Frequently asked questions: Fleshtrap, publishing, and more
Photo by Kriss Szkurlatowski
I get a lot of questions about my upcoming novel Fleshtrap these days, from fans of its time as an online serial to people just hearing of it now. Hopefully this will clear things up for everybody. And if it doesn’t, well. Just keep bothering me?
I’ve heard about this book over the years, but never got the chance to read the serial. What’s it about?
Fleshtrap is about a lot of things. It’s a book about damage, family secrets, and how trauma can leave scars so deep that they affect the world at large. It’s about Casey Way, a guy who’s been haunted by visions of his dead father for the last twenty years. His father, a pedophile, was murdered by his stepmother Alyona in revenge for abusing Casey’s stepsister Mariska for much of their lives. The guilt and trauma of these events have left Casey burdened with guilt, and over time Casey has dealt with almost debilitating insomnia, which causes violent hallucinations of people that he sees with holes cut into their chests. Sure, sometimes he sees these people’s faces on missing persons fliers, but he isn’t about to tell anybody about that part. There’s only so much crazy Casey can really deal with.
As the anniversary of his father’s murder approaches, Mariska takes him back to the scene of the crime: Their childhood home, to confront their past and finally get some closure, but it’s not that easy. Instead, something follows Casey back out into the world, something ugly and violent and familiar. It begins a vicious spiral of insanity as people around him begin disappearing and dying, but all that Casey knows is that somehow it’s tied to the death of his father, and only he can stop it. Or he’ll have to kill himself. Either way, he decides, he’s putting an end to his father’s reign of terror over their lives, whether in flesh or from beyond the grave.
It’s a horror book, a mystery book, a family drama and a love story. It’s about monsters, both the kind that defy explanation and the kind we make for ourselves. It’s about fathers and sons, the legacies we carry, and the shadows we labor under. If you’re looking for gore and shock-value, there’s some of that to go around, but Poppy Z. Brite or Clive Barker I am not. This is meant to be a more cerebral horror story, looking at the duality of human nature and the complexities of family for the root of our evils. Which is pretty much all I can say without giving away the entire plot.
(Spoilers: Giant spiders.)
(Okay, not really.)
Who is putting your book out?
My book will be available in October from Post-Mortem Press. I’ve done some work with these guys in the past, and this is one of the best indie outfits I’ve ever encountered in my travels. Look for it online in various and sundry formats starting October 1st.
I read your book before as a serial and I loved it. Is it going to be the same, or will this version be drastically different?
Me and my editor Paul Anderson have put our heads together to work this book into the best it can be, which has been a very good thing. Paul’s a great guy and he’s passionate about the work, and that’s made things 100% easier on me. A few slight changes have been made, that may or may not be too noticeable for returning readers, but I feel they’ve been to the benefit of the story. But trust me: Casey is still Casey. If you’ve read this book before, it’s exactly what you remember it being, just with a little facelift.
What makes your book different?
Different is such a loaded term, but I’ll play ball. Fleshtrap doesn’t have the most conventional of protagonists, and that was a conscious choice on my part. The plot follows the exploits of Casey, his boyfriend Joel, and Casey’s stepsister Mariska as they try solving this evolving mystery from different angles. They’re complicated people with complicated relationships, and each of them have a lot of baggage to work through over the course of the book. But ultimately this is a story about people who overcome horrifying obstacles in order to defeat monsters, real and imagined, internal and external. Yes, this story is creepy, and yes, this story is a bit gruesome at times, but I wanted this book to be as poignant and painful as it is disturbing. Ultimately I think that’s where its strength lies, and I hope people can appreciate that.
Do you consider this queer horror?
Um, no? It’s horror with queer people in it, yeah. But there’s also women in it, but that doesn’t make this feminist horror. I don’t have an agenda — well, I mean other than to make as many people uncomfortable as I can, I guess. With any luck, I’ll succeed in that.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a trilogy? I thought you were writing a sequel before.
I was. And it was. Now it’s not, if that makes. Originally this was the first of three books with two direct sequels, tentatively titled White Bull and Nightmare Child. After months of work-shopping and rewriting, I came to realize Casey’s story is fine as a stand-alone. White Bull, however, is still in-progress, but with a new plot and protagonist. It follows a writer and criminal justice journalist named Alexander Calleigh. His attempts to write the biography of recently-convicted serial rapist and murderer Robert Earle Baker go awry and end in Baker’s accidental death, after Baker tries to brutally rape Alex during a prison interview and Alex kills him in self-defense. Traumatized by the event, Alex takes a step back from his work and the naive drive that put him in harm’s way, and spends the next year in therapy.
Having sat on the sidelines doing fluff human interest stories, Alex is trying to get up his courage to get back into the field and do some real work. At the behest of his editor and college compatriot Shana, Alex is assigned to write an article on a local social worker named Jessica Ray-Morton, now ending her historic forty-five-year career as a caseworker. When asked if Jessica had any regrets, she tells Alex about a case from eight years earlier where the system failed an eight-year-old girl named Gemma Malveaux. After being abused by her mentally unstable mother for years, the traumatized Gemma goes on to kill a janitor at her school, stabbing him in the neck with a pen. When asked why she did it, Gemma only said that he was marked and he had to die.
Intrigued by this peculiar story, Alex goes digging into Gemma’s case. He learns that Gemma is now sixteen and remanded to the state mental hospital, under the guardianship of her former childhood psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Dreschner. Now a teenager, Gemma has a seemingly incurable case of Cotard’s Syndrome. Convinced that she is dead and in Hell, the girl now wears a white bull’s hide and paints her face, refusing to be called by her given name. Alex wants to tell Gemma’s tragic story and begins an investigation into her life at the hospital, only to realize that the true nature of Gemma’s personal hell is far darker than he ever thought possible.
White Bull is an investigative mystery and a road-trip story, following Gemma down her strange rabbit hole. Fleshtrap motifs and characters do appear in Alex’s story, albeit in a limited capacity, as a thematic through-line from book to book. It’s in the same universe, but definitely goes a lot further into madness and metaphysics than the first book. And it will be in a suitable drafted state by the end of the year, if all goes according to plan.
You talk a lot about the emotional side of the story, what about the horror?
Casey licked his dry lips and reached out to trace the edges of the padlock, sealing the box shut as though it had never been broken. He regretted his decision not to call Joel. Joel would have had something good to say, something warm and soft and reassuring. He would have made this alright. Now there was no calling him, because Casey knew Joel had no answers that he couldn’t find for himself inside the box.
Retrieving a butter-knife from the silverware drawer, he pried at the lock, twisted the blade in the shoddy catch to lever it open. The lock gave out in a jerk and scrape, and holding a breath he pulled back the lid. The smell of rotting meat struck Casey first, like the stink of an animal carcass left in the sun. Inside the metal box was a lining of sweating flesh, thin and heavily veined by blue arteries. Fingernails and tiny canines like a baby’s milk-teeth flanked all sides of the box in staggered rows, circling the throat at its center. A wide gullet of corded musculature, flapping open and shut in a wet slap of flesh and smelling like dead animal and intestinal juices. Slap, gurgle, sigh.
Gagging, Casey slammed the box shut and scrambled back across the kitchen, tripping, falling. The room lurched and narrowed his field of vision into a motion-sick tunnel. His pulse beat against in his temple until his sight cleared, grabbing the edge of the counter to drag himself upright. He disregarded the decorative pot of spatulas and spoons that he had sent across the floor, grabbing instead for a kitchen knife from Joel’s cutlery set and brandishing it at the box. The box didn’t move. The sounds of its digesting gullet thinned into a tight sucking noise. Another sigh and the box sounded pleased with itself.
Is that suitably horrible for you? I hope so!
Alright, that just about covers everything. If anybody out there is still curious, hit me up on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook or email. I almost always respond, unless I’m feeling like an asshole that day. In which case, just try harder.
