Guts, by Chuck Palahniuk

Like the story begins, take a deep breath.

Here's an excerpt from what is hands down the most painful, gritted-my-teeth through-it-I-swear-to-God-never-let-me-read-it-again, story I have ever choked down. Guts by Chuck Palahniuk. Cringe factor is off the charts.

" ...That's the only way this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.

So… I kick at it, at the slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm an inch closer to my escape.

Knotted inside the snake, you can see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the kind of horse-pill vitamin my Dad makes me take, to help put on weight. To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty acids.

It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.

It's not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What doctors call, prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain."

Bride of Frankenstein Blues

In bars around the world, this scene from Bride of Frankenstein plays itself out like a looped nightmare. Lights, camera, rebuff. As with scenes from the original Frankenstein, what's so achingly hard to watch in this clip is the brutality of rejection distilled down to its essence. His pleading hands, and her "Get the f---- away" scream. Can't blame him for wanting to touch. She is quite beautiful but sadly, aloof. (Where is Madeleine Kahn when you need her.) Equipped with a little Andrew Marvell, "Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime", etc., I think Frank might have fared better. Hmmm. Frankenstein's monster as a master of Courtly Love?

Going back a few years, when I was cobbling together a poetry chapbook, I worked up this shortie using Frank's pain as a jumping off point ....

Bride of Frankenstein Blues

Consider the moon, my friend, how its absence
troubles this unromantic air. Here in the dark,
like slow lightning, smoke unwinds,
creeps; everywhere you look, mouths, small dark graves
chew on drinks.
This is no night or finding brides.
Still, you come, touch her wrist,
and spring the classic recoil. It begins in her black eyes, darting
like spooked minnows around her stark face
and jitters down her spindly arms as they jerk back
from your touch and clasp up
her breast sacs as that piercing goose hiss escapes
her lovely lips. These damn castles are cold.
Some nights, arms outstretched
on the stairs, you think you could love the torches,
anything to light you up.

Currently with a few e-zines for consideration. Eyes crossed.

Baaaaad Scary Monkey

File under Random Creepy Shit.

Working on a freelance project today that could involve stuffed animals, I was sad and a little terrified to come across this one while searching for images. It is a monkey, so they say. I would go so far as to say it tops the clown from Poltergeist with its weird Chucky meets flying Oz monkey vibe.

Enjoy The Sound of Bradbury's Thunder

I am pushing hard, probably too hard at times, to get my son (who I call the wood-chipper when it comes to reading) to try out some of the stories I read as a kid - and the first master to come to mind is Ray Bradbury. Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked. etc. I have no idea how to estimate the impact his writing had on me and my own writing, but as I leaf through his collected short stories I come across The Sound of Thunder and think Ah! perfect for a kid. So I just read this to my son Whit. Here is a great excerpt describing a tyrannosaurus the hunters go to shoot ... also, here's a link to a synopsis if you haven't had the pleasure.

“It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a tone of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangles out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head it self, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons.”

Sigh. How gorgeous is that?!?

Full Moon, High Heat

Full moon, high heat, what’s the difference. I am turning. Here I sit, swamped in four straight days of humidity. Here I sit, sleepless and groggy, growing a little meaner by the minute. I am wired this way. Prolonged exposure to weather soup, the kind that keeps me wet even when not moving, evaporates my focus, patience and what small measure of civility I own, makes papers stick to my arms when I sit to work, prolonged exposure to weather like this undoes me, changes me in beastly ways. Remember the rhyme: “Even man who is pure at heart and says his prayers at night, can become a raging dickhead when the humidity blooms and the effin sun is way too bright.” (Apologies to Talbot) Now, someone might be inclined to point out that Iowa had a heat index of 131 yesterday, as if that negates my melting as if because someone somewhere has it worse I am not drowning. I would love to be the person who says, “Oh, that part of the country has it much worse” and get over it, but unless I have a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Being Peace handy, it’s a lost cause. I am turning. Werewolf. Heatwolf? Sounds corny but feels right. In the past few weeks, after simmering in my skin for days, and feeling that unhinged snap behind my eyes when I blink, I think this might be what turning feels like, the maddening pull to get out of your body and run screaming--or maybe it's more a sense of your body fracturing apart from you and leaving. It is July and I am under the spell of the sun, though, and not the moon. Tomorrow the heat index here is supposed to reach 105. Howl.

Bein' Green

Thanks to Horror Smorgasbord

for putting up a link to this Make Me a Zombie site. I am going for the gas chamber green or Exorcist barf green look here.

Scary Bad Art

Scary art abounds here. Not in a Night Gallery sense. But in the run over rabbit dragging itself off the road sense. Shine your shoes, toss back a green breath mint, and stroll through the Museum of Bad Art . There is something about that dog, maybe the eyes, that reminds me of Joey from Friends.