Today I have a new short story hosted on the Action Books blog: “Beloved Of Flies.” James Pate curates weird horror there intermittently. He was kind enough to include my little musing on the imaginary intersection of human and horde consciousness. It starts off like this:
“They cut him in half and filled his body with flies. He had no pain although he was conscious the whole time. Some method of hypnotic anesthesia must have been employed to mimic a dream and force him to comply. Attaching his severed halves, their seamless suturing knit his body cavities closed and whole as he lay stunned in the black hum. By the end of it, he appeared unchanged to the naked eye despite the horde of flies sealed inside.”
Another short weird one recently came out in the anthology Tales From Between: Words & Pictures. In “White River,” twin death metal musicians in a study on the effects of low gravity try to stay connected across outer space.
In other news, collaboration games have produced another truly unique result, a story neither author could have perfected on their own. I worked with Jonathan Louis Duckworth to create “L’Homme de Houbigant,” a story he describes as “surrealist nightmare within a nightmare within a brain running out of oxygen under a thousand tons of rubble.” It’s also about fragrance and memory, a couple of my favorite things. “L’Homme de Houbigant” willappear soon in issue 20 of the journal The Deadlands.
Horrorsong 