S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 21

Flash Fiction: Oceanrest Murder Confession

I did kill them, I’ll admit that.  I murdered them all, one at a time, using the curved, sharp edge of a seven inch blade.

But I didn’t write those words.

The blood wrote the words long ago, and I read them.  It was a sanguinary scripture.  Destiny scrawled out.

People used to read entrails and see the future in the guts–this was like that.  When I was a boy I looked up at the chalkboard and saw the blood dripping down the walls like runny jam.  The words were already there.  I saw the future in them, in their glistening shapes behind my teacher’s head.  I memorized them over days and weeks and never forgot what they said.  I knew the scripture forwards and backwards long before I ever contributed my hand to its diction.

You don’t seem to understand me.  To understand it.  You say that my fingerprints were found smudged in the gore, you say I chose to do it myself, taking their life from their throats and using my hand as a brush to paint my religion…I didn’t.  I am beginning a long standing prophecy.  You have to understand.  My actions, my subsequent arrest…this isn’t an ending.

This is a beginning.

I didn’t write the words.  The blood wrote the words for me, long ago.  I only read them.

The blood is still out there, writing.

Other people have read.

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Flash Fiction: Note From Oceanrest

(today’s flash fiction is not a macabre translation of life in NYC, but rather a little world-building exercise I did for a concept I’m working on)

[she found the papers in a ruffled pile in a disused stall in the woods]

[there was no explanation for them: what they were about, how they got there, how long they’d been sitting in undated excrement and woodrot]

[she has to read them.  The breadcrumbs led her this far, and she isn’t about to turn back, now.]

[she picks a sheet from the middle of the pile, like a child taking a card from a magician]

DATE UNKNOWN

The empty hallways fold in on each other like nesting dolls as I walk them, always empty, footsteps calling back to me in echoes, stretching on infinitely, longer and longer dialogues with the tiles.  One hallway becomes the next hallway becomes the next hallway.  Walking in circles.  Walking an ouroboros.  The hallways eat themselves while I’m still inside.

They fed me pills in every color of the chemical-spill rainbow.  I took them with water that shone like sunkissed oil.  All that color spilled darkness in me.

There’s something under it all like music but it couldn’t be music because the whole complex (the long repeating hallway) is absolutely silent.  Only my footsteps and the shadows pouring words into my ear.

I remember things, but I don’t know how I remember them.  There are three kinds of memories I find in the endless hallways: memories of impossible things, memories of things that never happened to me, and memories of things that happened too long ago to be clear.  I remember being followed by a woman in all white and a plague mask as her face, writing my life down on a clipboard.  I remember shadows whispering to me in every voice I’ve ever heard.  I remember a pale prince dying in my arms, the yellow sign blotted in the rorschach of his blood.

I remember you finding something hidden in your breath against the glass.

[wind rustles the autumn leaves and she glances over her shoulder.]

[but it was just the wind, wasn’t it?]

[she stuffs the papers in her backpack.  She knows she shouldn’t be here.]

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Flash Fiction: Downtown Dark One

They all wear ties.  Their skin comes in every variety of white.  Their watches cost more than your rent and you’ll only wear a suit like that twice, and only once that you’ll know about.  They pace the downtown streets on headsets tuned to a frequency mankind cannot hear.  The market bubbles beneath everything, speaking in a low dark voice like tar.  It whispers in their ears and fills their skulls with promises It never intends to keep.  When they open their  mouths, they all sound the same, and they all sound like It.  They drool black sludge and snort white powder.  Look away when you see one.  Look away, keep your head down, pray to whatever weak deities you have at your disposal.  It will eat them, in time.  Pray that the time is later.

A homeless man shambles by, a one-man parade of reek and despair.  His face is grizzled and hopeless.  His drugs are the table scraps of theirs, the whatever’s-left that the dealers scrape out of pocket bottoms.  His eyes gaze into unearthly distance, and you know he’s seen his deities devoured.  He walks past and you exhale, glad to be out of the stench wafting after.

His neck cracks and pops and his spine severs.  His skull jostles and jerks its way around to look at you, jaw lolling open with a message only you can hear and nobody else is aware of.  “It’s coming for you, next.  They’re coming for you, next.”

You pretend to hear nothing and move through a sea of suits toward a coffee shop.  You pretend their hollow eyes don’t follow you.  You pretend that you speak the language they gibber into their inhuman earpieces.  You order a medium skim latte with sweetener and clutch it in white-knuckled fingers.  Your wallet is empty and your job isn’t refilling it.  You drink the latte and pretend.

In the static of your nightmares you hear the homeless man whispering at you.  In your fever dreams, you know.

Now wake up and pretend.

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Flash Fiction: Subway Children

The train car is full of screaming children and their dead-eyed parents.  The parents are silent.  You can see in their faces they haven’t slept ever.  They have dreamless eyes and hard-lined faces and have never felt happiness.  The children wail.  They have just discovered the power of their vocal chords.  They are a banshee chorus.  I cover my ears and bow my head and it makes no difference: their bloodcurdling keening punches its way through my ear drums and echoes in the cavern of my skull.  They will grow up here and have children of their own.  Those children will shriek me into old age.  I will collapse in my seat, tumble forward dead, and they will keep screaming long after an MTA worker has collected my remains for deposit.  They will turn my liquescence into baby food, let it drool from the lips of shrieking children.  Those children will grow up and listen to the next generation of pink-faced howlers burst their ear-drums into deafness.  The subway surges on.  This is life here.  This has always been life, here.

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Flash Fiction: NYC Apartment

I wake up in the morning and it’s smaller than before.  I swear.  The walk from my bed to the kitchen is shorter.  This happens every day.  The walls are collapsing around me, the ceiling is getting lower.  I pace in tighter circles, wringing my hands and thinking about the day my room will inevitably crush me.  It’s a very nice neighborhood.  A lot of young people are moving in.  I won’t live to watch them get any older.  Their lives are just beginning.  My kitchen is next to the bed, now.  I can’t leave.  The door is blocked.  Such a nice neighborhood.

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Misery and Death and Everything Depressing, by C. V. Hunt

Dark.  Grim.  Hilarious.

Misery and Death and Everything Depressing is a short story collection by C. V. Hunt, whose uncanny talent of weaving dark humor with bleak plots and tormented characters gives even the grimmest tale a smirk.  For horror fans, the stories The Quarry and No Room for a Child will surely satisfy, combining genre tropes with excellent characterization and strong descriptions.  More literary fans will find Human Contact as a strange, skin-crawling examination of isolation and loneliness in the modern age–similar to Last Woman on Earth, a meditation on the same with quite a different ending, though perhaps the weaker of the two stories.

The strongest story, however, is Baby Hater.  It holds the perfect combination of humor, extreme human behavior, and a plot that unfurls into a beautiful tapestry.  I couldn’t stop laughing, chuckles and full-on guffaws teased from my lips by a bleak, sadistic narrator who, as the title suggests, isn’t a fan of children.  Of course, who really is?  The story only gets more amusing and still darker as the narrator’s original plan begins to slide sideways, running right up to a very satisfying climax.

The first and last stories in the collection are, in my opinion, the weakest.  The punchline of the first (To Say Mother Teresa Was Shocked When She Woke Up In Hell Would Be An Understatement) falls a little flat, the title possibly being the strongest point of the piece.  The last story (The Last Entry) is fine, but compared to the rest of the stories in the piece seems like a poor choice to end on.

All in all, Misery and Death and Everything Depressing is a stellar collection of stories.  Baby Hater alone is worth the purchase.  I consider the other stories as bonus material at this price ($2.99 for the e-book as I write this).  If I’d known ahead of time how good these stories were going to be, I’d have shelled out the extra $7 for the paperback.  C. V. Hunt has created some amazing work, here.  You should buy it.

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The Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero

This book was in my top 5 list before I even finished reading it.  The Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero, is charming, creepy, thrilling, and amazingly well-crafted.  If you feel the need to continue reading my opinions and insights, by all means do, but I actually recommend leaving now and just picking up a copy.

The book is a haunted house book.  No, wait, that’s not quite right.  It’s a book about dreams and visions and pseudo-science and murder most foul, and it takes place in a haunted house.  Also, there’s a secret society.  There’s a number of plot threads and interesting asides woven into the tapestry of the novel, but somehow they never seem to confuse each other or run amok, instead falling into a balance and clarity that many authors would struggle to achieve between so many things.  Everything in the plot supports everything else.  It’s delightful.  By the turning of the last page, you’ll realize that none of it was accidental and all of it was necessary.  There’s no fat to be trimmed.  It all makes sense at the end.

But the plot isn’t the best reason to read the book.  The characters are much better.  The prime narrator, A., is a curious, studious gent with a smirking sense of humor who is one of the more lovable narrators I’ve read in some time.  Quite the stand-up guy, on the whole.  Niamh is an energetic, frenetic partner who, though mute, has rather a lot to say.  I was utterly charmed.  Rarely do I worry for characters in fictional works, which has proven utilitarian in the current climate of literature and television, in which even seemingly essential characters are pruned regularly…but these guys had me tensely clutching the book, white-knuckled, holding my breath and sending out a silent plea to the author “no!  Please don’t!” which I consider a tremendous statement to their strengths.

All of this is delivered through diary entries, letters, security camera feeds, a home video camera, excerpts of magazine articles, faxes, etc… throwing out usual narrative delivery for other modes.  At first this comes off as a little “gimmicky,” but after a couple pages I stopped noticing entirely.  Many reviewers have related the delivery to that of House of Leaves, but I wouldn’t make that comparison per se.  House of Leaves is more of a serious-minded work, firstly, and secondly it requires you to rotate and twist the book, to read things in mirrors, etc… whereas The Supernatural Enhancements asks only that you keep reading, and has about as many visual elements/illustrations as Nos4a2.  Maybe a couple more.  And though there are cryptograms, ciphers, and puzzles…all of them are entirely optional, and most are solved for you by the narrators.  Except for the very first one.

My final note on the book is also perhaps the most important: Edgar Cantero writes great prose.  It is a difficult task to try to meld the poetic dread of Lovecraft with the pacing demands of a modern novel, but Mr. Cantero pulls it off marvelously.  His word usage is brilliant.  His choice in descriptors, metaphors, etc… are amazing and occasionally even stunning.  The rhythm of the writing is entrancing.  In terms of sheer aesthetics, in terms of quality prose…I should use the word “astonishing.”  Read the book if for no other reason than to experience what Edgar Cantero can do with the English language.

Now go.  We’re done here.

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No Grave News, More Fiction En Route

Hey, guys!  No Grave is still in the middle of a lot of changes and a lot of stuff being up in the air.  I don’t want to get into all the details at the moment (especially not in a public place where  my embarrassment will be tenfold if things don’t work out), but know that the delay is a good sign and that I’m working my absolute hardest to make sure you can get the book in your hands, one way or another, as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a couple other projects, and I figure that having something to read is better than having nothing to read, so I’m going to start posting some of the world-building stuff I’ve written, maybe even a couple sample pages from the projects proper.  I hope you enjoy the new pieces as they come out, but unlike with No Grave, I can’t make any promises about any of them going anywhere specific.  At least not at this junction.

Expect to see some world building descriptions, quick flash fictions, etc… especially from a little place called Oceanrest I’ve been working on for the past 2-3 years, give or take.

Why not start off with some background:

Oceanrest, Maine.  Population, 1985: 63,400.  Population, 2015: 35,750, including matriculated students.  Oceanrest is its own grave, the living part of the city nestled inside the dead.  Everything is derelict or slouching its way toward it, the remains of the city clinging to the sea, ensconced in a barrier of abandoned warehouses, dilapidated factories, and empty homes.

I’ve lived here just about my whole life, long enough, at least, to watch it fall apart.  Long enough to watch the factories and warehouses shutter up, one at a time, all five of them empty long before national news started talking about the recession.  Long enough to watch the roofs collapse under their own weight, disused and unmaintained.  Long enough to watch the budget cuts gut the hospital and the fire department, gut them so badly that when one of the wings of the Old Bentley hotel went up, it was half-kindling before the first truck arrived.  They managed to save half the building, and none of us are even sure why.

Even the logging is slow, now.  I used to look up at the sinuous silhouette of the mill at sundown as if it were a kind of monument, but with so many buildings closed and half the workers gone, now it looks more like a tombstone.

We still have two colleges, employing 3,000 faculty and staff between them, almost 16,000 students, which now makes them the largest employers in the town and a sizable chunk of the overall town population.  They’re on opposite sides of Oceanrest Avenue, a long, winding 7 mile road running west to east, two campuses edged in by the press of old forests and the looming shadows of long-empty structures crouched between the trees.

If you head south of the school on the East end, you’ll run into the old docks.  You’ll still see big cargo ships along some of the piers, but most of them are empty.  I couldn’t tell you the last time the docks were full, having never seen it happen.  My parents maybe could.  Now, though, the piers stretch out into the Atlantic like long bleached bones…like remains washed up on shore.

I’m more than a little familiar with what that looks like.

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On Horror and Meaning

A lot of people write about horror as something divided into the two categories of dread and terror, or terror and horror.  I often find myself thinking these terms don’t really tell the whole story, don’t really capture the breadth of horror.  Dread, here, refers to anxiety, psychological tension, or the sensation that something is going to happen. Horror, by comparison, refers to that which is gut-punch fear, the witnessing of the graphic crime, the description of the act itself, the grueling nature of the pain.  I believe that there is a lot more to horror as a genre than these two things, and that the make-up of horror relies on a wider palette than just the use of these tools.  I think, when talking about horror, it’s equally important to talk about meaning, about symbolism, context, and character development.

I am hard to shock, and generally not a fan of the grotesque.  It isn’t overly difficult to describe a troubling scene in detail, having done it myself a few times.  The right word selection, the right phrasing, the timing, these are things of instinct and structure, of research and implementation.  Often, scenes of the grotesque rely too much on mere-shock, something becoming quite pedestrian, these days.  Using the proper word might make the audience uncomfortable with a scene, and indeed discomfort is often important to the genre, but what is the meaning of any of it?  This is an issue I’ve had with several horror authors (though authors are still so far beyond the Hollywood system of torture-porn I believe they should give themselves a pat on the back just for existing): the gruesome descriptions don’t have the support of meaning, appealing instead to the gut-level, the instinctual.  I either don’t care about the characters, or don’t see the link between the characters and the horrors they experience.

What do I mean by that?  Let’s deal with some examples from multiple media.  In The Shining, for instance, we get to witness many layers of madness and struggle as they unravel.  Jackie Boy has some issues he can’t work through, alcoholism for one, slowly crumbling to them over time, losing it bit by bit until the very last frayed lash of his psyche finally snaps and the rest of him plunges into darkness.  I barely notice the haunted hotel as anything but metaphor, in his section of the story, an extended underpinning for his unresolved conflicts and uncontrollable vices.  Maybe even an excuse.  Wonderful.  After letting me watch his collapse, Mr. King could’ve written virtually any horrific thing in the world, and I would’ve read it and believed it. It had been earned, deserved.  The character and plot had been built up to the point where it established meaning, consequence, symbolism.  Or take, for another example, the Silent Hill games, informed through the character Alessa, which have monsters and settings of tremendous literal and symbolic meaning.  An abuser becomes a monster, a walking wasteland, spreading foulness everywhere it goes.  Besides being a terrifying visual, the backstory of it, the symbolic meaning as it relates to the character, is fantastic.  By pairing the gruesome with something cerebral, something emotional, it becomes not only a monster, but a statement.  It informs us.  This is what was done to me.  Wonderful.  Well-earned.  It has meaning to the characters involved.

In a way, (whilst the mind is on video games) Spec Ops: The Line skirts the boundaries of horror. It never goes full-horror, being in its medium a third-person shooter, but it brings the same kind of meaning.  You hunt a monster.  You do what has to be done to survive, to find him.  You do these things even when they are monstrous. When finally confronted with the face of the monster you sought, you realize you aren’t any better, that you’ve stared too long into the abyss.  It’s like looking in a mirror.  Heart of Darkness.  Nietzsche.  Context, character development, meaning. Without seeing the beginning of the character, half-honorable and driven, searching for this monster of a man, we can’t possibly appreciate the slow decline, the degeneration, the grotesqueries. It only means something if there’s a foundation of character, story, and symbolism.

That’s what is often  missing from the dialogue of terror versus dread, from essays on horror.  Themes, motifs, development, build, crescendo.  Symbolism!  Let me be discomforted by the distorted and warped things birthed from damaged psyches, let me be thrilled by the growing despair, the long fall, the unraveling madness.  Once in a while, instead of having the protagonist-as-victim, have the protagonist-as-perpetrator, let me feel morally uncomfortable.

Seeing, or reading about, the top of someone’s skull erupting in a burst of squelching brain matter and red mist has become fairly blasé.  Barbed wire wrapped around your arms and legs, pulled tighter with each tick of the clock unless you cave in to the antagonist’s demands…overdone.  Shock has out-shocked itself.  Shock has, in effect, taken the joy out of shock.  Shock value has no value.  We need meaning.  We need these things to be earned by the story.  If you start splattering people on page 5 and rocket off from there, we may end up wondering what the point is, or if there even is one.  We may grow rapidly emotionally detached from the book, film, or game.  We may shrug it off and move on.  Nobody wants that.

If you build it up, use meaning, use symbolism, take the character down bit by bit, slowly…when the shit finally hits the fan, the readers will be along for any ride you take them on.  Show us what or who the character loves, show us pre-existing conflict, show us some struggle, give us context for the content.  Then take it all apart.  Off-the-cuff example: Gail has a gambling problem, struggles with it, fights about it with her husband off and on, might’ve lost them some money some time ago, but she’s recovered, did gamblers anon, settled down, got a new place, got a dog, they’re rebuilding their lives, but she fucks up, has one of those awful days, one of those whiskey days, takes off for a weekend, racks up debt, runs away…except you can’t really run away, can you?  Soon, their dog is hanging by its entrails by the tree at the end of their street, its eyes in a mason jar on their front porch.  What about her parents?  Husband?  What happens next?  Give someone a life before you take it away.  Earn gore.  Earn terror.  Instill meaning.  The audience will be gut-punched by the dead dog (people love dogs), but now it has more narrative force behind it.  As a symbol of her recovery, for instance, or an omen of what’s to come.  You kill the same dog on page one, well, then it’s just a dead dog, isn’t it?  Even if you go into detail about the dog’s history immediately afterwards, it’s too late, you’ve already wasted the image.  I just opened the book, saw a dead dog, and reacted.  The reaction is spent.  Taking five more pages to tell me how great the dog was and how important the dog was to its owners…well, it’s already dead, so I guess that sucks?  Start the book with a heated argument, husband asking where she’s been, her saying it’s not his business, husband storms off, dog keeps her company with its soft, glassy eyes (the kind of eyes that love her even when she knows she’s fucked up)…all of a sudden I already want that dog to live.  Find the symbol, find the metaphor, find the character development, use those things as tools to build tension and plot, to earn terror and gore.

Or, go the monster route: if you’re just throwing monsters are a protagonist, why?  Is it Lovecraftian, where the monsters represent the vastness of the cosmos, the objective irrelevance of mankind?  Are they metaphorical for the protagonist’s (or antagonist’s) psychological issues, physical deformities, insecurities, phobias?  Are they mythological?  What are the important areas of the myth, to you?  What is your interpretation?  Do they exist to compel your characters to act a certain way, or to live in a certain setting (any monster-based apocalypse, for instance)?  What relationship do the monsters have to the story?  What relationship do they have to the characters?  How do they affect the setting?  What are they doing?  What rules govern them?  If you’re throwing monsters into the mix, you should have a very intimate understanding of why.  If you’re throwing monsters into the mix because they are cool, that is an acceptable reason, but you need to pay attention to what that means for the narrative, the characters, and the setting.  Don’t waste your monsters.  Make them mean something.  Otherwise they’re just prop pieces with claws.

You can’t batter a character who isn’t fleshed out. There’s no meat to tear off, no blood to spill.  Hollow characters crinkle like the dried husks of dead roaches, and when they blow away, nobody cares.  Graphic violence takes time and energy to read.  Nobody wants to read the paragraph-long description of the wounds a boring character sustains.  Nobody wants to read 5 pages of gore every 15 pages of plot and character development. It’s tedious.  There, I said it.  I finally just came out and said it: gore is tedious.  Turn the abuser into a walking wasteland, doing to the world what he did to his victim’s psyche.  Curse your characters.  Curse your monsters.  Make the world a nightmare.  But don’t just do that.  Focus on earning it.  Focus on making it mean something, either to your characters personally, or the reader symbolically.  Focus on context, on setting, on character development.  Let dread and horror be the goods you buy with the earnings you’ve made on meaning and development.  Use symbolism.  Create depth.  Make your horror about something.

Just one man’s opinion, but clearly a passionate one.

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No Grave Sneak Peek #6: Cyrus Sees Something

Cyrus looked out over the bar and saw ten or so customers clustered in groups around the whiskey barrel tables.  He cleaned what few glasses they’d used in the sink beneath the countertop. Afterwards, he’d let the warm water run for a little longer over his hands.  It was a soothing feeling.

“Hey,” a broad-chested man walked up to the bar and waved to Cyrus.  “Could I get a whiskey and diet?”

“Any particular kind of whiskey?”

“Jack Daniels.”

“Coming right up,” Cyrus turned towards the shelves of liquor bottles.  He reached out and grabbed the neck of the Jack Daniels, pulling it from the lower shelf and there was a body inside, a voodoo doll made of charred reeds tied together with bloody tendons.  It was a blackened crinkled husk, reeds singed and burnt, with a twisted, shrunken head bound on top by tanned ligature.  Its mouth hung open, cracked and toothless, and there were divots where eyes would’ve been, warped into alien shapes by whatever cruel torment had cooked it.  With a start, Cyrus  dropped the bottle and it landed with a heavy thunk on the counter by the cash register.  There was nothing in it but amber whiskey.

He took a sharp breath and reached back out to pick it up.  He held it aloft and rotated it, examining the liquid in the dim overhead light of the bar.  The customer cleared his throat, “You alright there?  Looks like maybe you should cut yourself off.”  Cyrus turned back towards him, trying to ignore the stupid grin on the man’s face, and selected a glass from the shelving on the opposite side of the register.

“I’m fine,” Cyrus replied, shoving the glass into the container of ice under the bar.  “Just been having a rough week,” he cracked a smile at the customer as he poured in a generous helping of whiskey, followed by a more restrained use of the Diet Coke.  “That’ll be eight dollars.”

“No problem,” the customer fished out a ten dollar bill and left it on the counter, taking the drink with him.  “Drive safe!”

Cyrus nodded without answering and took the cash from the countertop.  What the hell was that?

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