BEWARE HE WHO IS THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS TALE OF THE FACT OF FICTION AND THE FICTION OF FACT AND WHOM WILL BE KNOWN AND PERHAPS OR PERHAPS NOT REMEMBERED AS A AND FOLLOWED THROUGH HIS AND EVERYONE ELSE’S EMPTY EXPERIENCES IN THIS PLACE MOST CALL THE WORLD AND IN WHICH SUCH EMPTY EXPERIENCES WILL INCLUDE IMPOSED EXISTENCE AND ALSO OF COURSE YOUTH AND BEAUTY AND SEX AND MONEY AND SUBSTANCES AND POP MUSIC AND DESTRUCTION AND SELF DESTRUCTION AND OBSESSION AND ANNIHILATION AND EXPENSIVE CLOTHES AND JEWELRY AND MC MANSIONS AND POWER AND POWERLESSNESS AND RAPE AND BLOOD AND PISS AD SHIT AND CUM AND GLORIOUS DEATH AND NECROPHILIA AND CANNIBALISM AND TORTURE AND SADISM AND MASOCHISM AND SELF IMPORTANT WANNABE ARTISTS AND OTHER SUCH DIVERSIONS DEVISED TO TRY TO MASK THE MEANINGLESSNESS ALL BATTLING TO BE EITHER TRUE OR LESS TRUE.

An experimental novel in one sentence

Buy HEY BOY

A W W BREMONT IS A MEMBER OF GENERATION Y AND AND HEY BOY IS HIS FIRST NOVEL.

 

MISCELANEOUS VIDEOS OF RELEVANCE

 

EXCERPT

 

RELEVANT, IMPORTANT, INFLUENTIAL, INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point

– WILLIAM FAULKNER, ‘Absalom, Absalom!’

 

Everything’s in ruins, everything’s been degraded, but I could say that they’ve ruined and degraded everything because this is not some kind of cataclysm coming about with so-called “innocent” human aid, on the contrary, it’s about man’s own judgment over his own self which of course god has a big hand in or dare I say, takes part in, and whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine because, you see, the world has been debased, so it doesn’t matter what I say because everything has been debased that they’ve acquired and since they’ve acquired everything in a sneaky, underhanded fight, they’ve debased everything, because whatever they touch, and they touch everything, they’ve debased; this is the way it was until the final victory, until the triumphant end; acquire, debase, debase, acquire; or I can put it differently if you’d like, to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase; it’s been going on like this for centuries, on, on and on; this and only this, sometimes on the sly, sometimes rudely, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on; yet only in one way; like a rat attacks from ambush; because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side, that is, everything’s that’s excellent, great in some way and noble, should not engage in any kind of fight, there shouldn’t be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side meaning the disappearing of the excellent, the great, the noble, so that by now the winners who have won by attacking from ambush rule the earth and there isn’t a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs, even things that they can’t reach but they do reach are also theirs; the heavens are already theirs and theirs are all our dreams; theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence; even immortality is theirs, you understand?; everything, everything is lost forever, and those many nobles, great and excellent just stood there, if I can put it that way; they stopped at this point and had to understand and had to accept that there is neither god nor gods, and the excellent, the great and the noble had to understand and accept this right from the beginning, but, of course, they were quite incapable of understanding it, they believed it and accepted it but they didn’t understand it; they just stood there, bewildered but not resigned until something, that flash on the mind, finally enlightened them, and all at once they realized that there is neither god nor gods; all at once they saw that there is neither good nor bad; then they saw and understood that if this was so then they themselves did not exist either; you see, I reckon this may have been the moment when we can say that they were extinguished, they burnt out; extinguished and burnt out like the fire left to smolder in the meadow; one was the constant loser, the other was the constant victor; defeat, victory, defeat, victory; and one day, here in the neighborhood I had to realize and I did realize that I was mistaken, I was truly mistaken when I thought that there had never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth; because, believe me, I know now that this change has indeed taken place.

– BÉLA TARR, LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI; ‘The Turin Horse’

 

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing the blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up in gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

– CORMAC McCARTHY, ‘Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West’

 

I move around, I jump, I fling myself and yet I’m still inside that one space which is too tight for me, unbearably small, although at times it is only exactly just a bit too tight, and it is exactly then, when it is exactly just a bit too tight, that it is the most unbearable; I jump and I’m still inside something, whose dimensions could be called redundantly inabundant, because it is not simply a question of dimensions but rather that in the moment when I jump, and I am inside that space, I am immediately caught, the space has caught me, the space into which I leapt unguarded, and it is not that I’m not cautious enough, I am cautious enough, maybe even unduly so, but that it’s all the same where I jump, it’s certain that I’ll end up in a space that is too tight for me, at times only exactly just a bit too tight, but amazingly very often just that, unendurable, I feel that space coiling around me like a cage no matter where I move, I immediately reach the end, in fact hardly do I move at all before the end of that space reaches me, I say, it is so much like being in a cage, as if all I could ever do is jump in a cage, and I can’t do anything else, I have to jump, however if I jump I immediately end up in that space which, as I say, is often maddeningly tight, I feel more or less not as if I were jumping into a square wire cage, or even worse into a brick-shaped one, but at such times I feel that I have got myself into a space that has been measured exactly for me, that’s what I think, that it is exactly as big as I am, and that is the most maddening thing of all, because I don’t even have to move, I touch the grating everywhere, for it is all one and the same what the end of this space is made of, to me it is a grating, the grating of a cage, and at such times there is no mercy, I try to free myself and if I even merely budge I feel the attempt to be absurd, because everything within this space is made in such a way, this space-cage, so that exactly what is missing from it is space, because you have to imagine it like this, and I say this to everyone, everyone else who also needs to jump, they will understand what I’m thinking about, and how this has to be imagined, that space is exactly what it is not, that apart from me this space has no innate freedom, so that in fact it isn’t even that, just a cage made to my measurements, I jump into it and in reality if I think about it more deeply, it is even so when I think that the space into which I jump is somehow wider, because in reality just the sheer knowledge that if I stretch myself four, then six, then seven centimetres further out, I’ll touch this or that side, well, already I’m touching the wall of the cage, so that the end of the cage in reality already starts there, at that point where I’m thinking that in an instant I will bump into the end, in other words there is no escape, if I jump up to sink my teeth into your throat, I jump into the trap definitively and inevitably, there is unfortunately no point in speaking of escape.

– LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI, ‘AnimalInside’

 

MAIN LITERARY INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS

The Last Wolf’, by László Krasznahorkai

‘Absalom, Absalom!’, by William Faulkner

The Works Of Arthur Rimbaud

‘Juliette’; by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis De Sade

The Work Of William S. Burroughs

The Work Of Arthur Schopenhauer

The Work Of Dennis Cooper

`Light In August` by William Faulkner

‘Ulysses’, by James Joyce

‘The Sound And The Fury’, by William Faulkner

‘Assisted Living’, by Nikanor Teratologen

‘Strange Landscape’, by Tony Duvert

‘Our Lady Of The Assassins’, by Fernando Vallejo

‘Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West’, by Cormac McCarthy

‘The Melancholy Of Resistance’, by László Krasznahorkai

‘The Mysterious Stranger’, by Mark Twain

‘AnimalInside’; by László Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann

‘Death In Venice’, by Thomas Mann

‘Play It As It Lays’, by Joan Didion

‘The Madness Of The Day’, by Maurice Blanchot

‘Child Of God’, by Cormac McCarthy

‘Suttree’, by Cormac McCarthy

‘Hogg’, by Samuel R. Delany

‘Jealousy’, by Alain Robbe-Grillet

‘Ariel’, by Sylvia Plath

The Works Of Georg Trakl

‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, by François Augiéras

‘It Then’ by Danielle Collobert

‘Pedro Páramo’, by Juan Rulfo

‘The Well-Dressed Wound’, by Derek McCormack

‘a’, by Andy Warhol

‘The Room’; by Hubert Selby, Jr.

‘Tonio Kröger’, by Thomas Mann

‘Dancing Lessons For The Advanced In Age’, by Bohumil Hrabal

‘Cows’, by Matthew Stokoe

‘Eat When You Feel Sad’, by Zachary German

The Work Of Bill Henson

‘Tulsa’, by Larry Clark

‘The Trouble With Being Born’, by E. M. Cioran

‘Anthology Of A Decade Hedi Slimane RU DE’, by Hedi Slimane

‘The Sunset Limited’, by Cormac McCarthy

 

 

Queer Mojo
Rebel Satori Press

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. If today’s debuting book’s author doesn’t ring a bell, know that A. W. W. Bremont is the nom de plume (or is it vice versa?) of the blog’s very own longtime d.l. and commenter Armando! This is his first published book much less first novel, and need I say this occasion is thereby most momentous. Also, as someone who’s reading ‘Hey Boy’ right now, I can squarely and enthusiastically recommend it to all of you. So use your local time today to celebrate and read/look and ideally buy Armando’s aka A.W.W.’s novel and festively note the start of a no doubt stellar oeuvre to come. Thank you, folks, and thank you Armando for the golden opportunity. ** Misanthrope, It seemed a bit ambitious not even knowing where you are with what. Stick to your stick-to-it-ive-ness. Good you’re sorted, one arm-wise, just keep more than the usual look-out for daredevil bunny rabbits and deer and those types. And don’t pop it or get popped by it or anything like that, obvs. One gets the distinct feeling that virus outbreak-occasioned things are going ratchet up big time re: shutdowns and cancellations and so on this week. Over here and over there. Yikes, you bet. ** David Ehrenstein, Unexpected birds of a feather whose flock makes total sense. Other than an announcement by the publisher that Woody Allen’s book will be released here as scheduled, I haven’t seen or heard much about it here. I don’t think people are particularly surprised that that happened over there. I missed Nayland Blake’s retrospective, which I’m truly regretting. And thanks for the Rosenbaum/Bresson link, duh. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, Tyner was great. I got to see him live several times back when, and he was always spectacular. Mattei’s movies are all really garbage-y, top to bottom, in a delightful way if you’re a receptive state. I would truly love that guest-post you’re proposing, yes! Please do! I would be gratitude’s minion. Thank you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Like I said to Bill, his films are really junk, and not accidentally auteur-ish junk (unless I’m missing something), but tons of light fun in some cases. So great about the funding! Big big congrats, Ben! Seems like things are going most swimmingly for you of late! Hooray! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Good to see you, bud. That is quite the batch of film showings! Especially thrilled that the triple bill one went so well. How’s the Matthew Barney? I’ve heard extremely mixed things about it. Sure, a Skype catch up sounds great. Just let me know when is good for you. Sorry you’ve been hit with that whammy of irksome things. Upswinging? Yeah, don’t sweat the novel impasse. I know you know that’s part and parcel of ambitiousness. My plate? It seems my novel has a US home at last, and I’m anxiously keeping my fingers crossed and waiting for the paperwork part to be over. Film fund-raising. Zac and I have to go to Rouen soon to plead our case before a grant committee. TV series related hell that’s too lengthy/complicated to go into here. Fiddling with some writing. Was planning a Japan trip, but, with the outbreak, that’s been pushed into the we-will-see future. Reading: some poetry books that I’ll feature in a ‘… books I loved’ post pronto. A very good book on film called ‘After Uniqueness’ by Erika Balsom. Film-wise, the best thing recently was Margaret Honda’s ‘Color Correction’ at the Pompidou with her in person. Boy, was that a demanding watch. And other stuff I’m not remembering? You, great input-wise? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I don’t have Spotify, but for those who do … Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson with a very cool offer: ‘Yesterday, I made a Spotify playlist recreating Rough Trade Records’ great singles compilation WANNA BUY A BRIDGE? it was never reissued on CD or MP3, but every song from it is available on streaming, so you can hear it here.’ ‘Alternative Ulster’ is a great kick-start to anything. That’s the spirit (re: the operation). I’m imagining a lovely combination of relief and clarity-related perkiness. I have a feeling I’ll see ‘The Invisible Man’ on a plane. ** Okay. Do attend this awesome book’s DC’s apportioned birthday party and say something accordingly. Thank you! See you tomorrow.

* (restored)
____________

Richard Laymon

Marlon staggered toward them, blood spilling from his tattered face.
Sandy stood up in front of him.
‘Outa my way, bitch,’ he gasped. When he said ‘bitch,’ blood blew off his lips and sprayed Sandy in the face. ‘I’ve got some business to finish with your little monster, and then…’
She punched him in the nose.
His eyes bulged and he stumbled backward.
Sandy kicked one of his feet sideways. He tripped himself. With a gasp of alarm, he fell and landed on his rump. The trailer shook.
Sandy turned and lunged for the dresser.
Glimpsed a naked red woman rushing at the mirror.
Jerked open the middle drawer.
Snatched out her butcher knife.
‘You take this,’ Agnes Kutch had said, holding out the big, old knife to her. ‘You gonna be moving outa the house and living in that trailer out there, you gotta have a weapon. Wish I had a gun to give you, but this here is a real good knife. Mama, she used it on a fella once.’ ‘I know,’ Sandy’d told her. ‘I was there. I saw her do it.’
She slammed the dresser drawer and turned to face Marlon.
He was already on his knees, struggling to stand up.
She raised the knife overhead.
Marlon screamed like a woman. — from The Midnight Tour

 

Richard Laymon Kills!: The Official Website
The Richard Laymon Memorial Fansite
The Richard Laymon Library
Laymon on Laymon
Richard Laymon’s Rules of Writing
Richard Laymon’s page @ Fantastic Fiction

 

Dark Dreamers Interview With Richard Laymon

Book Unboxing fail – Completing my Richard Laymon collection

Top Five Richard Laymon Novels

 

_____________

Edward Lee

“Howie,” Leona said with the sickest feeling in her life churning in her belly. “That thing in your hand isn’t the hose…”

It hung limp until the moment she’d said that, almost as if it had sensed the trigger of Howie’s fear. His eyes snapped down…

Then the “hose” began to move…

Vaguely pink, glistening skin. About an inch thick. How long was it? It extended from his hand, behind him, its other end still on the other side of the shack. Howie tried to drop the grotesque thing but it was already too late for that. In the space of that synaptic second, the creature energized and wrapped around Howie’s upper torso—

Then Howie was dressed in the thing, wearing it like a corselet. His scream was severed when more of its length coiled about his neck. Howie fell over. — from Slither

 

Edward Lee Official Website
Edward Lee interviewed @ Buried.com
Edward Lee’s Header, the movie
Necro Publications
Edward Lee page @ Fantastic Fiction
The Edward Lee Forum @ Horror World

 

Meet Author Edward Lee

Edward Lee’s The Bighead: TRAILER

Author Spotlight – Edward Lee

 

____________

Charlee Jacob

It was the day which would eventually turn into the night of Halloween that the seller of skeletons came to our town. Obviously intended as decorations for the traditional celebration of good-natured horror, they were immediately more interesting than those plastic or cardboard types which the five-and-dimes sold. They weren’t flat, for one thing, but had three dimensions, having been molded out from an intricate form of papier-mâché perhaps. The skulls in particular were startling, almost an origami of macabre beauty. These were nothing mass-produced in some far-off Oriental country, created by near-slave labor who didn’t even know what Halloween was.

Simonville was not a big place and the foundling strings of bones soon found niches in front yard trees and on broad, covered porches. The mayor, who ran into the skeleton-seller outside of the luncheonette where he habitually went each noonday, even bought twenty-six to be hung about the park–twenty-six being twice thirteen and somehow appropriate for the light- hearted festival of modern Samhain.

I lived in an apartment so there was no place where I might have put one up. But I noted the skeleton-seller as he took the wheelbarrow from his pickup truck and peddled his bones from place to place. I followed him when he had sold them all, curious as to where he would go. Did he have relatives in Simonville? Would he sleep in his truck that night or in the park where so many of his wares would be shaking in the branches? — from Flesh of Leaves, Bones of Desire

 

Charlee Jacob Official Website
Charlee Jacob page @ Fantastic Fiction
Charlee Jacob interviewed @ Buried.com
Haunter
Charlee Jacob @ Facebook

 

 

____________

Jack Ketchum

You think you know about pain?

Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.

She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting – her own cat and a neighbor’s – and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-si stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.

My second wife says that’s pain.

She doesn’t know shit, that woman.

Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.

There’s an image that haunts her.

She is driving down a rain-slick highwayon a hot summer morning in a rented Volvo, her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully because she knows how treacherous new rain on hot streets can be, when a Volkswagen passes her and fishtails into her lane. Its rear bumper with the “Live Free or Die” plates slides over and kisses her grille. Almost gently. The rain does the rest. The Volvo reels, swerves, glides over an embankment and suddenly she and her lover are tumbling through space, they are weightless and turning, and up is down and then up and then down again. At some point the steering wheel breaks her shoulder. The rearview mirror cracks her wrist. — from The Girl Next Door

 

Jack Ketchum Official Website
Jack Ketchum Bibliography
‘The Scariest Guy in the Country’
Jack Ketchum News Blog
Jack Ketchum @ Facebook
Jack Ketchum’s Twitter feed

 

JACK KETCHUM’S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (2007) TRAILER

Jack Ketchum’s The Lost: International trailer

Jack Ketchum’s “Offspring”: Official Movie Trailer

 

_____________

Kathe Koja

Tess said less, watching the dancers, thinking of the rhythm inherent in metal, in corroding iron, in the slick long limbs of steel. Could it be found? Could she find it? … Branches of mastery, hints and feints and driving piston hearts, the drip of machine oil, the stutter of living flesh mechanically enabled; what she wanted — what did she want? Machines that were not robots, moving sculpture that did not mimic the organic but played, somehow, both with and off that distanceless dichotomy, the insolvable equation of steel screws and aching flesh, that wanted people not only as operators but as co-conspirators. See those dancers now, and imagine them locked in ballerina combat with the grip and clench of metal, the sweet smoke of rosin solder like incense around their dripping faces, imagine them lit with a hundred strobes and the subsonic growl of bass-heavy music like the throb of an engine running hot, burning hot, burning like the white heart of the arc.

Burning. All of it burning. — from Skin

 

Kathe Koja Official Website
Kathe Koja’s blog
Kathe Koja’s books @ Bookfinder
Kathe Koja pages @ Fantastic Fiction
Kathe Koja interviewed @ Dark Echo

 

WFC2010: Kathe Koja reading

Kathe Koja goes deep and dark with NERVE

 

____________

Poppy Z Brite

My name is Andrew Compton. Between 1977 and 1988 I killed twenty-three boys and young men in London. I was seventeen years old when I began, twenty-eight when they caught me. All the time I was in prison, I knew that if they ever let me out I would continue killing boys. But I also knew they would never let me out.

My boys and young men were transients in the city: friendless, hungry, drunk and strung out on the excellent Pakistani heroin that has coursed through the veins of London since the swinging sixties. I gave them good food, strong tea, a warm place in my bed, what few pleasures my body could provide. In return, all I asked was their lives. Sometimes they appeared to give those as readily as anything else.

I remember a sloe-eyed skinhead who went home with me because he said I was a nice white bloke, not a bleeding queer like most of these others that chatted him up in the pubs of Soho. (What he was doing in the pubs of Soho, I cannot tell you.) He did not seem inclined to revise his opinion even as I sucked his cock and slid two greased fingers into his anus. I noticed later that he had a dotted line tattooed in scarlet round his throat, along with the words CUT HERE. I had only to follow directions. (‘You look like a bleeding queer,’ I’d told his headless corpse, but young Mr White England had nothing to say for himself anymore.) — from Exquisite Corpse

 

Poppy Z Brite Official Website
Poppy Z Brite’s blog
Poppy Z Brite interviewed @ Vice Magazine
Poppy Z Brite’s books @ Bookfinder
Poppy Z Brite FanFiction Archive

 

AuthorViews: Poppy Z. Brite

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: #1 HORROR BOOK : POPPY Z BRITE

Ride with Poppy Z. Brite through the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans

 

____________

Douglas Clegg

The locals called it the Tombs, although it was much more than merely a series of subterranean burial chambers. It had been carved from rock by the local miners for some early Villiers ancestor and had been used just two years before my birth, when my grandmother had died. Her coffin was sealed up in granite and plaster within the Tombs, and there were spaces for other Villiers to come. My mother made me swear that I would never allow her to be buried there. “I don’t like that place,” she told me. “It’s cold and horrible and primitive. Put me in a churchyard with a proper marker. Do you promise me?” Certain that her death was years away, I promised her whatever she asked. I coaxed a smile from her when I demanded that upon my own death, she have the ragman cart me away to the rubbish pile.

What lay below the Tombs had once been a sacred site to the Cornish people, more than a thousand years earlier. It had been a cave, leading down the cliff-side through a series of narrow passages out to sea. It was believed to be an entrance to the Otherworld—the Isle of Apples, it was sometimes called—where a stag-god and a crescent-moon mother goddess ruled. — from Isis

 

Douglas Clegg Official Website
Douglas Clegg’s blog
Douglas Clegg Bibliography
Douglas Clegg @ Twitter
Douglas Clegg interviewed @ thedfunderground
Douglas Clegg on life as a horror writer

 

Neverland by Douglas Clegg – a book trailer

Isis by Douglas Clegg – a book trailer

Douglas Clegg’s The Attraction – a book trailer

 

____________

Lucy Taylor

A lot of people are going to be turned off by the kind of horror I write. I don’t write very much supernatural horror. It’s less frightening, because it’s horror couched in metaphor. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, all this stuff, can be brought off really well if the writer’s good enough, but real-life horror is much scarier. We’re pretty sure there’s not going to be a werewolf coming through the window, whereas if somebody flips out, breaks in, and blows us away, that could happen. I’m much more worried about the guy out there with the gun than the werewolf. — Lucy Taylor

 

Lucy Taylor Bibliography
Lucy Taylor @ Facebook
Lucy Taylor interviewed @ Locus Online
Lucy Taylor’s books @ Amazon
Lucy Taylor’s The Flesh Artist

 

 

____________

Jeremy Robert Johnson

One day you fall asleep happy. Next to a river under a dark sky. Then you wake up and everything has changed. Including you. You changed so much that for the first time you actually risk your life.

For what?

Love. It’s as good a word as any. It will do.

And you’ve gone so crazy with this feeling, call it love, that you find yourself in an absurd situation, humming moaning at telepathic bugs and killing brainwashed entymologists.

I know.

It sounds silly.

But it feels important at the time. — from Extinction Journals

 

The Basement Cypher: Jeremy Robert Johnson’s blog
Jeremy Robert Johnson Official Website
Jeremy Robert Johnson @ Goodreads
Jeremy Robert Johnson Bibliography
Jeremy Robert Johnson @ Facebook

 

Jeremy Robert Johnson, author

[Fractal’10] “The Oarsman” by Jeremy Robert Johnson

JRJ’s When Susurrus Stirs – Teaser

 

____________

Stephen King

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy’s slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof … a comfortable, almost cozy sound. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. He was six. His brother William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began, and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old. — from It

 

Stephen King Official Website
Stephen King’s Paris Review interview
Stephen King Bibliography
Stephen King Unofficial Fansite
The Stephen King So Rocks Site
Stephen King Library

 

The Stephen King Multiverse Finally Explained

Stephen King tells us what scares him

Stephen King interview (1993)

 

____________

Bentley Little

John Hawks had started walking the night after his fever broke. At first they’d thought that the sickness had passed. When they heard the creak of his bedsprings, heard his footsteps on the hardwood floor, they assumed that he’d gotten up and out of bed because he was all right. But when he strode straight through the kitchen and outside without so much as a word, when they saw the almost complete lack of expression on his skeletal face, the glassy stare of his pale eyes, they knew something was wrong. Robert and Cabe had run out after him, trying to find out what was going on, but the old man had begun circling around the house, bumping into the cottonwood tree, stepping through the jojoba bushes, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. They had followed him around the house once, twice, three times, yelling at him, demanding his attention, but it was clear that he was not going to talk to them. They were not even sure he understood the words they screamed. The only thing they were sure of was that he was still sick. And that, for some reason, he could not stop walking. — from The Walking

 

Bentley Little Homepage
The Horrifying World of Bentley Little
Bentlet Little @ Myspace
Bentley Little Bibliography
The Bentley Little Community
Free torrents of 19 Bentley Little novels

 

Spooky Noodles Reviews The Store by Bentley Little

My Bentley Little Collection So Far

Bentley Little’s “The House” Book Review
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** scunnard, Hi. Okay, thanks for the press statement. So basically you just want things that are amazing, I guess? I’m on it. ** David Ehrenstein, Genet apparently preferred that ‘PoL’ be considered a novel, but I agree that it’s very in-between and other. Understood, re: Polanski. ** Bill, Thank you, sir. And on M’s behalf. Ooh, good luck tonight, and I wish I was there to be assaulted in a Hsuian way. Let me know how it went, and, of course, if it’s recorded and uploaded, do share. ** _Black_Acrylic, So great that the writing workshop was so fruitful. I’m hoping there’ll be another, similar thing that you can transition into. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. The operation sounds actually quite breezy relative to what I was imagining in my ignorance. Good. Eye patch, suave. May it proceed with utter smoothness. We haven’t had that kind of panic in Paris at all yet, but the cases of infection in France just went up to 100 yesterday, so I think we’re edging towards freak out time. ** Well, okay. Today I resurrect a very old post by a long lost but, at one time, very present d.l. In fact the post is so old that at least two of the authors featured in the post have died since it was made and one of them has an entirely different genre now. Still, I’m banking on it having some contemporary value. But we will see. See you tomorrow.