Axl Barnes's Blog

Illustration by Brendan McCarthy  Shoved out of bed into the blinding light, 
I rushed to piece myself together.
The sweaty bed sheets were all crumpled from my twisting and turning.  
I made one into a noose
and hung it from the broken spring of my neck.
I screwed the metal black box of my head on top,
Inflated my lungs,
spit water into them until they gurgled just right,
and stuffed them into my ribcage.
I hooked up the tubes to my heart,
And listened to its murmur
As it pumped rusty exhaustion.
Knotting my intestines around my lower vertebrae.
I watched a lump of food crawl through --
anxiety meds and noodle soup.
I chained my trousers to my bony waist,
And glued flaps of skin here and there.
Shreds of dreams flashed in the back of my mind:
Running across a weed-choked field to catch the train,
Smoke covered the bruised morning sky.
Was my town on fire? Where else would I go?
Hunched back, on the way to work
I counted the pebbles and crumbs on the cracked sidewalk.
Black pairs of dress shoes slapped the asphalt,
and I noticed I was limping,
one of my scuffed shoes forgotten in the morning chaos.
At the office, I was nailed to the chair,
my head shoved back against the wall,
and the rope around my neck tied to a hook.Dressed in their gimp suits,
my tormentors ripped handfuls of wilted weeds
growing from the flesh of my arms.
Ashen blood oozed over torn muscle and rusty nails.
They chewed with yellow buck teeth,
Reeking, lumpy milk dripping from their mouths like saliva,
Their eyes, pools of brackish water at the bottom of deep wells.Stained, leathery fingers turned my eyeballs like safe tumblers
until my black box popped open
and snatched my battered brain,
severing my sluggish train of thought.
Everything became blurred, distant,
Like my mind had left behind its phantom.
They sat down on the dingy couch,
and used my brain as a keyboard.
The crevices of my cortex were flattened, worn down,
under their urgent, stained fingers.
I was a mother in a fentanyl trance.
glimpsing her baby raped and smothered for the thousandth time,
on a loop.
The baby turning into an eyeless doll,
melting into a yellow sludge. On a large monitor on the wall to my left.
pies charts, spreadsheets, graphs,
began their hypnotic march to nowhere.
The gimps passed my brain around like a deflated soccer ball.
Now and again, I heard their grunts and screams,
muffled, underwater.
At times, they’d start making out
Regurgitating and sucking sour milk
From each other’s mouths.
My eyes followed the clock on the wall,
Their gears turning,
Click-Click-Click
Tik-Tok-Tik-Tok
Click-Tic-Click-Tok
Flattened in a crevice between sleep and wakefulness
My heart pumped exhaustion
As I feebly waited for something long-erased
Like a demented person trying to ignite a flash of recognition
By rubbing an old picture.
A sticky, stubborn film of consciousness held me
from ascending from comatose boredom into mineral nirvana.
A memory formed in the dense fog:
The train passed by hills of trash with sinking houses on top.
A raggedy girl with skin peeling like curled sticky notes,
Pushpin eyes, hair entangled with rubber bands,
grabbed blank pages floating in a lake of sludge
and punched holes in them with her protruding incisors.
A group of boys in dirty underwear,
faces covered in black leather masks,
fingers like broken pens,
smashed old printers against a sinking, rusted bulldozer
their feral laughter scratching the edges of sanity.The memory was a single page from a lost binder,
and reading it only killed a few minutes.
My eyes went back to counting the seconds
and following the endless maze of patterns in the gray, dingy carpet.
At 5, I made my way back home,
Too tired to count the pebbles and crumbs stuck in the cracks of the sidewalk,
But awake enough to notice my other shoe went missing.
My used-up brain was back in the box,
A comatose fetus.
I mummified myself in the bed-sheets
and waited for the wave of darkness
to wash me down the drain.
I was in the vast field again, the train horn blared in the distance,
But between me and the tracks were large black pyramids,
Moving toward me, blocking my way
They were gimps on top of one another
Hundreds of them,
The ones at the bottom grazed on the grass
while the others chattered their protruding teeth, hungry, urgent
Froth like spoiled milk bubbling from their mouths.
I stood there rooted in place,
Knowing I’d never get home,
trying to pray to the bruised sky
but finding my arms nailed.
I was a weed-choked scarecrow,
Stuffed with shredded advertisements,
About to be devoured
and then tossed in the landfill.

 

 

I loved Transcendental Mutilation; while keeping in line with the visceral prose that defined his infamous first collection, Genital Grinder, Ryan Harding adds elements of atmosphere, cosmic horror, and weird fiction, which lend a more cerebral and somber dimension to his writing.
Besides its more vague meaning of “spiritual,” the word “transcendental” is also a precise reference to Kantian philosophy, and points to the basic structures of human experience, how the world appears to us ordered in space and time, in causal sequences, presence and absence, quantity, and so on. One of the keys to Harding’s stories is that the basic norms of experience are broken, and the subjects enter into a paradoxical, Lovecraftian realm of mutilation. In “Divine Red” and “Temple of Amduscias,” the rules of space are bent as the insides of buildings are incongruent with their outsides, in “Junk” the law of cause and effect is suspended, and the time in “Angelbait” seems to flow differently from ordinary time.

In the Postcript, the author points out that the story “Down There,” about a girl’s fear of the woods, was partially inspired by The Blair Witch Project. I’m a big fan of that horror flick, and I think the way the evil presence of the witch is suggested rather than shown makes the horror more suffocating; it’s as if the forest itself is cursed, and the protagonists, unbeknownst to them except maybe on a subliminal level, are trapped from the moment they step inside. The same goes for “Down There,” the evil is absent, yet omnipresent in the woods, in the bark of trees, in the foliage, in the shadowy corners. Evil is shapeless and lurks. Not fully something, but not nothing either. A malignant nothing.  

Speaking of nothing, “Temple of Amduscias”,  has a more existentialist element to it as Olivia, the main character, has an obsession with empty, abandoned places. With the faces of the void, the nothing, with hopelessness. The grim mood of this story reminded me of the pessimism pervasive in some other works of cosmic horror or weird horror like Thomas Ligotti, Nicole Cushing, and Curtis Lawson’s The Envious Nothing. 
These journeys through the doors of our perception result in mutilation, but also mutation: “Progression could mean growing new organs and limbs. Perhaps it may also mean losing some of the old ones through an act of transcendental mutilation.” In Ryan Hardin’s universe, like in Clive Barker’s, evil is also an opportunity for transcendence, agony is also a gate toward ecstasy, as it’s showcased in one of the best stories of the volume, “Red Divine.”

I can only skim through the surface of this brilliant, unique collection in this review, but I hope it’s enough to increase the appetite of horror fans. Ryan Harding is an original, powerful voice with a morbid, depraved imagination and a penchant for philosophy. My next stop is Header 3, Harding’s colab with the extreme horror icon Edward Lee.

Illustration by Randy Allende At the edge of the yellow-dusted park,
Mrs. Miller, wheelchair-bound, grazed fistfuls of weeds,
watching her forty-year-old son, Marvin, play devil sticks.
Blond helmet-hair, undisturbed by the wind,
dexterous hands hitting the center stick,  
Marvin moonwalked and flowed through wave dance motions
with his New Balance-clad feet.
His girlfriend, Ping, sat on the curb,
hood and black hair covering her face,
gunshots and explosions emanating from her tablet.
Marvin droned on with his litany of complaints:
“I told them about the milk jugs on the balcony,
It’s an eyesore, just ghetto.
Maybe that’s what they do in Africa?
I don’t know. I’ve never been there.
But this is Canada, last I checked.
Who in their right mind would want to live in a building like this?”
Mrs. Miller looked across the street
at the towering brown-brick building
with small black balconies and windows.
It appeared made of Legos,
except for the pile of empty jugs on the fourth floor,
which looked like a cluster of eggs.
A gust of wind knocked one out, and it fell on the manicured lawn,
spurting ejaculate on the grass.
The woman raised her pleading eyes higher still;
The sky was the clear blue of antiseptic mouthwash.
She began eating gravel-and-glass mix from her bag of Lays,
trying to crush the stones like jellybeans,
but smashing her stained teeth instead,
jagged pieces of rock and enamel slicing the back of her throat.
Still, Marvin’s nagging voice leaked
through her quaking facade and the grinding of her jaws.
“Normal women intimidate me, so arrogant and confident…
With a hot Down Syndrome chick, I’d be set for life,
But a meek Chinese like Ping is good too,
Doesn’t talk back, barely knows a lick of English…
On the downside, she’s as flat as a board,
and is as hairy as a monkey.
And you know how much I hate hair, don’t you, ma?”  
Mrs. Miller pulled up her sweaty dark grey t-shirt,
lifted her tubular, wrinkled breasts to her bloody lips,
ripped off the brown areolas with her ruined teeth
and chewed them like gum.
Oblivious, Marvin continued his juggling-and-dance act,
His black eyes focused on the sticks,
eyes that, even as a newborn, his mom remembered,
spoke of almost empty, musty backrooms
with mismatched pairs of shoes and old sale signs;
eyes like Ping Pong balls dipped in the sludge of an abandoned oil well.  
How many times did he perform his circus routine in the mirror?
Mrs. Miller wondered bitterly.
His whole essence was trapped in a mirror.
She gave birth to a hominid reflection,
to a not-fully-there;
A fake birth, which was truly a drawn-out, toxic miscarriage.
Marvin was just a faded stickman scratched on the wall of a cave.
In her mind, Mrs. Miller retraced the steps of her guilt:
Marvin had avoided the forceps,
But not the fists of bullies.
Did they go after him because he was weak,
Or did he become weak as a result?
Her mind was stumped by the chicken-or-egg paradox.  
Either way, Marvin had retreated to the periphery of existence,
to the painless exile of self-erasure.
Marvin dropped the sticks on the ground,
inhaled and exhaled deeply, as if awakening his inner chakras,
and began building a ball of energy with his arms around his chest,
above his pot-belly,
in the style of Master Roshi’s Ki Wave martial arts move.
With his palm, he thrust a shockwave of spiritual energy
toward a murder of magpies feasting on a flattened squirrel,
but the birds continued their pecking undisturbed.
Marvin began building an astral ball again,
with renewed intensity,
while he filled his mom in on the technical details
of a BJ machine he ordered from Amazon,
as Ping was firmly opposed to oral.
“It was my Christmas present for myself,
A little treat.
But someone stole my package.
I suspect the rowdy black kids from down the hall.
I mean -- who else?”
Mrs. Miller regurgitated, burning bile rising up her slashed throat
jetting through the stones crowded at the back of her mouth
like a spring of urine.
She tried to swallow it back
but began gagging and tearing up,
inhaling deeply through her nose.
Dandelion seeds landed inside her dilated nostrils,
Her whole body went rigid for a split second,
then was rocked by an explosive sneeze.
The debris clogging her throat turning into shotgun pellets
piercing through her brain and eyeballs.
Her vision shrank into a tunnel of pulsing flesh
and she was wrapped in an immaculate, soothing darkness.

 

 

 

Illustration by Randy Allende  I was filling up the wet counter when a wave of depression hit me, and my legs buckled, trembling like a cow before the captive bolt gun fires. It was early into an eight-hour closing shift, and I felt like I couldn’t do the trick this time. I was a cockroach in the sink, hit with a wave of water, standing still, either playing dead or too heavy and wet to move, waiting for the next wave to wash me down the drain. The hands of the clock on the wall by the meat department were stuck, like junkies at the train station trapped in a fentanyl slump.

Busy, chubby hands in the grimy mirror filled the bell peppers in the pattern of semaphore lights, and the cooling mist spraying my skin reminded me they were mine. Each movement released an acrid stench from my armpits, which, I hoped, would act as a customer repellent. My last shower was a hazy memory lost in mental fog. A week? A month?

In the background, mixing with the hum of the freezer, Christmas carols droned, hollow and distant, amplifying the familiar sinking feeling. Knowledge didn’t diminish its power, though. On the contrary, awareness made it worse. Everyone was fighting the afternoon demon, I knew from their pale, immobile faces, from their dead eyes, but they didn’t dwell on it, they were able to repress it, make it invisible. To me, it appeared like a constant roadblock on the way to a murky normalcy.

A kid walked by with his family, pushing a small cart that said “Customer in Training.” The parents grabbed a bag of green grapes and showed the little one how the scale worked. When they were done, the kid kept playfully pushing on the metal plate, watching the needle move up and down with round, curious eyes. I cringed. Wasn’t child's play just work practice? And what was work if not preparation for old age, boredom, and death? Child’s play was just training for rigor mortis.

Andriy stepped through the double doors from the back and walked toward me with his assured, steady stride and soft smile. His perfect posture--ramrod straight, squared shoulders, head held high--always made me feel self-conscious. I’d had a hump and slumped shoulders for as long as I could remember. Even being bipedal didn’t come naturally to me.

“How’s it going, Edgar?”

I was flattered he knew my name, gave him an automatic smile, and mumbled a lie, “Not bad.”

“Closing tonight?”

“Yeah…. I hear you’re a big manager now.” I gave myself an inward pat on the back for recalling that morsel of information.

“Yeah, it’s to get permanent residence before my work permit expires. I don’t want to go back to Ukraine, fuck that place.”

Andriy had come to our store as a refugee after Russia’s invasion in 2022. He started out working in deli, where we got to know each other while I went there to price cut-fruit and salads. For some reason, our produce section never had a retail scale, so I was always running back and forth.

I hit my forehead with my palm and shook my head. “Oh man, I don’t even understand why they expect you to work. Capitalist pigs! It’s as if my neighbor’s house is on fire, but I only let them inside my own place if they do chores for me.”

To my surprise, Andriy didn’t share my outrage and replied stoically, “That’s ok, I don’t mind working as long as my work is appreciated. Back in Lviv, I had my own restaurant, but employees were stealing and being lazy fucks. It didn’t go well. But here is better, people do honest work.”

My gaze fell on his blue shirt, crisp and neatly tucked into his black pants. The shade matched the piercing blue of his eyes. “How come you don’t wear the gray manager’s shirt? And how come you made manager so fast, you have no seniority?”

Andriy gave a sly smile, showing his even whites. “First of all, I don’t like gray. Secondly, I just went up to Darren, the district manager, and told him I want to be in charge.”

I nodded and smiled broadly to cover my confusion. This guy really wanted to work in this sordid, soul-sucking place? I retreated to safer conversational ground, “I feel you, man. If becoming a supervisor is what it takes, so be it. I’d definitely do my best to keep away from that meat-grinder as well.” I laughed too hard, sounding like a hyena. Brutal images from Goregrish flashed through my mind: Ukrainian soldiers having their balls cut off, Russians blown apart by drones as they smoked their cigarettes under the bare, black branches of skeletal trees, bodies crushed beneath tank tracks, merging with the scorched earth. Anxious not to offend or sound weird, I came up with something neutral  “The Ukrainians make good use of drones. Their resistance is very inspiring. Fuck Putin! That guy is nuts.”

Andriy waved his hand and adjusted his looped man bun nervously. I usually hated man-buns but it looked slick on him, like a samurai warrior. “There’s a lot of corruption in Ukraine,” Andriy said, “I’m too smart to die in that stupid war. I will stay here in Canada, there’s many opportunities here. I’ll have my own business, maybe a restaurant or something like that.”

“Damn, I’d work for your restaurant,” I ventured. “If you ever need a dishwasher or a janitor. I don’t know much about cooking, but I’ll do my best.” That statement surprised even me. I was like one of those joyous puppies who piss themselves when getting some attention. But Andriy was looking straight at me, the tops of his shoes were pointed directly at me. He wanted to have a genuine conversation, not just spit a few words my way for purposes of civility.

He smiled his princely, charming smile. “Well, thank you.” Then a shadow darkened his features, dimming the brightness of his blue eyes. “I keep having these fucking nightmares that the recruiters would reach me even here in Canada and force me to join the stupid army. Some of my friends are there--it’s a meatgrinder. I have a friend who machine-gunned two dozen Russians on the streets of Bakhmut. They kept coming down the same street, over and over again, in the same formation like mindless sheep. Trying the same thing and expecting different results. Madness, right? Anyway, my friend needed therapy after the first day. PTSD or something like that.”

I nodded, rubbing my scruffy beard, “I know the Russians don’t care much for their soldiers. I read somewhere that at Stalingrad they’d give them a few bullets and tell them to use the weapons of their fallen comrades as they become available. Imagine, taking on a Panzer division with a handful of bullets in your pocket.” I doubled over, braying donkey-like laughter.  

“Yeah, Ukrainian commanders are not much better, trust me,” Andriy said with a resigned tone.

Wiping tears of laughter from my eyes, my gaze fell on a raggedy hobo cutting through produce toward meat. A gray, stained blanket hung from his shoulders like a battered cape. A balaclava sat on his head, pulled up like a tuque, as if he were unsure whether he was going to rob the place or not. A bit hunched over, his shoulder muscles were so jacked they reached his ears. An aggressive miasma of rotted fish and bitter urine wafted over the apple and citrus tables, assaulting my nostrils. His battered Sorel boots shuffled against the floor, soles wet with snow, their laces undone. From somewhere inside his makeshift cape, upbeat music blared--Eminem’s “Slim Shady--a counterpoint to the soul-sucking carols.

“Look at this guy,” I pointed to Andriy, “no fucks given.”

Andriy looked over his shoulder, and his face twisted in disgust. He reached for his radio, pressed a button, and said, “Jason, there’s a suspicious guy in the meat.”

“Ok, I’m on it,” Jason the security guy, replied.

“Let me know if you need help,” Andriy added. “He looks big.”

“Sure will,” Jason said.  

Attention back on me, Andriy asked, “Why are there homeless people here in Canada? This is such a rich country.”

My heart beat faster, and my breath quickened as words crowded my mouth, choking me. This was one of my favorite topics and ranting about it would kill a lot of time. “Oh fuck, such a good question. Where do I even begin?” I pointed in the rough direction of the train station. “Bell Station here had been finished just before Covid. Before then, the scum dwelled downtown and on the north side but with the LRT expansion they infested the south. During Covid, our shit-for-brains mayor decided to make public transit free. Next thing you know, the bums live on the train. It’s nice and toasty, especially in the winter. No masks, obviously. Smoking crack and ice, shooting heroin, what have you. These virus-carriers started pissing and shitting all over, marking their territory. I mean, for God’s sake, this is public transit, not a GG Allen concert.”

As soon as that reference came out, I knew Andriy wouldn’t get it. He didn’t look like a punk rock fan. I raised my palm, “Nevermind that. Long story short, this train station became their fucking home. And since Foods ”R” Us is close to the station, they come here to eat. No fucks given.”

Andriy nodded, gazing toward the filthy behemoth as he stuffed his basket with packaged meat. Jason monitored the suspect from a safe distance, pretending to be on his phone. Eyes back on me, Andriy said, “I get that, but why are there homeless people here in the first place in the first place?”

I stroked my trashy moustache, and made a victory sign. “Two points. First, intergenerational trauma. You know…Natives. In residential schools they were abused mentally and sexually. Plus the genocide…Let’s just say, many of them haven’t recovered. They just can’t get a grip, and they kill themselves slowly with drugs and alcohol. But second, and this might sound a bit like a conspiracy theory. I think the homeless are left to wander in plain view by design. The rich elites show the poor what’s gonna happen if they don’t toe the line; if they stop working, if they stop paying their bills, if, God forbid, they start some kind of revolution. I mean, when I see these degenerates sleeping in their dirty blankets in the stations, I feel more motivated to go to work and pay those bills.” Again, I gave a shrill laughter, hopping he won’t notice my use of degenerate.

Andriy absorbed my arguments with avid interest, wheels turning behind his keen blue eyes. “I’m not convinced. There are rich and poor in Finland or Sweden, but they don’t have a homeless population.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been out of Canada. The way I figure is that these people are of no use to society. What’s the point of investing in them? They’re basically invisible, there’s no labor to be squeezed out of them. So then, they just let them roam around, like walking scarecrows.”

Andriy was shaking his head and getting ready to rebut when a middle-aged customer interrupted us, like they’re fond of doing. “Sorry sirs, do you carry halal chicken here?”

I began raising my hand to tell him to go to the meat department, but Andriy answered first, “We don’t carry it in this store, but Walmart does.”

The man sighed with disappointment and clenched his teeth. “And where’s the nearest Walmart?”

Again, I opened my mouth to say it’s not our business to know Walmart locations but Andriy already had his phone in his hand. “Let’s check out on the internet,” he said, tapping the screen and scrolling. “You go east on Nelson avenue, and then south on Calgary trail, till you reach Southpark Shopping Center. A Walmart is there.”

The guy nodded, mumbled his thanks and made himself scarce.

I gave Andriy a crooked smile. “A plus customer service, going above and beyond…”

He flashed an impish grin. “You have to be nice to them or they blow this fucking place up.”

Tilting my head back I let out a braying laugh.

Brenda’s nagging voice crackled over the PA system abruptly cutting our fun. “Andriy to customer service! Andriy to customer service, please!”

Andriy gave me a fist bump. “I’ll be back,” he said, his voice a poor imitation of the Terminator, as he marched toward the front end.

The interaction had a tonic effect. It was already time for my first break. With Andriy’s help I tricked the noonday demon once more, the scalps of two more work hours under my belt. I quickly finished filling up the bell peppers, and pushed my cart in the back, and headed to the break-room. 

I was stuffing my face with fries and chicken wings, and watching a Goregrish video about a cartel victim getting their face burned off, when shouting erupted near the cash registers. The commotion sliced through the air, and an acrid, spicy smell followed close behind. Brenda burst into the room, face beet red, muttering curses, and went straight to the eyewash station.

She got pepper-sprayed, I realized, with a surge of sadistic joy. I thought she should count her blessings, some of these thieves would spray fire in your face. These attacks were common as most robbers were also crazies or junkies. Once, this native chick threatened to commit suicide and started cutting herself with a knife from the kitchen aisle. I still regret not being there to video her. It would have been my first post on Goregrish.

Andriy rushed into the room and sat two water bottles, a milk container, and a some cloths on the table.

“Cold milk is good for rinsing too, Brenda.”

“The motherfucker blinded me. I can’t believe this,” she grumbled.

“What happened?” I asked, playing dumb.

“That crazy bum had pepper spray,” Andriy said as he hurried to the sink near Brenda, and soaked a white rag.  

“Oh no!” I said, and bit back laughter. Brenda, the racist cunt. Customers had complained about her for months in online reviews--especially the natives. How she followed them around the store, shot daggers with her eyes, and mistreated them at self-checkout.

Also, I knew the nosy cow had snitched on me for time theft, complaining my breaks were too long. Snitches get stitches, as they say. Karma’s a bitch.  

Jason came in, hands in his pockets. “Motherfucker was fast for a big guy.”

“Cyka Blyat,” Andriy said, “he left with all that meat?”

Jason nodded and looked down. “Not much we could have done. I just called mall security.”

Andriy produced his phone and walked to the far corner of the room. “I’m gonna call the police, too. This is assault.”

“Is all that meat coming out of your paycheck? Hundreds of dollars wasted,” Brenda barked from the sink. “Where were you?” she shouted as she stepped toward Jason, ready to punch him despite her slight body. “I kept paging for you. I’m gonna have you reported, you waste of skin.”

“I was waiting for him by the front door,” Jason said in a small voice.

“But I told you to come to the self-checkout.”

“You weren’t supposed to engage him, lady. That’s my job.”

“Well, you’re not doing it very well, are you? I’ve been paging for you all night, and that’s the first time I see you. God! You’re supposed to catch thieves, yet you’re the one stealing time.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, lady. You’re not my boss!”

Brenda threw out her hands in frustration. “So what? Am I supposed to let those scummy junkies rob us blind?”

Watching Brenda’s cheap over-the-top display filled me with anger and disgust. Throwing caution to the wind--and gas on the fire--I blurted out, “What’s it to you, Brenda? They’re not robbing you? Nothing here is yours? You’re already so blind you actually think you own the place?”

Her bloodshot eyes flashed and her face turned a darker shade of red. “If we let them steal, we’ll be out of a job, dimwit.”

“We’ll be out of a job anyway. You think it’s hard for a robot to do your basic job? You better focus on your retirement plan.”

Brenda was ready to spit her venomous reply when Andriy stepped between us, hands raised like a referee in a boxing match. “Guys, guys, this is not a productive discussion. We have to stay professional. Brenda, you can make your complaints to the management tomorrow, but now you better sit down and use these towels on your face to fight the burning. There’s no point getting anxious over this and making things worse. We need to keep calm.”

To Jason, Andriy said, “Come on, man. The police will be here shortly. We need to get our statements ready.”

They rushed out of the lunchroom.

Brenda sat down with a deep sigh and started sobbing quietly like a petulant child, tears streaking down her sunken cheeks to the trembling tip of her chin. The sound of Brenda crying was soothing. I craved licking her salty tears.

She was still hot, in a damaged sort of way. Thinning, straight blond hair framed a wrinkled, pale face that bore traces of a faded beauty. Her hazel eyes had a furtive desperation to them, like those of a stray lonely dog. Her emaciated body betrayed an unhealthy obsession with losing weight.

My dick jumped to life. I imagined her being gang-banged by a group of native thugs hung like horses and her tears and snot actually being thick layers of cum and spit. I imagined them fucking her face so hard her nose would start bleeding and her front teeth would loosen. My erection grew, pressing against my jeans. I opened my picture app and recorded her crying, holding my phone casually to appear I was reading something. Satisfied with the gathered material, I tossed the greasy container and empty Coke into the garbage, then filled the cheap plastic kettle for coffee. After lunch, I usually needed caffeine to stay awake.  

I sat back down. Staring at the tormented sicko, my libido gave way to a bubbling disgust. Soon, the hum of boiling water mixed with Brenda’s sobs and my simmering hate.   

“So, what happened Shitty Jane, did you try to play the hero again?” I poked at her. There were no security cameras in the lunch room, and no witnesses. If she decided to complain it would be my word against hers.

My sharp question jolted her into a straight position. She wiped the tears and snot off her flushed face with a cloth and looked at me like I was a roach squirming in her soup.

 I continued in a calm tone despite the torment inside. “You know people call you Shitty Jane? Do you know why? Because you look a lot like Jane and you guys are friends for some reason but she is cool and kind whereas you are…well…shitty.”

She brushed her hair out of her eyes with a nervous gesture and raised a thin eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Indeed it is. I hear that you used to be a manager and maybe that’s why you feel the need to be in control. But that is the past Brenda. You have to stop living in the past and accept the present. You’re nobody here. Your name on the schedule is all the way at the bottom and you barely get any hours. I guess you’re restricted? I know for a fact you’re restricted in the head. This job sucked you dry. Your husband barely touches you without cringing, I could bet on it. Menopause looms large. You going after thieves like that is just a cry for help. You need lots of therapy, Brenda. It’s not too late. Despite what they say, you can stop being shitty. You weren’t born this way, were you? I believe in you.”

She rolled her eyes hard and then glared at me with a mixture of revulsion and raw hatred. “Hell will freeze over before I take advice from your lazy, fat ass. You think I don’t see you, chubbs? Slacking off all day, trying to fly under the radar, all the girls on cash mocking you behind your back. We have our eyes on you, scummy beard-necked incel. I don’t know how on earth you made probation but you’ll be out of here before you know what hit you. The streets will thin you out real fast. Homelessness is the best diet, you eye-sore. Shouldn’t you be on the floor anyway, you walking dumpster fire?”

The cunt’s words cut deep, but I managed a smile. “You sound downright insane …Shitty…Jane?” I high-fived myself internally for coming up with the epic ryhme.

We stared each other down. Brenda’s face turned deadpan. Suddenly, she launched herself out of her chair, lashing at me with cat-like agility. I pulled back instinctively, her claws slicing through the air inches from my face. The table between us screeched against the floor as I scrambled out of my chair. For a terrible second I thought it would knock me down. The milk carton tipped over, spilling its contents, while water bottled rolled to the floor with hollow clunks.

I managed to sidestep to the left, keeping the table as a barrier between us. Branda quickly computed I was out of her reach and her wild eyes darted to the boiling kettle on the counter. As she lunged for it, I bolted to the door. Some primal part of my brain guessed the trajectory of her throw and I ducked by head a split second before the plastic kettle exploded against the wall. Scalding water whipped my back but my charged system swallowed the pain.

Heart pounding, I darted through the hallway to the safety of the sales floor and of security cameras. I veered to the right, down aisle ten. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Andriy and Jason talking to the police at the entrance. It will be on Branda to explain the mess in the lunch-room, when they get her statement. Although terrified, I was also euphoric. I really got under the bitch’s skin, at least some of my verbal punches had landed. I recorded her crying like a cheap slut who didn’t get paid. Things were happening. All the action kept the dark thoughts at bay. Brighter colors leaked into the world. I entered the backroom with a spring in my step.

A few days later, I was on the morning shift, restocking the salad wall, a hangover throbbing in my brain after a night of gorging on Imperial Stout, power electronics, and snuff films. My hands were opening and breaking boxes with dexterity, as if my diminished consciousness had freed them. The crinkle of plastic bags and clamshell boxes sent pangs of irritation through my tormented psyche. A mind-numbing Mariah Carey Christmas hit seeped through the speakers. The cold air from the freezer covered some of the fetid miasma emanating from my arm pits.

It was one of those gray, snowy days when people wonder why they lived so far up north. People, that is, who still had the strength to wonder and contemplate making changes. Not me. I was just a pair of hands slapping discount stickers on wrinkled salads with expiration dates marked for today or tomorrow.

High-pitched shouting from the self-checkout area pierced the morning lethargy. Rubbing my temple, I stepped toward the end cap and got a clear view of the whole front end. Brenda and Jason were shouting at a massive, raggedy-looking guy. Jason had his phone pressed to his ear. It was the hulk who had pepper-sprayed Brenda the other day. He still wore his balaclava as a tuque but, instead of the grimy blanket, now he had a ripped and tattered black jacket. Low-hanging Adidas sweats, barely holding to his narrow hips, revealed the crack of a hairy ass. His skinny legs made you wonder how they carried his gargantuan upper body. Wobbly, the ogre unzipped his stuffed pack with slow, deliberate movements, greasy black hair hanging into his face.

On till eight, Andriy finished ringing through a customer and stepped toward the scene. The shopper--a small, balding Filipino guy--fetched his bags and rushed to the door, no look back. The cornered behemoth turned his head toward Andriy, like an animal sensing danger. “Whatcha looking at, pale face? Stay away or I’ll fuck you up,” he shouted, wild eyes blazing from under a heavy, jutting brow.

“Can you just go out, please!” Andriy said and pointed to the door.

In the background, the warm, nostalgic notes of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” provided the soundtrack for the standoff.

Sensing something big was going down, I produced my phone and began recording.

Next, things happened in dazzling succession, as if someone pressed a fast-forward button.  

Brenda stepped toward the towering native guy, a can of spray in her hand, blasting. She must have kept it at the ready on her desk.

Suddenly, a guy in a black hoodie burst out of the aisle next to me, clutching a full bag to his chest like a football. With a savage yell, he shouldered the Christmas tree at the entrance and bolted out the door. The tree tittered and then fell unceremoniously with a defeated thud, ornaments scattering across the floor. 

A blade flashed in the corner of my eye. While everyone’s attention was on the ninja-looking thief, the big guy in front had produced a machete from his bursting pack. He hacked at the arm holding the mace. Brenda let out a blood-curdling yell as the can dropped and her forearm went limp, the bone broken. The lower arm dangled from the elbow, held by turn muscles, strips of skin, and tattered cloth. Jets of bright blood splattered on the sandy brown of the vinyl floor. Behind her, a wide-eyed Jason bolted toward deli and bakery. Brenda turned to cradle her gushing wound, and the blade hit the back of her neck with a sickening crunch. Blood oozed from the deep cut like fermented juice from an overripe watermelon, soaking her jacket. The blow dropped her to her knees, and she ripped out an agonized scream as she fell on her mangled arm.  

 Even if she survived this vicious attack, she wouldn’t be able to move much again. Chances were that Branda’s husband would have a vegetable for a wife, but at least she wouldn’t run her mouth as much.  

I got closer to the row of tills and zoomed in on my camera. I didn’t want any drop of blood to go to waste.

Driven by reckless instinct, Andriy rushed to Brenda’s help. With surprising agility, the attacker hacked at his head. Andriy pulled back, but it was a split, fatal second too late. Bright blood erupted, flying in the wake of the blade. He was dead meat. His carotid was severed. Barring some sort of miracle, he would soon bleed to death. That spray of bright arterial blood lit up my day, fireworks of endorphins illuminating the dome of my mind. A beatific sense of freedom engulfed me, and I approached the violent scene further, my heart racing, my hangover forgotten, all my troubles obliterated by the cathartic bloodshed. This was a high a hundred times more powerful than the Brenda incident a few days ago. This was the stuff I watched on Goregrish on the daily, but it now happened right in front of me, not through some grainy security camera with no sound. On top of it, my trusted smartphone immortalized everything in HD for my future pleasure. This brutality was the truth and the life!

Andriy covered his neck with his hand. His fingers turned red instantly. He looked at them with unbelieving eyes and stepped toward the assailant on wobbly feet.

The slasher paid no mind to the walking corpse and pointed the bleeding machete toward the dozen or so people cowering on my side of the cash registers. Spittle flying from his mouth, he shouted over the chorus of cries and screams, “Stay the fuck back or I’ll fucking scalp you all. Every last one of your sorry asses. I’ll cut you up, ya hear!” He barred his crooked teeth in a hideous mix of a clownish grin and a savage snarl.

A small crowd had formed on my side of the cash registers. Nobody dared play the hero. Mark, the meat manager, was frowning, probably thinking of running to grab the cleaver but not quite daring. Barb from bakery succumbed to hysterics and was screaming like a banshee, doubled over, hands covering her face. Angela from groceries was holding her chest--she had had a cardiac event just the week before. By contrast, Fernanda, the Mexican woman from Starbucks, had a stoic expression on her face as if this was just another day in the neighborhood.

While some in the crowd were frozen in terror--the deer-in-the-headlights look--others were punching numbers on their phones, recording or pressing them against their ears. To my right, a few people rushed out the doors were they bumped into confused customers watching from the lobby, necks stretched, fearful yet curious; agitated sheep in a stable.

Accompanied by a chorus of shouts and cries, the native thug walked slowly, casually, toward the automatic doors, his pants still sagging, a pack full of meat in his left hand and bleeding machete in his right, a skinny crimson trail behind him.

Andriy shuffled after him, zombie-like, his chest drenched in blood. Then he stopped and mechanically adjusted his man bun and shirt as if nothing had happened. As if his bleeding out were just a minor inconvenience. That gesture haunts me still and will for the rest of my life. It reminds me of an old episode of Forensic Files when this guy was attacked with an axe during the night, but managed to wake up in the morning and have his coffee as usual, oblivious to his head injuries. We’re designed to keep going even when drained of our essence; destined to keep crawling, keep dragging ourselves to nowhere.

After adjusting his hair, Andriy staggered like a drunk, his neck still pumping red on the floor, and finally crumpled to the ground, on his back, head still turned toward the door.  

I hurried past the first till toward him, still recording, and screamed, “Call 911! Call 911!”

As I approached, careful not to slip on the red puddles, the iron smell of blood got stronger. I kneeled down beside Andriy and focused the camera on his paling face. People panicked all around me and I was making art, a photo journalist in a war zone. I was serene, in the zone, buzzing.

Fernanda was suddenly at my back. “You think he’ll make it?”

I lowered my phone and turned. “Get the fuck--”  

Glass exploded and something metallic hit the floor with a harsh clatter. My heart jumped in my throat. Freezing wind hit my face. Fernanda retreated with a yelp followed by a wave of screams. Only a few feet away, one of the criminals had thrown a shopping cart through the window. They hurled insults at the traumatized audience. The big one kept brandishing his machete while the ninja-looking moved his pelvis back and forth, pretending to stroke his dick and ejaculate.

Although the attackers were nearby, my wave of creativity was a protective shield. I turned my attention Andriy. Using the distraction created by the commotion, I swiftly produced a sticker from my apron and stuck it on his forehead: “$2 dollars off if you enjoy it tonight.” His skin was clammy so I pressed a bit harder. Andriy’s eyes moved anemically, following my hand. Then he looked at me and tried to say something, but he choked, his words turning into a thin dribble of blood. I kept the sticker on for a few seconds, making sure the camera had a perfect view of it. Then I peeled it off and stuck it on my own forehead. The bright blue of Andriy’s eyes faded slowly, and his gaze went through me, as if I weren’t there. Soon, those expressive eyes would turn a dull gray and cloud over. His gray cells--the cells that made him too smart to go to war for Ukraine--were already shutting down, as useless as mold on a cauliflower. Enraptured, I recorded his Andriy’s final moments, his last breath. Then I turned off the camera and stood up, a contented smile stretching my lips.  

The criminals were gone, and now the broken window framed a cluster of stunned, bundled-up faces, against the backdrop of the snow-covered parking lot. Glass crunching under my feet, I walked briskly past the discarded shopping cart and toward Brenda. The thought of uploading Andriy’s death on Goregrish filled me with glee; it would be my first post. But maybe more quality content lay ahead.

Carol sing along, something peppy

Brenda was surrounded by a group of useless do-gooders.

Mark was making feeble attempts to assert some control over the chaos. “Don’t touch her, guys, she suffered a spinal cord injury. We need to wait for the ambulance!”

Branda lay where she fell, immobilized, her head pressed against the floor. Her severed forearm twisted downward at an unnatural angle from the jagged, glistening bone of the elbow. Red still leaked from ripped muscles that looked like mashed cranberries. Her hand was frozen in a grasping gesture. Wild eyes rolled helplessly like those of a dog hit by a car. Her mouth moved like a fish out of water, drooling on the black ergonomic mat. A puddle of urine grew from her crotch, adding an acrid tinge to the coppery smell of blood and the remnants of spicy mace.

Strident sirens cut through the drone of Christmas carols. Time was running out.  

I raised my phone to record, but then a new wave of inspiration hit me. I dropped the phone in my pocket, pushed through the bodies, and blurted out, “Don’t worry, Brenda. Help is on the way. You’ll be dancing in no time.”

Her hateful gaze burned a hole through me. If looks could kill, I’d be six feet under.  

The audience gasped as disgust twisted their faces. I felt like the sticker on my forehead was another abnormal detail in the unfolding mayhem, another lash against their traumatized brains.  

Caught in a surge of creativity, still focused on Branda, I raised my right hand with a grin. “High-five?” Her wilted hand stood lifeless. I dropped my own. “Down low?” Then yanked it back. “Too slow.”

Fireworks exploded in my vision. The punch drove me back, but I kept my balance. It was Mark.

“Shut the fuck up, you fucking weirdo!” he barked.

More aggressive mutters emanated from the huddle.

I tested metallic blood in my mouth and spat out a tooth. Then I smiled at them, blood dripping down my chin. Brays of laughter grew in my ears, coming from I don’t know where, it felt like I held it in forever. I brayed like a donkey, doubled over holding my belly, and then dropped to the floor.

They all looked at me like I was laughing at a funeral, and their dumbfounded, sheepish expressions only made me laugh harder. I rolled on the floor, ignoring the blood and shards of glass, my stomach aching, warm tears of joy streaking my cheeks. For a few glorious, shining moments, I transformed that brutal scene into my stage, frolicking in the limelight, with nothing but a broken window, a discarded shopping card, and two stiffs as my props.

  

Roman’s house was the stooping puke-green one at the end of the street.
After his grandfather ventured out one winter and suffered a stroke,
Roman’s mom, Zladka, started drinking more.
The walls absorbed the sick man’s shame
And his crooked mouth’s prayers for death
And pressed harder on the aging foundation.
Roman died in a car accident on his way to England,
where he worked as a cook.
He and his granddad were buried around the same time.
Grieving, Zladka drowned herself in hard liqueur
and the house spun, rocked,
its floors groaning like a wobbly boat in a storm.  
As shadows pooled,
she smeared the cracks in the walls
with clotted blood from her vomit.
Her bloated belly made Zladka wonder if she was pregnant
though she only rubbed herself raw
with spit, cigarette butts, and dry weeds,
plucked from the lonely sidewalk outside.
The house grew heavier,
its foundation a hungry root,
drinking in darkness for the cirrhotic, petrified fetus.
When the ground covered the mailbox and the house number
Zladka crawled out through the gap between the wooden porch
and the top of the door
then smashed a big hole in the coppery red tiled roof
with an ax.
As she settled in, the smoke from her cigarettes
rose in the air like from a second chimney.
Bottle of whisky in her chubby hand,
a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth,
Zladka sat on the creaking floor of the attic
barfing dust,
waiting for the mailwoman with the welfare cheque
and for her water to break.  

Rain was coming down hard and my plushies were on their period.I chewed on the fingernails growing like fungi from the soil of the TV screen,and sucked their grit into my cavities.I tasted wet pavement and rotted rubber.My beggar's eyes were fixed on the round clock on the wall,but its exhausted hands and crooked numbershad succumbed to the turmoil.I had carved a pleasure hole into the grimy mattressafter my pregnant wife had been committed,and now squeaks and whispery movements came from inside.My wife was in a padded room, I thought,just like her growing fetus,just like the things crawling inside the sticky foam.A deep chill washed over me,and I squeezed my plushies so hard their zits popped.
I looked out the window like through a gutter opening.
Torrents came down from the towering clouds of concrete,
and the tall, gray building across the street started leaning, sinking.
People dropped from the top floors like sprayed roaches.
Trembling, far-away hands tossed the plushies in the basket,
and clockwork legs walked me to the laundry room.
My neighbor, Patricia, sat naked in her wheelchair
in the middle of the flooded place.
The washers and dryers were silent, cubical buildings without power.
As she rocked back and forth
murky water as high as her knees
lapped at the brown nipples of her sagging, tubular breasts.
Thick with clownish makeup,
her moonface prayed to the blurred face of the clock.  
Diapers floated around like drowned babies.
Perched on top of one
two soggy roaches were stuck in a chitinous embrace.
Patricia’s eyes rolled toward me, her drawn eyebrows a mask of surprise.
“I’m waiting for my date,” she says with a brown smile.
“Came to wash my shit!”
I meant to say: can’t you see our building is sinking?
I meant to ask: how is he gonna pick you up?
I meant to say: the roads are closed.
But, when I opened my mouth no words came out,
my atrophied vocal cords went stiff.  
A solid, massive object came up my throat and invaded my mouth.
My frantic tongue tasted crawling rice and bitter bile.
My eyes bulged and teared up
as my mouth opened wide and my nostrils flared.
I dropped the laundry basket in the water
and grabbed the edge of the protruding object.
It came out and dropped in the water followed by a jet of vomit
as if from an unclogged pipe.
It was a newspaper bundle, maggots writhing over the faded print,
a floating landfill of words, now moving toward Patricia,
on whispering ripples of filth.
Patricia watched my buoyant discharge,
her swirling tongue smearing her dark lipstick.
Through a blur, I saw her lifting a skeletal leg
over the arm of the wheelchair,
exposing her hairy cavity.
Bloated hands grabbed the festering bundle
and rubbed it against the crooked crevice.
Patricia’s head spasmed back in ecstasy,
breasts dropping on the sides like sacks of sand.
Ecstasy crumpled Patricia’s face,
as she uttered a low gargling moan.
Fidgety fingers lubricated the hole with worm paste
and pushed the newspaper inside,
my rot hugging her rot.
 

 

 

Deteriorating Substance,
by Brendan McCarthy "To have committed every crime, but that of being a father." 
Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born 

As I walked down the street with a spring in my step, hands deep in pockets full of sticky, dead seeds, a glorious, sunny lightness unfurled behind my smiling eyes. Bloated rats scurried through the downtown landfill, trapped in the 9 to 5 maze. I wiped the crusted time from my eyes with the secret, white manna of my fingers,and looked up at the bright blue above the gray mounds of concrete, steel, and glass. 
The sudden buoyancy reminded me of skipping school, but it was much better,as if I had whited out my name from the class roster altogether,saving myself from the teachers’ wooden mouths, those holes filled with pubic hair soaked in flat coffee,and drizzled with chalk dust. It was as if I only had to go to school during recess To smoke with my buddies and plan the weekend debauchery. As if I had snaked the wormy tail of a sperm though the eyes of my slingshot,knotted the ends tightly, and stoned the school’s windows, smashed the teachers’ thick myopia glasses, and broke the chalk of their teeth. 
The anonymous, ghostly rebellion lifted me, my sneakers stopped touching the pavement,and I found myself pedaling through the air toward the infinite skyand the dark waters beyond. A beatific smile split my lips, Why not go all the way? Isn’t the one whose steps leave no trace, free to go anywhere? I remembered when I was but a wriggling proof of my dad’s fall from grace, digging in the shell of the egg, only this time I puked inside,A violent, black jet that smashed the egg, and filled the womb, oozing from the lips,and sealing them into a pious silence.

As a black metal fan, I had to learn to distinguish between art and artist pretty quickly. As many of you may know from the best-selling book Lords of Chaos, turned into a movie several years ago, the beginnings of black metal in the early ‘90s were marred in criminality. Varg Vikernes a.k.a. “Count Grishnack”, one of the pioneers of the genre, the creative force behind Burzum, did jail time for murder and burning old Christian churches. Bard “Faust” Eithun of Mayhem stabbed a gay guy to death. Jon Nodtveidt of Dissection was also convicted of a homophobic hate crime. Given their anti-modernist and, at times, openly fascist stance, a few black metal bands, most notably Graveland and Marduk, were targeted by Antifa, resulting in canceled shows and overall chaos. More recently, Jason Weirbach a.k.a. “Dagon,” the frontman of Inquisition, was outed as a kiddie porn fan.

Since I’m not a neo-nazi, a homophobe, an arsonist, or a pedophile, I decided to make a strict distinction between the art and the artist, or, better put, between the art and the public citizen creating the art. That is, as citizens -- Varg Vikernes of Norway, Jon Nodtveidt of Sweden, Jason Weirbach of the US -- these people are criminals, and I don’t condone their crimes; I sit back and let the justice system do its work. No one is above the law of the land. I am, however, a fan of their music and I value these people as artists, such as Count Grishnack or Dagon and so on. Many black metal fans embrace this straightforward distinction. As Dayal Patterson, a scholar of black metal, puts it, “There’s no doubt that Varg’s statements in magazines (and on his website, which even relatively recently mentions “negros and other inferior races”) have long been politically charged, yet they have never found their way into his music. Burzum’s huge popularity suggests that Varg has managed to tap into something truly universal. Though his post-prison albums have not proven quite as significant as those recorded prior to his incarceration, Burzum remains hugely popular with a wide array of listeners, including those who completely disregard Varg’s politics and worldview.”  What would black metal be if Burzum and Mayhem were canceled? Would there even be such a thing as black metal?

Since discovering Richard Laymon in 2007, I’ve become interested in Splatterpunk and extreme horror and got to know many writers and readers in this community. In a nutshell, Splatterpunk is to mainstream horror what Cannibal Corpse is to Metallica, or, in movies, what Dead Alive or Bad Taste are to The Shining or The Exorcist. More brutal, more gory, more depraved, more disgusting. Compared to the extreme metal community, most artists and fans of extreme horror are peaceful and laid back, but, now and again, some perceived moral indignity would ruffle the feathers of the SJWs infecting their ranks. Most recently, Otis Bateman and Stephen Cooper have been on the receiving end of a public outcry. Did they kill anyone? No. Did they set buildings on fire? Not even. What they did is not so much criminal as it is in bad taste. They shared private nudes of a woman (gasp!) Now, in my view, the backlash to this indiscretion was completely out of proportion, barbarous, and cringeworthy, proving Nietzsche’s claim that madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, it is the rule. Incited by the outrage squad in their midst, the extreme horror community reacted with a feigned outrage and bogus solidarity that would have given Stalin a bulging erection. These rebellious creatives fighting societal taboos through their transgressive works, these fearless outlaws of imagination and conventional thinking, they all fell in line like a bunch of NPCs applauding a Kim Jong Un speech.

Soon, there was talk of rape, sexual abuse, sexual predators, psychological trauma, manipulation, suicide, and so on; the usual insults hurled by loving and tolerant internet mobs on the daily. Most extreme horror writers, afraid their sales would dip and they’d be unable to pay their bills, promptly joined the resentful mob and posted vaguely ethical and accusatory mumbo-jumbo. “Readers” ripped the books of Bateman and Cooper on deranged Tiktoks and threatened to burn them with Nazi fervor. A sex-starved pansexual fatty decided to steal the show and made a TikTok with her and her mom in a hospital room -- the poor old woman visibly confused and uncomfortable -- in which they ripped up the books of the disgraced authors while pick me Chubbs, caught in a cancel culture demented frenzy, busted some “dance” moves reminiscent of Sumo wrestling. 

Authors who collaborated with the two culprits speedily withdrew their support and threw them to the curb. This occurred soon after Otis Bateman and Judith Sonnet had released a novel together, No One Rides For Free (Absolute Chaos). Initially, the collab got stellar reviews and I was looking forward to reading it. But Judith Sonnet decided to pull the novel and have a characteristic mental breakdown. No surprise there. 

As I was dying inside following this cheap performance of deluded virtue-signalers, I remembered that Wrath James White, critically acclaimed splatterpunk writer, had mentioned Otis Bateman as one of the writers spearheading the fourth-wave of splatterpunk: “It might even be time to start discussing a 4-th wave that includes writers that began after 2020, like Otis Bateman, Rowland Bercey Jr., Bridgett Nelson, and Mique Watson.” In addition, the two were gearing up for a collaboration. Now, meekly following the outrage squad, Wrath James White did a one-eighty and, in an unexpected TikTok worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, began speaking of a “moral code” that extreme horror writers supposedly must follow. This move gave me pause. What happened? Did Otis Bateman’s work lose all its artistic value overnight? Did his books suddenly become garbage just because of a moral blunder? What’s with this deep asymmetry between the extreme horror community and the extreme metal community? Unfortunately, extreme horror writers are not critical thinkers and they can become victims of deep-seated prejudices like the best of us. These questions and bitter revelations made me revisit my argument for distinguishing art from the public citizen producing the art.

 

One widespread logical fallacy is the ad hominem argument. This means attacking the person instead of proving the falsity of their claim. When one makes a claim one puts something forward as being true. It’s beside the point to attack the person instead of the claim itself. As the saying goes, when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. A similar fallacy occurs when someone attacks the character of an artist. When an author publishes a work of fiction, they put it forward as something that has artistic value, something they think is unique and worth reading. In the context of horror, aesthetic value means something terrifying, disgusting, unsettling, or dreadful, according to the norms of the specific genre or subgenre. It’s up to critics and lucid reviewers to judge whether that work has artistic merit, whether it elicits the emotions it’s supposed to. The author’s character has no bearing on this judgment. Otherwise, it’s like saying the theory of relativity is false because Einstein was a commie. Book reviews that make references to the public life of an author are just cheap gossip masquerading as aesthetic judgment.

Why should we support an author who is abusive toward women? Why should we give our hard-earned money to them? These questions are the product of murky thinking. We support artists, not moral values. Supporting an author is an artistic statement, not a moral statement. Supporting an artist is different from supporting a political party. It is well known, for instance, that Bukowsky was an alcoholic and a wife-beater. Now, when I buy a Bukowsky book, that’s not a vote for alcoholism or violence toward women, that purchase only shows an appreciation for his gritty, dirty realist style of writing, for his poetic vision. The same goes for William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, or other classic or contemporary writers accused of questionable behaviors and political stances in their personal lives. Was Lovecraft racist? Who cares? 

Unfortunately, the cancer of cancel culture spreads fast. Just the other day, this guy working for a minor horror publisher was bragging that they have fifty people blacklisted. This was cringe for so many reasons. Firstly, they already publish garbage and no self-respecting author would want to work with them in the first place. Plus, the hypocrisy. Suppose one of those blacklisted authors sends them something with real market value, something up there with the works of Bryan Keene or Bryan Smith. Do you think they’d stick to their guns? I’d bet they’d swiftly forget their moral posturing and go for the cash. But let’s consider for a moment the absurdities implicit in these oppressive attitudes. Should an author be subject to a background check when submitting a manuscript? After all, the publisher needs to make sure they don’t support the work of an outlaw. Should the police accompany them when they receive a literary award to confirm they are upstanding citizens? Shouldn’t a publisher have people infiltrate an author’s personal life to make sure they don’t commit any crimes? Make sure they don’t abuse their spouse or watch objectionable pornography. Shouldn’t we have artists under strict surveillance 24/7? Is this beginning to sound like Big Brother? What’s to stop the publishing world from becoming a police state? Having grown up in communist Romania, I can assure you police states are not fun, unless you’re a moral validation junkie or feminazi. Also, have you heard of the effervescent artistic life in North Korea? Their new fiction trends? Yeah, me neither.    

We need to step back and acknowledge a general fact about creatives, talent, and even genius. Artistic talent doesn’t come neatly paired with an angelic character in a nice package ready for mass consumption. Great art erupts from deep psychological conflicts in individuals who are fighting their own demons at the edges of sanity. These are deeply troubled psychological types, each unique in their extreme rebellion. That’s why so many are suicides: Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and so on. The impulse to create comes from a place of illness and war, not from a place of health, peace, and harmony. Also, as the famous movie Amadeus shows, God doesn’t necessarily bestow genius on the most pious but on, to quote Salieri, some “little creature, an animal. A gross and vulgar little man.” Thus, by canceling those with deviant behaviors and attitudes, we risk transforming a lush artistic landscape into a barren terrain populated with plastic smiles, neutered, sedated “artists” promoting derivative works to a crowd of neurotic Karens and ultrasensitive PC gender-benders. 

Richard Ramirez: “I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged.”

I really enjoyed this character-driven novel, The Serpent’s Call, especially since it explores the same territory -- supernatural horror where the protagonist is in league with Satan -- as my work in progress, Brass Knuckles Black Magick. Marks and I have a penchant for fanatical, elitist, anti-heroes, proud bearers of the black flame of chaos. Dalton Asher, the main character in The Serpent’s Call, reminded me, among others, of Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson. As a Satanic serial killer, Asher is connected to the nefarious force that feeds on people’s deepest fears, and this force gives him power and control over his victims, revealing their weak, hypocritical, pathetic natures. Predators sense the fear and trembling of the prey, an anxiety that makes their attacks precise, fast, and lethal. Prolific serial killers exist on another plane, a dimension that transcends the tiny world of the sheep, a realm fraught with danger as well as the promise of immortality.

As in his earlier two novels, The Militant and The Malcontents, Marks’ action scenes are graphic and immersive, a result, no doubt, of his experience in military combat. Like any real Satanist, Dalton Asher is a complete misanthrope, and the writing is steeped in disgust for average, normal humans. Loneliness and isolation are the other sides of misanthropy, and Dalton has no choice but to take the solitary left-hand path of the Adversary. The novel's pace is exquisite, and the character of Detective Amara Cruz is well-used to balance out Dalton’s bleak nihilism and create suspense.

A few things have kept me from giving this novel a full five stars. At times, the author switches from first-person to third-person narrative and these changes are a bit confusing. There are a lot of twists and turns at the end of the novel that seem a bit rushed and could have used more stage-setting. The author could have explored more the relationship between Dalton and Satan, as well as the one between Dalton and Amanda Cruz to give his protagonist more depth and create more inner conflict. That being said, this is a great, thought-provoking, supernatural thriller I highly recommend and I look forward to Mason Marks’ future releases!

Picture by Brendan McCarthy I’m slapping band-aids on the cracks in the pavement,         
and gluing my dead skin mask
but the tremors already spread too far, too close,
and I have to reach inside my head,
and stitch the eyelids of the foggy eye.
The neighborhood hobos sense my fear
and burst into my apartment.
I stand tall and tell them I live here,
but the “I” is faded,
it comes unglued like old wallpaper.
The intruders push me aside,
Defacing my silence with
growls, groans, moans, and grunts.
While some collapse on my bed
like exhausted zombies,
others stuff my food
into toothless, ashen mouths.
I curl up in a corner, a sick dog,
Squeeze my eyes shut,
And summon dreams.
 The bus is full of kids,
Chattering, chanting, pointing to the woods outside,
The nauseating green rushes by,
And then I see the distant top of a mountain,
chocked by swirling fog.
I sit at the back,
Small and ashamed,
Toxic exhaust fumes thick in my nostrils,
The puke bag I clutch in my lap
as white as my skin.
The beach is cold and empty,
the closed umbrellas like frozen ghosts
stuck between the gunmetal sea and the leaden sky,
the sand as heavy as my hangover.
It starts raining,
and I grab my vodka with a distant waxy hand
and run for shelter on wobbly legs.
Squinting through the torrent of spit,
I step toward the entryway to a seedy motel
but my approach alerts a mangy-looking yellow cur,
and its frenzied barking calls the whole pack
and they’re on my heels
as I run cursing this metal morning
of rabid teeth and celestial spit.
The train picks up speed
chugging in the rhythm of my galloping heart,
its whistle mocking.
I get hammered at the redneck tavern near the tracks.
I’m broke and the owner asks me to dig a hole in the backyard
to cover my tab.
The yard is choked by blood-splattered weeds;
I dig the pit next to the rusted carcass of a car
And fill it with shards of broken beer bottles,
as the boss said.
The sweaty labor sobers me up
And I hear the whistle of an incoming train.
I run again through the gravel toward the trucks
But my legs feel heavy, scraping against the rocks.
I gaze down in terror:
the stumps of my upper legs were stuck to sand hourglasses,
the heavy sand gathered in the lower bulbs.
I fall head-first
and fists of stones shatter the windshield of my face,
and the glass of my legs.
A bitter axiom occurs to me:
strewn glass trash can never catch a train.
The seedy motel room reeks of stale guests,
cheap bug repellent and cigarette smoke.
The wallpaper is vomit hardened on plastic flowers,
and the bed is a brick of moldy lasagna.
An anemic, insectile buzz comes from the nightstand.
I pick up the receiver with a waxy hand. “Hello?”
“Hey, sweetie,” my mom said, “we were looking for you everywhere,
dad and I.
How are you?”
I put on the broken mask of words, “Not good. I….I want to come home.”
A hesitating break followed by fake enthusiasm, “Of course, what a great idea, honey!
We’re here, waiting for you.
We moved from the last place, now that it’s only the two of us,”
strained laughter,
“We’re right across from the cancer in your uncle’s eyes
on the street with sinking houses
we rent a roomy basement just under another basement.
I’m here knitting blankets of dirt
while your dad is racing roaches on the bricked windows.
He’s petting his tumor while we watch the news on the cracked screen,
he likes how the stomach growth is purring.
Just follow the chatter of dentures, my angel,
and the buzz of pacemakers,
right by the dumpster with a broken couch on the side,
crawling with stray dogs ripped in half,
you’ll be sure to find us, sweetie.We’re here holding our breaths, missing you deeply.”