ood shit is where you find it. The needle in the haystack, the diamond in the rough, the quarter in the mud puddle – wondrous treasures often await the lucky, the canny and the adventurous.
ood shit is where you find it. The needle in the haystack, the diamond in the rough, the quarter in the mud puddle – wondrous treasures often await the lucky, the canny and the adventurous.
For those of you familiar with the works of Jeff Strand, Adam Pepper, Sarah Pinborough and Jeffrey Thomas, this book will surely be a welcome addition to your library – all four of these great authors collected under one cover!
But, for those of you who maybe only were acquainted with one or two of these individuals – or, best of all, are coming into this wholly fresh – you are the folks I truly envy.
Get ready for some good shit.
Back in the early 1990's, I was excited to go see a band I really dug at the venerable (and, alas, defunct) Lounge Ax here in Chicago. The opening act was some oddly-named outfit from Ohio called "Ass Ponys."
I figured I could safely arrive late.
Somehow, though, I got to the show early and was sitting there drinking a beer with my buddies and talking when the Ass Ponys took the stage. If memory serves, the first song was called "I Love Bob," and was about a girl who met a guy and in the heat of those heady early days of a love affair carved those eponymous words into her leg with a razor.
As you can imagine, that got my attention.
The Ponys played on, jangly pop rock set to stories of invented freaks, murderers and oddballs, with the occasional paens to such unlikely real-life individuals as Julia Pastrana and Ford Madox Ford ("The Fattest Poet Who Ever Lived!") – kind of like early R.E.M by way of Diane Arbus.
From that moment through the subsequent many years and six twisted genius albums later, I remain a diehard fan.
A similar thing happened when I saw my first Don Hertzfeldt short. I was there to see something else, when all of a sudden, I was blindsided by an unexpected bonanza of such proportions that I completely have forgotten what film I had gone to see in the first place.
What the hell do the Ass Ponys and Don Hertzfeldt have to do with a book of weird stories, you ask? To me, those are two examples of those rare happy epiphanies that occur when you encounter an artist that totally blows you away – when you least expect it.
As I said before, if you're familiar with Jeff's, Adam's, Sarah's or Jeffrey's work, then you at least have some sense of what lies ahead – truly original ideas flawlessly executed by four enormously talented writers.
However, if by some fortunate happenstance this book is your introduction to the gifted authors to follow, then you, my friend, are in for quite a treat.
You won't find any of the "usual" suspects here – no vampires, no werewolves, no smilingly hateful little children who kill their nannies. What you will find instead are some very disturbing tales that showcase the full range of what constitutes a "horror story."
Several of the stories involve body parts gone missing or astray. Some of these stories are funny, some are elegant, and some are just downright nasty. What I can promise you is that these tales do present a great snapshot of the remarkable scope these authors have.
This book, the one previous (Candy in the Dumpster) and the one forthcoming (Sins of the Sirens) are the literary version of the quaint sampler candy box – a chance for you to "taste" the work of various authors and see what is to your liking.
How do you know if these stories will be to your liking?
Stories often begin by the writer asking "what if...?" or "what would...?" The stories in this book are no different: you have, for example, Jeff Strand asking "What would be the best way to kill the most trick-or-treaters on Halloween?" Or Adam Pepper asking "What would one do to get back a kidney donated under false pretenses?" Or Sarah Pinborough asking "If a murder victim were cut into pieces, came back as a zombie and then smoked methamphetamine, would the smoke come out of all the places where they didn't quite fit together again?" Or Jeffrey Thomas asking "If one could be intimate with any person who had ever lived or died, who would one pick, and how would that turn out?"
You know, the very same questions you or I might ask.
Those questions continue, with three samples from each writer. We decided on the format of multiple stories from four authors as a chance to showcase several works from each writer's oeuvre. Hopefully, this sparks your interest to seek out the other published work available from these four writers – as well as whetting your appetite for other fiction as well.
At the end of the day, it's all about the "good shit" – in whatever form you find it. Coming up next are twelve stories that certainly qualify.
Here's to the good shit.
– Bill Breedlove
Chicago, IL
February 2007
