Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by John Haggerty

  “I don’t want anything from you, Dmitri.”

  He gave me his mirthless smile. “You wanted out of the camp. Your first compromise. The first of many. But enough. Let’s get moving.”

  As the day wore on, the constant movement began to wear on me. My legs ached with a dull pain, their movements sluggish. It was as if they were no longer legs at all, but rusty pieces of machinery. The boy was worse, not walking as much as falling forward with each step, stabbing a stiff leg out at the last minute to prevent himself from pitching headlong to the forest floor.

  I thought about stopping, closing my eyes and lying down, letting the forest take me. Each time these thoughts arose, I would push them away, trying to give myself reasons to keep walking. I thought again of food, of great, hot mouthfuls of meat. I thought of my friend Andrei, his cynical humor hiding an almost painful sincerity. I thought of Nadja, her pale northern skin and her sly smile, how she sat silent and angry through my trial, indifferent to the danger. And I thought of my father, the arguments he would have with my mother. “The powerful will always prey on the weak. It will never change,” she would say, her pretty face flushed. “You endanger all of us, and in the end it will make no difference.”

  He would smile at her gently. “Yes, but if I see injustice and let it stand, then the injustice infects me. I can’t stop. Please understand.” They came for him when I was 16, and after that my mother refused to speak his name, afraid that they were still watching, listening, that they would come for the rest of us, too.

  “Shit. Where is the boy?” Dmitri’s voice broke into my daze.

  I turned in a quick circle. He was twenty feet behind us, leaning against a tree. “Shit. Shit.” Dmitri ran toward him, pulling out the blowtorch. He dragged the boy upright, and it was as if his shoulder had become plastic, with red, meaty strands stretching from the trunk to his arm. “Hold him steady!” The boy’s head lolled on his shoulders. His half-open eyes were dim and glazed. Dmitri lit the torch and held the flame to the red membranes connecting the boy to the tree. They blackened and parted under the heat, but kept whipping around like tentacles, searching for their host. On the boy’s shoulder was a raw wound, filled with dozens of red, squirming worms. Dmitri held the blowtorch to his flesh. There was a stench of burning meat. The boy jerked a bit but made no sound.

  Dmitri took hold of the boy’s damaged arm. “We have to move faster now. It becomes more active when it has fed.” We started moving again, half running, half dragging the boy through the gray trees.

  We were both puffing with the exertion. I heard rustling noises behind us, the first sounds since we started walking. I looked back, and the forest behind us was suddenly, twitchingly alive. Clumps of moss squirmed on the ground and the downed timber, as if the whole forest was flexing its muscles.

  “Faster,” Dmitri said. Around us, red tendrils began to protrude from the mossy trees and ground. “Don’t let them touch your skin.”

  “How far do we have to go like this?”

  “Now that it’s awake, it will keep looking for us. We can’t stop.”

  “What about the boy? What’s wrong with him?”

  “The fungus carries a substance that acts like a sedative. He’ll be useless for at least thirty minutes. Until he comes to, we have to carry him.” The forest was squirming now, with meaty tentacles blindly searching for prey.

  We were growing tired, and our movements slowed. We lurched drunkenly about as the boy’s weight shifted between us. Behind us the forest was a snarl of fungus, spun with a huge spider web of meat. The air had begun to fill with a noxious smell, half flowery perfume, half rotten meat.

  “Look,” Dmitri said. “Over there.”

  Off to the left, there was a faint brightness, a break in the undifferentiated mist. Cold, slimy appendages dropped from above, brushing at my neck and hair. I hunched my shoulders against them and tried to walk faster.

  Suddenly, we emerged into a large open clearing. I felt the familiar hum of an electromagnetic field. At first I thought we had come in a great circle, walked back into the camp, but then I saw the exiles. There were perhaps a dozen—men, women, and a few children—gathered around a smoky fire. They were thin and hard, and they looked at us with a disturbing intensity. After a long moment, a man stepped forward to greet us.

  “Everything eats,” he said.

  “Everything eats,” Dmitri replied.

  “Everything eats, everything eats, everything eats,” the tribe behind him chanted in unison. They were stooped, emaciated and pale. Their skin was pitted and furrowed with scars. They surrounded the boy, poking at his gym muscles, whispering to themselves.

  “We come out of the forest in need of help,” Dmitri said.

  “You have awakened it,” the tribesman replied. “We will not be able to move for days.” Dmitri stayed silent. The man looked around the clearing, and into the rustling forest. “There is not much food, and everything eats. The laws of the forest cannot be broken. You may stay with us, but you must give us something in return. What do you have for us?”

  “A cow,” Dmitri said. “We have brought you a cow.”

  “And where is the cow?” the tribesman asked.

  Dmitri paused, and then pointed at me. “He will tell you.”

  There was a long silence. I could hear the ravenous whisper of the forest behind me, a vast wasteland of primordial hunger, all that need, just under the skin. I looked at the boy. In his stupor, he again looked like a child.

  “I can’t,” I said. Dmitri moved over to me.

  “Choose carefully,” he whispered. “Your people need you. Nadja needs you. The revolution cannot continue without you. The boy is an owner. A parasite. There are millions like him, sucking at the life of the workers. It is such a small sacrifice.” He pushed me toward the exile leader. “Go on. Tell him.”

  I looked out at the twitching forest, at the sickly tribe, up at the sky. I closed my eyes against the rain. “The boy,” I said, into the hungry silence. “The boy is the cow.”

  The tribesman nodded. “Excellent. He is a good cow. Everything eats.”

  “Everything eats,” Dmitri and I responded in unison.

  John Haggerty is a former software engineer and a volunteer prison teacher living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Confrontation, The MacGuffin, Opium Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Vestal Review and War, Literature & the Arts, among others. His work was a runner-up for the 2007 Bridport Prize and received a Pushcart nomination. He is currently working on his first novel.

  TYING NOTES TO BRICKS

  A Conversation with D. Harlan Wilson

  by John Boden

  D. Harlan Wilson is a tour de force in the “Bizarro” movement. Intelligent and hilarious and disturbing would be the first three words I would use to describe his work...barring the descriptive expletives, that is. The best thing about a D. Harlan story is that you literally have no idea where it will take you; each paragraph is its own unique animal, sometimes feral and snarling, other times tame and lethargic. I was fortunate enough to get to know D a little after reviewing his fantastic novella, Peckinpah. We emailed and chatted a bit and he granted me an interview. So being careful to avoid making sudden movements, I give you D. Harlan Wilson.

  • • •

  JB: Tell us a little bit about how you became the man you are now. What turned you into the twisted wordsmith we know today?

  DHW: Protein, anabolic steroids, elementary school brawls, Steve Perry, cheap scotch, collecting throwing stars, dreams of Idaho, and Rambo movies made me the man I am today. I don’t do those things anymore, though. Which is to say, I do them in moderation. Sometimes.

  I didn’t get into writing fiction until graduate school when I started working on my M.A. degree in the critical study of English at UMass-Boston. That was in 1995. I partied my way through my B.A. at Wittenberg University in Fratboyland, but I majored in English, and I wrote bad poetry. At UMass, I took a fiction
writing class for fun, and I was hooked. I didn’t get anything published until, I think, 1999. I probably shouldn’t have had much published until recently. I’m almost 40 and just now beginning to feel comfortable as an author.

  Nice of you to call me a wordsmith. I’ve always been more interested in language than story, which shows in my work, for better and for worse. But I’m very keen on the notion that our identities and selfhoods are constructed by language. It’s what makes us human, and that’s a story in itself. Continually developing my lexicon, and refining my ability to craft syntax, has been very important to me in adult life. That’s a big reason why I write what I write. Not that stories aren’t told, of course.

  JB: My introduction to you and your work came through my purchase of The Bizarro Starter Kit books...and I thought, “Wow, these cats are out there.” I particularly liked your story “Cops & Bodybuilders” for its sheer ridiculousness. There is so much humor in your work, almost Pythonesque humor, that you either love and get or don’t and don’t. How did you get there? How did you end up where you currently reside on the radar of Bizzaro and surrealist fiction?

  DHW: Thanks for the kind words, Johnny. I agree: readers generally either love or hate my writing. Or they just say it’s weird and leave it at that. Some of that has to do with humor being so subjective. For the most part it’s a result of how I estrange readers by destabilizing their expectations. My upcoming fiction collection, They Had Goat Heads, has received a few preliminary reviews with varying degrees of praise and skepticism, although they’re mostly positive. One review was quite scathing. Here’s an excerpt:

  “It's extremely rare that I genuinely dislike a piece of fiction. So why did I dislike They Had Goat Heads? I think the answer lies in the definition of fiction. Plot. Characters. All that jazz. In these short stories, the elements of fiction are barely discernible. The moment some semblance of plot begins to pop up, it's killed instantly by a random slew of profanity or nonsense. This weird hybrid between bad poetry and schizophrenic prose is ‘repetitive, endless torture’ to sit through. Don't waste your money.”

  So, yeah, uh, this reviewer didn’t like the book. And it makes sense given what the reviewer clearly looks for in fiction. That’s fair. And to be expected, on occasion. But why does all fiction have to do the same old shit? Fuck that, seriously. I make a concerted effort to subvert normative conventions. If you want convention, go read one of a trillion other plot-oriented, character-driven books out there. I try to do new and different things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I’ve always written stuff that falls rather far off the beaten path. I recall being heavily influenced by William S. Burroughs (e.g., Naked Lunch and the cut-up trilogy) when I first started writing. Like a lot of would-be “avant-garde” authors. Not so much for his subject matter as for the dynamism and innovative nature of his prose. Kafka really resonated with me, too. Anyway, it was years before I began writing publishable stories, and over time I developed my own style and voice. And my style and voice continue to evolve, like any writer that sticks with it.

  In addition to Bizarro, my writing has fallen into multiple genres and subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, splatterpunk, splattershtick (my favorite), irrealism, postmodernism, absurdism, critifiction, “literary” fiction, interstitial fiction, etc. It’s all of these things. And none of them.

  JB: How do you see the genre of Bizarro and where do you see it in the brickwork of the fiction genres? I realize it is a fairly young genre, but not a young style...there have been writers and works all throughout the history of written word that have been hard—or impossible—to categorize.

  DHW: Like I always say, Bizarro is a marketing tool conceived of and disseminated by a cadre of small press publishers to sell books. It’s proved to be an effective marketing tool. But, as you infer, there have been lots of weird and offbeat writing movements in the past—some of which (e.g., Surrealism) were devised for the same purposes.

  Bizarro is a subgenre of speculative fiction, I suppose. Mainly it’s distinguished by cartoon absurdism, grotesque playfulness, and cult (film) aesthetics. Some of my writing has certainly exhibited these features. But the core Bizarro writers have a much more refined idea about what it should be. They don’t like narrative experimentalism, for instance, which I do a lot of. And they tend to shy away from “literary” fiction. Most of my fiction these days is literary (i.e., metafictional and allusive); it’s more adequately labeled critifiction, combining fiction with critical theory. The point is, there are different kinds of Bizarro fiction. The kind I write has been called irrealism. This is arguably a subgenre of speculative fiction in and of itself, but whatever. Bizarro has gained momentum and wider recognition since its inception. I think it’s approaching stasis at this point. But milk it while it lasts, right?

  JB: Tell us about the journals you work with—Extrapolation and The Dream People—as well as what projects are on your horizon.

  DHW: They Had Goat Heads will be published officially at the end of September 2010 by Atlatl Press. Then, in January 2011, I have a novel coming out through Raw Dog Screaming Press, Codename Prague, the second installment in my “scikungfi” trilogy. The first novel in the trilogy was Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia, published back in 2007. The third and final installment, The Kyoto Man, will come out in 2012 or 2013; I’ve completed a first draft but it needs considerable revision, per usual. I’m also working on a series of interconnected novelettes, together called Curd, each of which features the same protagonist in different near-future contexts and narrative lifescapes. Not sure when that will be finished. As for criticism, I’m halfway through a short book on John Carpenter’s film They Live for UK publisher Wallflower Press cultographies series. That’s slated to be released in 2012.

  I’ve been the editor-in-chief of The Dream People: A Journal of Irreal Texts (www.dreampeople.org) since 2006. It’s an online journal put out biannually. We publish short fiction, novel excerpts, book reviews, microcriticism, interviews (sometimes), comics (sometimes), and artwork. I’ve only just taken on the role of reviews editor for Extrapolation, the oldest academic journal of science fiction criticism in America. It’s tedious, but fun, and very rewarding. Basically I gather new books of science fiction criticism from publishers, assign them to reviewers, and edit the reviews. I’m really happy to be part of Extrapolation’s team; they’re a sharp bunch of editors and scholars.

  JB: What are your thoughts on the current state of the small press, the POD places and the antho mills? Do you feel it is on the way out, as many claim, or just changing and evolving to remain viable in the current age of Kindle and e-books?

  DHW: POD and e-books will take over. Soon. They already are. Consider the fall of Leisure Books’ horror imprint recently; instead of mass market paperbacks, they’re moving to PODs and e-books because they’re so much cheaper and easier to produce. Bigger publishers will hang on for a while. But POD printing presses have the capacity to manufacture books that in many cases look (and are) much better than, say, books put out by HarperCollins, Random House, etc. Print books won’t disappear—people still like to hold them in their hands and turn the pages. I certainly do. But e-readers constitute an exploding market. Some critics think print books and e-books can’t co-exist; it must be one or the other. That’s silly. There’s room (and consumer demand) for all of it.

  JB: What and who do you like to read?

  DHW: My favorite author is Steve Aylett. His novels and stories strike chords with me more than any other author I’ve read, dead or alive. They’re funny, clever and satirical, and they make me think critically and creatively; I always learn something, either about the world and the human condition or about writing itself. That’s what I aspire for in my own work. Sounds like a simple combination, but it’s very difficult to do effectively. Consummate Aylett books include Slaughtermatic (novel), The Inflatable Volunteer (novel), Toxicology (stories), LINT (pseudobiography) and The Caterer (comic). But everything’s g
ood. Check out his library at www.steveaylett.com.

  Honestly I don’t like most of the fiction I read. I’m an elitist, admittedly, and selective to a fault—at least if I’m reading for pleasure. Many of the books I read are for the courses I teach or for literary criticism and reviews I’m writing. Right now I’m rereading Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for a course I’m teaching on African-American literature this Fall. Both are looooong books, doorstoppers, and I like them, but more for their historical context, although each author demonstrates a certain linguistic prowess and pace, and that means a lot to me.

  Primarily I read speculative fiction, though—science fiction, steampunk, (post)cyberpunk, splatterpunk, etc. In this area, Philip K. Dick is my touchstone. That guy was an idea factory and produced hundreds of stories and novels throughout his career. And he does a fine job mingling humor with more serious sociocultural issues and themes.

  Fiction aside, I’m an avid reader of literary theory, history, and criticism. Especially the latter. I subscribe to a bunch of science fiction academic journals and always try to keep up with critical trends in the field.

  JB: What trips your trigger as far as non-writing time...hobbies?

  DHW: I don’t have a lot of hobbies, unless watching movies and TV counts. I guess my biggest hobby is lifting weights. I’m into bodybuilding, always revising and refining my diet, and probably overtraining: lately I’ve been working out 60-90 minutes 5-6 days a week. Some of that time is spent doing cardio (treadmill, elliptical, etc.), but mostly it’s pumping iron. I do it as much for my health and image as I do for my psyche. I’m a high-strung fella, generally speaking, and I need that daily flood of endorphins to keep me on the level.