The heading in the e-mail edition of Goreletter 2.5 incorrectly dates the year as 2003. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, New Year’s is over. (I’m talking to myself here). Please archive 2.5 accordingly. However, the grace period for messing up checks does not end for another three weeks. So bounce away!

My upcoming book, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories is now available for preorder at Barnes and Noble with a 10% discount.

Take a look at Fluid Mosaic while you’re there.

Or just browse their amazing warehouse sale. Book collectors are finding all sorts of fun things, like signed limited editions, at 80% off! (This is a tip, not an advertisement!)

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
– Katherine Hepburn (died 2003)

If you were somehow dissatisfied by Stephen King’s book, On Writing, you might want to try to hunt down a hardcover memoir by a horror author named Gary A. Braunbeck, published last May by Wildside Press. The book, Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life, is everything On Writing should have been. One part memoir, one part writing workshop and one part film class, Braunbeck’s book may be more reminiscent of King’s study of the genre, Dance Macabre, than it is of On Writing, because it is more interested in the genre of fear than in the craft of writing itself. But what makes Braunbeck’s book succeed is the way he unflinchingly explores the relationship between genre texts and his own approach to both writing and the world — giving us insight into his horror “aesthetic” and elaborating on why reading in this genre means so much more than sticking your hand into goopy buckets of broken bone and blood.

Like so many writers in the genre today, the specter of Stephen King haunts Gary A. Braunbeck. In fact, the clever opening chapter of Fear is a film script that depicts a writer being chided by a copy of King’s books on a nearby shelf, books which talk and dance and tease him for repeating what King has already done. It’s an hilarious allegory for the contemporary horror writer’s struggle for his own voice under the massive influence of King. It’s just plain funny — like a Disney film gone horribly wrong. At the same time it allows us to not only empathize with the writer’s plight but also bracket off King’s similar book endeavors while we read ahead (and Braunbeck will go on later to deconstruct the films made out of King’s books, among other things). I think what makes this opening chapter work so well is that it serves as a great example of how Braunbeck can process personal anxieties into good fiction. That’s the grand lesson of this book and it’s one worth paying attention to if you’re a writer on the dark side. Reading this book made me rethink why I was so drawn to the genre as a young person. People assume that these texts corrupt the youth, but the truth is much more complicated than that: they give order to the chaos, they give a name to nameless fears, they empower us to confront nastiness, and they do so much more. In Fear in a Handful of Dust, we learn about this by tracing how horror fiction and film gave Braunbeck a way of understanding and managing the horrors and anxieties of his everyday life. His life experience, it turns out, has many lessons to teach.

Though Braunbeck can certainly be funny, the book is far more serious than its humorous opening chapter suggests. Fear in a Handful of Dust is an earnest — if at times, moody — exploration of the dark side, and this level of seriousness is what makes Fear more satisfying for horror fans than King’s On Writing. Braunbeck confesses openly, but avoids the self-absorbed blathering of many other memoirists. He is searching for the hot nugget of truth buried inside the bologna like the best of them. At the same time, he celebrates the genre as a sort of personal therapy and grand social ritual. He writes like a teacher, discussing films and books which had a profound influence on his aesthetic, as he builds a case for why we should take horror seriously. His love for well-crafted writing is contagious. The chapter on “Opening Lines” and other matters of writing style ought to be required reading in any horror writing course. Braunbeck celebrates the craftsmanship of great genre writers — especially highlighting the work of contemporaries like Jack Ketchum or Richard Laymon — in order to illuminate what makes work of dread a piece of literature. The analysis of his own stories and novels is equally compelling, giving fans of Braunbeck a lot of substantial meat to chew on.

One thing that made this book unique, I felt, was the close analysis of genre art films. Reading Fear made me want to run right out to the video store and spend more time with some classics. Braunbeck’s film analyses are really smart, but he tends to focus on secondary films by American directors that aren’t as accessible as most horror blockbusters — genre-bending films that pushed the envelope of cinema and took risks that weren’t always popular. So you might need to do a little extra research to pass Braunbeck’s class in Horror, so to speak, if you didn’t take the Film History prerequisite. But Braunbeck’s work is enlightening. He explains, for example, why Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses is “ingenious garbage” and why some almost forgotten films like Friedkin’s Sorcerer or Polanski’s The Tenant really deserve to be studied more closely. His lengthy discussion of John Frankenheimer’s work (especially the film, Seconds) gave me a far better appreciation for this director than I already harbored and Braunbeck’s treatment of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia made me want to host a Sam Peckinpah Video Marathon.

Even more compelling than the “lessons” in the book are the shocking autobiographical entries that Braunbeck crafts with an unflinching and dramatic flair. The tale of his alcoholic father’s breakdown one morning — featuring a loaded weapon — is a painful look back at an episode in Braunbeck’s life that will amaze you with its gut-wrenching honesty. The breakdown and recovery that close out this book will touch you. I won’t give anything away, except to say that the real world horrors that Braunbeck explores are scarier than a lot of the fiction I’ve read so far this year. And such excursions into memory explain Braunbeck’s approach to horror as a serious avenue into understanding the human condition. This is why I say Braunbeck’s writing is “earnest”: you never get the sense he’s pulling your leg. Even when he’s treating something lightly, he’s got a serious purpose. And I think that’s what I respect most about Braunbeck’s writing: his emotional honesty. This is one of the most interesting and intense memoirs by a genre writer that I know of. I recommend it to writers and horror fans alike.

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/shocklines/feinhaofduby.html
http://www.wildsidepress.com

+ There’s something beautiful about a snowman when it melts. I think it’s the way the black button eyeballs sink in and blow smoke from their sockets while the pyre at its feet crackles and spits as the flame of vengeance climbs up the hitching post. Or maybe it’s just the song we sing as Frosty burns.

+ Snow is a blanket. Ice is sheet. Winter is the earth’s deathbed…and you gleefully ride your sled across it, blasphemer!

+ Freezers preserve meat. Thus, I believe hungry space aliens with a technology beyond our imaginations are responsible for the winter chill.

+ They say time and time again to never eat yellow snow. But I think it’s the red snow you have to worry about.

+ Why do they call frozen body tissue “frostbite”? It’s true that exposure to the cold produces pain, but frost has no teeth. In fact, it’s the body that gets frosty, no? So I propose we call it “frostleg” or “icehand” or something even more appropriate, like “Body Pop” or “Iced Me.” If you’re upper palate freezes, then fine: frostbite.

+ The early symptom of impending frostbite is called “frostnip.” The early symptom of impending frostbite on your nipples is called “cruel irony.”

+ I don’t believe in the Abominable Snowman. But I pretend to, just so I can say the word “abominable” without necessarily sounding like some character from a really melodramatic Victorian novel.

+ I don’t trust the people who sing “Winter Wonderland.” Snow is something that buries us and we have to dig ourselves out of it, like dirt. I think “Inter Wonderland” is much more appropriate. (“Slain dead thing, are you list’nin’? Blood on snow, is a glistnin’…”)

+ I learned in science class that the best way to save someone from hypothermia is to strip and snuggle nude with them. I vaguely recall some point about the “body heat” being better than a blanket or a shot of cocoa. This explains why men die from hypothermia three times as often as women do in the US.

+ Why is a “fight” the only sport we’ve managed to invent for snowballs? And why is boxing a summer event, but snowball fighting not a winter event at the Olympics? And if snowballs are so innocent, why don’t we have city-to-city snowball hurtling battles, using gigantic catapults, instead of wars?

+ If you dream of white Christmases and sing “let it snow” every season, I challenge you to spend your next holiday up on the North Pole. See if Santa bothers to offer you shelter. You’ll change your tune pretty fast, I think.

+ Have you ever heard the term “chilblain”? The dictionary says it refers to the itchy and painful swelling of flesh that occurs when your hands and feet are overexposed to the cold. But it makes me want to suspend naked magician David Blain in a glass box from that snow-covered elm in my backyard right now.

+ Cryogenics sounds sad to me. But don’t be sad, Mr. Icy Corpse…there’s hope for you yet.

+ Avalanche is a great word. Its onomatopoeia is horrific. The very syllables bring to mind a Frenchman tumbling down a mountainside, until he meets his demise in a crunching vortex of snow and rock and ice: “Ahhhh…vahhh…laaaaaaaa…uNNCHHH!”

+ Sick torture idea #238: A murderer buries someone alive beneath a ton of snow, and then starts melting it rapidly with a blow torch so that by the time the victim starts asphyxiating, the melted water trickles down and floods their space just as they see light through the slush and begin to think they might break free. They drown, seeing their salvation through the gauzy snow. Or if they do manage to break free, well, there’s always the blow torch.

+ If you can see your breath, you’re still alive. But once your eyeballs crack like ice cubes, you’re probably a lost cause, no matter how much steam you aspire.

+ Icicles are the roof’s revenge.

+ Brains float in cranial fluid. Fluids freeze solid. Draw your own conclusions.

Eerie Gyri

guilt jitters around
the maze of her lobes, a rat
scrambling for exit

+++

Sulky Sulci

sausages of brain
plunge through the hole in her head –
straightening out her thoughts

Sugar
http://www.khm.de/~viehoff/SuesserHorror/

Daddy
http://www.malepregnancy.com/

Sugar
http://www.queasypops.com

Babies
http://www.faketeeth.net/

The final book cover “blurb” just came in for my short story collection, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories:

“Name your nightmare. Michael Arnzen delivers stories for every possible taste in horror. He can be witty and subtle on one page, then icky and overwhelming on the next. The subjects of these compact stories range from the beloved horror tropes that don’t really scare us, such as vampires, to our real fears, such as alienation, to things we hadn’t thought to worry about until reading the story, such as skeletal dis-articulation. 100 Jolts is a substantial library of horror fiction in one book.” – Bruce Holland Rogers, author of Wind Over Heaven

The Preditors & Editors online reader’s poll has closed. Their instructions were mixed up, apparently because the poll officially closed yesterday.

My story, “How to Grow a Man Eating Plant,” took third place in the Best Online Horror Story of 2003 race. Thanks to all of you who voted.

+ Begin a piece by describing an object that a character refuses to throw away.

+ You’ve been dead for ten years. If you somehow were able to return, what would you immediately do upon resurrection? Begin with personal exploration in first person — be honest and earnest. Once you run out of juice, start fictionalizing. You can change names to protect the innocent afterward.

+ Write about the surprisingly dire consequences of not following a common warning (mattress tag? street sign? washing label? it’s up to you!)

***
Instigation is a WEEKLY department in Hellnotes newsletter: http://www.hellnotes.com

If you publish something instigated by this department, let me know at arnzen@gorelets.com and I’ll mention it here! Or if you’re bold (and willing to forfeit electronic rights), post your response to a prompt by clicking “Comments” below….