THIS COLLECTION of short stories and poetry is intended only for mature audiences. The stories herein are often concerned with unnatural sex acts, sexual violence and erotic dismemberment and destruction. They were written during a period in my life where I made it a goal to explore subject matter more controversial, graphic and disturbing with each new project.
In my late college years, I started writing Hard Ball, the first novella I eventually tried to sell. With too many characters in too few pages, I explored ugliness, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence and insanity. In 1995, I finished writing the novella on my old Apple IIci computer; and I shopped it around to a few places. I received encouraging rejections, but rejections all the same. I set it aside and started writing another novella entitled Ugly Stick, which was more brutal and offensive than anything I had previously written.
Like Hard Ball, Ugly Stick was a series of interwoven stories and scenes, thrown together to push the limits of poor taste. But it was a different sort of novella. Fancying myself as a post-modern writer, I played around with the formats, writing some of it like a screenplay. And the scenes were much more distasteful. For instance, there was a scene with a baby-sitting uncle working the end of his penis like a mouth to convince his niece to make him big and happy. There was a scene written like a movie script with a Gestapo sergeant sodomizing a concentration camp captive in real time to the tune of Dennis Coffey’s Funk Connection, while intermittently gunning down other prisoners coming to rescue the captive in slow motion.
At this point in my life, I wasn’t much more organized than during the Hard Ball days. I was still finishing college. My living room was usually crowded with paper bags full of beer and liquor bottles for recycling.
I rarely knew nor cared to know in advance what I was getting myself into with people. I was open-minded to a fault. I often invited strange and unpredictable people into my life. For instance, a guest of mine once coerced me at gunpoint to drink Listerine after he was insulted that I wouldn’t share the bottle with him. A paranoid schizophrenic friend I had made years earlier tracked me down to my apartment and routinely visited me. We had many disorganized conversations. He would sometimes get sick in my living room and once stole a fire extinguisher from the hallway of the apartment building where I lived.
It was against this backdrop that I finished writing Ugly Stick. I was excited about the direction I was taking with my writing. My satisfaction with the completion of Ugly Stick was short lived though. If no one wanted to have anything to do with Hard Ball, it was even more apparent that no one wanted anything to do with Ugly Stick, which was even less mainstream.
Frustrated, I started to think the only way I could get published was by “selling out” and writing something “really stupid” and “dumbed-down” like a romance novel. I started writing the first pages of Acetone Enema, which was to be a full-length romance novel. I thought I might break into the mainstream with it. It was to be a romance novel with a twist. I would write a straight romance novel, only with a headless female protagonist. I read several romance novels so as to learn how to be true to the genre. It would have been a tremendous challenge; and, ultimately, I didn’t have the patience for it. I was busy with a full time schedule at college, working 50 hours per week and playing bass guitar in a gigging local rock band. I set it aside.
I let the writing go and started a full-time job as a collection agent after college. I did pretty well for myself, as far as that sort of work goes. I met the woman I would marry some eight years later. I mostly forgot about writing for two or three years when, suddenly, I received a phone call with an offer to “co-publish” my novella Hard Ball from one of the companies, which had previously rejected it.
I forget how much they needed from me to get the book off the ground. But it was thousands of dollars. I seriously considered finding the money to make it happen; because it was important to me to see my work in print. But, ultimately, I didn’t trust the deal; and it was too much money for me to gamble, not to mention that I would have had to put that expense on a credit card.
Encouraged by the co-publishing offer, I revisited Acetone Enema. I turned it into a short story and submitted the story to The House of Pain ezine end of 2002. Brigit Knox made a home for it there. I was excited by the positive feedback it received. Encouraged by the fanfare, I submitted several more stories there. I made fast friends with other authors who had stories published there as well.
Some authors I came to know were publishing their early novels through print on demand publishers like Publish America and iUniverse. Amongst those authors, I looked up to Mike Purfield who had some disturbing and hilarious stories published in the House of Pain and who was writing reviews for B-Independent and The Hacker’s Source. He appeared to be making the self-publishing model work; and, to his credit, he still seems to be making it work.
After the co-publishing offer and positive feedback about my short story on the House of Pain, I was more confident about the novella. So, after some deliberation, I decided to make Hard Ball available through iUniverse. The set up cost me about $250, which was a bargain compared to the co-publishing offer that had been on the table.
I continued writing and submitting horror stories to The House of Pain, which served as a great outlet for me. From January 2003-October 2004, I had four stories published at The House of Pain: “Acetone Enema”, “The Mechanics of Perversion”, “Baby Hunter,” and “The Purloined Lips of Destiny”.
I also submitted stories to the Chimerawold 2 and Chimeraworld 3 anthologies, edited and published by UK horror writer/ surrealist Mike Philbin. My stories “Blind Feeling” and “Misfortune Smiles Too” appeared in these anthologies 2004 and 2005, respectively. I’ve included those stories here also. “Misfortune Smiles Too” started as a road story; but I shortened it considerably for the anthology.
Around that time, Mike Philbin and I collaborated on a short story entitled “The Mound”, which we shopped around, looking for pro-rate pay to no avail.
About the same time I started submitting my short horror stories to the House of Pain, I started writing the first draft of a full-length psycho-erotic horror/science fiction novel, The Torture of Girth. It took me a couple of years to write the first draft. Since then, it has undergone many transformations. It started as an asinine story about a man who locks his overweight wife in the basement and forces her to lose weight while he goes on a killing spree, feeding her the remains of his exploits. I’ve gone back to it many times over the past nearly ten years now; and I’ve improved the first two-thirds of the novel so much that the ending is no longer suited to it. It’s evolved substantially beyond its humble beginnings.
It’s just in the last year or so that I’ve seen a new way forward with the novel. God willing, I’ll find the time to finish it before too many more years pass.
Over the past five years or so, writing has taken a back seat to life with my wife and son. But I look back with pride on some of the stories I’ve written.
Recently, I was disappointed to see that the short story archives at The House of Pain are missing. I always pointed people to my stories there, if anyone ever wondered what I was capable of as a writer.
In this collection, you will find the four stories, which were published in The House of Pain 2003-2004. I’ve reprinted two stories previously appearing in the Chimeraworld 2 and 3 anthologies. With agreement from Mike Philbin, I have included our collaborative short story “The Mound”. It appears in print here for the first time ever. And, finally, I’ve included one more short story and six poems.
I hope this collection will tide you over, as I seek the time to complete my novel. Time is precious and fleeting. For now, I am pleased to encapsulate some of it here.
Enjoy.
