We're all familiar with such elements of fiction as style, setting, pace, tone, grammar, description, character development, plot, and dialogue. But in my view, that's the easy stuff, compared to the often overlooked whopper. I'm referring to a four-letter word known as love. I've come to think of love as the fundamental ingredient in good fiction. Its absence is the mark of mediocrity; its abundance, the seal of authenticity.

The good news is that this is true regardless of genre. Not all rules of thumb are so universally integral across fiction categories. The bad news is that it cannot be faked and it comes with a conjoined twin: hope. I don't care how nihilistic you think you are, when you sit down to craft a make-believe tale, you are embarking on a hopeful mission. You hope the story succeeds. You hope it gets read. You hope it makes a difference in someone's life. I don't know about you, but I don't wake up every morning with that kind of hope percolating in my veins. But I've got to find it if I want to get any writing done.

Love is even tougher. Storytellers want to convey the truth, by and large, and if you're a writer, the first person to convince is yourself. It ain't easy to love our brothers and sisters all the time. In fact, it can be hard to make it through the front-page headlines without building up a good dose of hate. And that's as it should be. That hate can be useful. But it has to be tempered. If you want to write from hate, fire off an op-ed piece. Fiction has to come from a much holier place. And we have to love the characters we create.

As writers, we all walk into a story armed with a raft of prejudices, but if we walk out with those prejudices unchallenged, we've probably failed. It might be appropriate to write about a fat cop with a doughnut addiction, but is there a reason for it? Is something missing in his life? Maybe your female lead really does need to be a beautiful sex pot, but does her appeal come with a price tag? Is her beauty a burdern? In real life you can be a misogynist, racist, extremist, or whatever ist you want to be. But if you force discrimination into your fiction, it pops out like lipstick on a pig. Why? Because discrimination is false, and good fiction lays it bare.

Well, there you have it. Not exactly John Gardner-esque in its depth, I know. But I had a little time on my hands and an anvil on my chest, so I decided to do something about both. I haven't mastered the craft of fiction—I hope I never feel that I have—much less the elusive art of brotherly love. But it's good to clarify our goals as we beat a path toward literary superstardom. In that regard, maybe this post is as much for me as it is for you. I hope it hasn't kept you from anything important, like ironing your socks.

In a world as noisy as ours, one of the greatest gifts an artist can give is the gift of quiet. Maybe it's this quality, more than any other, that distinguishes the art we cherish from the art we put up with. Cherished art, after all, allows us to escape our cacophonous lives for a time and receive a filtered signal, designed to better us, if only we listen carefully enough.

What I love is that you never know where you'll find the really good stuff. I try to stop in at Left Bank Books whenever I visit the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, but I don't go there looking for comic books or graphic novels. I go there looking for angry poetry and polemical rants. Yet the decades-old collective is where I recently stumbled on volume one of Liz Baillie's instantly bewitching comic book series, My Brain Hurts, which is neither angry nor polemical. It speaks rather than shouts. It is quiet art.

You might suppose the gay teens that populate the story qualify My Brain Hurts as a fringe work, and the gay element might explain its presence at Left Bank, but Baillie's art and writing quickly move beyond the trappings of her outcast characters and peel back the layers to reveal their humanity. It's a bit of a magic act, really. At first the deceptively simple drawings seem to be little more than a backdrop for the dialogue, but then you begin to notice the consistency of the artwork, and the flow from panel to panel, page to page. Before you know it, you're hooked into a world that's at once a dream fantasy and a gritty nightmare. Sounds like the teenage years to me. I look forward to reading a lot more of Baillie's work.

See, it didn't take long for me to drift from the course I set out for myself with the Autopsy Report column. What the hell does any of this have to do with horror? Well, nothing. But My Brain Hurts is good, which is how I like my horror fiction, too. So if you simply must have justification, there it is. Quality trumps genre every time.

But don't you go worrying your pretty little head. The autopsy room isn't always so well lit. We'll find darker veins than this by far. In fact, if you believe nothing else I tell you, believe that the dark stuff will be the norm around here. The cadaver may have come in looking pretty good this time, easy to work with. But trust me, that's not always the case. Not by a long shot.

Welcome to the first installment of Autopsy Report, a new column within my blog. It will be irregular and largely unstructured, but put your greenbacks on this: I will do my best in this space to touch on various aspects of independent comics, small press publications, films of interest (to me), and other topics related to fiction. The common thread, you may have gathered from the title of the column, will be some kind of connection to the horror genre, though I'm even likely to veer from that edict occasionally. Veering from edicts is what I do.

I'm always reading a number of books, magazines, and comics at any given time, and I guess I'd like to capture some of my impressions of these things. The stories that speak to me the most. The zines that get it right. The comics that dare to be different. The movies that eschew the prescribed formulas of Tinsel Town. Information flows past us these days like a river in the throes of a rapid spring thaw, and I don't know about you, but I can only afford to purchase a fraction of the reading material I'd love to dive into. My local library is able to pick up some of the slack, but by no means all of it. A lack of time takes care of the rest, I suppose.

And this brings us to the real relevancy of the title I've chosen for this column. A lot of good work is in danger of dying shortly after leaving the gate, regardless of medium. Hell, a lot of it does die. It comes with the territory of working in small markets, and much of what I plan to discuss is geared for underground audiences. I'm not so interested in the suicides or casualties of disease, but I would like to dig around inside the carcasses of some of the murder victims out there in the world of under-the-radar horror, as well as the sideliners who take a shiv in the neck for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But don't worry, there will be plenty of time for us to consider the occasional grazed bystander and the fleet-footed escapee as well.

My opinions may not be of any lasting value to anyone—or of passing value to most—but if I can train my spotlight on some of my favorite creative work being done in a field that continues to mean a great deal to me, I will have accomplished what I set out to do here. And I can think of no excuse for waiting another moment to begin.

One of the more surprising announcements to come around in a while was Necrotic Tissue's decision to take the giant leap from being an online zine to being a print publication. I can only applaud the move. It may defy logic to some, but not me. I couldn't care less if cookbooks and how-to manuals disappear from bookshelves, but fiction, poetry, and most nonfiction is much better served by a traditional print existence than by the phantom-like confines of cyberspace.

In other big news, the inaugural issue of the new Creepy comic series has been unleashed from the Dark Horse stables, and it's a delight to see everybody's favorite uncle back in the saddle. Eric Powell's cover art is a nice homage to Frank Frazetta, too. Angelo Torres contributes his ink slinging talents to a story, and Bernie Wrightson provides the inside cover illustration. Also included at the end is a vintage story featuring the artwork of Alex Toth, so the proper respects are definitely paid. One of the stories is of pretty questionable taste, but then, Uncle Creepy's tastes have always been a little questionable. One thing's for sure: Cousin Eerie is turning in his grave over this one. Serves the ugly bastard right. (Besides, it probably says something about me that I only find one of the stories to be lacking in taste.)

That's enough of a claim on your time for now, but I'm convinced this is going to be every bit as much fun as I anticipated. I hope you agree. Now I lay my scalpel down. This case is closed.