About three years ago I wrote a story about the hanging of a political dissident. (That was the first story I sold — to Century. It’ll be out any month now, honest.) About that same time, Greg was working on a story, which will shortly see the light of day in Flytrap, about a hangman and a priest. Andy Duncan was up for a Nebula for “The Executioner’s Song.” Greg and I joked about this new trend in speculative fiction.

And here we have the real thing.

A ramp went from the lower floor to an upper floor about halfway toward the ceiling. A prisoner walked this ramp to a loft where there were two trap doors in the concrete, and above those two trapdoors, there were two thick ropes, like the kind used for securing ships. There were no lights and the windows were slits in the concrete walls. The execution chamber had a smell and I cannot describe it. An executioner pulled levers to release the trapdoors and kill the men. What struck me about the nooses, aside from the fact that the looters had avoided touching them, was how well-used they looked. The nooses looked blackened and greased.

—— Phillip Robertson, Salon

The story’s about the return of an Iraqi novelist and poet, Hamid al Mokhtar, to Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison (also known as Kanay), where he was imprisoned and regularly tortured for eight years. Because of the things he wrote.

Hamid al Mokhtar is a man with stories to tell. I’m just some guy who makes stuff up.