You’re bound to have questions. What exactly transpired in the tragic triangle? Who was really in control and who were the victims? Was anyone innocent? How did they die and what happened to the bodies? How did they come to rest within the Soothsayer? If they return to our world, what will they do?
Those answers (and more) are in there, fused at every level to songs of equal complexity and gravity. And the closer you listen, the further you voyage into The Bedlam in Goliath, the more disquieting and compelling the Volta’s brilliant audiocelluloid epic becomes.
This album is the sound of a band playing—magnificently—for its life. And it is a recording of such strange power that I believe the Goliath that haunts them will be forever struck down.
Word.
—Jeremy Robert Johnson, October 27th, 2007, Portland, Oregon
The Zayin Division—A Second Stage Burial
I. I am the simian martyr’s bullet-borne deliverance.
II. Ideomotor effect. Forced cryptomnesia. Your shroud returns stale whispers. Ropes tighten at each limb.
III. He half-woke to a wild leopard, to blood-pregnant air, the smell of his courted collapse. Laurel twigs crossed her hidden tools.
IV. The holy glyph floats close, its gray light angles suffuse the bones now dust, flesh now jelly. Every cell shakes loose its viral code. Supernus pacta sunt servanda.
V. Its hands swept through in the crooked mandible, the chemical lobotomy swung blind, the monoxide possessions. All of it annelid territory.
VI. Sandover light shone symbiotic until you saw it swallow-shift. Your retractions granted final grace.
VII. I will not follow your collapsing oblivion.
—JRJ, October 28th, 2007, Portland, Oregon (First print copy interment)
The Oarsman— Written for the Fractal 10 conference, based on their event theme: Reinventing the world. The result is a bit grim, I admit, but the organizers knew my work and were pragmatists about the result. Step on a rattlesnake, he bites you. Ask me for a story based on themes of ingenuity, creation, hope and rebirth, and I give you Buddhist empathy bombs and stranded sociopaths. (Thanks are due to event artist Oscar Montoya, who allowed his wonderful art for the story to appear with the story’s US publication in Dark Discoveries.)
When Susurrus Stirs— There might be a list on the wall beyond my laptop, and that list might include the names of several parasites I find endlessly revolting/fascinating. So if I do, on occasion, produce a story about a mutant variation on the parasitic wasp/bot fly/candiru/guinea worm/liver fluke/etc., please permit me my obsession and attempted exorcisms. And for anyone who thinks I’m going for the “gross-out” here, spend about five minutes looking up the above creatures on YouTube and you’ll see I’ve been rather gentle in relating their methods.
Persistence Hunting— Just prior to the release of Angel Dust Apocalypse I had shifted to a mostly nocturnal writer’s schedule, and I was also training for my first go at the Portland Marathon. Chugging down the road in a black stocking cap and baggy gear at 3:00 AM in the morning, and the cops never gave me a second glance. The bum camp that popped up beneath the underpass at 17th and Powell gave me plenty of grief for running through their temporary bedrooms, but I think I would have had to bring along a chainsaw to catch a cop’s interest.
The Witness at Dawn— The first of the four fixed form stories that made up my contribution to the symmetrina “Faded Into Impalpability.” I’ve always found it intriguing how people are more accepting of vigilante justice if it stems from a paranormal source. Charles Bronson shoots a murderer, and you’ve got yourself a moral gray area. Ghost kills the same murderer; the world is back in balance. Ghosts are so obsessed with accountability. And ominous plate throwing.
Consumerism— Yes, this is the same Ron from “Priapism” in ADA, and I originally intended to write a trilogy of his father’s one-sided “dialogues,” ultimately allowing Ron some kind of revenge. But then this idea landed and it wouldn’t go away, and I don’t know if the ending constitutes “revenge” or is just one more fundamental life changing abuse that further ruins Ron’s life.
Trigger Variation— Every rat finds a button to press. Even self-flagellating ascetic monks are trying to flip a switch. Some rats are just more self-righteous about their particular button.
The Gravity of Benham Falls— The original version of this story included a very pornographic scene beneath the waterfall, with all kinds of intimately described oral and breath control play, and I read that version to a number of elderly folks at a Boy Scout camp site. By candle light. And despite the number of times I have wished otherwise, this story remains true. (Scene altered for pace/gratuitousness and in an effort to erase the memory.)
Cathedral Mother— Did I mention the list on my wall? Two Richards are owed for this tale. The first debt is to Richard Selzer, whose essay “The Exact Location of the Soul” sparked in me an early fascination with infestation and parasitism (human and otherwise). The second debt is to Richard Preston, whose wonderful non-fiction book The Wild Trees chronicles the alien environment of the giant redwoods and the brave explorers who venture there.
The Brilliant Idea— The second of the “Faded…” stories. All of it—the tense, the precise word count, even the content of the allusions—dictated by the laws of the symmetrina. I recommend this form to every writer I know. The restrictions and obstacles in place create challenges which leave you with new tools, and the form can drive you to create a story outside of your normal mode. I don’t normally play with “fun” or “quirky” but I think I skirted both for this flash.
Simple Equations— Written for an anthology of horror stories set during WWII. I was initially hesitant to participate because of the sheer pre-existing quantity of stories set in that environment, and the danger of writing Wolfenstein-style stock Nazis. But after watching Trinity and Beyond I researched the way scientific communities in Germany, Japan, and the States all acquiesced to the military (out of fear, for funding, or due to a “pure” desire for knowledge outside of moral bounds). Those scientists who are still alive almost uniformly state that their efforts were about saving lives and making future wars so destructive they’d become untenable for the human race. But as McNamara pointed out in The Fog of War, when addressing the Cuban Missile Crisis, rationality won’t save us.
Cortical Reorganization— The third of the “Faded…” stories. Portland has its share of corner “spangers” and I have a history of coughing up for those who have dogs with them or are missing limbs. I once spotted a “spanger” in Eugene who I thought was exploiting people by wearing a baby doll in a harness on her chest. It looked very real and she pretended to rock it and concealed the plastic face from you as the traffic light turned green. I was pissed every time I saw her, until I had a conversation with a mental health professional who told me that they frequently provided such dolls to folks with mental illnesses, as it gave them a companion and someone to care for. So this lady was either a con artist (she raked it in) or a very sick woman whose only friend had a tiny plastic head and plush body. Due to the ambiguity I had to remove her from my Things to Pointlessly Seethe About list. (On the flipside I once tried to give a spanger a Taco Bell Ten Pack and he replied, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Which says something about Taco Bell Ten Packs. He acted like I’d tried to pass him a box of diarrhea, and I guess that if you follow the process all the way down the line, he was kind of correct.)
A Flood of Harriers— When I was younger and my family would travel up the I5 corridor, I would beg for a visit to a corner bookstore in Eugene that carried Cemetery Dance and Fangoria, both of which had proven more difficult to cop in Bend. So when this story appeared in Cemetery Dance so many years later, it meant a great deal to me. I was very surprised when the story sparked controversy and debate with some readers radically misinterpreting the piece as racist anti-Native American propaganda. When someone earnestly (if absurdly) equates you with Goebbels, it’s a bad time. I wondered if
they’d even read through to the end, which seems to embrace the idea of genocidal blowback (a sort of Re-Manifested Destiny) as a terrible return to karmic balance. The fact that the opening scene is a barely fictionalized version of an actual conflict my then girlfriend and I had at a rest stop in Warm Springs made the issue even more complicated. However, the editor at CD stood behind the story’s publication, and in the end I was introduced to a large and appreciative horror readership and given some great advice by Nick Mamatas: Not everyone is going to “get it.” Always be true to your vision for the story and write with your ideal reader in mind. (Thanks are due to all the folks who helped me through the exciting/wildly stressful time after this story’s release.)
The Encore— The last of the “Faded…” stories. Probably the most “quiet” story I’ve written in some time. Which is weird since it was inspired by my repair of a busted vacuum, an event which was far from quiet and almost cost me a finger. Before you rush in to mend a smoking piece of machinery, no matter how bedraggled and rushed you are, UNPLUG IT. That’s sound advice.
Laws of Virulence— That parasite list on my wall sits right next to some inspirational quotes from Mailer and Ellroy (I know—Muy Macho). I’d always wanted to attempt a story told through transcript, as Ellroy did with a lot of the transitional and buffering “documents” in American Tabloid. I was originally going to mirror an actual CDC outbreak report, but they leave little room for the human aspects of the story. Plus, the formatting, with all of those little boxes, was a bitch.
States of Glass— I now have difficulty, having done the research on under rides and having seen some awful photos, driving even fifty yards behind a semi truck trailer. Most have protective bars extending below the bed of the trailer, per regulations, but I’m not sure those things would hold up at decapitation velocity.
Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the cult hit ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, the Stoker Nominated novel SIREN PROMISED (w/Alan M. Clark), and the end-of-the-world freak-out EXTINCTION JOURNALS. His fiction has been acclaimed by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2007 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy Winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010 he spoke about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in Medellin, Colombia (where fellow speakers included DJ Spooky, an MIT bio-engineer, and a doctor who explained the neurological aspirations of a sponge). He is working on a number of new books. You’ll just have to trust him on this.
www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com
www.swallowdownpress.com
Alex Pardee (born February 5, 1976) is a freelance artist, apparel designer, and writer born in Antioch, California, USA. In addition to having his fine art exhibited in galleries all over the globe, Alex has acted as art director for numerous musical, animated, and film projects. Most notably, for the bands THE USED, IN FLAMES, and hip hop artist CAGE, and for the TV/film projects CHADAM & Zack Snyder’s SUCKER PUNCH, for which he created art for the film as well as for the marketing campaign. In 2007, Alex also co-founded a successful art and apparel company called ZEROFRIENDS, which acts as a marketable extension of his artwork and storytelling.
www.zerofriends.com
www.eyesuckink.com
Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. A potent mix of bad drugs, bad dreams, brutal bad guys, and surreal/incredible art by Alan M. Clark.
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An uncanny voyage across a newly nuclear America where one man must confront the problems associated with loneliness, insane dieties, radiation, love, and an ever-evolving cockroach suit with a mind of its own.
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The hip hop lovechild of William Burroughs and Dali...
“Cronenberg’s THE FLY on a grand scale: human/insect gene-spliced body horror, where the human hive politics are as shocking as the gore.” -John Skipp
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