Tag: Wrath James White

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.

Population Zero by Wrath James White

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Population Zero

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The extremity of the horror makes it odd by my calculations.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: For reasons that I have discussed in the past, I have been watching Wrath James White’s writing for a while. I was introduced to him via a collaboration that was so bad it remains in my top ten category for worst books I have ever read (Teratologist was the book, the sort of book wherein the protagonist’s name is spelled three different ways in one paragraph). So I sought out White’s web presence and his well-written, interesting blog did not mesh with the hot mess I had read so I gave him another chance. I next read Book of a Thousand Sins and saw that in some respects, my belief he was a far better writer than Teratologist presented him was justified. There were problems with that story collection, but White got enough right that I was heartened.

Population Zero is pretty much a vindication that my instincts were correct. All the issues that I saw in Book of a Thousand Sins were reconciled. Whereas characters might rant for pages on end in BoaTS,  in Population Zero the protagonist’s issues were woven into the plot and showed a character arc. White’s at times baroque writing style was a bit more restrained in this book and his characterization was excellent. The villain in Teratologist embodied Dean Venture when he declared, “I dare you to make less sense!” (Dean also had a terrible problem with his testicles, and the applicability of me telling you this will become clear as you read my discussion.)

There were some small problems in Population Zero that I am going to get out of the way before discussing all that was fabulous. First, the ending left much to be desired and that may just be my feeling on the matter. But the ending felt rushed and given the amount of energy others expended to get the protagonist to the end point, the ending felt wrong. Additionally, as the protagonist goes about his job, he delivers information that become obsolete with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996; tiny little points of social policy that I suspect only I would nitpick because they aren’t too glaring and because they flow well with the story White is telling. There are some small typos, as well. Someone tries to score “heroine” and a character “grinded” his teeth. They’re minor and not that intrusive, but they’re there.

(And it should be mentioned that if you are a social justice warrior, you will not like this book. The protagonist is very unsympathetic to the obese, to the poor trapped on a social treadmill of bad choices, and pregnancy in all forms. The protagonist is also a mentally disturbed, increasingly unhinged killer. In the past, when such a character had very unpleasant ideas, it was called characterization. In some quarters these days, it is a sign of a greater misogyny and class prejudice. I hardly think it so, but I have now given some of my more socially progressive readers clear warning that this book may not be to their tastes.)

Continue Reading “Population Zero by Wrath James White”

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.