Entropy in Bloom
Page 1
“I sat down, properly, with a cup of tea, read the first paragraph of the first story, and a disembodied voice shouted, ‘You will not close the cover until you read every word.’ The voice, as voices go, was a prophet. Entropy in Bloom crackles with weirdness, style, wit, a befittingly oddball sense of humanity, and a misshapen dark heart. I loved every damn story.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock
“Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. This is entertainment . . . and literature.”
—Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door
“I’ve seen the future and it’s bizarre, it’s beautifully berserk, it’s Jeremy Robert Johnson.”
—Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
“I’m a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he’s been bringing it for years.”
—Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
“A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories. While I read them, they made time stand still.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, New York Times bestselling author of Fight Club
“Jeremy Robert Johnson’s stories are, simply put, unlike any others you’ve ever read. It’s as if an alien life form picked up a pen and wrote its thoughts in a language comprehensible to humans— reading Johnson, you feel you are in the grip of an immensely powerful, possibly malevolent, but fiercely intelligent mind. Beware! (But enjoy—and trust me, you will.)”
—Nick Cutter, author of The Troop
“The guy’s a genius. Reminds me of William Gibson—the dark interest in altered states of consciousness, the unrelentingly furious forward movement, and the same kind of unlimited imagination.”
—Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
“Waaaay out at the deep end of the collective unconscious Jeremy Robert Johnson performs stand-up comedy for the gods. As with Clive Barker, there is no glorious mutational eruption that Johnson can’t nail directly through your gawping mind’s eye.”
—John Skipp, New York Times bestselling author of The Bridge (with Craig Spector)
“I don’t know if Mr. Johnson sold his soul to the devil to give him this gift for nightmare imagery, but by god, this guy can write. Johnson excels at pathology and perversity. A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”
—Cemetery Dance
“One of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Robert Johnson’s work has always tested the limits of both genre and literary fiction.”
—Bookslut
“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales.”
—Bookgasm
“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly horror, and when he steps outside the gross-out game he transcends most other straight literary writers.”
—Verbicide
“Johnson’s at once brutal and elegant, innovative and an immediate classic, ridiculously talented and an obvious perfectionist.”
—Horror Talk
Entropy in Bloom
Also by Jeremy Robert Johnson
Collections
Angel Dust Apocalypse
We Live Inside You
Novels
Siren Promised (with Alan M. Clark)
Extinction Journals
Skullcrack City
Entropy
in
Bloom
stories by
Jeremy
Robert
Johnson
Night Shade Books
New York
Copyright © 2017 by Jeremy Robert Johnson
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
eISBN: 9781597806077
For Caleb
Table of Contents
An Introduction by Brian Evenson
The League of Zeroes
Persistence Hunting
The Oarsman
The Gravity of Benham Falls
Dissociative Skills
Snowfall
When Susurrus Stirs
Luminary
Trigger Variation
Cathedral Mother
Swimming in the House of the Sea
Saturn’s Game
The Sharp-Dressed Man at the End of the Line
A Flood of Harriers
States of Glass
The Sleep of Judges
Author’s Notes
Acknowledgments
Publication Credits
About the Author
An Introduction
by Brian Evenson
I think it was Stephen Graham Jones who first mentioned Jeremy Robert Johnson to me, seven or eight years ago now. Shortly after, I saw a copy of Extinction Journals in a bookstore and picked it up and read the first line—“The cockroaches took several hours to eat the President.”—and thought, “What the . . . ?!?” A few paragraphs later, as things really got zany (with, among other things, radiation protective suits made out of Twinkies and sewn-together cockroaches), I decided to buy the book.
In Johnson’s world, anything can happen. The most crazed, twisted ideas are given life, pursued to their bitter limit. People have their lips removed in the name of beauty, Tibetan monks sing the human race into death, a boy slits open his own stomach just out of curiosity, a man’s body billows out in an explosion of tiny insects. Straight-edge punks might get high on intense violence, even murder, or a treehugger might find more in the crown of a redwood than she bargained for, or a man might discover that a robbery is just the first gambit in a game that will lead to his own destruction, a game whose rules he can’t begin to understand. One story even opens, “You could bite off Todd’s nose,” and it becomes quickly clear that if Jeremy Robert Johnson hasn’t actually bitten off someone’s (Todd’s?) nose, he’s spent a fair amount of time thinking about what that actually might be like, and he’s kindly willing to share the fruits of that knowledge with you, the reader. Beginning with absurd premises that often swerve into some serious darkness, reading Johnson is a little like believing you’re at a GWAR show and in on the joke, and instead suddenly finding yourself a participant in Gorgoroth’s Black Mass.
But it’s more than that, since Johnson can shift gears and genres between and within stories, keeping you always a little off balance, going from dark to comic, from Twilight Zone-style horror to contemporary noir to something almost Lovecraftian and back again. The point is, you never quite know where you’re going to go in a Jeremy Robert Johnson story, and even when you get a glimmer of where you’re heading, you may still not quite believe it. What makes Johnson so interesting is that once he takes on a premise, no matter how absurd it is to begin with, he treats it seriously. He rushes forward with the concept, often at a dizzying pace, leaving you as a reader wildly trying to find something to hold on to. These stories can be uncomfortable, difficult, unflinching, but they’re also always entertaining. Johnson writes with an energy that propels you through some very dark spaces indeed and into something profoundly unsettling but nonetheless human.
One of the grea
t things going on with writers working on the edge of several different genres, with writers simultaneously able to overlay the codes of different ways of reading into their work—providing multiple paths through a book and multiple deliberate dead ends that force you to shift code sets along the way—is that they’re both able to offer readers the satisfactions of those genres and to give them something more: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Johnson’s work rewards readers who read widely, who like different genres, and who think about connections across genres. The kinds of readers who are willing to stand on the side of the literary highway and thumb down whatever vehicle comes by, who are willing to take more chances than the average reader.
It’ll be a wild ride, but after a little shaking you’ll get to your destination, and be able to get out unharmed, mostly, and it’ll still be you. Or at least someone who looks and acts like you. Well, someone who will be able to pass for you in most circumstances. Honestly, the real you probably won’t even be missed.
The League of Zeroes
It’s obvious she’s having a hard time sipping her coffee. No matter how delicately she raises her hand or how straight and elegant her posture, she can’t help looking awkward when she drinks. Half the damn cup of coffee is trickling its way to the spreading brown stain on the front of her white blouse.
It’s her fault, really. She’s the one who wanted to have her lips removed.
She’ll adapt. We all do.
She’ll figure out how to keep her gums moisturized with Vaseline, and she’ll carry a small container of it in her purse at all times.
She’ll learn to drink with a straw tucked into the side of her cheek. You can still get some good suction like that and the method cuts the mess to nothing.
She’ll get her teeth bonded and bleached to emphasize their newfound prominence.
She’ll figure out how to make plosive sounds with her tongue against the back of her gums.
She’ll be looking good and find it even easier to smile.
I think she’s gorgeous, sans shirtfront stain, but I don’t think she’d go for a guy like me. I consider crossing the coffee shop and trying a pick-up line, but the three prongs I’ve had my tongue split into feel swollen and tied up. Still healing, I guess.
Although she might find my iris-free eyes attractive. They’re all pupil; very black, mysterious and hard to read. That might work for her.
Deep down I know she’d never go for an amateur freak like me. She’s the type of elegant, slightly-modified trophy girlfriend I see hanging around with Body Modification Royalty.
I’ll save myself the embarrassment for now. Once I join the League of Zeroes, though, she’s mine.
The thought of being a freak show all-star brings my all-black eyes back to my sketchbook. I’m looking at the drawing of my modification design, wondering just how the hell my brain is going to look outside of my body. I hope it’s symmetrical. I never had to worry about brain aesthetics until I came up with my plan.
I want to detach my brain from my body. I want to polish it up and put it in a nice display case and carry it around with me, like a sidekick.
My Buddy the Brain.
I jot notes around the sketch.
How do I keep the brain clean and presentable?
What kind of fiber-optics can transmit neuro-signals to my spinal cord?
How do I do this and not die?
Is it worth it?
I look up and across the room at Our Lady of Liplessness. I picture her licking the box I will keep my brain in, asking me what it’s like to be in the League of Zeroes.
She’ll think I’m special.
It’s worth it.
I wonder for a moment longer about asking her for a date, see if she wants to check out the Italian Horror Movie Festival on Fifteenth. I pass on the idea. Maybe it’s just sublimated embarrassment, but she looks a little uptight. She might bite.
I head out of the coffee shop and kick over three blocks in the cold until I reach a telephone booth. I sweep the coin return for change and come back with a finger load of ketchup. At least I hope that it’s ketchup. I’m curious, but I skip the smell and taste test and smear the red goop on the glass of the phone booth wall in front of me. I drop in some coins, press seven buttons.
Raymond picks up the phone on the other end and says, “SaladMan here!”
The second I hear his voice I feel like I wasted eighty-five cents.
“Hey, Ray, it’s Jamie. Cool it on the SaladMan shit, you don’t have to market to me.”
“I know, Jamie, I’m just trying to stay on point. I’m picking up a lot of regional buzz and a couple of the BMR’s have mentioned me on the website.”
Ray, who is my best friend based only on our mutual lack of total resentment, is obsessed with joining the upper echelon of the League of Zeroes. He keeps talking.
“I’m serious, Jamie. I’m like days from becoming Body Modification Royalty. You know Aggie WoodSpine? He’s always putting in a good word for me on the circuit, and Marshall Le Crawl has said, and I’m almost quoting like verbatim here, that I have one of the most original modification schemes he’s ever seen. That’s on the damn website.”
“I know, Ray, I’m aware of the accolades. I’m not doubting you. I’ve got more pressing business, that’s all, so if I seem impatient it’s only because what you’re saying isn’t important.”
“Thanks, Jamie. What’s going on?”
“Meet me at the Italian Horror Movie Festival in twenty minutes, okay. We’ll check out some Fulci, watch some eyeballs burst, and then we’ll go get coffee and I’ll tell you about my new scheme. I think I’ve come up with something really special.”
“Cool. I’ll catch you later.”
“Oh, hey, Salad . . . hey, Ray.”
“Yeah.”
“I saw another chick with no lips today. I think that style’s about to blow up.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen that around lately. How’d she look?”
“Pretty sharp, man. Pretty sharp.”
WE’RE HEADING OUT OF the theater halfway through the movie ‘cause we’ve already seen the best stuff; the scene where that kid gets the drill through his skull, and the one where the demon priest sucks out that girl’s organs just by staring at her.
Ray and I are walking in the flickering light of the faded theater marquee and I’m anxious, hoping for something more visceral in my life. No more celluloid thrills and vicarious rendering of the flesh. I’m ready for my next surgery and I can’t wait to tell Ray my plans.
I pop in to a Super Saver Mart while Ray waits out front. It costs me thirty bucks for a pack of Marlboro Chronics, a soda, two Charleston Chews, and a dropper of Visine. Half of the money goes to taxes. I have to give the government credit for that one. The same day they legalized weed they went and imposed a sin tax on candy and eye drops. It’s almost devious enough to be admirable.
We head over to D. Brewster’s Café and find some plush seats far from the speakers where we can have a conversation. I don’t order anything because I’ve already got my soda and chocolate, and Ray picks up an extra large mocha.
Ray is starting to smell. I think some of his vegetables have gone south again, even though Dr. Tikoshi soaked them in preservative this time. The lettuce sewn into his neck looks like it’s browning at the edges, and the tip of the carrot emerging unicorn-proud from his forehead has broken off. The sutures around the radish spliced into his right forearm look swollen and irritated.
Right from the beginning I told him SaladMan was a screwed-up scheme. I told him that perishables were always too high maintenance. He’s right about the attention he’s garnering though; even now people are staring at him. Still, on a purely olfactory level spending time with Ray is like hanging out with a big pile of compost.
Despite his odor, he gets big points for ambition. He’s got some respectable friends on the circuit and if he can get someone to endorse him as Body Modification Royalty he can do some tour time and then a
pply for the League of Zeroes.
The League. It’s the big money, the endorsements, the adulation, the weekly primetime broadcasts, and the outright worship of the people.
Ray’s got his goals set high. If he makes it big he’ll be able to buy fresh produce every day, and eventually he’ll be able to afford that platinum dressing decanter that he wants to have installed in his ribcage.
I’ve got him beat though. After my next modification I’ll be an indelible image in the public eye. My plan is the fourth ace nobody thought I had.
I lean in through a cloud of thick smoke and whisper my scheme into SaladMan’s cauliflowered right ear.
I’M ALONE AND WALKING home with my thin jean jacket wrapped tight around my shoulders.
I hear Ray’s voice in the café whispering, “Jamie, that’s impossible. What makes you think you could live through that kind of modification?”
I brush off his comment, but the concern sounded genuine. I try not to take it to heart. I’m so excited about my imminent fame that mortality has become a second-string worry.
Maybe Ray’s just jealous.
I shake Ray’s doubts out of my head and remember how great my scheme is. It’s worth the gamble. I’ve never been one to swallow motivational speaker pablum but I’ve always nodded in agreement at the phrase, “You’ve got to play big to win big!” So, I’m choosing not to acknowledge the danger. Now entering Ostrich Mode, head firmly inserted in sand.
On my way home I walk past trashcan fires and drug deals and I hear sirens wailing and glass breaking and a bag lady nearby mumbles something about wires embedded in the Earth telling all of us what to do.