REMEMBERING IOCUS

Paul F. Olson

Like all great ideas - the wheel, sharpened tools, woolly mammoth sandwiches - the Iocus stunt was born late at night, in front of a roaring campfire.

It was the summer of 1986, I was visiting Dave at his mountain home, and we had spent the day touring some of Northern California’s scenic wonders. Now we were kicking back in front of the flames, eating chips by the bagful, drinking Diet Coke by the gallon, and tossing around wild ideas. One of us (I honestly can’t remember who) brought up the idea of pulling an April Fool’s prank on readers of Dave’s magazine, The Horror Show.

Our inspiration was Sidd Finch, the pitcher who could throw a fastball at 168 miles an hour. Sidd, of course, was only a creation of the late, great George Plimpton, but Sports Illustrated readers didn’t know that when Plimpton’s profile of the baseball phenom appeared in the magazine in April of 1985, and many of those readers were utterly, embarrassingly fooled.

Wouldn’t it be fun, we thought, to play the same kind of trick on horror fans?

With the seed planted, it wasn’t long before we had the whole thing sketched out: a genre magazine that had been around for years, published every big name in the field, won dozens of awards, and earned bushels of respect from fans and pros alike. We would create just such an entity, profile it, and wait to see how many people were actually brave enough to come forward and say, “But I’ve never heard of that magazine!”

All we needed to get started was a name, something that would clue savvy readers to the fact that maybe, just maybe, what they were reading wasn’t real. I came up with the idea of using a Latin word. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a Latin dictionary at hand, and this was long before the days of the Internet, when you could log on and find what you were looking for within seconds. No problem. I called my wife back home in Chicago (where it was now about one-thirty in the morning), woke her up, sent her to find my Latin dictionary, and asked her to find a word that meant “joke” or “prank.” Good sport that she was, she never complained, and a few minutes later we had our answer.

Iocus.

I wrote most of the story on the plane flying home, and by the time we’d landed at O’Hare I had the beginnings of a decent profile. The work was light, easy, enjoyable. I remember, especially, the fun of trying to toss in enough details to make it all seem real, without revealing anything too specific - referring, for example, to the magazine’s “offices in the Midwest,” without ever giving an address, or even a state.

All we needed now was a little help from some co-conspirators, to lend the whole thing an air of authenticity. We were lucky enough to know some writers who appreciate a good joke when they hear one, and we had soon enlisted Dean Koontz, Richard Christian Matheson and Joe R. Lansdale to our cause. In the following weeks, they supplied some juicy quotes to flesh out the story. Joe in particular seized the idea with abandon, sending us not only some typically Lansdalesque comments but an entire sidebar, in which he wrote at length about his own favorite Iocus tales. I remember with perfect clarity the fun of working with Joe, Dean and R.C., and I’ll always be grateful for how enthusiastically they helped our little deception.

Now there was nothing to do but wait for the story to appear, which it did in the Spring 1987 issue The Horror Show - the closest a quarterly magazine can get to an April 1 publication date.

Over the next several months, Dave and I fielded several dozen inquiries from curious readers wanting to know more about the magazine. Where can I buy it? How do I submit a story? How come it’s not listed in Writer’s Market? How come you didn’t publish the address? There were even several notes from people clearly too embarrassed to admit they’d never heard of Iocus, who only congratulated us on profiling such a fine magazine. Out of all the letters, there were only a few people who seemed to catch on that the whole thing was a joke, and I’m not aware of anyone who picked up on the Latin wordplay in the title.

In short, we accomplished our original goal - and then some. I never saw anyone try to sneak Iocus into their list of publication credits, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some struggling writer, somewhere, some time, did exactly that. I’m absolutely positive that a few writers spent hours scouring the market guides looking for additional clues.

It just goes to show you what a fire, some fresh mountain air, and a twisted sense of humor can lead to.

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