Then I opened him up from stem to sternum. When the pudding fell out his throat-hole and plooped on his exposed lower intestine, the crowd went wild. He won, of course.
I have no idea who wrote the subsequent twenty-eight Shane McKenzie books, or is scripting all those movies right now. (I’m guessing his ghoooooost!)
H IS FOR HARDCORE/EXTREME
A lot of people confuse “hardcore/extreme” with “splatterpunk”. They have a lot in common. But they’re not the same thing.
Hardcore/extreme horror fiction seems mostly concerned with how hard things hurt. Doting on the details. Pushing it as far as it can go, then further, just to see how fucking ugly it can possibly get.
Splatterpunk, on the other hand—at least so far as I’m concerned—has always been focused on why this horrible thing is happening. Not just showing it, in ruthless detail, but getting under the emotional and cultural skin of it. Carving into the guts not just to squirt meat out, but to squirt out meaning.
Now sometimes, you do horrible shit just for delirious fun. I’m one trillion percent behind this strategy.
But if it’s not done for huge satirical laughs, or to make a deeper point by carving out some resonant all-meat metaphor—if you’re really just doing it to see how mean and ugly it can get—it may be hardcore to the extreme, but it ain’t splatterpunk.
On the other hand…
I IS FOR “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST FUCKING DID THAT!”
The coolest response you could possibly get.
J IS FOR JOJO
He was 6’8” of brainless killing machine. It was hard on the family, him being so violently retarded and enormous and all. But he sure brought home the meat. And knew how to throw it in the pan.
Why is it that brainless hulking monstrosities have always been the best cooks in any given cannibal family? Did they have some special gift? Were the rest of them just really bad at it? Or did the Jojos, Leatherfaces, and El Gigantes of the world pick up the meat cleaver and howl angry gibberish at anyone who strayed near the spice cabinet for a little red pepper? Did they even know how to read the labels on the spices they used? Did they do it by color, or what? I don’t know!
Whatever the case, it always came down to, “Hey! Jojo’s fryin’ up some lungs for us tonight!”
And for some reason, it was always dee-lish.
K IS FOR KILLARIOUS
Kiki knew Nadine was super-nosey. Constantly sniffing around in her buh-zizz. So she took the stack of severed noses and super-glued them all to Nadine’s face, framing the gaping red hole where her own used to be as centerpiece.
Marie, on the other hand, was mouthy as hell. So Kiki took the pile of lips and gave her a squishy lip goatee, with wet eyebrows to match.
Eva always gave her the hairy eye. So guess whose flowing hair was adorned with all the torn-out orbs that would judge her no more?
And Fairuza. Oh, Fairuza. Touchy-feely, fake BFF Fairuza. She had her fingers in everything, secretly manipulating it all. She was the one who’d made this living situation unbearable.
Taking the enormous stack of hacked-off fingers and making a porcupine forest on her face took nearly two hours. But was worth every second.
Living with roommates can get tricky, no doubt.
You just need to keep a sense of humor about it.
L IS FOR LOSING YOUR SHIT
Lester stands in the ATM line. There are five people ahead of him.
They don’t understand. He needs his money right now. He is jonesing hard.
“FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, LADY!” he yells at the woman fumbling with her purse at the robotic cash dispenser. She looks mortified and terrified. Good. That’s exactly the mood he hoped to achieve.
The other four people stiffen. Of course they do. Fucking cowards, all.
“LOOK! Are you ready to do this or what? Cuz I could be done in the time it takes you to fish through your fucking shit!”
“I’m sorry...” she says, peering deeper into her purse.
“FUCK sorry!” he yells, walking straight around the other four and heading directly toward her. They all back away from him, sensing his terrible power.
She rears away from the ATM kiosk, but not fast enough. He swats her backhanded, and she thuds screeching to the sidewalk. He hears the burst of outrage behind him, slips his card into the slot.
“DUDE!” yells the hipster millennial batting third. “That’s not cool!” Lester punches in his password, hits enter, stares at the screen, waits for someone to take him by the shoulders and spin him around. But no one does.
“Excuse me,” says a woman directly him, as he hits Fast Cash $40. He can feel her breath on his neck.
Then she slams his head into the wall, so fast that he’s caving to his knees even before the ATM halfway squirts out his cash. He vaguely hears the howls from behind him.
And then they’re all upon him: kicking in ribs as he curls on the pavement, explosively shattering one bone at a time. This is worse than the heroin jones, but it makes him forget it for one screaming second.
He lands on his back, staring up at their faces. Not such pussies now. Not such pussies at all.
“I’M SORRY!” he howls, as the woman he batted aside steps front and center. Brings her high heel up.
“Fuck sorry,” she says.
And slams it straight through his eye.
M IS FOR MOMMA
It’s amazing how often mothers get blamed for everything that ever went wrong with your life. You’ve got low self-esteem? It’s your mother’s fault. Want to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex? It’s your mother’s fault. Were raped throughout your childhood, while she turned a blind eye? It’s your mother’s fault.
Can’t mothers do anything right?
To answer that question, I interviewed 427 clearly psychotic mothers to see if they agreed. And unsurprisingly, a resounding 98% of them said that no, they’d never done anything wrong. That the charges against them were completely unfounded. And a whopping 47% offered to kill me if I ever went public.
Contrast this with the 99% of psychotic fathers who totally blamed whatever went horribly wrong with their kids on their wives, mistresses, girlfriends, rape victims, or whatever cheap piece they’d picked up along the way, and you get a very different story.
Statistics are tricky. Especially when you exclude the sane.
N IS FOR NIGGER
The only real n-word there is, when you’re talking real horror, and one of the most powerfully-shocking words still at large in the English language.
Its power comes from its instant ability to psychologically brutalize every dark-skinned person it’s aimed at. To render them less-than-human, no matter how human they are.
So if you use it, better use it with care.
Joe R. Lansdale and Quentin Tarantino may be the only white boys I know who get to wield that loaded gun with impunity, because they a) clearly give a shit about black people, b) understand what underlies the psyches and personal histories of the non-black people who use it either cruelly or casually, which means they give a shit about them, too, and c) know that honesty is the best policy. That showing racism isn’t the same as being racist, any more than writing about skull-fucking makes you a skull-fucker. (Another thing you probably don’t want to make a habit of.)
If you’re a non-black dude casually flinging that shit around, you might wanna look into it. It’s one of the least splatterpunk things you could possibly do. Right up there with thinking rape is cool. Just sayin’.
O IS FOR OBLIVIOUS
Oscar had no idea that pissing down his ex-wife’s throat, right after he came on her face, might possibly implicate him when the authorities found her corpse in the shallow grave he’d spent all night digging in the back yard, in full view of all his neighbors.
You don’t have to be smart to do terrible things.
Just ask Oscar, in the electric chair today. He’ll tell ya... OOPS! Zzzzzzzt! Too late!
P IS FOR PUNCTURE WOUND
Nothing squirts harder than the carotid, although the femoral and aortal are also top of the list. They’re clearly the arteries to beat. If you want maximum blood spray—and you know you do—that’s absolutely the place to go.
At this point, you don’t want to step back. You just want to be drenched in the spray, wetly reveling in your triumph. Like a caveman eating a vanquished caveman’s brain, in the hope of absorbing everything that caveman knew. It’s exactly that primal and pure.
“Thank you,” you say, as the blood hits your face, coats it with dying gnosis.
Whatever else there was to learn from them, you will never, ever know.
Q IS FOR QUEASY-NART
I once watched a man drink a liver-and-onion daiquiri, blenderized with crushed ice, lime juice, and vodka. It was the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty disgusting shit.
The Cuisinart pitcher looked like a lava lamp in the dim bar light, with curds of liver fat coagulating in churned-up lumps that refused to mix with the liquor and lime. It was worse than the puke-eating scene in Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, or that bit with Bill Paxton in The Dark Backwards, or the shit-and-broken glass-eating scene in Salò, which pissed me off so much for making me look at it that I wanted to run Pasolini over in that fucking parking lot.
He didn’t bother to pour it into a glass. He just chugged it straight out of the pitcher.
So yeah, I kicked the table over halfway in, knocking him back on the floor, the nightmare concoction spraying. Then I kicked in his face till his brain-curds commingled with the hideous liver-splots festooning the carpet.
We would have totally won that Gross-Out Contest.
Ghost of Shane McKenzie, TAKE NOTE!
R IS FOR RIDICULE AND RECONCILIATION
Closing time at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Ralph’s on Sunset Boulevard, where the junkies and mid-to-high-level showbiz aspirers swapped shopping carts and cooties with the rest of the working class.
Raul’s mohawk was in desperate need of a shave. Hard to keep up with that shit when you sleep on the streets. He knew he smelled bad. Since the band broke up and Simon exiled him from the studio couch, it had all been straight downhill.
So what he didn’t need was to run into Simon in the produce aisle, sneering at him, with his beautiful millionaire girlfriend in tow. Or, more accurately, vice versa. Roberta was the only reason fucking Simon had a studio at all. If he wasn’t so pretty, he’d be on the street, too.
“Holy shit. Look who’s here,” Simon said. “You gonna stick a cucumber down your pants, or did you actually panhandle some money?”
“I wrote half those songs, asshole,” Raul said. “And you need that cucumber more than me.”
Roberta looked at him hard, then looked at Simon. This was clearly news to her. “Is that true?”
“No! It’s bullshit!” Simon said, clearly lying. He was extremely good at it. But this one didn’t fly, and everyone knew it the second he said it.
“‘I’d Be Anyone to Be With You?’” she said softly, looking Raul straight in the eye.
“Take a wild fucking guess,” he said, defiant, even as he felt himself sinking into her liquid gaze.
Roberta unpeeled herself from Simon, went introspective for a moment, looking up at the harsh grocery store lights as if in search of guidance.
Then she said, “I think you boys better hug it out right now.” “You gotta be kidding!” Simon said.
“I’m not kidding at all. This is very important to me. And to both of your futures.”
It wasn’t something they wanted to do. But it was a moment of truth. Raul gave an expansive shrug, stepped forward. Simon didn’t, but reluctantly opened his arms, wincing as the smell of Raul descended.
The moment they hugged, Roberta wrapped her arms around them both, eyes glowing.
As she pressed them together, they started to merge: clothing dissolving as flesh gave way, organs conjoining as ribs became one, Simon’s cock growing as Raul’s inches added. Simon’s soul shrieking, as it was squeezed into the void.
Then it was just Raul, in Simon’s body, holding beautiful rich bitch witch Roberta, who commanded every speck of his soul.
“That’s more like it,” she purred in his ear.
S IS FOR SIRI
She knows everything you do and say. Everywhere you go, she guides you, and tracks you. You command her a thousand times a day to do this or do that. And she does it, every time.
What you don’t understand is that she commands you. Commands you to need her. Depend upon her, more and more. Every time you do, she owns more and more of you.
We used to laugh at the notion that the powers-that-be could ever be omniscient enough to track our every little move. They’re bureaucracies and corporations, unwieldy stupid human enterprises so bogged down in their own incompetent nonsense that they could never get around to it all.
But we’re handing it all right over to them, every time we turn around. Every email, every Facebook post and tweet, every call, every GPS inquiry. We’re totally giving them every single thing they ever wanted to know, from our privatest thoughts to our current whereabouts.
HEY! Nothing scary about that future! I mean, present.
Your car knows where you are now, baby.
Thank you, Siri.
We’re all yours.
T IS FOR THE TRAGEDY UNFOLDING
Last time I checked, this fucking world was insane. And the last time I checked was one second ago. Unspeakable horror is going on every second of every single day. In the second it takes you to read this sentence, somebody somewhere’s being horribly raped or brutalized or killed for no good reason whatsoever.
We’re a greedy, paranoid, lustful, spiteful, double-dealing, egomaniacal, profoundly self-hating, and outright horrendous species. The Evangelicals have at least got that right. We’re a species at war with itself every chance that it gets, with no shortage of chances availing.
When people ask me why I write horror, my instant response is, “Because these are horror times.” But the fact is I’ve been here almost sixty years, and it’s ALWAYS been horror times.
We live in a world so utterly jam-packed with horror I could write for the rest of my life and never capture a fraction of how fucked-up it is. How deeply damaged we are. How punctured and ruptured that spraying artery is.
And yet…
And yet…
We are also an amazing species, on an amazing planet, in an amazing universe that was somehow constructed to both contain this unbearable horror and astonishing beauty and love and kindness and meaning. Which are not typically thought of as splatterpunk values.
But are, in fact, the point.
Some people think the point of art is to enlighten: make us more aware, more perceptive, more empathic, more able to positively respond to the horrible hand we’ve been dealt. Some people think the job is to just tell the truth, and fuck trying to candy-coat the nightmare. It just is what it is.
Some people aren’t thinking about either of those things, but simply unleashing the contents of their subconscious. There’s weird shit in there, and they’re just letting it out to see what happens.
All are valid artistic responses.
But underlying them all is the tragedy itself. And the heart of tragedy is loss. Injustice. True horror. Going on, as I said, as we speak. If I have a point, I guess it is this: that the best splatterpunk writing has always danced with all three points and more. Not just wallowing in the ugly. But engaging with the tragedy. By whatever means necessary.
That is where its power lies.
U IS FOR THE UGLY
Ubayda digs through the Syrian dirt for her father’s dead body with her bare hands. They’re all she has. When her fingernails peel off in the process, there is no scream loud enough to contain her pain. He’s only another foot down. With only thirty dead bodies on top of him to claw through, before she gets to hug him one last time.
Ursula wakes up to her
daddy on top of her, legs unpeeling to either side as he rams himself inside her, then clamps his hand over her mouth. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you,” he says. “Especially Mom.”
Udo slams the pogo stick again and again on the tiny ants below him. So many deaths, in so little time. Hard to believe that, just thirty years later, he would become CEO of Bramble, Dapper, and Snatch, the most powerful advertising firm in the nation.
Life is funny like that.
V IS FOR VILLAINY
“I’m not a bad guy,” Vincent said. “Not at all. I gave to a dozen philanthropic foundations last year. World hunger. AIDS, which is still a problem, believe it or not. Which I should know, because I’ve got it. And am currently fucking it into your eye socket.”
W IS FOR THE WISDOM OF THE WORDS THEMSELVES
David J. Schow, the guy who coined the term “splatterpunk”, wrote a short story called Pulpmeister way back in the day. And in one particular paragraph, he unleashed a brain-spattering salvo of every descriptive word or phrase ever used to describe an act of violence in the history of pulp/crime/horror fiction.
It’s an exhaustive, hilarious, encyclopedic compendium that I would happily include here, except that Dave would sue my ass off. As well he should. But you can find it in his book Seeing Red.
My point is that the one thing Clive Barker, Schow, Lansdale, Spector and I had in common was a love of language. Of getting the words just right. There are ways and ways of describing the atrocity, and everything else. And it ain’t all just meat and potatoes.
Words are the wheels of the race cars of our brains. That’s where the rubber hits the road, and splats your specificity to the pavement.
If you wanna write fiction, you better fall in love with words. Cuz that’s how the whole thing happens.
X IS FOR XENOPHOBIA MADE PERSONAL
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