Tag: gore

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.

CRY; or Where Did I Get This and Why Did I Buy It?

At times it is unsettling how many books, magazines and such that I have that I absolutely do not remember buying. Sometimes the media is something Mr OTC purchased that ended up in my various shelves and stacks, but this is not one of those times because CRY is definitely not something he would be interested in. He’s ex-military. He has very little interest in human carnage. While I have less and less interest in the visceral nature of violence, I suspect the hook was the synopses of accidental and lonely deaths rather than the violent and sexually disturbing collages that make up half the content in the ‘zine.

Don’t ask why there is a pig reading a cell phone while using the toilet in our true crime section. I don’t know the answer to that either.

This is a provocation ‘zine, a descendant of very shocking provocative ‘zines that drew me in when I was much younger. Opinions will vary but the apex of provocation ‘zines was during the eighties and through the mid-nineties. Though a lot of provocation ‘zines are still a thing, the fact is that the early generation used images that were genuinely shocking. Late Boomers and Gen-Xers had a lot of fears – nuclear war, AIDS, the specter of shorter lifespans and worse economic fates than our parents experienced, the sudden rise of serial killers, among them – but we didn’t have the non-stop barrage of horribleness that has become common today. ‘Zines that showed us horrible images alongside horrible text, be it fiction or non-fiction, still had the power to shock.

The shock often came from a place of incompleteness. For instance, I had of course seen victims of the Holocaust in movies and knew there were CIA-funded wars happening in Central America. But I had never seen photos of bulldozers pushing emaciated corpses into pits or naked men being attacked by dogs while members of the SS garrison stood watching and laughing. I had not seen the broken and buried bodies from the El Mozote massacre. But ‘zine makers had access to such photos (and how some of them got their hands on some of the rarer photos is still a matter for discussion) and they shared how it is that even the most shocking violence is almost always far worse than we could imagine and that there is an ocean of cruelty, misery and horror we don’t know about. Provocational ‘zines were how I learned about the ways animals are treated in the food industry, and those pictures of torture I could barely imagine then haunt me to this day.

Such shock is useful to the reader. It was certainly helpful to me. It was part of becoming an adult, of raising the curtain and seeing what is really happening.

In the case of CRY, I don’t find much that is helpful, probably because I’ve reached the point to where I’ve seen every sort of atrocity outside of child pornography so it’s pretty hard to provoke me.  However, it is important to remember that sometimes even provocative ‘zines are less a desire to punch the audience in the face than an attempt to communicate inner turmoil or to share links between social phenomena that few others can see.

The purpose of this ‘zine is unclear to me and that I don’t know who created it doesn’t help. Google “cry” and “‘zine” and let me know how it goes for you.  I do know the ‘zine was released after 2015 because the first collage featured in the ‘zine contained stills from a video that became notorious in gore and criminal justice spheres online. In 2015, a fourteen-year-old girl in Rio Bravo, Guatemala was brutally beaten by a mob and then set on fire. Townsfolk believed she was involved in the murder of a taxi cab driver, but whether or not she was really involved is still open for debate. The two men she was with fled and left her behind to deal with the angry mob. The creator of this ‘zine opened with images of her, without any explanation, so clearly her story has some larger purpose grounding this ‘zine.

The Rio Bravo images are followed by a disturbing collage that incorporates human faces and spiders, which itself is followed by another collage, featured in black and white on one page and in color on the other. The images in this collage are from gonzo and humiliation porn, with images of snarling dogs, genital torture and, most disturbingly, the face (and only the face) of a little girl. The women in these images are vomiting, dressed as barn animals, covered in feces, and screaming. The title of the piece is “Smile for the Camera.” This brutality is followed by a two-page color collage of a woman’s face covered with what appears to be an aborted baby.

After the collages are four news-style stories about death. Minimal research of the names involved lead me to believe all these deaths were made up, which makes the meaning in them all the more important. The stories are about a father who accidentally ran over his daughter when she fell off the boat he was driving, a father and son who died drowning while on vacation, a nightcrawler who ended up recording his own death in a car accident, and a man whose suicide isn’t noticed for weeks.

Since the author created these sad stories, they aren’t just sad stories about unexpected death with a heavy emphasis on parents who wished they could have saved their children. Where I run aground is trying to marry the four stories with the collages that come before them. Is the theme the notion that parental love cannot stop atrocity, be it saving a child from drowning, from mob violence, or from being abused in extreme porn? If so, it’s sort of a tenuous link.

Outside of that shot in the dark, I am unsure what the creator was going for. And the hell of it is, maybe he or she had no greater goal than to present upsetting images and stories that show the futility of existence, or perhaps there is no greater idea behind the desire to shock or upset, a valid goal for reading such ‘zines. In the end I have no idea. Which is sort of fitting since I have no idea who made this ‘zine, where I got it, and why I bought it.

But also in the end, artistic endeavor has value in itself outside of the meaning people like me ferret out of it. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow because my life is dedicated to ferreting out meaning but however I look at it, CRY forced me to interact with the content, and that has a value to it as well.

Next week expect some Chris Mikul ‘zines to be discussed as I gather steam to tackle the very intense and wordy Q-Anon-ish ‘zine that I both dread and am strangely excited about reading. Wish me luck.

The Book of a Thousand Sins by Wrath James White

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Book of a Thousand Sins

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, extreme horror

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This book is not odd in the way many of the quirky, weird, off-beat and off-kilter books I review here often are. This book is only odd in that it is of an extreme, and that extreme is horror. This ain’t a book for the squeamish and the extremity of the content is what I think makes it fodder for my odd mill.

Availability: Published by Two Backed Books in 2005, it appears not to be in print any more since the imprint itself is no longer in business. You can, however, still score a copy on Amazon if you don’t mind paying at least twice cover price:

Comments: Wrath James White interests me on a personal level. Admittedly, all I know of him is what he puts online about himself and what he reveals about himself in interviews. He is someone I can see sharing a beer with, and talking religion and philosophy into the wee morning hours. He’s an interesting man with an unusual life arc and based on what I had seen of him and what others writers say about him, I bought blind three of his books. Not unusual for me. Before Richard Laymon died, I knew nothing about him but bought five of his paperbacks I stumbled across in a used bookstore based solely on the covers. I am a bibliophile and the -phile part makes me take chances on the unknown.

So, I had three White books, and one was his collaboration with one of my favorite horror writers, Edward Lee. The book, Teratologist, was possibly the most disappointing book I read in 2008, and I paid an arm and a leg online to get a signed, hardcover copy. I had not read a single review of it when I bought it and likely would have bought it even had I read a few but even so, I did not enjoy it. The book couldn’t even keep the names of the characters straight, sometimes getting the names wrong, as well as misspelling them (“Michael” frequently became “Micheal,” sometimes in the same page). I am a picky reader – every book on the planet has a couple of errors, and I am that snotty reader who generally notices them – but the grammar, spelling and punctuation in Teratologist were egregious to the point of distraction. Problematically, the topic was also a miss for me, a contrived and unlikely attempt to force a confrontation with God via the creation of human monsters using a vile drug that mutates the human sex drive. The grandiose and philosophically questionable nature compelling the book’s plot put me off. I bought my White books in 2008 and after reading Teratologist, I put the others away. I recently discovered them in the back of my nightstand cupboard, pulled them out and decided to give it a go. The Book of a Thousand Sins was strike two.

I always feel odd giving bad reviews on fiction, even when I emphatically think a book is not good. It is one thing for me to pull apart non-fiction books on conspiracy theory and new-age nonsense that asserts the soul of Einstein is on the planet Marduk. It is another to find fault in fiction because all fiction comes from a place of inner experience and not to like fiction is, in a sense, finding fault with the author him or herself, even if that is probably not the best way to look at things.

But however odd I feel giving a thumbs down, I didn’t much care for this book.