The Street with Sinking Houses (part 1)

Roman’s house was the stooping puke-green one at the end of the street.
After his grandfather ventured out one winter and suffered a stroke,
Roman’s mom, Zladka, started drinking more.
The walls absorbed the sick man’s shame
And his crooked mouth’s prayers for death
And pressed harder on the aging foundation.
Roman died in a car accident on his way to England,
where he worked as a cook.
He and his granddad were buried around the same time.
Grieving, Zladka drowned herself in hard liqueur
and the house spun, rocked,
its floors groaning like a wobbly boat in a storm.  
As shadows pooled,
she smeared the cracks in the walls
with clotted blood from her vomit.
Her bloated belly made Zladka wonder if she was pregnant
though she only rubbed herself raw
with spit, cigarette butts, and dry weeds,
plucked from the lonely sidewalk outside.
The house grew heavier,
its foundation a hungry root,
drinking in darkness for the cirrhotic, petrified fetus.
When the ground covered the mailbox and the house number
Zladka crawled out through the gap between the wooden porch
and the top of the door
then smashed a big hole in the coppery red tiled roof
with an ax.
As she settled in, the smoke from her cigarettes
rose in the air like from a second chimney.
Bottle of whisky in her chubby hand,
a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth,
Zladka sat on the creaking floor of the attic
barfing dust,
waiting for the mailwoman with the welfare cheque
and for her water to break.  

The Pregnant Sinkhole

Rain was coming down hard and my plushies were on their period.

I chewed on the fingernails growing like fungi from the soil of the TV screen,

and sucked their grit into my cavities.

I tasted wet pavement and rotted rubber.

My beggar's eyes were fixed on the round clock on the wall,

but its exhausted hands and crooked numbers

had succumbed to the turmoil.

I had carved a pleasure hole into the grimy mattress

after my pregnant wife had been committed,

and now squeaks and whispery movements came from inside.

My wife was in a padded room, I thought,

just like her growing fetus,

just like the things crawling inside the sticky foam.

A deep chill washed over me,

and I squeezed my plushies so hard their zits popped.

I looked out the window like through a gutter opening.
Torrents came down from the towering clouds of concrete,
and the tall, gray building across the street started leaning, sinking.
People dropped from the top floors like sprayed roaches.

Trembling, far-away hands tossed the plushies in the basket,
and clockwork legs walked me to the laundry room.
My neighbor, Patricia, sat naked in her wheelchair
in the middle of the flooded place.
The washers and dryers were silent, cubical buildings without power.
As she rocked back and forth
murky water as high as her knees
lapped at the brown nipples of her sagging, tubular breasts.
Thick with clownish makeup,
her moonface prayed to the blurred face of the clock.  
Diapers floated around like drowned babies.
Perched on top of one
two soggy roaches were stuck in a chitinous embrace.

Patricia’s eyes rolled toward me, her drawn eyebrows a mask of surprise.
“I’m waiting for my date,” she says with a brown smile.
“Came to wash my shit!”
I meant to say: can’t you see our building is sinking?
I meant to ask: how is he gonna pick you up?
I meant to say: the roads are closed.
But, when I opened my mouth no words came out,
my atrophied vocal cords went stiff.  
A solid, massive object came up my throat and invaded my mouth.
My frantic tongue tasted crawling rice and bitter bile.
My eyes bulged and teared up
as my mouth opened wide and my nostrils flared.
I dropped the laundry basket in the water
and grabbed the edge of the protruding object.
It came out and dropped in the water followed by a jet of vomit
as if from an unclogged pipe.
It was a newspaper bundle, maggots writhing over the faded print,
a floating landfill of words, now moving toward Patricia,
on whispering ripples of filth.
Patricia watched my buoyant discharge,
her swirling tongue smearing her dark lipstick.

Through a blur, I saw her lifting a skeletal leg
over the arm of the wheelchair,
exposing her hairy cavity.
Bloated hands grabbed the festering bundle
and rubbed it against the crooked crevice.
Patricia’s head spasmed back in ecstasy,
breasts dropping on the sides like sacks of sand.
Ecstasy crumpled Patricia’s face,
as she uttered a low gargling moan.
Fidgety fingers lubricated the hole with worm paste
and pushed the newspaper inside,
my rot hugging her rot.
 

 

 

Ascension through Sterility

Deteriorating Substance,
by Brendan McCarthy

"To have committed every crime, but that of being a father." 

Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born 

As I walked down the street with a spring in my step, 

hands deep in pockets full of sticky, dead seeds, 

a glorious, sunny lightness unfurled behind my smiling eyes. 

Bloated rats scurried through the downtown landfill, 

trapped in the 9 to 5 maze. 

I wiped the crusted time from my eyes 

with the secret, white manna of my fingers,

and looked up at the bright blue 

above the gray mounds of concrete, steel, and glass. 

The sudden buoyancy reminded me of skipping school, 

but it was much better,

as if I had whited out my name from the class roster altogether,

saving myself from the teachers’ wooden mouths, 

those holes filled with pubic hair soaked in flat coffee,

and drizzled with chalk dust. 

It was as if I only had to go to school during recess 

To smoke with my buddies and plan the weekend debauchery. 

As if I had snaked the wormy tail of a sperm 

though the eyes of my slingshot,

knotted the ends tightly, 

and stoned the school’s windows, 

smashed the teachers’ thick myopia glasses, 

and broke the chalk of their teeth. 

The anonymous, ghostly rebellion lifted me, 

my sneakers stopped touching the pavement,

and I found myself pedaling through the air 

toward the infinite sky

and the dark waters beyond. 

A beatific smile split my lips, 

Why not go all the way? 

Isn’t the one whose steps leave no trace, free to go anywhere? 

I remembered when I was but a wriggling proof of my dad’s fall from grace, 

digging in the shell of the egg, 

only this time I puked inside,

A violent, black jet 

that smashed the egg, and filled the womb, 

oozing from the lips,

and sealing them into a pious silence.

Splatterpunk, not Cancelpunk

As a black metal fan, I had to learn to distinguish between art and artist pretty quickly. As many of you may know from the best-selling book Lords of Chaos, turned into a movie several years ago, the beginnings of black metal in the early ‘90s were marred in criminality. Varg Vikernes a.k.a. “Count Grishnack”, one of the pioneers of the genre, the creative force behind Burzum, did jail time for murder and burning old Christian churches. Bard “Faust” Eithun of Mayhem stabbed a gay guy to death. Jon Nodtveidt of Dissection was also convicted of a homophobic hate crime. Given their anti-modernist and, at times, openly fascist stance, a few black metal bands, most notably Graveland and Marduk, were targeted by Antifa, resulting in canceled shows and overall chaos. More recently, Jason Weirbach a.k.a. “Dagon,” the frontman of Inquisition, was outed as a kiddie porn fan.

Since I’m not a neo-nazi, a homophobe, an arsonist, or a pedophile, I decided to make a strict distinction between the art and the artist, or, better put, between the art and the public citizen creating the art. That is, as citizens -- Varg Vikernes of Norway, Jon Nodtveidt of Sweden, Jason Weirbach of the US -- these people are criminals, and I don’t condone their crimes; I sit back and let the justice system do its work. No one is above the law of the land. I am, however, a fan of their music and I value these people as artists, such as Count Grishnack or Dagon and so on. Many black metal fans embrace this straightforward distinction. As Dayal Patterson, a scholar of black metal, puts it, “There’s no doubt that Varg’s statements in magazines (and on his website, which even relatively recently mentions “negros and other inferior races”) have long been politically charged, yet they have never found their way into his music. Burzum’s huge popularity suggests that Varg has managed to tap into something truly universal. Though his post-prison albums have not proven quite as significant as those recorded prior to his incarceration, Burzum remains hugely popular with a wide array of listeners, including those who completely disregard Varg’s politics and worldview.”  What would black metal be if Burzum and Mayhem were canceled? Would there even be such a thing as black metal?

Since discovering Richard Laymon in 2007, I’ve become interested in Splatterpunk and extreme horror and got to know many writers and readers in this community. In a nutshell, Splatterpunk is to mainstream horror what Cannibal Corpse is to Metallica, or, in movies, what Dead Alive or Bad Taste are to The Shining or The Exorcist. More brutal, more gory, more depraved, more disgusting. Compared to the extreme metal community, most artists and fans of extreme horror are peaceful and laid back, but, now and again, some perceived moral indignity would ruffle the feathers of the SJWs infecting their ranks. Most recently, Otis Bateman and Stephen Cooper have been on the receiving end of a public outcry. Did they kill anyone? No. Did they set buildings on fire? Not even. What they did is not so much criminal as it is in bad taste. They shared private nudes of a woman (gasp!) Now, in my view, the backlash to this indiscretion was completely out of proportion, barbarous, and cringeworthy, proving Nietzsche’s claim that madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, it is the rule. Incited by the outrage squad in their midst, the extreme horror community reacted with a feigned outrage and bogus solidarity that would have given Stalin a bulging erection. These rebellious creatives fighting societal taboos through their transgressive works, these fearless outlaws of imagination and conventional thinking, they all fell in line like a bunch of NPCs applauding a Kim Jong Un speech.

Soon, there was talk of rape, sexual abuse, sexual predators, psychological trauma, manipulation, suicide, and so on; the usual insults hurled by loving and tolerant internet mobs on the daily. Most extreme horror writers, afraid their sales would dip and they’d be unable to pay their bills, promptly joined the resentful mob and posted vaguely ethical and accusatory mumbo-jumbo. “Readers” ripped the books of Bateman and Cooper on deranged Tiktoks and threatened to burn them with Nazi fervor. A sex-starved pansexual fatty decided to steal the show and made a TikTok with her and her mom in a hospital room -- the poor old woman visibly confused and uncomfortable -- in which they ripped up the books of the disgraced authors while pick me Chubbs, caught in a cancel culture demented frenzy, busted some “dance” moves reminiscent of Sumo wrestling. 

Authors who collaborated with the two culprits speedily withdrew their support and threw them to the curb. This occurred soon after Otis Bateman and Judith Sonnet had released a novel together, No One Rides For Free (Absolute Chaos). Initially, the collab got stellar reviews and I was looking forward to reading it. But Judith Sonnet decided to pull the novel and have a characteristic mental breakdown. No surprise there. 

As I was dying inside following this cheap performance of deluded virtue-signalers, I remembered that Wrath James White, critically acclaimed splatterpunk writer, had mentioned Otis Bateman as one of the writers spearheading the fourth-wave of splatterpunk: “It might even be time to start discussing a 4-th wave that includes writers that began after 2020, like Otis Bateman, Rowland Bercey Jr., Bridgett Nelson, and Mique Watson.” In addition, the two were gearing up for a collaboration. Now, meekly following the outrage squad, Wrath James White did a one-eighty and, in an unexpected TikTok worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, began speaking of a “moral code” that extreme horror writers supposedly must follow. This move gave me pause. What happened? Did Otis Bateman’s work lose all its artistic value overnight? Did his books suddenly become garbage just because of a moral blunder? What’s with this deep asymmetry between the extreme horror community and the extreme metal community? Unfortunately, extreme horror writers are not critical thinkers and they can become victims of deep-seated prejudices like the best of us. These questions and bitter revelations made me revisit my argument for distinguishing art from the public citizen producing the art.

 

One widespread logical fallacy is the ad hominem argument. This means attacking the person instead of proving the falsity of their claim. When one makes a claim one puts something forward as being true. It’s beside the point to attack the person instead of the claim itself. As the saying goes, when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. A similar fallacy occurs when someone attacks the character of an artist. When an author publishes a work of fiction, they put it forward as something that has artistic value, something they think is unique and worth reading. In the context of horror, aesthetic value means something terrifying, disgusting, unsettling, or dreadful, according to the norms of the specific genre or subgenre. It’s up to critics and lucid reviewers to judge whether that work has artistic merit, whether it elicits the emotions it’s supposed to. The author’s character has no bearing on this judgment. Otherwise, it’s like saying the theory of relativity is false because Einstein was a commie. Book reviews that make references to the public life of an author are just cheap gossip masquerading as aesthetic judgment.

Why should we support an author who is abusive toward women? Why should we give our hard-earned money to them? These questions are the product of murky thinking. We support artists, not moral values. Supporting an author is an artistic statement, not a moral statement. Supporting an artist is different from supporting a political party. It is well known, for instance, that Bukowsky was an alcoholic and a wife-beater. Now, when I buy a Bukowsky book, that’s not a vote for alcoholism or violence toward women, that purchase only shows an appreciation for his gritty, dirty realist style of writing, for his poetic vision. The same goes for William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, or other classic or contemporary writers accused of questionable behaviors and political stances in their personal lives. Was Lovecraft racist? Who cares? 

Unfortunately, the cancer of cancel culture spreads fast. Just the other day, this guy working for a minor horror publisher was bragging that they have fifty people blacklisted. This was cringe for so many reasons. Firstly, they already publish garbage and no self-respecting author would want to work with them in the first place. Plus, the hypocrisy. Suppose one of those blacklisted authors sends them something with real market value, something up there with the works of Bryan Keene or Bryan Smith. Do you think they’d stick to their guns? I’d bet they’d swiftly forget their moral posturing and go for the cash. But let’s consider for a moment the absurdities implicit in these oppressive attitudes. Should an author be subject to a background check when submitting a manuscript? After all, the publisher needs to make sure they don’t support the work of an outlaw. Should the police accompany them when they receive a literary award to confirm they are upstanding citizens? Shouldn’t a publisher have people infiltrate an author’s personal life to make sure they don’t commit any crimes? Make sure they don’t abuse their spouse or watch objectionable pornography. Shouldn’t we have artists under strict surveillance 24/7? Is this beginning to sound like Big Brother? What’s to stop the publishing world from becoming a police state? Having grown up in communist Romania, I can assure you police states are not fun, unless you’re a moral validation junkie or feminazi. Also, have you heard of the effervescent artistic life in North Korea? Their new fiction trends? Yeah, me neither.    

We need to step back and acknowledge a general fact about creatives, talent, and even genius. Artistic talent doesn’t come neatly paired with an angelic character in a nice package ready for mass consumption. Great art erupts from deep psychological conflicts in individuals who are fighting their own demons at the edges of sanity. These are deeply troubled psychological types, each unique in their extreme rebellion. That’s why so many are suicides: Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and so on. The impulse to create comes from a place of illness and war, not from a place of health, peace, and harmony. Also, as the famous movie Amadeus shows, God doesn’t necessarily bestow genius on the most pious but on, to quote Salieri, some “little creature, an animal. A gross and vulgar little man.” Thus, by canceling those with deviant behaviors and attitudes, we risk transforming a lush artistic landscape into a barren terrain populated with plastic smiles, neutered, sedated “artists” promoting derivative works to a crowd of neurotic Karens and ultrasensitive PC gender-benders. 

Review of Mason Marks' The Serpent's Call

Richard Ramirez: “I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged.”

I really enjoyed this character-driven novel, The Serpent’s Call, especially since it explores the same territory -- supernatural horror where the protagonist is in league with Satan -- as my work in progress, Brass Knuckles Black Magick. Marks and I have a penchant for fanatical, elitist, anti-heroes, proud bearers of the black flame of chaos. Dalton Asher, the main character in The Serpent’s Call, reminded me, among others, of Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson. As a Satanic serial killer, Asher is connected to the nefarious force that feeds on people’s deepest fears, and this force gives him power and control over his victims, revealing their weak, hypocritical, pathetic natures. Predators sense the fear and trembling of the prey, an anxiety that makes their attacks precise, fast, and lethal. Prolific serial killers exist on another plane, a dimension that transcends the tiny world of the sheep, a realm fraught with danger as well as the promise of immortality.

As in his earlier two novels, The Militant and The Malcontents, Marks’ action scenes are graphic and immersive, a result, no doubt, of his experience in military combat. Like any real Satanist, Dalton Asher is a complete misanthrope, and the writing is steeped in disgust for average, normal humans. Loneliness and isolation are the other sides of misanthropy, and Dalton has no choice but to take the solitary left-hand path of the Adversary. The novel's pace is exquisite, and the character of Detective Amara Cruz is well-used to balance out Dalton’s bleak nihilism and create suspense.

A few things have kept me from giving this novel a full five stars. At times, the author switches from first-person to third-person narrative and these changes are a bit confusing. There are a lot of twists and turns at the end of the novel that seem a bit rushed and could have used more stage-setting. The author could have explored more the relationship between Dalton and Satan, as well as the one between Dalton and Amanda Cruz to give his protagonist more depth and create more inner conflict. That being said, this is a great, thought-provoking, supernatural thriller I highly recommend and I look forward to Mason Marks’ future releases!

The Primal Exile

Picture by Brendan McCarthy

I’m slapping band-aids on the cracks in the pavement,         
and gluing my dead skin mask
but the tremors already spread too far, too close,
and I have to reach inside my head,
and stitch the eyelids of the foggy eye.

The neighborhood hobos sense my fear
and burst into my apartment.
I stand tall and tell them I live here,
but the “I” is faded,
it comes unglued like old wallpaper.
The intruders push me aside,
Defacing my silence with
growls, groans, moans, and grunts.
While some collapse on my bed
like exhausted zombies,
others stuff my food
into toothless, ashen mouths.
I curl up in a corner, a sick dog,
Squeeze my eyes shut,
And summon dreams.
 

The bus is full of kids,
Chattering, chanting, pointing to the woods outside,
The nauseating green rushes by,
And then I see the distant top of a mountain,
chocked by swirling fog.
I sit at the back,
Small and ashamed,
Toxic exhaust fumes thick in my nostrils,
The puke bag I clutch in my lap
as white as my skin.

The beach is cold and empty,
the closed umbrellas like frozen ghosts
stuck between the gunmetal sea and the leaden sky,
the sand as heavy as my hangover.
It starts raining,
and I grab my vodka with a distant waxy hand
and run for shelter on wobbly legs.
Squinting through the torrent of spit,
I step toward the entryway to a seedy motel
but my approach alerts a mangy-looking yellow cur,
and its frenzied barking calls the whole pack
and they’re on my heels
as I run cursing this metal morning
of rabid teeth and celestial spit.

The train picks up speed
chugging in the rhythm of my galloping heart,
its whistle mocking.
I get hammered at the redneck tavern near the tracks.
I’m broke and the owner asks me to dig a hole in the backyard
to cover my tab.
The yard is choked by blood-splattered weeds;
I dig the pit next to the rusted carcass of a car
And fill it with shards of broken beer bottles,
as the boss said.
The sweaty labor sobers me up
And I hear the whistle of an incoming train.
I run again through the gravel toward the trucks
But my legs feel heavy, scraping against the rocks.
I gaze down in terror:
the stumps of my upper legs were stuck to sand hourglasses,
the heavy sand gathered in the lower bulbs.
I fall head-first
and fists of stones shatter the windshield of my face,
and the glass of my legs.
A bitter axiom occurs to me:
strewn glass trash can never catch a train.

The seedy motel room reeks of stale guests,
cheap bug repellent and cigarette smoke.
The wallpaper is vomit hardened on plastic flowers,
and the bed is a brick of moldy lasagna.
An anemic, insectile buzz comes from the nightstand.
I pick up the receiver with a waxy hand. “Hello?”
“Hey, sweetie,” my mom said, “we were looking for you everywhere,
dad and I.
How are you?”
I put on the broken mask of words, “Not good. I….I want to come home.”
A hesitating break followed by fake enthusiasm, “Of course, what a great idea, honey!
We’re here, waiting for you.
We moved from the last place, now that it’s only the two of us,”
strained laughter,
“We’re right across from the cancer in your uncle’s eyes
on the street with sinking houses
we rent a roomy basement just under another basement.
I’m here knitting blankets of dirt
while your dad is racing roaches on the bricked windows.
He’s petting his tumor while we watch the news on the cracked screen,
he likes how the stomach growth is purring.
Just follow the chatter of dentures, my angel,
and the buzz of pacemakers,
right by the dumpster with a broken couch on the side,
crawling with stray dogs ripped in half,
you’ll be sure to find us, sweetie.

We’re here holding our breaths, missing you deeply.”  

Not All There (poem)

I’ve never touched anything hard enough to leave a fingerprint, 
my blood is too stale for DNA,
and my seed is the rusted urine
darkening the foul corners
of underground train stations.

 
I dwell in the crawlspaces beneath being.
One time, a woman pushed me in a stroller,
And then sat on a curb by my side
And began eating apples from me
Biting into the red and green skin with her loose, yellow teeth
And then shrouding her tears in cigarette smoke.
Hurting as if disemboweled,
I crumbled over the last bruised apples
Heard the cigarette butt hiss in the rotten juice,
And the clap of a dumpster cover,
As loud as a gun but not as final.
Another time, I was there in a pile of clothes
On a bench in a frozen bus station,
Near a cart filled with empty bottles.
I was there for a few seconds,
If someone looked inside at that moment,
They would have seen me I think,
But it was a gray day heavy with absence.
I almost stood up,
But the clothes were too many, too thick,
Intertwined with my muscles and organs,
heavy like corpses.
My knees crumpled.
Defeated, I glimpsed myself in a broken mirror
sitting by a flattened can of Monster drink.
I was almost there, a cataract eye like a glob of phlegm
a few lethargic thoughts trapped in it
like bugs in a glue trap.

I see they’ve built new suicide barriers on the bridge.
But who has the stamina to jump in the first place?
I can’t even stand up in my dreams.
What I’m good at is falling through the cracks of the pavement
and dissolve into the pale, angry scratches of a pen out of ink,
or those of a razor on dead scars.
Last I heard,
my partial baptism has been postponed
until after my tentative funeral.