolkien, it was a hell of a door. Brooks walked me further in. Pratchett showed me you could be funny and devastating in the same sentence. McCaffrey. Burroughs. Howard — always Howard. Drake. Donaldson. The 2000 AD comics and Judge Dredd taught me that grimdark wasn’t a genre, it was an attitude. You want grim? Read Dredd. You want dark? Read Dredd again.
Today it’s Lynch, Butcher, Abercrombie, Hobbs, Salvatore. Writers who understand that heroes bleed, villains have reasons, and nobody gets out clean.
The result of all this? Hundreds of drawings. A treasure trove of material — bits of dialogue, outlines, unfinished screenplays, fragments of novels and novellas, short stories in various stages of completion — enough to fill a forge and then some.
So why now?
Why TurnScrew Press?
Why finally pull the drawer open?
Because my wife told me to. She looked at me the way only a spouse can and said, “I’m never going to see any of your stories published. Do it for the kids. Do it for the world. You have a lot of stories to share.”
She was right. She always was.
And my old friend Jesse — a fan of my work from the beginning — would have had plenty to say about me finally getting my ass in gear. Most of it unprintable. All of it deserved.
So here we are. The Forge is open. The stories are waiting.
Come in if you dare.
— H.C. Duryea, The Forgemaster