Odin Rising cover and some news

I finally got a drawing that will go on the cover of my novel Odin Rising. Kudos to fantastic local artist Britanny Cardinal for her help!! Also, graphic designer and author Konn Lavery will help with the general design of the cover and formatting. The novel will be released in early 2019.

In other news, I now have a Facebook page. I had to go with Axe Barnes as Axl Barnes was taken. Feel free to visit and follow. https://www.facebook.com/AxeBarnes/

In addition, next year I'll publish a collection of short-stories entitled Funeral Portraits. Most of the stories will be accompanied by killer drawings by Brittany Cardinal. Some of the stories I posted here will be rewritten and gathered in that volume, Natasha Suicide, A Playground with Crosses, A Perfect Day, Closing Shift and others. Plus, this collection will feature my first zombie story and tons of other sick and twisted tales. 

Satanism without Gimmicks

I know many metalheads who consider themselves extreme, yet whenever I approach them I gag from the stench of nine-to-five easy meat. They are easy in more ways than one. It's easy to wear metal shirts and piercings and tattoos, it's easy to play guitar and emulate your favorite band, it's easy to go to metal shows, chug a few beers and wallow in a cheap sense of community. But when you take away the appearances, gimmicks, and conditioned behaviour you're left with the wriggling wormy body of the Satanist's arch-enemy: THE SLAVE!!

Besides a mixture of amusement and sadness, my encounter with this new embodiment of the archetypal peasant made me reflect of criteria we can use to tell apart the real Satanist from the multicolored scum. By definition, the Satanist is a rebel, an outsider, a master of his own destiny. He's full of his own will and, depending on his mood, either anti-social or asocial. A lone wolf, he regards others as either inconveniences or useful tools, and befriends only a chosen few. By contrast, the Slave is eager to follow and obey the will of others, he can't bear solitude or any sort of personal responsibility, he's most at home in crowds, and dreams of shaking off his humanity and one day turning into a sex doll.

So, if we are to identify the real Satanists in a society at a given time we first have to ask: What are the most oppressive forces operating in this society? We live in an age of unfettered capitalism and wage slavery. The oppression characteristic of such a system is very dangerous and insidious as it doesn't come from a well-defined center of power, as in more classical totalitarian systems, but it's spread out in a network of tunnels and economic traps hidden by the attractive facade of free market ideology. In this context, language heavy with political import and other means of thought control are also tremendous and sophisticated instruments of coercion. In addition, things like one's family or friends or "tribe" have always been known to try to manipulate the individual by imposing requirements like carrying on the family name, participating in meaningless family events or defending various social traditions or customs the individual has no genuine interest in. 

In a capitalist society, the Satanist should be either grudgingly employed or unemployed and living on welfare. Anyone who willfully sells themselves for a full-time job is NOT A SATANIST, but A LIFE-DENYING SLAVE! The Adversary might work full-time when running out of options but he never does it happily or willfully and he knows he'll have to take his revenge for every second of such humiliation. The Satanist sells his labor while plotting his revenge. He controls his alienation with savage thoughts of bloody payback. Part-time and casual employment or living on welfare are always more seductive for a rebellious spirit. Rather than looking for him in an office building, there's a better chance of finding the authentic Opposer at the public library reading The Communist Manifesto, or down the river valley having sex, writing poetry or exchanging survival tips with the tented homeless.  

The real Satanist doesn't care about family or tribe or nation or any sort of community he contingently finds himself in. He only cares about himself, his will, his life. If you see a happy family man, behold, that is A WRETCHED SLAVE!! For a Satanist having kids is the equivalent of suicide, or even worse, a long-drawn sordid self-torture. The Satanist has a few like-minded friends but is always vigilant about the terms of those friendships. If a friend succumbs to the siren call of slavery he's immediately rejected before he starts spewing his nonsense and poisoning the elite group. The Aristocrat only socializes on his own terms and never wastes his time on worthless, boring people, unless he indulges his cruel desire to mock them and introduce them to their own weakness.

Ash from Nargaroth and a kindred spirit. 

The genuine Master is usually quiet and doesn't enjoy running his mouth and engaging in endless small-talk. Language is a trap, a form of thought control, a great force that constantly saps the powers of the individual. That's why the Satanist strives to be creative in his language use, and tries to resist and dismantle the disciplinary power implicit in the value-laden vocabulary uncritically used by his troglodyte contemporaries. False idols like God, Money, Nation, Love, are but amusing targets for the Rebel's steaming jet of urine. Like a true artist, The Satanist delights in the game of creation and destruction, destruction and creation. Art is the highest expression of freedom, and a good artist is always an original. Originality is a satanic ideal by definition because it involves the highest degree of self-knowledge. The artist is a creator of worlds rather than part of a world created by someone else.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger

The desk at which Martin Heidegger wrote is masterpiece Being and Time, a work that revolutionized western thought and invented a new language to describe the human experience. Martin Heidegger is a poetic hero by definition. 

As you can see, being a Satanist isn't easy. It's not for everyone. It's a life of almost unbearable lucidity, constant struggle with others as well as the shadows of others in one's self, a life of  endless, neurotic vigilance. Yet it is also a life of euphoric delight in one's creative powers, in one's strength to overcome one's self, learn and develop, and in one's capacity to find kindred spirits and imagine new ways of being free. So, if you're ready to go to a metal show, take a good look in the mirror at the symbols you're wearing and decide for yourself if you're worthy of them. What anti-social deed have you done lately? In what interesting ways are you different from the mindless scum that makes up society? Did you create anything of value in your life? Are you a hero or just a follower? If that introspection isn't going well, there's always the option of transcending yourself with a bullet or a knife. 

Emil Cioran and Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (Part 1)

There are many interesting connections between the work of nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran and the art of Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (for short DSBM). This should come as no surprise since Cioran authored such books as On the Heights of Despair, The Trouble with Being Born, and  A Short History of Decay. Throughout his life, Cioran had suffered from insomnia and the pest of lucidity and deep awareness in a cold and meaningless universe. Trapped in a painful dilemma, Cioran hated living just as much as he did dying. While he praised suicide, he always lamented it coming too late, like all actions rooted in a mind on the brink of madness. Despising a moribund God, Cioran only craved the dark forgetfulness of the complete void, which he received when he was blessed with dementia in his old age. 

In this post I just highlight a deep, organic connection between Cioran's early remarks on despair and the grotesque and the dark imagery of DSBM. Cioran wrote On the Heights of Despair at the age of 20, and already considered himself an expert in the problem of death. This fragment is from his early book.  

Despair and the Grotesque

"Among the many forms of the grotesque, I find the one whose roots are steeped in despair more unusual and complex. The other forms have less intensity. It is important to note that the grotesque is inconceivable without intensity of feeling. And what intensity is deeper and more organic than despair? The grotesque appears only in very negative states, when great anxiety arises from a lack of life; the grotesque is an exaltation of negativity.

There is a mad launch toward negativity in that bestial agonizing grimace when the shape and lines of the face are contorted into strangely expressive forms, when the look in one's eyes changes with distant light and shadow, and one's thoughts follow the curves of similar distortions. Truly intense and irrevocable despair cannot be objectified except in grotesque expressions, because the grotesque is the absolute negation of serenity, that state of purity, transparence, and lucidity so different from the chaos and nothingness of despair. Have you ever had the brutal and amazing satisfaction of looking at yourself in the mirror after countless sleepless nights? Have you suffered the torment of insomnia, when you count the minutes for nights on end, when you feel alone in this world, when your drama seems to be the most important in history and history ceases to have meaning, ceases to exist? When the most terrifying flames grow in you and your existence appears unique and isolated in a world made only for the consummation of your agony? You must have felt those moments, as countless and infinite as suffering, in order to have a clear picture of the grotesque when you look at yourself in the mirror. It is a picture of total strain, a tense grimace to which is added the demonically seductive pallor of a man who has struggled along horrible, dark precipices. Isn't this grotesque expression of despair similar to a precipice? It has something of the abysmal maelstrom of great depths, the seduction of the all-encompassing infinite to which we bow as we bow to fatality. How good it would be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void! The complexity of the grotesque born out of despair resides in its capacity to indicate an inner infinity and to produce paroxysm of the highest tension. How could this intense agony manifest itself in pleasant linear curves and formal purity? The grotesque essentially negates the classic, as well as any idea of style, harmony or perfection.

It is evident to anyone who understands the multiple forms of inner drama that the grotesque hides secret tragedies, indirectly expressed. Whoever has seen his face grotesquely disfigured can never forget it, because he will always be afraid of himself. Despair is followed by painful anxiety. What else does the grotesque do if it doesn't actualize fear and anxiety?" (Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair) 

Shining is a pioneering DSBM band, formed by the controversial Niklas Kvarforth. The philosophy of the band is the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment through physical and mental self-destruction. To illustrate this concept, Niklas is known for cutting himself on stage and even feeding bits of his flesh to members of the audience. Needless to say, many Shining gigs would end up with Niklas being taken to the nearest ER. The frontman also prides himself on the fact that his music can drive people to commit suicide as he hates not only humanity but everything that lives and breathes and grows. Even plants and trees, God dammit!!

The cynically named Lifelover band was also based on a self-destructive, nihilistic concept. Tragically, but not surprisingly, one of the founders, Jonas Berqvist, has died of a drug overdose. He explained the use of his mask on stage by the fact that usually his corpse paint would start running and become very messy as he sweated playing his guitar, so he decided to wear the painted balaclava or ski-mask instead, which gave him an even more sinister and grotesque look.

Silencer was a brief presence in the landscape of DSBM and their only album Death-Pierce Me has received cult status mostly because of the lead vocalist's, Nattram, terrifying, animalistic, high-pitched shrieks. Strange rumors about the enigmatic frontman abound, but it's NOT TRUE that he cut off his hands and sown pig's feet to the bloody stumps for the pictures above (more on that here). However, that would have been a very metal and kult thing to do. The fact that the pig's feet are only props doesn't take away from the sordid, disturbing character of the pictures.

I don't know of any DSBM band to have used these images of a supposed Russian Sleep Experiment that took place in the '40s. But they would fit perfectly on a DSBM album cover. The Russian Sleep Experiment is actually a horror story published on Creepypasta that follows five patients who were given a gas that would eliminate their need for sleep. After 15 days, the tale goes, the subjects began engaging in bizarre acts of self-mutilation and self-cannibalism. Their behavior became less and less human, their speaking slowly changing into alien shrieks. As the experiment got out of control the researchers were ordered to kill the nightmarish guinea pigs. "What are you?" one of the doctors asked the last of the remaining subjects. "Have you forgotten so easily?" the mangled patient replied. "We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all, begging to be free at any moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from in your beds every night. We are what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal haven where we cannot thread." 

"I long to be free, desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free." (Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born)

The Troop, IT, and the Poetry of Decay

I finished "The Troop" by Nick Cutter a week ago but it still echoes within me like the aftershocks of a major earthquake. What an exhausting yet orgasmic ride! The book grabbed me from the first pages and I was under its spell till the last page, and will probably feel its pull till the day I'm gone. It made me moan and groan, gasp and scream and mumble to myself like a lunatic. Maniacally, I underlined almost every sentence, the pencil my only defence against the horror. Visceral, like any self-respecting body horror story, but also infinitely disturbing and drenched in metaphysical anguish. "The Troop" is tied to Ryan C. Thomas' "The Summer I Died" as the sickest, scariest book I've ever read. Just like the torture of Tooth by Skinnyman in Thomas' masterpiece, Shelley's killing of Ephraim makes me scream and pull my hair out every time I think of it. I loved both Tooth and Ephraim like actual friends and their unbelievable torment and untimely demise makes me want to go to their graves and weep and mutter late words of consolation. It's not real, you say, just fiction, but their suffering feels all too real to me, just like my suffering for them.

The plot of The Troop is simple. For the weekend, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs is with his troop of scouts on the Falstaff Island, close to Prince Edward Island on the Canadian East Coast. The troop consists of five fourteen year olds: Kent, Ephraim, Max, Shelley, and Newton. On the first night they have an unknown guest, Tom Padgett, who had just escaped from Dr. Edgerton's facility. Needless to say, Dr. Edgerton is a sadistic mad genius with no regard for human life. Tom carries an infection, his body is taken over by worms, monster worms, conqueror worms — technically called "hydatid worms" — that take over your organism and give your brain the command to eat, eat, eat. Only it's not you who gets fed, it's them. They grow inside you and then, when you've fed yourself into starvation, they leave your hollowed system and conquer another host. These genetically modified worms are nothing but a biological weapon the military was experimenting with.

The island becomes the site of dangerous experimentation, and the Scoutmaster and his scouts are the guinea pigs.

Now, the plot thickens when we find that one of the boys, Shelley, is a psychopath who revels in making other beings suffer; spiders, fish, cats, dogs, other people, you name it. The panic that strikes his mates when the infection begins to spread is sweet music to Shelley's ears. The island becomes his playground where he finally has the opportunity to enact his twisted blood-games. All in all, with conqueror worms and a sadistic killer on the loose, shit is bound to hit the fan on the island.

Nick Cutter's original lyrical style is on full display when he describes the five boys through the eyes of Scoutmaster Tim: "All boys gave off a scent, Tim found — although it wasn't only an olfactory signature. In Tim's mind it was a powerful emanation that enveloped his every sense. For instance, Bully-scent: acidic and adrenal, the sharp whiff you'd get of a pile of old green-fuzzed batteries. Or Jock-scent: groomed grass, crashed chalk, and the locker room funk wafting of a stack of exercise mats. Kent Jenks pumped out Jock-scent in waves. Other boys, like Max and Ephraim, were harder to define — Ephraim often gave off a life-wire smell, a power transformer exploding in a rainstorm.

Shelly...Tim considered between sips of scotch and realized the boy gave off no smell at all — if anything, the vaporous, untraceable scent of a sterilized room in a house long vacant of human life.

Newton, though, stunk to high heaven of Nerd: an astringent and unmistakable aroma, a mingling of airless basements and dang library corners and tree forts built for solitary habitation, of dust smoldering inside personal computers, the licorice tang of asthma puffer mist and the vaguely narcotic smell of model glue — the ineffable scent of isolation and lonely forbearance."

Scoutmaster Tim is caught off-guard by the appearance of hungry Tom on the island. Tom is nothing but a shuffling corpse. Not strictly as zombie as his diet consists of more than brains: some algae and foam from inside a sofa bed are good enough for Tom; whatever he can stuff in his mouth and chew on. When the Scoutmaster reaches for the radio to get in touch with mainland and signal an emergency, Tom becomes violent, grabs the radio and smashes it on the floor. He then has a coughing fit, and some spit splashes on the Scoutmaster's face. Thus, Tim Riggs becomes infected. The conqueror worms will grow and eat him up from inside. He's a dead man walking.

Next, Tim manages to neutralize the intruder and tie him up on the couch. He's feeling unwell and hungry. Confused, he helps himself to more scotch straight from the bottle. The boys soon realize that there's something wrong going on in their cabin and that their master is unable to cope. Kent, their informal leader, is the most vocal of the bunch. When they see the worms crawling out of the dead man's body and they notice that Tim is losing weight at an alarming speed, they realize Tim carries an unknown, terrible disease. Led by Kent, they mutiny. Together, they isolate Tim in the closet of the cabin and lock the door with a key. To celebrate his victory over an adult Kent takes a drink from Tim's scotch bottle. Thus, Kent too becomes infected.

Psychopathic Shelly observes these developments with a cold, calculating eye. His sick and twisted mind takes center stage when he decides to linger by the Scoutmaster's closet when all other boys go outside. A bar of light comes into Tim's makeshift prison, from the small space between the door and the floor. Shelly decides to cover that light with two dishtowels and tape them in place, while singing to his master in a mocking voice:

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

I'm going to the garden to eat worms,

to eat worms

Big fat juicy ones, long thin slimy ones

Itsy-bitsy crawly-wawly woooorms.

At this point I realized I knew Shelly from somewhere. He reminded me of Patrick Hockstetter from Stephen King's IT. Patrick is one of the members of Henry Bowers' gang, the bullies who terrorise the loser club led by Stuttering Bill. Like Shelley, Patrick is a major creepazoid. He keeps a pencil box full of dead flies, which he kills with his ruler and shows it to other students. Like Shelly, who drowns his cat Trixie while sporting a hard-on, Patrick takes small, usually injured animals or stray dogs and locks them in a broken refrigerator in the junkyard, leaving them there to suffocate. In a fit of vague jealousy, Patrick also asphyxiated his infant brother when he was only five. Although they have different builds — Patrick is chubby, while Shelley is more tall and slender — they both have moonfaces devoid of emotion, slack and doughy, and their eyes are blank, alien.

Sketch by RayDillon

In Stephen King's book Patrick plays a minor role, just one of the kids who go missing, a victim of Pennywise the Clown. But who's the crazy clown in Nick Cutter's book? A moment's reflection shows that Shelley is Pennywise. Shelley is the disease, the crazy clown from outer space, the bringer of blood and chaos, the firestarter. This line of interpretation is consistent with Cutter's portrayal of Shelley throughout the book. Shelley is the first who realizes that Kent is infected and Kent punches him in the face in a desperate effort to keep the creep quiet. "Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood run from his split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice or care? The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning that flashed over the buffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown." Progressively throughout the book, the other boys grasp Shelley's lack of humanity and refer to him as something rather than someone. Shelley's The Thing. Shelley's IT.

But what about the hydatid, conqueror worms? Aren't they the real danger, the real disease? The relation between the mutated worms and Shelly is complex and requires a study in itself. What Cutter emphasizes is that, when Shelley eventually becomes infected, he welcomes the worms, he identifies himself with them. He wants to be their parent and help them grow and annihilate everything. Shelley and the hydatid worms are two aspects of the same disease, of a mindless cancer that aims to obliterate everything that moves and bleeds. Once the worms infect Shelley, he thinks of himself as being pregnant with them. He's both their mother and father. "His stomach was a swollen gourd. It bulged through his shirt and over the band of his trousers. Its pale circumference was strung with blue veins and sloshed with a dangerous, exciting weight." Shelley promises the worms inside him to kill Max and Newton. "First I have to kill them. Then I'll be alone. Then I can give birth in peace. Then we can all play."

Clearly, Cutter is a great portretist, a lyricist reminiscent of Ray Bradbury. However, his poetic inclination doesn't impede the fast-paced action of the novel but augments it with a deeper psychological layer. His description of Ephraim sitting on a boulder and brooding about whether his body's infected with worms and how to pull them out is burnt in my brain and will haunt me forever. Ephraim is Kent's challenger, they're both athletic Alphas. When the island gets hit by a storm, the boys decide to take cover in the cellar, wanting to avoid the cabin with the dead guy and their sick Scoutmaster. But it's clear that Kent is also infected. Nonetheless, the former brave leader wants to join the others. Ephraim beats Kent up, a bit more savagely than the situation required, given that Kent was already weakened. Moreover, Ephraim has anger management problems, mostly because of an unhappy childhood, overshadowed by an abusive father. So Ephraim takes Kent down and punches him again and again, his first working like pistons. But in the process he touches Kent's infected blood. The skin of his knuckles is cut open, Kent's blood is under his fingernails. Is that how the worms wiggle in? Did Kent accidentally give Ephraim the disease? Once they're in the safety of the cellar Shelley is quick to ask Ephraim these questions, and take sadistic pleasure in gradually breaking the other kid down mentally and physically.

"Shelly could tell that Ephraim was afraid that whatever was in Kent had gotten into him — it'd leapt between their bodies, from Kent's lips to Ephraim's hand, swimming in on the rush of blood. Shelly knew Ephraim was scared and he foresaw a great profit in nursing that fear along. It would be easy. Ephraim was so predictable — so predictably stupid.

Of course, Shelley hadn't seen the teeny-tiny worms at that point — but he'd understood that the sickness, whatever it was, scurried inside of you, ate you from the inside out. That's what made it so scary. This wasn't a bear or a shark or a psycho axe-murderer; those things were bad, sure, but you could get away from them. Hide.

How could you hide from a murderer who lived under your skin? [...]

Shelly had a method of probing, of opening doors in people that was uncanny. He rarely used this gift — it could get him in trouble. But he was able to spot the weak spots the way a sculptor saw the seams in a block of granite; one tap in the right spot and it would split right open.

I saw something, Eef.

That was all it had taken. The smallest seedling — he'd slit Ephraim's skin, just the thinnest cut, slipping that seed in. If Shelley did some additional work, well, maybe that seed would squirm into Ephraim's veins, surf to his heart, and bloom into something beautiful. Or horrible. It didn't matter which to Shelley."

Masterfully, Shelley plans the seed of doubt in Ephraim's mind. Thinking himself infected Ephraim becomes distant, obsessive, and stops talking to Max and Newton, his real friends who only wish to help him. When after the storm the boys decide to go look for food, Ephraim tags along, but his thoughts are leaden with fear, heavier and heavier, paralyzing anxiety.

"Sometime around midafternoon, Ephraim sat down and refused to get up.

"That's it. I'm not walking anymore."

They had come to a copse of spruce trees. The air was dense with the scent of pine. [...]

Ephraim sat on the moss-covered rock with his fingers knit together in his lap. His body position mimicked a famous Roman sculpture that Newton had seen in a history book: The Pugilist at Rest. Ephraim looked a bit like a statue himself. His skin had a slick alabaster hue, except for around the lips and the rims of his nostrils, where it had a bluish-gray tint. Newton had a scary premonition: IF THEY LEFT EPHRAIM HERE AND CAME BACK YEARS LATER, HE WAS SURE EEF'S BODY WOULD REMAIN IN THIS FIXED POSITION — A STATUE OF CALCIFIED BONE."

Besides being an amazing lyricist, Nick Cutter is a masterful painter of decay. With surgical precision he manages to capture the weeping of flesh. Weeping, in his writing is sometimes used as a metaphor for bleeding. A wound, a cut, weeps. When it bleeds, meat weeps. In Cutter's universe organic matter is damned. It's a cursed universe. Everything that lives and breathes is destined to agony. In the words of philosopher Emil Cioran, "life is too limited and too fragmentary to endure great tensions." (Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair) The Romanian philosopher argues that death is imminent in life, it's not a reality outside of life, but buried deep into the very source of life. Life breeds death. Such a fragile phenomenon, it can only be understood as an abnormal materialization of death, a grotesque disease. "The flesh," Cioran also writes, "is neither strange nor shadowy, but perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness. It is not only the seat of disease, it is itself a disease, incurable nothingness, a fiction which has degenerated into a calamity. The vision I have of it is the vision of a gravedigger infected with metaphysics." (Emil Cioran, The New Gods)

In a way, Nick Cutter is a gravedigger infected with metaphysics. He knows all the faces of death and can see it in the smallest details of everyday life. Just like Leibniz's theory of monads or David Bohm's Holographic Principle, in Cutter's world each part of the universe is a reflection of the whole. And Cutter is an expert in capturing those bits of reality that uncover the disease eating at the guts of the whole cosmos. Here's one of those mundane scenes rich with metaphysical insight:

"Last summer, Max had shared his house with a family of shearwaters — a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters had began to nest in the houses of North Point. They'd chip away the Gyprock exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their nests.

A family of shearwaters made one above Max's bedroom window. In the morning he'd crane his neck and see the daddy shearwater poke his head out of the whole he'd chipped in the house's facade, darting it in both directions before arrowing out over the water to hunt.

Max's father, however, wasn't impressed. The lawn was covered in Styrofoam and pink rags of insulation. The birds would wreck the home's resale value, he griped — despite the fact that he'd lived in North Point all his life and would likely die in this house. He drove to the Home Hardware, returning with a bottle of insulating foam sealant. He clambered up a ladder to the nest, shooed the birds away, stuck the nozzle into the whole, and pumped in sealant until it billowed out and hardened to a puffy crust. He climbed back down with a satisfied smile.

But the shearwaters were back the next day. They'd torn away at the sealant, ripping it off in chunks with their sickle-shaped beaks. Now the lawn was covered in Styrofoam, insulation, and sealant. Max's father repeated the procedure, believing the birds would relent. But shearwaters are cousins to homing pigeons — they always come back. I should shoot them, Max's father groused, though he could never do such a thing.

Still, he was angry — that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature. He drove back to Home Hardware, returning with another can of sealant and a few feet of heavy-duty chicken wire. Using tin snips, he cut the wire into circles roughly the size of the hole. Clambering up the ladder, he made a layer cake of sorts: a layer of sealant, the chicken wire, sealant, wire, sealant, wire. Okay, birds, he'd said. Figure that out.

Max returned from school the next day to find a dead shearwater in the bushes. The daddy — he could tell by its dark tail feathers. It lay with its neck twisted at a horrible angle. Its beak was broken — half of it was snapped off. It's eyes were filmy-gray, like pewter. It'd made a mess: shreds of sealant dotted the lawn. But his father's handiwork held strong. The daddy bird must've broken its neck — had it become so frustrated, so crazy, that it'd flown into the barrier until its neck snapped?

When Max's father saw the dead bird, his jaw tightened, he blinked a few times very fast, then quietly he said: I just wanted them to find someplace else to live.

In the middle of the night Max had been woken by peeping. The sound was coming from the walls. Max padded into his parents' room. His father rubbed sleep crust from his eyes and followed Max back to his bedroom. When he heard those noises, his face did a strange thing.

At three o'clock in the morning, Max's dad had climbed the ladder. His housecoat flapped in the salt breeze. Using a screwdriver and vise grips, he tore out the sealant and chicken wire, working so manically that he nearly fell. By the time he'd ripped it away the peeps had stopped. He'd reached deep inside the hole, into a small depression he'd had not realized was there. He placed whatever he'd found in the pockets of his housecoat with great reverence.

In the kitchen, his face was white with shock, he laid them on the table: the mama bird and two baby birds. The mama bird's wing was broken. The babies were small and gray-blue, still slick with the gummy liquid inside their eggs. All three were still."

In Cutter's universe caring leads to death. The daddy shearwater's care for its family leads to its destruction. Life is limited and fragmentary. The bird was programmed by Mother Nature to answer the distress calls of its baby birds. Equipped with a limited range of behaviors, the slightest change in the environment — the layered cake of sealant and chicken wire built by Max's dad — leads to the shearwater's self-annihilation. Life is mad. In a gruesome instantiation of Einstein's definition of insanity, the daddy shearwater tries the same thing over and over, peeking away at the sealant, while expecting a different result. Care and love, the things that stay at the heart of life, are nothing but harbingers of death. In the words of Dr. Edgerton, "love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love  that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price."  On this sobering picture, Mother Nature is nothing but a dying hysterical whore, crushed by the fear and guilt of being alive, yet desperately fighting for each and every breath, blindly clawing handfuls of earth and worms and stuffing them in its toothless, gaping maw.

All in all, "The Troop" is a remarkable novel, entertaining yet literary, warm yet visceral. I recommend it to all who have the strength to face the real horror behind the veils of the mundane and the stomach for the ugly metaphysical truths crawling inside it.    

On a brighter note, here's a Six Feet Under song with relevant lyrics. 

My face shows no emotion
The mind of an animal behind human eyes
Restrained with a rope
Crudely tied to wrists and ankles

Eyes jellied from chemical injections
Devoid of all compassion
I place no value on human life, life

Body temperature drops rapidly
But death comes slow
Post-mortal muscle reflexes
Repeatedly choked

Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
I climax as I murder

A mass of empty flesh
Chosen to die brutally
Not one has survived
My torture and abuse

Unbearable pain and cruelty
Hatred for all fucking life
Hatred for all fucking life
Hatred for all fucking life

Abducted, beaten and murdered
A slow, cold-blooded death
Bones have been boiled
And removed of all flesh

Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
I climax as I murder

Tortured until your death
Loss of blood drains from you now
Out leaks the human soul
Out leaks the human soul

My face shows no emotion
The mind of an animal behind human eyes
Devoid of all compassion
I place no value on human life

Body temperature drops rapidly
But death comes slow
Post-mortal muscle reflexes
Repeatedly choked

Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
Your torture brings me pleasure
I climax as I murder

Burning, I'm burning your blood
Burning, I'm burning your blood
Burning, I'm burning your blood
Burning, I'm burning your blood

Burning, I'm burning your blood

Interview for The Pulp

This interview was originally published by The Pulp. 

Our generation loves gore. Horror and the horrific. Sordid tales and psychological mindfucks. We address our need for the weird and spooky through video games, movies, and novels. The latter has been around for the longest, but there are writers putting a new spin on the traditional—taking the basics from Stephen King and making them relate more to our generation, how we respond to society, and how our worldview is warped by the way in which we live.

Axl Barnes, a local author and philosopher, addresses all of these issues from the perspective of rebellious teenage youths in his upcoming novel, Odin Rising. Author of the novella Ich Will, Barnes incorporates his impressive background with philosophy into fiction that attempts to deal with the oppression of social systems, youthful narcissism, existentialism, psychological horror, and more. Although difficult to categorize, Barnes’ writing tends to build on his own experiences as a teenager in Romania and the meaning of ethics, life, and death to those too young to fully understand.

We caught up with Barnes to ask him a few questions about his upcoming novel, his influences, and the difficulties of writing outside of one particular genre.

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What’s your background? How did you get into writing fiction?

I’m a philosophy and fiction lover. I had my first attempts at writing fiction when in high-school in the late 90s. Afterwards, I only wrote sporadically while studying for my undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. Once I got my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2011 from the University of Alberta, I started focusing exclusively on writing fiction and finally tackling some projects which have been shelved for too long. In 2012, I published a novella, Ich Will, which is about a poor, misanthropic philosophy student who’s unable to pay for his undergraduate degree and whose hatred for society takes an unexpected, bloody turn. Since then, I’ve been working on my first full-length novel, Odin Rising.

What will Odin Rising be about?

It’s about a group of teenage metal-heads in a small Romanian town in the mid 90s. Alex and Tudor, the group’s leaders, egg each other on to progressively more extreme, anti-social actions, from breaking windows and cutting car tires to desecrating graves and sacrificing animals to Satan. Their gruesome competition leads to killing an innocent older man, who just happened to challenge them at the wrong place at the wrong time. The death prompts a conflict between Alex and Tudor, a conflict between their views of what is extreme and the purpose of violence. While Alex is a Neo-Nazi who idolizes Hitler and the Aryan race, Tudor is a self-proclaimed nihilist who hates all races equally and only loves his knife, death-metal, and horror movies. Despite their differences, both youngsters think that they are possessed by Odin, the Norse god of storm and battle frenzy, and who’s awakening in Europe after centuries of slumber. Which one of two will prove himself a hero and join Odin in Valhalla?

When do you aim to have the book finished? 

By the end of the year. I hope to publish it sometime next year.

What were your influences in writing this book?

The book is rooted in personal experience and focused on two real-life events, both centered on the river that passes through my hometown. During summer in high school, my grandmother had asked me to take away a cat and drop it into someone’s back yard, as far as possible from her house. She handed me the cat in a sack, stating it was lazy and wouldn’t catch mice. I was with a few friends on that day and, youthful victims of boredom, we decided to take the cat to the nearby river and drown it. I’ll spare the sordid details, but suffice it to say that it’s true that cats have nine lives.

The second event occurred on another empty summer day: two friends, Vali and Lucian, and I got drunk and broke the windows of an abandoned service station. Then we went by the side of the river to drink some more and smoke cigarettes (that was the coolest thing, as we didn’t know of weed or other drugs). An older guy chased us down on his bike to lecture us, threatening to tell Vali’s dad about his vandalism. I remember asking Lucian why we couldn’t just drown the stranger into the river just like we had done with the cat? Lucian didn’t go for it, but what if he had? Or what if I had been drunk enough to just do it myself?

An additional impetus toward writing the book came from reading Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise Of The Satanic Metal Underground, a journalistic account of the Norwegian 90s rash of crimes connected with the black-metal scene. Varg Vikernes, a.k.a. Count Grishnackh, a central figure, was involved in many church-burnings as well as the murder of another leader of the movement. In his interviews, Varg argues fervently that his arson wasn’t part of a Satanic ritual, but part of reviving local Nordic pagan religion, and worshiping warrior gods like Odin and Thor, instead of the Jewish Jehovah. In my story, Alex and Tudor are aware and inspired by the events in Norway. Hence also the name of the book, Odin Rising.

What other fiction would you compare Odin Rising to and why?

Mainly Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Meursault, the main character of the novel, is a misfit who commits an apparently absurd crime. The deed puts him in jail, where he has a chance to reflect on the insurmountable gap between him and the rest of society, and to make explicit the meaning of his rebellion.

The first four chapters of Odin Rising are written in a realist, minimalist style, but in the last two chapters the boundary between reality and mythical dreams becomes blurred. In this respect, I was inspired by classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, as well as contemporaries like Clive Barker.

My fiction is also very much indebted to popular horror writers like Stephen King, Richard Laymon, and Brian Keene.

Are there any controversial themes in the book? If so, how and why did you approach them? 

Teenage rebellion is the main theme of the book. It’s such a widespread phenomenon, ranging from petty vandalism to more serious crimes like school shootings, arson, and suicide. This novel is an attempt to uncover the source of this violence. Why do teenagers think that the adult world is lame and disgusting? Why do they want to mock or destroy it? I tried to see things from their perspective, which also used to be my own perspective, and make explicit their brutal judgment of the adult world.

One thing about the teenage psyche that struck me was the fact that the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for decision-making, practical deliberation, and planning, isn’t fully formed. So, while their intelligence, memory, creativity, and other brain functions are normal, teens don’t care about the future. For an adolescent, everything is here and now—there’s no tomorrow, no career, no insurance of this and that, no pension plans, no happily ever after. And that’s partly why teens are so emotional and restless, because for them everything is at stake all the time. But this psychological condition allows them a deep insight into the nature of the world around them and the nature of society. I think expressing that insight has both artistic and philosophical value.

If you had to describe Odin Rising in an elevator pitch of 10 words or less, what would you say? 

It’s an artistic and philosophical exploration of teenage rebellion.

What difficulties have you faced in writing and publishing Ich Will and in the upcoming publication of Odin Rising?

Marketing is the main challenge, especially since my fiction doesn’t fit a specific genre. Both Ich Will and Odin Rising are close to psychological horror, in the sense that the horror is triggered by an abnormality of the main characters’ psychology. However, this categorization misses something essential: my characters end up doing horrible things because they’re in the grips of some philosophical ideas. And those ideas are critically discussed in the context of those stories. So, in a sense, my writing appeals to both readers who enjoy Socratic dialogues, but also to those who like graphic horror and violence. If I were forced to put a label on it, I’d call this genre philosophical horror or existentialist horror. Paradigmatic examples of this are Clive Barker’s chilling short story “Dread,” and its movie adaptation, as well as Scott Bakker’s horrific thriller Neuropath. Still, I hope that a consistent marketing effort through social media and websites like Goodreads will help my fiction reach the right audience.

Odin Rising may still be in progress, but do you have any plans for future work? 

I have developed ideas for two more novels. The first one has the working title This Town Must Burn! and features Canadian analogs of Tudor and Alex from Odin Rising. The action is set in a small Western Canadian town in the early 2000s. The youngsters are now in their early twenties and face the overwhelming pressures of adult life. Will they adapt and become domesticated, or will they continue to rebel and burn everything to the ground?

The second novel has the tentative title Defective, and it’s my take on zombies. Jack, the main character, is a young, obese warehouse worker who starts rotting alive: his mind stays fully functional while his body starts decomposing. The story is an account of Jack’s actions, decisions, and psychology in his transition from life to bodily death. While still philosophical, this book will fit well into the genre of body horror.

Both these projected novels will feature one theme that I’ve approached in Ich Will: alienated labour in capitalism. One of the main weapons capitalist society uses to break down and dehumanize its members is meaningless work, or wage slavery. So, in the spirit of George A. Romero’s zombie movies, this will be horror with a political edge.