C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 22

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Tundra

Book Spotlight

So, I’m not going to try and write something myself for this prompt, but I am going to highlight other books by indigenous authors set in this environment! I’ve got a thing for threes, so I’m going to highlight three books here.

For Younger Readers

Tales from the Tundra: A Collection of Inuit Stories by Ibi Kaslik – review here.

For Older Readers

Unikkaaqtuat: An Introduction to Inuit Myths and Legends – English version

Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories – get it here. This one was a Romancing the Gothic Book Club read!

“Taaqtumi” is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark”―and these spine-tingling horror stories by Northern writers show just how dangerous darkness can be. A family clinging to survival out on the tundra after a vicious zombie virus. A door that beckons, waiting to unleash the terror behind it. A post-apocalyptic community in the far North where things aren’t quite what they seem. With chilling tales from award-winning authors Richard Van Camp, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Aviaq Johnston, and others, this collection will thrill and entertain even the most seasoned horror fan.

Interview with Suzan Palumbo ~ Skin Thief coming Oct 2023

Listen to the episodePreorder Skin ThiefBio

Suzan Palumbo is a Nebula finalist, active member of the HWA, Co Administrator of the Ignyte Awards and a member of the Hugo nominated FIYAHCON team. She is also a former Associate Editor of  “Shimmer” magazine.

Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection “Skin Thief: Stories” will be published by Neon Hemlock in Fall 2023.

Her novella “Countess” will be published by ECW Press in spring 2024.

Her writing has been published or is forth coming in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins and other venues. She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and tweets at @sillysyntax. When she isn’t writing, she can be found sketching, listening to new wave or wandering her local misty forests. 

Coming in Oct 2023 from Neon Hemlock PressInterview Transcript: Introduction

CMR: Hello! Welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and I’ve got Suzan Palumbo with me for this episode. And, Suzan, would you like to introduce yourself?

SP: Hi, I’m Suzan Palumbo, I am a dark fantasy and horror writer, though next year I have a space opera coming out, to throw a wrench in there. I’m originally from Trinidad and Tobago, I was born there, and I emigrated with my parents to Canada.

I co-founded the IGNYTE Awards with L. D. Lewis; I am an editor; I will be editing an issue of Strange Horizons this year, the Caribbean issue that comes out in October.

I like to write. I like to read. I love horror. I love everything Gothic. I love fashion, and I love plants.

CMR: That’s amazing. Thank you for that. I’m really excited for your Skin Thief anthology that’s coming out soon as well, and the cover looks amazing. So that’s going to be posted in the Transcript for everyone to see.

Are you going to read an extract from that? What extract have you got for us?

SP: So I’m going to read something very, very short.

CMR: Perfect.

SP: It’s in the collection, and since you sent your questions ahead earlier –

CMR: I did.

SP: And you mentioned “Laughter Among the Trees” in the questions, so I’m going to read from that, so that we have a reference point.

CMR: That’s really good. Yeah. So “Laughter Among the Trees” is freely available as part of the DarkMagazine.com. So I’m going to put a link to that in the transcript as well, so everyone can read the whole thing. But I really love that. And I’m going to link to your other work that’s freely available as well, Suzan. So please go for it.

SP: Awesome. So this is going to be very short, and I’m going to just make a note here that there is self harm, and it’s on screen on this, on this excerpt that I’m going to read. In this story. What happens is that there is a Trinidadian Canadian family. They’ve gone camping, and the younger sister Sab has gone missing. And she was last seen with a boy named Greg. And the older sister Anna is sort of dealing with the fallout and the sort of survivor grief of her sister disappearing.

So I am going to start.

‘LAUGHTER AMONG THE TREES’ EXCERPT

Read the whole thing here: https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/laughter-among-the-trees/

Dark Magazine Feb 2021

Sab remained between us. Her absence slicked over my skin, like a membrane. I glimpsed her, as she was, bounding up the stairs; breathed her scent as I walked by her locked room; heard her whisper, “shut up, loser” before I drifted to sleep. I never saw Greg again. He’d gotten what he’d wanted.

One night, while looking at myself in the mirror, Sab’s voice clawed up my throat reflexively. “You’re ugly. Everyone hates you.”

“You’re a bitch, Sab,” I snapped back.

A smile cracked my lips. From then on, whenever I was alone, I spoke for Sab.

There were no school hikes for me. No week-long grade ten wilderness trip or renting a cabin at Wasaga Beach with my friends when I turned seventeen. Mom kept me home from everything “wild.” I was free, as long as I was caged within the steel and concrete confines of the city.

When she walked in on me and Marit, a university “friend” I’d brought home, kissing on my bed, she closed the door without a word. We went downstairs, braced for a fight. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting.

“All yuh want some cake?” she asked, as if this were a cherished routine.

“Yes, thank you,” Marit said. She slid into the chair across from my mother and quirked her lips into a smile. I raised my eyebrows as Mom stiffened and passed Marit a plate of coconut cake. I remember stilted small talk and Marit asking my mother about her job while being utterly charming. Mom looked back and forth between us. When Marit had licked her fork clean, we walked her to the door.

“Come back anytime.” Mom was distant but sincere.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dindiyal. I will.” Marit winked at me before she turned and left. I closed the door and leaned my back against it.

“So?” I asked breaking the prickly silence. “Do you like her?”

“Ana.” She grimaced, like she’d tasted rancid milk. “She looks like an older Sab.”

“Fuck that.” I left her at the bottom of the stairs. I locked myself in my bathroom and steadied myself against the vanity. A voice bubbled up my throat. It was grittier than my earlier versions of Sab’s voice.

“She looks exactly like me,” I whispered. I wretched bile into the sink until the acid scorched my throat.

I moved out after graduation and survived by feeding off my memories of Sab like a maggot. I blended her voice with mine, usurped her unquestioning confidence to land a job at a prestigious law firm; transposed her charm into adulthood and used it to fuck the women I wanted. I locked pathetic Ana inside me, trotting her out for family and the occasional drinks with Marit. I flooded the space left by Sab while it ate Dad’s liver and stole Mom’s connection to the present.

I constructed the life I dreamed Sab would have had and lived it. Sab owned a waterfront condo and sipped champagne with top tier clients. Sab was profiled in the Saturday paper as the quintessential immigrant success story. Sab comforted relatives and said, “Thank you for coming,” at Dad’s funeral. Sab organized mom’s move into a nursing home when she could no longer live alone.

Sab, Sab, Sab. I glutted myself on the potential of her unfinished life. Yet, the frost that had blossomed in me so long ago had fractalized, coating my intestines and invading my lungs. Sometimes, I’d take a knife to the inside of my upper arm and slide the blade beneath my skin to check if I was completely numb. The face reflected in the blade was always my own.

Soon, I only allowed Anna to crawl out of the morgue inside me to visit Mom at the retirement home.

Dark Magazine Feb 2021 – “Laughter Among the Trees” by Suzan Palumbo

Interview Transcript

SP: I’ll stop there.

CMR: oooh my god.

SP: Such difficult words.

CMR: I find that when you’re reading an extract it’s like, oh, this would be the perfect one to illustrate this. Oh, my God! I actually have to read it!

SP: Yeah! And I can’t, like, oh no I’m reading this, OH NO I SWORE in this story!

CMR: There was one line I had to do like 3 or 4 times, because I just couldn’t say it. There- it had a lot of ss and shh in the same line, and I just couldn’t make my mouth say those sounds correctly.

SP: oh no, yeah.

CMR: You did great, like that was great. I’m going to put a link to that in the transcript, so that people can read the whole thing. and I really recommend that you do, because “Laughter Among the Trees” is so good. So let’s talk about the way that body horror in general shows up in your work, and where that comes from I know that’s like, a very big, like… ‘Body Horror’ covers a lot of bases.

 I really like the way that it kind of appears in “Laughter Among the Trees” particularly, and those sorts of images of, you know, “the morgue inside her”, and maggots, and those kinds of ideas about herself, and where that… you know, which I think is kind of a body horror imagery, even though there’s nothing physical going on externally at that point.

So do you find yourself looking at the body as a site of horror for specific reasons, and how does that show up in your work?

SP: So this is an interesting question for me, because when I first started writing, right, I just started writing stories, and I was writing them, and they were all horror or horror related. And I started noticing a trend where I kept writing about skin. Different kinds of skin, or different kinds of veneers, or different kinds of outer shells, and them forming or peeling off, or shifting or changing. And so I looked at, probably about 2 years ago, I looked back at all my work, and I was like, Wow! You are really obsessed with body or and skin and shape shifting, but I didn’t realize it at the time while I was doing it.

And I think when I had hindsight I was like, okay. Well, why, why is why are you obsessed with this?

And I think it’s because writing is often therapy. and I think I have a lot of issues.

CMR: (agrees with the ‘writing is therapy’ part)

SP: I think so. Yeah, a lot of those issues are about. You know. What I feel is okay to present on the outside, and what I am like on the inside, and that sort of negotiation.

And I think in society we have a lot of rules, and we have a lot of, you know, appropriate behaviour and things like that. But I think, why I keep coming back to body horror specifically, is because it represents probably one of the most intimate conflicts you can have.

When you’re talking about conflicts and stories, they’re always like, you know, a man versus society – “man” – man versus society, man versus nature, and then they have men versus himself. And you know, I’m really interested in that, because that conflict is one that’s really hard to escape. It’s really hard to escape the conflict you have inside yourself. You have to really bury it if you, if you want to get away from it, and I like that. I like how visceral it is, and I like how it’s very hard to ignore, and I like that, when I’m writing. I think that’s why I keep coming up with body horror because it’s like your body is rebelling against you.

CMR: Mmhm.

SP: You can change houses, it’s much harder to change your body. You can, but it’s much harder. It involves more emotionally. I think.

CMR: It does. Yeah, that’s yeah, that’s yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, I love the idea of that kind of you… You inhabit different shells or different personas and different, like a hermit crab, right? Or you grow to fit something. And then you have to shrug it off because you’re no longer that person, and you have to find something that fits you, and, like all of that kind of internal struggle that’s manifested through like a physical, visceral engagement with your physicality and stuff like that that really fascinating. Yeah. And I think you’re right. Like, I think when we do write, when we write horror, and I think for me as well as a lot of it is very therapeutic, and it’s a lot of internal struggles, I think. Yeah, I can kind of relate to that. Yeah.

SP: For me, for me everyone’s like, oh, why would you want to write horror, and I’m like because I’m processing all of these things and processing thoughts and processing, you know, what has happened to me what I think is happening, what happens to other people? And yeah, that’s why I do it. It’s it’s therapy. It’s cheaper than paying. Yeah.

[Laughter]

Body Horror and Folklore

CMR: And yeah, and there’s like there’s other elements to it as well, I think as well like you’ve got so much going on in some of the short stories because they’re so layered. I really like – like I love how much you cram into a very short space. And you’ve got really beautiful kind of lyrical prose that I really enjoy. And yeah, I noticed there was some engagement with folklore – folkloric elements, and ghosts and paranormal kind of things in your work as well. How does body horror intersect with folklore in your work, or does it?

SP: It does! So I write different… There are different folklore traditions. I guess they do sort of interconnect. So there’s… I’m from Trinidad. So we have our own sort of folklore that has developed through it. It’s British. It’s French. It’s Spanish; it’s West African. It’s South Asian. It’s indigenous it’s all of those things.

And so we have our own folklore stories, and a lot of them are very, very physical. A lot of them are our body horror. We have a we have a vampire called the soucouyant, and she’s a woman. She’s an older woman who sheds her skin and flies like a ball of fire into the night to find someone to suck their blood. And that shedding of the skin is very body horror. And we have another one, douen [pron. dwen].

That story is about a child who has died and was not baptized, and they come back as a ghost. But their feet are backwards. That’s very body horror.

Yeah. we have another one, La Diablesse, that’s a woman who’s a temptress and she walks the lanes at night, luring men. And they’re really really into her, but when they get her in a position where they’re going to do something with her, they find that she has a cow’s leg. She doesn’t have a human foot, or two human feet. She has a cow’s leg and a human foot, and that’s sort of Body Horror-ish! So it I don’t want to say that, like people who have these sort of things going on just regularly in real life, that they’re “body horror”. It’s the sort of something bad has happened to you. And now you have to deal with a change, sort of thing. That’s the horror aspect.

CMR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. like the becoming monstrous, or like becoming in some way uncanny or like it’s something you don’t recognize. And then oh, my God, what is this?

SP: There are people like, I don’t want to say that that is “a horror”. Generally it’s not that, you know.

CMR: Hmm.

SP: It’s a difficult topic to talk about, is it? It’s like, what is body horror exactly? Something that’s one person sees as horrific might not be horrific to somebody else, because that’s normal to them. That’s how they are in an everyday situation. But that’s how it shows up in our folklore where it’s something that you expect, and then it’s a little bit different. It’s not what you expected.

SP: It’s a difficult topic to talk about, is it? It’s like, what is body horror? Exactly. Something that’s one person sees as horrific might not be horrific to somebody else, because that’s normal to them. That’s how they are in an everyday situation. But that’s how it shows up in our folklore where it’s something that you expect, and then it’s a little bit different. It’s not what you expected.

CMR: Yeah, and also if it’s happening to you, and you are not expecting to undergo a change, it’s a cause of concern. It’s a cause of terror. It’s a cause of like some things happening within you that you can’t explain that you don’t understand that’s paranormal. That’s out of your control, potentially, or supernatural or something like that, and it’s beyond the bounds, beyond the regions of explanation as well. I think there’s that kind of especially with folklore. Isn’t it. Like all of that. You can’t explain it in normal terms, like you have to… There’s a supernatural explanation or religious explanation, or, you know, oh, it’s just something that happens that maybe you can’t control, or you have to resort to some sort of magic, or some sort of something that is not regulated by a certain area of society that that you live in, or like mainstream society, whatever that means to me, and then you have to go to the edges of your society to figure out what’s going on, or you have to move beyond what you thought of as as normal and safe. And you have to try and figure things out that way.

So yeah, yeah, does that make sense?

SP: Oh, no, it certainly does it. It’s interesting because folklore has … It doesn’t have necessarily the sense the sort of consciousness that I do or we do now today of what what is, quote, unquote, “normal”, and what is horror, and what isn’t horror, so.

But that’s what I grew up with, those folklore stories, and they’re hundreds of years old, and they’ve been passed down. And so they do really influence my work.

Yeah. So I mean it’s not necessarily what I believe, but those sort of images are in there for sure.

CMR: That vampire sounds amazing.

SP: Oh!

CMR: But why does she shed her skin? What’s going on with that?

SP: It happens okay?

CMR: It just happens.

      [Laughter]

SP: Okay so the whole point of that story, that folklore story, is that is has a historical basis. There is an old woman who lives in a certain area, and they’re not married, and no one knows why or how they they have been able to have this property. And women really having property sometimes causes people to stress. Because why? Why does this woman have control of her life or her property?

So people made up the story that she had made a deal with the devil. And that’s why she’s able to have a house and live on her own. But as part of that deal with the devil at night she sheds her skin and puts it in a mortar. You know the cooking…

CMR: mortar and pestle? Yes.

SP: Yeah, so she puts it in a mortar, and she flies off to find somebody to suck their blood because she doesn’t have a job or anything. So that’s how she sustains it herself. Right? She sort of like, I don’t know, like smoke or something. She comes into your house while you’re sleeping, and she sucks your blood, and then she leaves, and you wake up with 2 bruises on your neck or on your leg, or on your arm, and the way to stop her is, you’ve got to put like rice grains on the windowsill. And she cannot resist counting these things. So if you want to keep her out, you put that there and then she’ll stop, and she’ll start counting, and then the sun will start rising. She has to leave. She has to go back home, so she you you’re protected. She won’t get in your house because she has to stay outside counting.

And if you really want to kill her, you break into her house and put salt in her mortar where her skin is, and when she tries to put it back on it’s too small, and then the sun comes up and she dies.

CMR: Oh, wow, okay, that’s really cool. I’ve heard the counting thing, that’s a European thing as well isn’t it?

SP: Yeah! That’s where we get it from!

CMR: …that vampires are weirdly compulsive about needing to count stuff.

SP: Lots of stuff.

CMR: I don’t know why but I’m really interested to where that has come from like.

SP: Yeah, that is interesting.

CMR: But yeah, it’s not we like. But anyway, yeah, so I had that skin thing is really cool, because that’s almost like, you know, the selkie myth?

SP: Exactly yeah!

CMR: or like the werewolf myth, you know like where they become wolves, and if you steal the human skin they can’t change back, I’m thinking like in Bisclavret, Marie de France’s lai, where he becomes a wolf and then his wife steals his human skin and he’s stuck as a wolf forever? And like, yeah, he bites her nose off as punishment.

SP: Well it’s stressful being a wolf all the time!

CMR: Damn right! Especially at a time when people hunt wolves. And yeah like that’s really interesting. I haven’t heard of a vampire shedding her skin before. That’s a really cool mix, I love folklore so much. Have you used any of that in Skin Thief, in your collection?

SP: Oh, yeah, the whole book is that.

CMR: Amazing.

SP: Yeah, I actually have a story like that, with the with the vampire shedding her skin – “vampire”. It’s at PseudoPod. It’s called Tara’s Mother’s Skin. So it’s about a girl, and she encounters one of these one of these soucouyants, and she’s determined to- because the villagers are like, oh, she’s the village vampire, you should not go there – and she’s determined to say no! She’s a lovely lady! And I’m going to redeem her.

[Laughter]

CMR: Oh no.

[Laughter]

SP: It’s that in a way, I guess. I won’t spoil it. The whole collection is sort of like, because I write so much about shape-shifting and body shifting and changes, the whole collection is that; sort of paranormal, or folkloric, (except one story), where people sort of change or lose their skin. And I actually I did a selkie story, but with deer instead of … seals?

CMR: ooh!

SP: Seals?

CMR: Yeah, seals.

SP: So it starts off with more Western sort of shape shifters. And then, as the stories go on at the end it’s very Trinidadian shape shifters. I did this on purpose. It’s a shift in the actual arc of the story. You shift from being very Canadian to very Trinidadian at the end. So I’ve ordered it that way on purpose. The stories are all shape-shifting, but the book itself is shape-shifting from someone who is very Canadian-voiced to someone who is very Trinidadian-voiced, because I’m both.

CMR: Yeah! That’s amazing. Yeah that’s really cool. I love it when a collection is ordered in a specific way, so like you can either dip in and out if you want, but then you kind of lose the sense of the overall arc, if there is one, and it’s like, yeah, it’s really cool to see how people have structured the anthology.

SP: Well, I have people who are like, no I’ll just read them in any order, and I’m like – please read mine in order!! Please! I made this on purpose this way! But it’s okay, just read it. It’s fine if you don’t do that, but, like. You know.

CMR: It’s like how artists like music artists. Sometimes you know, structure their albums in a particular way, and I’m one of those nightmare people that just like put it on shuffle. Ruined it. No, there’s a story!

SP: It’s like a candy box, you know you can just pick and enjoy.

CMR: I’m really excited to read it.

SP: I’m really excited for you to read it! I’m really excited for everyone to read it!

CMR: Yeah. What remind us when it comes out again? October?

SP: It comes out in October, for Spooky Season.

CMR: Perfect. Perfect time. So far away and yet so close.

SP: I know. It’ll be here in a minute.

Dysfunctional Families in Suzan Palumbo’s Dark Fiction

CMR: Yeah, going back to “Laughter Among the Trees” just for a second, because I also want to pick up on another theme in your work, and maybe we could talk about how that manifests in the Skin Thief collection as well. But I’m thinking specifically about the idea of family and the darker side of family dynamics that shows up in “Laughter Among the Trees” in particular, and especially in that extract that you read out for us, because you’ve got this amazing imagery of being inhabited by the memory of a departed sibling, and it’s not a possession in like a traditional sense, is it? She’s recreating Sab in herself, and like making space for Sab in herself as a way of processing that absence. But it’s like being possessed by an imagined person, which I thought was such a cool idea, and also such a really good way of showing how somebody is not at all dealing with loss, or dealing very badly with that, and is being permanently haunted by somebody.

But also, the very – almost negative relationship that they have?

SP: It’s a very bad relationship, yeah.

CMR: Very bad, very toxic relationship that they have as siblings, that she then has with herself and her own body as a result of having a very toxic relationship with her sister who is within her. I thought that was like really interesting way of showing all of that. And I’m wondering if that’s something that you – so the darker side of family is something that you explore in your work a lot, and do you find that’s another area where body horror can come into play in different ways?

SP: For sure. I think… it’s a very good, intelligent question. You you you you! You really! Make me sound a lot smarter than I probably am – the way you describe things. I think – I mean, when family dynamics and body horror… Let’s just be like, not paranormal. Let’s just be regular, right? Let’s say you have something that you want to tell your parents right. And you know, like, okay, I’m queer, right? So you have feelings. You have thoughts, to have ideas. And you want to be honest about yourself, where you want to tell your family and you. You. You know your family doesn’t accept that, or you know that they’re not going to like that, or they’re going to say we don’t want you in the house or any of these things. You internalize that because you’re like, okay. I can’t say it. So I have to keep it inside. And when you keep it inside, I mean, just even on a everyday physical level. It’s stressful. it feels heavy. It’s oppressive. People get anxiety. People become depressed. People have all kinds of reactions to it.

So. Yes, I’ve I, of course, think that difficult family dynamics sort of manifest inside you, because you carry that with you, and you have emotions and feelings about it. When you’re writing it, it’s easy to sort of visualize those things as, okay, I just disappointed my mother because I didn’t watch my sister, and she has disappeared now, and so I keep hearing my sister’s voice, because I can’t forget it, because I feel guilty about it, sort of thing. So yeah, I think grief, you carry it around, I think loss, you carry it around, and I think if it’s inside you, and it makes you upset, then that’s a form of body horror.

Mental Illness Manifesting as Body Horror

CMR: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like that physical manifestation of because that like, yeah, like as you say anxiety and depression are- those are mental illnesses that manifest in a very physical way, because they have physical – um – what’s the word?

SP: Presentations! Presentations! Yeah.

CMR: Presentations! Yeah, physical presentations, and you can have like, panic attacks, you can have–

SP: I have panic attacks all the time. And they’re terrifying. It’s horrific.

CMR: Yeah.

SP: Yeah! Sorry, you didn’t need to know that. [Laughs]

CMR: [Laughs] I’m like – yeah but exactly that. And you can just not want to get up, you can just want to hide in a small space in your bed, and you can – and that can lead to other physical issues where you don’t take care of yourself and that can exacerbate other problems, or just something as simple as, you know, depression making you put stuff off, so you don’t go see a doctor about stuff, or you just, you think, oh, you know, I deserve to have this, all these negative thoughts, oh I deserve to have this happen to me, or whatever…

SP: Yes, that you deserve punishment.

CMR: Yes, so you deliberately don’t take care of yourself, or when you have an injury or something, you just ignore it, or you don’t you know, like you don’t eat right, and you don’t like– so you can have body horror manifesting in like– So like, I talk a lot about disordered eating and body dysmorphia in my work, and generally not as body horror but as something that characters just happen to have, but that’s also like, for somebody experiencing it, when your body changes and you don’t have a very good perception of what that is like, like that can be very disorientating and very traumatic. And so, yeah, like all of those things can come into play and often like it’s as a result of like, ‘I don’t know how to deal with my family’, or like the the background of you know, when you have family who comment on certain things about your physical appearance, when you have family who you have a bad relationship with, and that causes you to be so anxious when you’re around them, that you have these coping mechanisms that don’t work, and when you can’t escape your family, you know. What do you do when you do? Or when you do escape your family and you have terrible coping mechanisms that you bring to other areas of your life, how do you manage that, and all of that kind of stuff can manifest in different different ways. So yeah, like body horror is a good way to explore that, right?

SP: Yes, and it isn’t, because sometimes words — words don’t don’t really convey exactly like I like. We’re using the word of horror, right? And I have a lot of these issues myself. I’ve been depressed. I have anxiety. I have other issues, I’m neurodiverse, and I don’t think of myself as a horror?! Like I don’t think of those things as “a horror”, but they are discomforting, and discomfort sometimes goes along with the horror genre.

CMR: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And I think that’s — I’m also neurodiverse and queer and these different things that’s hard to sometimes process and, and it’s easier to process within a particular genre. Like you say, like horror as therapy and like, yeah, and it’s easier to kind of maybe externalize a lot of the feelings, and express them in a body horror context, because of the way everything makes you feel physically, so it’s easier to explain the physicality of the emotion –

SP: Exactly.

CMR: -and what that’s doing to you, yeah, and I feel that’s an easier way for me to kind of examine how I feel about stuff and like it sounds like that’s very similar for you. I’m not sure if that’s —

SP: Oh, that’s exactly, that’s exactly it. I’m anxious, or I’m having an issue. How do I, How do I sort of process that? Well, okay, I’m going to remove it from myself or I’m going to take, or I’m going to make it take a physical form, and I’m going to pro[cess], I’m going to work through what’s like to interact with that physical form, or with that voice or with that sound. And it’s presented in a horror way, so that I can process it. Is it horrific to feel like, is it? Is that itself a horror? I’m not sure. But I’m presenting it in a way to process it.

CMR: Yeah. yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me as well, I think.

Other Tropes in Suzan’s Work: The Gothic and Villains

CMR: And do you have any other themes and tropes that you play with as a writer apart from, you know, body horror, we’ve kind of covered a lot. Do you have any like other favourite ones? And maybe, could you give us examples from Skin Thief without too many spoilers, if you do?

SP: Okay. So this was a hard question for me, because I’ve been so obsessed with with shape shifters. So I’m like, what else do I like? Do I like anything else? I really am just obsessed generally with anything Gothic. So you know you give me even the just, the settings and the trappings of it, and everything Gothic. So you know, if there’s a castle, I love it.

I have an actual story that’s like a Phantom of the Opera retelling. [Her Voice, Unmasked in Weird Horror #1] But it is a steampunk Phantom of the Opera retelling, so it’s got like, you know you’re in a castle, and you go down to the dungeon and stuff like that. So I love the sort of mad scientist genius who creates something, and and it he realizes that he shouldn’t have created it because he’s made something that can think on feel on its own, and [it] should be its own person. So I like, I like stuff like that.

I … what else do I like. I really like villains. I really like people who are like – in “Laughter Among the Trees” she’s not a perfect person, the protagonist. She feels jealous, she’s angry, she’s upset. She is not a perfect person, and I enjoy stories [like that]. There’s a market. There’s a audience. There’s a – there’s a need for people who are like. Okay, this is a very sweet, nice person, and this is the villain dun dun dah. But what I like is, I really like a character who is a mess, and who is flawed and makes bad choices, or has feelings that people don’t usually acknowledge. I love that. That’s not a trope, but I love it. I’ve tried that in a lot of the stories to write characters who feel angry, who are resentful who who are struggling with with things because that’s how I feel. I’m not perfect. Yes, I don’t even know how to end this, this ramble about how I love villains and people who are flawed. Give me a messed up person. I’ll love them forever.

CMR: Yay, I love them, too. That’s great. That’s basically yeah, because that’s I think I basically just write antiheroes at best. And I think that’s – they’re just more interesting.

SP: Right? If someone – okay, this is my thing. If someone can get you to understand why this miserable person, why you should empathise with them, that’s magic. Like you got me to be like, okay, She – okay. So she’s jealous, and she’s upset and she’s… But I get why she’s jealous and she’s upset. I think that’s brilliant.

CMR: Yes, yeah. And I yeah, I love that. And I get why it’s easier to root for people with heroic qualities but I’ve never really related to people like that. I think it’s just like, I’m not – I’m not a hero. [Laughs]

SP: No, me neither. [Laughs]

CMR: [Laughs] I’m just a messed up person with a lot of flaws. [Laughs]

SP: Yeah, no, I I totally. I mean I love that for people who love it [the hero character type],

CMR: Yes!

SP: like if you, if you like that, yeah, go wild.

CMR: 100% Yeah.

SP: But give me the messy – like – the horrible, I’m going to be messy and petty in the corner by myself person to follow. It’s so juicy. I love it.

CMR: And there’s just so much as a writer when you’ve got that kind of character. Sometimes you’re just presented with an absolute gift of a character that you can do so much with and like. I know a lot of people go, yes, the redemption arc. I’m like No, no, no, no! Let’s just explore this. Let’s let them get a little bit worse.

SP: We don’t need to be redeemed necessarily, I mean. And when we’re talking about this, I always have a caveat that I’m: I’m not like, talking about people who do atrocities, and we want to empathize with them. I’m not talking about the people who do atrocities. I’m talking about the regular people who are like just regular people, who I have probably feel guilty for a thought they have, or feel bad about, you know, or ashamed, because, you know I didn’t feel like cheering for Bob when he won the award like that kind of person, I’m not talking about like, you know, for historical, horrid kind of people that kind of people, I don’t want to redeem them, or like, understand that, like I’m not talking about that.

CMR: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s. I just think there’s just so many more layers, aren’t there, to people.

I think – I think that’s about all we’ve got time for in terms of discussion. But I just want to, before we go, I just want to give you some space to plug anything you want that’s coming out. Tell us where to find you. Tell us where to find your book, and I’ll put all the links in the transcript as well, so that everyone can head to cmrosens.com and you’ll find the transcript there, so you can just access all the links easily.

But yeah, this is your space plug anything you want before before we say goodbye. It’s been fantastic.

Links and Keeping Updated with Suzan Palumbo

SP: I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I have a book called Skin Thief coming out. [Laughs] Maybe you missed it in the in the discussion. But yes, my collection Skin Thief is coming out from Neon Hemlock. It is coming out at the end of September, beginning of October [2023]. It’s a short story collection. We talked about “Laughter Among the Trees” a lot – that was nominated for the Nebula, and also on the Hugo long list last year, so you can get that story in print if you buy it.

I don’t have a lot of things I’m allowed to talk about out loud. Yet.

I have several stories coming out. Another one is from Neon Hemlock. It’s in the Crawling Moon anthology. That’s queer dread. That’s what that anthology is about, so I’ll have a story coming out with them.

I will have some non fiction coming out, and in other anthologies. But I really can’t say too much, because I’m not allowed to yet. It’s very mysterious.

CMR: That’s fair.

SP: So I’ll just plug my book. Please read it when it comes out.

CMR: Yes, and review it, read and review.

SP: Honest reviews.

CMR: But yeah, that that helps it get noticed and shared more widely and that’s what we want. Yeah, I can’t wait. I’m really excited.

SP: So excited you’re excited!

[Laughter]

CMR: It’s been fantastic talking to you, it’s been really interesting to chat about body horror, folklore, all that juicy villainous stuff. Look forward to anything else that you’re writing because I’m really excited to read a little bit more.

SP: I do have a novella coming out next year, in 2024.

CMR: Ooh, ok!

SP: But it’s a Space Opera.

CMR: Yes!

SP: It’s a Space Opera, it’s not – there’s no body horror in it. Okay, maybe a tiny bit.

CMR: Okay.

SP: I put a tiny bit.

[Laughter]

CMR: Okay, I was like, I don’t believe you.

SP: Okay, maybe there are some vultures, but mostly it’s just spaceships.

CMR: I’m so exci– okay what’s that called, are you allowed to say?

SP: It’s called Countess. It’s a retelling of Count of Monte Cristo in space.

CMR: Oh, my God! Okay, that sounds amazing. Yes.

SP: I love Count of Monte Cristo.

CMR: That’s yeah, he’s. He’s like the ultimate antihero, isn’t he? Okay so Countess, and it’s –

SP: 2024.

CMR: – 2024 novella. I’ll be on the lookout for that. And that is all we’ve got time for. So thank you so much, Suzan, for being on the podcast. It’s been brilliant to have you and good luck with everything that you’ve got going on! So much stuff going on.

SP: Thank you for having me. This has been so fun, you’re so wonderful.

CMR: Aw thank you! Hopefully, maybe you’ll come back for the next season.

SP: Oh definitely!

CMR: Yay! Grand. Maybe we’ll see you again soon. Take care, and bye for now.

#MonstrousMay 2023: Reproduction

My twist on vagina dentata, inspired by seahorses and Alien.

References: Dr Monday and Miss Charlotte are mentioned in The Crows and obliquely referenced in The Day We Ate Grandad. Alex is the same character mentioned in Thirteenth that Katy was sleeping with.

CWs for gore and fatal, unwitting surrogacy

Parenthood

It was 11:03 on Monday morning, and Justin Connolly, Fiat driver, dog lover and perpetual job-seeker of Flat 4b Commercial Street, had the misfortune to be dead.

Whatever brought Justin out to such a lonely picnic spot, five hundred yards from where he’d parked his Punto, was a mystery. The enigma of his final moments was hardly made any clearer by the scanty possessions strewn around him; the new gold signet ring on his right middle finger, the bloody leather wallet, and the set of gory car keys.

In the wallet were a selection of credit cards and receipts, although Justin didn’t seem to be the kind of person who would keep receipts on purpose. Most were from the local petrol garage, stuffed in the same compartment as a dog-eared loyalty card for some high street coffee shop chain.

He was one stamp away from a free coffee.

There was nothing to suggest why he had driven two hundred miles to the edge of the Great British coast on the edge of some great British weather, not unleashed yet but gathering strength in the great grey sky, and Justin himself didn’t have a lot to say about it.

Mr. Connolly’s last resting place, or, more accurately, places, was Unger Point, a beauty spot whose name and scenic views had lost significance to all but the most avoided local bores.

Justin had been here only once before, on a mate’s stag weekend in Pagham-on-Sea.

They’d come back to the caravan site along this path, late one night, not as far gone as the girls they brought back with them but enough to not really care how they got home.

Some residual impressions of that midnight ramble must have remained in Justin’s waking mind, or he wouldn’t have made his way, turtle-like, back to the spot above the beach where he and – he thought her name was Lucilla but it could have been Lisa or Liz- couldn’t wait to get back and did it right there while the others yelled at them to catch up…

That had been two weekends ago.

Last weekend Justin had had stomach and chest pains, so he’d got a pack of something or other for it from the chemist’s thinking it was heartburn.

The receipt was in his wallet.

Then he’d been to the doctor’s, and, according to the scrap of paper on the dashboard of his car, was currently missing a hospital appointment.

He was also missing a date with his girlfriend, who still didn’t know about the LucillaLisaLiz situation and now probably never would, not unless one of the lads (most likely Sam) dropped a clanger at the funeral, if there ever was going to be one of those, but Sam had a sense of propriety even if he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

The tablets hadn’t worked, but heartburn was the least of his worries since that particular organ wasn’t occupying his chest cavity any more.

“He could have at least got to the beach,” someone said.

It had been high tide, which was probably why Justin had chosen to drive up to the cliff top instead of onto the shingle underneath, which at the time had been under several billowing fathoms of salted, crashing water. The first observer of the three clearly thought that this decision on the part of the deceased was rather inconvenient. If it had been made purely in the interest of self-preservation, it had been undoubtedly pointless.

“When it’s time, it’s time.”

The second observer, being female, sounded a little more understanding. Behind the cultured Parisian accent there was a hint of a culture of a different kind, of balmy nights and beating drums.

The third said nothing.

Silence settled between the three watchers, filled by the rushing crests and the lost calls of gulls on the sweeping wind, a vacuum of words and thoughts as blank as the single staring eye in Justin’s shattered skull.

Doctor Monday, man of a thousand faces, not one of them his own, pulled the jaunty rim of his trilby down lower over the stretched forehead of skin-mask number five, while Miss Charlotte’s trim grey figure appeared unconcerned.

A breath escaped the good doctor’s stiff leathery lips, and something behind the glass eyes blinked, the lids barely twitching.

“By the way,” he added, after a few more moments of careful thought, “After I’ve had a word with Lucilla’s parents, we had better put up more contraception posters in the clinic.”

Alex stared at the mess. A teenage predilection for graphic violence of the CGI and live-action movie kind had forged him into a prime candidate for surgery or a career on the sharp end of A&E, but he had never seen anything like this.

“What did you mean in the car,” he asked finally, too horrified and fascinated to stop looking, “When you said we’d have to sort it out? Shouldn’t we – shouldn’t we call the police or something?”

Dr. Monday said nothing.

Miss Charlotte cuffed Alex smartly across the back of his head.

Thus, most of Justin Connolly, the jobless, dog-loving, Fiat driving, two-timing cadaver of Flat 4b Commercial Street, was hefted into industrial bin-bags, and departed the world at 11:15 a.m. in the arms of the tide, never having learnt his lesson, and never having found out what his problem was.

At least his passably humanoid offspring, all healthy and newborn, had a good start in life as they splashed about in the mess they had made of their accidental parent and battled happily over his spleen. (Miss Charlotte thought it was best to line their carry-box with something familiar.)

“I’m glad Lucille was honest about it all, that does make things much easier,” Dr Monday confided to his protégé. “It is a pity about the host, I suppose.”

The skin-mask smiled at the little newborn nymphlets balanced on Miss Charlotte’s knees in the back of Fred’s taxi, and it was an eerie sight. One thing skin-mask number five failed to convey convincingly was a sense of paternal instinct. He needed skin mask forty-three for that.

Alex learned several important lessons that day.

The first of them was the most obvious: keep everything, absolutely everything, to yourself. No one will ever believe you.

The second was the most practical: always have a pair of latex gloves handy, in case of emergency. Destroy the gloves afterwards.

The third was the most important. When out on the pull in Pagham-on-Sea, always, always, ALWAYS check for vaginal barbs.

#MonstrousMay 2023: Camouflaged

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT A REAL SUSSEX FOLKTALE, AND REV. J. D. ALLARDYCE NEVER EXISTED. HE IS A CHARACTER BRIEFLY MENTIONED IN THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD, AND CREDITED WITH OTHER [FICTIONAL] FOLKLORE AND COLLECTED TALES FROM THIS [FICTIONAL] PLACE.

The Dairymaid and the Knuckerhole

Rev. J. D. Allardyce (collected 1899)

Near the village of Piddingdean is a sinkhole, which appears to be bottomless, and fed from some underground spring or stream. It is known locally as the knuckerhole, as within its depths a ‘knucker’ or water serpent, once lived. The etymology of knucker is likely from the Old English nicor, a generic term for any water monster or water sprite, but in this part of the country refers to something like a great lizard or water-dwelling dragon.

There are many stories about the knucker, and one of them was told to me by a venerable lady of the parish, Mrs Allison Bentley, formerly Miss Allison Cooper, some ninety-seven years of age.

This story was related to her by her own maternal grandmother, Mrs Olivera Youngblood, whose surname is no doubt an Anglicised form of Jungbluth, or Jungblut, a Germanic surname that implies a connection with the German Palatines who were known to have fled religious persecution to Great Britain in the early eighteenth-century. There is perhaps an element of this history in the tale told to me – for when considered in light of the fate of many German refugees of this time, perhaps we can view this folktale and its rendition in an allegorical manner that speaks more of human acts of cunning and persecution, alongside the surface meaning of the tale, which is, on the face of things, a simple story of a dragon lurking in a hole.

I have done some independent research, as far as such things can be conducted, into the fates of the Palatines and Huguenots who settled in this part of Sussex, and my annotations are drawn from multiple sources, including notes taken from interviewing older members of the parish on the matter. My findings are set out in a lengthy essay on this topic, which has been printed in the Sussex Agrarian Journal, Vol. II, a publication I am proud to serve as a co-founder and member of the editorial board.

Once many years ago, a knucker lived in the knuckerhole outside of the village of Piddingdean. It was a cunning, large monster, whose home was the silent depths of the pool in Pidding Woods.1

Now at that time there came a great swarm of rats from the ships in the port, and the bravest of the local men went to the pool to wake the knucker up, and get him to leave the water to hunt these vermin and rid the countryside of them.2

Well, a dairymaid felt sorry for the little things, for all they were at the corn and the cattle feed, and into every mischief you could imagine. She managed to gather some of the creatures into the barn, and hide them under baskets and milk pails until the knucker had finished his spannelling3 about the river and woods after the vermin, and much of a mess he made of it too, before he returned to his pool once more.

Her father was not best pleased, but she would not give them up, and soon trained them to do small things around the farm, until they were quite the little helpers. The knucker, however, was not satisfied, and soon came out of his pool again, but this time for cows and horses, and nothing else would do.

It would lie in wait in the ditches, a great long thing it was, all grey and brown from the mud in its pool, to hide its red underbelly and the flashes of red on its topmost scales, draped about in weeds to disguise its snake-like head and vast, savage jaws. It would wait patiently until a cart went by, and then rise from its hiding place all at once, all red and fierce, and down would go the carthouse and the carter too, if he weren’t quick about it, and the cart was dragged to the ditch and left all in a pile of splinters.4

The dairymaid had a brother, as hard-headed as she was soft-hearted, and he took his sister down to the knucker pool to see if the knucker couldn’t be appeased with an offering, since she wouldn’t give up all the vermin the knucker had been promised.

But the dairymaid was sharp and she was quick, and as soon as she spotted the ripples on the pool, she threw in all the cheeses she had hidden in her apron, and the knucker devoured them all instead of the maid. Then she slipped free of her brother’s grip and fled back to the farm to tell their father what had happened.

Well, their father was thundering furious, and declared his son should make it right – he sent him back to the pool with an axe and told him not to come back unless it was with the knucker’s head.

But the knucker had left the pool and was resting in the bushes, all covered over with mud and weeds, so that when the lad came back with his axe, the beast was upon him directly and pulled him into the pool before he could take a swing. He dropped the axe, and the knucker soon drowned and ate him.

The dairymaid waited and waited, but when her brother did not come back, she guessed what must have happened. Her rats helped make more cheese, and pats of butter too, and with their help she soon had a fair feast of dairy to take to the pool. She made a lard cake and other puddings, and put it all in a wheelbarrow, and set out.

By evening, she found the knuckerhole was quiet, and there was only her brother’s axe lying on the ground. She unwrapped all the food, and took up the axe, and hid herself in the bushes with mud and weeds to cover her white pinafore and pretty rosy cheeks. She waited and waited, until the knucker was hungry again, and emerged from the pool to devour all the food she had left for it.

It wasn’t long before the beast had the colly wobbles5 from the cheese and butter and cake – it lay on the ground, red underbelly and all, and couldn’t get up. Up sprang the dairymaid with her axe, and chopped off its head. And Piddingdean and Pidding Woods were never troubled by the knucker again, and the good people thereabouts learned a hard lesson about strange bedfellows, and the dairymaid did make a good match and grow prosperous in her father’s farm, which was never troubled by rats or insects or any other of God’s creatures, for they all loved and respected the dairymaid, and she did live happily ever after.

[1] This was part of the Sauvant estate until 1737, when, upon the marriage of Ursula Sauvant to Edmund Hartley it passed to the Hartley estate.

[2] There was an infestation of rats noted in some almanacs from many years ago, and such things are not uncommon. However, the Huguenots and Palatines were described as a “swarm” in contemporary accounts and newspapers of the day, and the language preserved in the tale makes for a suspicious parallel. The local Hanging Judge, Reginald Knightley, seems to have sentenced a number of German refugees and immigrants to the gallows for charges of theft and poaching, an astounding 48 hangings in a three week period, until the local encampment was cleared and moved on to Wiltshire and further along the Sussex coast.

[3] Spannel, m. To make dirty foot marks about a floor, as a spaniel dog does. See A Dictionary of The Sussex Dialect (1875) for the definition and examples.

[4] I cannot find what this might directly relate to, except an anachronistic memory of the toll bridge, the subject of some complaint in the 1600s. It may also be a reference to a medieval sheriff, known for extortion and corrupt behaviour, who operated as head of a criminal gang in East Sussex in the mid-to-late 1300s. It could also simply be a formulaic part of the tale relating to dragon behaviour, and nothing more.

[5] colly wobbles – stomach ache

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT A REAL SUSSEX FOLKTALE, AND REV. J. D. ALLARDYCE NEVER EXISTED. HE IS A CHARACTER BRIEFLY MENTIONED IN THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD, AND CREDITED WITH OTHER [FICTIONAL] FOLKLORE AND COLLECTED TALES FROM THIS [FICTIONAL] PLACE.

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Monster’s Hide

The Condemnation of 43-55 Starling Lane

cws: body horror (graphic) involving skin and eyes

My neighbour has been dead for days, but I can still hear him coughing through the wall. It is a hollow, hard bark of a cough, forced from his chest cavity and vibrating over his voice box, but it isn’t him doing the breathing.

Starling Lane is a long street behind a disused train track that once branched from the main line to the Barker Mill, and curved along past the village of workers known as Barker Crescent, which is several streets in curved rows set a short distance from the town, and arcing down to Pagham-on-Sea docks – not to be confused with the historic Pagham Harbour, which only shares the first part of the name.

I moved there in the summer of 2007, when there were 58 terraced cottages, two for sale, three rented. It wasn’t a bad little place to live. It had storage heaters and hadn’t been decorated since 1984 – “authentically retro”, the estate agent said to me. I saw some mould in the attic. “Don’t worry about that,” the surveyor said. “It’s not dangerous.”

The houses on the end of the row seemed to disagree; whenever I walked by, the curtains were speckled grey with it, hanging in the windows like limp rags. Paint peeled around the door frames. I never saw anyone go in or out of numbers 1-4 Starling Lane, and after a couple of years, I started noticing that 5-8 were also eerily quiet. No music, no dogs, no kids, no arguments. The lights stopped coming on. The cars remained in the parking spaces, but one day I got home from work and three of them were missing. Then another four cars, gone. Other neighbours parked there instead, leaving gaps for my Nissan Micra. I never parked in front of those houses, I couldn’t tell you why.

Some sixth sense, perhaps. Well, I know now.

In 2010, they knocked down numbers 1-10. There were skips in the street and around the corner, and I had a nose through some of the items – they were throwing away all the good stuff, coffee tables, kitchen appliances, curtains, bed linen, bed frames, bookcases. I took a few things for my house; I thought nobody would mind.

I should have suspected something then, when my eczema flared and got worse, spreading over my hands and elbows and arms in rough, bleeding patches. But it settled and responded to treatment, leaving white, rough splotches behind, and I tried not to think about them. I covered up. Kept them dry. I saw a specialist when my skin began to change, when it began to harden, when small growths appeared. They were like boils, but solid, and underneath the hump of hard, bleach-white skin, was a layer of translucent jelly that clung into my flesh with tiny fibres. I managed to peel one off with a butter knife, the flat blade slipping in the gap and prising it away, leaving a shallow, bloody pit. It hurt, but it healed. I didn’t want to see a doctor. My skin didn’t want me to, so I didn’t go.

Nothing filled the gap. Number 11 was empty, unsold. The people at Number 12 moved out six months later, then Number 23. I never knew them.

At night, I thought I could hear a moaning sound, like someone in pain. A long, drawn-out groan in the early hours, right above my head. The attics connect, you see. All the way along. They’re all partitioned off, but the terrace was built in one long line, dividing walls put up on a shared foundation. Maybe the coal cellars all connect too – mine is a concrete box, far too damp for storage.

I did investigate the moaning. I assumed at first it was someone’s TV, but couldn’t fathom what they’d be watching that sounded like that. I went up to my attic with a torch, and it was coming from the other side, but how far along I couldn’t tell. I went back downstairs and came out of the house in a dressing gown and slippers, walking slowly along the street in the dark.

There wasn’t anything to hear from outside. Nothing except the scream of a vixen, strangled and eerie, somewhere in the woods behind Starling Lane. There was the rumble of distant traffic, reassuringly human and modern and civilised. But there was no moaning, no human-voiced groans. None of the other houses had lights on.

I went back home, and the sounds had stopped.

Not long after that, Numbers 13-15 had notices served. I didn’t actually see their tenants leave. Number 28 and Number 40 went up for sale. I asked the lady at 40 if they were moving somewhere nice. She just looked at me, as if I had asked her what the moon was really made of.

I should have gone, too.

But I didn’t.

I don’t know why I didn’t. I blame my skin.

When Number 40 was empty, things got worse.

16-27 were silent. I never saw them. The moaning at night resumed, but it sounded different. Less human. More like the lowing of a cow, but a cow with a human throat. I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out where it came from.

I picked off boil after boil that summer, packing the pits they left, in constant pain with the stinging that set my skin on fire. My eyes began to swell and itch. I found layers of the jelly on the undersides of my eyelids, eating into the raw pink underneath. It detached as I pulled my lower lid down in the bathroom mirror, thin and pale-grey, but rooted at the bottom. I tried to remove it myself with tweezers, and it came away painfully in gelatinous pieces. I couldn’t get all of it, and it came back. It rewarded me only when I left it alone.

My second eyelids grew back after I tweezed them out, for that was the best way I can describe what they are. I had muscular control over them at first, two sets of lids that blink independently of one another. The lower set are now fused over my eyeballs, and I still see, but in a grey filmed glaze. It is restful, and better this way. Now, I do not have to look at myself, my skin, my situation, and see what has happened to me. It is easier to accept – and besides, there is no ‘I’ anymore. ‘I’ am we, we are me, and yet there is still some part that insists on an independent sense of self. The part of me still encased in this skin.

They knocked down Numbers 11-30. We had inspectors come to visit the other properties from Environmental Health, but I refused to let them through the door. They said they’d be back with warrants and legal permission, and I called their bluff on that. They wanted to know if I had a skin condition. I shut the door. My skin stopped hurting so much after that. I began to nurture it. It liked me to moisturise. I stopped picking out the boils. They only came back.

My toes fused first. Then my fingers. Webs of skin, fragile and soggy, linked the digits together. These were easily broken, like the thin covering of a blister, but when broken they itched maddeningly and the itching was impossible to relieve. I let them be, aired them, dried them, and they hardened. Only that brought relief.

I noticed now that the patches were changing colour. There was a greenish-grey tinge to the skin. Some of those bleach-white patches were darkening to a kind of mushroom taupe, while others mottled into shades of light and dark, slate and lichen. When I could not get out of bed anymore, I knew that they would condemn our houses too, that this was not just me, but the whole street, and we would all soon be gone. I clung to the seconds of life like they were small eternities, moulded to the mattress and sheets with the jelly of my new flesh, feelers of it connecting to the rest of the street.

That’s how I knew my neighbour was dead.

I could taste him, if I tried. I could reach into his chest with my extremities, and pump his diaphragm as I feasted, keeping myself alive just that little bit longer, until they came for me.

I could feel others, also still alive, doing the same to my living body. We nourished each other.

It is strange that, in those final moments, we never exchanged words but we were more in community than we ever had been on our little street.

Environmental Health are back. They have erected a cordon.

My thick, spongey hide is no protection from what they will bring to finish us off. I am not afraid of the wrecking balls and the flamethrowers, though. I am ripe and ready. They do not yet know we need the heat and the fire. My hide is bursting with nuggets of life.

They may destroy Starling Lane, wipe it off the town map like it was never here, but we will live on.

Things like us always find a way.

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Cave

cw: claustrophobia, dub con, chained-up man fucked to death by crustaceans in total darkness, very unerotic egg-preg

.

.

.

.

The rocks are impenetrable, impassable. The darkness, total.

There are no voices from beyond. He will die here, chained to the iron rings, starving in the wet sand.

Deeper in the darkness, something stirs. It is May, the season is turning, and the seawater warms. From within the tunnels and passages of the salted chalk, antennae and feelers seek hormones and pheromones, tasting the musty air for prey and partners.

The mating dance begins in the dark.

The segmented bodies rise, feelers waving. Each segment is encased in a horny outer shell, stippled rough like rock and dark algae-green, spotted white along the sides. The soft bodies inside are a tender, translucent meat, with pear-drop faces that grey, uncooked colour, two round orbs for eyes on short stalks facing forwards. They have small mouths that open and close in silent fish-kisses, and long tube-like antennae that rotate and probe. In the dark, they could be mistaken for ghostly, hooded aliens, little greys peering out from beneath their crustaceous bonnets, so nearly mammalian, so close to humanity, and yet… so very far.

They have thick tails, like lobsters, and claws, four in all, two for fighting and two for delicate pincer movements, and their legs number six in total along the stippled, spotted sides.

They are trapped in the cave, too.

But biological imperative is strong with their kind, and it is May, and the temperature is right, and the water is the way they like it. They begin in the darkness, clicking out of their holes to swarm the rocks, finding weaknesses and pushing their way through to the beach. Warm soft bodies, raw and dripping beneath the shells, find another warm, soft body, whimpering and straining against his manacles.

The females are in heat, as mammals can be.

They search for a sperm packet, to be deposited against their bellies. Tens of them move over each other, over the chained figure, who moves against them in the dark and writhes in a clumsy manner they can only interpret as inviting.

Short stubs like fingers probe his soft sperm sac. It is different, for he is unshelled. Perhaps in some cruel accident, or perhaps he has shed. He is big, bigger than the other males they smell, and that’s the important thing.

He begins to think there are worse fates than this one, for now he realises what they are. Merfolk, hardshells, pretty little things. He has not lain with one, not yet, but he’s heard stories. He’s heard they know what to do with a man.

On discovering the sperm packet has not been released, the merfolk, for their part, attempt to retrieve it. There are orifices to probe, some obvious and open, eliciting moans from the unshelled one as feelers sink deep inside and begin to tease, to explore, to shaft. Others are hidden and secret behind folds of skin, skin which ought not to be broken, and are fondled cautiously, either side of the sperm pipe. The eye of the sperm pipe itself is explored by one, but briefly.

Eventually, he ejaculates.

The mermaids collect this effusion on their undersides, where their egg packets hang in clusters. Then, they find his moaning, opened mouth, and pump the fertilised eggs into the belly of the father.

The young will take hours to gestate, and nourish themselves on the way out.

The rocks give way as the dance is done, and the merfolk scuttle out into the shallows to mate again, and again, and again. They leave behind the unshelled thing, egg-bound in the cave, and soon to be a nurturing feast for their young.

Day 5: The Tentacled Beast is an unfinished experimental scene that takes place between The Crows and Thirteenth, so contains spoilers for the end of The Crows. I’ve posted it only to Ko-Fi, so you can read it there for now for free, then after 31 May 2023 will become a member/supporter-only piece of extra content.

#EldritchGirl S03E03: Devil’s Drop

Unger Point – Devil’s Drop

Most places have somewhere called Devil’s Drop, I’m willing to bet: we called the quarry something like that. In Pagham-on-Sea, that place is Unger Point, mentioned from Carrie’s POV in The Crows, but she’s not a local.

I wrote a thing about Devil’s Drop/Unger Point for Monstrous May last year, and referenced that in the novel, because hardshell merfolk are 100% canon.

That post is here: Crustaceous Merfolk. It is quoted below.

Under the stars on a summer night, a land shoal drunkenly scatters. One of the group makes his way to Unger Point, and rests where the tide laps at the edge of the shingle, on its way in. He lies down, not knowing the tide is coming in, and the water laps closer until it is around his ankles. 

With the rising water come the folk. 

    Usually, the folk have their fill of sand worms and picnic remains, but every so often there is a feast like this. They are quiet, emerging from the foam on jointed legs. On land, their shells are slick and shiny, and their skin reflects the inky navy of the night sky. Their burly claws encase tender, muscular flesh, made all the more succulent for sharks in deeper waters by feasts like these. 

    They mass when the feast is spotted. 

Some smaller of their kin have arrived first and are already peppering the body with their starred shapes, making tiny, high-pitched burbles to attract the others. The starfolk glisten in the night, phosphorescing, and the body seems to glimmer with diamonds. They have swarmed to the easiest places – the eyes, the soft lips, which had been parted in sleep, and so fill up the mouth cavity. Starfolk clamp down with their venomous bellies, and feed. The body is already swollen with the reaction from their bites. The enzymes break down the fat and flesh from the inside, and what bubbles into the mouth is sucked up by their pulsing, glowing fronds. Chubby cheeks and big, glazed orbs for eyes make them look cherubic, their bulbous heads unencumbered by cartilage or bone, blown up into the squishy mockery of human babies by a system of air and water sacs they use for propulsion. The puckered rosebud lips are for this purpose – the feeding happens underneath the starred limbs. 

    The shellfolk are much bigger and enjoy the results of the starfolk’s enzymes. They, in turn, break down the bones and allow access to the marrow, break through skin and allow the starfolk to feed within the wounds. There is enough for all. 

    The body has four limbs, tubular and jointed like the shellfolk do, but most of the feast is in the trunk of the torso. 

    The shellfolk break pieces off with their claws, shredding the meat as the internal organs break down and ooze into gel. The body twitches feebly – it was probably alive when the starfolk began, but cannot last much longer. The lungs wheeze and gurgle but this could be from the shaking of the body and pressure upon it now that the shellfolk are there. Starfolk drop off the parts the shellfolk are stripping, plopping onto the sand and scuttling back to swarm the dripping wounds. 

The shellfolk have eyes like sheep on retractable stalks, and they roll in their sockets, assessing the feast. Seal-heads with human features sniff out their prey. They discourse over food with clicks and whistles. They feed from two mouthparts – the ones that might pass for human in the face that could not, and the mandibles located in their chests, at the lip of the shells that fuse to their tough, seal-hide skin. Their skin ripples in reflection of the changing sky, a chameleonic wetsuit. 

Mastication takes place in the human-like mouthparts and the stomach, which is filled with grinders. The softer flesh is tasted, enjoyed. Bone and gristle, as well as less tasty morsels – a matter of personal preference – is delivered direct to the stomach through the lower mandibles for nourishment. 

The starfolk burble as the tide creeps over the body, now thoroughly dismembered and split apart. The patch of shingle where it lay is full of waving claws, jointed legs that scuttle and shift the pebbles, and tiny sparkling blobs that plop off into the water when sated, bobbing back out across the waves in myriads of bloated crystalline lights. 

There is little left. Some cracked bones picked clean. Some ribbons of intestine, shredded and lying on the stones like limp strips of bladderwrack. The sea will wash it away and fish will tuck in, and the shelled folk will submerge and scuttle back to deeper waters. 

~ C. M. Rosens, Monstrous May Merfolk piece

That’s what Katy can hear in the cave, and although we don’t see these fae, it gives you an idea of what to expect later when we get into the Otherworld a little more thanks to Myrddin’s involvement. I will be looking at this more in other stories and flash fic pieces!

In the meantime, this post is sponsored by Ariel’s Fish & Chip Shop on Dock Street.

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#MonstrousMay 2023: Hypnotised

Hypnotised

An extract from Chapter 9 of THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD

“You look nervous,” Jem Foreman observed, and Theo tried not to blush. Nerves were natural, he told himself, and not at all a sign of doubt. It was the thrill of it, being so close to ultimate power, the source of their family’s glory.

Of course, Jem was never nervous. He was as stoic as usual, defying the warmth of the late spring evening with a plain grey golf jacket to hide the ooze seeping through his shirt. They were in the car park of an abandoned warehouse, where Japanese knotweed and nettle patches had fought the concrete and won. The warehouse was one of David Wend’s, but Theo wasn’t sure if he knew his relations had commandeered it.

Uncle David hadn’t used it for a while, probably not since the people trafficking thing. Theo had heard rumours that had ended badly. He wondered why Uncle David was still alive.

Theo shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“You better be.”

“I told you I wouldn’t let you down,” Theo said, trying to keep his voice level, “And I won’t.”

Jem eyed him. “I hope that’s the collective ‘you’, not me personally, because this isn’t about me. And it’s not about us, either. You know that, right?”

Theo wanted to know what the fuck ‘us’ meant if it didn’t mean dinner and a bottle of red wine in front of the television and screwing whenever Jem felt like it. If that wasn’t enough, he’d hoped being part of this greater cause would at least make Jem see he was boyfriend material.

“Of course I do.” Theo licked his lips. “Am I in trouble? For running away yesterday?”

Jem shook his head, giving him a soft smile of reassurance. “No. You’re not in trouble. Her glory has come in handy, though. We’re making use of that in the ritual today.”

He turned and beckoned Theo to follow him.

“Her glory?” Theo picked his way carefully around the potholes and headed to the heavy metal side door.

“Such as it is. Wend-McVeys aren’t exactly prime specimens. But the shrine wants what it wants, and it wants someone’s glory for this ritual. Why cut one of ours off when hers was lying there?”

Theo tried to act nonchalant. “Granny Shaw used to say—”

“With the greatest respect,” Jem said, cutting him off, “If it wasn’t for Olive Shaw, we’d have already Ascended. Neither Beverley Wend nor Olive Shaw had the sense to see Granny Foreman was right. It’s our time. That’s why we’re here. Right, Theo?”

Theo stopped, cheeks burning. He made himself nod.

“Right, Theo?” Jem repeated.

“Yes, Jem,” Theo said.

“Are you ready?”

Beyond Jem was the darkness of the warehouse. It was all very straightforward, nothing to worry about. Theo licked his lips.

“Sure.”

Jem handed him a robe and a mask from just inside the door. Theo slipped them on, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.

The light was steadily fading over the tarmac and concrete beyond the car park fence, the sky bleeding reds and oranges in sickly bands that made him feel empty inside. Sunsets always made him feel weirdly anxious, balanced on the edge of the definite velvet energy of nightfall on one hand and the clear rush of day on the other.

He didn’t like the weak amber of the dying sunlight, refusing to give up for far longer than it should. It was a nothing time, a nowhere time, and Theo hated it.

The warehouse swallowed them in shadow, and it was a relief when the door closed and left him safe in the dark.

The Remnant were gathered, robed and Changed, and Theo allowed his proboscis to slide out of his throat to demonstrate his own glory, such as it was. It unfurled hesitantly, hard slim casing pressing on his tongue, a reedy thing next to all the crustaceous limbs and anemone fronds like udon noodles cased in aspic, the thick octopodid arms and needle-mouthed suckers, the tight, thick coils, strong as snakes, tough as tree roots.

Theo rubbed the back of his neck beneath his hood and nearly knocked it down again, jostled by the press of relatives.

He had managed to hunker down in his pew when the family fled the church, but bruises were starting to form on his sensitive skin, marks of sensible heels and just-in-case umbrellas as his aunts clambered over him to flee their Death God. Theo had fled too, once he’d stopped being trampled.

The jostling reminded him of where the bruises were, and he whimpered, scuttling through the crowd to find somewhere he wouldn’t be elbowed in his tender ribs.

He didn’t know what had happened to Layla, but he prayed to Grandad that she was all right. He’d always liked her.

The shrine was in the middle of the derelict space, containing pieces from the Wend shrine salvaged from Wundorwick and articles from the Foreman shrine used by the last head of the family. With the devouring of Uncle Marcus and Aunty Ida, the family were rudderless, and there had been no time to call another election. The other shrines lay silent and abandoned.

Theo slipped to the front, letting the conversations wash over him.

The body of this shrine was an antique apothecary cabinet that had belonged to Olive Shaw. There was an engorged heart pierced with a large hatpin on the flat top. The drawers were open in a pattern forming a rough spiral, and in each one a strange stone phosphoresced. A ring of candles encircled it, more for the aesthetic, Theo supposed, but also because there was no electricity in the warehouse, and it was getting dark.

His proboscis throbbed with his quickened pulse and flicked involuntarily around before he could retract it.

Jem oozed over to his brothers Gavin and Brandon, laconic Gavin fresh from his latest hike across the Andes with his close-cropped beard and chestnut man-bun perched high on his head, bully-boy Brandon standing to attention like a militarised slab of beef.

The three of them entered the circle of candles, and a hush descended on the gathering.

“Are you ready to see yourselves for what you are?” Gavin asked, taking the lead.

“We are,” Theo said with the others, sucking in his proboscis to speak clearly.

“Are you ready to see what awaits us?”

Theo was less sure of this, but he answered appropriately, and in unison. “We are.”

“Tonight, we open the portal,” Gavin said, and a thrill chased up Theo’s back. There was a hiss of anticipation, and Theo stopped listening.

Gavin was giving it the hard sell, the way Theo tried to sell waistcoats to the guy who came into his shop every Wednesday to buy another tie, but it was the shine in his eyes that held Theo’s attention.

Gavin had never looked twice at Theo, but the few words they’d exchanged over the cold buffet last Yule had been pretty great.

Theo huddled in the safety of his hood and robe, burning with guilt over Jem’s brother, desperate for Gavin to look his way, while wondering if Jem even cared where he was. The more impassioned Gavin got, hood down, candle flames throwing sharp shadows across his strong cheekbones and chiselled jaw, the more Theo throbbed with shame and longing.

It was when he missed a crucial part of the speech that prompted liturgical responses, too tongue-tied to get a word out, that he realised his heart wasn’t in the future of the family the way it ought to be.

He wasn’t ready.

The three Foreman brothers began to chant. Layla’s severed glory was unwrapped by Brandon and placed alongside the heart. The mouth at its tip fastened onto the oversized organ like a leech, the severed end jerking into life.

Theo flinched as Jem cut his arm and oozed over it.

It was always about sacrifice, about pain, about blood.

Doubts prickled in the back of his mind. Would it ever be anything else? When Grandad rose, when his priests swarmed and covered the earth, what would they get at the end? What would be left?

Until then he had imagined a new world order, the kind of hedonistic utopia of legend and myth.

Gavin was waxing lyrical about conservation and eco-spirituality and how they were really saving the planet, how nature would find a balance and the Remnant would be transcendent, Ascended, the true gods ruling over lesser species. That didn’t sit well with Theo.

Jem had always emphasised the physical changes, the attaining of godhood, the power they would wield as their birthright and reward. Now, he wasn’t sure what sort of reward that would be, but he was starting to think the image he had in his head – an image Jem had encouraged – wasn’t quite what would happen.

The ritual began.

Theo hadn’t been part of one like this since his own Changes, drawn into Great-Aunt Beverley’s cellar with his siblings and parents, trying not to cry.

He quivered, wishing he hadn’t pushed his way so close to the shrine, and realising the press of family at his back meant he was stuck there.

The stones glowed; the heart began to pulse.

Reality tore in front of him, a white-hot flash ripped through the air in an arc within the circle of candles. Theo couldn’t catch his breath, air rushing by him in a rollercoaster of spinning fractals while he knew he was standing still.

The light was bright as lightning, and then it was daylight. A blinding sun lighting a wasteland of obsidian and jet, reflecting into the warehouse. Theo stared into the desolation of Grandad’s domain, eyes aching and dry, and saw things that might once have been trees, stunted and fossilised on a headland of rotting fish thrown up in low tide. This was no utopia.

The chanting of the Remnant reminded him he should be chanting too.

Jem was shifting shape in front of his eyes, twisting into something elastic and indescribable, something fluid and solid at the same time, something alien and erotic and wonderful. Theo felt a tug in his own throat and let his proboscis free.

His throat expanded around it as it uncoiled, not the reedy little thing of a few moments ago, but something that the rest of his body burgeoned from like a fruit, his whole sentience and senses bound up in the length of star-grey, rippling power arcing from his mouth. His lips stretched wide, then wider, his teeth sank into his own flesh and his skull cracked and split.

Everything that was Theo was falling away, limbs nothing but stumps, extremities discarded. He was only his glory, his glory was him. He arced through the air, hungry for assimilation.

LET ME THROUGH!

The Voice filled Theo with ecstatic terror. It brought him down from his flight of glory and flung him back to his eighteenth birthday, the day he’d Changed. He remembered the pain, the needle in his neck that pushed through and strangled his vocal chords, the blindfold that itched, the way the cellar floor had become hot black sand…

He shrank back into nothing at the irresistible demand and realised how small he was compared to the Voice, the power in it reverberating through every fibre of his body.

His proboscis withdrew, all its glory illusory.

Theo would have fallen if it weren’t for the family pressing around him, keeping him on his feet.

His doubts crystallised in cold certainty.

He didn’t want to meet the Voice at all.

There was no way to close the portal now that it had opened; or if there was, Theo couldn’t think of one. He couldn’t move, the candles now an impassable ring of brilliant fire that was somehow a solid wall of glittering air. Nothing made any sense. The warehouse was twisting out of shape, and Theo was sure he was upside down.

Then he heard it.

Not the Voice.

Worse.

The rustling of insects, wings beating in sync, a swarm of something terrible, massing over the volcanic crags and filling the alien air. The swarm grew louder, and Theo saw them masking a shape, something that moved in impossible angles, something vast and horrible, coming for them with frightening speed.

Panic seized him. His chest turned to ice.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Someone pushed him, desperate to get closer, and Theo fell into the candles. He bounced back, singed, and knew even if he ran away it wouldn’t help.

Joining an apocalyptic death cult solely for someone he was screwing to finally admit they were together was the worst choice he’d ever made, and it was also going to be his last.

Theo braced himself, a sob of horror escaping his dry mouth, waiting for the swarm.

Something twinkled in the wasteland between the rocks. It grew and glittered, a second portal of light drawing energy from this one.

Theo felt a tug in his head, a strange itch behind his eyes.

He saw a face.

It burst into his head with sudden clarity and it was not a face he had ever seen before, but it had a strange air of familiarity as if it had always been lodged in his brain somewhere.

It was not a human face, but it wore one like a mask.

It had too many dimensions, too many layers, too many sides. It had human features, but even they weren’t right, as if the Face had heard about human eyes and noses and mouths when making its copy, but had never seen them before. The Face defied description, eating away at his attempts to make sense of it, feeding from his confusion.

The Face was the only True Face he would ever see.

Theo prayed to the Face to save him from the swarm, offering his strength and soul to the Face if it would close the portal.

The True Face stared through him, now all that he could see, all that he was aware of. Its not-human eyes glittered darkly, a myriad of others trapped behind them, making up the fractured colours of the irises.

It saw him, saw straight through him, saw him naked and exposed and raw, a grub of slime and quivering terror, and its lips peeled back from too many molars into a wide, stretched smile.

Theo’s strength leached out of him.

Something cracked. He heard it, a sonic boom somewhere in the Outside. The shrine exploded in shards of stone and painted wood. The portal closed.

Theo fell back as the candles were extinguished.

He lifted his head from the blood-splashed concrete.

Jem, Brandon and Gavin Foreman were dead.

He was coated with them.

The warehouse echoed with the Remnant’s moans, mutterings and wails of dismay.

“Did you see that?” Theo hissed, grabbing a cousin’s arm. “The Face! Did you see it?”

But the cousin shook her head. “I don’t – what happened?”

“The Face,” Theo whispered, too stunned to process the fact that bits of his lover were all over the fucking walls. Weirdly, he didn’t care. The Face stuck in his mind, sharp as a cravat stud. “Did anyone see it? Anyone else?”

Only a few looked at him as if they knew what he meant. The others had glazed expressions, as if waking from bad dreams.

“The Face,” Theo whispered, his head buzzing.

He stayed on the floor, coated in blood and scraps of Foreman flesh, as the screaming finally started.

#MonstrousMay: The Monster’s Teeth

cw: human teeth, graphic sensory descriptions

The Monster’s Teeth

He wasn’t meant to be here. 

He knew he shouldn’t touch anything when he was in the Big House, and his mother had told him to stay in the kitchen.

He could hear grown-up voices shouting and calling from all over, some commotion and cries of “Fetch the doctor” and gossip from the parlour maids. The kitchen was too hot, too crowded, and half the staff were rushing in and out when they had no reason to be, just to hear the latest from the cook and the housekeeper, who had repeated their stories a hundred times and had enough tea and biscuits to repeat it a hundred times more. Normal service was suspended. 

He didn’t understand what was going on, only that there were too many people. 

Nobody noticed when he slipped away into the quiet panelled corridors where he could breathe, and snuck around the grand staircase to the other side of the house. Here was the master’s study, the smoking room, the big, long dining hall, and he crept into the first empty room he could find as a place of temporary solace. 

He wasn’t meant to be here. 

The study was an avalanche waiting to happen, drifts and peaks of papers and books everywhere, coloured chalks scattered on the bare boards with the rugs rolled up in thick sausages, the grate empty and cold. 

He shouldn’t touch anything. 

He knew that.

But there was a cabinet full of tiny drawers, none of them labelled – or if they were, the labels were in such tiny, spidery writing that he could barely make out the words. Thomas, said one. Araminta, said another. 

He opened the drawers one at a time, and the tiny boxes slid out, contents nested in hanks of wool. 

Tiny milk pearls with bumpy ridges, pronged roots embedded in the softness underneath.

He opened others, unlabeled. The contents of these were bigger, yellowed, decayed. Their roots were rusty, stained. He didn’t understand, but he was transfixed. 

Each drawer contained more treasures, pitted and ulcerous, pearly and perfect, molar and premolar, cuspid and incisor. They rolled hard and sharp between his finger and thumb, gritty and salted under his tongue, grating under his own teeth as he bit them to test their authenticity, like a man biting coins. 

Chips scraped off in his mouth like tiny shards of eggshell, little bits of grit that felt wrong in his mouth. 

He explored the bumps and hollows, the points and planes, growing used to the contours and forbidden taste of iron and salt.

He made the collection his own by touch and taste, placing the possessive stamp of saliva on each and every one he could find no matter how his taste buds rebelled, detecting traces of chemicals and cleaning fluids, until the collection was entirely his own. 

Sliding the last drawer back in place, he heard his mother calling his name. 

“Dicky Pendle! You’re for it, when I find you.”

He snuck himself into a musty corner of the study and waited for the door to open, for the heavy hand of righteous fury to descend on his shoulder and yank him out for a belting. It didn’t matter, when he had a bright new secret to keep.

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Werewolf

Notes on the Village of Hangingstones, West Yorkshire

1518

A strange happening (Extract from R. E. E. Stubbs, ‘Hangingstones and other Villages, a short history’ (1898) :
Three days after they hanged Widow Harding at the hanging stones, there came upon the village nearby a terrible storm, so great the roof of the church fell in and the tower crumbled. Several of those huddled inside were killed, but those who escaped reported tales of a large black dog with deep red eyes like the burning pits of Hell who came amongst them and tore many limb from limb… Indeed, it was reported there that when the bodies were recovered from the church, they showed signs of tearing rather than crushing, as if they had been rent asunder by a wild, ferocious beast. Of the survivors of this terrible atrocity, it was said that they were never themselves after, and that on the nights of the full moon they could be seen on the tor capering around the stone circle there and shifting their shapes to roam the moors as beasts. There came a certain priest to that place to see if what was said was true, but he came away saying there was nothing to the tale but superstition and tragedy – but the priest himself was rumoured to have the power to shift his shape at will, a slur against his character levelled by the Protestants, and he was later burned at the stake for refusing to recant his Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, the superstition has arisen that every hundred years or so (for these things are never terribly precise) the black dog with burning eyes is seen again, plaguing travellers and locals alike, sometimes to blame for the deaths of livestock and for spooking horses along the road, at other times driving people to madness, and still at others taking vengeance if called upon for this purpose.

1620

A curious tale from Yorkshire (Extract from R. E. E. Stubbs, ‘Hangingstones and other Villages, a short history’ (1898):
While in Lancashire the Pendle Hill witch-trials were ongoing, in Hangingstones there was a coven who danced with the Devil on the tor, so they say, and they called upon the demon keeper of the hounds of Hell to release one of his creatures to protect them from the witchfinders. After their dark rites beneath the full moon, a howl rang out across the moors like the call of a mermaid or siren, irresistible and beautiful and terrifying. They followed the sound of the howl like ones possessed, leaping and dancing under the stars, and went straight into the gorge at Devil’s Drop and were never heard from again. But, that very night and for many nights afterwards, travellers spoke of a large black dog roaming the moors that spooked their horses, and farmers lost many livestock.

1735
A gothick mystery (Extract from the published Journal of Dr L. Fairweather, vol. 2, Travels Through the North Countrie (1730-37):

28 August 1735
A certain curate’s daughter, Alice Thompson, vanished from her home on the night of Wednesday last, after receiving a note from a stranger to the village. The stranger stayed the night at The George Inn, but no trace of him has been heard or seen since his sudden departure in the night. No blame could ever be attached to such a pure young lady as Miss Thompson, and her frantic parents and friends suspect foul play. The circle of standing stones on the tor above the village, where in the past miscreants from the parish were hanged upon the gibbet set there, are a gruesome and sinister sight, and scraps of bloodied cloth were discovered therein upon the grass, which appeared to be part of a lady’s night-gown with a fine lace collar. Her mother has identified the lace as belonging to the missing lady. No body has yet been recovered, but a local farmer claimed that he saw a large black dog with blood-red eyes upon the road and that this was the very night that both Miss Thompson and the stranger vanished. Their connexion to each other is still quite unknown.

09 September 1735
…Regarding the tragic tale of Miss Alice Thompson that I recorded previously: the remains of a young man were later recovered from Devil’s Drop, mauled and savaged beyond recognition. In his pack, recovered from the grisly scene, there were pieces of Miss Thompson’s jewelry and an ivory fan. Miss Thompson’s fate remains a mystery.

1826
A Tale of Terror (Local Newspaper Report)
A terrifying tale from Yorkshire has set the imaginations of our most sensible gentlemen of late, with several astonishing stories emerging from the survivors of Sir William Armitage’s hunting party. The party of experienced gamekeepers and less experienced gentlemen, became lost on the moors. Of the gamekeepers only Mr Daniel Haywood was left, staggering over the tor with Sir Thomas R———, whose leg was very badly wounded. They were with a young beater purported to be Mr Haywood’s son, Master Samuel Haywood, and Sir Charles L———. Neither of these eminent gentlemen are given to flights of fancy and are considered to be most sensible, redoubtable fellows, and yet the tale they told of ‘a great devil dog’ hunting them across the moor and devouring their hapless companions was fit for the most lurid of publications……

1919
Murder on the Moors (Local Newspaper Report)
For some, the horrors of the Front are no mere memory. Lance Corporal Samuel Thackrey was shot dead last week in a tragic case of ‘shell shock’, a common affliction among the returning men. It is reported that Private Charles Bennett, who served in Thackrey’s regiment during the Great War, was ‘running wild’ on the moor in pursuit of the imagined enemy, and that the Lance Corporal was shot attempting to bring Bennett to his senses. For several days prior to the shooting, neighbours allege that Bennett had reported hearing howling on the moors and seeing ‘a girt black hound’ watching his cottage at night, and believed it to be a death omen of some kind. Bennett was seen limping after a dog-bite, apparently blaming the ‘black hound’. Bennett, who had grown increasingly disturbed since his return from France, became agitated after a small boy let off a firework on the village green, causing him to commence snarling, shouting, and threatening passers by. He accused Lance Corporal Thackrey, whom he did not appear to recognise, of being a German officer and many other fantastical things besides, before drawing his pistol and shooting the Lance Corporal in the head. The curious detail learned by this reporter is that Bennett shot Thackrey with a silver bullet, and no one can account for how he came by it.

The View from the Tor

It is no easy task, to take off one’s skin. 

First, because the skin you see is different to the skin you do not see, and it is much easier to peel something tangible from your body than it is to detach your very essence; second, because it hurts.

Observe: 

A field in the witching hour, once deserted, now crawling with stripped bodies.

Silver light gleams on a mass of undulating skin, writhing in the dark. The expanse of grass is now a lake of spines and cresting bodies, moving in waves and ripples of cracking, lengthening, shifting bones. Peach-white and gammon-pink meets and merges with earth tones and stone tones, golden, rich, mottled, grazed, stippled with psoriasis and acne, smooth and supple.

Among the neat stacks of clothes on the field’s edge, humanity has been put aside, folded carefully with shirts and skirts and jeans and shoes, the shape of each person carefully stowed between layers of polyester and cotton.

Upturned buttocks, reflecting the roundness of the orb above, undulate in various stages of painful eruption. A second hole opens above the anus, where there was a coin-shaped scar, now a coin-sized opening. The tailbone erupts through it, pushing to the surface and breaking the skin. Lengths of fur unfurl like fern-fronds, feeding through the broken holes where the skin is already raw from last month’s Turning. 

A forest of tails, curling and dark, some glinting with aged grey and some with youthful white, blossom upwards. Small ruby spots fleck the raised round cheeks, drips of claret leaving the curves tear-streaked. 

Ribs expand and crack. It is hard to breathe when the body knows it should not be this shape, this size. Reconfiguring contortions sweep the gathering, causing billowing humps of groaning flesh to surge and subside, slick with perspiration. 

One final push relieves them of their burdens, gives them full and final release. 

And now:

The pack shake damp fur and trot into the dark, leaving their human layers behind.