Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’:
Taboo Taxidermy
 | Rogue Taxidermy |
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I dedicate this month’s entry to my brother, Dan, who gave me the wonderful “Magic Mummified Miniature Mystery Hand” you see pictured above as a Christmas gift. This exquisite piece of art is a Custom Creature original by rogue taxidermist, Sarina Brewer.
Oddly Chilling Thoughts
+ 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.
Special Holiday Edition!
Happy Holidays! I wanted to surprise everyone by packing extra horrors into this special issue of The Goreletter, so I invited friends from several writing communities to send in “holiday gorelets” for publication here, with a prize going to what I judged to be the best submission. Not an easy task! Most are about Santa and Xmas. I did not reject any of the entries — to my way of thinking, the more the merrier. I’ll post the award winning poem at the very end, along with a little explanation why I chose it. Enjoy. And do yourself a favor and visit some of these writer’s websites and buy their books with that gift certificate you got for the holidays. Really: try someone new!
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First Christmas at Grandma Lucia’s House
With loving dark arms she reaches to embrace
the children, the kids’ candy apple eyes wide
in terror as the huge hands descend gray
and powerful, fleshly, the thick unnatural lipstick mouth
alive with ancient smiles, behind her the meats
hanging from racks and wires, sausages, lungs,
necks, these are delicacies where she’s from, starving
peasants would scream in the fields for this,
staring into snow-stuffed skies for the face
of Mother Mary, and my kids are shrieking.
– Tom Piccirilli http://www.tompiccirilli.com/
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A Sled Parked atop the Roof
A sled parked atop the roof.
Deer grazing on the front lawn.
A man in red breaks into the house
Passes through the front door
Without opening it — amazing!
His hands are empty going in
But his arms are loaded when he leaves
Can you see bloodstains on crimson material?
A shell in each chamber should suffice.
This magic elf won’t rob us twice.
– Bev Vincent http://www.bevvincent.com
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Santa’s Got a Brand-New Bag
Cookies and milk shoved into a gaping maw
Guts rumble beneath the big red suit
Pine tree wilts as the mouth opens wide
A gloved finger slides down the throat
Vomit and bile, gifts and gobs rain down
Floor now slick with acid and toys
The fat elf retreats, his job well done
Another holiday worth remembering
– John R. Platt http://jplatt.homestead.com/
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Santa is a Cannibal
Santa is a cannibal…what, you hadn’t heard?
Well, his habit isn’t flaunted;
He’s wickedly canny to get what he’s wanted
For dinner, elves are preferred.
Little elfin Leonard brought
Santa cookies and custard,
But ol’ Kringle’s carnivory
got the lad flustered.
“He tried to flee,”
Santa ho-ho-hoed with great glee
“But he was terrific with mustard!”
– Lucy Snyder http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/
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Empty Stockings
Chimney
smoke Christmas Eve,
crematorium ash
on the hearth the year the fat man
vanished.
– Deborah P Kolodji http://www.amaze-cinquain.com
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Unwrapping The Phantom
The angry Santa weeps lakes of tinsel
packages them in the womb of crystallized sky
then adorns his presents with ribbon-ed clouds
And He sends them to adults in anger
For in this world of antediluvian Gods
he is now a jolly, lobster-red joke
But we know not what we had
when we were ten, and, believed in him
And, what magic was uncreated when
we were given that final gift; the truth…
– J.M. Heluk http://www.jmheluk.com/
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‘Twas the Night After Christmas
Welcome to Dark Santa’s manse
It’s time for the midnight dance
Come into his workroom
And seal your doom
Try not to be afraid
Though it’s a very dark tomb
Stuffed with all sorts of toys
To fulfill his twisted joys.
– Ron Breznay
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Reindeer Games
It was Blitzen, I think, who, sick of his damned
lashing, twisted to bite the ropes that bound us
setting Santa into freefall toward no chimney
below but all twelve of us flew down anyway
and tore him to pieces, champing through fat
onto bone and flying our twelve separate
ways and all twelve of us had red shiny noses
the Christmas that freedom was our first gift
to each other
– Michael A. Arnzen, http://www.gorelets.com
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Christmas Presence
Early morning, and the first awake.
Mom and dad and sister, still sleeping.
The packages look different, are lumpy,
clumsily re-wrapped.
Ornaments glisten. They seem almost moist,
nestled in there among the blinking red lights.
The tinsel looks silky and blond
The cookies are gone from the mantle, and,
The stockings are full. But they’re small.
Little girl stockings.
– Chris Garrett
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Please Come to my Solstice Sacrifice
and Tree Decorating Party!
Drink blood ‘til you’re sated,
eat flesh ‘til you’re gorged,
then we’ll light the fire,
sacrifice the supplicants.
There’ll be chanting and dancing,
while decorating the tree:
First entrails, then eyeballs,
carved kneebones, cartilage,
perforated kidneys, and a
four-chambered heart.
– Terrie Leigh Relf http://www.writersmonthly.us/
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stocking stuffers
red ribbony bonus
surprise tucked deep
beneath candy
caned fingers
pruned mistletoes
the egg noggin drip
a dead giveaway
– Kurt Newton http://www.kurtnewton.com/
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The Necrotide Spirit
There was a Christmas Tree
in the mausoleum this year.
Saw it when I was placing roses
by old Aunt Matilda’s crypt.
Gifts by the dozen sat beneath the tree,
all gaily wrapped yet dirty.
I felt suddenly festive
and couldn’t help but sing along
with the clogged and raspy voices.
– Kevin Donihe http://users.chartertn.net/mbs/kldwriter/
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Super Ate Family Films
licking at
the window bloody
red holiday
smile slit spreading
ornamental anger
thankful for this bounty
– John Edward Lawson http://www.johnlawson.org/
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Santa Goes Postal
Mrs. Claus no longer speaks, save to complain
of cold and isolation. I find solace
in cable horror movies, watch shooting sprees
on CNN performed by postal workers
with less cause for grief (fewer packages, better
work conditions than my icy North Pole prison).
I scheme to pull children from their beds,
drag them trembling over frosty white
powdered lawns, where (I’m guessing) blood
will make a lovely cherry snow cone spill.
– Norman Prentiss
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*** WINNER ***
Nosferatu Celebrates the Season
Not down
some chimney but through
her window
he is everything good girls
die for
tall dark & red-suited –
eventually — bearing
the gift that keeps on
giving: endless
Christmas Eves.
– Ann K. Schwader http://www.geocities.com/hpl4ever/
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All of these poems were so good, it was impossible to pick one winner in this so-called “contest.” I almost chose Kurt Newton’s “stocking stuffer” because it reads so much like an Arnzen “Gorelet” that it’s uncanny. It’s a damned good horror poem, so I’m sending Kurt a signed printout of my e-book, Sportuary, for taking third place. Tom Piccirilli’s “Grandma Lucia” is the most literary and probably well-written of the batch — truly a dark and familiar poem — but perhaps not as gleefully gory as the others. Tom takes second and wins a free review copy I have of the Monks/Fisher Six Crimes anthology. Although it’s a vampire poem, Ann Schwader’s piece stood out as the most original to me, in not only the Nosferatu concept, but also the way it weaves double-meanings into almost every line, therefore standing up to multiple re-readings. Ann wins a copy of Bruce Boston’s fantastic new collection, Pitchblende, signed by Boston, Simon, and Arnzen (who wrote the intro and edited the book). Ann’s poem wins because it’s written so tightly that it’s truly a gorelet. But they all are and I thank every writer who contributed for their grotesque gift to us all. Happy Horrordays!
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Holiday X
The most popular article from last year’s Goreletter was “Holiday X” — an essay on the X in Xmas — and since it’s that, um, “most wonderful time of the year” once again, I thought I’d reprint that article here (while I work on the December issue’s “Blather” column). To read “Holiday X” click below or go directly to the archived copy of vol 1.4.
Holiday Book News
I’m very pleased to announce that Delirium Books will be re-releasing my Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Grave Markings, in a limited run of collectable leatherbound and hardcover copies in Spring 2004. This is part of their Dark Essential series of “must have” horror books.
I was happy to learn that I have two titles (three if you count an anthology I’m in) listed on the Shocklines Bookstore bestseller lists this week! (My e-book, Sportuary, is also #5 on the Cyberpulp Bestseller List!)
Thanks to all of you reading this who have picked up copies of Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems or who pre-ordered 100 Jolts.
If you’re an amazon.com customer, they now offer the e-book version of Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems. You can also now get Arnzen e-books at Palm Digital Media in addition to Fictionwise.com.
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