Flesh Wounds
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About the Book
A popular businessman awakes one morning to discover that everyone hates him. A young woman must surrender her virginity to a grotesque enemy in order to fulfil her family’s destiny. An extraordinary chain of events is set in motion when a cocktail cabinet falls out of the sky and kills a farmer. A depressed man decides to make his suicide the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him …
Oozing paranoia, black humour and a certain amount of old-fashioned gore, this is a collection of classic Christopher Fowler short stories – each telling a chilling tale of desperate individuals who learn the hard way that … flesh wounds.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Joanne Harris
Introduction by Christopher Fowler
Introduction: ‘You’ve Got To Love Something Enough To Kill It’
The Laundry Imp
Hated
Night After Night Of The Living Dead
Tales Of Britannica Castle: I. Ginansia’s Ravishment
Perfect Casting
Tales Of Britannica Castle: II. Leperdandy’s Revenge
The Most Boring Woman In The World
The Unreliable History Of Plaster City
The Young Executives
Jouissance de la mort
Evil Eye
Brian Foot’s Blaze Of Glory
Mother Of The City
A Century And A Second
Read on for an extract from Spanky
About the Author
Also by Christopher Fowler
Copyright
Flesh Wounds
Christopher Fowler
Dedication
For my brother Steven
Introduction by Joanne Harris
I was first introduced to Christopher Fowler’s books over twenty-five years ago, via the horror section of my local library. Roofworld was my first: a tale of secret communities on the rooftops of London, invisible from the ground, their inhabitants moving from building to building on a series of zip lines. To a country-dweller such as I, it was so intensely visual that even now, whenever I’m in London, I find myself looking at rooftops more often than at the city streets.
After that I looked for more novels by the same author. I soon realized that his work was not easy to categorize. Few of his books sit comfortably in the horror section. Red Bride is a classic femme fatale tale, Spanky a hip retelling of Faust. Psychoville is a suburban Natural Born Killers; Soho Black is at the same time a zombie fable and a barbed satire on the film industry. Plastic is a version of Bridget Jones’s Diary reimagined by Quentin Tarantino; Calabash is both an extended metaphor of adolescent alienation and a portal to Narnia, with subterranean echoes of Gormenghast.
Fowler’s masterly short fiction reflects an even broader spectrum of influences. Film and literary references abound, as do references to popular culture, comics and the media. As we see in his memoir, Paperboy, much of his work reveals an enduring love of literature and the cinema, as well as a keen sense of humour, an eye for period detail and a boundless enthusiasm for anecdotes, eclectic facts, strange occurrences, unsolved mysteries, bizarre customs, macabre crimes, and tales of the unexpected.
London looms large in the landscape, of course: a London of many faces, reflecting the many faces of the human psyche. Victorian London rubs shoulders with the nightclubs and cafés of Soho; the homeless and the marginalized watch passers-by from the alleyways. Wealth and misery, pleasure and fear, horror and farce co-exist in close proximity to each other, divided by the finest of membranes. In Fowler’s London, the worlds of film noir and Ealing comedy are never very far apart, and even in the most ordinary of settings – a launderette, a shopping mall, a neat little suburban house – everyday horrors are lurking, awaiting their chance to slip out from the shadows.
In Fowler’s world, reality and fantasy are always dangerously close. Executives make secret pacts with demons, lonely adolescents plot to blow up their neighbourhoods, and prim suburban housewives are subject to creeping neurological meltdowns that culminate in orgies of violence among the cupcakes and tea-towels. In Fowler’s world, the illusion of sanity is a pair of net curtains that conceals an ominous reality. No one is ever completely safe; no one is entirely stable. Everyday things can suddenly take a turn for the sinister, and all it takes is a tiny twist – a chance meeting, a thoughtless mistake – for a life to be thrown out of balance and for the darkness to emerge.
All this is combined with an unfailing eye for detail, a dry and satirical sense of humour, an insight into human nature that seems close to uncanny, and is delivered with a style and panache that sometimes seem almost effortless – but don’t be fooled. It takes real skill to sound this good, and the lightness of the author’s touch conceals an underlying narrative of alienation, of urban unrest, of social satire, of psychological unease, and of the darkness that hides in plain sight, along the façades of the mundane.
Perhaps this deceptive lightness of touch is why the author, in spite of having won countless genre awards, has never received the mainstream literary acclaim he so deserves. Perhaps it is the mercurial quality of his writing that has kept him from settling comfortably into a niche. Perhaps it is the sheer scope and variety of his output that continue to defy categorization. Now more internationally known for his Bryant & May detective series – the seemingly nostalgic exploits of a pair of elderly sleuths, filled with disquieting details and dark, subversive humour – he continues to alarm and entertain his readers, while also creating some of the most accomplished and intricate set-pieces in the whole of the mystery genre.
I’m delighted to see that the author’s earlier novels (and indeed his entire short-story oeuvre) are now being made available in ebook. They are still as fresh and topical as they were when they first appeared – and it’s interesting to note that, though originally written as speculative fiction, many of them now seem uncomfortably prescient in the light of current events. If you are already familiar with the work of Christopher Fowler, then you’re probably already celebrating this re-release of his backlist. If not, I almost envy you: you have something wonderful in store. But be warned, once you have entered Fowler’s world, you may never look at your own in quite the same way again …
Joanne Harris, December 2015
Introduction by Christopher Fowler
In my fifth collection of short stories I tackled fourteen new tales in a world where a man could wake up to find that everyone hated him, a farmer could be killed by a falling cocktail cabinet, and suicide could be the most exciting thing that ever happened to you …
This was my widest-ranging collection to date, and several of the tales were turned into short films. ‘The Most Boring Woman in the World’ was filmed three times by different directors with differing sensibilities. In this and the previous collection I’d commissioned artworks to accompany each story, but now I think the tales stand better without any preconceived notions of how they should look. The illustrators included the legendary Graham Humphries and Batman artist John Bolton.
By this time I’d started including short pieces about the stories before each tale. I’ve always enjoyed hearing how other writers come up with their ideas, and this gave me a chance to explain some of the origins.
Quite a few of the tales use black comedy to get their points across. By this time I had learned how to control my effects, and rather like a picky eater making sure his beans didn’t touch his fried eggs, I was careful to keep humour and horror separate. The book also included the two baroque Gormenghast-like ‘Tales of Britannica Castle’ stories that will eventually form part of a much larger fantasy novel I’m writing, entitled The
Foot on the Throne.
With this book I started earning critical comparisons with Stephen King, something that gave me immense pleasure. While I enjoyed The Shining and Salem’s Lot, I always preferred King’s short stories. That’s not to say that I don’t have massive respect and admiration for him. I do, and ‘The Unreliable History of Plaster City’ was my attempt to do what he does so smoothly and seamlessly. The result is nowhere near as good as his version would have been.
This is the last of the books that fall into my ‘Early Collection’ category. They were to be followed by four more short-story collections, now known as the Devil Quartet.
Christopher Fowler, 2016
‘You’ve Got To Love Something Enough To Kill It’
Martin Scorsese said that, and he should know. Here’s an old joke: An elderly couple visit their lawyer.
‘What can I do for you?’ asks the lawyer.
‘We want a divorce,’ says the eighty-year-old wife, indicating her decrepit husband. ‘We’ve been married for fifty years and we hate each other’s guts.’
‘Forgive me for asking,’ enquires the incredulous lawyer, ‘but why did you leave this so late?’
‘Well,’ says the wife, ‘we wanted to wait until the children were dead.’
The joke has some relevance; trust me.
This collection of short stories uses the horror/fantasy genre to look at the ways in which we hurt ourselves and each other. We know it’s flesh that wounds, not guns and knives. They merely provide the how. We provide the why. People not only do spectacularly cruel things to each other, their victims willingly allow it to happen. Couples in awful, disastrous marriages stay together for years for all the wrong reasons. Some people end up in entirely unsuitable jobs and never figure out why they’re miserable. Others destroy their children without even realising what they’ve done.
What is it with us?
Why should a perfectly normal person with a single character flaw fall in love with the one partner most likely to exploit it? Which perverse muse is responsible for drawing together victim and bully, virgin and philanderer?
Well, sometimes we choose to punish ourselves and sometimes life handles the assignment for us, the difference being that life’s casual cruelties have a terrible random anonymity – the illnesses, the accidents, the acts of violence, all unforeseen. Whereas living together is sometimes like watching a car crash in slow motion; you know something’s going wrong but there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
Our curse, of course, is to be convinced of our rightness in the face of all reason. Who needs ghosts and demons? We’re the enemy and we know it, and the knowledge still doesn’t stop us.
This kind of doublethink extends beyond the family into the public arena. We know when a government is corrupt, when an advertiser is selling rubbish, when someone is lying for gain – and we go along with it, although we do make satirical jibes on late-night comedy shows.
If this ability to destroy each other unwittingly is counted as a yardstick of the new horror, we suddenly find ourselves with a new set of heroes; chroniclers of modern fears would have to include Franz Kafka (bureaucracy, authority), Martin Amis (greed, venality), Aldous Huxley (authoritarianism), Joe Orton (sexual terror), Evelyn Waugh (moral turpitude), H H Monroe (human cruelty), Alan Ayckbourn (disintegration of family), John Collier (retreat from reality), Jonathan Carroll (the end of dreams), Joyce Carol Oates (love’s betrayals) and hundreds of other authors not especially linked to the genre, all of whom have spent time cataloguing the cruel ironies of modern life.
This is an age filled with paradox, a time when the great outdoors is less frightening than the inner city. A time when we use jeeps and mountain boots to get through the urban jungle. A time when even pocket faxes, call-switching, mobile phones and Internet news groups can’t help us to communicate with each other on anything other than a superficial level.
Conceptual artist Heath Bunting has a habit of picking through skips in the City of London and noticed people throwing equipment away not because it was broken but because it was no longer wanted. He’d often find a whole computer in a skip – minus its plug. People cut the plugs off because they know how to reuse them. Technology has run ahead of humanity.
There’s a saying that America went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilisation. Well, we can’t afford to be too superior, because it looks like our time to be civilised is well and truly over. Wholesale genocide goes unheeded and unpunished while a televised court case about a celebrity murder tops the ratings. Pop culture is supposed to exist alongside real culture, not replace it.
You think this isn’t the decline and fall? Check out the regression in the streets, the territorial markings, the speed tribes and grungies, the eyebrow rings and stomach staples, the restlessness, the aimlessness, the sheer lack of interest in anything real. If it’s true that the bench mark of a nation’s civilisation is the respect it accords its elders, we’re in deep trouble.
I know this seems pessimistic, so I must rely on you, gentle reader, to provide some fresh-faced optimism that will redress the balance. Meanwhile, accept these tales of people facing unusual dilemmas. Some of the characters inhabit present-day cities. Others exist in the landscapes of my imagination. All, no matter how bizarre the stories they relate, have reasons to be fearful in this, the closing chapter of the planet’s most incredible century.
Christopher Fowler
Soho, summer 1995
The Laundry Imp
* * *
I’ve always been a sucker for urban legends, but most of them seem to be variations on perhaps no more than half a dozen themes. In an effort to tread a less-worn path, I set myself the task of creating a new legend that didn’t rely on the involvement of hitchhikers or murderous babysitters. I hadn’t intended to evolve a connection between monsters and personal hygiene …
‘THAT WASN’T THE way I heard it,’ said Charlene, folding her arms across her heavy chest. ‘Whoever told you that was lying.’ Her wonderbra sailed past the window twice, then vanished from sight.
‘You know how these stories get exaggerated.’ Lauren readjusted the crotch of her jeans and stared back at her rotating knickers, hypnotised. ‘I mean, it’s obviously not true or anything. It couldn’t be. Someone would have heard the screams, or seen the blood leaking out.’
‘Well, it was late at night. There wasn’t anyone around to save her.’
The two girls sat back on their grey plastic bendichairs and watched as the huge grey steel washing machines thudded and hummed and shook.
A freezing wind moaned fitfully under the glass entrance door, to be dissipated in the tropical steam heat of the laundromat.
‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Charlene complained. ‘The lights are too bright and the air smells funny.’
‘That’s from the soap. My sister Beverly got a panty rash from the powder they put in the dispensers. She accused her boyfriend of sleeping around, and by the time she’d found out the real cause of the problem he’d admitted he was seeing someone else, so …’ She allowed the thought to vaporise and replaced it. ‘So she died, then, this girl?’
‘I’m not sure whether she did or not. But if she did, it wasn’t in the way you’d think. I didn’t know her personally, but then you never do, do you? It’s always a friend of a friend. Hard to ever know what’s really true.’
This much is true.
It was a bitter, desolate winter night. Vernie wouldn’t have bothered venturing out to the laundromat, but earlier that day she had spilled a strawberry milk shake down the front of her dress and the stain had stayed even after she had hand washed it. Gary always left his dirty washing in a white plastic bag beneath the sink, so she added the dress to it and set off, knowing that he would never get around to taking his turn with the laundry.
The Albion Laundrette was set in a parade of semi-derelict shops in a high street that nobody used any more. Respectable townsfolk headed for the vast shopping
mall at the edge of town, a spotless climate-controlled dome filled with clowns and children and the scent of hot bread. There they could buy Belgian chocolates and novelty greetings cards. Here there was just a sauna, a restaurant of vaguely Arabic origin, a minicab company, a takeaway kebab counter, a porno book store, a closed-down electrical repair shop and a smeary-windowed room filled with fat Greek men playing cards.
On this night, the laundrette was the only illuminated store front in the parade. It stood behind a blizzard of litter, a large rectangular room lit by buzzing fluorescent strip lights. It contained twelve large washing machines, two heavy loaders and six tumble dryers. There were black and white rubberised tiles on the floor, twelve grey plastic chairs, two powder dispensers and a folding bench on which sat a pile of soft, dog-eared women’s magazines. A cubbyhole at the rear was reserved for the manageress, who came by at nine in the morning, noon and eleven o’clock at night to lock up.
Vernie pulled the fake-fur collar of the cheap coat around her throat and set the plastic bag at her feet. At first she thought the place was closed, but the door was just stuck. Inside, the sticky warm air smelled of exaggerated cleanliness. The room was empty, but one of the huge front-loading tumble dryers was on. Presumably someone would be returning soon for their laundry. It wasn’t a good idea to leave your clothes unattended in this neighbourhood; they were likely to disappear.
Vernie selected a machine and dumped her bag on the top. This was the most depressing place she could imagine spending the evening in. Especially when she knew that her friends were having fun somewhere else. But she couldn’t go with them to the club tonight because she had no money, and because Darryl was going to be there with his new girlfriend, the one he’d been seeing while he was going out with her. Instead she was left in the flat with Gary and his boyfriend, feeling like a gooseberry while they sat on the sofa feeding each other scoops of chocolate-chocolate chip Häagen-Dazs.