H-space MGB Story: Penishroom

PFC Stewart Peter Bate couldn't pinpoint the exact moment he'd lost his mind.  He suspected it might have been the moment he'd watched a giant penis eat Hernandez.  If watching a monstrous cock devour one of your squad buddies wasn't an indication you'd totally lost it, then what was?

They'd been on exploratory—xplo—duty.  Normally that meant hours of trudging across featureless rocks and dirt in search of something that wasn't featureless rocks and dirt.  And normally it was a fruitless endeavor as normally all they found was more rocks and dirt.

This time, as they'd pushed out further, they found something that wasn't rocks and dirt—they found life.  The edge of an enormous jungle to be exact.  The squad was so shocked to find something that wasn't rocks and dirt they thought it must be a mirage.  The ground fell away in a rift that extended into the distance and resembled a great crack in the earth.  They couldn't see the bottom as it was hidden beneath a dense green canopy of alien vegetation that covered the floor of the massive canyon.  They hadn't seen the jungle from a distance as the canopy didn't extends above the cliff edge they were standing on.  It grew in this vast cleft in the earth like moss growing in the cracks of a paving slab.

Radio communication was patchy and inconsistent on this side of the gate.  Something to do with different physics.  On finding something of interest, and this was massively of interest, they should have returned back to base to report.  Squad Leader Reynolds wanted to push on further instead.  His reasoning was that they'd only just started the sweep and it would be a waste of an exploratory run to head back now.  Bate suspected the real reason was because Squad Leader Reynolds knew that if they did go back the top brass would send in the glory boys from Special Forces instead, and they'd be the ones getting the credit for any new discoveries.

It was an open secret amongst the men that Squad Leader Reynolds had a chip on his shoulder about the 'glory boys' of Special Forces.  There were rumors the squad leader had been washed out of Special Forces training for bullshit reasons and had harbored a grudge ever since.

So they'd descended down into the jungle and Hernandez had been eaten by a giant penis.

It wasn't a giant penis exactly, but had looked remarkably similar.  All the vegetation in the jungle was a little strange—a little warped, a little over-fecund.  The shapes and scents had triggered subconscious imagery that had made the men's balls itch.  That itch had been magnified by the heat and humidity beneath the canopy.  Sweaty like a ten-dollar-hooker's crack and smelling just as rank, as another soldier had put it.

Hernandez had found the fungus or plant that looked like a giant penis.

"Hey, doesn't that look like a giant cock?" he said, his face cracking up with mirth.

It did.  The fungus or plant—if it was either—was a column about ten feet high and fleshy-pink in color.  The top bulged out into a reddish bulb that resembled the glans of an erect human penis, though it was probably nothing more than the cap of an enormous mushroom.  What really made the resemblance was the presence of two round fleshy growths with wrinkled skin at the base of the column.  They looked like a pair of giant testicles.

The resemblance was so striking it was easy to imagine a titan lying just beneath the surface with their erect genitals poking up out of the soil.

Hernandez was still laughing and making filthy jokes about it when the giant penis-shaped thing had bent over and swallowed up his head and shoulders.  The thing bent back to upright taking Hernandez with it.  His legs kicked out as he went down whatever the thing had for a throat like a drunken Santa going down a chimney upside down.  They watched the bulge pass down the column until it reached the base of the shaft and Hernandez's still struggling form was squeezed out into one of the giant testicle-like growths.  He continued to struggle and they saw the imprints of his hands and face as he tried to force his way out of the sac.  The sac itself started to throb and pulsate in an unwholesome manner.

The rest of the squad, belatedly, once the initial shock had worn off, sprang into action.  Their first instincts were to go for their guns and shoot the giant cock-mushroom thing.  Nothing happened.  They depressed the triggers and their guns refused to fire.  Shitty alternate dimension physics, Bate thought.  Not only did it fuck up all their electronics, sometimes it fucked with their weapons as well.

Squad Leader Reynolds was first to go at it with his machete.  The others followed his lead.  The thing looked soft and fleshy, but was fibrous and tough beneath the surface.  It shuddered loathsomely as they hacked away.  Instead of blood, their cuts brought forth thick white pus that gave off a reek that caught at the back of their throats.  They hacked and hacked while the loathsome swollen 'testicle' had scrunched and shuddered and churned Hernandez inside it.  Eventually they hacked the main stem down and ripped open the top of the round pulsing ball of wrinkled flesh.

They were too late.  They found Hernandez inside.  Bits of him anyway.  They floated in a milky-white soup.  His limbs looked boneless, rubbery and wasted—like meat left in a pot too long.

Bate might have just about been able to ride that one out.  Then Hernandez's head had floated to the surface and the eyes blinked open.  His face had twisted up and he let out a sigh as if he'd just emptied his nuts into Miss USA.  Then it dissolved into milky-white broth.  The whole noxious mix had poured out across the floor like a river of stodgy filth.  It stank like old semen on a whore's bed.

And that had been that for Bate.  He'd sped right out of Sanesville leaving streaks of burning rubber behind him.

Snuff/Skin Flick

The first (and hopefully not only) story for Literotica's Halloween story contest is up.  You can read it here:

"Snuff/Skin Flick"

This is a little more horror than my usual stories.  At one point after writing it I did briefly consider sending it out to more mainstream horror fiction magazines.  Then, after I'd stopped laughing, I decided that was a stupid idea.

All the horror movie references are real horror films.  Ruggero Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust, apparently was arrested on suspicion of murdering his cast for real.  That must have brought a warm glow of job-done-well to the heart of whoever was responsible for the special effects.

I don't expect "Snuff/Skin Flick" to score very highly.  The main PoV character is too far removed from the action to have the same level of sexual intensity as my other stories and my Nasty End stories never score as highly as the Nice End stories.  Still, I hope people appreciate it as a more mainstream-type horror tale.  There are more typical succubus stories on the way (don't worry, they still have fucked up elements ;)).

As always, if you have any questions about the story or there were things that bugged you about it and you want to let me know, feel free to scrawl something in the comments below.

Oh, I might as well tackle something I saw on Literotica's boards.  Snuff is on the list of things that Literotica doesn't allow in stories.  So how does a story with Snuff in the title get through?  (and correspondingly, how the hell do you get anything posted there at all, Hydra, considering the typical death count in your stories?)

I can't speak for the official policies of the site, but in general it seems to be don't submit anything where the PoV character gets sexually aroused by killing another character in a way that could be copied out in the real world by anyone reading that story.  PoV and realism are the important factors.  From a horror literature point of view this does rule out certain types of story, but I don't blame the site owners for wanting to be cautious here.  No-one wants to feel tangentially responsible for a nutjob enacting a murderous sexual fantasy they picked up from reading a story online.  Despite this, there is still plenty of leeway for a writer to depict brutality, as this story will attest. :)

Japanese Mushroom People and Ghost Ships: The story of how I rediscovered William Hope Hodgson

I was a voracious reader as a child.  My school had a small library and I devoured all the horror, fantasy and science fiction I could find.  I loved (and still love) scary short story collections.  There were two stories I remember as really scaring the bejeebers out of me.

The first featured a remote part of rural America being slowly corrupted by a blight that came from a meteorite.  This blight took the form of a strange colour and caused plants and animals to grow in bizarre and horrifying ways.  I remember the plight of the hapless farming family, unable to leave despite knowing the colour is slowly consuming them from the inside.  The ending is unsettling as well.  On one hand it seems like it’s over—having eaten its fill, the colour shoots back off into space—but on the other the narrator reports seeing a residue still present at the bottom of the well.  Worse, the whole area is going to be flooded and turned into a reservoir, potentially spreading the contamination further.  For a child used to ghost stories with nice neat endings, an ending that implies it might not be over, that it might, in fact, get much much worse, gave me shivers.

Most horror aficionados will immediately recognise that as HP Lovecraft’s classic: “The Colour out of Space.”  I didn’t know who Lovecraft was at the time, but when I bumped into his work—and the Cthulhu mythos—again later, it was no great surprise to learn he was the writer responsible for a story that had left a mark on me.

The second story was about a group of sailors that found a queer abandoned boat.  The boat is floating in a patch of scum and covered all over in strange fungal growth.  As the sailors climb aboard, the sense of something being wrong deepens.  Below the decks they think they hear what sounds like the pumping of a great heart.  Then the fungus starts to move.  One man is gruesomely consumed and the others barely escape with their lives.  Worse, this is not a story that ends with the monster meeting a final and fiery end.  The narrator ends his story and the reader is left with the knowledge that the fungal ship is still out there.

Trying to identify this story was more of a puzzle.  Sadly, back then I was too young and stupid to actually pay attention to the names of the writers who provided me with these wondrous stories.  Or in this case even the title.  I knew it was a story about a creepy boat covered in man-eating fungus, but as I couldn’t remember either the writer or title, and had not come across it since, I figured this was going to be one of those pieces of nostalgia forever lost to the mists of time.

And so time passed...

Recently I watched the cult Japanese film “Matango.”  Fans of Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopedia will recognise that name.  It’s used for this entry:

No, not that Matango...

I don’t know if KC took the name from the film or both have the same roots in Japanese mythology.  (On a tangential note, Alraune, another frequently appearing monster girl, comes from German myth, and the Hanns Heinz Ewers novel of the same name has also spawned a few films)

Matango is an odd 1963 Japanese film where a bunch of characters get ship-wrecked on an island.  The interior of the island contains lots of strange mushrooms and they find the wreck of a research boat covered in strange fungal growth.  They avoid eating the mushrooms at first, but then food supplies run low and the horror kicks in when they discover eating the mushrooms turns you into a mushroom person (with appropriately icky slow transformation)

So far so Japanese.

Except it isn’t.  The plot is based on the short story “The Voice in the Night”, written by the English writer William Hope Hodgson.

“...boat covered in strange fungal growth.”  Could this be the mystery author of the mystery story that scared the bejeebers out of me as a child?

And indeed it is.  After a little digging through Hodgson’s bibliography and the wonders of out-of-copyright work being made available on the internet, I was able to rediscover “The Derelict.”

You can read it here.

“All about him the mould was in active movement. His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouser-leg away as if it were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream, and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful, severe life. It was simply infernal. The man had gone from sight. Where he had fallen was now a writhing, elongated mound, in constant and horrible increase, as the mould appeared to move towards it in strange ripples from all sides.”

Brrr.  Yep, still as creepy as I remember.

Hodgson came before HP Lovecraft and while his work lacks the core cosmic bleakness saturating Lovecraft’s works, he’s worth checking out if you like old weird horror.  His books can be found for free at the Gutenberg project here.  He also created the supernatural detective Thomas Carnacki.

And that, through a rather convoluted path, is how I rediscovered the stories of William Hope Hodgson, a writer who scared the bejeebers out of me as a child.

Book Review: Adam Nevill - Apartment 16

This fella appears to be picking up a bit of buzz recently.  His most recent book, The Ritual, was one of the winners at this year’s British Fantasy Society awards and this one was nominated last year.  He’s also the first new horror (proper horror, not sparkly vamp’n’woof romance) writer I’ve seen appear in the horror section of my local Waterstones in what seems like forever.  He’s also good.  Apartment 16 is a cracker of a book.  A modern ghost story might be a close enough description, but Nevill never allows the book to get bogged down and doesn’t shirk from describing graphic and disturbing imagery.

The plot follows the converging paths of two characters.  Apryl is a young woman over from the States to claim an inheritance from a previously unknown great aunt.  While going through her aunt’s belonging she uncovers a disturbing history to the ancient apartment complex her aunt lived in.  Seth is a failed artist working as the night-shift guard at the same building and slowly falling under the influence of the evil that permeates the building.  Don’t be put off if that sounds uninspiring.  Nevill’s vivid descriptions and concept of an afterlife as black and as cold as a distant dead star elevates what could have been a humdrum, staid idea into a highly effective chiller.  Definitely one for when the nights grow longer and colder.  I’ll definitely be adding more of Mr Nevill’s books to my reading list.

Book Review: Gary McMahon - Rain Dogs

Here's one of the books that was recommended to me when I asked for good contemporary British horror.  It was a runner-up in the British Fantasy Awards in 2009.

Hmm . . . yeah.  It’s definitely a book of two halves.  The first half is dull, dreary rubbish and there were a number of times where I was tempted to throw the book aside and move onto something else.  There’s a working-class family man returning home after a stint in prison for killing a burglar and a woman in an abusive marriage who’s able to see ghosts, but it’s all mired in the rut of miserable characters living miserable lives British horror really needs to break out of.

Thankfully the story comes back from its half-time oranges with a lot more vim and vigour.  The eponymous Rain Dogs are an imaginative concept, the pervasive rain evokes a strong atmosphere and the pieces do come together in a decent—and thankfully coherent!—climax.

It’s hard to know where to rate this one.  There’s an interesting horror story here; it’s a shame getting through the first half is such a boring slog.

Horror doesn’t need to be literary, but it needs to be horror.

I’ve been ruffling a few feathers again.

This Guardian article, “Horror: a genre doomed to literary hell?”, is exactly the sort of bunkum that gets written when literary types point their condescending noses at those horrible plebby “genres”.  It’s a nonsense argument.  Asking why horror isn’t more “literary” is like asking why Slayer don’t sound more like Coldplay.  They’re different beasts, with different aims.  Horror works best when it’s hitting the senses at a visceral level.  Sometimes it’s raw and not very pretty, but that’s fine so long as it evokes the right response in the reader.

That’s about as much of a rebuttal as needs to be written and it wasn’t the article but the clip-clopping of comments beneath it that dragged me out from under my bridge.  People offered up their lists of talented writers and argued this as evidence of horror fiction being in rude health.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t true.

It’s closed bubble thinking.  It’s one of the perversities of modern technology.  While the whole world is opened up to anyone with a keyboard, it’s easy to fall into little circles where shared thoughts and opinions are bounced around, amplified and magnified out of all proportion to their relevance to the rest of the world.

Step outside the bubble.  Who’s reading?  Who’s commenting?  Who’s reviewing?  Who’s recommending?

Who cares?

On my last visit to England I popped into my local branch of Waterstones.  Next to several shelves full of Twilight clones was the horror section.  The only books I saw by writers that hadn’t been fixtures on the horror shelves for at least two decades were Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Adam Nevill’s Apartment 16.

This is not a sign of health.

Step outside of the usual writer’s haunts and go clip-clopping into the tangled jungle of the World Wide Web.  Look for the places regular(ish) people hang out.  Look at how much is written about films, music, TV shows, computer games, anime.  Look at how little is written about books.

Even in The Guardian’s own book section.  Take a look at this thread recommending horror books to read for Halloween.  Spot a work that was written this century.

This is not a sign of health.

It’s not a mainstream thing either.  I have a fairly esoteric taste in music, yet if I want to find the best new death metal and black metal albums released there are plenty of online resources I can use to help me discover brilliant new bands.  Ditto for games and movies.  For horror books the best I’ve been able to manage is to slum around articles like this and see what gets recommended in the comments section.

That’s not to say there aren’t online resources.  Nick Cato and his team do a wonderful job with The Horror Fiction Review, there’s plenty of interesting stuff on the VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review, and there are also the websites of award givers like the HWA and BFS.  The crucial difference is these horror fiction resources are (mostly) written by writers, for other writers, while the others are written by fans, for other fans.  It’s crucial because the other media reviews don’t require me to disentangle the tainted web of who knows who to determine whether the recommendation/review/award is unbiased enough to be trustworthy.

This is not a sign of health.

We have a finite amount of leisure time and there are plenty of competing activities to devour it.  If we want people to read horror fiction we have to give them a compelling reason do so, otherwise they’re going to spend that time watching TV, going to see films or blowing zombie’s heads off on their Playstation.

Talk of horror becoming more “literary” raises the hairs on the back of my hands.  Trying to appease literary critics is a trap that has swallowed many a promising horror writer.  For me, the problem with a lot of modern horror is the writers are trying to court a literary audience that will never like, appreciate or understand them.  It’s like the hapless nerd of a teen movie trying to impress the prettiest, most popular girl in class when it’s obvious she’s a bitch and the right girl for him is the one hiding behind glasses and mousey hair.

This doesn’t mean horror fiction has to be shit, but first and foremost it needs to be aware of what it’s trying to do.  It’s a rollercoaster.  It’s a way for people to confront their fears from a position of safety.  It’s a spike in the heart rate, a prickle on the back on the neck, a lurking miasma of dread, a bowl of ice in the pit of the stomach—all from the comfort of the reader’s armchair.  The very good modern horror films and computer games know and provide this.

Horror fiction doesn’t need to become more literary, it needs to find and re-engage with an audience that, neglected, has turned to other genres and media for its thrills.  It needs to burst out of the bubble clique, grab readers by the throat and shout “Read Me!  Put down that remote and Read Me!  Put down that controller and Read Me!  Then go and tell all your friends to Read Me!  Because I’m the scariest, spookiest, creepiest, eeriest, most spine-tingling muthafucka you’ll ever spend an evening with.”

Time Out's 100 Best Horror Films

Here's some inspiration for films to watch in the dead hours of night:

Time Out's 100 Best Horror Films.

That's a distinguished cabal of horror experts they've polled there. Unsurprisingly, they've come up with an extremely solid list.

I'm not sure what my top 10 would be. Hellraiser, The Thing and Ring would be certain inclusions. Probably Night of the Demon as well (brilliant black and white horror film). After them...well it's lists, it's always impossible to include everything. Just about everything on that list is excellent, so rather than more nods to The Exorcist, Evil Dead II, etc., here are some horror films I like that aren't there:

In the Mouth of Madness
Carpenter does Lovecraft from first principles.




Hostel
Unfairly maligned for kickstarting the torture porn thing. Unusually for horror franchises, the sequel is good as well.

The Host
Superb Korean monster movie.

The first half of Jeepers Creepers
Horror films are easy to make but so hard to do well. The thirty or forty minutes of this are brilliant...then it plummets off a cliff into mediocrity.

The Quatermass Xperiment
This shouldn't really be here. They butchered Nigel Kneale's original story and replaced a humanist ending with Kill It With Electricity! but I have a soft spot for the film as it scared the pants off me as a child.



Tremors
A stretch for a horror list I know, but the whole film is a masterclass on how to make a monster B-movie and populate it with living, breathing characters.

I'm still waiting for someone to make the quintessential succubus film.

Recently, I Have Been Reading... #1

One of the most important pieces of advice they give to writers is to read lots. This was something I used to do. In my teens and early twenties I was a voracious devourer of books. Then I fell out of the habit. Juggling a full-time job with writing and other hobbies doesn’t leave a lot of time left over. Plus, I tend to think time spent reading is time I should be spending writing, especially when self-imposed deadlines start looming. Sometimes it’s good to eat a few books to blast the cobwebs away though. This is what I’ve munched through on my kindle lately:

Christopher Fowler – Hell Train
One of my favourite horror writers from back when I used to read more voraciously. This is an enjoyable romp featuring Brits abroad being ghastly and clueless, and meeting imaginative and bloody ends on a train bound for Hell. Well, sort of. It’s a story within a story of a writer pitching a script to Hammer at a time when the studio was falling out of favour (They’re better now). Part of the fun is trying to guess which famous Hammer actor Fowler has in mind for each character.

Carlton Mellick III – The Morbidly Obese Ninja
I’ve been meaning to check out the Bizarro (sub-?)genre for a while. Mellick is the granddaddy when it comes to fucked-up weirdness. This is a manga-esque tale of a 700-pound corporate ninja. Short, but it zips along and Mellick does a great job of providing a rational underpinning to his very weird world.

J.F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams – Clickers
Entertaining pulp horror. Crab things with scorpion tails and venom that makes limbs burst like overripe bananas emerge from the sea and threaten a New England town. Ultimately, the clickers are fairly dumb critters and it’s easy enough for the (well-armed) townsfolk to keep them under control once the initial surprise has worn off. The things that follow the clickers out of the sea, not so much…

Wrath James White – Like Porno for Psychos
Whoa, this is some good shit. A collection of some really nasty short stories. If you like my work, but want something even darker, this might be up your street. It’s definitely more on the horrifying rather than the arousing side, but I found it encouraging (for me anyway) that’s it’s possible to fling around the cocks and pussies and not be stuck in the porn ghetto. Faves for me were “Feeding Time” and “Nothing Better To Do”.

Brian Keene – Kill Whitey
A dock worker rescues a stripper from a seemingly unkillable Russian mob boss. A fast-paced page-turner that reminded me of the early Koontz thrillers-with-a-supernatural-twist I used to enjoy reading.

Cameron Pierce – Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island
Another Bizarro piece and…um…yeah. A group of teens borrow a yacht, get attacked by pirates and end up on an island where the girls look like centrefolds by day and turn into rapacious, raping, vagina monsters by night. It’s short and starts right in the action, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Part of me thought it was too silly, with characters more suited to a cartoon, and another part of me thought it was fucking hilarious. Probably best to think of it as a horror comedy—like an XXX version of one of Peter Jackson’s early splatter movies—to fully appreciate it. I suspect Bizarro might be beyond the comprehension of my simple little brain.

Curse you, Cameron Pierce! You made me feel old.

This gets a sex scene. It's the woman.

Edward Lee – The House
Lee is the master of hardcore fucked-up gross-out porno-horror. This is two novellas, “The Pig” and “The House”, in one. “The Pig” is the better of the two, a disgusting yet blackly hilarious tale of a luckless filmmaker falling foul of the mob and forced into making “speciality” porno’s. Nearly every taboo is gleefully transgressed in some style and the ending is satisfying.

“The House” isn’t quite as strong. While it also has moments of memorable grossness (Shake-a-Puddin’, blergh), Lee never escapes the straitjacket of Haunted House conventions.

Ah, that was good to blast out some cobwebs. If anyone has any similar suggestions for things to read, feel free to pop them in the comments.

(Oh, and don't worry I'm about to try and outdo Lee, WJW and others in nastiness. I know my niche and what I'm good at :) )

The Changing Face of High Street Horror

While I was back home for the Christmas holidays I paid a visit to my local Waterstones to see what was lurking on the horror shelves.

Paranormal Romance is still very much the ‘in’ trend. So much so there was a whole rack of shelf space given over to ‘Dark Fantasy’. Love 'em or loathe ‘em, it doesn’t look like the hunky dudes with fangs and the hunky dudes with fur and fangs are going away any time soon.

In the actual ‘horror’ section proper—Waterstone’s labelling, don’t look at me like that!—Monster Mash’em’ups are the other bandwagon rolling down the hill. I haven’t read them and sort of suspect they’re a one-punchline joke stretched far beyond its use-by date.

Of course, it’s because of this kind of nonsense Christopher Fowler (I wish I had a blog like his—he must type like a zillion words a minute or something) and Maura McHugh kicked off the Campaign for Real Fear.

Me, I’m kind of ambivalent. These are not the horror books I want to be reading, but they are for a lot of other people and they enjoy them enough to buy them by the truckload. Few things piss me off more than the whole snobbish ‘your taste is rubbish, you should read/watch/listen to what I’m reading/watching/listening to’ attitude, so I’m not going there. Even if it means I must accept the existence of true horrors like Eastenders, Friends and X-Factor.

Trends are cyclical anyway. Someone’s going to write the book where the shy but pretty heroine falls for the tall, dark and handsome vampire...who then tortures her relentlessly over the next couple of hundred pages by making her watch while he kills everyone she ever cared about, and we'll remember that vampires are actually really fucking scary.

Next year it will be...well, probably no Waterstones and its slot taken by a shop selling iPhone cases and other tat, I reckon.

Why the shame?

So I was on one of my night time internet trawls – distraction behaviour when I should be writing – and I came across this.

It was the marketing blurb that interested me:

“Longing for sizzling stories of sexy demon lovers, seductive vampires seething with oral metaphor, kinky succubi ready for nameless sins? Are you slavering to taste the obscene forked kiss of tales that titillate and terrorize?

Wow, sounds scorching. Where’s the button with the little shopping trolley icon?

“This isn't it.”

Oh.

“If you want unsurprising, comfortable "erotic horror," you've got the wrong book Go back to reading Fangs For The Mammaries XXIV”

Um...yeah. Guess I’ll slink off with my tail between my legs. Thanks for the slap on the face.

Okay, so you checked the date, saw the anthology is about ten years old, probably out of print and are wondering why I’m blathering about it now.

I think because it struck me as a perfect example of the inferiority complex genre fiction – always a whipping boy for the critics in their ivory towers – suffers from, and that’s just as true then as now. It screams defensiveness – “We’re not like those other stories you think might exist, we’re important, serious work.”

Why?

Seductive vamps and their ilk are the bread and butter of the horror genre. People buy horror books and pay to go and see horror movies because they want to read/see those tales. One of the things that used to bother me back when I was devouring horror anthologies was so many writers were trying so hard to avoid the usual horror conventions their stories ended up being not what I bought the book for in the first place. Why the shame? Isn’t the purpose of Erotic Horror to ‘titillate and terrorize’?

Nothing against the book. I’m sure it’s very good. There are a lot of good writers amongst the contributors. I found it odd they chose to define it by what it isn’t rather than what it is.

Wouldn’t mind reading that hypothetical Fangs For The Mammaries XXIV though...

New monsters...or another tired old look in the mirror?

I caught a nice article in the Guardian about the Campaign for Real Fear short story competition. I don't know much about Maura McHugh, but I read a few of Christopher Fowler's books when I was younger, with "Disturbia" probably my favourite.

I like what they're getting at though. Where are the new monsters? Damn right, there're only so many vamps, woofs and brain-munchers you can take before you want to decapitate the lot of them and shove silver-tipped stakes through their skulls just to make sure they stay dead for a good decade or so.

I'm interested to see what comes out of this. My worry is I've heard arguments like this in horror before and all that comes out of it is a slew of "there's nothing more monstrous than us humans" stories. To be fair, there isn't. When it comes to sheer gut-wrenching nastiness, real life puts a shiv in the guts of horror fiction every time. However, just like vamps, there's only so many humans being shitty to other humans stories you can read before it starts getting tedious. Like tuning into Doctor Who only to find out you've got Eastenders (a dreadful, dreary, miserable British soap) instead.

Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies are popular for a reason. They might not possess the same shock value as stories grounded more in reality, but they do offer escapism. Personally, I think the challenge is to continue to shock an increasingly genre-savvy audience, without boring them with the same grim, mundane everyday existence they're trying to escape in the first place.

I'm biased though. I like my monsters. The weirder the better. Hopefully they'll turf up something as exotic, terrifying and downright strange as China Mieville's slake moths and insane multi-dimensional spiders.

I might give the competition a try. That 500 word limit is a real bitch though. At least it'll keep horror-head occupied, which might leave erotica-head free to write some stories where the main character gets to have sex and not get their soul ripped out, all their fluids drained or any of the other bizarre and unusual deaths I seem to subject my characters to :D

And rather predictably, the first idea I had - A "there's nothing more monstrous than us humans" story.

*sigh*