Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology

by ed. Pela Via

  “The baby died. I put it in the trash. Remember to pull the can to the curb tomorrow.” —CP

  “Yes, I could see it in the child there, a black door under the confetti of his brains…” —BB

  “The thing was hissing and it tried to curl in on itself and Myra started shaking” —JRJ

  “You were heavier than I expected, and the room felt bigger than it was.” —NY

  “They take you at night. Or, they take you early in the morning.” —KM

  “What was supposed to be an infant in seven months now sits in the palm of my hand.” —GT

  “Without Tilly the world was clocks. They hovered with round faces and she scurried away.” —AG

  “The moon is full on the horizon, full and dancing along the top of every gentle wave.” —ADJ

  “She flared in the dark like some wild animal’s lone eye in my headlights.” —CC

  “I look at her again. I want to see something there…to remember the woman I married. But I can’t.” —JRH

  “She bites down hard on my collarbone and my whole body jerks.” —MJ

  “For the 15 seconds it takes her to saw through the arm I’ve never loved anyone as much as her.” —CJD

  “When I came out of that fever dream, stumbling into the sunlight…I had resurrected myself.” —LC

  (photo: Charles King)

  Recommended Reading

  Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer

  During his first night out of a mental institution after suffering a nervous breakdown, Phineas Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude. She drugs him and removes his kidney and leaves him in a hotel bathtub full of ice with a note on the counter that reads, “If you want to live, call 9-1-1.” Phineas, an ex-police officer who had recently been searching for information against the Denver Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit, later finds out that his kidney was actually replaced by a baggie of heroin. While searching for his missing kidney, Phineas actually finds love in his attacker, while he evades the angry police of Denver and tries to unlock the secrets behind his wife’s recent death.

  1998 Viking Press Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  Hell’s Half Acre by Will Christopher Baer

  Kidnapping, snuff films, amputee geeks and a requiem of lost love . . . Cast adrift after the blood symphony of Penny Dreadful, Poe is looking for answers in the form of a woman. He tracks Jude to San Francisco, where he finds her involved with John Ransom Miller, a wealthy sociopath with a mysterious hold over her. Jude is nursing a revenge fantasy against a U.S. Senator with an amputation fetish who wants her dead, but she needs Miller’s help, and in exchange, Miller wants Jude to help him pull off a high-profile kidnapping and make a snuff film on the side. Poe throws him-self into the mix, hoping he can save Jude from herself, make sense of his past, and safely navigate a torturous internal landscape he calls hell’s half acre.

  2004 MacAdam/Cage Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  How They Were Found by Matt Bell

  In his debut collection How They Were Found, Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again. Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled

  humanity might yet remain to be found. Contains the story "Dredge," selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010.

  2011 Keyhole Press Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  There Is No Year: A Novel by Blake Butler

  A wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the birth-wrench of art, evocative of House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, from a novelist rapidly emerging as one of the voices of his generation. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “If the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

  2011 Harper Perennial Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  Serpent Box by Vincent Louis Carrella

  In the deep mountains of Appalachia, the Flints of Leatherwood, Tennessee, spread the word of the gospels by handling deadly serpents and drinking lye in front of large gatherings of the faithful. Believing his ten-year-old son Jacob—called Toad or Spud—to be a prophet, Charles, the patriarch, takes the boy down a long and arduous path as they travel the back roads of the postwar Deep South in search of God and plumb the depths of their unorthodox brand of faith. But sudden, shocking tragedy will shatter Charles’s cherished dream of building a ministry and a permanent church—and set young Jacob on a dramatically different course.

  2008 Harper Perennial Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  The Contortionist’s Handbook by Craig Clevenger

  John Dolan Vincent is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent’s clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name.

  2002 MacAdam/Cage Kindle | ePub | Goodreads | Audio

  Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger

  Eric Ashworth awakens in jail, unable to remember how he got there or why. All he does remember is a woman’s name: Desiree. Bailed out and holed up in a low rent motel, Eric finds the solution to his amnesia in a strange new hallucinogen. By synthesizing the sense of touch, the drug produces a disjointed series of sensations that slowly allow Eric to remember his former life as a clandestine chemist. With steadily increasing doses, Eric reassembles his past at the expense of his grip on the present, and his distinction between truth and fantasy crumbles as his paranoia grows in tandem with his tolerance.

  2005 MacAdam/Cage Kindle | ePub | Goodreads | Audio

  The Fighter by Craig Davidson

  Everything has been handed to Paul Harris, the son of a wealthy southern Ontario businessman. But after a vicious beating shakes his world, he descends into the realm of hardcore bodybuilders and boxing gyms, seeking to become a real man, reveling in suffering. Rob Tully, a working-class teenager from upstate New York, is a born boxer. He trains with his father and uncle, who believe a gift like his can change their lives, but he struggles under the weight of their expectations. Inevitably, these two young men’s paths will cross.

  2008 Soho Press Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

  Meet the residents . . . The haunted father of a washed-up stuntman. A disgraced surgeon and his son, a broken-down boxer. A father set on permanent self-destruct, and his daughter, a reluctant powerlifter. A fireworks-maker and his daughter. A very peculiar boy and his equally peculiar adopted family. Five houses. Five families. One block. Ask yourself: How well do you know your neighbours? How well do you know your own family? Ultimately, how well do you know yourself? How deeply do the threads of your own life entwine with those around you? Do you ever really know how tightly those threads are knotted? Do you want to know? I know, and can show you. Please, let me show you. Welcome to Sarah Court: make yourself at home.

  2010 ChiZine Publications Kindle |ePub | Goodreads

  Cienfuegos by Chris Deal

  These stories render emotion in shades of stark gray. Like sculptures, Deal subtracts from his Cienfuegos superfluous elements, leaving a base from which the reader is allowed to interpret, perhaps participate in, his characters’ disjointed lives. Each word hints at two others; each line implies a life; each brief fiction describes a world.

  2010 Brown
Paper Publishing Kindle | Goodreads

  Lick Me by DeLeon DeMicoli

  Through the use of dark satire, Lick Me is a wickedly funny tale from an original voice that shows no mercy when writing upon the immoral standards of network television that interprets news worthy headlines by ratings, while an easily influenced culture finds their “truths” in celebrity tabloids.

  2009 P’NK Books Goodreads

  When October Falls by Christopher J Dwyer

  Clint Korbis has lost it all: his sanity, his grip on life, and most importantly his wife, Jenna, who disappeared without warning. Exhausted and incapable of coping with the loss, the only relief seems to be suicide, but then a series of happenings indicate that Jenna may not be dead…she may be closer than Clint thinks.

  2011 Brown Paper Publishing Goodreads | PDF

  Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel by Steve Erickson

  In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother commits a desperate act: convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, she determines to stop it and becomes the lake’s Dominatrix-Oracle, “the Queen of the Zed Night.” Acclaimed by many critics as Steve Erickson’s greatest novel, Our Ecstatic Days takes place on the forbidden landscape of a defiant heart.

  2005 Simon & Schuster ePub | Goodreads

  Zeroville by Steve Erickson

  A film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and-most important to him-the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made.

  2007 Europa Editions Goodreads

  Last Days by Brian Evenson

  Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

  2009 Underland Press Kindle | Goodreads | Audio

  Major Inversions by Gordon Highland

  Your roommate says you should date more, that all those spandex nights on stage paying tribute to hair metal and banging faceless groupies only amplify your Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. That this quicksand town of floozies, fiends, and filmmakers will survive without your commercial jingles. And your narcotics. That you should turn in your daytime security-guard badge and settle down. He’s got the perfect girl, a cinnamon-scented innocent who will bring that elusive substance to your life despite the familial forces that conspire against your union. Always lurking in the periphery, the roommate remains buried in his Master’s thesis, the parasitic puppeteer behind your reinvention, the search for your birth parents, and your all-too-brief film scoring career. A supporting cast of lecherous directors, deluded bandmates, federal agents, and nostalgic exes obstruct your path to closure and ironic revenge in this “revisionist character study.”

  2009 CreateSpace Kindle | Goodreads

  Angel Dust Apocalypse by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Meth-heads, man-made monsters, and murderous Neo-Nazis. Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They’re all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can’t close the door. This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of . . . the ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE.

  2005 Eraserhead Press Goodreads

  All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones

  Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe plunges into a renegade manhunt after the town’s sheriff is gunned down. But unbeknownst to him, the suspect—an American Indian—holds chilling connections to the disappearance of Doe’s sister years before. And the closer Doe gets to the fugitive’s trail, the more he realizes that his own involvement in the case is hardly coincidental. A descendant of the Blackfeet Nation himself, Doe keeps getting mistaken for the killer he’s chasing. And when the FBI’s finest three profilers descend on the case, Doe suspects the hunt has only just begun. But beneath the novel’s pyrotechnic plotting, the deeper psychic cadences of Stephen Graham Jones’s prose take hold. His specific imagery and telling detail coalesce into the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting. But like the other seminal works in the genre (Fight Club, Red Dragon), All The Beautiful Sinners will unnerve you, and it will then send you back to page one to experience its mysteries all over again.

  2004 Rugged Land Goodreads

  Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones

  On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and experimental nuances, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references, and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss. There are books about movies and movies about books, and then there’s Demon Theory – a refreshing and occasionally shocking addition to the increasingly popular “intelligent horror” genre.

  2007 MacAdam/Cage Kindle |ePub | Goodreads

  Stay God by Nik Korpon

  Damon lives a content life, playing video games and dealing drugs from his second-hand store while his girlfriend, Mary, drops constant hints about marriage. If only he could tell her his name isn’t really Damon. If only he could tell her who he really is. But after he witnesses a friend’s murder, a scarlet woman glides into his life, offering the solution to all of his problems. His carefully constructed existence soon shatters like crystal teardrops and he must determine which ghosts won’t stay buried-and which ones are trying to kill him—if he wants to learn why Mary has disappeared.

  2010 Otherworld Publications Kindle | Goodreads

  Old Ghosts: A Novella by Nik Korpon

  Nik Korpon brings us back to a Baltimore we haven’t seen since The Wire and answers the question of what might’ve been if The Grifters’ Roy Dillon had tried to settle down, go straight, and have a kid. A story of brothers and sisters or lovers, Old Ghosts reads like a horror story down one man’s memory lane. —Seth Harwood, author of Jack Wakes Up and Young Junius.

  2011 Brown Paper Publishing Goodreads | PDF

  In the Devil’s Territory by Kyle Minor

  The debut collection of stories and novellas (including “A Day Meant to Do Less,” a Best American Mystery Stories 2008 selection) from a young writer who is, as Benjamin Percy has said, a master of “the dark caverns of the human heart.” A schoolteacher escapes East Berlin at night, swimming the Spree River three times carrying elderly relatives on her back, so she can make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and “ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.” A young hu
sband reckons with the likelihood that his wife’s troubled pregnancy will end with her death before Christmas. A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father’s tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, In the Devil’s Territory plumbs the depths of human mystery, where meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettinesses.

  2008 Dzanc Books Kindle | ePub | Goodreads

  By The Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends by J David Osborne

  Siberia, 1953. Stalin is dead and a once-prosperous thief named Alek Karriker is feeling the pressure. Trapped in an icy prison camp where violent criminals run the show, betrayed by his friends and his body, Karriker is surrounded by death and disorder. Bizarre Inuit shamans are issuing ever-stranger commands that he must obey. Opium is running scarce and bad magic is plentiful. Razor-tooth gangsters can smell Karriker’s blood and they plan to murder him more than once. The only option: ESCAPE. Enlisting the aid of an aging guard, a cold-blooded killer, and a beautiful, murderous nurse, Karriker must now secure his getaway by finding a “calf”: a gullible prisoner to be cannibalized when the tundra is at its most barren. As the vice grows tighter and life in the gulag becomes increasingly surreal, Karriker must hurry to find his mark and convince him . . . BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE’LL BE FRIENDS

  2010 Swallowdown Press Goodreads

  The Way To Get Here by Gavin Pate

  “Against the ominous backdrop of a national blackout, Pate grabs us by the hand and deftly guides us through the darkness of one man’s apocalypse. Stark, urban, and cinematic, The Way To Get Here contains enough wrecked lives to fill up a downtown shelter house and shows us that nothing is more lethal than love.” —Joey Goebel