by Adam Cesare
There’s a cut and we’re close up to the drill bit now, spinning. We’ve jumped the hundred and eighty degree line. Someone didn’t go to film school. Shocker.
The drill presses forward and the woman’s face appears on the opposite side of the frame, her third eye bulging out of her skull.
It’s a shot I’ve seen before, many times before, popularized by Fulci. Yup. As predicted the drill finds paydirt in the girl’s third eye, the gore looking fake as hell as the rubber prosthetic is torn off in a pop of fake blood and spirit gum.
But then the drill retracts, the fake eye still skewered on it, and the camera dips to the woman’s smiling face. She’s wearing red lipstick and her teeth are off-white as she parts them. No matter how beautiful you were, you still had nicotine stains before laser whitening treatment was invented.
Then the unexpected happens and that smile is pierced by the drill, the edge of the woman’s lips still curled up like she’s enjoying it, but the drill bit tears through her two front teeth, displacing them in a cloud of blood and enamel shards.
It’s so real I have to look away, puke into an old plastic noodle cup. In that moment I’m thankful that I don’t clean up after myself, otherwise I would have coated my couch and my tapes in vomit.
Then it’s over and we’re back to the close up of the woman, with all her teeth, looking into the camera repeating what she’s said before or something close enough to it that I can’t tell the difference.
Before I even think about it, the fact that the VCR could wind up breaking the tape, I hit rewind and see if I can watch the drill sequence again, whether I can spot a cut and see if they switched out her face with a dummy.
It’s not there anymore and we begin with a fresh scene, even though I’m sure I’ve gone backwards.
I continue like this long enough, rewinding over atrocities and seemingly deleting them from the tape because they never show up again, that I must have fallen asleep.
When I wake there is no light peeking through the blinds.
I think that can’t be right, that even if the tape was recorded in long play mode, there would only be four hours of footage but I’ve been watching it longer. My back is pressed against the couch. I’m not even sitting on it now, but on the floor.
It can’t still be playing.
But I know that possible and happening are two different things now. I’ve been shown so much over the past day.
It’s not the violence. I hate that, it’s too close to real. It’s not the snappy dialogue. I find that pretentious and overindulgent. But for some reason I still haven’t gotten up to get myself something to eat.
I can smell piss but I don’t look down. Either because I’m indifferent or ashamed, not because I’m afraid.
A man is stapling up signs to a post, looking for a missing dog. He’s old enough to be someone’s dad, has rings around his eyes like he’s been doing this for days now. He’s called over to the car by an unheard voice and something terrible happens to him when he gets there.
Rewind.
Lecture.
There’s a woman taking her clothes off, she’s talking to whoever’s behind the camera, acting bashful like this is the first time she’s done something like this. For money. Then the preacher woman joins her and begins applying body paint to the new woman’s body, tiny stars over her nipples, a triangle around her bellybutton. Then something terrible happens to her.
Rewind.
Lecture.
I try taking a sip out of a nearby noodle bowl but the taste is awful so I spit it back out.
The tape goes on and I’m terrified to take it out of the machine or attempt to record it.
I might miss something.
I’m getting weak now. There’s nothing left in me to throw up and it’s an effort just to depress the rewind and play buttons. My arm aches from holding my fingers over the VCR controls.
It’s fifteen steps there and back to make noodles. I would be able to keep an eye on the screen the whole time.
But I can’t stop myself. I can’t make myself stand up, my eyes now so close to the screen that I can count the individual dots of light.
It’s so bad it’s good.
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More from Adam Cesare
Tribesmen
“Sick and sardonic and just plain brilliant.” -Duane Swierczynski, author of Fun & Games and Canary
“The best new writer I’ve read in years. Wonderfully lean prose and edge-of-your-seat thrills. Drop everything else and start reading Tribesmen.” -Nate Kenyon, author of Day One and Sparrow Rock
“A cunning, cinematic redmeat feast for weird film lovers and horror freaks, Adam Cesare’s Tribesmen is a first-rate literary midnight movie, and a blistering debut. BRING YOUR FRIENDS!” – John Skipp
“Tribesmen is a gory and clever homage to those Italian cannibal flicks that we all love so dearly, but without the real-life animal cruelty! Highly recommended.” -Jeff Strand, author of Pressure and Wolf Hunt
“Sometimes everything goes wrong, in the best possible way. Think Snuff and Cannibal Holocaust meeting at a midnight movie. And then give one of them a camera, the other a knife.” – Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels, The Gospel of Z and Demon Theory
This novella is available here in ebook and paperback.
Video Night
“If you put together the gore, action, monsters, and sense of excitement that made ’80s horror movies so great, you’ll only have about half of what makes Video Night a must-read tome for horror fans.” –Horrortalk
“The momentum keeps building. The stakes keep escalating. The monsters just keep getting worse and worse, the catastrophic mayhem more juicy and hopeless. Best of all, the writing moves like a greased torpedo, compulsively readable as it rockets through your brain [...] Adam Cesare’s gonna be a Fango superstar.” – Fangoria
"Video Night is a sharp, smart, energetic novel which pays tribute to all the brilliantly gross horror comedies of the VHS era, even as it carves out its own corners of shock literature." -Daily Grindhouse
This novel is available here in ebook and paperback.
The Summer Job
“The prologue of The Summer Job is one the best and scariest openings to a horror novel I’ve ever read. […] The rest of the novel is equally great. It’s a little like Jack Ketchum’s Offseason, if you replace the cannibalistic savages with a satanic cult, but I feel so strongly about The Summer Job that I’ll go out on a limb and say that I believe it’s better than Offseason. I really do.” – LitReactor
"The textbook definition of a nail-biter. The Summer Job is a kissing cousin to inbred classics from masters like Ketchum and Kilborn. Cesare's best novel yet."—Bloody Disgusting
"Cesare's latest is a knockout...There's a potent retro vibe running through Cesare's work, in general—he's the closest thing literary horror has to its own Jim Mickle or Ti West."—Complex
Check out this novel in ebook and paperback right here.
Mercy House
“Adam Cesare’s Mercy House is a rowdy, gory, blood-soaked horror tale guaranteed to keep you up at night. And if that was all it was, I’d have been a happy reader. But Cesare has a maturity far and away beyond his years. His characters are treated with a surprising capacity for understanding and empathy, giving them an unexpected depth rarely seen among the nightmare crowd. Mercy House is the kind of novel you sprint through, eating up the p
ages as fast as you can turn them, and yet it lingers in the mind like a haunting memory, or the ghost of a smell. Cesare is poised to take the reins of the new generation. Looking for the new face of horror? This is it right here.”—Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Dead Won’t Die and Dead City
“Mercy House is 100% distilled nightmare juice. Adam Cesare notches up the horror to nigh-unbearable levels. Even my skin was screaming by the end of this book.”—Nick Cutter, author of The Troop
“Adam Cesare makes his presence felt with Mercy House. A no-holds-barred combo of survival horror and the occult.”—Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
“This is extreme horror at its best, so don’t step into this book with an uneasy stomach. You must wait sixty minutes after eating before opening up Mercy House.”—LitReactor
This novel is available as an ebook right here.
Exponential
"Exponential is fast-paced fun, a rollicking monster movie in 200 quick-moving pages."—Ain'tItCool
"Exponential is an excellent novel, one of the best creature features I've read in years, and will very likely appear on my Top 10 Horror Reads of 2014..."—Horror After Dark
"...Adam Cesare's mix of grim violence and old school horror movie references make for a great read."—Rue Morgue (#152) on Exponential
Pick up this novel in ebook or paperback right here.
Zero Lives Remaining
"Tribesmen/Video Night author Cesare is a true master of fast-paced, fun, balls-out, over-the-top fear fiction, and those narrative talents are on full display in [Zero Lives Remaining]..." —Fangoria
"The victims in Zero Lives Remaining are different—far from being the typical lost, wide-eyed fodder, these outcasts and obsessives quickly catch on to the truth of their awful situation and come to battle armed in their own strange ways...enough to leave every joystick of the arcade drenched in blood." —Rue Morgue
This novella is available in ebook and paperback here.
Adam Cesare is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia. He studied English and film at Boston University.
His work has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies. His nonfiction has appeared in Paracinema, The LA Review of Books and other venues. He also writes a monthly column for Cemetery Dance Online.
His novels and novellas are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other fine retailers.
Please visit his website to learn more.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Still
Flies in the Brain
Rollin & Jeanie
Pink Tissue
Border Jumper
Trap
The New Model
The Girls in the Woods
The White Halloween
Bringing Down the Giants
So Bad
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