How did I really know that it was all as unreal as the back of my hand? Because I could see through to the very veins?
Maybe... but it was really the white blood that gave the game away.
Pissing in the Barbican Lake (with Jamie Mcleod)
Jeremy Reed
The lake’s a black tower-blocked
obsidian slash
deep as the London underground
a lit-up urban hologram
like a UFO looking in
on toxic shivery freeze.
We chill outside, pre-interval,
waiting for Marc to bleed Jacques Brel
into a shattered torch ruby—
The Devil OK, Le Diable Sa Va
done like a shocking urinalysis
of lyric spiked with wild
English garlic. We won’t go down
sub-podium to the deodorant cubes
submerged in urine, but whip out our cocks
for a steamy duo on the pier,
our yellow pigment urochrome,
and mine fluorescent from B vitamins
and Jamie’s clear, his nitrogen
the hissy deposit.
They fill in now, three triangular towers—
Cromwell, Shakespeare and Lauderdale,
and we describe glittering arcs,
a sort of subversive piss graffiti
into the pond—and seven floors above
under a white barrel vaulted ceiling
I catch a boy doing karaoke
liberated into subtext, arms thrown,
while we in midstream make the water ring.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicides
Jeremy Reed
A 12-gauge shotgun and red dahlias,
an explosively paranoid Joe Meek
waits for the moment like take-off,
a Boeing’s nose cone climbing out:
bang, bang, he blows his landlady
into free fall and follows her
backwards down the stairs
in a saturated vermilion star.
307 Holloway Road: his flat
a sounds lab—pop and Ouija and blue pills,
its lo-fi off-peak legit.
They follow after him, all the way down
the escalating suicides
or death-inducers, Presley, Hendrix, Brian Jones,
John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ronnie Lane,
Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain,
excess bingers hallucinating in the drop
into the roaring underground
like hearing tubes brake at King’s Cross
before their terminal shut down.
Joe’s shot precipitated avalanche,
the bodies slamming through down the decades,
their lives obituarist memorabilia,
left with an aura-halo, the dull glow
of house lights sunk in Bishop’s Avenue,
the Saudi billionaire owner
weekending in Zurich, his lit mansion
there like a liner in the Hampstead dark.
About the authors
Brendan Connell
Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Fast Ships, Black Sails (Nightshade Books 2008), and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). Some of his published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010), Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2010), and The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (Chômu Press, 2011).
Colin Insole
Colin Insole is a writer of supernatural and strange fiction and a part-time lecturer from the market town of Lymington, on the south coast of England.
His debut novella, Oblivion’s Poppy, is set in the aftermath of the Second World War and was published in 2010. A second novella, Alcyone, explored the history and mythology of Prague and is set in the months following the Velvet Revolution. Both books were published by Ex Occidente Press of Bucharest, Romania.
He has contributed stories for the tribute anthologies (Cinnabar’s Gnosis and The Master in Cafe Morphine) to Gustav Meyrink and Mikhail Bulgakov respectively, published by Ex Occidente, and for Side Real Press in Delicate Toxins—their tribute anthology to the German writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Other stories have been included in Supernatural Tales, edited by David Longhorn, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, edited by D.F. Lewis and A Tail for All Seasons 3, published by Priory Press on the Isle of Man.
D.F. Lewis
DF Lewis—the publisher of Nemonymous—was born in 1948 only a few miles from where he lives now on the Tendring Peninsula coast, has been married for 41 years and has a son and daughter. He loves reading fiction, writing fiction creatively beyond his own experience, constructively provoking people and listening to ‘classical’ music.
Daniel Mills
Daniel Mills is a young American writer with lifelong ties to New England. “Testing Spark” draws on his experience working in a semiconductor fabrication plant following his graduation from the University of Vermont in 2007. Its contemporary setting marks it as a departure from his other work, much of which uses historical environments to explore the legacies of sin and repression in New England life. His short fiction has recently appeared in Aklonomicon and Supernatural Tales, while his first novel, Revenants (2011), is available from Chômu.
Jeremy Reed
Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born poet and novelist, dubbed by the Independent, “British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie”, and by Pete Doherty, “a legend”. Author of over fifty volumes of poetry (including Listening to Marc Almond, Quentin Crisp as Prime Minister and Patron Saint of Eye-Liner), fifteen novels (including Boy Caesar and The Grid), and numerous volumes of non-fiction, Reed is known for his extraordinary imaginative gifts, his characteristic use of language like experience freshly recorded on the nervous system, and his visionary mining of subject matter outside the range of his contemporaries. His biggest fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Björk, who has called his work, “the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world”.
Jesse Kennedy
Jesse Kennedy is a writer, filmmaker, and artist living in Denver, Colorado. He has a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University. He is a counselor/associate and grant writer for TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. His short films have been shown internationally, and his poetry has been published in Bombay Gin. His writing on film has appeared in monographs and periodicals distributed through TIE. He can be reached at [email protected].
Jimmy Grist
Jimmy Grist has been trying to eat more vegetables.
Joe Simpson Walker
Joe Simpson Walker is the pen name of Philip Johnson (born 1959). His first creative activity was as a musician involved in the DIY underground of the late Seventies and Eighties. As Philip Johnson he made approximately thirty cassettes and a number of appearances on vinyl, including his own album Youth In Mourning (Namedrop Records 1982). In the Nineties he turned to writing. His early novels include Slackhurst (1992), Lovedrool (1993), Her Hands Are Tied (1993), Fetishdoll (1994), and a novella, House of Footwear (1995-96). In 2011 he returned from a long hiatus with Jeanette, published by Chômu, his largest and most ambitious novel to date. That same year a collection of his short stories, Strange Desires, appeared as a mass-market paperback from Silver Mink Books. He is at present working on a new novel and aiming for publication in 2012.
His favourite quote about his fiction came from a clinical psychologist to whom he read part of an earlier draft of Jeanette: “It’s very well written, but everyone in it seems to be barking mad.”
John Cairns
Born a bastard at Shoreham in 1938, I was fostered out in London and then to an aunt in S
cotland before my mum married after the war to give me a father.
I had the highest IQ ever in Buckhaven and Methil and was junior school dux. Mum pawned the silver medal. I was top of the first year at Buckhaven High and thereafter relaxed into doing only what was necessary. I was, however, history dux before going onto Edinburgh where I decided against working for a first, being more interested in loving a man I left on his having an erection. He was my first case as an adult. I wrote him and others out in a novel I posted off to Iris Murdoch whose thirteen-page criticism is in the John Cairns Archive. The book gave me entry to the Glasgow literary scene and Betty Clark. The book made from my archived correspondence with her is having its layout designed by KiPublishing. Its title is CORRESPONDENCE. Although I’m the author and it’s designed by my unconscious, it also stands as the magnum opus of my friend Betty.
My unconscious came out on a holiday in Argyll and I became more interested in realising spiritual reality than that of material life as a teacher so did some supply in London while my style changed to one could convey the unconscious to consciousness. ‘Sketch of a Just Man’, a short story from that prolific period, was published in a magazine, Words 5, which accepted it as from somebody other.
To plumb the unconscious I used love unexpended on others to my artistic end and finally wrote ‘the book’, a replication of my life when as a child I was collaborating with my unconscious I called my man in living out scenes of dialogue kept intact in unconscious memory. My aunt realised she also was taking part in the book which was designed to keep her from death by giving her a reason for living. She was my first case. KiPublishing have a copy of ‘the book’.
‘INSTANCE....’ is my most interesting take on unconscious communication since it swings between that to talk and back again continually. It’s also my one proactive story, to which any reader can provide a conclusion by using it to prove telepathy the only way it can be proved scientifically or, on trying, by failing to.
Julie Sokolow
Julie Sokolow is a musician, writer, and filmmaker living in Pittsburgh, PA. At nineteen, she released a lo-fi indie album, Something About Violins, through Western Vinyl that achieved acclaim from Pitchfork, Wire, and The Washington Post. At twenty-one, she was awarded a Brackenridge Fellowship and honorary BPhil degree from the University of Pittsburgh towards the development of her screenplay, The Subvertebrates. Recently, she’s picked up the camera to direct documentaries. From 2010 to 2011 she was a finalist in Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day contest, won best director at the Sprocket Guild’s Film Festival, won a Creative Capital Flight School Fellowship, and received a Pittsburgh Filmmakers First Works Grant and Heinz Endowment. Now, at twenty-four, she is producing, directing, and editing a psychological feature-length documentary entitled Aspie Seeks Love. Sokolow’s work addresses consumerism and escapism in American society and explores the friction between the individual and societal norms. Learn more about Julie Sokolow at www.juliesokolow.com
Justin Isis
Raymond Radiguet, peanut butter, Shizuka Muto dresses, non-existent law firm, whatever.
Katherine Khorey
In 2011 Katherine Khorey, born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, finished her MA at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. The previous year she graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in English Literature and Russian Language. While an undergraduate she spent a year studying at Trinity College in Dublin, during which time she volunteered at the then newly opened writing centre, Fighting Words. Wherever she’s lived, however, Katherine has been a frequent participant in community projects and endeavours, particularly those involving theatre, music, and education.
Following the completion of her MA, Katherine was offered a resident fellowship at the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta, Michigan, where her work in both fiction and literary analysis will continue. She will also continue in her duties as a slush reader for Apex Magazine. Meanwhile, she has contributed to the line of short story chapbooks published by Pendragon Press, and provided the written content for Beyond the Image: The Icons of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, a book on the history and theology of Orthodox sacred art.
Currently, Katherine is completing and refining her first novel, an excerpt of which appears in the Centre for New Writing’s Manchester Anthology 2011. Like “Autumn Jewel”, the novel, set in a live Halloween attraction, explores the links between fictional horror and melodrama and “real life” tragedy and relationships.
Katherine can be contacted at [email protected].
Kristine Ong Muslim
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Night Fish (Shoe Music Press/Elevated Books, 2011). Forthcoming books include We Bury the Landscape, a full-length ekphrastic short fiction collection from Queen’s Ferry Press, the full-length poetry collection Grim Series (Popcorn Press), and the poetry print chapbook Insomnia (Medulla Publishing, 2012). She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web 2011, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Her short fiction and poetry have been accepted in hundreds of publications, including Contrary Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Hobart, Narrative Magazine, Sou’wester, Southword, and The Pedestal Magazine. Her publication history can be found at http://kristinemuslim.weebly.com
Megan Lee Beals
Megan Lee Beals lives in Tacoma, Washington; a beautiful and malleable city, which she often breaks into pieces to be used as setting for her stories. Including this one. A lover of fiction in all its forms, she works in a used bookstore, and feeds her habit with paraphernalia from the worlds of novels, comic books, movies and videogames. She writes to add her own ideas into the vast collective unconsciousness, and to help fill in any gaps she finds in our massive literary landscape. In winter, she snowboards with her husband-to-be and recuperates from snowboarding with her one-eyed cat. More information, and her online comic can be found at www.oyonoface.com.
Michael Cisco
Michael Cisco is the author of The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime Books, 2004), The Tyrant (Prime Books, 2004), The Great Lover (Chômu Press, 2011), a contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and Album Zutique (ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in Leviathan III and Leviathan IV (ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel, The Traitor, is published by Prime (2007). Secret Hours, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the Phantom (“Mr. Wosslynne”), Black Wings (“Violence, Child of Trust”), Lovecraft Unbound (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”), Cinnabar’s Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (“Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed”), and Last Drink Bird Head anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Cadaver Is You”), an appearance in The Weird (Atlantic/Corvus), an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press, The Wretch of the Sun, from Ex Occidente Press, and The Narrator, from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.
Nick Jackson
Somewhere in the corner of a Norfolk field, half-buried in a hedge, Nick Jackson pieces together stories from scraps of skin and bone, fragments of history and maybe the odd bit of coloured glass. He’s been doing this for about twenty years as well as teaching in adult education. Before that he spent time in Mexico, Belize and Manchester. His stories have been published in the independent press on both sides of the Atlantic. His first collection, Visits to the Flea Circus, was published by Elastic Press in 2005. A second collection of his stories, The Secret Life of the Panda, was published by Chômu press in December 2011.
Nina Allan
Nina Allan’s stories have appeared regularly in the magazines Black Static and Interzone, an
d have featured in the anthologies Catastrophia, Subtle Edens, Strange Tales from Tartarus, Best Horror of the Year #2 and Year’s Best SF #28. A first collection of her fiction, A Thread of Truth, was published by Eibonvale Press in 2007, followed by her story cycle The Silver Wind in 2011. Twice shortlisted for the BFS and BSFA Award, Nina’s next book, Stardust, will be available from PS Publishing in autumn 2012. An exile from London, she lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex.
Paul Jessup
Paul Jessup doesn’t exist.
Peter Gilbert
Peter Gilbert has had work appear in The Curious Record, Cynic On-Line, Axe Factory, Hobo Pancakes, Low Budget Science Fiction and other venues. ‘Body Poem’ was first written in 1994. No editors at the time took interest, but the author believed the story had value. The manuscript sat on an old large format disk, until it was rescued and copied in 2010 onto newer usable computer media. The manuscript was tweaked slightly to eliminate some cultural cobwebs, but remains largely as written in 1994.
Quentin S. Crisp
Quentin was born in 1972 in North Devon, England. He is the author of a number of volumes of short and long fiction, including Morbid Tales (Tartarus Press, 2004), Rule Dementia! (Rainfall Books, 2005), and “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” (Chômu Press, 2010).
‘Koda Kumi’ is the Justin Isis remix of his short tale ‘Italiannetto’, which first appeared in the collection All God’s Angels, Beware! (Ex Occidente Press, 2009). ‘Italiannetto’ is a tale of the part played by Annette Funicello in the childhood of the narrator.
Ralph Doege
Ralph Doege was born in 1971 in a small town in Germany. After studying librarianship, and writing a thesis on the life and work of Philip K. Dick, he began to write stories and essays for several magazines and anthologies. He was nominated for Kurd-Laßwitz-Prize and Deutsche Science Fiction Prize for his story “Schwarze Sonne” (Black Sun), and he is the editor of the anthology “Julio Cortázars Fantomas gegen die multinationalen Vampire und andere Erzählungen aus und über Lateinamerika” (Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas against multinational Vampires and other stories from Latin America). In 2010 he released his first story collection: Ende der Nacht (End of Night). Locus online wrote about his first story collection: “Most of Doege’s stories feature fantasy and/or SF elements, but the focus is always on psychological dilemmas. This in itself is pretty unusual for German science fiction and fantasy, and Doege takes it a step further by repeatedly confronting his characters with virtually unsolvable philosophical problems. (…) he is a truly unique and highly recommended voice in German speculative fiction.”
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 42