Hairs

by Ira Rat

"Six insidious stories, as small and upsetting as an eyelash comprise Ira Rat's Hairs. Each uncomfortable experience leaves the reader squirming for more. To quote from the opening story At the Base of a Crucifixion,
"(A)nxiety is still the highest form of art."

– Joe Koch (author, The Wingspan of Severed Hands, and The Couvade)


"'Rat somehow captures a fistful of psychic fragments from the ether and tosses them right into your open eyes. Every story is saturated in a recognisable contemporary angst and apathy - yet the prose is still propulsive, as if Rat's sheer dynamism of craft is enough to animate even the most jaded post-covid consciousness into a powerful metaphor."

– Chris Kelso (author, The Dregs Trilogy)




Part Raymond Carver, part Kafka’s fragmentary writings. Hairs is a collection attempting to exorcize every needless word from Ira Rat’s already minimalistic horrors.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror

90 pages, Paperback

Published October 31, 2024

About the author

Ira Rat works and lives in Ames, IA.

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abandoned roads and lost souls looking for the right exit. Gray Sorensen is a fine name, but will it really make a difference? A note: if you ever have a hole in your head, don't attempt to fix it yourself without using disinfectant. Things grow up there.

[Sadie Hartmann]

"Anxiety is still the highest form of art."

"You can scrub your life of as many identifiers as you can, but people will always insist on a name."
"Every piece of art needs one."

That Constant Irritation would be a great companion piece to Chandler Morrison's, Along the Path of Torment. That lonely, hopeless, scathing LA vibe

An Iowa Story freaked me out.

I'm the Last Person I'd Want to Be. A gut punch; a bruise. So sad.

More soon.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I pull at the stitches, and they come out without any effort. Just the slow, uncomfortable feeling of floss being dragged across my gums. Tender and as deliberate as I can be until they're gone, and the skin falls loose again, now dropping past my bottom lip."

Lonely, bleak, and deeply upsetting. Ira Rat's Hairs is an anxiety riddled, atmospheric, crushing pit of despair and sadness. These extremely short stories deliver a total gut-punch, so miserable and sorrowful. The tales contained within Hairs are intensely mesmerizing and all too memorable, at first, these weird and wonderful little tales may feel disjointed, but each one is connected by desolation and depression. Each story abruptly ends, utterly unresolved, feeling much like being shoved off a cliff and plunging head first into the murky depths below. With Hairs, Ira Rat has put faith into the minds of the reader, it's on us, after all, to allow our twisted imaginations to run free. There's a brutal uniqueness to this grim little novella, and for a book so tiny, it has some serious teeth.

Hairs reads like almost no other book I've ever experienced. It's art. It's something that totally transcends the written word. Somehow, by saying so little, Ira Rat spins images that twist and gnarl into beastly forms that beg to break free from the pages. This isn't a horror novel, these aren't tales of terror, instead this is a novel of discomfort and abandonment. Perhaps, we may call these tales slices of life, except they're not. They're cutting, scathing, horrendous vignettes that make for a viscerally unpleasant experience. These stories are deeply unnerving, absolutely harrowing, upsetting to the core. It's almost impossible to fully describe what this book even is. It was so short, over so quickly and yet it felt like the end of everything - Hairs made me want to drink bleach.

"Cancer causes cancer-causing cancers. You've got to avoid them at all costs. My first memory of my mother is her holding her fingers like a bunny quoting. I'm late! I'm late! The last is crying over a radiated husk."

Fiercely emotional, a total void of a novella, blistering and brutal. Each of the stories in Hairs felt like an apocalypse. It's too difficult to define the exact feeling left behind by Hairs, but it was something akin to hunkering down in a bomb shelter while the rest of humanity watches itself crumble. Some real bleak shit. There's something haunting and despairing about this entire collection, what strange little things they are, definitely not horror, yet they fit the bill, being scary, horrible, monstrous things. If minimalist horror is a thing, maybe that's what this is, stripped away, cut down, every single unnecessary word cast aside until all that's left is the most simplistic, distressing and somber of prose. Absolutely electrifying, an experience like no other.

"Again." Her mother demanded from within another spasm of coughs. A bottle of bleach was in her hand, and she slowly began adding it to the water. "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me-" Her mother plunged her face into the sink."

[Stay Fetters · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hollywood isn’t a meat market but markets meat better than anywhere else. In this town, even our vegans are cannibalistic."

All hail Ira Rat! The King of uncomfortableness and pulp! No one can write stories like Ira can.

Just imagine being spit on and eating food out of trashcans together. His stories are truly bizarre love!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great collection of short stories, and they were all bangers. I will definitely be reading more by Ira Rat ASAP.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My neighbors are cam girls and junkies, but that’s beside the point. Deep down, aren’t we all cam girls and junkies?”

I am an Ira Rat fangirl and have been for a while, though I could never quite vocalize what it was specifically that I found so mesmerizing about his books. Finally, with Hairs, I understand. Ira Rat writes like no one else: his prose is akin to the best kind of modern art: edgy and smart without the slightest hint of ostentatiousness. His transgressive stories sprout imagery that outgrows the pages, wrapping itself around the reader’s inner core; rather than scream, the tales ooze disturbance and discomfort.

Much of these stories are slices of life, but they aren’t carved with clean, sharp blades. Instead, the vignettes are jagged and rough, and that is what makes them so visceral. The description in “At the Base of a Crucifixion” is so well crafted, you can smell the odor of John Deere hats seeping through the glass; the characters in “That Constant Irritation” are car accidents from which you can’t look away. The ending of “I’m the Last Person I’d Want to Be” is horrifically beautiful and will leave you thinking about it for days after.

Grab this collection. Read it. It will follow you.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hairs is like a velvet bag of brightly colored glass shards. The book looks amazing (Filthy Loot is impeccable). Inside the covers are short stories. They are vivid. They sparkle, they shine, and then they slip through your fingers. Leaving cuts to remember you buy. Rat knows how to end a story without killing the mystery.

[Books For Decaying Millennials · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased the deluxe edition of this book, directly from FilthyLoot. The main differences being page length, and the inclusion of pieces Ira had initially published separately, that book I also have read. All views and opinions are mine, given freely.
-
In the Introduction this small collection, author Ira Rat explains why the stories included, and to a greater extent, much of his published work, are shorter. It's a glimpse at something, perhaps part of a larger story. THere's an expectation, that these glimpses will be revealed to be part of a larger written work. short story evolving into a novel. The story's in Hairs eschue this very idea. It's something I've come expect from Ira's writing. I think it's what drew me in from the start.
It's that powerful effect of only getting a glance, a few morsals that make the stories to potent.
Ira pulls back the curtain, making us priving to moments of deep ugliness, terror, descents into a persons inner void. fragments of tableaus that if they were fully realized would probably induce night terrors. Yet again, it's that holding back, that glance out the window, as Ira put's it, that makes it so much more potent. Because we the reader are left with our own thoughts, mentally circling back to these short moments, imagining what was before or after the story's end.

Iowa, The Midwest, purely geographic concepts. Places on a map, and so much more. There's an almost metaphysical space, or perhaps Liminal Space, that Iowa encompasses. The Facade of Iowa Nice, used as a smokescreen to block out the ugliness, abuse, dark secrets and pockets of nasty weirdos that you can find scattered in small rural communities. That mantra of everything is ok, while everything is the farthest it could be from "ok".
I have my own steamer trunk of feelings, history and hurt associated with Iowa. Books like hairs, and writers like Ira, are helping me to process it all.
Didn't mean to get personal, but living in Iowa, even for apart of your life, leaves a mark on you.

[Madison McSweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Art, fame, family, legacy. People strive to find meaning in their lives - and fail - in this deeply unnerving collection of stories. This one left me very unsettled.

[on storygraph (macclown) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I looooved this. Visceral and emotional, can't get enough of Ira Rat's writing honestly. A great collection.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I read anyone write contempt as well as Ira Rat does in Hairs. The cornered terror of splintering wood as intrusive thoughts rip propriety’s last door off its hinges; the contaminant bloom of poison swirling irreversibly down the well. There’s an Easton Ellisonian wretchedness to these six portraits in miniature - that hardbitten, numbed-and-bloodshot youth that’s already lived long enough to see all its most safeguarded dreams reduced to glamor filtered clickbait and derivative content slop. But whether it’s the seething cynicism of children shoved violently into premature adulthood, or the lizard brained depravities of the adults that shoved them there, Rat’s relentlessly acidic voice and caustic one-liners have a way of corroding the consciousness without ever allowing it the peace of a full dissolve (a description not unlike how we’re taught to imagine Hell). Rather, these blistering inner monologues layer and swell until they fill their container skulls like a drone-looped black metal scream. They see and hear every evil, but speak it back to themselves alone. There’s nowhere for it to go but further in. Nothing for it to do but swallow them whole.

[Jon Steffens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ira Rat is a ridiculously underrated writer. His work carries such a distinctive voice, and he sets a palpable mood in as few words as possible. Horror, transgressive fiction, unsettling literature, whatever you want to call it: Hairs will grab you.

[Carina Stopenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

gross little delights

[Lucio Vasquez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Six fragmented stories, brief in length but everlasting in substance. I particularly enjoyed the last story, which explores the ambiguous line between an artist and their art — and how one can lose themself in that gray abyss.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eleven very short stories that were more like slightly transgressive scenarios than stories. They all felt incomplete, like sketches, or character monologues which didn’t really go anywhere or wrap up nicely.

Unfortunately not for me, but I am a fan of the format and style.