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Artist Charles Hill's rendering of "Black Tooth Pond"
(a.k.a. Lester Pond), as it appeared in the 1970s/1980s
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My new novel,
The House at Black Tooth Pond, is scheduled for release by
Macabre Ink (the horror imprint of
Crossroad Press) on February 11, 2025. The ebook and paperback editions are now up for
pre-order
here. Just for
shits and giggles, I thought I'd write up a little missive about the novel's
setting. Also note that the novel is an expansion of my short story of the
same title, which recently appeared in the anthology
Shunned Houses, edited by
Katherine Kerestman and
S.T. Joshi.
The World of Black Tooth Pond"Black Tooth Pond" is a name I coined many years ago for a small body
of water hidden in the woods behind Martinsville High School. My introduction
to it came by way of a tenth-grade biology class outing to conduct
water-quality experiments. I'd had no idea the place existed, and finding this
pond, shrouded in morning mist, an array of black, tooth-like tree trunks
protruding from one end, really fired my imagination. The name "Black Tooth
Pond" immediately sprang to mind, and as far as I was concerned, that became
its official moniker. I discovered in later years that it was known as "Lester
Pond," after the name of the landowner. In 2010, I wrote a fairly lengthy blog
about my subsequent adventures at and around the pond, which you may find
here.
Last year, after more than a decade, I
decided to check it out again (blog entry
here). To my dismay, I found that, while the pond still existed, all the woods
around it had been clear-cut (as have all too many pristine woodlands in this
county). I was informed that those woods were considered valuable only for
their timber, which is, in my book, among the most deplorable attitudes of the
entire human species, so the landowners can go fuck themselves. But that's a
whole 'nuther story.
A fictional version of Black Tooth Pond became
a semi-regular setting in my tales of Aiken Mill/Sylvan County, Virginia, a
location loosely based on Martinsville and the surrounding counties of
Patrick, Henry, Franklin, and Floyd.
Left: Black Tooth Pond (a.k.a. Lester Pond) in December 2010; Right: the
pond in November 2023
The House of Cabiness
The place I call the
House of Cabiness — the "haunted house" of the title — was an old homestead out in another part of Henry County that
my brother, Phred, and I discovered back around 1990 while roaming the backroads in
his pickup truck, which was a regular activity in those days, oftentimes with his dog Luther accompanying. I'm not going to state that we necessarily went out to the boonies to fire up illicit substances or anything, but... well, sometimes, we might have done some not-at-all smart things.
On one of our nighttime outings, we found a little dirt road that led back into some pretty deep woods, so we decided to follow it. We could only drive so far before the road petered out into a rough footpath, so we parked the truck and continued
a piéd. After a while, I noticed that the silhouettes of the nearby trees against the starry sky became curiously boxlike, and I realized I was seeing the contours of a totally overgrown old house. Phred and I both loved finding such "haunted" places, so we wandered around the exterior of the structure as best we could with only cigarette lighters to light our way. Much in the way of Black Tooth Pond, this old place captured our imaginations, and so we decided to return to the house in daylight.
I don't recall whether it was the next day or sometime later, but anyway, Phred and I did return, this time with flashlights, and made a thorough exploration of the inside. Did you ever see The Blair Witch Project? Well, the inside of this house looked very much like that. We found a huge stack of old mail, twenty to thirty years old, some unopened, addressed to various members of the Cabiness family. (In the novel, I changed this to "Caviness," simply because the "cabin" part of the name somehow seemed a little too much given the title of the tale.)
The most ridiculous part of all this was that, not long afterward, one of my brother's college friends, who was getting married, decided to come visit Phred the night before his wedding, and — for his de facto "bachelor party" — we ventured out to the house. The next thing I knew, my brother, his friend, an additional friend, and I all piled into that house with not one flashlight to our names and went wandering about. I know not how, but we avoided the plentiful, bottomless holes in the floors; went up the fucking rickety stairs; and, somehow, did not die.
I returned to the place a few times after that and took some photographs, both inside and out, but that was all within a few months of our original adventure. I'm quite certain that the house no longer exists; for one thing, it was on the verge of falling down over thirty years ago, and for the second thing, Google Maps shows that in that area — sadly, as around Black Tooth Pond — all the woods have been fucking cut down. God awmighty, sometimes I despise humanity for the damage we inflict on our very home.
Anyhoo, all this gives you a bit of backstory for the settings you'll find in both the story "The House at Black Tooth Pond," and the novel of the same name. I surely do hope this whets your appetite.
Bye now!
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Artist Charles Hill's rendering of the House of Cabiness,
"cleaned-up"
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Left: My pen & ink rendering of the old house, circa 1990; Right: a
photo of the actual location, circa 1990
