More New(ish) Cool Shit

This has been going on for a while now. Great stuff happening over at Horror Oasis and I got the chance to do the reads on some of their earliest forays into fiction publication. Check out the playlist. Buncha cool stories -- all read by me.

Another semi-recent development is my first pro-rate sale (I think. I'm not 100% sure of the nitty-gritty in that definition). But you can check it out at the NoSleep Podcast. They did a great job dramatizing The Tall Man. And, honor of honors, that cover art is from my story.

new cool shit

This is the latest development in my bizarre and shallow arc as a writer. I went out on a limb and sent the editor at Dream of Shadows this narration I did. Filipe was enthusiastic and this is the final product. I can’t say how grateful I am to have another bucket list item crossed off. Island Retreat first appeared in Dream of Shadows Issue 3. Get a copy.

Book Review: Human Tenderloin by Craig Wallwork

I think I'm going to experiment with adding my book reviews to this space for the one person who comes here.

                                             

Craig Wallwork’s Human Tenderloin is a collection of 16 short stories.

The opening track is ‘Bird Girl,’ a bit of a body horror/grotesquerie playing over the background of an apocalypse. Bird Girl’s outer world is grim and dark but its inner life contains warm, bright notes of hope. Like a lot of Human Tenderloin, it’s ultimately a story of Love - in this case, parental Love.

I really appreciated that facet of these stories.

Love - Capital L Love.

There are plenty of horrors out there, and none I’ve read have trod so steadily the narrow path of real, loving notes that don’t stray into greeting card sentimentality.

***Editorial sidebar: Too much of my reading (and viewing) in the last year has featured remorseless horrors that sell humanity short in exchange for brutal & shocking violence or rely on a cheap supposition to prop up shoddy approximations of better stories.***

The second entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Dollhouse’ - a creepy little cursed object story, pressed into its musty surroundings like a footprint in a swamp. The dread slowly pools like water leeching up through the earth. Odds are, you’ll see the end coming - as you will with other stories here - but it doesn’t lessen the effect.

Similarly, the title track, ‘Human Tenderloin’ has a hazily visible climax that doesn’t tarnish the tale in the least, as it relies on its own bizarre circumstances and almost slapstick level humor to carry it through a tale largely about sourcing long pork for butchering and eating among a close-knit group of ghoulish gourmands.

My favorite entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Paradise Won.’ ‘Paradise Won’ is an almost funny meditation on love and loss, repentance and forgiveness from the perspective of a widower renting a cabin from the devil. I won’t say more than that because, even though ‘Paradise Won’ does nothing to hide its cards, it manages to be surprising and moving nonetheless.

There are some truly bizarre mindbender horrors in here as well. Most notably: ‘The Hole’ ‘Time’s Flies’ ‘Murder Song’ and ‘They Were Born Without Faces’

‘Nothing Short of Dying’ is brutal, bizarre, downright gross, perhaps - and yet, it is a love story. And that is what elevates this and so many other stories in Human Tenderloin beyond being beautifully written oddities.

If there’s a low note here, it’s the hidden track, ‘The Ballad of Windsong House’ - a longer tale than the rest whose introduction is a bit laborious but serves its own payoff well. It has the feel of a bloated short story or perhaps a truncated novella. In the end, ‘Windsong’ circles back around to the connective tissue that holds the entire collection together, Love. Capital L Love.

I’ve been truly disenchanted by a lot of my reading of late, feeling that storytelling had become a contest of grim ideas and horrible suffering visited upon rooms stuffed with poor approximations of humanity. Human Tenderloin is populated by people that feel real, often sympathetic - at the very least understandable - even in the most horrific and strange of circumstances.

My only complaint about human Tenderloin is also one of its greatest strengths. The language is consistently beautiful and inventive. It always feels fresh and lush and filled with the Love that suffuses the entire collection. For me, it felt at times just the thinnest layer too thick, which is really hardly any complaint at all.

TLDR: Horror built on a solid foundation of Love, weirdness, and prose sharp enough to carve a steak from your leg. The collection I’ve read that shares the most DNA with Human Tenderloin is Joe Hill’s Full throttle - one of my all-time favorite collections.

By Way of Reintroduction

 SOo ...

Its been what? Three years since I dropped by here? 

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Why, you may ask, has it been so long?

Simple: I grew disenchanted and depressed by my work as a writer. I joined a writer's workshop in hopes that I would be able to hone my novel, Darkle, into something that might catch an agent's eye and thus find a place that would print it on paper for all to read. The workshop was populated with know-it-all do-nothings. A dozen people would arrive every Saturday morning, with no writing of their own, ready to give everything they laid eyes on the Simon Cowell treatment. 

The organizer/de facto leader of the group seemed to have founded it specifically to acquire captive readers for his pedophilic, rapey, misogynistic techno-porno, pseudo-enlightened opus. He claimed it existed in multiple, multi-thousand page volumes that have been in continual revision for twenty years. 

His inability to write, coupled with a strong desire to crush other writer's dreams caused the group to violently dissolve before a year passed. 

Nobody in the group was a reader of horror, thus nobody in the group really had a coherent perspective on my book. I received personal criticism of my character's choices, which only illuminated the fact that these people were not qualified commenters. I was even asked to take over the group after the drawing and quartering of the 5000 page wet dream. 

I said no and promptly quit writing, despairing of the process and the future of the craft itself as the more I read the more I felt like my entertainment had taken a back seat to intellectual posing and making cute references to pop bullshit.

**I've read two award-winning books this year and both bored the crap out of me. Whatever was happening is only getting worse. 

I could go on. 

I won't.

If you've made it this far, you know a little about why I walked away. Now, why'm I back? 

I was happy not writing for a long time. Not trying to squeeze a page or a paragraph in between all of life's obligations took some stress off, added some time for sleep, exercise, reading, meditation.

Then I wanted to write again - so I did. In months, I nearly doubled my lifetime output. I began submitting again and promptly sold Island Retreat to Dream of Shadows Issue 3. That was January. I have received dozens of personal rejections from dozens of very kind editors since then, but I remain frustrated in my attempt to really break into the world of paid publishing. The more I read, the more I realize I need to find the right people. I suspect the group is small. I'm certain they're you're out there. 

Find me.

Also, recently, I've made some efforts to revive my voiceover career. Part of that has been the fulfillment of a longstanding dream: Narrating fiction. You can check out some of my work at the very cool Horror Oasis. I hooked up with the oasis because I like their mission to ensure all voices are heard and because I thought I could add value with my voice skills. I'm stoked about it and hopeful this project keeps growing. 

I'm still writing. I've accepted that I'll never sell much, but I keep trying. As of this writing, I have 10 weirdos out, trying to make their way in the world. knock wood and cross fingers for me, willya?

Til next time,

@nicktionary19

Grooming

So I shaved. First time in over a year I've seen my upper lip.

I look 30% more alive.

Strange how I struggled with this choice. I liked my mustache but I was tired of it. I grew tired of the extra minutes required to tame it every day. I grew tired of food staying in it rent-free. However I enjoyed the notoriety that came with a big, ridiculous mustache. 

Here is the mustache in question:

It is grand, no?

Unfortunately, this is more how it usually looked:

this does not please me.

But I struggled with the identity that would be lost with it. I had not only become attached to it, I had equated it with myself. Once gone, it would take another year to grow back. I wasn't sure I could hack it. 

Last week, I was late to work twice because of extra time needed just to make the goddamn mustache symmetrical. 

So I cut it off in the middle of the night after it woke me by tickling my nose. 

And you know what? I'm still me. 

And you know what else? Only two people seem to have noticed.

Long story short: Nobody cares. Do what you want. Be you.