I had a wonderful time at World Horror Convention 2004 in Phoenix last weekend. Above, is a photo taken during my fiction reading the first day of the con (see RDSP website for a few others), where I read a poem I wrote on the plane — “You Can Leave Her Head On” (a parody of a famous Joe Cocker song you might remember from The Full Monty) in addition to several shorts from 100 Jolts and Gorelets. If you look beside the corny plastic skull on the side table, you might even be able to spot the little canister of beef jerky that — as luck would have it — my old buddy Cary Heater of Borderlands Bookstore “threw onto the stage” during my reading of the latest “Blather” column from The Goreletter.

I sat on two panels during the conference. “Common Mistakes in Writing Horror” featured me, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Jones, and Alan Beatts. On that panel, Beatts audaciously asked us to confess our very worst mistakes ever, and I had to report that I once wrote a vampire story where a vampire narcissistically sized himself up in a mirror before going off to hunt in the night. Ramsey talked about a telegram a narrator was writing while all along being attacked by Cthulhu…what a riot. And Jones discussed the many ways new writers shoot themselves in the foot when approaching established editors. On the panel “Short Dark Fiction” I discussed the marketplace and pros and cons of the short story genre along with Adam Golanski, Melinda Thielbar, Gene O’Niell and Nancy Kilpatrick. The highlight of this one was the talk about approaching anthology markets, which is difficult when you’re breaking in. Aside from a few bits of advice, I didn’t have too much to contribute to this panel, but I made heavy breathing noises over the microphone and cracked a couple of silly jokes (one writer in the audience talked about how an editor bought HIM a drink in order to talk about what he wanted to see in the submission pile…my reply: “How many ounces per word did ya charge him?”).

The conference was mostly spent catching up with WAY too many friends to list here, and doing too many things I can’t report here. Launching my book 100 Jolts through a debut signing and a conference suite party. The con even published an excerpt from Jolts in the program booklet. Since the stories in that book are so short, it was neat to get feedback from people who had read it just a few minutes after buying it. All in all, I returned home renewed and enthusiastic about the genre. My next one will likely be the HWA Weekend/Bram Stoker Award Banquet in early June. And definitely the Horrorfind Weekend in mid-August.

Winning entries have been received for the “Strange Visitors” contest, which is now officially closed. But the “Review Race” contest is still wide open!

In the “Strange Visitor” contest, I asked subscribers to guess which of the following oddball phrases were NOT entered into search engines to find my website, according to my host provider:

nude pyre
moldy heart
animated suicide
open caskets
girl on crutches
she is now a mannequin
softness of swelling brain
dead moldy monkey cheese
hot zombie love nest
once my friend pooped herself at school
poems about sick babies
splitting the brain

(Weird, I know.) The answer was “hot zombie love nest,” which I made up. Our winners are subscribers Tracy Mowdy (who was the FIRST to respond at all) and Dean M. Watts in second place. Tracy wins a signed copy of 100 Jolts; Dean gets a gift certificate to bitpass.com.

UPDATE, 5/26: I’m writing poems based on the titles in the list above (striking them through as I complete them)…see the Weblog Exclusive department for them.

I’ve just mailed the latest issue of The Goreletter to newsletter subscribers. It includes extras not available here on the blog, including TWO contests (which feature free book prizes and bitpass.com certificates) and coupons to several books, including discounts on the deluxe edition of Grave Markings! Subscribe (for free!) to have access to these goodies, by filling out the form on your right or registering at gorelets.com

I was at the convenience store the other day and I saw a man buy ten sticks of beef jerky. I made a funny face at him. He chomped off a chunk with a violent tug. “It’z Atskinz,” he said, slurring his reference to the Atkins diet. But I thought he said “rat skins.” So I nodded in understanding: jerky has the taste and texture of rat skins, indeed. It’s man’s version of the dog biscuit. Like a fob of leather, it’s something we like to teeth on. And apparently jerky is in high demand like cigarettes and candy bars, all tempting to seduce you into making an impulse purchase, right there at the point-of-sale. Who can resist? Who doesn’t drool at the sight of dried and salted flesh?

I’m no vegetarian, but I have to admit I have an aversion to jerked meats. Heck, I blush just saying the words. And I probably don’t need to tell you how sick “snapping into a Slim Jim” really sounds in my ears. All puns aside, I’m not even sure what jerky really is. All I know is that it’s a form of “cured” meat, but even that doesn’t sit right with me. Why do they call it “cured” meat, anyway? I mean, it’s dead already…so what’s to cure?

Don’t get me wrong: I understand the appeal of beef jerky. It’s nature’s convenience food, passed to us long before there ever were Seven-Elevens and Mini-Marts and roadside gift shops called “Buckskin Charlies.” Beef jerky is a throwback to the frontier days, when Native Americans taught bear trappers how to cure strips of meat so they wouldn’t have to take up so much space packing the whole dead cow on the back of their burro. This allowed them to eat the rotting carcass at their leisure and not have to gobble the bloated festering corpse in a panicky rush before the maggots beat them to the good bits. Salt, smoke, and sun shrunk the meat down and cooked it up like bacon. The invention of jerky was a breakthrough that turned the decomposing body into a salty bite-sized snack, handy enough to fit all your favorite bits and pieces into one small saddle bag. And why not? Eat the jerky on the way to the mine. Eat the burro when you get there. Dietary planning at its finest!

On the day jerky was invented, dead meat became fun. Like salt water taffy. Only meaty. What’s more entertaining than champing down on salted animal tissue and shaking your head from side to side like a dog on a chew toy? Very little. Except doing so naked with a friend. Or something as simple as saying the word itself: “jerky.” A truly snicker-worthy term if there ever was one. All its connotations are quite bizarre and unseemly. Does jerky crassly refer to the method of stripping the meat off the bone? To the ugly body motions necessary to tear off a bite? Or is jerky a term of affection, like “Petey” or “Billy” — something you call a little jerk? Or is it simply just a term for the last (dying) action performed by the very same muscles and sinew you’re chawing on?

You’d be surprised. My research tells me that “jerky” is actually a bastardization of the term “charqui” (pronounced “sharkey” in Spanish) — not to be confused with actual shark jerky (which is pronounced “yuckie” in English) or with a certain argumentative butter substitute with a smart mouth. “Charqui” used to be cut in large strips that were dried and cured and later cut up and put into stews — and back the days of yore it still resembled meat to some degree. Jerky probably had nutritional value of some kind then, too. But today, it’s mostly all “formed” from whatever strange meat still clings to the bone after the slaughterhouse has had its way with old Besty the cow. Modern jerky is a lower level of hotdog. Nothing in nature is so perfectly shiny and cylindrical as the meat sticks I’ve seen at the convenience store.

Of course, you can get organic jerky made of 100% USDA Grade A beef, hand-twisted and custom-jerked by some unknown farmer in Muskogee who probably doesn’t wash his hands very well. You can flavor it up in exotic smokes and rub it down with mystical spices. You can jerk exotic animals, too, from koalas to kangaroos. But no matter how pure the meat, no matter how cute the critter, it’s still just a glorified dog treat when all is said and done.

Sure, jerky has its benefits. It’s high in protein. It’s preserved so well you can take it camping or hunting with ease. You can store it in your survival shelter for eons. One dead cow can feed a family of twelve without the modern convenience of a refrigerator for months and months. It’s a miracle food! It’s even been sent with astronauts to the moon and back. Sounds as neato as Tang, right?

Not to me. For one thing, lots of crazy things have protein in them — from parrot parts to pavement puke. Protein alone is not reason enough to eat jerky. And the very idea of jerky in space is a scary science-fiction story waiting to happen. What sort of message would it send the aliens who discover it? I can imagine a capsule coming back from the stars, with strips of astronaut jerky dangling inside. And a message from the stars: send more.

Which raises the question: Is man-jerky Atkins-approved? Only Jeffrey Dahmer knows. The serial killer experimented with preserving techniques and used to snack on his cannibal candy between meals. I know he was crazy, and he ate a lot of people in any number of taboo ways, but I also know the man-eater wasn’t exactly fat when they arrested him. He looked rather fit, actually. Lean, even. Low on carbs, for sure. Mmm.

If you’re looking for some light — yet dark and twisted — reading, then you’ll enjoy Denise Dietz’ quirky erotic horror-comedy, Fifty Cents for Your Soul (Delphi Books, Apr 2002). Dietz draws her inspiration from her sister, Eileen Dietz — Linda Blair’s “demon double” from The Exorcist — to put together this hilarious black comedy about an actress who gets cast in a schlocky horror film, Forever Asmodeus, only to find herself possessed by a lusty and murderous demon who has dreams of stardom all its own.

The play with the demon double in this book is genuinely fun, and there’s a lot of raunchy laughs in this book, but what really makes this novel a page-turner is Dietz’s penchant for snappy one-liners and witty turns of phrase. She’s not afraid to go over-the-top — as in the opening line (“The woman who straddled Victor Madison had hiccups.”) — or to drop a witty metaphor in passing like it was easy (“My mother, of course, thinks my logic is as twisted as a French cruller.”) Dietz pulls this off by telling the story through the first person perspective of Frannie Rosen — a narrator whose voice sounds something like a young Bette Midler if she’d been cast in an episode of Sex in the City directed by Tim Burton. At one point, for example, Frannie witnesses a murder and notes two things: one, that blood is brown when it coagulates, and, two, that “In the Rosen household, blood never has time to turn a rusty brown. Immediately, if not sooner, it’s soaked in white vinegar, club soada, and/or salt water.” And so she tells the cops to try that little household hint. But sometimes the joking gets downright ludicrous. Take, for example, Frannie’s description of the demon:

“Call it a doppleganger, call it a dybbuk, call it a nudist who stuffs beetles inside its belly without swallowing. I only knew that if a tree fell in the forest and hit a mime, no one would hear (or care), but if it hit my demon, the echo of its eerie screech would reverberate left and right, up and down, from the Bronx Zoo to Bloomingdales…”

Yes, the demon eats beetles by shoving them directly into its flesh — and that’s pretty neat when Dietz depicts it. But Frannie’s voice allows her to pull a mime joke out of the blue where others would be drop dead serious. The humor refuses to take a back seat to the horror. When Frannie gets serious, it’s only when the demon possesses her — in dream visions akin to rape fantasies — that dramatize her seduction into the dark side. Her demon is indeed quite randy, and the sex jokes are frequent. But the light-hearted approach to the horror is what kept me turning the pages, waiting for the next humorous jab, whether zinger or groaner. Die-hard horror fans be warned: Dietz is predominantly a writer of romantic suspense novels, not supernatural horror, but in my opinion this only enhances the creative approach she brings to the genre, making this one of the quirkiest “demon lover” books I’ve ever read. Granted, I haven’t read a lot of them. But as a fan of The Exorcist, I found Fifty Cents for Your Soul worth far more than two bits.

Denise Dietz. Fifty Cents for Your Soul. ISBN 0966339754. 283 pp. Hardcover. Delphi Books, April 2002. $22.95. Delphi Books, POB 6435, Lee’s Summit, MO 64064.

http://www.denisedietz.com
http://store.yahoo.com/shocklines/ficeforyosob.html