Today’s word is “squeg” (pronounced “skweg”). To “squeg” generally means “to oscillate in an irregular fashion.” My fan squegs when the gears need oil. Squegging is what a volume meter does when a singer bumps into the microphone. Waves squeg when someone drops a body in the ocean. Pencils get all squeggy when you do the old “rubber pencil” trick. I squeg back and forth when I drink brandy and walk on ice. “Squeg” is not to be confused with “squegg” which means to either be disinterested in gender or to try to freak someone out. Squeg has no relation to Squiggy, Square Peg, Egg Squirts, or Queequeg from Moby Dick. Squeg was not invented by the authors of the Scrabble dictionary. Squeg would be a good name for a baby, but only last until age 21.

Goreletter 3.06 was mailed to subscribers on 11/Feb/2006 @ 19:47 est. If you subscribe and did not receive this issue, e-mail me for a replacement or review the archives at gorelets.com.

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The claw foot tub clenches
the floor whenever I twist
the handle hot, scouring the bone
tiles and filthy basin belly.
Droplets spray and pepper the flesh
– and that’s just the curtain of skin
dancing on its meat hooks, absorbing
the stream, but perpetually unclean.
I don’t understand why the blood
doesn’t wash out; why it molds so much.
Maybe something ill spills
from the green gums of that open-mouthed
shower head, spraying its sickness.
Or perhaps it’s just my plumbing.

Flesh-a-Sketch
We ought to have temporary tattoos that are nonetheless permanent. Why must the art be stagnant? Especially if it’s bad? We want art that we can revise and change, yet something that still sends the message that we’re so committed to our art that we’re willing to be surgically altered. If they can make adjustable pacemakers and prescription birth control patches these days, they ought to be able to make movable tattoos. Here’s my idea: embed little colored metal pellets under the surface of the skin, so we can use a magnetic device to move them around whenever we want to. Like that children’s art toy, I’d call it “Flesh-a-Sketch.” Don’t like that evil Ace of Spades? No need for that blow torch. Just shake your arm. It’s gone.

Replaceable Fingers
I think there’s much more we can do with the human hand. Particularly the fingers. I think our fingertips should be replaced with jacks that allow us to screw in and swap all sorts of prosthetic devices, right from birth. As a writer, naturally, I’d love it if I could press a secret button on my palm and click a ballpoint right out from the tip of my finger. Got a kid who likes to suck on his thumb? Give him “fingernips” instead. And we call all be really wild Freddy Kreugers with insertable blades. We could embed cell phones into our palms and literally “talk to the hand.” Set it on vibrate. Imagine the possibilities!

Stomach Paperclips
You’ve heard of stomach stapling before, right? Same idea. Only temporary. Sometimes I like feeling so full I have to open my belt.

Mobile Airbags
When a car gets impacted, airbags inflate and save lives. Why can’t we embed a similar technology in our flesh? Someone punches you — boom — your shirt explodes and a large pillow of air absorbs the blow. Slip on the ice — bam — a large buttock inflates and you land so safely you could go tubing down a mountain on your own rear end. We could all play suicide with trains and tall buildings. What a thrill! This invention would make the automobile airbag useless, so it would even save us millions.

Tongue Implants
People get all sorts of things implanted into their mouths — braces, bridges, fillings. Why should the teeth have all the fun? Let’s accessorize our mouths with extra tongues. Clone ‘em, take them out of cadavers, make ‘em out of vinyl…it’s all good. Maybe get one pierced that wouldn’t always get in the way; or mod them both to play mouth maracas. We could even invent a new language when we’re not too busy French kissing. Wait, that wouldn’t be “French” kissing anymore. But you get the idea. I’m sure you’ve even got some ideas of your own now.

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
– R.D. Laing (died 1989)

Few realize that the term “anthology” — which we use to denote collections of short stories by different authors, usually following a shared theme or genre — comes for the Greek word for “flower-gathering.” Corpse Blossoms, the first volume in a series of anthologies from the new horror publisher, Creeping Hemlock Press, is more than just a collection of some dead leaves — it’s like an amazingly fulfilling chilled salad. Or should I say a very full, chilling salad? Either way, it’s fiction with an earthy, dark flavor in every bite. And though I’m more than satisfied by the meal, I can’t wait till they toss together their next dish.

Edited by Julia and RJ Sevin, Corpse Blossoms will immediately strike you as a different kind of horror anthology the second you hold it in your hands. If an anthology is a flower-gathering, then the editors have arranged these twisted clippings into a very distinctive bouquet. First off, there’s something inherently gentle about the package — from the charcoal image of the funeral flower on its gray front cover to the high quality green bindings and pastel cover with a copper foil stamp. Usually I don’t judge a book by its cover, but when I examine a new publisher’s first offering, I am interested in the investment they put into the quality and I can’t help but judge whether or not they really know what they’re doing based on the book’s production value, in addition to its general aesthetic unity. This book sends a message: the stories you’re about to read are high quality. And the book has a distinctive character. Corpse Blossoms evinces a soft horror mood that’s really somewhat eerie — like a thing found abandoned in a mortuary, yet quivering with a life all its own.

So do the stories match the quality and character of the book? Are they, in the publisher’s words, “tales of quiet terror and screaming fear by some of the finest authors in the field”? Indeed, for the most part, they are, and though there were many fine horror anthologies published this past year (indeed, we may be experiencing a horror anthology renaissance), Corpse Blossoms holds its own as one of the finest horror anthologies to come out this season.

One of the most interesting elements of the book is the dictum in the foreword, which begs the reader to “read these exceptional stories in the order that they appear for full effect…this is no lottery.” Corpse Blossoms has twenty-four stories, many by longstanding and reputable writers in the horror genre (Gary Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Steve Rasnic Tem) and many by writers who have made a noticeably significant splash in the horror scene since the turn of the Millennium (Kealan Patrick Burke, Scott Nicholson, Darren Speegle, Bev Vincent, Nick Mamatas, Steve Vernon, Brian Freeman). The fiction is generally harder in tone than you might expect, given the gentility of the packaging. In the stories themselves, the “quiet terror” usually stems from a character whose reality has started splitting apart at the seams, and the writers ratchet up the creep-outs until everything erupts in a moment of “screaming fear” — and for some, explosive gore — in an emotionally powerful way.

I can’t talk about all of the tales, but let me share my thoughts about three that really stuck with me, to give you a sense of the book’s range.

One of the weirdest pieces in this is collection is “The Last Few Curls of Gut Rope” by Steve Vernon. The title is a tad bit misleading, because Vernon’s tale is really a surrealist piece rather than a gorefest (though you won’t be entirely disappointed in the climax if a little gut-wrenching splat is what you’re seeking when you read this one). What makes “Gut Rope” surreal? Well, if you’ve ever read my short-short story, “Domestic Fowl,” then this is “Domestic Fowl” to the 20th power. It’s about a guy who orders eggs at a restaurant and is served a live squawking chicken (“You asked for eggs,” the waitress says, “but the chicken comes first.”) And then it just gets weirder and weirder, playing off the familiar chicken-and-egg formula by “dishing out” many absurdist moments and encounters, until it reaches its bizarrely-feathered conclusion. Vernon is gaining a reputation for his humorous voice, and though this story does not disappoint in that regard, it also reveals a layer of psychological depth underpinning his fiction that is getting deeper and more profound than in the past. It’s one of his best tales yet.

Another wildly-imagined contribution to the collection comes from Bentley Little, whose opening paragraph is probably the most creatively hilarious of the book:

He found it in a shack in the desert, a horrible thing of jellyfish and claws, scales and squid, bound into shape by strands of dark kelpy seaweed. It was sitting in the center of the rotted wood floor, and under his gaze it shifted, moved, tried to slink away beneath a sandy bench, all the while making a hideous squeaking squelching sound.

‘Dad?’ he said.

This is from Little’s “Finding Father,” a quirky and emotionally disturbing tale about a trucker who is hunting down his father, who, it seems, is leaving a trail for him to follow in the form of bathroom stall graffiti. The premise of this one is a little hard to swallow, but that’s almost universally true of Bentley Little’s short stories. Little always ambitiously pushes the envelope of horror fiction and writes horror with a contagious sense of frenetic glee that inevitably takes you on such a ride that you not only forgive the absurdity behind his stories, but also gladly join him in his playground of the unreal. This story had me at “jellyfish and claws.” They latched onto me and I went along for an outrageous descent into terror.

I love stories like these; tales that go over the top in a quest for unconscious thrills. Their unsettling humor pushes you over the edge and into some psychic state of disbelief akin to madness. Corpse Blossoms is at its best when it delves into the psychological — rather than supernatural — side of horror. And it doesn’t just go for the outr

You’ve seen it in every carny movie ever made. Now’s your chance to throw blades at the person tied to a spinning wheel. It’s simple, childish, time-consuming fun — like darts for the demented.

http://quickflashgames.com/games/knifethrow/

+ Place a deaf person in a burning building. First sentence: “(S)He didn’t hear the alarm.”
+ Place a wheelchair-bound character on a sinking ship.
+ Dramatize the methods of a “slow” serial killer.

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Instigation is a WEEKLY department in Hellnotes newsletter…who also now publishes a new online magazine of stories based on my prompts, called Wee Small Hours!

For your next movie night, rent:

Circus of Horrors (1960)
Seconds (1966)
Johnny Handsome (1989)

Just learned that my poem, “Those Who Landed, Surprised to Discover that Zombies Had Taken Over the Planet,” is a nominee for a Rhysling Award in Short Poetry. The Rhyslings are one of the few genre poetry awards out there; it’s given each year by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. “Those Who Landed…” first appeared in Dreams and Nightmares magazine this past Fall, and subsequently reappeared in my chapbook, Rigormarole: Zombie Poems. As a member of the SFPA since 1987, I’m very jazzed to be a part of this.

Since I’m tooting my own horn with these abomi-nominations, I guess I can play another note. I’m overjoyed that my novel, Play Dead, and my poetry collection, Freakcidents, are both receiving recommendations for the 2005 Bram Stoker Award. It’s still too early to know if they’ll make it to any official ballots, but it truly is an honor to be recognized this way by the Horror Writers Association.

I’ve also been nominated by my wife as the 2005 “Man Most Likely to Take Out the Garbage,” so I better go give my acceptance speech to the rats….