Kevin Strange's Blog: Strange Sayings - Posts Tagged "strangehouse-books"
New interview
Hey Gang! Check out this brand new interview I did with Mike over at (Re)Searchmytrash.com!
http://www.searchmytrash.com/cgi-bin/...
http://www.searchmytrash.com/cgi-bin/...
Being a prolific Artist
I'm not sure when being prolific became a goal for me. Growing up, even after high school when I first fell in love with cinema while managing a chain of porn shops, I never paid attention to the fact that some of those filmmakers had made dozens of films over long decades.
Sometimes my partner, D.F. Noble, jokes about writing some shitty young adult novel so we can retire.
I have no interest in retiring.
So when did that become a thing for me? When did the idea of creating continuously until my body breaks down and prevents me from creating anymore come about?
I'd been aware of Stephen King's long career. Of Woody Allen's insane work rate. Of Bob Dylan. But none of that meant anything to me until I sat down and wrote my first script.
I hated it.
I sucked. I felt like a kid trying to draw a full color comic with crayons. So I bought a bunch of books on writing. I learned what everybody learns. To be good at writing, you have to write. A lot. All the time. And you have to read. Everything. So I wrote another short film script and actually produced a short film. Hated it. So I made another. Sucked, but not as bad. So I wrote a feature film script. God awful.
As of today, I've written and directed nearly 20 short films. I've written and directed 5 feature length films with another half-dozen film scripts that remain un-produced. I've written a short story collection, three novellas and two novels. And I still learn every single time I sit down at my computer and start a new story.
My friends who grew up with me --the blue collar, small town folk who think people like me are just stubborn idiots who won't grow up and get a real job-- slowly started to notice there was something special going on when month after month, year after year, I was still churning this shit out.
I've never had writer's block. My biggest enemy is staying focused on one project to completion before the next movie or book jams its way into my brain and takes over my focus. And I had no forethought or intention of creating in this way.
I know filmmakers who are still selling a movie they'd made five or six years prior. I know authors who wrote one book, one time, and that was it. They were done. That's crazy to me. Maybe it's about self doubt. The idea that I still haven't made “The Movie” or written “The Novel” that defines me as an artist, that will live on beyond my natural lifetime. Maybe these folks have and did.
But I don't think that's the case.
I think George Carlin wrote a new comedy album every year because he was always endlessly trying to find new ways to communicate his ideas to people. The whole notion of quitting any form of work once you've acquired a certain amount of money is a nasty idea to me. It's loathsome, it's the product of lazy minds, or of people who choose to do work they hate, just for a paycheck.
Carlin didn't need the money, Steve Jobs didn't need money at all when he was dying and still worked at Apple until three days before his death. Stephen King has famously sold the movie rights to his manuscripts for a dollar. That's not wealth motivation. That's a personal yearning for communication.
And somehow, completely unbeknownst to me, I possess it.
As I push forward through my third novel, I'm already outlining a fourth and fifth. I've already come up with a title to a new short story collection that may not see the light of day for another year. I'm bouncing ideas for new anthologies off my partners. I have unfinished business in my film making life that keeps me up at night. There are still scripts that beg me, deep into the long dark hours, to be shot and edited into real movies.
When does that stop? Does it ever? I hope not. I hope that overwhelming monetary success (should I ever be fortunate and lucky enough to see such a thing) doesn't kill the hunger inside me to create better, stronger art, faster and faster.
The list of prolific authors is endless. There's no way that, at 32 years old, I'll ever catch up to, or match the output of authors who've been at this for twenty years longer than me.
But I can work every day, every month, every year at becoming a better author, at putting out more books than the previous year, of topping my fastest novel turnaround. These things drive me, they excite me, and they exist inside me without my permission.
Being prolific isn't a choice. You either are, or you are not.
Sometimes my partner, D.F. Noble, jokes about writing some shitty young adult novel so we can retire.
I have no interest in retiring.
So when did that become a thing for me? When did the idea of creating continuously until my body breaks down and prevents me from creating anymore come about?
I'd been aware of Stephen King's long career. Of Woody Allen's insane work rate. Of Bob Dylan. But none of that meant anything to me until I sat down and wrote my first script.
I hated it.
I sucked. I felt like a kid trying to draw a full color comic with crayons. So I bought a bunch of books on writing. I learned what everybody learns. To be good at writing, you have to write. A lot. All the time. And you have to read. Everything. So I wrote another short film script and actually produced a short film. Hated it. So I made another. Sucked, but not as bad. So I wrote a feature film script. God awful.
As of today, I've written and directed nearly 20 short films. I've written and directed 5 feature length films with another half-dozen film scripts that remain un-produced. I've written a short story collection, three novellas and two novels. And I still learn every single time I sit down at my computer and start a new story.
My friends who grew up with me --the blue collar, small town folk who think people like me are just stubborn idiots who won't grow up and get a real job-- slowly started to notice there was something special going on when month after month, year after year, I was still churning this shit out.
I've never had writer's block. My biggest enemy is staying focused on one project to completion before the next movie or book jams its way into my brain and takes over my focus. And I had no forethought or intention of creating in this way.
I know filmmakers who are still selling a movie they'd made five or six years prior. I know authors who wrote one book, one time, and that was it. They were done. That's crazy to me. Maybe it's about self doubt. The idea that I still haven't made “The Movie” or written “The Novel” that defines me as an artist, that will live on beyond my natural lifetime. Maybe these folks have and did.
But I don't think that's the case.
I think George Carlin wrote a new comedy album every year because he was always endlessly trying to find new ways to communicate his ideas to people. The whole notion of quitting any form of work once you've acquired a certain amount of money is a nasty idea to me. It's loathsome, it's the product of lazy minds, or of people who choose to do work they hate, just for a paycheck.
Carlin didn't need the money, Steve Jobs didn't need money at all when he was dying and still worked at Apple until three days before his death. Stephen King has famously sold the movie rights to his manuscripts for a dollar. That's not wealth motivation. That's a personal yearning for communication.
And somehow, completely unbeknownst to me, I possess it.
As I push forward through my third novel, I'm already outlining a fourth and fifth. I've already come up with a title to a new short story collection that may not see the light of day for another year. I'm bouncing ideas for new anthologies off my partners. I have unfinished business in my film making life that keeps me up at night. There are still scripts that beg me, deep into the long dark hours, to be shot and edited into real movies.
When does that stop? Does it ever? I hope not. I hope that overwhelming monetary success (should I ever be fortunate and lucky enough to see such a thing) doesn't kill the hunger inside me to create better, stronger art, faster and faster.
The list of prolific authors is endless. There's no way that, at 32 years old, I'll ever catch up to, or match the output of authors who've been at this for twenty years longer than me.
But I can work every day, every month, every year at becoming a better author, at putting out more books than the previous year, of topping my fastest novel turnaround. These things drive me, they excite me, and they exist inside me without my permission.
Being prolific isn't a choice. You either are, or you are not.
My name is Kevin Strange
My name is Kevin Strange. I'm a director, a producer, an actor, a film editor, an author. I've written, produced, directed, and starred in more than a dozen feature and short films. I created a production company in 2005 called Hack Movies with no money, no skill and no professional help whatsoever. By 2010 I produced and directed 7 films that saw DVD release, only one of which was ever picked up by a legitimate distributor in a very limited release.
In 2012 I created a publishing house called Strangehouse Books with no money, no skill and no professional help. By 2013 I've overseen the publication of 6 full length books with another dozen to be released before the end of the year. This includes the editing, formatting, typesetting and graphic presentation including the layout, design and commission of art for each and every book.
Not a single one of these movies or books was created to exploit a trend, cash in on a fad, or enter a hot market. In nearly a decade of devoting the majority of my time and effort to the creation of art, I have never ever made a single dime.
I've felt like a god, usually right after a project has been completed and all of the pieces have fallen into place, when my vision has finally come to fruition and is ready for its audience to see it. I've had moments of crushing doubt that made me want to quit and regret every second I've spent doing this. I've felt like nothing, zero, a loser, a bum, an overgrown child, a helpless man-baby. Usually after a project has been released and fails to capture the attention of the millions of fans I know it deserves.
I'm a 5 time college dropout. On paper I don't have the skills to even operate a forklift. I work jobs far below my intellectual level, am managed by kids barely more than half my age without a tenth of the management and organizational skills I possess. I've never once made over 30 thousand dollars in a single year, sometimes not even that much in two years. I've lived with family and friends until they resented me. I've lost more friends than I can count due to my controlling nature and unwillingness to choose human loyalty over my art.
My parents either don't know or don't care what I do with my life. My high school friends think I'm a child who refuses to grow up. I don't own a home. I've never owned a car younger than 15 years old. I'm 33 years old this year and if I get sick with something serious like cancer, I will die. Guaranteed. The number of people in my life that would actually be at my side if this were to happen are few enough in number to count on one hand. Truth be told, that number might be zero.
Yet, I have never compromised my artistic vision, no matter how many people pressured me to do so. I have no children, But I have no debt. Not a single solitary penny of it. I will never be a commercial artist. I will probably never have any money. I will almost assuredly die scared and alone. But every single one my creations was brought into this world with no filter, no compromise, no fear of social stigma. Love them or hate them, they are REAL art, the way art should be produced.
Should I never make another film or write another book, I've left my mark on this world. My identity, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my passion, my lust, all lay within the contents of those dvds and between the pages of those books for as long as there are content devices to view movies and read books. I will live on and maybe one day enough people will see my movies and read my books that all of this will have been worth it. Maybe enough already have. What's the difference between affecting and inspiring one person or one million people. Is there a difference?
Even if I make another dozen movies and write another 50 books, I will never change my process, filter my beliefs, change my attitude or bow down to a corporate master for the sake of trends or fads. Money, fame, professional accolades, nor societal pressure will ever take precedence over the pure, unfiltered creation of my art, no matter the consequence. My name is Kevin Strange, and this is my life.
New book: VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN
Gang! Kevin Strange's newest book, VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN just went LIVE on Kindle! The sexy paperback edition will be available no later than next week, but for now, you can snag this sucker in all its digital glory for just $2.99 at Amazon.com!
Check out the details below:
"Guts is a bad motherfucker in a bad, bad world. The government nuked the sky seven years ago to combat a super fast spreading virus that turns humans into blood thirsty, ravenous killing machines that look more like giant, mutated bats than people. The new sky kills these "vampires" instantly, but at a cost. The entire planet is slammed with mega-high doses of radiation every time the sun comes up, completely changing life on earth as we know it, and completely decimating what little civilization there is left.
In Nuke Town, Guts wakes up in a strange motel with no memory of how he got there. A brother and sister duo are the only two humans in sight, but are they friend or foe? As the paranoia sets in, and Guts begins to understand the true implications of a nest of sophisticated, mutated vampires, he must use all the cunning and skills that his years in the wasteland have taught him if he hopes to survive the horror that awaits him in ... VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKETOWN!"
NUKE TOWN is Ultra Gore Porn for your Brain Balls, gang. Grab your copy now and see what all the fuss is about! Click here to buy VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN!
Check out the details below:
"Guts is a bad motherfucker in a bad, bad world. The government nuked the sky seven years ago to combat a super fast spreading virus that turns humans into blood thirsty, ravenous killing machines that look more like giant, mutated bats than people. The new sky kills these "vampires" instantly, but at a cost. The entire planet is slammed with mega-high doses of radiation every time the sun comes up, completely changing life on earth as we know it, and completely decimating what little civilization there is left.
In Nuke Town, Guts wakes up in a strange motel with no memory of how he got there. A brother and sister duo are the only two humans in sight, but are they friend or foe? As the paranoia sets in, and Guts begins to understand the true implications of a nest of sophisticated, mutated vampires, he must use all the cunning and skills that his years in the wasteland have taught him if he hopes to survive the horror that awaits him in ... VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKETOWN!"
NUKE TOWN is Ultra Gore Porn for your Brain Balls, gang. Grab your copy now and see what all the fuss is about! Click here to buy VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN!
Why Bizarro?
A lot of authors are obsessed with realism, even when they write fiction, which is, essentially, the art of making shit up for a living. Many authors do meticulous research or draw inspiration from backgrounds that allow them to write socially or scientifically accurate fiction.
My question? Why the fuck are you trying to be accurate about telling made up stories? Because your readers demand that a book about the FBI be as true to the real FBI as possible? Ok, that's fair, I guess. But why don't those readers just read true crime magazines or the newspaper? They are, after all, going in to this thing understanding that the story they're about to read is completely fictional, totally made up. A big ole lie.
Cult author Chuck Palahniuk makes a living describing unusual jobs or hobbies in meticulous detail. He spends more time researching for his books than actually writing them.
Why?
Why not make shit up, since, you know, you're already making shit up. Who gives a shit if there REALLY was a cult that employed all of their members as housekeepers? I certainly don't give a shit, and would never base my enjoyment of entertainment on the historical accuracy of housekeeping.
Telling me about some obscure explosion in Russia that ACTUALLY HAPPENED, MAN! Isn't going to sway me one way or the other about your Russian alien 6 book saga. Either it's going to be cool or it's going to be a piece of shit. The anecdote about the real explosion is trivial at best, and at worst leaves me wondering why you chose to take a fact and turn it into bullshit in your book. Why not write an essay about the actual events if they intrigued you so much?
Let's not even get started on the ridiculous scientific accuracy of something like Star Trek or someone like Isaac Asimov.
That's why I love Bizarro. In Bizarro fiction, authors who make shit up for a living, reaaallly fucking make shit up for a living. Almost all Bizarro fiction takes place in some weird post apocalyptic world or alternate universe where nobody gives a shit about its plausibility or the accuracy of its inhabitants' physiology. Everything from the environment to the characters to the plots have a type of hyper creativity that makes Tom Clancy's stringent adherence to realistic gun play seem almost satirically obnoxious.
Seriously, I want to put 7 bullets from a 6 shot revolver in my brain pan every time I hear someone complain about reloading guns on THE WALKING DEAD. It's a TV show about zombies! You're willing to accept the living dead, but not that a character may have reloaded his weapon OFF SCREEN???
Fuck that shit. Give me Carlton Mellick's TUMOR FRUIT featuring a planet called Barack with acid oceans and homicidal aliens, or MP Johnson's floating psychic ham in PORK KNUCKLES MALLONE.
With Bizarro, I can make up a giant Robot Barack Obama to fight a giant zombie made of zombies built by a guy from the future but piloted by his present self who doesn't have a clue how to operate it. With Bizarro I can create a biological virtual reality using the hallucination causing blood of pig-frogs used by a nest of nuclear mutated vampires. I don't need to have seen an obscure newspaper article about frogs raining from the sky for that shit to be cool.
Why Bizarro? Because with Bizarro, my readers have no expectation that I'll limit myself to what is scientifically possible on Earth, or that my story will even take place on Earth, or anything remotely resembling Earth.
Why Bizarro? Because fuck reality. I see reality every time I step outside my door or turn on the evening news. Don't give me half-assed fiction. I like my asses big and full. Give me full assed fiction. Give me Bizarro.
My question? Why the fuck are you trying to be accurate about telling made up stories? Because your readers demand that a book about the FBI be as true to the real FBI as possible? Ok, that's fair, I guess. But why don't those readers just read true crime magazines or the newspaper? They are, after all, going in to this thing understanding that the story they're about to read is completely fictional, totally made up. A big ole lie.
Cult author Chuck Palahniuk makes a living describing unusual jobs or hobbies in meticulous detail. He spends more time researching for his books than actually writing them.
Why?
Why not make shit up, since, you know, you're already making shit up. Who gives a shit if there REALLY was a cult that employed all of their members as housekeepers? I certainly don't give a shit, and would never base my enjoyment of entertainment on the historical accuracy of housekeeping.
Telling me about some obscure explosion in Russia that ACTUALLY HAPPENED, MAN! Isn't going to sway me one way or the other about your Russian alien 6 book saga. Either it's going to be cool or it's going to be a piece of shit. The anecdote about the real explosion is trivial at best, and at worst leaves me wondering why you chose to take a fact and turn it into bullshit in your book. Why not write an essay about the actual events if they intrigued you so much?
Let's not even get started on the ridiculous scientific accuracy of something like Star Trek or someone like Isaac Asimov.
That's why I love Bizarro. In Bizarro fiction, authors who make shit up for a living, reaaallly fucking make shit up for a living. Almost all Bizarro fiction takes place in some weird post apocalyptic world or alternate universe where nobody gives a shit about its plausibility or the accuracy of its inhabitants' physiology. Everything from the environment to the characters to the plots have a type of hyper creativity that makes Tom Clancy's stringent adherence to realistic gun play seem almost satirically obnoxious.
Seriously, I want to put 7 bullets from a 6 shot revolver in my brain pan every time I hear someone complain about reloading guns on THE WALKING DEAD. It's a TV show about zombies! You're willing to accept the living dead, but not that a character may have reloaded his weapon OFF SCREEN???
Fuck that shit. Give me Carlton Mellick's TUMOR FRUIT featuring a planet called Barack with acid oceans and homicidal aliens, or MP Johnson's floating psychic ham in PORK KNUCKLES MALLONE.
With Bizarro, I can make up a giant Robot Barack Obama to fight a giant zombie made of zombies built by a guy from the future but piloted by his present self who doesn't have a clue how to operate it. With Bizarro I can create a biological virtual reality using the hallucination causing blood of pig-frogs used by a nest of nuclear mutated vampires. I don't need to have seen an obscure newspaper article about frogs raining from the sky for that shit to be cool.
Why Bizarro? Because with Bizarro, my readers have no expectation that I'll limit myself to what is scientifically possible on Earth, or that my story will even take place on Earth, or anything remotely resembling Earth.
Why Bizarro? Because fuck reality. I see reality every time I step outside my door or turn on the evening news. Don't give me half-assed fiction. I like my asses big and full. Give me full assed fiction. Give me Bizarro.
New Kevin Strange collection! $2.99 for one week only!
Kevin Strange's new short story collection THE LAST GIG ON PLANET EARTH AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES hits Amazon Kindle (and paperback) today! For one week only, this collection of short horrific fiction is on sale for just $2.99. After this week, the Kindle price goes up to $4.95. Don't miss out on this deal!
Renowned Lovecraftian author Jeffrey Thomas said this about the title story: "Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and tentacles. Kevin Strange's "The Last Gig on Planet Earth" is a highly entertaining Cthulhu Mythos tale, liberally spiced with humor and gore, and overlaid with a profoundly effective aura of encroaching doom. I am impressed! I am wanting more Strangeness!" -- Jeffrey Thomas, author of Monstrocity
Get this mind blowing collection right here: http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Earth-St...
Renowned Lovecraftian author Jeffrey Thomas said this about the title story: "Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and tentacles. Kevin Strange's "The Last Gig on Planet Earth" is a highly entertaining Cthulhu Mythos tale, liberally spiced with humor and gore, and overlaid with a profoundly effective aura of encroaching doom. I am impressed! I am wanting more Strangeness!" -- Jeffrey Thomas, author of Monstrocity
Get this mind blowing collection right here: http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Earth-St...
The Humans under the Bed by Kevin Strange Part 1
Gang! It's Halloween and shit! I wanted to do something special for you guys, even though we don't have a new giveaway coming up for quite a while. So, remember what I did with MCHUMANS before the release of STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT? I serialized it here on Goodreads in a series of blogs. Well, I'm going to do that again!
This time, I'm going to share with you guys, for the first time ANYWHERE, a brand new novelette from Kevin Strange called THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED, from the upcoming STRANGE FUCKING STORIES ANTHOLOGY!
Synopsis: 500 years after monsters wiped out the human race, a quiet calm has settled over the population of nightmare creatures that go bump in the night. They work their monster jobs, raise their monster families, tend to their monster homes, and generally enjoy the peace and prosperity of life without their sworn enemies, the human scourge, that so blighted the land for so many centuries.
In fact, the only inhabitants of this new monster world that even still speak of human kind are the children who share hushed secret fairy tales about evil humans coming up from underneath their beds, pulling the little monsters to their deaths. But of course these are just stories. Of course all the awful humans are dead. Or are they?
I can best describe THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED as Monsters, Inc. meets Full Metal Jacket directed by David Cronenberg.
Now, I give you part 1!
------------------------------------
Dexantheon opened his eye. Had he heard what he thought he heard, or was it another nightmare? They'd become so frequent, the terrible dreams of home invasion and violence upon his family, that he didn't immediately jump out of bed when he heard his son's scream.
It wasn't until he heard it again that he leaped from beneath his warm blankets and covered the distance between bedrooms in three loping steps. He swung the door open. Not letting the panic he felt in his wide chest seep into his voice, he said, “Dexy, Willex? You kids OK in here?”
His twins, Dex Jr. and his little girl Willex shared the room. They both had beds situated side by side against the far wall, but inevitably Dexantheon would find Willex curled up next to her brother each morning, snuggled in the crook of his arm.
Now her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. Dexantheon took a cautious step into the room. “Kids?”
Dexy's bed was occupied. A large lump under the covers rose and fell, as though breathing. “You guys alright?” he asked; this time his anxiousness betrayed him and his voice squeaked a bit. Another step and he was beside the bed. Watching the lump, he carefully took hold of the corner of the blanket and held his breath. When he pulled it back, he had to suppress a cry.
Under the covers were two pint-sized little creatures staring up at him. One was green with reflective, aqua-colored scales, a huge unblinking red eye taking up three quarters of a face already more than half of the ugly little beast's entire body. It was shaped like a Twinkie stood on end: one elongated tube with thin, long arms and feet ending in webbed claws. Razor-sharp teeth lined a mouth that ran nearly all the way around the horrific creature's head, and a long blue tongue wagged out from one side, stretching half the length of its whole body.
The other thing resembled a grotesque fly if it'd been cooked in a microwave and left out in the heat of the sun to spoil. The thing was bluish gray in color, like what a potato might look like if left out in a dark alley in the winter. Its head was all eyes; two big bulbous things with thousands of facets, all red and wet. Four antennae sprouted up from the tiny crown of its head; a head not even half the size of its huge eyes. Its body shape was vaguely humanoid, with three sets of thin arms and one pair of skinny legs, each ending in a lobster-like claw. Two pairs of transparent, slimy wings jutted up off its back and hung down, draping over its thin, emaciated body like a see-through night gown. But its skin was the worst part: it was made up of tiny, pinhead-sized versions of itself. Like the itty bitty things had replicated and multiplied until they had become one larger version of themselves. They were constantly moving, shifting, trading places as they linked together, claw to claw and wing to wing, in tens of thousands of little connections.
But Dexantheon didn't have to suppress a cry because there were little monsters in his child's bed. His children were the monsters in Dexy's bed. And he was a monster, too. A full-grown version of little Dexy—huge and scaly and just as awful looking as his son—and Willex was the spitting image of her mother. No, Dexantheon was startled because there was supposed to be a third monster in the room with his kids: their friend Buxtak, son of Buxtak the Horrible. Buxtak the Titan, the World Eater, the Invincible, The Scourge of the South and Defiler of Nations. He was also Dexantheon's best friend who'd died in the final battle with the humans.
Buxtak Jr. was staying the night, as he did every other weekend while the children's mothers worked night patrol around the monster city. If something happened to her little Buxy, his nine-headed serpentine mother would eat Dexantheon for breakfast...
“What's wrong, Dex? Where's Buxtak?”
Little Dexy looked up at his father, sniveling. His gigantic eye was moist; a tear threatened to drop down onto his enormous blue tongue. “D-daddy. Willex was talking about the humans again! Th-the humans under the bed!”
Dexantheon heard the toilet flush, and the steady clomp, clomp, clomp of Buxtak's fat feet stomping down the hallway. The yellow monster—no older than his children, but nearly as tall as the towering Dexantheon himself—awkwardly waddled into the room.
“Had to pee,” the hulking monster said, his high-pitched voice betraying his youth. He was round and thick with two sets of stubby, antler-like hands, ending in even stubbier fingers tipped with reptile-like eyeballs (just like his mother's) sticking out of the top of a head that never really ended in a neck, just kept rolling on down his bulbous body. His legs were little more than ankles protruding from the base of his egg-shaped body, ending in two enormous feet longer than Dexy and Willex's entire bodies.
Buxtak flopped down on the floor next to Dexy's bed, where a single pillow lay. He was round and pudgy enough already—he didn't need to sleep in a bed to be comfortable.
Dexantheon sighed with relief and sat down on the edge of Dexy's bed, causing the front end to raise up from his hefty bulk. He stroked Dexy on top of his scaly little head. Dexy the fraidy cat. His sister was always tormenting him with stories of the humans.
“There are no such things as humans, Dex. Haven’t been for a long time,” Dexantheon tried to say in the calm, soothing voice that always quieted his son's fears. This time, however, the huge monster was not able to control his voice. It warbled when he mentioned the humans. He hadn't personally seen one in over 500 years.
Not since the Great Purge, when humanity's single most awesome achievement, a self-aware super computer, dubbed itself the Overmind and called up mankind's greatest nightmares with its flesh forges, waging an endless genocidal war on its creators.
Dexantheon was born in one of those forges, fought in that war, personally murdered countless thousands of human beings. He was there when the last living person was skinned alive, quartered, and fed to the Overmind itself.
But lately, there had been talk, rumors and murmurs from the night patrols that weird looking things had been spotted in the hills and mountain ranges just outside the monster city, horrible creatures that looked like hairless monkeys warped and fused with steel and wires. Human technology. The kind of technology that hadn't existed since the Overmind grew itself a nightmarish flesh body and covered the entire world with great, creeping madness.
The monster city was one grand, cyclopian mound of writhing flesh. Tendrils and clawed things, bat wing-like drapes of semi-transparent flesh and doorways laced with fang-filled mouths made up the houses and buildings; phosphorescent giant eyeballs atop slimy, batracian stalks acted as streetlamps; and rivers of bright green slime served as roads, all weaving together into ambulatory mazes of Stygian horror the monsters called home, overseen by the titanic flesh mountain of gibbering, oozing, twitching horror known as the Overmind. Nothing of human civilization remained, and hadn't been seen in half a century.
“Yes huh,” Dexy said, defiantly sitting up in his bed. “Willex said she hears them whispering under her bed at night! Tell him, Wil!”
The little fly creature next to him blushed. She looked embarrassed. She stammered through her explanation. “I-I hear things, Daddy. They... they talk about us when they think we're asleep.”
Buxtak gulped and darted his finger-eyes around the room, as if scanning for humans. “I-is that true, sir? M-maybe I should sleep on the couch...”
Dexantheon sat stunned. His children stared up at him, waiting for an answer, for him to calm their fears and tell them everything would be OK.
He stood slowly and sighed. “Maybe,” he said, scratching his scaly chin with a purple talon. “Maybe you're right. Maybe there are humans under your bed.”
Dexy began to whine. He clutched Willex, another tear forming in his huge eyeball.
Suddenly Dexantheon shot his arm out and grabbed the foot of the bed, lifting it up off the floor, nearly touching it to the ceiling. “Hello?!” he yelled dramatically. “Any humans under there?!” He held his free hand up to the hole in the side of his head that served as an ear. “What's that? You're gonna eat my kids when I go to bed? Don't do that! They're good kids!”
Now all three children were laughing. The lumbering monster dropped the bed, causing his children to pop up into the air before landing back on the mattress made of coiled tentacles. He darted across the room and lifted the other bed. “Any humans under here?!?”
“Stop it, Dad!” Dexy said, his tears now caused by laughter.
Dexantheon charged across the room and swung open the closet door. “Is this where all you humans are hiding?!?”
Now the children's laughter filled the room. Even Buxtak was rolling around on the ground pretending to talk to humans under the bed. Dexantheon smiled. He tucked the children back into bed, kissed them each on the heads, and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he crawled back into his own bed, the unease he'd felt earlier almost seemed silly. He turned off the light and laid in the dark for several minutes before turning the bedside lamp on. He peeked under his bed just once to make sure.
***
What woke Dexantheon next was not just the screams of his children; it was the screams of his children followed by an explosion that shook the foundation of their flesh home. Baring his gigantic fangs and flexing his foot-long talons, he galloped the short distance to the kids' room on all fours, ready to tear anything harming his offspring to pieces.
Putrid black smoke hit him as he crossed the threshold into Dexy and Willex's room. The smell of charred flesh assaulted his nostrils. He hoped to the Overmind that it was not the flesh of his children. As the smoke cleared and Dexantheon's eye adjusted to the thick darkness, he saw them. Not his children. There was no sign of the young monsters.
Humans. A pair of them.
They were nothing like he remembered them. The soft-bodied creatures that he'd once dismembered and eaten in scores had changed in the five hundred years since he last laid eyes on them. There were two of them standing in front of the ragged, gaping, bleeding hole that should have been his son's bed.
Each one was different, but they shared several unmistakable similarities. Their skin was pale. Pale almost to the point of translucency, having never been exposed to the sun. Blue veins coursed through their mangled flesh, and Dexantheon could almost make out the layers of muscle under their skin. Their heads were caged inside a series of steel bars bolted to the tops of their heads and at the bases of their shoulders. Their eyelids were pinned to their foreheads and cheeks, causing their mouths to pull open in hideous grins that were home to jagged metal serving as teeth.
Their torsos were naked, revealing more twisted metal modifications. There was some sort of circular contraption bolted to the center of their chests. Thick metal spokes radiated out from the circular thing across their chests onto their upper arms, digging trenches in the flesh, seemingly grafted to the bones of their arms. The spokes continued past a pair of steel elbow joints, down the forearms, ending in foot-long metal claws grafted directly onto the flesh of their hands. Similar modifications crisscrossed their legs and feet.
It only took Dexantheon a moment to find out what purpose these modifications served. The circular things on their chests spun, creating a high-pitched hum as it sent gyroscopic energy through their technologically-enhanced limbs. This caused their entire bodies to vibrate and shake. Dexantheon was convinced they were about to shake themselves to pieces, when they struck.
They were faster than any human Dexatheon ever fought during the Purge. Stronger, too—tenfold. The two humans screamed, their voices warbled from the motion of all the metal fused to their bodies. They lunged at him as several more crawled out from the smoking pit in the middle of little Dex's room.
Both humans hit him at the same time, one on each of his tree trunk-sized arms. They wasted no time, slashing, biting and tearing at his nearly indestructible scaled hide. To his surprise, they'd already pierced his skin in the few seconds they'd been wailing away at him, a feat no human had ever achieved in hand to hand combat in the thousands of battles he'd fought during the Purge.
Dexantheon quickly smashed his arms together, squashing the first two humans like bugs. Their shattered and broken limbs hung uselessly in their steel cages, dripping blood and gore as the hulking monster wadded them up and used the whole mess like a baseball bat as the next wave crawled up out of the smoking hole in the floor, warbled their war cry, and charged him.
Three of the metal/flesh hybrids ran at him. Two were females with symbols carved into the sides of their heads, and the other a black-bearded male, huge in his own right. With his modifications, he stood nearly to the top of Dexanthon's chest. The monster swung his corpse-bat, making quick work of the first female, giving the second a chance to leap up onto his arm and scuttle onto his back while the male stepped forward, lifting his right arm, which had been fused with some kind of rectangular mace. Using his left arm as a counterbalance, the male human swung his arm weapon at Dexantheon, forcing the monster to parry using his corpse bat. The force of the blow buckled the steel beams and sent most of the wadded up flesh flying across the room.
With his weapon useless, Dexantheon reached back and pawed at the female, who was using some kind of a blowtorch attached to her head-cage to burn the top of the monster's head. Having been forged in flame and nightmare, the blowtorch did little damage, aside from giving the huge beast a slight headache. Dexantheon's talon hooked the torch's wiring and he flung the female off him like a booger. She landed half-in, half-out of the window in Dexy's room. As she struggled to crawl back into the house, the window's razor-sharp fangs snapped shut, severing the female in half at the waist. She twitched and bled, hanging from the wall, dying slowly.
Now face to face with the bearded human, Dexantheon threw a punch. To his surprise, the big man grabbed it mid-swing. The human swung his mace again, forcing Dexantheon to grab it with his free hand. Now deadlocked, the two muscled giants pushed and pulled on each other in a virtual stalemate; that is, until Dexantheon's long tongue split in two, revealing a two-pronged appendage hidden inside. The appendage struck out like a snake, embedding itself into the bearded human's forehead, causing him to instantly go limp. His mouth hung open and his stretched-open eyes glazed over.
Dexantheon was inside of his mind. The monster saw everything the big man saw: saw his fears, saw his memories, saw his whole short, violent life. And as another score of vibrating, screaming humans flooded out from the hole in his son's floor like a plague of locusts, Dexantheon saw the plan. The twisted, insane plot that these creatures had formed. The war they would now wage against the Overmind and his monster race.
And even as he beat, crushed, and smashed the biomechanical things with ease, he knew. After seeing inside the bearded man's brain, seeing what lay beneath him inside the catacombs underneath the monster city, Dexantheon knew...
…The humans would win the war.
***
Dexy was blind. The blast had knocked him unconscious. His ears rang so loudly, he couldn't hear himself crying. As he regained his wits, he felt an immense pressure on his chest. Finding he could still move his arms, he pushed and the pressure moved. The chaos in his little room came into focus as the pressure—his bed—fell from in front of his face, allowing him to see again.
What he saw was at least ten naked, vibrating, hairless monkeys, encased in a shiny material that he'd never seen before, attacking his daddy. Were these humans? The stories Willex had told him about the beings who once inhabited the Earth didn't describe the savage things crawling all over Big Dex—as his mommy called his daddy—at all.
Willex.
Panic set in as the small monster frantically searched through the rubble for his sister. He pulled a jagged piece of flooring away from the top of a pile and saw an arm partially concealed by more debris. Dexy redoubled his efforts, tossing aside the fragmented remains of his bedroom to fully uncover the limp body of his sister.
Lifting one last big hunk of bone that served as his floor, Dexy freed his sister from the mound of rubble. “Willex!” he screamed. His voice still sounded far off, but the ringing had begun to subside. Dexy began to hyperventilate. She wasn't moving. “Willex!” he screamed again, this time shaking her arm. The little fly-girl stirred, coughing.
Relief surged through the small cyclops monster.
“W-what's happening?”
“Humans!” Dexy said, almost excited by the invasion.
Willex's own eyes bulged. She peeked around the huge pile of rubble separating the little monsters from the battle raging next to their bedroom door.“We have to hide!” she said, pulling pieces of bone around them to conceal their location.
A huge hand shot out from the side of the rubble. Eyeballs on the tips of the fingers blinked dust away. Buxtak shook himself the rest of the way free. He smiled dumbly at the other two monsters. “Hey,” he said, oblivious to the events transpiring directly behind him.
“Don't worry,” Dexy said, smiling back. He pointed at his father. “Daddy will protect us!”
***
Click Here to read part 2
This time, I'm going to share with you guys, for the first time ANYWHERE, a brand new novelette from Kevin Strange called THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED, from the upcoming STRANGE FUCKING STORIES ANTHOLOGY!
Synopsis: 500 years after monsters wiped out the human race, a quiet calm has settled over the population of nightmare creatures that go bump in the night. They work their monster jobs, raise their monster families, tend to their monster homes, and generally enjoy the peace and prosperity of life without their sworn enemies, the human scourge, that so blighted the land for so many centuries.
In fact, the only inhabitants of this new monster world that even still speak of human kind are the children who share hushed secret fairy tales about evil humans coming up from underneath their beds, pulling the little monsters to their deaths. But of course these are just stories. Of course all the awful humans are dead. Or are they?
I can best describe THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED as Monsters, Inc. meets Full Metal Jacket directed by David Cronenberg.
Now, I give you part 1!
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Dexantheon opened his eye. Had he heard what he thought he heard, or was it another nightmare? They'd become so frequent, the terrible dreams of home invasion and violence upon his family, that he didn't immediately jump out of bed when he heard his son's scream.
It wasn't until he heard it again that he leaped from beneath his warm blankets and covered the distance between bedrooms in three loping steps. He swung the door open. Not letting the panic he felt in his wide chest seep into his voice, he said, “Dexy, Willex? You kids OK in here?”
His twins, Dex Jr. and his little girl Willex shared the room. They both had beds situated side by side against the far wall, but inevitably Dexantheon would find Willex curled up next to her brother each morning, snuggled in the crook of his arm.
Now her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. Dexantheon took a cautious step into the room. “Kids?”
Dexy's bed was occupied. A large lump under the covers rose and fell, as though breathing. “You guys alright?” he asked; this time his anxiousness betrayed him and his voice squeaked a bit. Another step and he was beside the bed. Watching the lump, he carefully took hold of the corner of the blanket and held his breath. When he pulled it back, he had to suppress a cry.
Under the covers were two pint-sized little creatures staring up at him. One was green with reflective, aqua-colored scales, a huge unblinking red eye taking up three quarters of a face already more than half of the ugly little beast's entire body. It was shaped like a Twinkie stood on end: one elongated tube with thin, long arms and feet ending in webbed claws. Razor-sharp teeth lined a mouth that ran nearly all the way around the horrific creature's head, and a long blue tongue wagged out from one side, stretching half the length of its whole body.
The other thing resembled a grotesque fly if it'd been cooked in a microwave and left out in the heat of the sun to spoil. The thing was bluish gray in color, like what a potato might look like if left out in a dark alley in the winter. Its head was all eyes; two big bulbous things with thousands of facets, all red and wet. Four antennae sprouted up from the tiny crown of its head; a head not even half the size of its huge eyes. Its body shape was vaguely humanoid, with three sets of thin arms and one pair of skinny legs, each ending in a lobster-like claw. Two pairs of transparent, slimy wings jutted up off its back and hung down, draping over its thin, emaciated body like a see-through night gown. But its skin was the worst part: it was made up of tiny, pinhead-sized versions of itself. Like the itty bitty things had replicated and multiplied until they had become one larger version of themselves. They were constantly moving, shifting, trading places as they linked together, claw to claw and wing to wing, in tens of thousands of little connections.
But Dexantheon didn't have to suppress a cry because there were little monsters in his child's bed. His children were the monsters in Dexy's bed. And he was a monster, too. A full-grown version of little Dexy—huge and scaly and just as awful looking as his son—and Willex was the spitting image of her mother. No, Dexantheon was startled because there was supposed to be a third monster in the room with his kids: their friend Buxtak, son of Buxtak the Horrible. Buxtak the Titan, the World Eater, the Invincible, The Scourge of the South and Defiler of Nations. He was also Dexantheon's best friend who'd died in the final battle with the humans.
Buxtak Jr. was staying the night, as he did every other weekend while the children's mothers worked night patrol around the monster city. If something happened to her little Buxy, his nine-headed serpentine mother would eat Dexantheon for breakfast...
“What's wrong, Dex? Where's Buxtak?”
Little Dexy looked up at his father, sniveling. His gigantic eye was moist; a tear threatened to drop down onto his enormous blue tongue. “D-daddy. Willex was talking about the humans again! Th-the humans under the bed!”
Dexantheon heard the toilet flush, and the steady clomp, clomp, clomp of Buxtak's fat feet stomping down the hallway. The yellow monster—no older than his children, but nearly as tall as the towering Dexantheon himself—awkwardly waddled into the room.
“Had to pee,” the hulking monster said, his high-pitched voice betraying his youth. He was round and thick with two sets of stubby, antler-like hands, ending in even stubbier fingers tipped with reptile-like eyeballs (just like his mother's) sticking out of the top of a head that never really ended in a neck, just kept rolling on down his bulbous body. His legs were little more than ankles protruding from the base of his egg-shaped body, ending in two enormous feet longer than Dexy and Willex's entire bodies.
Buxtak flopped down on the floor next to Dexy's bed, where a single pillow lay. He was round and pudgy enough already—he didn't need to sleep in a bed to be comfortable.
Dexantheon sighed with relief and sat down on the edge of Dexy's bed, causing the front end to raise up from his hefty bulk. He stroked Dexy on top of his scaly little head. Dexy the fraidy cat. His sister was always tormenting him with stories of the humans.
“There are no such things as humans, Dex. Haven’t been for a long time,” Dexantheon tried to say in the calm, soothing voice that always quieted his son's fears. This time, however, the huge monster was not able to control his voice. It warbled when he mentioned the humans. He hadn't personally seen one in over 500 years.
Not since the Great Purge, when humanity's single most awesome achievement, a self-aware super computer, dubbed itself the Overmind and called up mankind's greatest nightmares with its flesh forges, waging an endless genocidal war on its creators.
Dexantheon was born in one of those forges, fought in that war, personally murdered countless thousands of human beings. He was there when the last living person was skinned alive, quartered, and fed to the Overmind itself.
But lately, there had been talk, rumors and murmurs from the night patrols that weird looking things had been spotted in the hills and mountain ranges just outside the monster city, horrible creatures that looked like hairless monkeys warped and fused with steel and wires. Human technology. The kind of technology that hadn't existed since the Overmind grew itself a nightmarish flesh body and covered the entire world with great, creeping madness.
The monster city was one grand, cyclopian mound of writhing flesh. Tendrils and clawed things, bat wing-like drapes of semi-transparent flesh and doorways laced with fang-filled mouths made up the houses and buildings; phosphorescent giant eyeballs atop slimy, batracian stalks acted as streetlamps; and rivers of bright green slime served as roads, all weaving together into ambulatory mazes of Stygian horror the monsters called home, overseen by the titanic flesh mountain of gibbering, oozing, twitching horror known as the Overmind. Nothing of human civilization remained, and hadn't been seen in half a century.
“Yes huh,” Dexy said, defiantly sitting up in his bed. “Willex said she hears them whispering under her bed at night! Tell him, Wil!”
The little fly creature next to him blushed. She looked embarrassed. She stammered through her explanation. “I-I hear things, Daddy. They... they talk about us when they think we're asleep.”
Buxtak gulped and darted his finger-eyes around the room, as if scanning for humans. “I-is that true, sir? M-maybe I should sleep on the couch...”
Dexantheon sat stunned. His children stared up at him, waiting for an answer, for him to calm their fears and tell them everything would be OK.
He stood slowly and sighed. “Maybe,” he said, scratching his scaly chin with a purple talon. “Maybe you're right. Maybe there are humans under your bed.”
Dexy began to whine. He clutched Willex, another tear forming in his huge eyeball.
Suddenly Dexantheon shot his arm out and grabbed the foot of the bed, lifting it up off the floor, nearly touching it to the ceiling. “Hello?!” he yelled dramatically. “Any humans under there?!” He held his free hand up to the hole in the side of his head that served as an ear. “What's that? You're gonna eat my kids when I go to bed? Don't do that! They're good kids!”
Now all three children were laughing. The lumbering monster dropped the bed, causing his children to pop up into the air before landing back on the mattress made of coiled tentacles. He darted across the room and lifted the other bed. “Any humans under here?!?”
“Stop it, Dad!” Dexy said, his tears now caused by laughter.
Dexantheon charged across the room and swung open the closet door. “Is this where all you humans are hiding?!?”
Now the children's laughter filled the room. Even Buxtak was rolling around on the ground pretending to talk to humans under the bed. Dexantheon smiled. He tucked the children back into bed, kissed them each on the heads, and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he crawled back into his own bed, the unease he'd felt earlier almost seemed silly. He turned off the light and laid in the dark for several minutes before turning the bedside lamp on. He peeked under his bed just once to make sure.
***
What woke Dexantheon next was not just the screams of his children; it was the screams of his children followed by an explosion that shook the foundation of their flesh home. Baring his gigantic fangs and flexing his foot-long talons, he galloped the short distance to the kids' room on all fours, ready to tear anything harming his offspring to pieces.
Putrid black smoke hit him as he crossed the threshold into Dexy and Willex's room. The smell of charred flesh assaulted his nostrils. He hoped to the Overmind that it was not the flesh of his children. As the smoke cleared and Dexantheon's eye adjusted to the thick darkness, he saw them. Not his children. There was no sign of the young monsters.
Humans. A pair of them.
They were nothing like he remembered them. The soft-bodied creatures that he'd once dismembered and eaten in scores had changed in the five hundred years since he last laid eyes on them. There were two of them standing in front of the ragged, gaping, bleeding hole that should have been his son's bed.
Each one was different, but they shared several unmistakable similarities. Their skin was pale. Pale almost to the point of translucency, having never been exposed to the sun. Blue veins coursed through their mangled flesh, and Dexantheon could almost make out the layers of muscle under their skin. Their heads were caged inside a series of steel bars bolted to the tops of their heads and at the bases of their shoulders. Their eyelids were pinned to their foreheads and cheeks, causing their mouths to pull open in hideous grins that were home to jagged metal serving as teeth.
Their torsos were naked, revealing more twisted metal modifications. There was some sort of circular contraption bolted to the center of their chests. Thick metal spokes radiated out from the circular thing across their chests onto their upper arms, digging trenches in the flesh, seemingly grafted to the bones of their arms. The spokes continued past a pair of steel elbow joints, down the forearms, ending in foot-long metal claws grafted directly onto the flesh of their hands. Similar modifications crisscrossed their legs and feet.
It only took Dexantheon a moment to find out what purpose these modifications served. The circular things on their chests spun, creating a high-pitched hum as it sent gyroscopic energy through their technologically-enhanced limbs. This caused their entire bodies to vibrate and shake. Dexantheon was convinced they were about to shake themselves to pieces, when they struck.
They were faster than any human Dexatheon ever fought during the Purge. Stronger, too—tenfold. The two humans screamed, their voices warbled from the motion of all the metal fused to their bodies. They lunged at him as several more crawled out from the smoking pit in the middle of little Dex's room.
Both humans hit him at the same time, one on each of his tree trunk-sized arms. They wasted no time, slashing, biting and tearing at his nearly indestructible scaled hide. To his surprise, they'd already pierced his skin in the few seconds they'd been wailing away at him, a feat no human had ever achieved in hand to hand combat in the thousands of battles he'd fought during the Purge.
Dexantheon quickly smashed his arms together, squashing the first two humans like bugs. Their shattered and broken limbs hung uselessly in their steel cages, dripping blood and gore as the hulking monster wadded them up and used the whole mess like a baseball bat as the next wave crawled up out of the smoking hole in the floor, warbled their war cry, and charged him.
Three of the metal/flesh hybrids ran at him. Two were females with symbols carved into the sides of their heads, and the other a black-bearded male, huge in his own right. With his modifications, he stood nearly to the top of Dexanthon's chest. The monster swung his corpse-bat, making quick work of the first female, giving the second a chance to leap up onto his arm and scuttle onto his back while the male stepped forward, lifting his right arm, which had been fused with some kind of rectangular mace. Using his left arm as a counterbalance, the male human swung his arm weapon at Dexantheon, forcing the monster to parry using his corpse bat. The force of the blow buckled the steel beams and sent most of the wadded up flesh flying across the room.
With his weapon useless, Dexantheon reached back and pawed at the female, who was using some kind of a blowtorch attached to her head-cage to burn the top of the monster's head. Having been forged in flame and nightmare, the blowtorch did little damage, aside from giving the huge beast a slight headache. Dexantheon's talon hooked the torch's wiring and he flung the female off him like a booger. She landed half-in, half-out of the window in Dexy's room. As she struggled to crawl back into the house, the window's razor-sharp fangs snapped shut, severing the female in half at the waist. She twitched and bled, hanging from the wall, dying slowly.
Now face to face with the bearded human, Dexantheon threw a punch. To his surprise, the big man grabbed it mid-swing. The human swung his mace again, forcing Dexantheon to grab it with his free hand. Now deadlocked, the two muscled giants pushed and pulled on each other in a virtual stalemate; that is, until Dexantheon's long tongue split in two, revealing a two-pronged appendage hidden inside. The appendage struck out like a snake, embedding itself into the bearded human's forehead, causing him to instantly go limp. His mouth hung open and his stretched-open eyes glazed over.
Dexantheon was inside of his mind. The monster saw everything the big man saw: saw his fears, saw his memories, saw his whole short, violent life. And as another score of vibrating, screaming humans flooded out from the hole in his son's floor like a plague of locusts, Dexantheon saw the plan. The twisted, insane plot that these creatures had formed. The war they would now wage against the Overmind and his monster race.
And even as he beat, crushed, and smashed the biomechanical things with ease, he knew. After seeing inside the bearded man's brain, seeing what lay beneath him inside the catacombs underneath the monster city, Dexantheon knew...
…The humans would win the war.
***
Dexy was blind. The blast had knocked him unconscious. His ears rang so loudly, he couldn't hear himself crying. As he regained his wits, he felt an immense pressure on his chest. Finding he could still move his arms, he pushed and the pressure moved. The chaos in his little room came into focus as the pressure—his bed—fell from in front of his face, allowing him to see again.
What he saw was at least ten naked, vibrating, hairless monkeys, encased in a shiny material that he'd never seen before, attacking his daddy. Were these humans? The stories Willex had told him about the beings who once inhabited the Earth didn't describe the savage things crawling all over Big Dex—as his mommy called his daddy—at all.
Willex.
Panic set in as the small monster frantically searched through the rubble for his sister. He pulled a jagged piece of flooring away from the top of a pile and saw an arm partially concealed by more debris. Dexy redoubled his efforts, tossing aside the fragmented remains of his bedroom to fully uncover the limp body of his sister.
Lifting one last big hunk of bone that served as his floor, Dexy freed his sister from the mound of rubble. “Willex!” he screamed. His voice still sounded far off, but the ringing had begun to subside. Dexy began to hyperventilate. She wasn't moving. “Willex!” he screamed again, this time shaking her arm. The little fly-girl stirred, coughing.
Relief surged through the small cyclops monster.
“W-what's happening?”
“Humans!” Dexy said, almost excited by the invasion.
Willex's own eyes bulged. She peeked around the huge pile of rubble separating the little monsters from the battle raging next to their bedroom door.“We have to hide!” she said, pulling pieces of bone around them to conceal their location.
A huge hand shot out from the side of the rubble. Eyeballs on the tips of the fingers blinked dust away. Buxtak shook himself the rest of the way free. He smiled dumbly at the other two monsters. “Hey,” he said, oblivious to the events transpiring directly behind him.
“Don't worry,” Dexy said, smiling back. He pointed at his father. “Daddy will protect us!”
***
Click Here to read part 2
Is Kevin Strange "Bob Carl?"
Hack Movies and StrangeHouse Books mastermind Kevin Strange addresses recent rumors that he is the alter-ego of the Facebook troll account “Bob Carl” who has been giving the bizarro fiction writing community trouble:
https://www.kevinthestrange.com/is-ke...
https://www.kevinthestrange.com/is-ke...
Strange Sayings
Pontifications of one Kevin Strange, cult film director come Hardcore-Bizarro author.
- Kevin Strange's profile
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