The recently released Immanion Press collection The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee showcases the stylistic diversity of her approach to weird fiction. The shortest piece, ‘An Iron Bride,’ is set during an eighteenth century European war; it is unapologetically romantic, and owes more to Brontës than the Cthulhu mythos. ‘The Persecution Machine’  is a gleefully eccentric romp about a man who’s hunted by horrible steampunk-like automata that has a Roald Dahl-like manic energy. ‘When the Clock Strikes’ is one of Lee’s dark fairytale retellings, where the Cinderella character is an agent of epic revenge against a misogynist creep. ‘Antonius Bequeathed’ is a tender, comic and bizarre fable about aging.

These disparate scenarios and thematic trajectories are all joined together by Lee’s evocative prose, which perhaps, is her unique contribution to the weird fiction cannon. Lee’s prose is febrile, sensual, imbued with an ominous wit. She was one of genre fiction’s premier stylists.

Tanith’s descriptions of an underwater city of Selkies (here styled as Shealcé) are so rich and lustrous, the language becomes a character in and of itself:

“It seemed to Huss Hullas like a city of chimneys, for the curious hollow formations twisted and humped and ascended over each but all went up–in places ten times the height of a man and more–and at their tops they smoked and bubbled, and that was the air brought down into them by the Shealcé themselves, in their chests and in their fur, which gradually went up again and was lost in the water.”

— ‘Because Our Skins Are Finer’

She uses wordplay, particularly in her titles (‘Elephantasm,’ ‘Clockatrice,’ ‘Reigning Cats and Dogs’ are few examples) and her characters often break the fourth wall, distantly aware of their own mythological roles.

***

Lee insisted that for her, writing was almost like channelling spirits. She wrote her fiction (all 90 novels and 300 short stories and novellas) longhand in a kind of trance. She was subject to the dictates of her imagination rather than by market forces. Her late period work, mostly published by the small press, defies neat categorization. These pieces are as influenced by the weird, the liminal and disquieting as her mainstreamed published work is, perhaps even more so.

Her loosely connected (and unfinished) Colouring Book series mixes several genres, including thrillers, ghost stories and in one case, science fiction. All of the Colouring Books deal with darker psychology, and Lee samples genre tropes like an old school hip-hop mixmaster. The first book, L’Amber, is the most straightforward of the series. Set in 1980s London, it’s the story of a twisted love triangle with overtones of the work of Patricia Highsmith. The next book in the series, Greyglass, is a haunted house story about dysfunctional maternal bonds. Like the ever changing house in the story, the story hops genres, from ‘realistic’ character studies to crime fiction. The supernatural element, a kind of living metaphor, is absent for most of this strange novel, which recalls the hallucinatory work of British cult novelist Anna Kavan. To Indigo mixes a kind of metafictional cult-of-personality Chuck Palahniuk-stylized thriller with a Decadent alchemical fantasy novel. Ivoria is a hybrid of detective fiction concerning a possibly cursed piece of ivory. Killing Violets, set in 1920s is Downton Abbey as imagined by Lars Von Trier. The final novel Cruel Pink is another play on the haunted house trope, peopled with the strange inhabitants of a London apartment building across different time periods, ranging from the 1700s, to contemporary times, to far-future and post apocalyptic times. Lee’s prose for some of these under-appreciated works is pared down or she adopts a cagey first-person narrative technique.

Lee also wrote novellas and stories along with her half-brother, Judas Garbah, where she actually ‘channelled’ a mysterious author named Esther Garber. Fatal Women: The Esther Garber Novellas are darkly surreal lesbian fiction, both contemporary and historical. All are written with feverish intensity and recall, at times, work by Colette, Anais Nin and Sarah Waters. The second collection, Disturbed By Her Song incorporates the work of Judas Garbah. His two pieces, Ne Que V’on Desir and The Crow are classic weird fiction with a homoerotic twist. The first piece is about a man who seduces all of the men on a train bound for Russia, then inexplicably turns into a wolf. The second piece, set in Spanish countryside, is about two male lovers who have a chance encounter with a magician.

Tanith’s final novel, Zircons May Be Mistaken, is a mosaic story about zombies and ghosts. It just might be the most optimistic post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel ever written, full of pathos and humor.

Because Tanith Lee got her start in Sword & Sorcery fiction, her tremendous contribution to the weird tale is often overlooked. Lee’s weird fiction was less concerned with cosmic existential dread. Instead, with her opiated prose and dream-logic plots, she found dark beauty in the weird.

The post Weird Beauty: The Weird Fiction of Tanith Lee appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: First off, can you tell us about how Valancourt Books came about?

Valancourt Books: We started Valancourt Books way back in late 2004.  At the time I was researching a really fascinating, though obscure today, author named Francis Lathom, who wrote Gothic horror fiction in the 1790s and early 1800s and was rumored to have been gay.  Unfortunately, most of his books were almost totally inaccessible in North America: I ended up having to drive twenty-eight hours from Seattle, where I was living at the time, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to print them off microfiche. That struck me as being totally absurd: we were in the 21st century, the technology existed to bring these rare books back into print in a cost-effective way, and I thought, “Why is no one doing it?” Then I thought, “Why don’t we do it?” Our first couple years, we focused almost exclusively on 18th & 19th-century Gothic fiction and over time we gradually expanded into the Victorian era — penny dreadfuls, the out-of-print works of authors like Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker — and then into early 20th-century fiction.  In late 2012, after realizing that a vast amount of important, still-copyrighted fiction was virtually impossible to get except through interlibrary loan, we moved into more modern works, and those have been our primary focus over the past few years.

WFR: How do you find books to reprint? Are there criteria you feel a work must have or shouldn’t have in order to invest in resurrecting it?

VB: We find books in all kinds of ways.  For one thing, we get a lot of emails, tweets and Facebook messages from our readers, suggesting books they’d like to see republished.  One of our favorite releases from last year, Philip Ridley’s In the Eyes of Mr Fury, was recommended to us by someone who visited our table at the World Fantasy Convention. There are also a lot of blogs and websites focusing on neglected books, and we take a look at those.  And sometimes we stumble upon something great just by chance while browsing a used bookstore or library.

As far as criteria a book should have, we have to be fairly selective, since there is so much more out-of-print material than a small operation like ours could ever hope to republish.  First of all, of course, we’re looking for books that are great reads and that are still enjoyable and relevant, even if they’re many years old.  We also try to focus on books that are hard to find; many books published in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s have hundreds of used copies for sale online for a penny each, and it’s pretty tough to compete with that.  And we’re mainly looking for books that fit into one of the categories we publish — weird/horror/supernatural/etc. or gay interest fiction — though we occasionally make an exception for an outstanding lost classic that doesn’t really fit one of those labels.

WFR: What books would you recommend to weird fiction fans who aren’t familiar with Valancourt Books?  

VB: We’ve published so many we love that it’s hard to choose!  By far our most popular author has been Michael McDowell, whom Stephen King once called the finest writer of paperback originals in America; if you haven’t yet read his The Elementals (1981), a very different sort of ‘haunted house’ novel that takes place under the glare of the sun on an Alabama beach, you’re missing out.  Michael Blumlein’s World Fantasy Award-nominated collection The Brains of Rats (1989) is a brilliant book that blurs genre boundaries and features some of the most unsettling stories you’ll ever come across.  A couple story collections that are a bit older but absolutely brilliant and filled with tales that are weird and sometimes horrific are The Hunger and Other Stories (1957) by Charles Beaumont (best known for his Twilight Zone scripts) and Gerald Kersh’s Nightshade and Damnations (1968).  Some of our Victorian releases are wonderfully weird as well, particularly Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Ernest G. Henham’s Tenebrae (1898).

WFR: Last year, you published a collection of works by Robert Aickman, and you included many of his lesser known pieces. Can you tell us about this collection, including how you selected works for it?

VB: We’ve wanted to publish Aickman for a long time.  Tartarus Press, of course, has done a fantastic job of republishing his works in collectors’ hardcover editions, but we wanted to make him available for readers with more modest budgets.  Unfortunately for our efforts, it turned out that the British publisher Faber holds the rights to almost all of Aickman’s material, even though they haven’t chosen to make it available in the US except for ebook versions.  Our omnibus collection contains Aickman’s sublime novel The Late Breakfasters, which had never previously been published in the US, and whose first edition copies cost many hundreds of dollars, along with all six remaining weird tales that were not available in one of Faber’s ebook editions.

WFR: Valancourt specializes in dark (Gothic/horror/supernatural) and LGBTQ fiction. I know Michael McDowell wrote Southern Gothic fiction and happened to be gay, but I don’t know if any of his books featured gay characters or themes. These are pretty disparate genres but are there any books or authors that lie at the intersection of these two? 

VB: There’s no gay content in McDowell’s horror fiction, though he did co-author a series of gay-themed detective novels that have been reprinted by Felony & Mayhem. But for whatever reason, gay authors and horror go hand-in-hand and have since the beginning of the genre. In addition to Francis Lathom, early Gothic novelists like Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk, 1796) and William Beckford (Vathek, 1786) are widely believed to have been gay, and gay subtexts abound in Victorian horror like The Beetle and Dracula.  We’ve published a number of gay horror authors, including Hugh Walpole and Forrest Reid, both early 20th-century masters of the supernatural, the fascinating bisexual writer Frank Baker, author of the avian apocalypse novel The Birds (1936) (which predated Du Maurier’s story), Michael McDowell, Michael Talbot, etc., and in 2017 we’ll be republishing a collection of weird tales by the well-known gay writer L.P. Hartley.

WFR: For your LGBTQ literature, do you feel that it’s necessary that sexuality plays an overt role in the work, or do you approach such works from the perspective that it’s part of your mission to ensure the publication of the author’s voice regardless of how prominent that component is in the work in question?

VB: Most of the gay fiction we republish is from the 1970s and earlier, so the sexual content, if any, is usually pretty tame compared to books being published today (keep in mind that Penguin was prosecuted in 1960 for obscenity for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967 and in much of the US until even later). Our republication of early gay literature is aimed at preserving that part of our history and culture, which was in some danger of vanishing, since virtually all those texts were out of print.

WFR: The quality of your books, including the cover art, is always superb. Who does your art for your books? To what degree would you say Valancourt values the integration of theme between the printed word and image/design?

VB: Thank you!  We take great pride in trying to make the books as attractive as possible in terms both of cover art and typesetting.  We think books should contain great stories but should also be beautiful objects in and of themselves. We’ve been extremely fortunate in having found some fantastic cover designers like M.S. Corley, who has done a lot of books for us (including the Aickman you mentioned, which made one list of 2016’s best book covers) and Henry Petrides, who has done absolutely brilliant work.  We also had the chance to work with Mike Mignola on cover art for two of the Michael McDowell reissues, which was a really exciting experience.

WFR: What kinds of obstacles do you encounter—legal, archival, etc.—when attempting to bring obscure books back into publication? Are there any “white whale” projects that you’d like to be able to do but for any reason have been unable so far?

VB: There are a ton of obstacles! The most common one is that sometimes it’s difficult — or even impossible — to locate the rights holder. Copyright now lasts 70 years past an author’s death, and it’s quite common to come across an author who died in, say, 1965, and whose work would thus be in copyright until the end of 2035, but the author died unmarried and childless. Who controls the estate? The choice becomes either to forgo publishing important material or to publish and hope some distant great-grandnephew doesn’t come out of the woodwork someday to sue you, an unpleasant prospect, especially for a small press. Another problem we’ve been encountering more and more often is that the original publisher still owns the rights, even if the book has been out of print for decades. Most people don’t know this, but once a book goes out of print, the author (or his/her estate) has to demand the rights back from the publisher; if they don’t, the publisher can essentially hold onto them forever.  In many cases, the book might have been originally published by an entity that no longer exists — the company was bought and sold, bought and sold again, and is now owned in some obscure way by a huge conglomerate like Penguin Random House. And getting those giant operations to respond to rights queries can be a very frustrating process.

As for ‘white whale’ projects, yes, there are a number of them, but I won’t mention any by name, as we’re still holding out hope that one day we can sort out the rights situations.  Sometimes it can take years, but we’re very persistent!

WFR: What projects are you working on now? Can you tell us about any horror or weird fiction books you have slated for 2017?

VB: We’ve got some great stuff coming out in 2017.  A paperback reissue of rare Richard Matheson stories that was originally published as a Subterranean Press hardcover and which will include an additional rare story not in their edition.  A trio of horror novels by Ken Greenhall, who isn’t a household name, but connoisseurs of horror who have read his books Elizabeth (1976) and Hell Hound (1977) rate them as masterpieces of the genre. A reissue of L.P. Hartley’s The Travelling Grave and Other Stories, originally published by the legendary Arkham House and long out of print. Eltonsbrody (1960), a very weird horror novel by the Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer, who is best known for the ghost story My Bones and My Flute. We’ve gotten a tremendous response to our first volume of The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, which included seventeen stories by Valancourt authors, two of them previously unpublished, so we’ll be putting out a second volume in October. We also have a number of other exciting projects in the works, but contracts aren’t yet signed, so I can’t say much about them right now. But keep an eye on our website — we’ll have a lot of exciting horror and weird fiction coming out in 2017!  And as I said, we’re always open to suggestions, so if there’s a book someone wishes were on our 2017 list, they should get in touch!

The post Interview: Weird Fiction and More at Valancourt Books appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Stephen King (1947–) is one of the most prolific, best-selling, and influential living authors of American horror fiction. Born in Portland, Maine, King’s father left the family when he was just two years old, and he was raised by his mother alongside his adopted older brother. Inspired significantly by H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Matheson, King knew from a young age that he wanted to write horror fiction. After earning a B.A. in English from the University of Maine in 1970, he began selling short stories to men’s magazines and his debut novel, Carrie, was acquired by Doubleday in 1973. He married author Tabitha (Spruce) King during this period, and they have since raised three children: Naomi, Joe, and Owen, the latter two of which have become successful authors in their own right. King subsequently published several novels that have become classics of supernatural horror, such as Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977).

Since these beginnings, he has published 55 novels, 6 works of nonfiction, and approximately 200 short stories, many of which have been adapted for film or television. He has won all major awards associated with horror and dark fantasy, in addition to numerous others that include the National Medal of Arts and the O. Henry Award for “The Man in the Black Suit” (1994), reprinted in The Weird. King has also frequently shown an interest in experimentation with publishing media and form, releasing The Green Mile in serial installments and Riding the Bullet digitally before it was common. He has long resided in his birth-state of Maine, a setting that has become famously associated with him due to its frequent appearances in his work. His most recent book is End of Watch, the concluding entry in a trilogy of crime novels.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

When I was twelve years old, I was afraid—desperately, morbidly afraid—of horror flicks. My best friend in grade seven was a girl named Steph Melnychuk. We played softball together back in Sarnia—a small town in Ontario maybe double the size of Bangor where Stephen King grew up—and her throw was something to be reckoned with. I was the only one willing to catch for her (badly at that) and I still remember the hot sting when the ball went blazing into my clumsy glove. She was taller than me by about five inches, smart, effortlessly cool. She liked to throw slumber parties at which we’d dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and one night on a dare we locked ourselves in the basement bathroom to paint our faces with glow-in-the-dark nail polish. But it was her idea, her deep-seated love of the macabre.

She was the horror fan, not me.

In the early 1990s, Steph invited me over to watch a made-for-TV flick called “Sometimes They Come Back” in which a reluctant high school teacher returns to his hometown only to be harassed by the ghosts of the school kids that killed his brother. I was nervous from the get-go, and true to form the thing—schlocky as it was—stayed with me. In a recent conversation, the writer Sam J. Miller suggested that every horror writer has a personal monster, something that scares the bejesus out of them. For me, that monster is—and always has been—the ghost. Ghosts are like a warning about mortality, and at twelve years old I was only just beginning to grapple with those fears. No one in my family had died. I had never been to a funeral. The idea of dying fascinated me: it was repellent, awful, but it wasn’t unnatural. Precisely the opposite.

That was my first experience with Stephen King.

In Danse Macabre, King lays out his theories surrounding the purposes and practices of writing horror:

Terror—what Hunter Thompson calls ‘fear and loathing’—often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal—if it hits you around the heart—then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.

What I experienced as a twelve-year old was a profound sense of the possibility of unmaking, the possibility that a bunch of kids a little bit older than me could do hideous things—that kids my age were vulnerable; they could be murdered, they could drown, they could be struck by trains that seemed to come out of nowhere.

When I was in my final year of high school, a tanker truck smashed into the side of my dad’s car on an icy stretch of road within sight of the chemical plant where he worked. My mom was in South Africa at the time, clearing up the effects of my grandmother who had recently passed on, and my older brother Justin was living just outside of Toronto, a good three hours’ drive away. So it was my younger sister and I who were driven to the hospital—I don’t remember by whom—while my dad was in critical care. My dad had always had a definite vitality about him. He used to regale us with stories of his childhood growing up in Rhodesia where he set scorpions and matabele ants to fight; later, he barely missed an opportunity to be on the South African fencing team. He had, he told us, a pet chimpanzee. But when we saw him it was like meeting a stranger. He was badly bruised, black wires everywhere, and I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, only enough to know he didn’t recognise me, not in that moment.

That moment brought about a sudden understanding that someone I loved could come undone. Could be unmade.

The power of ghosts is the power of memory, or at least that’s what I’ve always thought. Memory is what gives us a sense of continuity, a sense of self. And ghosts are the most vital form of memory, just as haunting is really just a different kind of remembering.

My dad survived. The bruises healed. And although he was always frailer after that, prone to losing both his balance and his mental equilibrium as many who suffer traumatic head injuries were, I didn’t lose him. But his memory suffered. Some part of that continuity—who he had been, who he was after—had shifted.

My second moment of unmaking occurred more recently. Six months ago I took up a permanent position at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge as Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing. It meant leaving Canada for good. But I had felt it was worth it. The job was a good one, a dream job in fact, and there were people I loved whom I didn’t want to leave. I was prepared to make England my home.

But after my first semester had passed, a semester which had mostly masked for me the bitter campaign of misinformation and demagoguery that was raging in the background, the United Kingdom voted by a narrow margin to break away from the European Union. For those of my generation it had seemed an unthinkable outcome. Like so many others, I had gone to bed early that night, unwilling to watch another hour of political mayhem, feeling relatively secure that reason would prevail… and the pre-voting polls had backed me up.

In H is for Hawk, the nature writer Helen MacDonald speaks about the origins of the word bereavement in the Old English bereafian, which means “to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.” She writes that the death of her father felt like that:

Imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone.

This image stuck with me on the day that Brexit was announced. It felt as if everyone I knew and loved had been damaged by what had happened—had been punched in the stomach—and yet I felt totally alone. I remember my partner telling me to come out for drinks in the city—to commiserate in company—but I didn’t want to because I was crying and I wasn’t sure if I could pull myself together enough to be presentable. And when I walked outside a week of grey skies and rain had perversely cleared to sunshine, so there were tourists walking along the canal; everything seemed strangely normal, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the world had changed irrevocably overnight. I felt untethered, unprepared for what was to come next.

The world has become a scary place. On July 14, less than two weeks before I write this, a 19-tonne cargo truck was driven into the crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. 84 people were killed. I don’t like reading the news much right now.

King writes about a similar feeling after JFK’s assassination, how those three days of grief which followed “is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy and—in retrospect—mass memory…Love cannot achieve that sort of across-the-board hammerstrike of emotion, apparently.”

But horror can. And that’s the point, really.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a bus headed from Portland to Bangor for a research project about the publication of Carrie (1974), Stephen King’s first novel. My own first novel was sold to Random House Canada this year, but that isn’t what the project is about, only an excuse, really, to understand the origin of a writer whom I have come to respect and deeply admire.

The Hunt for Red October, streaked with static and all its buried Cold War anxieties, is playing on the overhead monitors, and outside everything is pure black. If the sun were shining, then perhaps I would recognise the landscape. Many do; there are fans who say that when they first enter Maine it has an instant recognisability, as if they’re coming to a place they have always known. For me, it’s a bit different. What hits me first are the smells, the thick scent of pine. My family used to vacation in nearby Kennebunk when I was a child.

They say that you’re more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.

I lied earlier, about my first encounter with Stephen King. Or rather, I misremembered.

I have a vague recollection: perched in the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, someone was pointing into the distance, saying, “That’s where Stephen King lives.” My dad was driving. I felt completely safe. Untouchable. We had been fishing. I had got nothing but two-inch long feeders, but my brother kept telling me about how he had been going after a big one, a pike with crazy teeth set in a jagged old grin. I was seven or eight years old, I think. My brother was always telling me ghost stories, telling me whoppers. But I didn’t believe them much. When you’re that age it’s still possible to feel completely safe.

Much of this is prelude, so forgive me. On to the matter at hand.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is typical in many respects of King’s oeuvre. It’s a good story, a solid story—so good, in fact, that it won the O. Henry prize in 1996. The narrative has a nostalgic quality to it; it is retrospective, a single memory that is offered up without explanation or even the hope of belief:

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I…. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to me … those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said.

It is a tale, however, that is about transitions, about how life can slip away from you and how the grave is always waiting. King’s writing has an undeniable charm to it. His stories drift along almost lazily, glinting with a touch of malice, maybe, but soothing too. His stories are like fish hooks, and once they catch you, struggle as you might, he’ll reel you in all the same.

“Is horror art?” King asks in Danse Macabre. “The work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art.”

This particular story has always struck me as one of those which looks outward, beyond, before. As a narrative about an encounter with the Devil, it has a certain timeliness to it; yet King’s Devil, despite his fancy suit, isn’t urbane. He isn’t a charmer. He’s pure madness all the way through, and the tale he tells the narrator is perhaps one of the scariest of all: “‘Sad news, fisherboy,’ he said. ‘I’ve come with sad news….Your mother is dead.’”

What follows is a harrowing account in which the Devil taunts the narrator with a story about a fatal bee sting. The same allergy, the same weakness in the blood which had killed his brother Dan, was also shared by his mother, the Devil says, and that very day, only a few minutes ago, a bee flew through the window and caught her by surprise:

‘You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed….So, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic justice, isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.’

The narrator resists, of course, but the tale is terrible precisely because it has the ring of truth. We’ve all inherited from our parents a terrible mortality. And at the same time the tale hooks deeply into the narrator’s secret fear, the fear we all share about our loved ones: that while we were sleeping, while we weren’t paying attention, something terrible might have happened…

In June, 1999, Stephen King was walking eight feet to the side of the road in North Lovell when a van hit and seriously injured him. He sustained an assortment of broken bones, a punctured lung, and a head injury. When I began reading The Dead Zone for the first time earlier this month, I was struck by the description of Johnny Smith in his coma. I had thought it was one of those filched autobiographical bits that often show up in King’s work (“Write what you know,” he says, and boy, does he!). But, of course, The Dead Zone was one of King’s early novels, published in 1979, twenty years before the accident. And my point is not the supernatural but the hypernatural; after all, it’s easy to imagine your own death when you’re a horror writer. We do that kind of thing all the time.

The story is interesting in that it comes with very little moralizing. This is not a Devil eager to trick a man in order to steal his soul. The Devil here is malice, pure and simple; he is hunger; he is a grinning set of jaws that will devour you whole simply because you are there. It is old school religion, that, a religion of black and white in which the Devil comes, not because of a sin committed for which he might legitimately be feared, but simply because the Devil is and that is exactly what he does: he comes, and he comes, and he keeps on coming.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is a story about fishing; this is appropriate because fishing has such Biblical overtones, certainly, but also because it’s a sport born half out of hunger and half out of playfulness. The narrator hooks himself a big one, a nineteen-inch brook trout. Quite the accomplishment for such a young boy. It is that fish alone that saves him, for it is enough to distract the Devil, who eats the thing whole with jaws that open up like a snake’s.

In a recent interview following the publication of Revival, a Lovecraftian novel about a minister who loses his faith, King said he believed “in evil”, but he has for all his life “gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.” The Devil of “The Man in the Black Suit” is an outside force, but it isn’t purely religious, to my mind, nor is he the accrual of bad forces, of crimes and transgressions, manifested in novels such as ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) or It (1986).

The Devil here is a kind of sudden badness that comes out of the blue.

Like a bee sting when you’re allergic.

Like a truck coming out of nowhere in the darkness.

And there is a part of me that is thinking about this story as I sit on the bus, thinking about what it means to write about memory and to write about the fear of death. Outside, the world around me has fallen into darkness. I can’t see my way clearly. Sometimes it seems as if the only lights are headlights.

Perhaps the end of the story isn’t where we should be focusing. Because “The Man in the Black Suit” ends as all horror stories end: with a tremor, with that sinking feeling of “what comes next and do I really want to see?” But another way to look at the story is this: it’s a fishing story, and all fishing stories are about lies, aren’t they? Big whoppers. Tales that grow bigger in the telling.

And the Devil lied.

The narrator survived two World Wars, the atomic terror of the 60s, and God alone knows what personal tragedies that have come his way. He was born in 1905, and he has lived out his ninety years, suffering losses, yes, but living all the same. Maybe this fear has always been clawing at him, the image of that terrible grin—relentless as oncoming headlights—and the hungry words, “Biiig fiiish!” chasing all the truths of the moral world into ruin.

Except it is just a fear, a fear we all have.

Our man is still kicking, even after everything.

He may not be strong enough to run much more. He may not have fine large brook trout.

He may be old, and his creel may be empty.

But the Devil lies. And our man is still alive.

____

Bibliography

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Electronic.

King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. New York: New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979. Print.

King, Stephen. It. New York: Viking Press, 1986. Print.

King, Stephen. “The Man in the Black Suit.” In The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. New York: Corvus, 2011. Electronic.

King, Stephen. Revival. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. Print.

King, Stephen. ‘Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975. Print.

MacDonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage, 2015. Electronic.

Sometimes They Come Back. Dir. Tom McLoughlin. 1991. Based on a short story by Stephen King: “Sometimes They Come Back.” Cavalier. March, 1974. Reprinted in Night Shift. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1978.

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Ramsey Campbell (1946–) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies; three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’.

Grady Hendrix is a frequent contributor to Tor.com and author of the recent 80’s-inspired horror novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. In this contribution to the Weird Writers series, Hendrix examines a story by an author who influenced him as a horror writer.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

Ramsey Campbell’s fiction is crazy. Not in the sense that it’s arrow-through-the-head wacky, nor in the sense that it’s over the top, but in the clinical sense of the word. Campbell writes horror that gets its mileage by deploying the effects of mental illness. His characters are gripped by depression, their perceptions can’t be trusted, inanimate objects are conscious, living creatures behave like automatons, personalities are overridden and replaced, consciousness is detached from physicality. More than that, Campbell seems determined to induce these symptoms in his readers. His style is his substance.

Born in Liverpool, much has been made of his childhood devotion to H.P. Lovecraft and his early career as a Lovecraft impersonator. His first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was set in the Cthulhu mythos, and his first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, contained nothing but variations on Lovecraft, with their locations changed from New England to plain old England. But Campbell was done with Lovecraft by the age of 23. A far more fruitful way to think about his writing is to take seriously what he wrote in an essay at the end of his second novel, The Face That Must Die, “The object of writing is to tell the truth.”

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think. His descriptions are crazy-making, full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. Porches “sprout tubular metal scaffolding,” and doors and suitcases are invested with agency (“The porch door had opened. When it had displayed its gap for a while, a suitcase emerged.”) and usually the narrative voice is linked to the distorted perceptions of characters who are delusional, dreaming, or mad:

“The clock was chanting: see you on Jan, see you on Jan. His mind listed places he must wipe, over and over. Had he forgotten one? The door. The doorknob. The table. The chair in which he’d sat. The cup — he must wipe all the cups, to make sure.”

All of the examples above are taken from his first two novels, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Face That Must Die (1979), both of them slim volumes about psychopaths, neither of which was a financial success. Campbell was writing a lot of short stories at the time but his agent was convinced that all the money was in big fat novels, like the ones Stephen King was writing. In 1980, all the horror guys were publishing 400 and 500 page books and getting rich. Didn’t he want to get rich, too? And so Campbell wrote The Parasite, a big fat horror novel about a woman who experiments with astral projection and winds up becoming possessed.

There’s nothing wrong with The Parasite, but you get a much more concentrated dose of Campbellian terror in his short story “The Brood,” published that same year. Blackband is a depressed veterinarian, well on his way to total dehumanization by the vast metropolis where he lives, spending his days with pet owners he loathes, spending his nights staring out the window at the homeless people who shamble down his street like lost souls. He’s fascinated by The Lady of the Lamp, his nickname for a woman who trudges in circles around a streetlamp all night long. When she disappears he tracks her to her squalid home and enters her ruined basement where he finds disgusting worms, hatched from nearby eggs, feeding on a cat that may or may not still be alive (Campbell is typically vague on this point). Blackband goes to fetch gasoline and returns to burn the place down, but he winds up becoming food for this newborn brood.

The one Lovecraftian trick Campbell still uses is keeping his monsters offstage. When Blackband sees the creature that laid the eggs, Campbell describes it as “a stain” an “inverted coat” and he tells us what it doesn’t feel like (“something that was not flesh”) rather than what it does, much as Lovecraft prefers to go on about “indescribable horrors” rather than describing them. Which would seem to be the job of a writer. But Lovecraft, and Campbell, want to invoke a feeling in their readers, and Campbell had decided that the best way to do that is to mess with their minds.

“I do value the shift of perception fiction can achieve,” he said in an interview. “Within the narrative and within my mind.” If Campbell believes that “the object of writing is to tell the truth” then the fact that all perception is untrustworthy is the truth as he lived it. As he writes in an afterward to The Face That Must Die:

“For as far back as I can recall my mother showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia: she was convinced that radio programmes and newspapers contained secret messages for her; she would recognise people as someone quite different and insist that one was disguised as the other.”

He writes that this experience taught him, “That one’s perception of reality (or, in this case, my mother’s) need not be the same thing as objective reality.” Never was this more obvious than when he writes about his own experiences with altered states:

“At times my own indulgence in this [acid] brought me unnervingly close to my mother’s condition, especially when I suffered a protracted nightmarish flashback not long before I began to write this book [The Face That Must Die]. As I penned the tenth chapter I saw the words start to writhe on the page and found it difficult to continue, but I did.”

Campbell doesn’t want to describe actions, he wants to alter perceptions, and giving oneself over to his writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Sounds are heightened, perceptions are warped, hallucinations loom. Reactions are divorced from their causes so that they become alien and strange, and his descriptions of horror go hand-in-hand with descriptions of squalor. Reading his books, one begins to feel strongly that their room needs to be cleaned and that bugs are crawling over their skin.

Philip K. Dick

Seen in this light, Lovecraft pales as an influence and some of Campbell’s other favorite authors seem much more relevant. Philip K. Dick played with reader perceptions in some of the same ways and Campbell praises several of Dick’s stories for how they monkey with notions of reality and identity. Campbell’s twisting of words comes from Nabokov whom he cites as “a crash course in how much more you could do with language.”

The problem with Campbell’s work is that it’s hard to sustain this kind of effect for long without driving readers mad. The Parasite begins with a heady seance set piece in which a bunch of children lock a little girl in a dark room along with something unwholesome. By the end of this prologue the reader is wrung out, stressed out, and a little bit burned out. As Campbell said in an interview about this book:

“The problem I’d set myself, which I don’t think you can sustain for novel length, is that it’s from the viewpoint of the character to whom it’s all happening, and she’s aware of what is happening to her. All I think you can do is convey her sense of mounting terror and panic, but there’s a limit to how much you can do that.”

Campbell’s novels are good, but his style really shines in his short stories, each of which feels engineered for maximum intensity, to make the reader feel off-kilter, unable to trust his or her own perceptions, unable to trust the perceptions of the characters, unable to even trust the language on the page. They’re designed, in other words, to make you feel crazy.

The post 101 Weird Writers #42 — Ramsey Campbell appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The roaches were in high spirits. There were half a dozen of them, caught in the teeth of love. They capered across the liquor bottles, perched atop pour spouts like wooden ladies on the prows of sailing ships. They lifted their wings and delicately fluttered. They swung their antennae with a ripe sexual urgency, tracing love sonnets in the air.

So begins Ballingrud’s grotesque tale. Against this backdrop, a plot unfolds involving a love triangle, a recovered cell phone, and some eerie text messages. Compared to Ballingrud’s 2013 debut collection, North American Lake Monsters (which you should have read by this point), The Visible Filth is decidedly darker and more in the horror range of the dark fiction category. Not to worry though: the writing here is every bit as good as Ballingrud’s previous works.

In Filth, Ballingrud has struck an excellent balance between making believable characters with realistic problems and creating a terrifying, suspenseful plot. Moreover, Ballingrud does an excellent job of balancing answers with questions–you get enough answers in the end to feel satisfied but not so many that everything in the book is explained. Visible Filth will definitely leave you wondering, it will haunt your thoughts for days afterwards, and I think that’s the true mark of a good weird tale. I think this sentiment is also echoed in the words of China Mieville: “frustrate me, I beg you.”

I have to confess that there are times when I grow bored of works that bear the horror label. However, every now and then I read an amazing, well-written piece that brings me back around and reinvigorates my love for the genre. Nathan Ballingrud’s Visible Filth is one of those pieces and I’m sure it’ll easily be one of the best releases of 2015.

The post “The Visible Filth” by Nathan Ballingrud appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This is the first episode of a projected 12-episode series that will run exclusively at Weirdfictionreview.com, usually on Monday. Later this week, we will feature an interview with the webcomic’s creator, Leah Thomas. Click on each image for a larger version of the page.

WFR Oddkin Note:

The stories referenced in this episode are by Alfred Kubin and F. Marion Crawford. Alfred Kubin (1877 – 1959) was a visionary Austrian writer and artist whose masterpiece was the novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side), first published in 1909. The Other Side is a dystopic fantasy set in a strange and oppressive city. In the excerpt reprinted in The Weird, the narrator describes a strange sleeping sickness and the beginning of the ruination of the city. Meanwhile, F.(rancis) Marion Crawford (1854 – 1909) was an Italian-born American writer noted for his classic weird and fantastic stories, including “The Upper Berth” (1895), “For the Blood is the Life” (1905), and the story included in The Weird, the lively and horrific “The Screaming Skull” (1908).”

The post “Reading the Weird” Web Comic — Episode #1 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Art by J.K. Potter

Falling. Falling. Am I no more than some goldfish to be plopped back into the cold water when the sun runs so warm over my scales? Does the eater of the dead deserve no more ceremony than this? Oh, but all of a sudden I am ravenous for so much more than the dead. It is life I would bite—I have acquired a taste for it. There is blood in the ocean and I have determined the source. Ruth, or what is left of her, is drifting somewhere amid the earthly influx. Hundreds of murders, suicides and carrion shuffled off in their sleep and only one I want. But where? Clinging to the underside of an prehistoric whale with its skeleton picked clean, hoping to be forgotten in Lethe’s arduous rapids or clogging the drains and ditches of Elysium?

I strain against the current and brace my webby fins against Hell’s accrual. For all I know, I have never been so far up. Sights I lack the eyes to appreciate foam at my passing: recycled civilizations swallowed whole, once-proud divinities transformed into insensate eels and the bright bodies of enormous fallen angels suspended in the shallows like fishing vessels seen from the bottom. And above even that, a conflagration: the lake of fire where the fat of the land beyond is roasted. My headlamp is a thousand times outmatched. Such radiance would turn me to salt were I not so eminently insoluble. And then I see you, my little worm, spinning daintily at what, if the netherworld had a circumference, I would dub the water’s edge. It is, at any rate, where the water meets its opposite and turns to mist. A fine red mist.

Swim into my mouth, Ruth Blossom.

***

Part Three: The Lost Girl Ruth Blossom

A flake of spite and an iota of crazy met in the ovule and gradually took the shape of a girl. You were unwelcome in the world and, as it could not throw you back, it tried to lose you in the crowd. It would have been easier had you not stood out so, with your incompatible eyes, birdlike bones and unsavory expression. From the start, you were doomed to be an orphan; your parents, running scared from the thing they had made, left you in a copse. Left you no words but the language of nature, which is extremity: The nuns of the orphanage to which you were shortly consigned censured you for the savagery with which you pursued your native tongue, while girls feared you and the boys saw nothing they could twist, bend or break. Could something as eldritch and impartial as that sneering zygote in pajamas be said to have a soul worth saving? But, ah, you adored animals. Especially dead ones; you filled your bunk with stiff kittens and skinned squirrels so that when roll was called and you failed to appear, the proctors pulled the covers back and were greeted with the terminal daze of fresh road kill.

You carried out a ruthless campaign of sabotage on the sedans and SUVs that sat in the lot while their owners came inside to sign the papers to deliver the lucky Johnnies to their new suburban residences; and you stocked the home’s crawlspaces with a trove of pilfered letters, wallet-sized photos and keepsakes stolen from the other children so you could improvise an imaginary family of your own from their deceased mothers and distant relations. But by the time you were ten, you’d boomeranged back from two adoptive families whose complaints—that you were unsociable, vulgar and deceitful—turned you off kin for good. The third time, you opted to run away before you could be retuned like a faulty spigot. It was much better to be born fully armed from the planet’s scalp, needing no one, pleasing to nobody but yourself. Having folks meant having expectations to live up to; you expected nothing. And nothing was a prospect you could aspire to.

As unkempt and clever as an outhouse rat, you fed yourself on crusts and fair-weather charity, getting yourself in and out of backroom encounters in less time than it took to tell. Not that there was a word of truth in the screeds you unfurled whenever you found yourself sitting opposite a social worker. They wanted tragedy on a grand scale. The odyssey of bodily abuses you gave them—centering on bonfires, cheap motels and vacant strip mall lots—could have illuminated the pages of all the storybooks missing from your childhood. As a teenage vagabond working co-ops and the occasional con, you learned to focus the same rangy strength that raked a hoe across a fertile ditch into the little fingers with which you pinched a wallet, plucked a dollar from the collection plate or tickled the prick of a sugar daddy weekender.

You loved flowers best. You loved the way they crumpled in your hands when you squeezed their soft doll-heads. Unable to abide the sensation of being watched in your sleep, you took care to smash all the buds before bedding down in a deserted garden grove on a blanket made of petals. It was in an orchard that you first heard the music crackling in the heart of the woods. Its source was something other than the wandering minstrel you’d expected: a smiling man sitting on a log with a semi-functional radio warbling from the hollow. Such pretty songs. The one about hunchbacks and pedestals ended with a line that made you shiver like the scraggly hawthorns and honey locusts that enclosed you: It is your turn, beloved/It is your flesh that I wear. When you asked how the song was called, my ancient enemy replied that it was one of the Songs of Love and Hate.

“Was that a song of love or a song of hate?”

“They are the same song. Both make the little flowers grow.”

“Does music make the flowers grow?”

“It brings things to the surface.”

But if there was ever a being that seemed content to remain underground, it was Cody Horn-Naquin. You’d heard him spoken of by your fellow vagabonds and sisters of the road: One of the last denizens of a ghost town whose few surviving buildings trembled when the wind blew, he’d elected to stay behind when the government had come to evict the last desperate farmers and exercise sole authority over the cornfields— he was said to have lit them all ablaze, as though to spite the earth. A sinister figure then, possibly the Devil, said to be acting as shepherd to a stable of juvenile criminals and vicious lunatics. These, he claimed, were children that could claim rightful lineage to the Garden of Eden, their ears so close to the primordial soil that they were set free from the erroneous belief in “progress” that plagued the rest of the flat places. For those who thrived in such places, he had nothing but contempt.

“Their feet are swift to shed blood,” he said gesturing at the snaky head of the highway running under the cloud formations, “I am little more than a witness. We’re all witnesses where I live. But for all that, we are prepared.”

“For what?”

“For when the mist grows too thick to see through. My father was a sheriff, you see, and I am his successor in one regard. I keep the peace.”

As he told you of his people, his “No-People,” you awaited the customary creep of good intentions, the moment when this latest minister would try to save you. In fact, he did not even ask your name (fortunately for you, who scarcely had one to give him). Instead, he offered shelter in a place between places, a way station for the willfully lost.

“Sounds like a damn Church to me.”

“Far from it. But at my house, we have the same number of mansions. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

There were so many wonderings rolled into the bolus of strange that sat before you that it seemed pointless to ask any question at all. Instead you offered the only assertion you had handy and said, “I’m Ruth.”

“Like the convert in the Megillat.”

“Like the Babe,” you said, having picked up a line or two from your travails in the unclean motels and truck stops of Gatlinburg. Cody just laughed and asked if you had a surname to hang on that mouthful and when you replied that you’d used up all the ones ever given you, he crushed flowers in your hair and—for all that he was not a priest—baptized you anew.

Ruth Blossom: a strange name by most standards, but not one that especially distinguished you among the No-People, who had dwelt for years under the nose of the state troopers in an old chicken ranch consisting of a house, a smattering of trailers and a dozen leaky bathtubs, living off their own harvest and leaving no traces. There you had friends like Eula Dogwood, who had rowed her canoe away from a sexual reorientation camp called Refuge one warm Tennessee night and never looked back; Clifford Milkweed, the carny’s boy who up and left the fairground in despair of a destiny biting the heads off chickens; and your very best friend, Molly Birch, who still wore the hospital bracelet that said she was insane. Their birth-names belonged to somebody else—to the pieces of paper stapled to the side of telephone poles, the databases they hacked to erase any record of their existence and the backs of the cartons that were the sum of their impact in the commercial sector. You were the missing persons. A society of self-preservationists disappeared from group homes, delinquency centers or what, with ironic redundancy, the chorus of castaways called “a bad situation.” Everything set adrift must come to rest somewhere; from a communion of loners came unity.

The actual population of runaways calling the ranch home shifted with the years. But the number was always holy. A beacon to prodigals who learned of it via rest stop graffiti or resolved to investigate crude rumors pertaining to a secret nerve center of angelic rejects. Sometimes, it was true, you couldn’t help but think of yourselves as angels. Hair bathed white by the light of the burgled computers, limbs insect-thin from spending the bulk of your days indoors, you monitored the progression of the planet’s decline from the anonymity of the Internet. Operating under a variety of screen names, you crunched numbers on global warming, despoliation of the glaciers, calculated the likelihood of meteors colliding with earth and distributed classified information from agency motherboards. It was impossible to know from which direction the end of the world would come, but Cody maintained the No-People as the last line of defense against the Apocalypse. It was better, he said, that the planet be defended by an impartial jury.

Not that your role as civilization’s secret saviors consumed all your time. Board games, for example, were treated with a severity that bordered on the fanatical. Split into teams, you fell asleep in your trailers planning the opening gambits of the next day’s round of Risk and the No-People’s jargon, online soubriquets and inside jokes revolved around these alliances. Your particular passion was for Stratego; you excelled at picking off the spies and miners as they idled down the game board with their numbers withheld. Cody seemed to attach particular importance to this game, which was held to be even greater than Clue, one of the few games that he actively played. Usually his role was as arbiter, gamesmaster.

He only had one friend of his own that any of you knew of: the old preacher Ridley DeLeure. From the windows, you’d see DeLeure taking a jaunty step out of his old Trans Am and fanning the clouds of tailpipe smoke with his wide-brimmed hat. For the most part, he never fraternized with the rest of you, preferring to meet Cody privately, in the rumpus room. The two of them would stay up talking excitedly, arguing sometimes over vague theological matters that were of little interest to the No-People, whose first experiences of God had been uniformly unpleasant (some, like Molly Birch, had even been subjected to exorcisms in their youth). In any case, Clifford, Eula and the others paid little attention to him—after years tending the digital wheel that kept mankind on the road, the local realities couldn’t help but recede somewhat—but your curiosity was piqued by the strange old hermit. He had the dogged squint and defiantly leveled chin of Stratego’s 9 piece. But if someone grabbed his corners and turned him around, you strongly suspected they wouldn’t find a man at all, but a bomb.

Sneaking around the grounds and going ear-to-door-crack in the dead of night to listen in on the plotting of Settlers of Catan strategies and memorize Battleship moves had been second nature since the games began. Waking one night to shouts ricocheting off the wood paneling, you crept to the top of the stairs on feet like little unpeeled fruits, knelt and listened to the argument unfolding:

“Now Cody, I thought you oughta have fair warnin’. It’s just like you told me in the barn when we was sprouts. There is a plan and I’m dog tired of standing outside it.”

“But you have no right, DeLeure! Universal sin belongs to the universe, to take personal offence at the isolation into which we’re all plunged is worse than heretical, it’s megalomaniacal. I never tried to stop you from going up on that hill and blowing your horn of Jericho because I never believed you’d be so willing to bury us in the rubble. When you came to us in the woods outside Good-Morrow, what were you but a meager false prophet, handling snakes and denuding other fools with parlor tricks? Now it’s the same swindles, but the power is real. Is the truth worth so little that you’d turn around and walk back into the flames from whence I delivered you?”

“I mean to return the favor. History’s not a wheel, it’s a cul-de-sac. No man before me that has had the knowledge that I have has had the sand to turn back toward the source.”

“And become the Christ you ceased to believe in when I showed you the secret.”

“If that’s what it takes. No man has a right to stand outside the fold, Cody. We must be held to accounts. Otherwise progress is impossible.”

“You and I are exceptional creatures, DeLeure, but only one of us is wrong. We alone comprehend that it is death that keeps the Beast at bay, death that keeps him forgetful. When I breathed the red mist inside your mouth, I showed you your place in a design whose watchword is freedom, not the craving for slavery, the hateful wish to lead and be led into pastures. But that freedom has ever been a burden for you.”

“No, old friend, this time the scales have really fallen from my eyes. I accept the burden and the promise of a new earth, you’re the one living in defiance of the righteous judgment. You stand by while innocents perish for the sake of an evil, sinful mankind. I heed the signs and hear proof of our condemnation in the tolls of the dead and the long list of crimes we perpetuate upon the defenseless so that the wicked may thrive and the earth be renewed behind its allotted time. It is an unbearably dirty place, my friend. It must be cleansed for the one to come. Cleansed for the flood.”

“You can’t be serious. You really intend to wake the Beast. And how do you intend to—” And then there came a silence during which a draft like the wind from a pair of enormous winds threw open the door you’d left slightly ajar and Cody muttered, “Goddamn you, of course. He’s here, isn’t he? Listening in.” Before you could scuttle back to your bed, he came running up the stairs, caught you by the shoulders and commenced shaking you until your teeth chattered.

Life among the No-People adopted a dramatically different character in the days following the preacher’s last visit. Convinced of the brutal campaign that would shortly bloody Belladonna’s bluffs and ditches, Cody commenced a less passive mode of resistance. The ranch, which had offered solace to so many waifs and strays, became the site of a training camp where children were prepped to become the foot soldiers of an invisible army. Rifles replaced Diplomacy’s plastic pegs and war games were played outdoors, in the woods behind the ranch. It was an exhausting regimen. Capture the Flag was the highlight of the daily exercises, which began with strenuous laps and hole-digging, followed by a mandatory hour on the shooting range. Taking aim at old mannequins and battered road signs, you wonderedwhat had hardened Cody Horn-Naquin, who had seemed such a charming surrogate, into this cruel and exacting general.

“A place at my table is worth more than rain or tears,” he barked when Eula pinned your arm behind your back in the farmhouse. The others cheered and clapped from the loft as, both clad in fatigues, you fought for the favor of your patron, “Those that sit beside me are the inheritors of the kingdom. Those who falter or display weakness aren’t fit to lick up our crumbs!”

Later, nursing your strained limbs and picking at your plates on the stoop while the winners of the day’s contest dined indoors, you and mad Molly Birch resolved to flee together. Better to take your chances on the uncertain promenade as a bon vivant than continue to exist amongst the merciless No-People, whose once-fortifying spirit of competition had matured into bitter rivalries: Eula Dogwood had matured into a cruel centurion and Clifford Milkweed practiced weird experiments with corpses he dug up and kept in his trailer, the smell of the chemicals he poured over their flesh ruining the taste of what few bones you were thrown. You knew too much about the sadness of dogs to wish to be treated as one, even a dog of war. In short, you wanted no part of whatever Crusade you were being readied for.

The two of you stole away through one of the obstacle courses set up in the gorge, sneaking under the brambles on sore elbows and crawling through a culvert until you emerged in the county’s ragged outskirts. You and Molly hugged each other close, certain of your deliverance. That was before you saw the black car dogging your wayward tracks. Over the following year, your rovings straddled the state line but never completely cured you of the contention that you were being watched from behind dark glass; only being allowed to lope about like a half-starved wildcat until such time as the car that waited for you outside motels and snarled its engine while you licked the backsides of strangers in the rigs of their tractor trailers opened its rusty doors and ushered you back into your station at Cody Horn-Naquin’s side. He had always claimed to have special plans for you. “Little flower,” he used to say, “you will be planted so deep in the garden that none will know you for my serpent.” But no one knew you for anything. In that anonymity was power. You were certain of this and certain that whatever role the sheriff’s son had in store for you would make the ones you and Molly played in certain grainy amateur films look like home movies.

Still, your premonitions was/were? nothing to the signs that Molly Birch seemed to discern all about her: “My golly, Ruthie, I swear. Today I scratched off three sets of seven, not all at once but over time outta ten lottos. That’s the seven churches of Asia, the seven seals and the seven trumpets. And then I did multiples of the other numbers and you know what I got? That right, 666. So then I started looking at them out-of-state license plates and matching them to the verses in the pocket bible they’s got for sale and you know what I read? The Beast and the false prophet are cast into the lake of fire. I just know it was meant for us, Ruthie. I feel like an angel’s tryin’ to reach you and me, but can’t find the way. And I don’t know why we can’t open our hearts wide enough. What do you think it all means?”

It meant that when the angel came, his white Bigarno opened for the one between the two of you sane enough not to spoil a good racket with continual reference to Eschatology For Beginners. And, though you felt bad about ditching her inside the Higgledy Piggledy, when Doc came you saw the surest way to avoid getting pinched alongside Molly, whose testimony would probably include confession to St. John’s beheading and the crucifixion on top of anything you’d actually done. Doc was so sweet with his “Laisser le bon temps rouler, girl!” and scratchy beard. You were very much in love; a small, blighted bird’s love. The bird the sits atop the rhinoceros or flosses the teeth of the yawning croc. To the grande dame philanthropists and slum-church counselors who had harped upon the goal missing from your life, you could now reply: You wanted to be every animal eventually.

In The Church of Gehenna, you switched out your predator’s fur for a martyr’s feathers. You could plainly see that, in Stratego terms, it was a matter of going from red to blue on the same board, but at least here were new records to play. Cody’s taste in music seldom went beyond Country. And in place of the proud loneliness of the No-People, Ridley’s nightly sermons promised that you might someday be found:

“Listen, friends,” he said, “the word is given to us and the word is water. Water is the flood and the wellspring, the pump and the handle, that which we are given and to which we return  when our arms are freed from this straitjacket of flesh. All the land is encircled by water, our veins are full of it, and I’ll tell you a secret: It’s all the same water, friends. We’re all part of the same pool, and when it trickles through the earth it connects us to Hell. With water we will quench the fire! I’m here to tell you today that we stand upon the spout. The pressure when that cork is finally popped will make us level with Heaven. And when others are drowning, we will float by on a boat laden with enough seed to sow a new earth where this one ran so woefully aground.”

But DeLeure’s commentary on seed spores and budding flora never did address what would become of the wild game when the zoos and jungles were all submerged. The first flood had seen fit to conserve the animals, but Ridley’s cargo was strictly human. He imagined that being beastly meant being without a soul; and so it fell to you, who knew better, to stock Gehenna’s hollowed trunks, gardens and the expansive cave system you called Colonel Mustard with species never yet singled out for radical evolution. But in the age to come, who knew? Perhaps it was not the descendents of apes that would inherit the earth at all, but the offspring of Thistle, the baby goat you found munching plastic at the base of the mountain, or the snouty brood of Balonius Monk, the boar you saved from slaughter a town away and reintroduced into Belladonna’s wilderness.

Going beyond the Church grounds was, in Doc’s words “arrete toi.” All your rescues were, perforce, conducted in secret and under cover of the secondhand moonlight as it reflected in the frog-pond and radiated from the honeysuckle. Your routine consisted in sneaking from your bunk and stealing across the land like an unhinged sister of mercy, whisking opossum from the path of speeding vehicles, nursing wounded deer in their glen, and shepherding the animals into some cove or barn and wait for Doc to find you:

“Sometimes I wonduh why we always gotta meet thusly, pop chock.”

“Because great love never starts at home. And you love me so much, bird dog.”

“I surely do. So keep outta the caves, n’est pas?”

Had you heeded Santo Campo, I might never have heard you coming. Instead, the chicory stabbed your feet. I, undulating through the mineral deposits, perked up. Juniper petals covered the trail of blood you left behind you so Doc, who tore his coat on fences as he searched for you in train cars and boarded-up nightclubs, was too late to keep you from coming ever closer to where I was swimming, deep in the mountain. Amid the wild pigs and rattlers that nested in Colonel Mustard, your mind became twisted as the roots that protruded from the stone and snagged between your toes. Little girl, you were lost. There was no one but dumb herds to hear you scream when you slipped into a crevasse and found yourself plummeting through the darkness, then clutching at nothing and feeling the cold slick stringy nothing clutch back. Dangling above a black subterranean sea, you stared into the void, unaware that it was staring back. Until, gradually, a light came on—a lamp that locked your blue and green eyes with mine, which are no color at all.

You felt yourself slip and, not for the first time, gave yourself up for lost. But the one you had left never left you: your advocate in the valley of doubt, he cried your name as my spittle flecked your boots. And as the monstrous angler leapt like some gibbering piranha out of the underground lake, Cody Horn-Naquin’s arm shot out of the gulch and hauled you back.

What lies did he whisper in your ear, Ruthie, what was the news from Cody Horn-Naquin—if I must still address the adversary by that ridiculous epithet—as he swaddled you in his dark arms? This point of your tale must be surmised, for all I could hear in that catacomb was myself, screaming. Besides, I know what that caitiff said to you, before he pinned a flower in your hair and left you in a clearing for Doc to find. He told you about me. I know because I see the canal I made through your dreams, luring imaginary fawns into my light, gnashing to death the loving parents that appeared to you when you slept. You dreamed my dreams for me, Ruth Blossom, and to you they were horrible nightmares from which you awakened and saw the black car parked outside the Church’s windows. When you put your pink nose to the glass, it roared away in reverse, kicking up gravel and leaving a rose to remind you of your mission. Yes, night by night, the adversary came to you to remind you of your part—that you were charged with nothing less than building a dam against my incursion into your planet’s fetid waters.

But, you fools of Canaan, how could that plan succeed when you are already dead and absorbed into the very Beast you labored to delay? When I see all that you see? And so you were not only Cody’s spy in Ridley’s church, but mine as well; and as you prowled about the compound, reading forbidden magazines, carefully removing alarms and tagging the trees with ciphers for the encroaching No-People, I saw Ridley watching. It was he who had called me, he whose memories nourished me. He practiced for his fated appointment with my small intestine. Eager to give his life so that I might live; who am I to deny the sacrifice of a personal savior? What to call such a man, but a Christ? Though you would call him by a different name.

On the last day, it was not the black car that brought tidings of the coming engagement. Instead, as you woke in the early hours for your usual trip—there was a particular mastiff you were planning to liberate from his masters in Lenoir City—and, walking down the hall with candle in hand you saw your own rain-battered reflection at the dirty window. But then—a ghastly smile split your second face. You reached out to touch your sneering double and she reached back at you, like a living painting that then jerked out of the frame to unlatch the window that Doc had bolted against your flight. Pulling you out and into her arms, the second girl put her arms around the shadow that had cast her and kissed you on the lips.

“Oh Ruthie, isn’t it wonderful? It was Clifford Milkweed—can you believe it?”

It was mad Molly Birch, chemically transformed into the spitting image of Ruth Blossom. She spoke with your mouth, telling you how my adversary had reclaimed her after your desertion. How my enemy had given her new purpose in the salvation of man and remade her in your sweet-limbed likeness. This was how Doc would be deceived into leaving his post, at which point war would erupt in the hills and by a great sin, the world would be saved.

“Molly, no, Doc’s a sweet old thing. It’s not up to you, just let me try.”

“Sorry, Ruthie baby, it is no longer even I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me as I give myself for you.”

And as her white, remodeled throat spilled Cody’s putrid scripture, you heard music. A guitar being strummed in the woods outside the church, where the black car rested. “G’bye now, Ruthie,” said Molly Birch and stepped backward into the ravine. Up jumped Cody Horn-Naquin and deftly strangled her with a guitar string. The whole time he kept her green eye level with your blue one. When you were done watching yourself die, the prophet spoke, saying “It your turn, beloved.”

He thought he knew what pieces he could stand to lose, but I will hold him to this crime too. You watched without specific feeling as he hurled Molly’s body into the back of the black car and drove slowly backward over the smoking ground. Only after he was gone did you allow the candle to drop from your fingers. And such was the dispassion your proxy execution had awakened that if it hadn’t been snuffed out in the fall, Cody’s army might have arrived to find a crispy burnt offering instead of Gehenna’s faithful. But they did not find you, for by then—even as Doc was finding you missing and tracking Cody into the trap you’d both set—you had gone to the caves to release your menagerie. Nature was the only good you still believed in. Its natural state was wild. Craziness, as you’d learned from Molly, was pure. Perhaps too pure to live. Little Ruthie, weeping there as you rode the cattle out of Colonel Mustard, you resembled some fairytale princess. Birds fluttered up from the handmade birdhouses you had fixed for them, you uprooted bats from their belfries and even threw open the doors where you’d hoarded bobcats. The mountain became a paradise, a striped spotted exodus that moved as one body through the countryside, stamping the leaves with their hooves and thundering across the kudzu-covered bridges. The only beast uninvited to join your menagerie was myself. For, once you returned to hide in plain sight at the The Church of Gehenna, you played my hated enemy’s last card and closed your eyes.

In this manner I was denied a glimpse of the carnage that followed. I could only listen with mounting impatience as the cries of wild horses mingled with gunfire and the No-People launched their offensive. Judging from the din, which bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the shriekings of the newly-damned, the long-rehearsed coup wracked the Church, upending idols and pitching its statues through the stained glass. Icons fed a fire that soon singed the vinyl of each record and improvised its tongue up doorcracks even as the building was evacuated. The heretics had arrived at your front door, Ruthie, bringing a purely localized, controlled Judgment Day. It must have been something to witness the walls crumbling, the children-warriors dressed in paint and feathers unfolding from the trees with their rifles and grenades. Timbers fell and glass broke, but you did as the adversary had told you and kept your spying eyes shut. I heard the laments of Ridley’s believers as they whimpered in captivity, the wails that rushed down the same hallways where you blindly felt your way to Ridley’s quarters. What could I do? You would have been safer in my stomach. Instead you refocused your orbs on the enormous sharpened crucifix my herald Ridley DeLeure was engaged in hanging from the ceiling.

“The cross of Saint Peter,” said DeLeure, as he leapt from the ladder and turned to face you, “Looks good, don’t it? Carved outta onyx. You’re just in time girl. I was just fixin’ to put the finishing touches on it.” So saying, the onetime prophet of Good-Morrow placed three nails into you palm and asked, “Care to give me a hand?”

“I am come to give you a whole hell more’n that,” you said, and dropped the nails between their flattened relatives in the floorboards, “I’m keepin’ you from doin’ something terrible to yourself and every other person too.”

“I would have waited, but the red mist has forced my hand once again. Have you heard of the red mist, child? It is the mist that wells up from the netherworld and takes the form of Hellish things. We give up water and gain smoke. But our age has bequeathed an awful misbalance. Far too much water has been spilled and only a chosen few have the mist. I got it from Cody, who tried to keep me from the sacrament, I gave it to Doc and—poor little Ruthie, I’ve often wondered if Satan himself was your Daddy. I reckon he might as well’ve been. You of all folk should know the iniquity of man.”

“In the eyes of God, man is an animal too. He don’t know no better. Have mercy, Ridley DeLeure, have the mercy that’s missing every damn place else.”

“Don’t let’s be ungracious.” And putting a hand into your sticky hair he added, “After all, it is for your sake that I go to my reward.”

“But,” you demurred, “I don’t want you to die for me. I want you to stay here with me and Doc and even Cody Horn-Naquin, who loves you and wants to keep you.”

“Ah, but I was not speaking to you,” he said and twisted your hair hard as he stared into the flaming pools of your eyes and I frothed up at him, all attention, “I was speaking to you, Leviathan. I have remembered everything, in order, I have arranged my soul for your scrutiny so that you may find the way. I have everything covered on this side. By now Cody will have disposed of Santo Campo. Both my servants shall go down beside me—a gambler and a whore. Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.”

“But,” screamed my mischievous bud though she knew herself to be nipped, “what if you never get to Hell? What if you go to Heaven?”

Ridley flung you to the ground and cursed, “Oh, I am aware of the righteous life I lived, always doing God’s work and fumigating the land for His next crop. Until this moment, I have never sinned. That’s the task left for you, Ruthie. Let’s see how many sins we can work out between us.”

And so? saying, he fell upon you.

*          *          *

Too soon! Too soon am I vanquished! A story cannot subsist without characters and all of mine are dead. A story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the lives of these three are all mixed together. Muddled and fused. They plummet with tremendous weight, passing out of life. I fall with them, shrunk to the size of a minnow. Flip, flop, I am tossed by the finger I longed to bite back into my bottomless parlor. Pity your poor angler, for I have no eyes left to see. No living witness remains to testify on my behalf. But I can hear Cody Horn-Naquin gloating, hear his relief that another of our duels is closed. Standing over the slaughter, flames licking audibly over his skin, the adversary speaks:

“So the dust is dust and the rose petals lie trampled upon the ground. I know you have heard this before, but in this exchange, as in all our conflicts, I take no pleasure. I remember what we were. I recall how we were split. It is mine to remember and yours to forget. But the souls are the same, split evenly between us. They’re all yours and all mine. It’s only smoke and water. Creation, at its base, consists of only the two of us. You are my audience, Leviathan, the world is what I write for your entertainment, and because there is nothing else to do. The token of such a covenant is friendship. And love. Love is what they took from you. I tried to show it to Ridley, and that was my mistake. Now, at last, I have accounted for it. And all that’s left to say is that you will always be my friend. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Try to remember.”

The post Backwater, Part III of III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Last week began and ended with work from the French–not my own, but translations by Kit Schluter and Katie Assef, doing wunderkind Weird precursor Marcel Schwob and twisted Belgian fabulist Nadine Monfils, respectively. Last week also saw the highlight of a classic favorite by Kelly Link, courtesy of Adam Mills (all hail Adam Mills!) who until recently was WFR’s very capable managing editor (he will be sorely missed–is already, in fact). Then on Thursday we took a turn for horror humor with a gory vampire redneck tale from proud South Carolina native Grady Hendrix, and on Friday finished up with some delectably perverse doings in Venice.

This week at WFR, I am proud to present J.W. McCormack’s visionary short novella Backwater, serialized in three installments. McCormack grafts his heady, pyrotechnic prose to the Biblical backbone of a rip-roaring Armageddon adventure in a Weird update of deep Southern Gothic featuring snake preachers, Cajun gamblers, cult compounds, and teenage runaways–all narrated by Hell’s own anglerfish, who gleans life stories from souls as he digests them. This will be accompanied by images from J.K. Potter, well-known for his covers and art for Subterranean Press.

Backwater will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while Tuesday and Thursday will showcase an original sequence of weird prose poems by G.C. Waldrep inspired by the work of outsider artist George Widener.

Bringing the Weirdness,

e.g.

The post Summer Solstice appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura Colombe, Contes pour petites filles perverses, was published in 1981 with illustrations by Léonor Fini and a postface by Thomas Owen, who was a champion of her work. Since then, Monfils has written over thirty novels and directed several films. She lives in Montmartre.

Katie Assef studied French literature at Sarah Lawrence College and recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her prose and translations have appeared in journals such as Whole Beast Rag, PANK, Alchemy: a Journal of Translation, Cerise Press, and Three Percent. She lives in Berkeley and is currently an apprentice with Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY.

Venice was my last island. A dream outside of time. It was the only place where I felt the waters formed a barrier between me and the world, protecting me from human stupidity.

Something in me was broken. I’d lost my appetite for love, along with all the rest. Sometimes when you can’t change your life, you try to change your look: I swapped my black dresses for colorful clothes and hacked off my long dark curls.

I was another person on the outside–only on the outside. Walking past a mirror, I found my reflection strange, but on the inside I still wore black and would often smooth my phantom curls.

Life had made me more and more withdrawn.

I had come here to escape my demons.

My short hair, jeans and boyish suspenders stood out against the ancient, forbidding scenery like a keepsake box floating amid ominous waves. I had the insolent gaze of those with nothing left to lose; only my reflection in the water could still make me lower my eyes.

I strolled down the narrow passageways around Piazza San Marco, and it took a few days before I felt the effect of the strange atmosphere, like a shadow’s veil that falls gently upon you and never lifts.

To love Venice, you have to cast off your old self, to overcome your disgust of the filthy waters, dive in and let them wash away your dead skin.

Despite my horrible fear of rats, I was convinced the greyish water would help me recover the little girl I had once been. Her laugh and naïve gaze–what ingenious armor! I left my clothes on some pier and began to swim. I didn’t leave the water until I was exhausted, my mind empty.

Someone had stolen my goddamn pants. The thief must not have liked my blouse, for it pined away on the embankment, its heart torn to shreds. Instead of panicking, I took this as a sign and sat calmly beneath the Rialto bridge, waiting for an angel to come along…

A bum approached me. His sour breath made me want to vomit. I tried to fight him off, but he had that madness that gives rise to strength. He pinned me up against the cold, damp wall, gripping my wrists in his right hand, and dug his knee into my stomach to keep me still. With the other hand, he unbuttoned his pants and tried to take out his soft penis. He grumbled. Suddenly, he grabbed a bottle of red wine that lay on the ground and shoved the neck up into me. It was the only skill he had left…

I experienced a strange, repulsive pleasure, something violent rising in my throat. He crushed my breasts and tried to kiss me, but I bit him. He yelled and slapped me, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. After kicking me in the shins, he let me go. I felt a little piece of meat stuck between my teeth! I should have bit his tongue.

He walked off, cursing. The bottle rolled on the cobblestone and the sound echoed like an empty cry. If I had to have been raped by a bottle of wine, I would have preferred it to be a grand cru! But it had no label.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned and saw an old lady smiling at me. She motioned for me to follow her. Her hair was tied up in a black scarf, and she walked with a limp. Her coat was the color of water, a stormy grey. She took it off to cover me and brought me into her house, a gloomy old place isolated at the end of a blind alley. The rez-de-chaussee resembled a warehouse filled with useless objects. Mismatched chairs were piled on top of one another between moldy crates. A paradise for vermin. We climbed a wobbly staircase to the poorly lit first floor. On a bare table, an oil lamp burned. An old magazine crumbled into dust on the floor beside a broken doll.

That was when I saw her, a tiny figure crouching in the corner.

The old lady murmured a few words in Italian, and the little girl stood. She wore a red dress, a red so intense it seemed unreal. Oddly, when she walked, blood seemed to trickle from its hem. She took my hand and led me into a windowless room. A large candle was all that illuminated the rusty iron crib, half-hidden by dirty curtains. She asked me to sit on the bed. The sheets smelled of urine. And not only that—a strong scent of men, too.

Exhausted, I finally fell asleep despite my nausea. When I woke the next morning, I found the little girl seated at my feet. She was watching me with her little marten’s eyes. I felt as if she was searching through my mind like an old scrapbook, trying to unravel some mystery.  She wore the same red dress as the day before, and I was still wrapped in the old coat.

The old lady came in and gave me a night-blue silk dress. The little girl watched as I slipped it on. I hadn’t seen her smile yet, but maybe she didn’t know how.

“It’s my mother’s,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Camarde,” she answered, with a strange glimmer in her eyes.

“You have a pretty red dress.”

She jumped off the foot of the bed and twirled several times like a music-box ballerina. Blood splattered my face and the walls.

The child stopped twirling and began to laugh wildly.

“You’ve got your period?”

“No. It’s my dress that’s bleeding. It bleeds all the time. Ever since I killed the first man.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just then, the old woman called for her in a harsh voice. I heard the Moors of the clock-tower strike their hammers nine times on the bell.

“Come on. My grandmother is waiting for us with hot coffee. We can’t dawdle or she’ll beat my legs with her cane, and that’s the worst!”

“Why do you stay with that mean old hag?”

“And where else should I go, in your opinion? Come on, hurry up!”

The old lady drummed her slug-like fingers on the table. She had a fat nose and the shadow of a mustache. She smelled like rancid butter. A true marvel of nature.

She explained that I’d have to put on some makeup and walk the street to bring clients into her establishment.

“The child’s mother used to do it, but that whore took off overnight. Providence sent you to us!”

What luck! I’d walked right into a mouse trap—the old crone and her bleeding granddaughter ran a brothel worthy of Madame Claude herself.

Well, I needed food and a place to sleep. And anyway, it would be fun to try.

Swaying my round derriere, my mouth painted like a porcelain doll’s, I transformed into a baited hook for dumbfish.

The catch was not miraculous, but I did reel a little something in. Rather pudgy, sallow-eyed, in a clerk’s suit. Garden-variety. Never mind, his shirt pocket was stuffed with bills.

I didn’t want to have sex with this guy, but if I had to, I wouldn’t make myself sick over it. All I had to do was close my eyes to be somewhere else.

The fat fish followed me to the house of the witch and Little Red Riding Hood. The old lady made him pay before going any further. She took the bundle of bills and slid a few into my cleavage. Then she motioned for me to lead the wolf into the sheepfold.

The child sat huddled in the darkest corner of the room. I could tell she was there because of the broken doll on the floor beside her. The man didn’t even notice. He undressed, murmuring some dirty talk to rile himself up. He had the bulbous nose of a wino and a pink stomach the color of vacuum-packed ham. Real appetizing. Beneath this jumble of folds was a little rod to distract from the rest. I let my dress fall to the floor and lay down, obedient, eyes closed. I was already on the islands of the Rising Sun, there where flowers are blown apart by a gentle breeze. I spread my legs and waited like I did at the dentist’s.

The fat man collapsed on me with a gasp.

Did he like me that much?

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large knife planted in his back. The little girl in red stood behind him. This time, she was smiling.

“My mum and I always did that together.”

Afterwards, she helped me drag him to the trapdoor.

“Here it is!”

She pointed to a latch in the flooring. The john was heavy, but the girl was surprisingly strong and together we managed to throw him into the hole. I watched him sink into the waters of Venice.

“The canal passes underneath. No one will ever know. It’s black as hell,” said the child.

“You’ve killed many like this?”

“Only the first one counted. The others, we forget.”

“And the old lady – she knows?”

“We told her they left by the back alley. But I think she knows and doesn’t care. As long as it doesn’t mess with her life…”

She began to twirl, projecting tiny stars of blood onto the walls. Then she took me in her arms and led me in a wild dance.

She roared with laughter.

The post The Red Dress appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

They were just finishing up their second case of Bud when the Vampire King showed up. Hinckley’s wife wanted to get pregnant again, so he was putting away two for every one of Chad’s. Gerrold was pissed off because he’d gotten screwed by yet another investment opportunity. Also, his wife had left him, backing up over his dog as she tore out of the driveway. Gerry’d been planning on selling that dog to a fellow over in Aiken. He sat in his busted-out lawn chair flicking survival matches at a paint can full of gas.

“Come on, man,” Chad said. “Those cost fifty cents each.”

“This is how I relax,” Gerry said. “My wife left me, my dog’s dead, and I’m broke.”

“How much did you lose?” Chad asked.

“More than I got,” Gerry said. “They told me I could make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year selling real estate. Goddamn LandTrayde.”

He flicked a survival match and it flew in a perfect arc, landing in the gas can.

“Gimme those,” Chad said, snatching the matches out of Gerry’s hands.

“Who the hell is that?” Hinckley asked, looking past the blazing can. The three of them watched the shiny Prius crawl up the mud track and pull into the big dirt yard in front of the Barn. The spookiest thing about the vampire was how clean his car was.

“Probably a child predator,” Chad said. “They’re always scrubbing their vehicles of evidence.”

“Goddamnit,” Gerry said. “We come out here to bang on shit with tools and forget how our lives are bad country western songs, and here comes some pedophile driving a battery-powered kiddie car asking directions.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” the vampire said, picking his way across the mud. He was beautiful, his clothes were Italian, and he had the diction of a movie star.

“You in a band?” Hinckley asked.

“No,” the vampire said. “My name is Karl and I require your assistance.”

“Fuck off back to Germany,” Gerry said.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” Karl said.

He picked up Gerry’s F‑150 by the back end. Gerrold cussed because it wasn’t even close to paid off yet. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out his Glock.

“Put it down, you fucking meth-head,” he said, his two-handed stance swaying slightly.

“Gerry, you’re drunk,” Chad said. “David Bowie, put down the truck. Gerry put down the gun.”

Karl talked to them casually while holding the truck’s rear tires a foot off the ground.

“It is all right,” he reassured them. “Gerry? I would like you to shoot me.”

“Don’t do it, Gerry,” Chad said.

“I’d already’ve double-tapped your ass if it wouldn’t fuck up my paint job,” Gerry said.

“Come closer,” Karl said. “Shoot me right in the chest.”

“Gerry!” Chad said.

But Gerry was crab-walking towards Karl.

“Do not hesitate,” Karl said. “I will give you this.”

He reached into his expensive suit jacket. Gerry shot him twice.

“Dammit!” Chad yelled, he plucked the gun out of Gerry’s hand, dumped the clip, and popped the round out of the chamber.

Gunsmoke hung in the air.

“It is nothing,” Karl said, casually putting the F‑150 back on the ground. “See, I am unharmed.”

He walked towards them, pulling two stacks of cash out of his jacket.

“I am a vampire,” he said. “And I will pay you gentlemen $20,000 to kill me.”

Gerry looked at Chad. Chad looked at Hinckley. Hinckley looked at Gerry. They all looked at Karl.

“I’m gonna need to be a lot drunker for this shit,” Gerry said.

***

They started out slow. Gerry’d already broke the seal on the thing, but it was still hard to take the first shot.

“On three,” Chad said. “One…two…THREE!”

No one moved.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s passed out,” Hinckley complained.

Lying in the mud at their feet, Karl looked like a baby. A big, beautiful baby wearing an expensive Italian suit who had just drunk four bottles of Jack and sixteen beers. He snored softly.

“He asked us to!” Gerry hissed.

“That don’t mean it’s easy,” Hinckley said.

“We all shoot at once,” Chad said. “Come on.”

“Why’re we whispering?” Hinckley asked.

“One…two…THREE!”

This time they each pulled the trigger. Gerry had his Glock, Hinckley had his .38, Chad had his Guide Gun, and when they fired it sounded like a single crack and looked like a single flash.

“We get him?” Hinckley asked.

Chad took a squat and fingered the bullet holes in Karl’s suit. The vampire stirred and mumbled something.

“Didn’t even break the skin,” Chad said.

They each unloaded full magazines into Karl, shredding his suit, ruining his tie, and reducing his shirt to scrap. The echoes rolled away and Karl gave a little wet snore.

“What the fuck is up with this fuck?” Gerry asked.

Chad went into the Barn and came back out with his shotgun. He put it right up to Karl’s face and peppered it with buckshot. Nothing.

“Shitfire,” he said. “We’re gonna have to earn that money.”

***

They all needed the money.

“$20,000, man,” Gerry begged. “I can double that in two months with my day trading system.”

Hinckley’s problems were more urgent.

“She bought some sexy panties,” he said. “I’m a weak man. She’s get a baby out of me before October. How’m I gonna send ‘em all to law school?”

Chad looked at the Barn and the collection of crapped out cars sitting on the oil-stained dirt lot. This was supposed to have been his moneymaker, instead it was sucking him dry. He didn’t even have enough money to put new tires on his truck. They were so old and bald they were going to blow out any minute and send him spinning off the highway. Might be doing him a favor, broke as he was.

They agreed on a three-way split. The vampire suggested they get him drunk before trying to kill him.

“If I am conscious, I might defend myself,” he purred. “It is better if I am incapacitated first.”

“You care what you drink?” Chad asked.

“It is difficult for me to taste anything that is not a part of my regular diet,” Karl said.

“You on Paleo?” Hinckley asked.

“He means blood, dumbass,” Chad said. “Who’s sober enough to drive? Hinckley?”

“You’re more sober than me,” Hinckley complained.

“I’m not leaving this son of a bitch on my property unattended,” Chad said. “Karl, give Hinckley $100 out of that vampire money. Hinckley, beer run.”

Hinckley came back an hour later with six cases of Bud and eight bottles of Jack Daniels, along with two packs of Pampers and a case of paper towel.

“Mei told me we’re all out at home,” he said, then turned to Karl. “Sorry, no change.”

They sat out front of the Barn and started drinking. No one said anything until Karl moved from Budweiser to whiskey.

“What’s it like to sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“I do not understand,” Karl said.

“Sparkle, glimmer, shine, whatever it is you vampires do,” Gerry said.

“Ah, like the book,” Karl said.

“Yeah, like the book,” Gerry said. “You may be immoral but you ain’t real swift on the uptake.”

“Unfortunately, it is nothing like that,” Karl said. “Being a vampire did not turn out to be what I thought it would be.”

“Thought you’d sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“Something like that,” Karl smiled. “Live forever, I challenge you. I cannot digest solid food. For more than 100 years I have smelled pizza, but not once have I tasted it. I am haunted by memories of investments I never made. IBM! I could have gotten in on the ground floor but instead my money was tied up in canals. It has been 30 years since I have had an interesting conversation. People have been talking about the weather for hundreds of years. It is always boring. Always! I have reached a point where I prefer the embrace of death to hearing once more person wonder whether it is cooler today than yesterday or if this rain will last.”

“Yeah,” Gerry observed. “Sucks to be immortal.”

“To find some purpose I have hunted down the others like me and torn them to shreds,” Karl said. “I am all that is left.”

“Okay, why don’t you get that second bottle of Jack down your piehole,” Gerry said. “It’s getting late and we need to kill your ass and get the hell home.”

***

It went on for so long that it stopped being serious and got funny, then got serious, then got funny again. They took turns hauling Karl up on top of the Barn and throwing him off while one of them stood in the yard shooting at him with Chad’s shotgun. Vampire Skeet. Chad finally called a halt because they’d gotten so drunk they were mostly hitting the Barn.

They lit him on fire, hit him with kitty litter napalm, dropped a ‘71 Chevy Malibu on him, and tried to take off his head with a cutting torch. They chained him up between their cars, and tried to pull him apart by driving in different directions, but Hinckley’s Caddy kept stalling out, and Gerry’s F‑150 just spun its wheels in the mud. Chainsaw blades dulled, radial saws wouldn’t bite, and when Chad clamped his head in the drill press, he couldn’t get the bit to bite into Karl’s eye even with all his weight on it.

“That is sick,” Gerry observed.

“You got any better ideas?” Chad asked.

By now, Karl was wearing a shop apron they’d tied around his waist because Gerry objected to seeing his vampiric junk flapping free. His body was scorched in places, red in others, dirty as hell, but otherwise it was unmarked.

“We’re never gonna get that money,” Hinckley whined.

“How do you even split $20,000 three ways?” Gerry asked. “It’s like he’s fucking with us.”

It was like he was fucking with them, Chad thought. He’d been divorced twice and audited three times and he knew what it was like when someone was fucking with you. He looked at the perpetually pissed-off Gerry and big dumb Hinckley arguing over whether you carry the one or what, and he realized what he needed to do.

$6,650 each,” Chad said. “Take that last $50, Hinckley. You’re going on another beer run. It’s time we got serious.”

***

“Why us?” Chad asked Karl.

The vampire was feeling the effects of alcohol poisoning. His eyes were sinking shut, his head kept nodding forward and snapping back.

“Your YouTube videos,” he mumbled.

Gerry, Chad, and Hinckley had been putting up YouTube videos of themselves blowing the shit out of shit for a while. Their best was a refrigerator they’d stuffed with home-made dynamite. They’d set it off with an incendiary round and it launched itself into the sky like God kicking a field goal, made a great big arc trailing fire, and punched through the roof of the Barn. They’d had to cover the hole with two sheets of plywood.

“If he can find us on Youtube so can other people,” Hinckley said. “We gonna get in trouble?”

“He’s out,” Chad said, lifting Karl’s arm and letting it fall back down. “Get the guns.”

***

Chad made sure they pounded so much beer while wiring the homemade C‑4 that Hinckley finally had to go inside the Barn and sleep it off. Gerry lasted about an hour longer. In that time, the two of them turned the field behind the Barn into a war zone. They strapped an explosive vest to Karl, they wired him with dynamite, they put him inside an old bank safe and set off a charge so big it puffed out the walls. By four AM, Karl was sporting some scorch marks and minor bruising but that was it.

“Get me another beer,” Chad said. “And get me the rubber tubing and some of the napalm. I’m gonna go deep.”

He turned around. Gerry was stretched out next to a steaming pile of half-digested chicken fingers, snoring softly.

“Finally,” Chad said.

It took him a while to drag Karl around front. The vampire was heavier than he looked.

***

The first rays of the rising sun were resting on Karl’s face when he cracked one eye open.

“Morning,” Chad said. “I was kind of hoping the sun would make you burst into flames or something.”

“No,” Karl said, standing up and stretching in the cool morning mist, joints popping. “I am very sore but it appears I am still alive.”

“Yeah,” Chad said. “Sorry about that. What happens now?”

“Now I am forced to kill you,” Karl said.

“I figured it’d be something like that,” Chad said. “Them other two are inside, I got ‘em drunk as lords when I realized what was gonna happen. No reason for ‘em to suffer.”

“How deeply moving,” Karl said. “Usually by the time I wake up you’ve all killed each other over the money. You’re so noble.”

“Your poker face ain’t as tight as you think it is,” Chad said. “You cocky-ass European bucket of fuck.”

“How are we breaking our fast?” Karl asked, adjusting his balls as he sat down on the broken lawn chair.

“Moonshine,” Chad said, kicking the wooden spindle between them and making the mason jars clink together. “My daddy’s recipe.”

He raised his jar in a toast and slammed back half of it, then exhaled kerosene vapor and pounded his chest. Karl smiled.

“You did your best,” the naked vampire said. “I’m sure.”

“You were just messing with us,” Chad said. “You knew you couldn’t be killed.”

“A little bit,” Karl admitted.

“Is that fun for you?” Chad asked. “Makes you feel like a big shot?”

“It passes the time.”

“Well, cheers to you, dickface,” Chad said.

The two men clinked mason jars and Karl knocked back his in one slug.

“Thirsty,” Chad observed.

“I have much to do,” Karl said. “You have left me a small mess to clean up and it will take some time.”

“You’ll find a way,” Chad said. “You gonna suck our blood?”

Karl smiled.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Chad said. “You don’t even got fangs.”

“I have fangs, I assure you,” Karl said.

He parted his lips, his jaw unhinging like a snake’s. Two long, sharp incisors unfolded from the roof of his mouth. He hissed, unable to help himself, which is when Chad struck three survival matches and flicked them in. Karl swallowed reflexively.

“I felt that,” he said, sternly. “I was going to make your passing relatively painless but that was not a pleasant sensation.”

He stood and advanced on Chad, who fell backwards out of his chair, then scooted away on his butt across the mud.

“Where are you running, little man?” Karl smiled.

Then he paused, hand on his stomach. Something inside of him twitched.

“Napalm,” Chad said. “My daddy’s recipe. I gave you a napalm enema, too. Only probelm was I couldn’t figure out how to get it lit.”

Karl screamed fire, and dropped to his knees.

“Your skin was tough as shit,” Chad said. “I figured your guts might not be.”

Black, greasy smoke poured out of Karl’s throat, a secondary explosion inside his cloaca jerked his body and a lava flow of molten innards oozed out onto the ground in an endless mudslide. He lay on one side, panting steam, guts boiling, convulsing painfully.      “Don’t thank me,” Chad said, prying the two bundles of cash out of Karl’s hands. “It was my pleasure.”

Karl snatched for Chad’s arm, hitting it hard enough to numb it from the elbow down. The two rolls of bills fell into his pile of flaming organs. They flared up as they caught fire.

“That’s okay,” Chad said. “I did it for love.”

He sat for a while, sipping warm Budweiser to get the shitty taste of moonshine out of his mouth, watching the vampire cook from the inside out. By the time Gerry stumbled outside, squinting in the sun, Karl was little more than a smoldering, deflated sack of indestructible skin propped up by his diamond-hard bones.

“You cooking bacon?” Gerry asked, sniffing the air.

“Killed that vampire,” Chad said.

“Smells good,” Gerry said, popping a Bud, and dropping into a lawn chair.

When Hinckley got up, he took his morning piss on Karl’s skin bag.

“That’s what you get for fucking with a bunch of good old boys,” he said. “So how’re we splitting up that money again?”

“There is no money,” Chad said. “It burnt up.”

He pointed at the two nuggests of charred paper immersed in the smoldering mess.

“You burnt our money?” Gerry asked, jumping to his feet, knocking the lawn chair over backwards. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“How the hell am I gonna pay for another baby now?” Hinckley yelled, on the brink of tears. “I was counting on that!”

“Your baby?” Gerry roared. “My retirement fund! I don’t have a safety net anymore thanks to LandTrayde! And you went and burned it all up.”

“You’d prefer I let him kill you?” Chad asked.

“You’re jealous because you knew I’d invest it and double my principal in six months,” Gerry said. “You’re a petty man, Chad Bowers.”

“You’re jealous,” Hinckley said. “You envy me the family love I’ve got in my life. You’re a sad, lonely man.”

He turned to go. Gerry followed.

“Wait just one minute, you assholes,” Chad said. “I saved your lives. That cash was collateral damage.”

“I’m sure it was, you jealous prick,” Gerry said. “Come on, Hink. Let’s get the fuck away from this little man before he drags us down to his level.”

“Yeah,” Hinckley said. “See you next Tuesday.”

“I’ll bring my hex wrenches,” Gerry said. “Yours suck shit.”

“Fine,” Chad said. “Get on out of here. Leave me to clean up.”

“Serves you right,” Gerry said. “You burnt up our futures.”

Chad watched their cars bounce up the mud track and vanish into the woods. Then he sat for a while, contemplating his situation. It took him another warm beer before he started seeing the silver lining. He hosed Hinckley’s piss off the vampire husk and picked it up. A few measurements and he felt like it was about right. If he could just find a way to cut it there was plenty here.

He might be getting those new tires after all.

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