We have two winners in the ‘spaminot’ contest from Goreletter 4.01! But one contest still remains open, so subscribe soon and you can still enter.

The “spaminot” contest asked readers to guess which of the following phrases was NOT a real spam header I received: aggressive mannequin, be decomposable, cuddle grime, diabolical meathead, drive by grimace, efficiency nose ring, goth seniority, grandmamma warlock, medication madhouse, open face surgery, sanity immersion, toucan retardation, undeliverable baby. (Can you believe the sick ingenuity of spammers?). The made-up phrase was “diabolical meathead.” Guess I wasn’t so diabolical after all.

Craig Clarke wins 1st prize, nabbing an autographed Advanced Review Copy of my novel, Play Dead, a copy of The Dead Cat Poet Cabal (constructed by Gerard Houarner), a signed Play Dead book jacket, and Horror Library Vol. 1 (edited by RJ Cavender).

Tracy Mowdy came in 2nd with the winning entry, earning an autographed copy of Mythic Delirium #14, a signed Play Dead book jacket, and a copy of Butcher Shop Quartet (edited by Frank J. Hutton).

Congratulations to Craig and Tracy.

The currently open contest — a subjective draw which invites subscribers to send me a witty interview question for my weblog on amazon.com — will remain open until June 10th, when I pick my favorite question and answer it. To participate, all you need to do is subscribe to the e-mail edition of The Goreletter and follow the directions in the latest issue. The winner will receive a free and highly collectible deck of playing cards with art by Dave Liscomb inspired by my novel, Play Dead!

The Goreletter Vol. 4, #1, with the title “Tender Cuts” was mailed to subscribers on 25/May/2006 23:08 est. It contains two contests for prizes and extra material not available here on the weblog version. If you subscribe and did not receive this issue, e-mail me for a replacement or review the archives at gorelets.com.

Subscribers to this newsletter receive bonus material — and have access to exclusive discounts, contests, and other benefits. Subscribe today…it’s painless, fun and free! (But probably not completely pain-free). — Mike Arnzen

Hatebeak

The Electric Amish

Cookie Mongoloid

[Thanks to Bruce Siskawicz and Rick Fleck for suggestions.]

Most free movie-inspired online games are trite gimmicks, and Slither: Hunting Season — based on James Gunn’s 2006 campy horror film Sliver — is certainly one of them. But Hunting Season is astonishingly well-made for a simple 3rd person shooter that has you do little more than point and click to shoot at random on-coming targets while offbeat sound bytes from the film randomly play over the speakers. The game puts you, a desperate cop with a rifle, slightly off the center of the screen, generating a sense of helplessness as the camera peers straight down from above in an bird’s eye view. The player’s job is to keep on the lookout for approaching monster worms, targeting the cop’s rifle at them as quickly as possible. As if pinned to the hub of a wheel, you don’t get to move. Instead, things come crawling at you — and the better you are at picking them off, the harder and harder it gets to shoot them all. The game play is excellent, because it truly succeeds in making you feel “surrounded” by the enemy… which wants to jump in your mouth, wriggle down your throat and infest you with its slimy body. You’ll get a gratuitous gore clip when you get killed in the game, which makes the impossible survival of the onslaught sort of worth it. (“What kind of animal WANTS you to eat it?” one sound byte from Slither asks. The answer? Hollywood.)

Bring on the worms: http://www.slithermovie.net/hunting/

Hunting Season requires the latest Shockwave Player (installed automatically as a browser plug in). It may also require a fast internet connection and a decent graphics card in your computer, because the design is richly competitive with most modern shooting games for the PC.

“Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”
– Tennessee Williams (died 1983)

+ Reveal a horrifying disfigurement behind a woman’s veil.
+ Something is “bulging” beneath Charlie’s sweater. Jane is obsessively fixated on this. Dramatize the revelation of Charlie’s hidden surprise.
+ Create a character who has no fingernails. What happened to them and what surprising skill can he perform without them?

***
I’m sad to report that my weekly “Instigation” column will no longer appear in Hellnotes newsletter, because it is a newsletter no more. Moreover, the “Wee Small Hours” flash fiction webzine has been canceled. But not to fear: Hellnotes is still alive under the editorship of David B. Silva, and has evolved into a new FREE syndicated weblog that you should visit regularly!

And I will continue to regularly publish “Instigation” in The Goreletter.

Lots of little news bytes to pass along.

• WHC: I’m heading to World Horror Convention in San Francisco on May 11-15th. Details on the no good business I’ll be up to are here.
  
• News: I’ll be sending out the next e-mail edition of The Goreletter shortly after I return. New contests await! Sign up now if you want to win something.
  
• Vanderworld: Look for the fun interview, “Michael Arnzen Walks the Plank,” scheduled to appear on fantasist Jeff Vandermeer’s weblog in the weeks to come. (And if you’re looking for a great summer read, I really recommend his books!)
  
• Not Dead Yet: A neat review of my funky “household tips for serial killers” chapbook, Michael Arnzen Dying, just went up at Bookloons.
  
• Pod: The Goreletter is proudly sponsoring Pod of Horror for the month. If you haven’t listened to this wacky horrorshow, check them out at HorrorReader.com
  
• Film: The production of Exquisite Corpse — a compilation of short films by different artists responding to my poetry — is coming along swiftly. The website isn’t up yet, but it is likely to appear at www.exquisitecorpsemovie.com. I’ve seen an advanced look at the DVD cover sleeve…this is going to be VERY COOL!
  
• Web: Raw Dog Screaming — publisher of my books, Play Dead and 100 Jolts — has overhauled their website. It looks fantastic and they’ve got some great new titles recently announced. Check ‘em out.
  
• Blog: My NEW weblog at amazon.com is now up and running. The dismembered hand is taking questions.
  

Take a walk down the pet food aisle, the next time you’re at the supermarket. Marvel at the rows of canned meat and bags of hearty pellets — all those wasted by-products scraped from the slaughterhouse floor and the oily sludge trellises of the fishery, all that scrapple repackaged for consumption by animals who really have no choice in the matter. This is what we’ve ordained to feed our domesticated beasts. It’s a wonder they don’t come after us with…well, tiny little torches and pitchforks.

Take a pensive moment under the fluorescent glare of the pet food aisle to contemplate the fact that you’re surrounded by more dead meat than you’d find in some morgues. Try not to imagine all the chopping, carving, slicing, cubing, mashing, and grinding that went into each and every one of those perfectly stacked cans. The chow packets are as bulky as body bags. Don’t be fooled: there’s nothing “tender” about a “cut.” There’s no gourmet Navy chef at work behind the “Sea Captain’s Stew” of salmon guts commingling with cow testicles in a broth of poultry gizzards. Take a whiff — smell all that yumminess? That’s the fine odor of dismemberment, dried and fortified with “more great taste!”

If cats had taste they wouldn’t lick themselves clean. If dogs had taste, they wouldn’t drool all over my fine carpet.

But I digress. Sometimes it’s the dried foods that are the worst of all. They come in all shapes and sizes — little formed fishies, tiny X’s, teensy squares. More than “nine lives” are in them, their bodies stewed together in some giant vat to produce a brown muck that is subsequently formed and baked and bagged. All traces of life are removed and transformed into a magic “formula” that animals would never find in nature, but which pet nutritionists are more than happy to endorse. Imagine pouring milk over your breakfast cereal and spooning up a brown pellet of soggy meat. That’s what you’re doing to Fido every day, when you’re not otherwise teasing him with a dog biscuit that’s shaped an awful lot like a skinned human leg bone.

The more you think about these things, the more repulsive they become. But we don’t want to think. We want to feel good about spending less on our pets than we do on our own meals, and we want to feel loved for selecting them the fanciest of feasts. But what really creeps me out is the happy little packaging that leads us to believe we’re somehow making the right choices. I’m talking about all those picture perfect cats and canines, from the snarky fatcat models like Morris to those dopey-but-lovable Alpo dogs. Like famous athletes on cereal boxes, these are celebrities in the animal kingdom, right? Wrong: Morris would be dead meat in an alley fight and Lassie would get so mauled by the pack she’d single-handedly redefine the meaning of dog biscuits. Even when the animal sponsors are cutely drawn, they’re kind of creepy to me. The “Meow Mix” brand logo is, essentially, a dismembered cat, it’s alphabet soup of body parts formed into letters that spell the brand name. The happy-go-lucky names and slogans don’t help. Like, do I really want my animal to be “Friskie”? Couldn’t that get me arrested in some states?

No, there’s nothing cute and cuddly about the pet food aisle — all those perfect pet faces on the packages are utterly unnerving. Look at them, lined up in rows and columns like some animal cloned pet army — gazing up at us, head cocked to one side with unknowable intention, licking the Pavlovian drool from their lips and baring their sharpened, pearly white teeth! It’s a bad veterinarian’s living nightmare.

And did you ever notice that in every pet package, the animal is smiling? Smiling! Animals do NOT smile! They don’t waive hello and say “howdy-do” or “it’s grrrreat!” or “hmmm…snuggle!” They snarl and champ and would bite the hand that feeds them if they weren’t so preoccupied by the puzzling sound of food pouring into a ceramic dish. Seriously — the “photoshop tricks” on the pet food packages don’t fool me. I can still see that look in their little kitten and puppy dog eyes. And I recognize it. It’s the same look you see on Wild Kingdom or Animal Planet, when they show lions tugging a string of bloody muscle from fresh kill. The glint of primal satisfaction from gnawing on all that gamy goodness.

Now, I know there are a lot of “alternative” pet foods that are out there — from scientifically formulated dietary mixes to “vegetarian” snacks to chocolate covered dog biscuits. But the more that pet food becomes like human food, the more human food becomes like pet food. Most of the prefab stuff you buy at the grocer’s is close enough already, thank you very much. And until Fido can pick up the tongs properly, he isn’t getting any of my salad.

So I guess we have little choice but to slop it all out in a pretty little dish and leave the stinking dead meat in the open air. It sits there in a puddle in the corner like a torn carcass in the Serengeti, drawing flies. Fluffy comes and goes as she pleases, lapping at the corpse cuttings, happy that her owners have provided her with every morbid morsel.

Mange! And I mean that both ways, carnivores.

And don’t even get me started on the TV commercials. Where you see puppies hopping on laps like happy little children, licking their owner’s faces, I see wild animals getting a little taste of their prey before the bestial mauling and fanged carnage begins. Dogs love bones. And we are pet food. Don’t forget that.

For your next movie night, rent:

The Man with Two Brains (1983)
MST2K: The Atomic Brain (1997/ aka Monstrocity, 1964)
Man with the Screaming Brain (2005)

He found the bottle of People Repellent at a health food store. The package was right next to the all-natural bug sprays and fly papers and anti-mosquito incense. It cost $24, emblazoned with a stick figure logo that raised a scrawny arm in a “talk to the hand” gesture. He thought it would make a funny gift for his girlfriend, who always complained about the people in her office, so he blew what was left in his wallet for the novelty spray, along with his usual assortment of herbal extract supplements and offbeat teas.

At home, he started wrapping the gift. He chuckled at the logo on the bottle again, but then found himself questioning his choice. Maybe she would read between the lines and accuse him of calling her anti-social. Or maybe she’d assume that all the gifts in their relationship from that point forward would be juvenile pranks. She might conjure an image of fake doggie doo in her Christmas stocking or a squirt ring surprise during their marriage ceremony, and then quickly remove him from her speed dial.

He didn’t want to “repel” his own girlfriend, after all. So he grabbed the bottle and opened the lid of the trashcan. Something liquid sloshed inside. He shook it. Wondered what it really was. Took a whiff of the sprayer.

It smelled fantastic. Like flowers fountaining inside of other flowers. But it was still musky enough to be called cologne. He decided to try it out. He sprayed People Repellent on his neck, then his arms, then his chest, and then inside the waistband of his jeans…spritzing copiously until he was sure he could keep inhaling it like a floral cloud descended from heaven, floating around his body.

Immediately a number of houseflies stirred inside his trashcan and zoomed up from the refuse to glom onto his flesh. More flying gnits zipped across his house and landed on his skin, fizzling in the still-wet sheen of People Repellent on the back of his neck and on his arms. Mosquitoes followed, whining around his ears before dipping their beaks into their newfound nirvana.

They itched, and he was surprised by just how many flying insects were living in his house, but he also understood what was happening with perfect clarity. He went outside and walked slowly down the sidewalk, heading towards his girlfriend’s house just a few blocks away. A thousand thousand more insects joined their brethren on his flesh. His body became a living block party for the local gnats. Moths landed on his eyelids. Honeybees buzzed and nuzzled into his belt line. And people quickly got out of his way.

He was a living coat of writhing wrigglers when he rang her doorbell, waiting to see what kind of person she’d turn out to be. Beneath a mitten of mites, he still clutched the spray bottle in a free hand, which he held behind his back like a lover’s bouquet.

***
If you like stories like this, you’d like my collection, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories