Jamie Grefe's Blog, page 31

TARANTULEECHEN

06/29/2013 UPDATE: a new publisher (details soon) has acquired this novella with a tentative release date of late 2013/early 2014. I feel like a Spring Breaker. Thank you, world and, readers, prepare yourself for the beast. 

I am currently shopping my latest novella, TARANTULEECHEN, an homage to 1980s/90s B-movie/exploitation cinema that features a cheerleader punk band, a most gruesome and hungry monster, an ornery sheriff and his sidekick, plus a whole of hardboiled action, sorcery, gore and punk rock. This 19,000 word novella is looking for a good home with the right publishing house. Please contact me for more. Thank you. 

Here is an excerpt from TARANTULEECHEN: 

It’s late—the hum of night crickets.

    A two-story farmhouse.

    Shlurp-clmp-shlurp-clmp: a beastly form, wiggling too many limbs, drags across the lawn toward a shed and enters the dark.

    Behind us, slippers shuffle and a throat clears, mumbling grumpy, gravelled spite. A shadow, a man.

    Frank Donner throws open the front door, his chin gleaming stubble in the moonlight. He’s all silver hair and bifocals, a lumpy old bastard. Donner scans, squints, leans on the porch beam, hands in his pockets. It’s nothing, only:

    Smoke drifts horror-jitters over the yard.

    The shed glows green.  

    He folds his arms, spits. Suddenly—

    The shed is a series of fizzles, pops, cracks like bone grinding metal.           

    Donner grits his teeth.

    The roaring shed morphs to a growl.

    He unsticks himself from the porch beam. “Can smell you in there,” he says, “and I want you to go back to where you came from.” He coughs. “Counting to three—you, you understand? Leave. This. Family. Alone.” He doesn’t count to three, instead pushes his dentures further into place and clacks.

    The thing in the shed ejaculates a splat.

    “Wrong night,” he says. “End this legacy.”

    The thing farts.

    “Crabdammit!—”

    The front door bangs open, slippers on stairs, index finger on book spines. Donner’s weathered hand yanks out a leathery hardback, ancient, faintly glowing green. Those dentures clack, suck dust. He bites his lip, searches inside. He’s muttering. Nervous hands fumble page to page and suddenly stop. “This ends,” he says, tapping the text, “right here.”

    Over his shoulder, a bay window frames the yard. Curtains flutter and we focus past them on the monstrous form, how it has emerged from the shed, backlit, ominous, and ready, but it just looms for now, a heaping chunk like smokey knives made of bile.

    Lightning snaps the shed.

    Those appendages warble, shimmy slow; the beast disappears in a snarl.

    The front door kicks back open for round two. Donner stands armed with the book and ready to read. He tips it open, rakes chin stubble—thunderclaps—and grins. He’s found the right page. “Got yourself into a heap,” he says, shuffling to the shed. “Not your fault, still—a fucking heap and this is it.”

    He looks up to the sky. He stares ahead at the eerily quiet shed.

    Each step is a Morricone harmonica wail of reverbed tension.

    Cold creeps over Donner when he stands at the shed door. It’s time, he thinks, time to put a stop to this. He clears his throat, looks down at the opened book and then, his mouth shooting right into our very soul, as if in some kind of witch-trance, growls out, “Beast of the Wretch, and Misery-Monger of the Ceaseless NightFrost GloomHole, I summon your return to the Caverns of UrOoze, to the Vomitous Hail and Sleet Stench of the Vile Clench Rod. May Fire Suckers eat your Soulless Corpssssssssss—.” Cough.

    He breathes, stands unsteady, phlegms up snot. Otherwise, it’s quiet. Over, he thinks. It’s finally over. Let’s study this turd.

    He yells, “kiiiiiyaahhhheeeeee,” Bruce Leeing open the shed door, but that beast, those appendages, those razored claws, all of its hulking girth stands close, too close, dripping, waiting, just grinning evil down on poor Donner.

Donner turns the page, there is more: another stanza—unread.

Unfinished. Too late.   

    Gulp.

It strikes—hard.

Contradiction and Community: A Talk with Dan Magers

Contradiction and Community: A Talk with Dan Magers:

The poetic work of Dan Magers is challenging and engaging, beautiful and mysterious. A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece about one of Magers’ poems and, more recently, had the chance to speak wit…

Blood Mask: On Room 237 or, Bonny Billy vs. Wendy Carlos

This is our mother-brain: a synth, raga, and a donkey. It shed hair, hard pressed by the question that doppelgangers are hawks carving chairs to disappear. And this beard is how I growl, see nothing but “impossible windows” in the goat-light of a film clip.

*

Here is the hotel where we strip rooms, luggage-stuffed organs, gutted screeches and a wave. This is not a lunar mission. These are not notes about shapeshifting. This is about wolves, eagles, and the subtext of a frozen frame.

*

We are a hedge maze: a duck is Jack, a boy’s sweater, beastman, finality, cacophonic pastness, gold rushes like “all the best people.” I’ve left you a key.

*

Unmask me in blood, mother-brain. Flood the shaft with royalty. Men in robes clink glasses when music blues the light. Unravel. This carpet is a diamond pattern of brothers, a family escaping these “pictures in a book.” All is not yet.

*

Not real. I’ll bring that ball and gown to the hospital as an alternate ending. It’s fit to shine. Show me the prince who looks like a Minotaur for this tale, our lost soundtrack of revelation, is the final interpretation on how to maunder.

*

Keep to a whisper. The dead do not whisper, they sing master

JAMIE GREFE, RE JOHANNES GÖRANSSON’S HAUTE SURVEILLANCE

JAMIE GREFE, RE JOHANNES GÖRANSSON’S HAUTE SURVEILLANCE:

Tarpaulin Sky gave me a beautiful page feature for the Meat Screams piece I did in regards to Goransson’s HAUTE SURVEILLANCE. Please click this post’s title for said page. Thank you!

Goblins: an Essay

I am at the house—again—to ignore a bag of bread, shell casings; guests stare, gnaw the perimeter like trees that get tangled in your hair when I bring you cake. You are hungry, tossing potato sacks down stairs. Let us sit at the table and wonder, we can conjure how to stop time. Rum raisin is not my prayer. You would know this if you didn’t fall asleep on street corners or use your belt and stave hunger, stay the father. I once saw my grandfather come out of the mirror. We built molotov cocktails in the bedroom and set priests on fire—the driveway is where goblins burn. Humans burn. Priests burn. We know how young men run through forests and drink milk, become branches or paste for maidens to eat. We hobble around the camper. I’ve brought popcorn and corn cobs for us to suck until we explode in gorilla suits with pink star-trails and organ flare. It’s not enough—melt. It’s not enough—save my mother from eating an apple. I’ve taken showers in green, hid under covers and shoo away teen boys who feign love for girls who take trips in vans to Nilbog. My grandfather is an angel. Goblins don’t exist. Repeat. This is not your kingdom of shadows. This is Provost in hell. We are a modern family: the van, sunlight, clover leaves and pianos lure mouths open—this is about not eating food. And if we speak, we shut our eyes to hear. And if we scream hard enough, our family just might sprout magic windows and stones of love. Press your hand against the stone. Press your hand against my heart of ham. Feel blood run. I’m made of sap, leaking son. 

 

I wrote a short piece about creative nonfiction writer Brian...

I wrote a short piece about creative nonfiction writer Brian Oliu’s book, LEVEL END at The Eyeslit-Crypt. 

This is truly a beautiful book and highly recommended.