>>Josh Kuntzman: Alright I guess this is a long lead in to the story that blew my mind. There was

>>Speaker: Now I just need you to fill out that last sheet.

>>Josh Kuntzman: Alright, so, when I was a little kid I always grew up with monster stories being read to me, at night, it would be the (...), came out of the sea, he'd get all the others but he couldn't get me, and then my dad would turn off the lights.  And I would got to bed with the thought of the (...) going through my head. And we also had the Oxford book of children's poetry, so my dad would read me, stories like the, you know, "He'll grind your bones to make his bread, and he's just waiting to get you." And he was very good at reading those last lines. Slowly and potently I guess for a kid. So it's like "And he's waiting, just waiting, to get you." Boom, lights go off, and I'm left with monsters in my mind. So, and you know all my toys were monsters and I spent a lot of time with toys when I was young. And I always felt, by myself, drawn to the scary creatures and sympathizing with them more, you know, psychoanalyze me later, but... So I grew up with that, and then it started coming out in my writing, the first one I remember doing, I wrote in 5th grade it was called "The Zombie." And it was served me, these ideas started coming to come out of that connection to monsters and monsters within their deeper psychological, whatever. And the connection to humanity. So the Zombie poem I sort of recited off the top of my head it's back from 5th grade, it was:
"In the middle of the night, the leaves made an eery sound, I heard a noise and turned around and saw it emerging from beneath the ground. It's eyes glowed a brilliant red, I could tell by the smell that it was dead. I started running toward the sea, it turned around and looked at me. Rotting, clotting, flesh and blood, clomping, stomping through the mud. My arms were hurt, my legs were sore, I felt that I could run no more. And just before the light of day, he grabbed my arm and ran away. He took me to his lair late that night, when we got there we had a fight, jumping pushing tumbling kicking I gave the monster quite a licking and got away without much harm, but on my leg I had his arm. I ran down about thirty blocks, when I got home it was 12 O'clock, I laid down on my daughters bed, my wife gave me ice for my throbbing head. When I looked in the mirror I saw a sight, that turned my face completely white. My flesh was rotting, I didn't look well, now I was under the zombie's spell." So I submitted that for a 5th grade poetry contest and it lost to something that was fluffy, but that's alright, I'm cool. But anyway, (coughing) more down the road I kept on thinking about monsters and writing about monsters and things like this. And reading about monsters but it always left something lacking. I read Steven King's "Cycle of the Werewolf" which my cousin Eric gave me, and that I thought was great. Lines like "Love is like dying" and things like this. There was this beauty, and this arrogance to like werewolves and moonlight creatures and things like this. But there was also something I couldn't explain, like this connection between mankind and animals, and that we needed these creatures. And it all came down to when I was in the library walking around and looking for a book to read. You know, I had read the Steven King stuff and I wanted to, I had a hunger for something that wasn't fiction because I wanted to know that these creatures are real. So I started reading non-fiction stuff, like there was a book called "Bloodlust" that I was reading about vampires, but that's really just about people who drink blood as a sort of fetish. And that didn't do it for me. What did it for me was this old book called, it's "Reverent Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves." And it was in the non-fiction section, and I was like "Whoa, werewolves in the non-fiction section." So I pulled this book out, and started reading it. And it's like this anthropological study of werewolves throughout human culture. You know the leopard people of wherever, there were like Were-deer from Scandinavia or Denmark or whatever. There are these were-animals, these animal-people in all cultures. And that is sort of speaks to this underlying animal instinct that we can never get rid of. And we accounts of people who real werewolves who were out there eating children and then were vomiting up finger bones later and that's how they got caught. And I was like "We're human beings right, we are these animals and that's why we have all these fears and all this suppressed things that we need to get out. And then this book just summarizes it all so succinctly and has so much from all different cultures all over the place that I had never even thought of. And it just brought it all together for me, and blew my mind, so that's my story.