Jackson in HRPG-World: 3-1 A Sticky Starting Scrap

Time to set Jackson off on another (mis)adventure.  No prizes for guessing the game.


Jackson in HRPG-World: 3-1 A Sticky Starting Scrap

“Jakasan.”

Mostly asleep, Ian Jackson wasn’t sure if the feminine voice was coming from the waking world or his dreams.

“Ian Jakasan.”

“Fuck off,” Jackson said.  He tried to bury his head deeper into his pillow.

A lightning bolt came out of the blue and grounded through Jackson’s dozing form.  He jumped about a foot off the mattress.  His sheets slipped off his convulsing form.  His hair stood on end and his teeth clenched together so hard they would have bitten off the end of his tongue had it not already been turned back on itself like a slug dipped in salt.

It also woke him up.

After his body stopped twitching uncontrollably he took stock of his surroundings.  It wasn’t the bed he’d gone to sleep in.  It looked similar, but this was a different plain little bed in a different plain little bedroom.  It had a single bookcase and single wardrobe, same as the plain little bedroom he’d fallen asleep in, but they were in different positions.  Like the other bedroom, the room looked a prop department’s idea of what a plain little peasant’s bedroom should look like rather than a room someone actually lived in.  That was because it wasn’t real.  It was part of a computer game and Jackson was stuck inside it.

There was an angel floating at the foot of his bed.  She had massive tits.

She smiled beatifically at Jackson like a mother to her brainless brat.  She might have had a kind, maternal face, but the rest of her body was one hundred percent MILF, with the emphasis on the F.  Her white dress was slinky rather than saintly.  It hugged her shapely figure like a second skin and a split down the sides exposed the creamy-white flesh of her thighs.  A pendant with a large red stone drew attention to her neck and the deep creamy valley of her cleavage beneath it.

Doubtless the Bible Belt would not approve of this depiction of an angel.  Jackson supposed it could have been worse.  At least she wasn’t blindfolded and tied up with bondage chains.

Jackson was too busy ogling her babelicious figure to notice she’d opened her mouth and was speaking to him.  Not that it mattered.  He couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

This was a first.  Before, it hadn’t mattered where Jackson had been or who he’d talked to, everyone had spoken English back at him.  Was this some kind of glitch or bug?

“I don’t understand,” he said to the angel in white.

She paused and asked him what he guessed was a question from the intonation of her voice.  Jackson shrugged.  He hadn’t understood that either.

The angel nodded and then carried on with her spiel in a language that was incomprehensible to Jackson.

Not carry on, repeat, he realized.  He recognized some words.  It sounded a lot like the same speech she’d tried to give him earlier.

“I don’t understand,” Jackson interrupted, growing frustrated.

The angel paused and asked him another, or even the same, question.  Jackson didn’t understand, so he shrugged again.  This time he was sure the angel was repeating the same speech right from the beginning.

Stupid game.  It must have got stuck on the wrong language.

This time when the angel asked the question again he smiled brightly and nodded.  If he didn’t the angel would just keep repeating the same piece over and over.  Besides, he didn’t need to understand what she was saying, it was the same usual shit every JRPG started with.

I, angel of the giant mammaries, have chosen you to save the world/princess from the evil dragon/sorcerer/demon king.  You of all the stupid-haired kids with unfeasibly large swords are the most likely to complete this arduous quest despite currently being a level one weakling that would immediately expire if the wild dogs roaming around the second village so much as sneezed on you.  Now go, achieve your destiny, slaughter all the wildlife between here and the final castle while amassing enough to gold to crash the economies of every kingdom in the land.  You will, of course, be able to carry this gold—all of it—around in your pockets.

As she spoke Jackson’s gaze dropped to the level of her cleavage and stayed there.  He wouldn’t have minded putting his hands on those and giving them a good squeeze.  Did wanting to squeeze the tits of an angel automatically doom him to hell?

Nah.  She wasn’t real.  She was just pixels, same as everything else around here.

Finally, her speech given, the angel faded away and Jackson was able to get back to sleep.  He wasn’t out for long before a commotion outside woke him up.

Good morning, this is the alarm call for your tutorial quest.

He wondered what would happen if he stuffed a pillow over his ears and ignored it.  No, he couldn’t risk it.  It might trigger some kind of non-standard game over that left him trapped here for eternity.

Swearing, Jackson got out of bed and got dressed.  He found an impressive-looking sword that must be shit because it was his starting weapon and all starting weapons were shit.

At least there were no NPC parents waiting in the kitchen to bore him with their single line of encouragement repeated over and over.  That meant he must be the poor little orphan destined to save the entire kingdom or some other shit like that.  It also meant this shitty little hovel was his alone.  Nothing a good bulldozer couldn’t fix.

Outside, the inhabitants of Ye Olde Little Rustic Starting Village were running around and screaming their heads off as if the sky was falling down on top of them.  They were also screaming the same gibberish language Jackson couldn’t understand.

A blessing.  At least he didn’t need to worry about talking to each and every one of them on the off chance one of them had a vital piece of information he needed to find out.  Smiling, he gave the panicking villagers a cheery wave and walked in the direction of their pointing fingers as nonchalantly as if he was heading down to the local 7-11 to pick up a case of beer.

Given he was level one and this was the starting village, it was probably something super lame like a butterfly or raccoon.

That pissed him off the most.  When They—whoever They were—moved him from game to game, couldn’t they at least let him keep his levels.  It fucking sucked having to start right from level one again and again.

Jackson reached the edge of the village where a dark, primeval forest encroached.

It was going to be a butterfly, or a dog, or maybe even a lone ferocious goblin.

Ooh, the terror.

Or it could be one of those stupid auto-lose fights against some enormous dragon or similar monster.  Jackson wasn’t relishing that prospect.  Sure, he couldn’t Game Over, but being stomped into the ground by a level bajillion dragon was fucking painful when you were actually in the game for real.

He walked between the trees.  This was where the villagers had pointed to.  No humongous dragon, which was a relief, but also no stupid butterfly or pansy level one monster either.  Was this the right place?

Battle music played in the background.

Yep, it was the right place.

A blue splodge jumped out into the centre of the path and wobbled like an oversized plate of jelly.

Of course, he should have known.  Obviously it was going to be a blue slime.  It was always a fucking blue slime.

The blue blob bobbed and quivered.  Protoplasm erupted out of the top and formed into the shape of a sexy young woman with humongous, jiggling boobies.

Jackson’s mouth fell open.

to be continued . . .


The posting schedule might be a little erratic for the next week or so while my aging laptop decides whether or not it's going to expire completely.  Sunday hopefully, a few days later if not.

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.

Book Review: AJ Kirby - Paint This Town Red

Time for another book review.

AJ Kirby’s Paint This Town Red came to my attention after it made the shortlist of The Guardian Books not-entirely-serious Not The Booker awards.  It surprised me because the synopsis was clearly of a horror novel and horror novels are normally greeted with the same enthusiasm as finding dog shit on an expensive shoe in literary circles.  I picked it up because it sounded interesting from the reader reviews: population cut off on an island, man-eating panthers and a shark that makes Jaws look like a minnow.

Those reader reviews—total bullshit.

The book is best described as if Stephen King went to Lindisfarne, where it’s wet, miserable and everyone has shit sex lives.  It wants to be a Koontz or King epic, but everybody’s a bit British and incompetent.  The source of supernatural evil is a bit crap.  It sends a shark (whoops, can’t swim on land), a sick panther (that doesn’t eat anyone) and a giant vulture that manages at best a score draw with a light aircraft.  Overall it’s more Fawlty Towers than The Overlook.

The Guardian's Sam Jordison gave the book a complete shellacking.

It’s not quite as bad as all that.  Despite the large cast of characters and extensive back story, it never felt a drag to read and I raced through it in a couple of days.  The book does have that important ‘page turner’ quality.  I also enjoyed how Kirby slowly revealed fragments of a past tragedy involving a mysterious doomsday cult through the recollections of his diverse cast.

Sadly, after an interesting setup, the book doesn’t maintain the early promise.  It doesn’t really come together.  The characters are well-drawn but remain static.  The supernatural threats turn out to be rather ineffectual and purposeless.  Eventually the book peters out in one of those annoying some-weird-shit-happens-and-that’s-it endings that are always a letdown.

New Story - "Trent the Traitor"

One of the canards of horror is nothing is scarier than things left to the imagination.  There’s a germ of truth there, but too often writers use it as a convenient excuse to bugger off home early.  Look, here’s my spooky house—Woooh.  Here’s my scary atmosphere—Waaah.  Here’s my terrifying monster—Actually, you can create that yourself, because . . . Nothing is Scarier than the Imagination.

Um, yeah, right.  I didn’t realise I picked this horror story up from IKEA, or that I’d have to head out into the forest and chop the wood myself.

Sometimes it’s right for the story and other times the Fade to Black to preserve a reader’s delicate sensibilities can feel like a cop out.  Lovecraft famously left the finer details of his eldritch abominations to be filled in by the reader, usually because his protagonist’s mind had already disintegrated by that point, but there was at least enough for Chaosium to fill Call of Cthulhu bestiaries with some weird and wonderful critters.

If you’ve got an imagination you might as well use it.  Sometimes that’s what the reader is expecting and wants.  Especially in erotica, where drawing the curtain across before getting to the juicy squelchy parts is firmly disapproved of.

Hence this outpouring from the noxious regions of my mind:

“And not only with each other: Trent saw humans caught up in the bacchanalian frenzy.  The demons used them like toys made of flesh.  He watched as a plump demon with the glistening black skin of a leech embrace a muscular man.  The over-cushioned lips of her vagina sucked in the man’s penis, sucked, and the man’s skin was torn away like pink tissue sliding over a raw hunk of meat.  A fiend with the head of a fish rammed a cock the length and girth of a moray eel into the vagina of a petite little blonde girl doubled over in front of it.  It pushed hips forward and the belly, then whole body of the girl swelled up like a water-filled balloon, swelled up until her eyes bulged, swelled up until something ruptured and white froth tinged with pink poured from her mouth and she deflated like a punctured blow-up doll.  A skinny man struggled in the midst of a group of twisted little goblins.  They drove penises hard like pointed horns into his anus, his mouth, his ears, even his eye sockets.  They tore flesh from the man in ragged strips and wrapped the glistening red bundles of muscle around their cocks and masturbated with them.  A slack-faced woman lay wrapped in the tentacles of some kind of abomination with the upper body of a woman and lower body of a deep-sea nightmare aberration.  The demon’s sinuous arms terminated not in hands but in obscene appendages that resembled the mouths of lampreys.  She fastened them to the woman’s tits and mewled in delight as more of her tentacles slithered up between her captive’s bleeding labia.”

It was originally a two sentence description.  Then I thought, no, that’s not good enough.  They’ll want examples.

(Don’t ask where the examples came from.  I try not to think about it.)

The full story can be found here on Eka’s Portal.

Eka’s Portal is an online Vore community.  Most aspects of Vore don’t appeal to me as a fetish, but there is some crossover with some of the succubus/monster girl stories I write.  It also hits that Erotic Horror sweet spot where arousal, disgust and fear smoosh together in a big gooey ball.

It’s been a while since I posted anything there, so I thought a little hell-space story might make up for it and show I’m still writing and alive.  Enjoy!

As always, if you like the story and haven’t already picked them up, please consider giving some of my books a look.  You’ll like them.

Book Reviews: Carlton Mellick III - Warrior Wolf Women of the Wastelands & The Menstruating Mall

My rant about the relevance of horror fiction nowadays is a perfect excuse to kick off some book reviews I’ve been meaning to post for a while without finding the time.  Yes, I’m another (sort of) horror writer writing about other horror books, but I’m also regarded as the great unwashed self-published slime by anyone who’s anyone. 

Ooh, someone’s chip on their shoulder is showing.

No community connections here.  Unless it’s one of my eXcessica/Literotica stable-mates, in which case I’ll put a ruddy big disclaimer at the top of the post.

First up some Bizarro from the mutton-chopped master of madness, Carlton Mellick III

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland.

Okay, so this is where the hype comes from.  And it’s deserved.  An awesome ride that’s hugely entertaining as well as making mincemeat out of more serious books tackling similar themes.  I love the verve and confidence.  It’s like Mellick is saying, ‘Look, I can create a future world based off of McDonald’s Happy Meals, fill it with furry chicks, giant wolves and multi-armed mutants, and it will still have more to say than any number of serious, dull and downright miserable SF dystopias.’

In a post-apocalyptic future, survivors are living in a walled city surrounded by wasteland.  Authority is what you’d expect if a multinational fast food conglomerate bought the government, judiciary and police force.  There are troubles in happy-happy-we-will-fuck-you-up-if-you’re-not-smiling utopia.  Men are growing extra limbs and the women turn into wolves if they get too sexually aroused.  Just as with everything else defective in modern consumerism, when this happens the unfortunates are thrown out to fend for themselves in a wasteland where female werewolf biker gangs battle mutant armies led by a man with a giant hamburger for a head.

There’s gratuitous weird sex, furry apocalyptic bikers and all kinds of imaginative craziness, but throughout it all Mellick keeps a solid grasp on the fundamentals of plot and character.  Despite the odd building blocks, the story holds the reader’s attention without floating off in a cloud of nonsensical froth.  The only criticism I have is how eager the survivors were willing to throw in the furry bikers.  Mellick does give reasons for the survivor’s actions, but they didn’t seem that strong given how eager the wolf women were to kill them or worse.  It’s a minor blemish in an otherwise thoroughly entertaining read.

I’d love to see this made into a film, but as it would require every litigious corporate fast food behemoth to go out of business first, I suspect it might be a long time coming.  We can all do our part—don’t eat burgers, buy a vindaloo instead!

The Menstruating Mall

This is a shorter read.  Ten characters are trapped in a mall that appears to be menstruating.  Weird shit happens, some of them die, and then the mall and survivors start to change into something else.  Not as strong as Warrior Wolf Women as there isn’t much underpinning the story other than skewering some obvious stereotypes and being weird-as-fuck for the sake of being weird-as-fuck.  Fast, fun and inventive, but by the end of it I found myself sharing the same sentiments as one of the cast when they had their “Screw this, I’m outta here!” moment.

A Succubus for Halloween picks up a review on Monster Librarian

It’s a little ironic.  Last post I was moaning about the lack of places to find reviews of horror books and then I find out one of my collections picked up a nice review on MonsterLibrarian.com last month:

http://www.monsterlibrarian.com/anthologies.htm#A_Succubus_for_Halloween

So this is the point where the sales take off . . . ?

Well, actually no.

The same thing happened when the same collection received a lovely write-up on the Horror Fiction Review.  It’s what I meant last week when I was talking about the difference between “for other fans” and “for other writers”.  Is the audience avid readers looking for the next book to read, or avid writers eager to see how their book will be received?  One is an expanding universe, the other a shrinking bubble.

That’s not a fault of sites like Horror Fiction Review and MonsterLibrarian.com (If you know of any others, please plug them in the comments—I have a kindle, and it’s always hungry for fresh words), they’re doing a fantastic job.  It’s the reality of the world we live in.  If we can’t offer a compelling reason for people to put down their game controllers and TV remotes, then we scribblers of fiction don’t deserve to exist.  Harsh, but that’s how it is.

A review isn’t just an advertisement, it’s also valuable feedback, and especially important if—like me—you’re (sort of) self-published.  The great thing about having no snooty gatekeepers around is it means we can write whatever the hell we want to write.  The bad thing about having no gatekeepers around is there’s no one to stop us from walking out of the front door without any clothes on.  A positive review is a nice confidence boost.  It means I’m not deluded, I’m not wasting my time and I can write well enough to justify a seat at the table.

That’s not the end of it, though.  It’s an okay review rather than an “Ohmigod!  You must read this writer RIGHT NOW!” kind of review.  Being able to sit at the table without feeling like I’m dirty bum fresh from the street is nice, but being competent is not enough.  I’m not a Lovecraft, a Barker or a King.  I need to work harder on my craft and write better stories (while still keeping the same level of heat as a blazing hot porn film, because that’s my thang, and we all need a thang).

I also need to remember to send my other books out for review . . .

(and finish Succubus Summoning 201.  I know, I’m sorry)

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.”