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Vastarien #8
Vastarien: Vol. 3, Issue 2
Vastarien: A Literary Journal is a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas. The journal includes nonfiction, literary horror fiction, poetry, artwork and non-classifiable hybrid pieces.
Double issue! Original cover art and 13 original, full color illustrations by living legend Harry 0. Morris. 25 works of fiction by Michael Griffin, Cody Goodfellow, LC von Hessen, Sarah L. Johnson, John Claude Smith, Casilda Ferrante, Lora Gray, Matthew M. Bartlett, and others! 2 Nonfiction articles by Alex Skopic and John Palisano. 9 poems by Sonya Taaffe, Rae White, Dimitry Blizniuk and others. All new recurring column by a special guest!
Double issue! Original cover art and 13 original, full color illustrations by living legend Harry 0. Morris. 25 works of fiction by Michael Griffin, Cody Goodfellow, LC von Hessen, Sarah L. Johnson, John Claude Smith, Casilda Ferrante, Lora Gray, Matthew M. Bartlett, and others! 2 Nonfiction articles by Alex Skopic and John Palisano. 9 poems by Sonya Taaffe, Rae White, Dimitry Blizniuk and others. All new recurring column by a special guest!
- GenresHorror
350 pages, Paperback
First published December 16, 2020
1 person is currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Jon Padgett
50 books531 followersJon Padgett is a professional–though lapsed–ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Grimscribe Press, which publishes
Vastarien: A Literary Journal
, a source of critical study and creative response to the work of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett’s first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine.
Padgett’s voice has also become synonymous with the works of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett has lent his voice to numerous Thomas Ligotti works, including the recently released Penguin Random House audio version of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and various Cadabra Record releases, “The Bungalow House,” “The Red Tower,” “The Small People,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” “The Clown Puppet,” “Pictures of Apocalypse,” and “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel.” In addition to his work as a Ligotti narrator, Padgett has also narrated two Cadabra Records releases of his own work, “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” and “Origami Dreams.” With his ability to channel Ligotti’s prose and poetry via the spoken word, Padgett is a singular figure in the world of weird storytelling.
Padgett’s voice has also become synonymous with the works of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett has lent his voice to numerous Thomas Ligotti works, including the recently released Penguin Random House audio version of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and various Cadabra Record releases, “The Bungalow House,” “The Red Tower,” “The Small People,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” “The Clown Puppet,” “Pictures of Apocalypse,” and “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel.” In addition to his work as a Ligotti narrator, Padgett has also narrated two Cadabra Records releases of his own work, “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” and “Origami Dreams.” With his ability to channel Ligotti’s prose and poetry via the spoken word, Padgett is a singular figure in the world of weird storytelling.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 25, 2021
Reviews of each work will appear as when completed. Possibly once a week two works that worked for me.
Deprimer
by Mike Thorn
Just recently finished his debut novel out Feb 23rd Shelter for the Damned and liked and reviewed it so wanted to give shorter work of his a try.
Dr Cribs i am on to you!
I followed from your building on the outskirts of the district.
Vincent lives in Canada with depression, a high pressure job, plenty monies, and thinking of ways of ending it all, with a bullet or something else.
When all else failed, and Vincent had already tried many routes with various therapies, opportunity knocked with a strange charismatic man that operates from obscurity and anonymity with abilities that may sound appealing and a talent in sniffing out Deprimers.
This was an abstract work that almost carried me under its wings empathically until matters turned down an certain avenue, or should I say agreeing to certain terms, now that is something for concern, one that leaves perplexing rumination with a paradoxical tale, good short stories can do this, question certain beings and choices, along with good word usage.
I Wake up and Remember Myself
by Michael Griffin
First person telling evoking the emotions and the domain of his, a psychological taxing perpetual journey in a labyrinth of ones mind and core of being.
This domain an obscure one, trying to understand ones whys and how, decipher ones dilemma, with a memorable empathic discourse on self and self-scrutiny.
Ignorance is sometime bliss.
This is my second reading of his works and loved his novella Armageddon House and I have two of his collections The Lure of Devouring Light and The Human Alchemy on my pile with beautiful cover art of which I am going to tackle few of his stories in coming weeks.
Oh the Beautiful Stink
by Matthew M. Bartlett
There is..
Trouble with old man in party hat with a trio leading him down streets
Trouble to sleep
Trouble at the supermarket
the malodorous gelatin of unknown provenance
Whistling of a disquieting tune
Trouble with the television
Trouble with silence and ambient noise
With the myriad of troubles, who’s fault is it?
One thing for sure.
Welcome to the Matthew Bartlett Zone!
It seems to be the birthday of a man of older age. He seems to be lead down paths by a trio, mostly suburban streets and blindfolded. If you see or hear of these sightings report to local authorities.
Okay..well that was a little time in bizarre trappings with terrible unsettling things.
There be peculiarities with mind stirring and word acrobatics maybe.
I like the way he builds the sentence and other places his sharp short shock sentences. My first but not my last read of his works.
Roscoe’s Malefic Delights
By LC von Hessen
“The Comestitorium is down the block and around the corner from my apartment, so in my regular neighborhood dealings I end up passing Roscoe’s Delights and Roscoe’s cigar smoke far more frequently than I’d prefer.”
Dear writer I have also abandoned that street and can never pass The Comestitorium and Roscoe’s Delights again.
It is all true what you tell, I couldn’t describe as great as you with vivid evocation and such great descriptiveness Roscoe stands in front of me and his meal, I have to shake these memories from my mind these words here, my last repeating of any dealings or mentions with Roscoe.
“Roscoe himself was a generic sort of man with a plump, squarish, gently mottled face, which looked as though someone had attempted to carve a face into a potato and didn’t finish out of boredom. Frankly, we had no guarantee that he wasn’t a sack or two of potatoes that had gained sentience, donned a human skin and a curly toupee, and opened a local eatery.
But the actual Roscoe before us wears windbreakers and jeans, with hands in his pockets and a smug, faintly distasteful smile, emitting a laugh low in the throat, huhuhuhuhhr, like a choking motor.”
I have food critic heading there I have asked a favor of him, he owes me one, you know Mr Anton Ego that one investigated Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris, he will settle it all.
“My apartment, as it happens, is an inadvertent Petri dish of structural decay. The building itself is over a century old, and its interior surfaces form a battered skin, pocked with wrinkles, scars, and weals over time. Eggshell cracks routinely appear in my ceilings and walls, shadows laying down roots that the cold moisture of late-year months and humidity of summer conspire to widen and wedge apart, lapping tongues of layered paint, eventually dropping off in jagged swathes like the facial features of a tertiary syphilitic.”
Yes well I had the same I was in the next block they all seem to be designed in same manner, get out please!
“I grumble past the omnipresent Comestitorium line which now extends down the block and around the corner, obscuring the gate to my apartment stoop.”
And I won’t miss that line because I too had to dodge the terrible souls lining up.
I also did one more thing I saw an ad he posted he was in need of a nanny and I referred one great nanny, Leanne Grayson, she owes me one too, she has been hired and its all working out to plan. Hope to read sometime in the future that you have moved to better accommodations and city.
“The Comestitorium served only one item: the embarrassingly named “Roscoe’s Delights,” available slathered in various types of sauce. The titular item was far from “delightful” to look at, reminiscent of blood-drained white worms or skinned, flattened rats’ tails or stringy strips of tripe, spongy and resistant like an oddly complex form of pasta that fought the fork and curled up with the tongue. If one chose, as most did, to eat them with sauce, they were served with a cloudy, jellied orb on top that was prodded open with one’s fork to diffuse over the contents, like a boiled egg—perhaps appropriately, since each orb resembled the amniotic sac of a zygote. With predictable pretension, each of the sauces was also linked somehow to one of the four medieval humours via the restaurant’s menu, which improbably described this whole experience as a gastronomic panoply of gustation for connoisseurs of mastication.”
Konrad by R. P. Veit
A tale of a passionate runner, she is separated with teenagers, in distress with case of wear and tear damage that needs some Konrad treatment.
Don’t we just hate those little and big pains that get in the way and deter our running routines.
There is a few feelings Victoria will go through along with her pains.
Doing the turtle movements can only help the joints but not with Konrad watching I rather do it in private.
There is an imaginative mind of Victoria brought alive with the creative crafting of the author.
The Psychic Surgeon
by Cody Goodfellow
In his first paragraph he mentions “There were no forms to fill out. I paid in cash.”
Then there is descriptions of hands in a certain way “I recall that they looked and felt uncannily small and fine, like the hands of a doll.”
One would think get the hell out of there, all the fingers prying and digging, but then it’s not so gruesome and beneficial in ways.
Not for me he can keep his hands to himself.
An interesting peculiar very short tale..maybe one cannot deter his end but he can at least make few adjustments.
APOCTATRYPTAMIN® by T. M. Morgan
“ATP, like any substance, can be dangerous when abused. When administered properly, it works as intended: it allows our minds to navigate through the innumerable, tangential existences, choosing the path in which we always survive. I am offering the world immortality, utopia. And you degrade all of it.”
Getting ATP pronto.
As I read more further on second thoughts I skip on that thought, erase, erase.
There be experimentations and injections with one at precipice of do and maybe die possible outcomes and variations at play.
Feelings, actions, with death and life in the mind and “obsessive thoughts about the fractal universes that bloom all around us,” awaiting in the story.
There is this sentence that strikes some today news similarities: “The whole world needs to be vaccinated. Once we all share in mortal perfection, I will have perfected our uni-verse. There is still too much resistance and mimicked products that do harm instead of good. Talonz,” I say with disgust, “and Chinese knock offs. It must be everyone using my compound.”
Homeownership and you
by Kurt Fawver
“You’ve lived a lonely life, a life in search of a tangible, all-American dream: the house. Now, you believe, you can focus on balancing the cosmic scales. You can fill the house with love and memories. You can have it all.”
I am sure he can.
And yes “nothing can possibly go wrong here.”
But then oh dear, a door to somewhere… and so forth the story unravels.
Home ownership proved to be not what he expected and he needs to “regain psychological mastery over your home.”
Engaging and immersive short haunting tale.
Excerpts @ https://more2read.com/review/vastarien-vol-3-issue-2-edited-by-jon-padgett/
Deprimer
by Mike Thorn
Just recently finished his debut novel out Feb 23rd Shelter for the Damned and liked and reviewed it so wanted to give shorter work of his a try.
Dr Cribs i am on to you!
I followed from your building on the outskirts of the district.
Vincent lives in Canada with depression, a high pressure job, plenty monies, and thinking of ways of ending it all, with a bullet or something else.
When all else failed, and Vincent had already tried many routes with various therapies, opportunity knocked with a strange charismatic man that operates from obscurity and anonymity with abilities that may sound appealing and a talent in sniffing out Deprimers.
This was an abstract work that almost carried me under its wings empathically until matters turned down an certain avenue, or should I say agreeing to certain terms, now that is something for concern, one that leaves perplexing rumination with a paradoxical tale, good short stories can do this, question certain beings and choices, along with good word usage.
I Wake up and Remember Myself
by Michael Griffin
First person telling evoking the emotions and the domain of his, a psychological taxing perpetual journey in a labyrinth of ones mind and core of being.
This domain an obscure one, trying to understand ones whys and how, decipher ones dilemma, with a memorable empathic discourse on self and self-scrutiny.
Ignorance is sometime bliss.
This is my second reading of his works and loved his novella Armageddon House and I have two of his collections The Lure of Devouring Light and The Human Alchemy on my pile with beautiful cover art of which I am going to tackle few of his stories in coming weeks.
Oh the Beautiful Stink
by Matthew M. Bartlett
There is..
Trouble with old man in party hat with a trio leading him down streets
Trouble to sleep
Trouble at the supermarket
the malodorous gelatin of unknown provenance
Whistling of a disquieting tune
Trouble with the television
Trouble with silence and ambient noise
With the myriad of troubles, who’s fault is it?
One thing for sure.
Welcome to the Matthew Bartlett Zone!
It seems to be the birthday of a man of older age. He seems to be lead down paths by a trio, mostly suburban streets and blindfolded. If you see or hear of these sightings report to local authorities.
Okay..well that was a little time in bizarre trappings with terrible unsettling things.
There be peculiarities with mind stirring and word acrobatics maybe.
I like the way he builds the sentence and other places his sharp short shock sentences. My first but not my last read of his works.
Roscoe’s Malefic Delights
By LC von Hessen
“The Comestitorium is down the block and around the corner from my apartment, so in my regular neighborhood dealings I end up passing Roscoe’s Delights and Roscoe’s cigar smoke far more frequently than I’d prefer.”
Dear writer I have also abandoned that street and can never pass The Comestitorium and Roscoe’s Delights again.
It is all true what you tell, I couldn’t describe as great as you with vivid evocation and such great descriptiveness Roscoe stands in front of me and his meal, I have to shake these memories from my mind these words here, my last repeating of any dealings or mentions with Roscoe.
“Roscoe himself was a generic sort of man with a plump, squarish, gently mottled face, which looked as though someone had attempted to carve a face into a potato and didn’t finish out of boredom. Frankly, we had no guarantee that he wasn’t a sack or two of potatoes that had gained sentience, donned a human skin and a curly toupee, and opened a local eatery.
But the actual Roscoe before us wears windbreakers and jeans, with hands in his pockets and a smug, faintly distasteful smile, emitting a laugh low in the throat, huhuhuhuhhr, like a choking motor.”
I have food critic heading there I have asked a favor of him, he owes me one, you know Mr Anton Ego that one investigated Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris, he will settle it all.
“My apartment, as it happens, is an inadvertent Petri dish of structural decay. The building itself is over a century old, and its interior surfaces form a battered skin, pocked with wrinkles, scars, and weals over time. Eggshell cracks routinely appear in my ceilings and walls, shadows laying down roots that the cold moisture of late-year months and humidity of summer conspire to widen and wedge apart, lapping tongues of layered paint, eventually dropping off in jagged swathes like the facial features of a tertiary syphilitic.”
Yes well I had the same I was in the next block they all seem to be designed in same manner, get out please!
“I grumble past the omnipresent Comestitorium line which now extends down the block and around the corner, obscuring the gate to my apartment stoop.”
And I won’t miss that line because I too had to dodge the terrible souls lining up.
I also did one more thing I saw an ad he posted he was in need of a nanny and I referred one great nanny, Leanne Grayson, she owes me one too, she has been hired and its all working out to plan. Hope to read sometime in the future that you have moved to better accommodations and city.
“The Comestitorium served only one item: the embarrassingly named “Roscoe’s Delights,” available slathered in various types of sauce. The titular item was far from “delightful” to look at, reminiscent of blood-drained white worms or skinned, flattened rats’ tails or stringy strips of tripe, spongy and resistant like an oddly complex form of pasta that fought the fork and curled up with the tongue. If one chose, as most did, to eat them with sauce, they were served with a cloudy, jellied orb on top that was prodded open with one’s fork to diffuse over the contents, like a boiled egg—perhaps appropriately, since each orb resembled the amniotic sac of a zygote. With predictable pretension, each of the sauces was also linked somehow to one of the four medieval humours via the restaurant’s menu, which improbably described this whole experience as a gastronomic panoply of gustation for connoisseurs of mastication.”
Konrad by R. P. Veit
A tale of a passionate runner, she is separated with teenagers, in distress with case of wear and tear damage that needs some Konrad treatment.
Don’t we just hate those little and big pains that get in the way and deter our running routines.
There is a few feelings Victoria will go through along with her pains.
Doing the turtle movements can only help the joints but not with Konrad watching I rather do it in private.
There is an imaginative mind of Victoria brought alive with the creative crafting of the author.
The Psychic Surgeon
by Cody Goodfellow
In his first paragraph he mentions “There were no forms to fill out. I paid in cash.”
Then there is descriptions of hands in a certain way “I recall that they looked and felt uncannily small and fine, like the hands of a doll.”
One would think get the hell out of there, all the fingers prying and digging, but then it’s not so gruesome and beneficial in ways.
Not for me he can keep his hands to himself.
An interesting peculiar very short tale..maybe one cannot deter his end but he can at least make few adjustments.
APOCTATRYPTAMIN® by T. M. Morgan
“ATP, like any substance, can be dangerous when abused. When administered properly, it works as intended: it allows our minds to navigate through the innumerable, tangential existences, choosing the path in which we always survive. I am offering the world immortality, utopia. And you degrade all of it.”
Getting ATP pronto.
As I read more further on second thoughts I skip on that thought, erase, erase.
There be experimentations and injections with one at precipice of do and maybe die possible outcomes and variations at play.
Feelings, actions, with death and life in the mind and “obsessive thoughts about the fractal universes that bloom all around us,” awaiting in the story.
There is this sentence that strikes some today news similarities: “The whole world needs to be vaccinated. Once we all share in mortal perfection, I will have perfected our uni-verse. There is still too much resistance and mimicked products that do harm instead of good. Talonz,” I say with disgust, “and Chinese knock offs. It must be everyone using my compound.”
Homeownership and you
by Kurt Fawver
“You’ve lived a lonely life, a life in search of a tangible, all-American dream: the house. Now, you believe, you can focus on balancing the cosmic scales. You can fill the house with love and memories. You can have it all.”
I am sure he can.
And yes “nothing can possibly go wrong here.”
But then oh dear, a door to somewhere… and so forth the story unravels.
Home ownership proved to be not what he expected and he needs to “regain psychological mastery over your home.”
Engaging and immersive short haunting tale.
Excerpts @ https://more2read.com/review/vastarien-vol-3-issue-2-edited-by-jon-padgett/
February 14, 2021
Seemingly as an inadvertent but preternaturally intended theme-and-variations on the Bartlett (that was in turn the latest representative of this whole remarkably substantial yet pervasive book’s gestalt decorated by many Harry o. Morris artworks), there follows this mighty Triptych of relatively short works….
DISSOLUTIONS – FINAL WORKS by William Kamen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo — May 11 to September 3, 2023
by Miguel Fliguer
The fusion of an artist with his work, literally the fusion of a painting on a canvas with one’s body and soul, as brilliantly conveyed by a catalogue of Kamen’s posthumous exhibition of paintings, the fusion of words like Bartlett’s with images like Van Gogh’s…
…followed by “the drooping sack of an old man” seen in the mountain crick and a young woman’s duly bowing to the protocols or etiquettes of age as well as that crick’s sacrificial confessional in the story entitled MOUNT P (by Denise S. Robbins) containing another series of incantatory refrains, here upon the different P-words of the Mount’s name, like PERSEVERE and PRAYER, as well as POINTLESS and PITILESS. From this book’s crib to crick. That pointless hole in the wall of rock. Via Bartlett’s hospital room again. I remain in its cruel palliative care, I guess. Or at least part of me does or will. The other part still climbing more PLEASANT heights…
…with, in between, another young girl or woman in cruel transition …
ADVICE I WISH I’D BEEN GIVEN WHEN I WAS A 12 YEAR-OLD GIRL ABOUT TO WATCH ‘THE EXORCIST’ FOR THE FIRST TIME
The ultimate incantatory refrain, as written or transcribed as a poem by Chelsea Davis.
Keep telling yourself that is was a movie — it was art, not life. And art is everything, I say. Hope and survival built in. But if life still ends cruelly, pray its Art perseveres.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.
DISSOLUTIONS – FINAL WORKS by William Kamen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo — May 11 to September 3, 2023
by Miguel Fliguer
The fusion of an artist with his work, literally the fusion of a painting on a canvas with one’s body and soul, as brilliantly conveyed by a catalogue of Kamen’s posthumous exhibition of paintings, the fusion of words like Bartlett’s with images like Van Gogh’s…
…followed by “the drooping sack of an old man” seen in the mountain crick and a young woman’s duly bowing to the protocols or etiquettes of age as well as that crick’s sacrificial confessional in the story entitled MOUNT P (by Denise S. Robbins) containing another series of incantatory refrains, here upon the different P-words of the Mount’s name, like PERSEVERE and PRAYER, as well as POINTLESS and PITILESS. From this book’s crib to crick. That pointless hole in the wall of rock. Via Bartlett’s hospital room again. I remain in its cruel palliative care, I guess. Or at least part of me does or will. The other part still climbing more PLEASANT heights…
…with, in between, another young girl or woman in cruel transition …
ADVICE I WISH I’D BEEN GIVEN WHEN I WAS A 12 YEAR-OLD GIRL ABOUT TO WATCH ‘THE EXORCIST’ FOR THE FIRST TIME
The ultimate incantatory refrain, as written or transcribed as a poem by Chelsea Davis.
Keep telling yourself that is was a movie — it was art, not life. And art is everything, I say. Hope and survival built in. But if life still ends cruelly, pray its Art perseveres.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is its conclusion.
March 18, 2021
The most eclectic and consistently high quality Vastarien so far (especially considering it’s a double issue). If you’re a fan of existential, weird, literary horror of any stripe you will find a lot to like here.
June 28, 2021
As always an excellent collection, this one with double the punch in terms of the number of works included. In awe of the creativity, imagination, and sense of dread/forboding/horror (I can't quite pin down the right term) that went into each of these stories.
In particular, Chelsea Davis' Advice I Wish I'd Been Given When I Was a 12-Year-Old Girl about to Watch The Exorcist for the First Time was a 2 page HEAVY hitter that should be required reading. I want to mention the fantastic artwork as well. Extremely well done and really added to my enjoyment of this read. Thanks to all the authors and the crew at Grimscribe Press for another great one!
In particular, Chelsea Davis' Advice I Wish I'd Been Given When I Was a 12-Year-Old Girl about to Watch The Exorcist for the First Time was a 2 page HEAVY hitter that should be required reading. I want to mention the fantastic artwork as well. Extremely well done and really added to my enjoyment of this read. Thanks to all the authors and the crew at Grimscribe Press for another great one!
January 23, 2022
Kurt Fawver writes for the nihilistic wage slave in late stage capitalism. “The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking” highlights the futility of artistic expression, while “Workday” the futility of earning for your corporate masters. His contribution to this volume “Homeownership and You” uses an uncomfortable extradimensional space behind an extra door to apply cosmic horror to the concept of property ownership.
Vastarien is not afraid to experiment with form while exploring horror and nihilism. “Oh the Beautiful Stink” by Matthew M. Bartlett is a bleak prose poem about that last walk into what dreams may come. “Advice I Wish I'd Been Given When I Was a 12-Year-Old Girl about to Watch The Exorcist for the First Time” by Chelsea Davis lands its punches with such compact prose.
Vastarien is not afraid to experiment with form while exploring horror and nihilism. “Oh the Beautiful Stink” by Matthew M. Bartlett is a bleak prose poem about that last walk into what dreams may come. “Advice I Wish I'd Been Given When I Was a 12-Year-Old Girl about to Watch The Exorcist for the First Time” by Chelsea Davis lands its punches with such compact prose.
March 28, 2021
I did not love this volume, so I did not finish all the stories. But the essay about corporate horror and "My Work Is Not Yet Done" was the best piece of non-fiction I've read in "Vastarien" to date.
"Homeownership and You" and "Roscoe's Malefic Delights" were pretty good.
"Homeownership and You" and "Roscoe's Malefic Delights" were pretty good.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews