Oddtober 2024: Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz

Book: Tears of a Komsomol Girl

Type of Book: A hybrid of true crime, photography, literary fiction, historical fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Jesus Christ, this book…

Availability: First published in 2020 by Infinity Land Press, you can get a copy here. My copy is from a 2022 reprint.

Comments: I said in yesterday’s look at Grady Hendrix’s take on the final girl trope that today I would be discussing an anti-final girl, and while that is sort of a flippant way to broadcast a new entry, it’s still an accurate assessment. Arina, or Arisha as her mother calls her, dies several deaths in this novel, and though she (sometimes only) dies in her dreams, her deaths are no less real and devastating for that fact.

This is one of those times when I realize I’ve come across something rare and so odd I am almost uncomfortable trying to discuss it. I know there are subtexts I will miss. I know that there are ideas and emotions Szasz is trying to convey that I will overlook entirely. But the inevitability that I will get things wrong also comes with a bit of excitement, especially if it means others who have tackled this book come and discuss it with me (hint, hint).

Arina is fourteen and lives in Russia during the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, an uneasy time when the culture change from communist control to a more open approach to trade and politics is just beginning. The specters of the old ways are crashing headfirst into the dangers of the new ways and Arina is trying to find her way in the midst of this change. Alongside Arina’s arrogant yet hopeful explorations, the Ripper of Rostov, one Andrei Chikatilo, is murdering people in horrific, gory ways and he too is a specter that haunts Arina.

This is a novel with an unreliable narrator and pays no attention to a linear progression of time. Arina, an accomplished violinist who aspires to become a professional musician, attends a boarding school for gifted students but she also attends a school near her home, sometimes returning to a dormitory, sometimes returning home to her mother. Sometimes she is an orphan, sometimes she lives with both parents, and sometimes only her mother is at home.

Arina’s versions of her life are always grounded in some very specific realities, mainly that she is small and looks younger than she actually is and she knows she is prey even as she hopes one day to become a predator in her own right. She does not want to be a murderous predator, but rather hopes her already jaded approach to male-female interactions enable her to make “connections” that will serve her well when she is an adult. She approaches the dying days of the USSR by graduating from Young Pioneers to becoming a Komsomol girl, and she approaches party politics the way she does her sexual interactions – it is something she does with an eye to building connections that can later assist her in her future ambitions.

Arina doesn’t hesitate to discuss herself as a bratty girl. She complains endlessly about the cheap, man-made leather shoes her mother purchased for her, one of the consistent threads in her different stories, she admits she has the sense that she is better than others, and she engages in uneasy behaviors, like covert masturbation as her family is gathered, watching a video of one of her performances. She does not worry that her recitations of her less positive qualities will ever hamper her, as she is profoundly confident in her capabilities to navigate the world around her and manipulate the situations in which she finds herself. Or at least she thinks she can until she encounters the killer she calls Satan, Mr. Chikatilo, and it is in his presence, even if it is only in her nightmares, that she encounters a force that genuinely reveals her vulnerabilities and forces her to regard herself as a victim who does not have control, dignity or even bodily integrity if a strong adult decides to take them from her.

It’s so tempting to discuss this novel in terms of the collision between old communism and the changes that awaited Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin wall. Chikatilo, born in Ukraine right after the Holodomor and right before the horrors of the Second World War, endured a savage upbringing. He may or may not have lost a sibling to cannibalism, but undeniably he lived in dire poverty until he was an adult. Shaped by chaotic political violence, it would have been difficult for him to conform to the necessary self-control required in the USSR even had he been sane. But he wasn’t sane and the structure that communism would have given him he ultimately devoured with every person he killed. Arina, on the other hand, raised in structure so confining that she lives a life longing for ultimate freedom, was more than poised to leap into the brave, new, unstable world of travel, work and freedom but was herself devoured by the chaotic past, and it happened over and over, each dream of her death at the hands of Satan worse than the one before.

But that is just one of many ways to look at this astonishing novel. Another is that all the versions of herself that Arina conveys are elements of the experiences clever but underprivileged girls faced in the USSR, even as it became Russia. One could see her different stories as the results of small changes in her environment that, when reset, left her on a similar but somewhat different path. She is in turns a girl from an abusive home where fathers beat unfaithful wives, a girl sent to an orphanage when her parents died, a girl who was preyed upon by those in power in a supposedly classless society, a girl who would be ravaged by the past before she could begin living her future. But Arina also represents every teen girl anywhere. The anger she felt over her man-made leather shoes that looked cheap and did not hold up to the weather well, being unable to please her mother no matter how much she practiced her violin, being in possession of a new body and the new power that comes with it – this is the state of all girls everywhere. The arrogance of youth is universal, as is its hope. I would have been an age peer of Arina’s and her inner life was not wholly different from mine and the main difference is that Arina, by virtue of where she lived, was more or less born to be prey and no matter how her life changed from chapter to chapter, her end would always be the same. She may live a different life during the day but at night Satan always takes her in her dreams until one day she does not get a chance to rewrite the story of her life.

Arina’s dreams and reality can be summed up in a passage where she meets a man with whom she begins a sexual affair (and keep in mind she is fourteen and looks even younger while he is very much an adult), a man she calls Uncle Vanya. She walks past his chauffeured car and it is so obviously a symbol of the wealth and power she one day hopes for herself that she stops and looks at the car intently, seeing her own reflection shining back at her from the immaculately clean vehicle. This seems like a great symbol – she sees herself in the objects that represent a life far better than the one she currently lives. But then the chauffeur steps out and threatens her, telling her to leave. Uncle Vanya tells his driver to stand down and takes his measure of Arina, feeling her out to see how much intolerable behavior she will accept. When she lies and says she is much older than she is, he understands she is both too young to understand the near-Faustian bargain she will make if she accepts the ride he offers, but is old enough to feel as if she controls the situation since she caught the eye of a much older, wealthy and powerful man. And in the end, Arina does not seem to mind what Uncle Vanya and his friends want from her and because she is willing, she does not see it as a violation because she experiences true violation every time she dreams of Satan. It’s also interesting to note that one of her sexual fantasies where she is not raped and murdered involves a very involved dream about a Lenin statue coming to life.

This is a brutal novel but even in the most excruciating passages discussing the harm that comes to Arina, Szasz writes the horror with an almost poetic hand, but other times her hand holds a hammer, as does Satan during one of his attacks on Arina.

The photography in this book is disturbing, showing what happens to Arina in her dreams of Satan. Photographed and illustrated by Karolina Urbaniuk, the black and white photos in this book are of Szasz, wearing the same clothes and hair style but experiencing violence differently in each nightmare attack. Each chapter begins with a photo of Szasz as Arina, featured in a collage of other famous people and common sights in Russia, with a photo of her ravaged body later in the chapter. Each violent photo is accompanied by a paragraph or so of Russian that looks as if it could be from a newspaper clipping. Intrigued, I used Google Image translate and realized the text in those images came from the things Arina says during her attacks.

The final attack is, understandably, the one that affected me the most. Arina, wearing the dreaded synthetic leather moccasins she hates, is rushing to a Komsomol Youth meeting where lateness is not tolerated. The bus breaks down and everyone is forced off the bus in the rain and Arina is distressed about potentially being late and in trouble. Chikatilo, who has been stalking her, is on that bus and attempts to comfort her, reminding her that she had no control over the bus breaking down. He urges her to come with him back to his home where she can dry off and wait out the storm, and knowing she absolutely should not follow him, she does anyway, almost fatalistically going to her death. Once she arrives inside the shack, she knows she is in trouble but remains calm, holding onto a sliver of doubt that perhaps this would not end poorly, thinking perhaps she is being too hasty in her opinions. But then it happens and nothing can save her, and in this scene I forgot how obnoxious Arina was, how arrogant and scheming and bratty she was.

She became to me what she was and always was – a teen girl in a dangerous world where terrible things happen to the weak and no amount of pleading or dreams of power could change that.

There are so many ways to explore this novel that I hope others who have read it find this discussion and tell me how they processed it. I cannot say if this is a book you should read, because it is violent and upsetting. However, I can say I found this to be a remarkable book, so remarkable that you may notice by their absence the swaths of text I often reproduce when I discuss books. I did not quote from this book because I have no idea which section would best represent the elements of this book that spoke to me, a former spooky girl who lived in my head and never knew what damage was waiting for me to find it. The entire book is a memory and a revelation to the right reader, and if you are that sort of reader, I highly recommend it.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Book: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, dark humor

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not wholly odd, but sometimes you can veer off the odd path when it’s Oddtober and you want to discuss final girls.

Availability: Published by Berkley in 2021, you can get a copy here.

Comments: Grady Hendrix really knows how to create tiresome female lead characters who really drive home how irritating they are even as you want them to win. He did it in Horrorstör, which has been discussed on this site, and he did it in The Final Girl Support Group. The heroine in this novel really is quite tiresome, but I kept reading even as I was rubbed the wrong way because Hendrix, through the use of high tension and a perpetually caroming plot, keeps his reader in such a state of anticipation that the miserable inner chaos of his lead character seems very fitting.

There have been several movies and books released over the last decade or so that use the “final girl” trope. I discussed one of them in yesterday’s look at the film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I am neither pro nor con regarding meta-heavy looks at horror, but I prefer those that are black comedies or outright parodies. Though Hendrix manages to maintain a tense plot, this is a comedic book, mainly because the heroine, when juxtaposed with the other final girls in the book, is such a mess. The book can be very deep in terms of psychology, giving a look at what PTSD can do to survivors of violent crime, but ultimately it is mostly a rollicking, fun horror novel that takes the final girl trope and runs with it in a million directions all at once. And, to give Hendrix his due, I had a couple of “a ha!” moments after reading that were gratifying, like realizing how it was one character’s computer was “hacked.” Just half an a hour ago before writing this I suddenly understood why the psychiatrist’s son was being such a brat, antagonizing one of the final girls and urging her to read his self-drawn comic book. It’s hard to have a tight, labyrinthine plot, but Hendrix pulls it off with such ease you don’t realize it until the black humor fades and the plot points take center stage.

Here’s a quick synopsis and be aware that there may be spoilers though I am going to do my level best not to ruin the ending: In the fine tradition of Palahniuk’s use of support groups to bring together unlikely characters, final girls from notorious murder cases that closely mirror the plots of famous horror movie franchises have come together for group therapy. The recovery from their violent pasts has varied from woman to woman, but none have struggled more than Lynnette, whose descent into PTSD-fueled paranoia has taken over her life and turned her into a terrified but well-organized fear machine who is also surprisingly cowardly when push comes to shove. Then one day the woman who best handled her attack – Adrienne – is murdered, and on the day she is killed the rest of the group experience odd and violent events that make it seem as if they are all under attack again. Lynnette, paranoiac that she is, knows something terrible is happening to them but has a hard time convincing the other girls. When it is revealed that Lynnette had been writing a book about the group that had very unflattering portrayals of the group and their psychiatrist, Dr. Carol, Lynnette becomes the temporary villain of the piece, as she was the reason so much information got out about the final girls, putting them in danger. As Lynnette is forced to find the other final girls and plead her case about them all being in danger, she is hurled through all sorts of violent and harrowing situations as she pieces together what is really happening. When she realizes who the killer is, she sets in motion her extremely violent redemption.

That’s all I will give of the plot, but it will hurt nothing to discuss the final girls in this book because half the fun of the novel is the sort of fangirl (or boy) experience of seeing the characters who shaped the horror films of your childhood reconfigured into the women in this novel. Here’s a look at the cast of characters, who all have the first or last name of the actress who portrayed their characters:

Lynnette Tarkington is inspired by a girl who had a very limited role in the first movie in the “so bad it’s good” Christmas horror franchise, Silent Night, Deadly Night. The role is played by scream queen, Linnea Quigley, and Lynnette is clearly a call back to “Linnea.” When the deranged Santa in the film breaks into a family home, he finds a girl who had just had sex on the family pool table, picks her up and impales her on a mounted stag head, ramming the antlers through her torso. Lynnette plays dead and survives, and part of the reason she was never able to move on as well as the other final girls in her support group is because she merely survived the attack that killed her entire family. She did not kill the men who harmed her, and that has caused some of the women in the support group to believe she is not a genuine final girl. She wants to support the other women but when she is initially given the chance to save one of her therapy-mates, she chokes. Overcoming the bone-crushing fear that narrows her focus to her own survival and nothing more will be difficult for her.

Adrienne Butler is a rare black final girl who is inspired by Alice from the first installment of the Friday the 13th franchise. She survived and killed the man who attacked the counselors who let his son drown (he never really had a son though) and was appalled when her struggle was turned into a film. She later sued, took control of the franchise and bought the camp where she was attacked and turned it into a retreat for abused and victimized women.

Heather DeLuca is an amalgam between Nancy from the first A Nightmare on Elm Street and Kristen from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Though she is clearly meant to signal association with Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, she has become fairly insane since killing her more prosaic attacker (Hendrix has to limit the supernatural elements a bit to keep this novel grounded in a more possible reality) and has a terrible drug habit as well, which links her to the character Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette. She’s erratic, and is as ruthless about her survival as Lynnette. She is darkly hilarious, as well.

Marilyn Torres is my favorite final girl in this novel. She is based on Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and is the most self-contained, resilient and reliable woman in the group. She was a Texas debutante who insisted she be able to attend her coming-out ball, even as others felt it was in bad taste, just to give her attacker one final metaphorical fatal blow. She married into extreme wealth and is the woman the others go to when they need help, especially after Adrienne is killed. She is polite, kind, and maniacally focused on doing what she considers to be morally sound. She is also very dignified and proper in the fashion of women raised in big town Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, which rings very true to me.

Dani Shipman threw me for a moment because she was a woman whose brother broke out of an asylum on Halloween and ostensibly found her to try to kill her in the parking lot of a hospital. This to me was clearly a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis’ role from Halloween 2, so her name should have been Jamie, right? Except later in the franchise, when Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is killed at the beginning of Halloween 4, a new Jamie is introduced as Michael Myers niece, and she is played by an actress called Danielle Shipman, who later plays Annie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake in 2007. Dani is in a relationship with a woman dying of cancer when the events of the novel get rolling and, in my opinion, is the saddest final girl in the book because she really does have everything taken from her in the end, or at least everything that really matters.

Julia Campbell is based on Neve Campbell’s character from Scream. She kills her two attackers but ends up a paraplegic as a result. She’s my least favorite of the final girls and I am not sure why. Likely because the first introduction to her shows her to be a confrontational, somewhat mean girl, but really, who could blame her. She and Adrienne were the faces of the final girl phenomenon as it played out in the press.

Because I do not want to spoil this book entirely while wanting to talk about Marilyn some, I’m going to discuss one scene from the book that doesn’t really affect how it ends. Dani has been taken into custody because there is some belief that her brother did not commit the murders in the hospital and that Dani killed him unnecessarily. Dani’s wife, Michelle, is dying of cancer and Dani had promised her that she would make sure Michelle was able to die on her ranch, but when Dani is arrested for shooting at the police who wanted to take her in for questioning, Michelle is placed in hospice care. Both Heather and Lynnette descended on Marilyn when their lives began to implode after Adrienne’s death, and Lynnette manages to persuade Marilyn to drive them to see Michelle. Once there, Lynnette’s conscience demands that she get Michelle out of there so she can die at home like Dani promised her. What follows is grimly hilarious, and the only thing that keeps it from becoming an outright atrocity against a sick woman and the nurses who want to keep her comfortable is Marilyn’s innate decency and Texas rich girl ability to control bad situations.

As an orderly seems as if he is about to prevent them from leaving with Michelle’s near-corpse, Marilyn saves the day with her taser:

“You zapped him in the nuts,” the teenaged girl says, incredulous.

“Fucking A,” Heather says.

“I want you to know that I deeply, deeply resent the position you’ve put me in,” Marilyn tells me.

The three manage to get the dying woman into Marilyn’s super expensive SUV and unfortunately the woman loses control of her bowels. Against the wishes of the other two she decides to deal with the situation:

“I am not going to let this woman sit in her own mess,” she says, curving down the exit ramp onto a surface street, heading toward a Ralphs supermarket. “She is Dani’s special friend, and she deserves some dignity.”

When Heather makes a smart remark to this, Marilyn takes her in hand:

Marilyn parks, cuts off the engine, and rounds on Heather.

“This is a natural human process,” she snaps. “We will accord her the respect that any of us would expect if we were in her situation.”

She then barks orders at Heather and Lynnette, goes inside the store to get adult diapers and some water, and once she can comfortably clean up the dying Michelle, she does so without any complaint. She places all the soiled towels and clothing into plastic shopping bags.

“Heather, go throw this away.”

“I’m not touching that,” Heather says. “Just leave it.”

“We are not litterbugs,” Marilyn snaps. “Throw this away or I’ll smack you.”

Heather does as she is told. I just adore Marilyn.

I was hesitant to read this book because I was lukewarm toward Horrorstör and because I’d read reviews that said this book was hard to follow, with too many characters and other complaints about the pacing. That is why I seldom read reviews before I read any book because mileage varies so much in fiction, all the more so in genre fiction, that reviews often lead me astray. I found the book very easy to follow once I realized the key to understanding who the women were and what they represented, and that happened as soon as I noticed there were characters named “Heather” and “Adrienne.” I suspect that if a reader does not have a very strong background in horror films, especially those from the twentieth century, this book may seem confusing at first. Luckily that was not a problem for me. I really enjoyed this look at what becomes of final girls when their monsters are slain, and it’s an excellent meta-look at the trope of final girls, how women deal with institutionalized violence and how hard it can be to rise above what is done to you. Highly recommended.

Come back to tomorrow for a look at a sort of anti-final girl book, a book where there is only one girl who is killed over and over again.

Oddtober 2024: Revisiting The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths by Corrine May Botz

Book: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

Author: Corinne May Botz

Why I Consider This Book Odd: The book documents unexplained deaths as depicted in the form of miniature, almost dollhouse-like scenes. This book is bizarre, creepy yet utterly charming.

Type of Work: Photography, essay

Availability: Published by Monacelli in 2004, you can get a copy here.

Comments: I discussed this book fifteen years ago, back when this site was still I Read Odd Books. I had been thinking about reposting the discussion because it’s such a great book and having posted it so early in my book blogging “career,” it seems worth reposting it because few current readers have likely seen it. Add to that that Corrine May Botz is giving a talk on December 8, 2024 for Morbid Anatomy and this seems like a perfect time to repost this extremely cool book that covers the work of a decidedly odd, very gifted woman. What follows is more or less an unaltered repost, though I’ve rejiggered parts of it to conform to the way I now handle quotes and photos.

This book is amazing. Though the content is likely a bit morbid for most to consider it a coffee table book, had I coffee table, it would definitely be prominently displayed on mine. The book discusses the career of Frances Glessner Lee, a woman Corinne May Botz describes as:

“…brilliant, witty , and, by some accounts, impossible woman. She gave you what she thought you should have, rather than what you might actually want. She had a wonderful sense of humor about everything and everyone, excluding herself. The police adored and regarded her as their “patron saint,” her family was more reticent about applauding her and her hired help was “scared to death of her.”

Raised in an ultra-traditional, very wealthy family, Lee spent a good majority of her young life thwarted, though she was exposed to home decorating skills that would stand her in good stead when she began making the Nutshell Studies. Unable to attend college as she wanted, once her parents died, Lee started to come into her own, both metaphorically and literally, as she then had plenty of wealth to support her interests. She met a man by the name of George Magrath, a medical examiner who testified in criminal cases in New England. Magrath enthralled the young Lee, and it was through Magrath and his knowledge that Lee began to see what would become her life work.

Interested in promoting proper examination techniques to coroners, who were then mostly untrained in criminal investigation, she founded a library at Harvard (where her parents had refused to allow her to study) that contained over a thousand rare books she had collected. With her inherited wealth, Lee set up the George Burgess Magrath Endowment of Legal Medicine, and though she did not have any formal training, she was respected as an authority in what would later become forensic sciences.

However, it did not go unnoticed to Lee that students could seldom get any hands-on training, due to many factors, the main one being that few crime scenes of interest occurred when students were in training sessions. That caused her to create the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. These death scenes in miniature were physical reenactments of baffling cases, set up meticulously so that students could study them and analyze the clues and evidence in the scene, and come to an appropriate conclusion. Some were suicides that looked like murders, accidents that looked like suicides and some were murders that the killers tried to make look like either suicides or murders. The goal was to encourage students to study and find all pertinent information the scenes provided. She held seminars using her miniature scenes as visual aids. She made it clear that it was not always necessary to find the cause of death, but rather the scenes were “exercises in observing and evaluating indirect evidence, especially that which may have medical evidence.”

The sheer amount of work that went into the Nutshell Studies, as well as Lee’s incredible attention to detail, astonishes me. All of her skills and knowledge were poured into the miniature scenes. Working from crime scene photographs, she would construct detailed scenes, filled with information – some relevant, some not. The models she created worked, in the sense that one could raise the blinds, a tiny mousetrap would spring, and the coffee pots were filled with coffee grounds. With her knowledge of interior design, Lee selected wallpaper and furnishings that matched the socio-economic and class structure of the victims in the studies. She agonized over the scale of everything, making endless adjustments until the entire scene was in perfect scale.

No less attention went into the dolls, representations of dead people. Stuffed carefully to ensure flexibility, clothing hand made (even down to Lee hand knitting silk stockings for the dolls), and posed with care, these dolls became macabre representations of terrible ends. Though Lee never felt as if her dolls looked realistic enough, she had no qualms about creating dolls that showed the extremes of violence and death.

Though Botz observes this in decidedly more eloquent prose, as I read the essay about Frances Glessner Lee, I could not help but think that her choice of life work was a huge middle finger extended towards her parents and society as a whole. Her parents refused to let her get a college education and taught her that she “shouldn’t know anything about the human body.” Yet she ended up in a career where she attended autopsies and created representations of terrible crime scenes. Better yet, her career brought her into close proximity with lots of attractive, unmarried young men, a situation that had to be satisfying to her even though most of them saw her as a maternal figure, sending her Mother’s Day cards. Once her parents were dead, Lee did not set back the clock and get the education she wanted, but rather used her inheritance to become involved in legal medicine, a subject of which her father heartily disapproved. Though some of her class prejudices showed up in her works – she was reluctant to show crime in upper class settings – her quiet assumption of a decidedly unfeminine career, as girlie as making dollhouse scenes may be, was a blow for her personal freedom as well as a chance to do that which interested her.

The book is primarily made up of photographs and information about the scenes Lee created. Each scene collection has a numbered picture at the end that shows all the various clues and information one should have gleaned from the scenes, as well as analysis of what one could potentially think of the information. For some of the scenes, at the end of the book isa sort of answer key, so one can see if what one saw in the scene had any relevance to a crime. It’s an interesting diversion for those of us interested in the macabre, looking at these scenes and trying to puzzle out what Lee wanted us to see, absorb and interpret.

Oddtober 2024: The Bug Collector by Wrath James White

Book: The Bug Collector

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, extreme horror, body horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is possibly the most disgusting book I’ve ever read.

Availability: Published by Bad Dream Books in 2024, you can get a copy here. I read the Kindle version.

Comments: About a million Internet years ago, I could not bring myself to discuss in any amount of detail Edward Lee’s short story, “The Dritiphilist.” Remember that? We were so young then.

I’ve toughened up over the years. I’ve been dragged down some nasty roads. I’ve read the now infamous Swamps of Dagobah Reddit story. The stomach-churning Jolly Rancher account barely registers as gross these days. Outside of horrific depictions of child and animal abuse, very little fazes me anymore. But I do have to say that even taking into account the cover and that Wrath James White has been known to get his gross on, I entered into this novella without wholly knowing that it was going to be one of the most intense splatterpunk novels I’ve ever read.

In my defense, I thought the cover was hyperbolic, and I processed the idea of a bug collector through the lens of a documentary about “bug chasers” I saw around twenty years ago called The Gift. At the time, the concept of bug chasing was still new, and the documentary was shocking to a lot who saw it. The bug chasing in the documentary was specifically HIV, and the film looked at men who made the decision to deliberately acquire the virus. It wasn’t disgusting, but it was unsettling and extremely sad in places. I recall specifically one young man who broke down crying as he tried to explain why he wanted to develop HIV and far from it being a sexual fetish for him, it was an acknowledgement that he knew he could end up dying but he felt infection was so inevitable that he just wanted to get it over with. In some way, not having HIV made him feel like an outsider in his community. Due to antivirals and the vastly improved life expectancy now for people who acquire HIV, some young gay men call HIV “gay diabetes” but even as late as 2000, treatment of HIV was dicey, giving a lot of weight to a decision to engage in such sexual nihilism.

Wrath James White took that nihilism and took it a step farther with the notion of “bug collecting.” The protagonist, a man who is evidently named Joey but god help me I somehow walked away from this reading experience without any memory of his name, collects sexually acquired infections. He wants all of them. At once. And he gets them, after spending years engaging in very disgusting sex with equally unsavory partners. He has no equivocation about why he is seeking out around thirty sexually-acquired infections. He is driven by the power of fetish:

My fetish had destroyed my health and ruined my life. I was a victim of my own paraphilia.

He developed his fetish as a result of a random sexual attack when he was a child. He later was shown a public safety film about STDs (or STIs as they are now called), complete with photos of diseased and suppurating genitalia, and with his childhood abuse in mind, those images became his default arousal fodder. Some pre-adolescent boys’ first sexually titillating images were of breasts or even images of staid but interesting heterosexual porn. Joey was turned on by disgusting pictures of bodies ravaged by disease.

Joey engages in a lot of risky behaviors to get his diseases but he is not an “ethical” collector because before the diseases rendered him a shambling, rotting, nose-less zombie, his appearance did not initially warn off prospective sex partners. Though he deliberately had sex with people he hoped would give him diseases, he didn’t consider that perhaps those people would not appreciate a two-way disease exchange. A prostitute he failed to disclose his diseased status to takes him hostage to punish him because, in a bizarre twist of fate, Tina was what is called a “super carrier.” She can be infected with any number of sexually transmitted diseases without showing symptoms, meaning she had no idea she was sick while she was infecting other people. She’s out for revenge and tortures Joey but as she does so, she wants him to explain why the hell he decided to do this to himself and to her and it’s right about here that I am going to stop discussing what happens in this book other than to leave you with the following quote from Miss Tina:

“What the fuck kind of sick white boy shit is that?”

One of the things I struggle with in regards to this sort of horror is that it so often violates basic story-telling tenets. We are told, not shown. Characters are one-dimensional. Plots are absolutely predictable. And editing is sometimes dicey (which I’ve mellowed about over the years but it still is something that leaps out at me).

But somehow this disgusting book works better than its peers and I think I understand why. White uses a traditional story-telling framework, flips the scripts on sex and presents his audience with a repellent take on One Thousand and One Nights. The Bug Collector is Thirty and One Infections and he’s Scheherazade to Tina’s Sultan. Ultimately, he’s more doomed than Scheherazade, and he’s telling stories to delay the inevitable rather than save his life, but the structure is there and it justifies a passive, recitation of events. In a story like this, you must be told rather than shown. The familiarity of the story framework also takes away the sting (and stink, frankly) of this sort of content because we get to keep an arm’s length prurience, hearing about disgusting events without immediacy, reserving urgency for Joey’s current plight.

One other issue I think I sorted out was the tendency for White’s characters to hold forth rather than speak. In this regard, Joey is not engaging in a traditional conversation. He is literally telling stories to save himself. Interestingly, I’ve dinged Edward Lee for this, with his hillbilly rapist discussing deep philosophy with a cop come to arrest him, and may need to reread some of his work and see if my reaction to it is similar to the reaction I had to Joey’s elevated language in The Bug Collector – amusement. There is something quite funny about this man whose appearance resembles an extra on The Walking Dead speaking like a college professor as he explains his appalling fetish to a street prostitute. And this is a book that needs some levity to be sure, so it was welcome rather than discordant.

How exactly did Joey get all those diseases? What does Tina do to him and does he deserve it? No way am I gonna quote from any of those passages. Nope. Absolutely not. Read it and find out.

This sort of horror is not for everyone. It’s written for a very specific audience, the sort of reader who understands the appeal of horror that seems like it is the result of a bunch of horror writers having a drink and egging each other on to see who can come up with the foulest narrative. It’s okay if you aren’t that sort of reader, but if you are, this is one of the better examples of this sort of extreme body horror.

It’s interesting that in a genre that generally causes me no small amount of existential despair I found two examples that work, this novella and May Leitz’s Fluids. I must be getting mellow these days. Still, step cautiously. This really is a gross book that revels in being gross. If you are into that sort of thing, you’ll be as happy as a pig in mud with White’s latest offering.

Oddtober 2024: Plastic Soul by James Nulick

Book: Plastic Soul

Author: James Nulick

Type of Book: Fiction, science fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It answers questions that science fiction has tried to address for years, among them: What fuels the desire for humans to clone themselves and what do the clones really think about the experience? Nulick takes us from the collective soul to the plastic soul and it’s eerie.

Availability: This book is available for pre-order for both an “artist” edition as well as a “jank” edition.

Disclosures: James Nulick is a friend of mine.

Comments: James Nulick has spent the last few years traveling down two different paths. He first introduced readers to his Drake® world in his short story collection, Haunted Girlfriend in the short story, “Body by Drake.” Set in the not-too-distant future, Drake® Corp is almost as important as the government and exists in a world that is only dystopian because it so resembles how we currently live taken to its logical conclusions of ecological destruction, sociological quagmires, and a growing separation between the rich and poor. We saw more of this world in the short story collection Lazy Eyes, a familiar but uncomfortable sense that the roiling inequities that plague us now will take root so deeply that our futures are cast in stone before the calendar pages even get a chance to turn.

As he created Drake® world, James was also exploring an interesting idea that human beings are cosmically linked to one another in ways we don’t often see and seem impossible. In his novel, The Moon Down to Earth, unlikely characters share the same thoughts. A super-morbidly obese Hispanic female shut-in, a mixed race young man who wants to be a rapper, an elderly racist widower living in a trailer – their thoughts at times mirrored each other in a way that pointed toward the mystical, almost as if the much-derided “hive mind” was at play. He later expanded these connections in Lazy Eyes, where animals and humans began to exhibit those cosmic links with each other. The dead live, the voiceless communicate, and the lines of human and animal experiences are blurred.

These two paths meet in Nulick’s latest novel, Plastic Soul. When I first read this novel, the realization that Nulick had been world-weaving all this time, culminating in this unique, frightening yet strangely hopeful novel, was humbling. For years James Nulick has been tossing crumbs for his readers to follow, world-weaving in a manner that in itself seems as magical as the tendrils he sees that hold us together. It’s tempting at times to discuss the existential questions this novel raises, but it almost seems like an insult to me to explore this novel with a larger philosophy to guide you. Philosophy has little place in magic, I think. Any real philosophical examination of this novel would necessitate the use of quantum theory and I am not Richard Feynman. This novel made me feel, at times, as if I were one of the apes who found the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and now I feel the urge to make tools.

I decided to discuss this book for Oddtober 2024 because it is, at times, so very creepy. This novel is cinematic, the sort of book that creates profound visuals. A medical facility that cloaks unethical activities behind a veneer of sterile luxury juxtaposed with the sort of secretive suburban childhood familiarized in early Spielberg films. Fleets of cars chauffeured by a slender, attractive Asian man named James (private car ownership has been banned in the Drake®-driven universe). A wealthy home with grounds devoted to bee cultivation. A thrift store with couture-priced designer labels. This novel fairly cries out for a cinematic adaptation.

The novel introduces the reader to a world wherein the rich can clone themselves in order to ease their loneliness, only to realize that the human will is no less forceful in medically manufactured human beings. There is a cloying creepiness that is reminiscent of the more clinical elements of David Cronenberg films (if Dead Ringers comes to mind when you read this novel, we can be friends), there is a nervous anticipation as the reader waits to see what will happen when clones are shipped to live with their genetic donors, and a sickening feeling that Nulick is showing us how easily we will be victimized by the very technology we hope will save us, both us and the other living creatures we create.

Ultimately, in science fiction, we’ve learned that even with the best intentions fueling our actions, there is never a good outcome where human clones are concerned. Even when cloning is cloaked with the idea that it benefits mankind, we still have human beings we classify as The Other so we can justify harvesting their organs, forcing them to do dangerous work, or, in the case of Plastic Soul, being used to cure the loneliness their DNA donors experience in their wealthy, exclusionary lives.

To inject a little bit of humor into this very serious discussion, this novel also addresses the age old question of what it is human beings do with their clones: Would you have sex with your clone or robotic replicant if you were able to? James also answers the mostly unasked question of how the clones feel about the option even being on the table in the first place.

If I seem like I am dancing around what is happening in this novel, it is because I am doing just that. To discuss the reasons why people do what they do in Plastic Soul, the real, deep, evolutionary reasons, will absolutely spoil the novel. But I can convey the visuals and give an overall sense of theme by following the book’s layout and telling you a bit about the characters whose names are the chapters in the book.

“MRS NARCISSUS/Sylvie Biusom,” sets up the visuals and overall tone of the novel. Sylvie was named for Sylvia Plath, but unlike her namesake, she lived with her father and was abandoned by her mother. Of course Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, did not abandon her – he died – but Sylvia as a child interpreted his absence as an abandonment and it affected her for the rest of her life. Sylvie, who was actually abandoned, also carries the impact of that abandonment and it has thwarted her. She does not like people, she loathes being touched, but for all that she adores her father, she still longs for companionship outside of just his company. Her father, a very wealthy man, likes to keep bees, much as Otto Plath did, and Sylvie helps him as much as she can with beekeeping.

Sylvie’s haughty officiousness hides a deep loneliness even as she denies experiencing any sort of sexual attraction because she so dislikes human connection. So how does a person like Sylvie achieve any sort of happiness in life? Watching the Blip – a future means of watching visual media – she sees an ad from The Chrysalis Institute. The ad features a woman sitting across from a mirror image of herself, and asks the question:

How much would you pay to have an honest conversation with yourself?

It turns out she would be willing to pay a lot, and she sends for a driver to take her to the Institute so she can pay outrageous sums so she can recreate herself and in eighteen months have an honest conversation. At a clinical but luxurious facility, she is treated deferentially and given all the details she will need to clone herself. It takes about a year, using proprietary nutrients and chemicals, to grow a clone to adulthood, and another six months to train the clone in language. The clone also has all her memories, which means, presumably, the clone will know all of Sylvie’s motivations in creating a clone in the first place.

There are three extremely important things those who commission clones must understand. The first is that all clones must be older than twelve years old when they leave the Institute to ensure no one creates a clone to engage in pedophilia, an arbitrary age cut-off that seems significant only to those who created the rule. The second is that they must not ever have sex with their clones. The third is that all clones are outfitted with a sort of kill switch so they can be terminated at will should the need arise. It is extremely expensive to commission a clone so generally one assumes that people would not want to kill a clone unless they were billionaire psychopaths, and it should also sow a bit of unease that there is some worry that a clone might need to be killed for some reason, necessitating a kill switch in the first place.

The place on the clones’ bodies where the kill switches are located should also sow unease. A lot of it.

Sylvie names her clone Jenny, a name with a heavy biological implication. Sylvie also notices that the driver who ferries her around is somehow always the same man, an Asian man named James. When Jenny is finally delivered to Sylvie, their meeting is touching and glorious but… There’s always a but in stories like this. Jenny states plainly the real difficulty in commissioning a clone.

When you created all this, without asking, of course, did you ever consider what I might want?

How can it possibly occur to a “woman born” human that an exact replica of themselves, with their memories and equal intellect, will not want to have that conversation The Chrysalis Institute promotes?

“BRO BOT: Joey Osbium” is the most important chapter in the book and therefore the one I will discuss the least because the scope of his life cements how terrible the new world really is. After a childhood spent sharing a room with his older sister, creating a deep bond with her, and falling in love with his best friend who was heterosexual and likely never picked up on Joey’s adoration and sexual attraction, Joey becomes a grown-up orphan. His parents die, his sister marries and seldom bothers with her younger brother, and when Joey begins to fall in love with his fellow partner at his law firm, he more or less retires. His family left him with an extraordinary amount of money so he does not need to work, and when his loneliness becomes too much to bear, he too decides he would like to have a conversation with himself.

The end of Joey’s chapter is so uniquely considered and beautifully-executed that it is almost impossible to describe.

“PLASTIC SOUL/Daria Moore Thompson, M.D.” is the most disturbing chapter, and Dr. Thompson is a deeply loathsome woman. Though at the end of the book she comes very near to experiencing an upswing in her character arc, her innately disgusting nature taints the small amount of good she manages to bring to the table. Dr. Thompson has a husband who adores her, a fairly nice life and income, and a wardrobe of designer clothing, but she is appalled that she is aging and her unrequited love for one of the founders of The Chrysalis Institute warps her psyche so profoundly that she inflicts disturbing harm on one of the clones who lives at the Institute, a clone made in the image of her beloved.

Yes, founders of the Institute cloned themselves and permit those clones to be used for research or as unpaid labor, and likely do not care what happens to their mirror images when the lights go out. A huge clue as to what is happening comes from Dr. Thompson:

Honeybees are the most perfectly socialized beings on the planet, and we can learn a lot from them…

“THE PERFECT BODY/Iyama Siyos” is the final chapter and it is through Iyama’s eyes that we finally see the genuine evil being wrought at the Institute. Iyama represents the good that man does in spite of himself and is far better than those who created him. In his late teens, he is a clone who must remain at the Institute, as he is a clone made for research. He knows he is made in the image of an Institute bigwig, he knows he has “siblings” born naturally to his DNA donor, and slowly understands his role in a technological machine that does not endow him with the same humanity as those who are “woman born.”

Iyama is in love with James, the slender Asian driver, and it is through his genuine emotional and sexual attachment to James that influences how Iyama finally decides to deal with his lot in life. Nulick deviates from the cinematic nature of the novel by showing a realistic escape attempt. No massive explosions. No gunfights. No final speech from the mad scientist. Just a naive, scarred-up boy, who is human regardless of what “woman born” scientists think about him, trying to take control of what happens to him, endowed with a youthful hopefulness that steers him away from simple compliance.

It is through Iyama that the horrors become clear through the eyes of a teen who feels unease when he should feel rage, who feels genuine love rather than self-serving lust, who at the end may not really know that he has, indeed, suffered.

Throughout the novel, the not-so-distant future element is grounded by framing it with current events. Dr. Thompson was born the day the Challenger exploded. 2020 is referred to as a “difficult year” and the events of that year described as a specific attempt to control ecological problems. In its way, these revelations are humorous, compared to the rest of the text. Nulick also gives us several stories of people who used body parts obtained from Chrysalis clones that are darkly hilarious. Sometimes having a conversation with yourself cannot solve your problems so imagine the issues that may arise when a new tongue does not make you feel better about yourself.

As you read this novel, there may be moments wherein you think Nulick needed an editor with a heavier hand to eliminate repetition in these individual stories. The repetition is not a bug, it’s a feature, and it is necessary to spell out what is really happening in Nulick’s world. The experiences at The Chrysalis Institute are nearly identical. There is a common interest in expensive labels and designer clothes. The color orange is important. And the bees. Drones, queens, many-chambered hives.

When I step back and look at the way Nulick meticulously set up the two paths of work that led to this common destination, it makes me feel something akin to jealousy because it is impossible not to marvel at this sort of long term vision. This is a book I highly recommend and hope this discussion does it justice. You really need to read this and when you do, please come back and tell me what you think. And always remember, as we learn in Sylvie’s chapter, with all apologies to Jane’s Addiction, we’ll make great pets.

Oddtober 2024: I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

When I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, I watched a movie on television that affected me deeply. I’ve discussed some of my very specific fears before on this site and interestingly all of them were provoked by media and not some innate fear common to children. For example, I get very antsy around people wearing full-face masks or too much makeup, and that was the result of being terrified by an Alice Cooper tour commercial I saw when I was very young.

For all that it scared me, this is actually is a very sad film.

The fear I want to discuss here developed after I watched the film Bad Ronald. Have you seen it? It’s a made for TV film adapted from a novel by author Jack Vance and it absolutely messed me up. The plot of the film is that a divorced mother who suffers from mental and physical illness, has raised her with the hopes that he could become a doctor so he can cure her sickness. Her teen son, Ronald, is awkward and an outsider at school – kind of like a male Carrie but without telekinesis – and one day he decides to ask a girl out on a date. She declines and laughs him down. Later her younger sister mocks Ronald, who pushes her so hard on the ground that she suffers a fatal head injury. After racing home and telling his mother what happened, she decides to cover a door with wallpaper and essentially walls Ronald up in the house so the police can never find him. Seclusion causes Ronald to descend into a fantasy world where he is a prince who is going to protect his princess from an evil intruder. Then his mother dies and the house is sold, unaware that Ronald was living in a hidden room. The new owners have three teen daughters and Ronald decides one of them is his princess and that an older boyfriend is the evil intruder and things go bad but ultimately the only other death is a nosy neighbor who is literally scared to death.

Clearly Ronald never crept into the shower.

For the record, it is not a good movie. Not the worst movie made in 1974 but arguments could be made that it belongs on some sort of “worst of” top ten list. It also stars Scott Jacoby, who was also in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, an early Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen film that also involves a hidden cellar entrance and a creepy man who accesses the house.

Ronald becomes filthy and creeps around the house at night, eating food, stealing family items, watching the family sleep, all while still living in his dream world of himself as a prince trying to protect a princess from harm. The images of him emerging from the dark, dirty and deranged, spying, stealing and moving things around, affected me and eventually every time I heard something creak in the house, I would freeze in fear like a squirrel who sighted a hawk. I began to develop the idea that someone was creeping around in the house between the walls, which would be impossible with the crappy little 1950s house we lived in. I even intuitively understood that we did not have the sort of house that could provide enough room for an intruder to skulk between the walls, but I still could not shake the fear that every time I heard something or felt like something had been moved without me touching it that someone was in the house, stalking me.

This specific fear was cemented during a two month period when both of my parents were working night shift. I was in the third grade and had to be alone in the house from the time I got home from school until my father arrived home after midnight (my parents were broke and had interesting perspectives on child rearing plus we had no family in the area, so don’t think too badly of them). Add to it that at the time we didn’t have phone service, and I spent a nice chunk of time absolutely terrified.

This scenario is somehow still less upsetting than *Bad Ronald* creeping around the house.

It faded over time, but the fear of someone being in the house would remain a thought in the back of my head until my mother and her new husband moved into a far less ramshackle home. However, even living in a place that made far less noise didn’t eliminate the fear entirely. When Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs came out, it revived the fear and twisted it into a generic fear of someone being in the house. Given who I am, when the movie cycled over onto cable, I watched it every time I could. The titular people under the stairs were portrayed as monsters, but they were made into monsters by their captors and ultimately were forces of good, but the idea of ragged, abused people living under my nose without me knowing, was just another wrinkle in the same “someone’s here and watching” cloth.

Then, god help me, I read about the Lalaurie case. Whether or not the details are all true, the accepted story is that Delphine Lalaurie, a demented slave owner in New Orleans, was experimenting on her slaves, chaining them throughout the mansion and performing ghoulish experiments on them that sound as if they were straight out of Nazi research or Unit 731. A fire broke out in the house in 1834, allegedly started by a slave who was chained in the kitchen and was hoping to draw attention to her plight, and the fire brigade discovered the horrific torture chambers. The abuse was so egregious that even during Plantation era slavery in Louisiana, people were appalled and stormed the house, but Madame Lalaurie was able to escape and is believed to have fled to France. No one had any idea she was doing this, torturing, maiming and killing slaves right under the noses of her neighbors. I’ve often wondered if the Lalaurie case was partial inspiration for The People Under the Stairs.

I did not develop a phobia or fear from the Lalaurie case and a Wes Craven film, but the essential premises linked my brain back to Bad Ronald: there may be a hidden place in homes where deranged people are living, or, worse, being harmed. But mostly I forgot about it because I had student loans and the Internet had not been invented yet.

Enter Reddit.

I cannot recall how many times people have found a hidden space in their homes that someone had been living in, or found evidence of someone living in an attic or cellar. Sometimes families lived in those homes for years before discovering someone had been creeping into their house without them knowing, doing god knows what while they were sleeping. When we bought our house, luckily we purchased a more modern built home that is essentially cardboard held together with wall putty but lacks a basement and the only place someone could hide is, interestingly, under the stairs, but we’ve been in and out of that space making repairs over the years, so I know no one is there. Plus an adult male who seldom leaves me alone at night lives here so when the cats do something that produces creepy sounds, he can go and check on it. Also I’m sort of an adult now, and can permit the adult part of my brain to drive me around these days. I still am extremely uneasy when people wear scary masks or wear corpse paint apropos of nothing but I’m not afraid of them. I just wish they wouldn’t. And this is similar. It was never as closely as held a fear as my mask/makeup issues – it’s just something I remember viscerally when “triggered.”

But every now and then, I see something like this and I feel that same sort of chilly creepiness that I experienced the first time I saw Bad Ronald.

Even though this video is fake, it’s still so horrifying I have to include it here. An aspiring actor hoping to go viral concocted this video of a woman living in the crawlspace over his apartment. The premise: he set up the camera because he’d noticed food and things going missing. This woman was descending into his apartment at night, eating food, watching television, and even urinating in his kitchen sink. Because I also have a germ aversion (caused by the same house I lived in when Bad Ronald warped me, a shit heap if there ever was one), the idea that someone could creep around at night and pee in my sink is just too much to think about.

There are a shocking number of videos about this sort of thing happening on YouTube and I am unsure how many have been debunked. It almost veers into the supernatural, thinking about how someone can creep around your home, creating their own home while you sleep or are away, and you never know it until you set up a camera after noticing things going missing, or remodel the house and break through a suspiciously thin wall, or get norovirus repeatedly because a stray human keeps urinating in your sink.

All in all, I have remarkably few genuine fears for someone this neurotic but this was one of those times when the fear that plagued me as a kid actually manifested for other people in real life. But I’m also proud to announce that I watched The People Under the Stairs on Shudder last week and was able to reminisce about my weird childhood rather than force Mr. OTC to search the house top to bottom when our stupidest cat fell off a shelf into the laundry bucket at three A.M.

Tell me about the weird thing that scared you when you were young. Was it the result of unmonitored television time? Did you grow out of it or did it get worse as you got older? Let me know!

Oddtober 2024: Fluids by May Leitz

Book: Fluids

Author: May Leitz

Type of Book: Fiction, novel, horror, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Extreme horror is odd by default, and the odd was strong in this book. This book also demonstrated to me that I really need to organize my book shopping habits.

Availability: Self-published by BookBaby in 2022, you can get hard and digital copies on Amazon.

Comments: I saw the movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (and will be discussing it this month), which I liked quite a bit. I did my usual rabbit hole routine of researching the film, the director, the guy who performed the music and the cast. I found out that a YouTuber called NyxFears had a small role in the film and as I looked into her career, saw she had written this book, which I ordered (probably off Bandcamp, but I may be wrong). Then the book got placed in my to-be-read pile that by now has hundreds of books waiting for me to get my ass in gear.

A year passed and a casual stroll on the Goodreads tag for “extreme horror” showed me a book called Fluids by May Leitz. I went on Amazon, got the ebook, and read it. I was not blogging regularly at the time, but I figured at some point I would discuss it here. As I was looking through my to-be-read pile, I found the hard copy for Fluids and had one of those moments wherein I understood I had yet again purchased the same book twice but it took me reading the first three pages to jog my memory. I wish I could say this was the first time I have done this. Hell, I wish I could say that this was only the twentieth time I’ve done this.

All of the above is by way of saying that I have an extra copy of this book that is pristine despite me having read the first few pages and the first person who guesses who was president of the United States when I was born will win it. Just leave me a comment on this entry with your guess. People who are related to me by blood or marriage or went to high school with me are excluded from guessing.

Back to the book.

I entered into reading this book knowing little more than that someone who appeared in a film I liked wrote it and that the cover said it was an extreme horror novel. It is indeed extreme, but stands out from the crowd for being so extremely well-written. Extreme horror as a genre produces chaotic text, but within the chaos, you seldom find the attention to characterization and psychological motivation that you see in this novel. For a self-published book, it is well-edited and the writing overall is very strong. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, so if discussions of violence upset you, consider giving this discussion a miss.

Oddtober 2024: We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula Ashe

Book: We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

Author: Paula Ashe

Type of Book: Short story collection, horror, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s hard to take me by literary surprise. I absolutely was not expecting what this book delivered.

Availability: Published in 2022 by Nictitating Books, you can get copies here. For the record, I read the Kindle version.

Comments: This book is perfect to start off with for Oddtober 2024. I’ve been on a horror kick lately, and luckily most types of extreme horror lend themselves well to oddness. This book is not in-your-face weird, but rather is weird in that creepy, unsettling way that is often hard to explain. Paula Ashe is a rare writer in her willingness to explore the minds of both the victim and the assailant without sentimentality or a pious morality. Rather, she looks at the human condition with a sharp, focused eye, showing us the will of the victim and the will of the abuser, sometimes blurring the lines between the two without pandering.

Ashe had to defend this approach in her own epilogue. She explains that people actually do take value in the way she presents abuse, saying, “…there are other people who read my work for solace. For understanding. For a bizarre and bitter reprieve.” I am one of those people. As long-time readers of this site may recall, the gut punch from fiction like this was better for me in the end than years of therapy wherein all I was permitted to do was navigate my own suffering rather than build a foundation of knowledge about the human condition. It’s heartbreaking to realize we live in a culture wherein a woman who has written some of the best horror fiction to come across my radar has to apologize for daring to explore the depths and motives behind human evil. Wonderful…

This is a relatively short collection – eleven stories in 133 pages – and you can easily read it in one sitting. I’ve reread the whole of it a couple of times now, and have read two of the stories several times as I attempted to run to ground some of the names and spells mentioned in them. Ashe merges the ancient into the modern and mixes her own horrors with established devils with such skill that I still am unsure if some of her stories are wholly of her own creation or if my research skills have failed me. She inspired me to dig deeper, and even if her prose had fallen short, spurring curiosity beyond the book itself is often worth the price of admission. Luckily, her prose was on the mark, visceral and beautiful. Absolutely savage in some places. She keeps a steady balance between the gloriously cruel and the bitterly hopeful.

One of the many charms of this collection is that Ashe experiments in style and method of story-telling. The story “Grave Miracles” will remind younger readers of “ritual” creepy pastas, wherein an authoritative, omniscient voice gives instructions so the reader can perform a specific series of steps to succeed in paranormal games or endeavors. Ashe constructs her story “Grave Miracles” using such a framework, outlining the startling steps one would take to bring a dead wife back to life and the things that will have to happen to keep her “alive” and flourishing. This story is immediately followed by “Exile in Extremis,” an email exchange between an investigative reporter and her contacts at a magazine. The magazine has published her story about grave robbing, young women coming back from the dead, and an entity known as the Priest of Breathing, and the editor and the magazine CEO need her to reveal her sources. A police investigation was launched as a result of the story and the journalist, Elle, sharp and nearly-unshakeable, does all she can to protect the editor from probing into the story any further. The story manages to be horrifying yet amusing, as Elle deftly uses illegal tactics and the threat of social embarrassment to protect innocent but annoying people from themselves.

Another surprise for me was Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight. I’m no “Ripperologist,” in that I can’t recite every little bit about the Jack the Ripper killings, but I’ve swam in that true crime lake, reading a lot of non-fiction as well as fictionalized accounts of the Whitechapel murders. I’ve come across a lot of “Jill the Ripper” theories, asserting that Jack was really a woman. This is the best Jill the Ripper story I’ve come across, assigning the protagonist a believable motive and bestowing her with the skills to commit believable violence. I can’t discuss it in any depth without potentially ruining the story, but Ashe both adapts her style to fit what one imagines an omniscient narrator’s voice would sound like as she narrates in 1888, while simultaneously holding on to the earthy, erotic tone the story demands. It’s a delicate balance, and one that Ashe manages marvelously. Describing Jacqueline and her minister husband, she says:

In Whitechapel’s rookery of wastrel the fine pair is as prominent as a hanged man’s prick.

I dare you to write a line more provocative and perfect than this. You can’t do it. You’ll cramp up. If you do try, be sure to stretch out first.

Ashe’s focus ranges from folklore to true crime, ancient history to inter-dimensional time travel. She tackles the horror of what happens when filial evil destroys maternal love and how one woman’s reaction to terrible abuse destroyed the sister she wanted to save. She picks out little, terrible details that, to the right reader, marry together reality and her fiction. A single line from “Carry On, Carrion,” brought to mind one of the more unique details from the miserable story of Tristan Bruebach.* Each story has little details like that, little pieces of horror from real life that make her stories all the creepier because, as we know, the truth is always far more fucked up than fiction.

The final story in the collection, “Telesignatures from a Future Corpse” is likely the piece that is the “price of admission” story for many, and indeed it is a great story. However, I want to discuss the two stories that caused me to spend hours researching old cults and folklore recitations of protection. In discussing these two stories I will likely spoil them some so read on with this in mind.

Biblio-Curiosa No. 6 by Chris Mikul

There are a lot of reasons to read Chris Mikul’s work. He’s erudite and has a fondness for the strangeness that is the backbone of this site. He is able to look at terrible literature with a kind intellectualism that I would do well to emulate (there are a couple of books I eviscerated on this site that I want to revisit and see how they read with a more generous, less pedantic eye). He’s introduced me to some amazing books, not the least among them The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Gibbons, which I’ve had in my possession for a while but have yet to read because I’ve wanted to read it for so long that I feel a weird sort of sorrow at the prospect of losing that feeling of joyful anticipation.

One of the best reasons to read him is his deep knowledge of writers who have more or less been lost to time. There are so many excellent and interesting books that for various reasons slip away from the public eye, and Mikul finds a lot of value in researching such books and the authors behind them. His articles that feature books that are lost or nearly lost to modern readers are fascinating, and at times maddening because I can seldom find copies of the books to read for myself.

There are five articles in Biblio-Curiosa No. 6, and I am limiting myself to the cover story, but bear in mind that the remaining four articles are very much worth reading, especially the analysis of William Nathan Stedman, a poet very much in the running for the worst poet ever. I’m discussing the cover piece exclusively because it is such an excellent example of Mikul’s research chops as well as his affection for the topic as he ferrets out information about forgotten authors and their works.

Few know the name Frank Walford these days, and that is a shame because his books were both ahead of their time in terms of content and because the content itself was often completely lunatic. Mikul’s article focuses on Twisted Clay, a delightfully batshit and sordid book about a psychopathic teenage lesbian. This book was initially published in 1933, and contains violence and sexual implication one does not expect to find in pre-WWII literature.

I’ve noticed that people interact with my work more when there is a cat involved. So here’s Mikul’s ‘zine atop my baffled cat, Calliope.

Twisted Clay is narrated by its protagonist, Jean Deslines. She lives in New South Wales with her father and grandmother. She is, as Mikul points out, “sexually precocious,” and at age twelve was already behaving in a very provocative manner, swimming nude in front of neighbors and attempting to seduce the clergyman her beleaguered grandmother asks to speak to her about her exhibitionism (and it sounds like she very nearly succeeded). Jean is primarily sexually attracted to women and sleeps with the housemaid Jenny, and one wonders how her grandmother felt about having two lesbians in her prim household. Later, Jean’s cousin Myrtle, herself a lesbian, tells Jean that she doesn’t like men so she will likely never marry. When Jean pushes her for more details, she tells the fourteen-year-old Jean to look it up.

Jean reads the sexual arbiters of the time (think Freud and Havelock Ellis) and realizes she is a lesbian and is so appalled by this information that she seeks out a boyfriend, sleeps with him and promptly becomes pregnant. Her father arranges an abortion but this does not change Jean much. In fact, she begins to dress in a manner meant to attract men, and it succeeds, because when her Uncle Harry and Aunt Gabrielle come to visit, Uncle Harry develops a sexual attraction to his young niece, a situation that drives her aunt to despair as she tries to make Jean aware of the situation. Jean toys with the woman, fully aware that her uncle wants to have sex with her, but pretends she doesn’t. When she finally feigns understanding, she immediately accuses her of having a dirty mind. When everyone comes to see what the matter is, Jean adds fuel to the already incendiary situation and her aunt and uncle leave the next day.

Jean’s father speaks to the family doctor, Dr Murray, and they discuss what needs to be done with Jean. Insanely, the doctor recommends that she receive a sort of ovary operation to encourage more feminine behavior, as well as psychotherapy. Jean is thrilled at the idea of psychotherapy because she can “mystify the operator by relating imaginary dreams and fictitious incidents!” She is less enthusiastic about the operation, thinking it would kill her personality and that she would be justified in killing her father in defense to avoid such a death. And this is how this strange girl tries to dissuade her father from forcing the surgery:

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Dr. Murray said, if he owned me, he would thrash me. Why don’t you thrash me, to see if it should do any good?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too old to thrash.”

“I’m not, I’m not! See, here’s your walking stick. Beat me with it, beat me hard!”

“Go to bed, child, and don’t talk nonsense.”

With a quick jerk, I stripped off my pyjama trousers, standing before him nude to mid-thighs, clad only in my dangling pyjama coat. “Beat me, Daddy, beat me hard, beat me till the blood flows. I want you to.”

Okay, so by now it should not surprise anyone that some of Frank Walford’s books got banned and that this book is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

To avoid going to Europe for the surgery, Jean fakes interest in a grave site in which someone will be buried later that day. Jean’s father takes her to see the grave and she takes him out with a hatchet to the head and pushes him into the grave. But this was a “from the frying pan into the fire” sort of situation because Dr. Murray is given guardianship of her. Jean, once again with her back against the wall, decides to set up Dr. Murray. She senses he is attracted to her so she tries to seduce him and arranges for a policeman to see the good doctor throw himself at her. Alone finally, her father’s ghost appears to her telling her no hard feelings for killing him, but later she hears a voice that tells her she must go to the grave, dig her father up and wrap up his broken skull. She does so but realizes that she didn’t secure her father’s corpse, which could implicate her, so she pretends that she dug her father up because she had overheard Dr. Murray murmur something about killing him. This causes the town to consider Jean a heroine but the voice again speaks up, wanting her to return to bind his wounds a second time. This time Jean’s luck runs out and the police catch her in the act and arrest her. (The plot makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.)

Sent to a mental asylum, she escapes and turns to prostitution to support herself. She is disgusted by the men she sleeps with but earns a lot of money. Later the voice comes back and tells her to start killing the men who lust after her, and yet again she does what the voice tells her. She runs into cousin Myrtle again, they resume their sexual relationship, but the voice tells her to kill Myrtle, too, and she obliges. Later Jean opens a beauty salon and a gangster takes a shine to her and wants her to join his criminal pursuits. She does and later finds that she is attracted to the gangster and becomes a sort of moll. Life is going as well as it can when one of the policemen who arrested her for killing her father sees her, follows her and manages to get a sample of Jean’s fingerprints. She kills the police officer, but this last murder has her feeling contemplative. She muses about suicide:

Life was not so attractive that I desired to cling to it like a limpet to its rock. I had tasted almost everything but death. Should I…? Why not?

Why not indeed? I leave the reader to wonder what she ultimately does.

This book sounds like a hoot, but the fact that the author was a hoot as well is the icing on the odd cake. Frank Walford was born in Australia in 1882. He was a gifted amateur boxer who could have gone pro had a horse not kicked him in the face, breaking his cheekbones and knocking out a few front teeth. He then decided to purchase a boat and traveled along the Australian coastline and three months later came back to land but the rough company he kept caused him to lose a job with a bank. He then returned to sailing again, and made money fishing and shooting crocodiles. (It’s right about here I need to mention that I am not making any of this up.)

Walton was pretty good with a knife and gun and got to prove his mettle with a knife after a man with a grudge stabbed him in the back, right in his kidney. After he recovered, he challenged the man to a knife fight and severed the tendons in his elbows, ensuring the man would never again stab a man in the back.

He eventually married and had children and began to write. He became involved with a group of writers who called themselves the Blue Mountaineers. Interestingly, the only other member of the group who had some success writing penned a novel that featured an atypical heroine who thinks about suicide when life got too boring. His novel Silver Girl sounds absolutely lunatic. It features a passage wherein a side character realizes his wife gave birth to the protagonist’s child. When the protagonist comes to visit with his new wife, the side character grabs the infant and uses it as cudgel to beat the protagonist’s wife to death.

During WWII, Walford served in the Voluntary Defense Corps and became an avid anti-Communist and continued to write. Mikul observes that it is very difficult to summarize Walford’s style.

He could be coarse…, morbid and willfully perverse, but when he chose to, he could write with great sensitivity and feeling. He had a journalist’s eye for detail, and the settings for his stories are always vividly imagined, no matter how wild the plots became.

I can’t help but marvel that Walford’s work was published, especially Twisted Clay. He really was pushing boundaries, and even now, it seems very likely social media would have come for him and cancelled him had his books been released today. I’ll probably spend the weekend looking for copies of his books and pray they are affordable if I find any.

Check back tomorrow for another Mikul ‘zine before I pivot back to non-Mikul content. Should you decide to purchase a copy, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

ETA: Holy crap, it turns out that Amazon carries Twisted Clay!

The Ghosts of My Friends, created by Cecil Henland

Book: The Ghosts of My Friends

Creator: Cecil Henland

Type of Book: Autograph book, novelty

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it’s just such an interesting intersection between sentimentality, Rorschach’s test, and the turn of the century interest in klecksography.

Availability: This is a vintage book. I cannot seem to find the date this book was published but the earliest signed signature in my copy is in December, 1907. There were two editions from London and New York. The copy I bought from a rare book shop on Abe Books, is a London edition, published by Dow & Lester, and at this moment there is no genuinely vintage edition of this book from either printing for sale on any of my go-to shops for interesting books.

Comments: I have been doing a lot of genealogy research lately and have been beating my head against a wall where one branch of my family tree is concerned. I simply cannot find proof that the man who may be one of my seventh great-grandfathers had a son with the name of one of my actual sixth great-grandfathers. It is unlikely this research block will be solved by DNA testing yet I spat in a tube for half an hour and mailed it off anyway. I’ve also been cleaning up and reorganizing some bookcases and came across my copy of this delightful little book. I sat down for a moment to flip through it and look at the little ink blot signatures and with several ancestry research sites open on my computer, I decided to plug in the names because it seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time.

I didn’t discover that a famous or notorious person signed this copy of The Ghost of My Friends but the amount of time I spent looking into the people who signed and the history of the book, I realized I should probably write about it.

The signatures in this book may initially bring to mind the Rorschach ink blots used to make personality determinations based on what it is people see when they view a symmetric, but otherwise random image. However, for the purposes of this discussion I think it’s best to look at the 19th and early 20th century fads around ink blots, and this decision has everything to do with the fact that I have spent far too much time lately investigating the administration of the Rorschach test to be able to speak about it in under five thousand words or so.* There was a surprising amount of interest in seeing images in ink blots prior to the creation of the Rorschach test in the 1920s, and while those fads certainly influenced Rorschach, they are interesting in and of themselves.

One such example was the work of a poet called Justinus Kerner, who was also a medical doctor, entry-level occultist and first identified botulism (people had a lot more free time back then because there was no Twitter). Due to failing eyesight, Kerner often marred his paper with ink blots, and one day, after examining some of the crumpled pieces he thought were ruined, he noted that when folded in half the ink made an interesting pattern. He decided to make more ink blot art and used those patterns to illustrate a book of poetry called Kleksographien, which you can and should look through in its entirety, and it is believed that Rorschach had access to the book. The title, translated into English, is “klecksography” and that literally means “making ink blots.”

Klecksography became a popular pastime for children during the late 1800s. I found references on Wikipedia and across various blogs to one klecksographic game called Gobolinks or Shadow-Pictures For Young And Old, which amazingly has been reprinted. You can also thumb through the original version on Project Gutenberg. The game encouraged children to make monsters out of ink blots, which in turn were used to stimulate their imagination by creating stories about those monsters, the so-called “gobolinks.” This book is a descendant of such games, rather than a tool meant to genuinely analyze behavior or personality.

The Ghosts of My Friends was the creation of Cecil Henland, and I can find very little out about her life. In fact, I found out more concrete information about her husband than I did about her. The most I could come up with about her was from a message board devoted to fountain pens. User cercamons discovered that Cecil was a woman, something that is good to know before one writes a long article making assumptions about the implied gender of the name “Cecil.” Cercamons discovered that Cecil was a “founder of a nursery school system in England and the widow of Lt. Col. Arthur Jex-Blake Percival, who was killed in battle in November 1914.” Click on the image for the larger version to see all the very interesting books Cecil Henland created, including Hand of Graphs. I can find out nothing about Hand of Graphs yet I somehow know I want this book very badly.

The first page offers some useful instructions and it’s interesting to note that later entries are less distinct than earlier ones, lacking the smudging and theatricality of earlier blots. I lack the will to determine if fountain pen technology improved from the 1900s through the 1930s but one presumes that it did. Perhaps the parts of the pen that control how the ink funneled down into the nib became more refined. Regardless, anything that improved ink flow and prevented ink from spotting the page affected the drama of ink blot ghosties. You can see this play out in one of the ghosts from 1932. Not enough ink leaked out to leave a proper image on both sides when the paper was folded.

Now for the ghosts!

The first page is signed by C.W. Fendick on December 1907. Because Ancestry.com exists, I easily tracked down the Fendick family in a 1911 census record. This is the pater familias, one Charles William Fendick. He was 42 or 43 when he signed this. He was married to a woman named Selina, and in 1911 they had five children: Margaret Selina, Charles Percy, Edith Helen Alice, Sidney Walter, and Reginald Stanley. I’m glad people printed their names but I also wish I could unsee the printed name until I tried to decipher the signature. But when the printed name is illegible, it’s just as bad because most of the time I need the printed name to discern the name in the signature ghost. So there you go.

Were I to hazard a guess, I would say this book belonged to Margaret Selina Fendick. There is no inscription to prove this, but later in the book, on December 26, 1930, we see the ghost of a man named Arthur Mayn. Margaret married an Arthur Mayn on October 20, 1923. It looks like this little book was signed mostly around the holidays. I can’t help but think that Margaret was reminded of this book around the holidays in 1930 – her father, mother and brother Sidney signed it again on December 12, 1930 – and she signed it with her married name and got her husband to sign it, too. Margaret Selina would have been 15 or 16 years old during the first volley of signatures. It seems like this novelty book would have been a fun gift for a teen girl. Something else that lends credence to the idea that this book belonged to Margaret Selina is that one of the first signatures in the book belongs to “Edith Vickery.” I found an Edith Vickery in Essex who would have been about 14 or 15 years old when she signed, making her the right age to be a school friend of Margaret’s. Other surnames appeared in the book as well, like Poole and Cooper, but I did not research them because at some point even I know when I have gone on far too long.

The book is fairly fragile so we did not scan every autograph in the book. We grabbed the “ghosts” who seemed most interesting to us. I’m including my two favorites in a larger size but you can click on any image to get a closer look.

If you don’t see a teddy bear peeking up at you over the top of the signature, can we even be friends?

One cannot help but feel that within young Edith Vickery was a butterfly waiting to burst forth from this adorable caterpillar.

There is something very Creature from the Black Lagoon about Jack’s signature.

There’s something a bit sinister yet cute in this ghost. This is from Sidney Fendick. To me the top half looks a bit like a small demon jumping for joy.

I see something bunny-ish in Edward Bonner’s tentative ghost.

Here we see that improved fountain pens reduced leaking, which in turn made it hard to transfer excess ink when the paper was folded. Mr. Poole was unable to make a ghost at all.

One thing I really found interesting in this book was that people re-signed the book, often with over two decades between signatures. That means we can see how the “ghost” changed over time. I’m including examples from Margaret’s parents, CW Fendick and Selina Fendick, as well as Margaret herself.

Today’s entry has been brought to you by enormous AI-generated ancestry databases and late Victorian fountain pens. I wish I had more reason to write with pen and ink. If I tried to do an ink blot ghost signature, it would likely look like a large A followed by random squiggles, and the only ghost one would see would be that of my muscle memory for handwriting. Though this book cost far more than was likely reasonable, I’m glad I grabbed the copy when I saw it. I don’t think I know how quickly time is passing and the recent past becoming relic until I stumble across books like these.

*I have been researching Rorschach tests because of the work I am still doing on my book about failed assassin, Arthur Bremer. I am indeed still working on the book, I suspect I will always be working on the book in some manner, but hope the actual work anyone would be interested in reading will come to an end this year. Arthur played hilarious games with earnest psychiatrists who asked him to describe what he saw in ink blots. Yeah, he shot four people and was sort of a proto-but-largely-benign-incel, but his therapeutic chicanery made me feel very fondly toward him.

Odd Things Considered

Category: Books