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.