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Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Excerpt: White Trash Gothic by Edward Lee
Happy Halloween, Ghouls! I can think of no better way to bring this horror extravaganza to an end than with a teaser by fiction master, Ed Lee. Taken from his latest work in progress, I present to you....
WHITE TRASH GOTHIC
by Edward Lee
Indeed, he thought of lost worlds.
Surely, this curvaceous silhouette of flesh could only be the answer to thirty years of aesthetic query, like Pynchon’s cryptic V., like Burroughs’ Joan--the target of every writer’s most sincere quest: the search for the woman he can never have. Alas, he thought. Here am I, face to face with the Goddess of the New Dark Age, and what a terrifying and joyous thought it was!
The hand tightened about his. He was beseeched by eyes wide and lambent as diminutive moons, but as bottomless as an ocean trench, and the voice resounded as if from the highest precipice of the earth, to offer, “Come. Come with me...and see...”
Nikoff Raskol followed her out of the room into the living dark.”
* * * *
Here, then, is my conundrum. The above page, I’m told, was found in an old manual typewriter, in a fleabag motel, in the mid-‘90s. Evidently I am the author of the page. I am totally upapprized of the motel’s location, nor do I have any idea of what I was doing there.
My name is ______ ___, and I was born on May 25, 19–. This I know only because of my driver’s license. Some time ago a doctor told me that I exhibited chronic symptoms of transient global amnesia, dissociative amnesia, and retrograde amnesia, three types of catastrophic memory deficit that rarely occur together. MRIs revealed no trace of prior cerebral accident or disease mechanism, nor any evidence of a good ole konk on the head. It was actually an interesting affliction: I could recall not one single detail of any aspect of my life, yet I remembered all major world events that had occurred in my lifetime, and I remembered all that I had learned. For instance, I knew that I had attended Harvard and Yale, and studied language, art, philosophy, literature and much else. I remembered the exact layout of Harvard Yard, I remembered Kirkland Street, the Ted Williams Tunnel, Memorial Hall, and the school’s founding date of 1636. Yet I don’t remember being there. I don’t remember a single student or professor. I remember that Tycho Ottesen Brahe was a Danish astronomer of monumental import, and that he died from a ruptured bladder and had a silver nose because he’d lost his real one in a sword fight. I remember that Emanuel Swedenborg began to publish the Daedalus Hyperboreus in1715, and is asserted to have converted lead into gold in 1770 after proving the absolute unity of a Supreme Entity in essence and being. I remember that in 216 B.C. the Carthagenian Army under Hannibal Barca annihilated the largest Roman army yet amassed on the plain of Cannae, killing 75,000 legionnaires in one afternoon.
Yet I don’t remember my parents, friends, nor where I was born.
I don’t remember when exactly any semblance of cognition returned to me. People claiming to be close friends told me I was a speculative novelist of some repute. This undoubtedly was true, for one of them told me I owned a storage locker, the key to which was in my wallet along with my license, credit cards, etc. There was also a small card with the storage facility’s address and the number 154. In this locker, I found all my published books, dozens and dozens of them, all with younger author photos of me in the back. Evidently I’d been quite the existential man, no wife, no kids, and no settled abode. The indication is that for years I’d been a denizen of motels, always seeking out new naturalist locations in which to write. I also had a bank account, with money in it, a considerable sum–royalties, apparently, direct-deposited from publishers. I could relate endlessly of my faltering rediscovery of myself, but that would be inconsequential. I felt driven to discover one single thing: my last location before the onset of my amnesia.
This prospect plagued me. I thought perhaps that the secret must lie in one of my books; therefore, I expended no little time in reading every single one...and not one of them kindled a single memory. (And most of them were stodgy, rather pompous, not altogether interesting, nor altogether coherent, in spite of rave endorsements by the likes of the New York Times Literary Supplement, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly and scores more.)
How could I be aware of the celebrity of, for instance, the New York Times but not be aware of being reviewed in it, nor of writing the actual book that was reviewed? Mine, truly, was a bizarre malady but also, somehow, a exhilarating one.
It seemed I had nothing to live for in the future because I didn’t know what I’d been living for up to that point. I didn’t know what to do with my life now, after nearly the entirety of it had gone by with my being none the wiser. I thought of Voltaire’s Candide, reckoning the world as a useless terrain of terror and foolishness and emerging from its churning orifi to find himself reborn in a terrain of truth and actualization. I thought of Roquentin in Sartre’s pallid La Nauseé, and I thought of the Pequod’s final voyage.
It seemed I had nothing to live for in the future because I didn’t know what I’d been living for up to that point. I didn’t know what to do with my life now, after nearly the entirety of it had gone by with my being none the wiser. I thought of Voltaire’s Candide, reckoning the world as a useless terrain of terror and foolishness and emerging from its churning orifi to find himself reborn in a terrain of truth and actualization. I thought of Roquentin in Sartre’s pallid La Nauseé, and I thought of the Pequod’s final voyage.
Nothing mattered, and that realization seemed exciting and scintillant, just as Ahab’s quest for the great white whale must’ve been. A neurologist seemed to take stock in the suspicion that my amnesia must’ve been caused by a severe psychological traumatic shock, something exceedingly horrific, and he finished his speculation by pointing out, “In all likelihood, this trauma was so potent that your memory loss may actually be a blessing.”
A curious deduction, the prospect of which enthused me. Didn’t God appear to Moses as a burning bush because the sight of God’s visage is so intricate, complex, and unreckonable as to cause instant madness? What, then, did I see that could be so catastrophic that my memory would be wiped clean? Not that I suspect I’d glimpsed the unglimpsable face of God, but what of something else more corporeal and rooted in empirical existence?
A murder?
A ghost?
A natural disaster?
To my core I felt it must be beyond things of that ilk, something unmitigated, something too appallingly calamitous to be cogitable. It made sense. Since the resurgence of my self- awareness, my dreams at night were exclusively populated with horrors beyond pondering. They exhibited elements of--
1) The psycho-sexual: twenty-two caliber gun barrel brushes quickly plunged into the urethra’s of throbbing penises; comely women hanging naked by their wrists only to have their epidermis expertly pulled inside-out off their bodies like suits of skin; rustic men cutting holes into women’s skulls, to effect coitus with their still warm, still living brains; screaming pregnant girls gang-raped enmasse until the wares of their wombs were perfunctorily ejected, and men, still more rustic men, calmly copulating with curvaceous headless bodies.
2) The allegorical and the patently absurd: A woman with the physique of a Playboy model rampaging through a kindergarten in a wake of shrieks and flying blood, yet this woman possesses the head of a bull; a teenage girl in trampy garb, evidently watching a screen connected to a closed-circuit camera, suddenly turning with a jerk, and exclaiming, “Mom! He’s putting Gummy Worms in his dick!”; a penis and its accommodating scrotum, six-feet tall and stalking through the woods on human legs.
3) The Luciferic: Things arising from smoke. Pug faces on stout, corded necks. Flesh the hue of riverbed clay, pit-nostrils and chisel slits for eyes. There's a black moon in a red sky, a vale, horrid and vast, refulgent with luminous fog, and a lake of steaming excrement. From fissures in the black rock, the pitiable naked horde is expulsed. A great black grackle flies overhead, its black-marble eyes gazing down in reverent delight. The horde is a mass of screaming bodies, terror incarnate, living chaos. And from the steaming lake, the ushers come to bull into the horde amid suboctave chuckles, their fat hands at once twisting arms and legs quickly out of sockets, wrenching heads off flexing necks, yanking whole spinal columns out of stretched open mouths. Fire gushes in the distance, greasy black smoke pours from cracks and rabbets in the vale's stone face. Stout pinkies calmly squash eyeballs in howling faces; ears, noses, lips, and fingers are bitten off and nibbled as tidbits. Talons swipe to lay open bellies, misshapen fists are thrust into rectums through which innards are extricated like tissue paper from a gift box. The ushers grunt and chuckle, plodding on, popping heads with malformed feet, inhaling blood, holding faces steadfastly down to drown in the tarn of bubbling shit whence they came, all in the name of Satan.And one more–
4) The monstrous: for no other word can be better suited–yes–a monster, in overalls, with bunched muscles, and seeming to be sucking the feces out of the anus of nude woman with a crushed head. Closer dream-scrutiny suggests that the woman’s brains have been eaten out of the cranium, just as her waste was now being eaten out of her bowels. The monster rubs its crotch in some disconnected excitement; the erection which prints though the overalls is as big as a rolling-pin. When the last of its meal has been sucked down, it looks to the sky with a grin, as if giving thanks to some deity for the bounty of food it has just enjoyed.Its head is the size of a large watermelon, but warped; one eye huge, the other tiny.
Yes, these were the dreams I experienced nightly, these and further images and scenarios much worse. What could have happened to me in the past, or what could I have seen, that would cause such a tableau atrocities to brew and ferment in my subconscious?
I had nothing else to do than endeavor to find out.
But where to start?
The query took me back to that one sheet of paper found in the typewriter twenty-odd years ago. My inclination was that it was the first page of a novel. I knew now that I was a novelist. Therefore?
I must write the rest of the book.
I sensed with certainty that if I finished the book, my life’s memories would come back to me, and all my questions would be answered. What made me feel this way? I have no conscious clue. Perhaps it was a whisper from the ether, a sign from Dante’s Sisters of the Heavenly Spring. Or perhaps it was just bullshit concocted by an insane mind.
Oh, I forgot to mention one thing. That single page in the typewriter? It had a title at the top: WHITE TRASH GOTHIC.
EDWARD LEE is the author of almost fifty novels and numerous short stories and novellas. Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, Japan, Russia, France and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, andHaunter of the Threshold. You can visit Edward Lee at http://www.edwardleeonline.com/
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