I’m the cover story in the Fall issue of the Laurel Mountain Post, a great regional newspaper (their online edition should be online shortly). Take a look at this hilarious Halloween-themed cover!

“one has to remember as a painter
that there is great beauty in the color of meat.” — Francis Bacon

these heavy wings
of hand carved carcass
flutter with the ghost throes
of rusty meathook panic
pulling me out of my chair
with all the audacity
of a drunken butcher
lifting me high
as a crucifixion post
and my dinner fork
clatters on the table

[ Inspired by Bacon ]

Strange Itineraries by Tim Powers lives up to its title: it’s a trip.

Tim Powers is a powerhouse fantasy novelist. He’s probably known best for his historical fantasy, and books like The Anubis Gates and Declare have won him a huge following. I think my favorite is Last Call, a book about the inspiration behind playing cards come to life, which was one of the handful of card-related stories I read as I was working on my novel, Play Dead. It taught me more about writing than it did about cards, per se. An accomplished writer of what you might call “fabulism,” Tim Powers talent is bringing the mythic and the marvelous to life while at the same time retaining a strict psychological realism, dramatizing the way characters think and feel in deeply penetrating ways, regardless of whether they’re magicians or monsters or men. The world in a Tim Powers book is marvelously unique, yet at the same time his settings are very concrete and keenly detailed and the people are undeniably just like you and me. But being “psychologically” realistic does not make Tim Powers a “realist” by any means — indeed, his mission seems to be to bend reality, and Strange Itineraries succeeds at unhinging it at every stop along the way as he takes us on a tour of some exceptionally weird landscapes and frightfully uncanny mental vistas.

Strange Itineraries collects nine fantastic tales by Tim Powers, culled from anthologies (like the mega-horror book, 999), collectible chapbooks, and familiar serials like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s SF Magazine. It’s a great sampling of Powers’ talent (as well as that of James P. Blaylock, his collaborator on one third of the stories included here — almost enough to make me think he deserves to share the book’s byline). The stories range from peculiar fantasy to disturbing (but subtle) psychological horror and twisted alternate reality. Powers is not a horror writer in the strictest sense, but he can be very dark and mind-bending (and often, funny), but what really floors me is his sheer imagination. He takes risks and always pulls it off.

In his introduction, Paul di Filippo refers to this collection as a book of “haunted” stories. This is an excellent way to think of Strange Itineraries — though it is not so much a collection of “ghost stories” as it is a tour of diverse settings where things are not as they seem. In the title piece, “Itinerary,” a character steps into a short circuit in space and time and Powers’ effectively loops the plot structure of this story in a way that really gets you at the end. (You’ll also learn why this book has a porcelain duck on its cover). One of the darkest tales in the collection, “Through and Through,” visits a priest with a ghost in his confessional, a specter who looks him “through and through” with surprising results. “Pat Moore” is the doppleganger story to end all doppleganger stories, where the title character encounters more Pat Moores than even Pat Moore can imagine. In “The Better Boy” — perhaps the best “magical garden” tale I’ve ever read — Powers shows what happens when a man’s “inventor’s pants” go missing and throw off his plans for the tomatoes…and so much more. The closing story, “Night Moves,” invokes the specter of death in a mind bending and sophisticated way, rife with irony. I really can’t describe these stories without either relying on gross overgeneralizations or spoiling things by giving everything away. So I’ll just stop now and say that if you’re looking for an escape, climb aboard Strange Itineraries and prepare to launch on a very bizarre tour hosted by one of the most brilliant imaginations of our day.

Strange Itineraries is available in trade paperback for $15.95 (US) from Tachyon Publications. (And congratulations to Tachyon on their tenth anniversary!)

For your next movie night, rent:

The Seventh Seal (1957)
Love and Death (1975)
Meet Joe Black (1998)

If one searches long enough in Salem, Massachusets, one can find fine urns filled with the ashes of witches burned at the stake. The splintery burnt timbers once found inside these urns — called “witchpicks” — are nearly impossible to discover, however, for at the turn of the century they were all the rage among voodoo cultists, who would stick the splinters into makeshift rag dolls hoping for bonus damage.

The first slide observed by the inventor of the microscope was smeared with his own nasal discharge. An enigmatic notation in the margin of his lab report reads: “God is cold.”

Weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another plane beside the Enola Gay carried the atomic bomb to Asian shores — but this early flight was lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Neither the B-29 bomber nor its payload have ever been discovered. One military legend suggests that they were actually sent on a supernatural mission to destroy whatever force was behind the triangle itself. Another has it that the plane was swept up into a hurricane that still swirls untracked in the Atlantic, waiting to strike American shores.

It’s a little known fact that in 1883, the first iron gynecological instrument was used to torture a man.

“Fido’s Follicle Folly” — the first hangover remedy available in a dog-shaped medicine bottle — was patented in 1812 by Georges Catostrand. This popular medicine contained one knife tip of plaque scraped from the teeth of a feral canine suspended in a pint of grain alcohol.

On the eve of his execution in 1974, Gary Bronson Davis gleefully requested “Human Head Cheese and Whore Haggis” for his last meal. It was granted.

The first flyswatter was actually a cat, swung by its tail to smash a pesky housefly.

A boy was born with six breasts in 1962. Only two of them survived.

Secret Vatican scrolls reveal that the first human baby was named neither Cain nor Able, but Cainable. He was actually a conjoined twin, before one side ate the other during a violent argument (hence the term, “cannibal”).

Few realize that the invention of the handkerchief predates men’s underwear.

After his beheading at the climax of the French revolution, Louis Bastarte’s dismembered head is rumored to have delivered the phrase, “Sacre Bleu! I can still feel my legs!” hours after they carried it away in a bloody basket toward its burial site. Some French claim to have been kicked by the phantom legs, which they believe stick out from the head’s grave site. A woman in 1911 also claimed to have been impregnated by “The Kicking Bastarte.” Her baby, of course, was invisible to the naked eye. She was diagnosed with hysteria, and continued to breast feed “Little Louis” at the asylum. Psychologists could never explain the cause of her spontaneous lactation.

Enormous marbles were swallowed by ancient Romans in order to cleanse the bowel. Games involving the stones soon followed. Today we call it Bocce.

I received many excellent entries for the Goreletter’s “Mess Up My Fridge” contest last month. Now my refrigerator is truly damned. So many strange entries came in that I couldn’t just pick one winner…but FOUR, which all tied for first place. For prizes, everyone received a free Arnzen poetry book – and anyone who entered was e-mailed a free Bitpasss for access to The Sickolodeon, just for playing!

Below are the winning entries. Didn’t win? Eager for more? The “review race” contest for Play Dead is still on! Be among the first subscribers to post a “customer review” of my new novel on amazon.com, bn.com, ProjectPulp.com, or some other online bookseller, and you could win a free book, (no matter what you say)!

THE WINNERS

Soft belly babies
Two hearts strong rhythm–stiff hooks
Both splitting wetly

– Stephen M. Wilson

***
blind casket petfood
mouse balloons and memory
cat embalmed in milk

– Cameron Pierce

***
Squalid brain balloons,
Memory writhing inside,
Gleam with mad wonder.

– Tanya Twombly

***
Embalmed skin costume
Naked writhing locked inside
Wet with casket worms

– HorrorWench

***
HONORABLE MENTIONS

Cat paws out the heart
Of the dead mouse as it spurts
And it tastes like milk.

– Barbara Bates

***
Dead memory worm
writhing inside wet brain chunks
with unstoppable rhythm.

– Kathy B.

***
Haiku will never be the same again. The contest is over, but you can always post fridge magnet poetry on “The Damned Fridge” at gorelets.com

Exmortis is an excellent haunted house game, reminiscent of the “Silent Hill” series of twisted “crawlers”. You click your way around a creepy abandoned house, picking up clues (and weapons) as you try to solve the mystery of where you are, why there’s a head in the microwave, and why there’s blood all over the furniture. Try to solve the symbol puzzle before you die in a horrible fashion.

Sure, you’ll spot a lot of familiar horror images and feel like you’ve been here before. But there’s something about the way this game is put together that makes it really creepy. Combining nice art and a moody score, Exmortis is effectively chilling, even if it tests your patience as you try to figure out what to do next (a link to a helpful “walkthrough” is included below for the frustrated).

Play Exmortis (warning: the game is a 5 mb file that downloads when you load the game)

Brought to you by Ben Leffler Web Design

Need help? The Exmortis walkthrough can assist, as a last resort.

[Note: Exmortis requires Macromedia Flash, which is probably already plugged into your web browser]

World’s Goriest Board Game

Googly Chess by Bob Crouch

Totally Gross Board Game

BONUS FUN, KIDS!
Gross Out Games for Christian Youth Camp

The anthology — IN DELIRIUM — which includes my previously unpublished story about a mad dentist who creates his own toothy monster called “Mr. Mouth” — just went up for sale at Delirium Books and rumor has it that it’s already almost sold out! It’s a cool limited edition, due out this Christmas, and aside from being full of extreme horror tales, the collection is unified by one principle: the stories were all free gifts donated to the publisher, Shane Ryan Staley, by people he’s published in the past — simply as a gift for being one of the best publishers of horror around. The quality of Delirium hardcovers is among the best in the business, and with a line-up that includes hot writers Brian Keene, Kurt Newton, Mark McLaughlin, Tom Piccirilli, Weston Ochse and more, I can see why this rare collectable is almost sold out already. Get it while you still can at Delirium Books.

“The consumer’s side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious.”
– Stanislaw J. Lec (died 1966)