In his younger days, my husband was part of a successful Death Metal band in the UK, and in recalling some of their more prevalent creative arguments, introduced me to the term ‘Blood all over the place.’ It was a catchphrase to describe a certain type of lyrical suggestion offered repeatedly by band members who favored torn carcasses and graphically horrific descriptions of doom, whether or not they made any sense or fit into the song in question.

While never in the music business, I could certainly relate to the term in reference to horror writing. I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet when everyone was a horror writer, and flaming skulls graced the doomy black web pages of a thousand zines, each claiming to be the darkest lair of hair-raising fiction. Every writer, it seemed, was competing to conjure the grossest images of depravity. Dead babies hung from trees in apocalyptic settings, people were skinned alive, tortured, decapitated, and often with graphic sexual undertones.

A horror writer I know once referred to this as the ‘and then his dick exploded’ brand of fiction, a literary equivalent to Death Metal’s ‘Blood all over the place.’

I’d like to say I was immune to this tactic, but found myself getting sucked in after multiple rejections telling me my stories were ‘too fantasy’ or ‘too Twilight Zone’ or ‘too humorous.’ I raged at the injustice. I had no elves or swords in my stories! They were paranormal and clever and weird, what more did these people want?

A horror anthology came along that everyone wanted to get into. They wanted dark gruesome stories set to some satanic theme or other, and everyone in my little tribe of writer friends was submitting. This was it, I decided, I’m gonna show’em what’s what! I crafted a tale of dark and dirty deeds, Hell demons and doom I was sure would rival the best of the ‘and then his dick exploded’ entries. I’m so very bad, I thought. Lock up your children, I’m pure evil!

I showed the story to an editor friend who’d published a lot of my previous work, and happened to like my style, before I was confident enough to realize I was developing ‘a style.’ He wrote me back with an unenthusiastic pat on the head and said the story was ‘okay.’ I was baffled, as he usually loved my stuff. So I nagged him for more details.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “This story is not you. You’re trying to write like someone else, and it doesn’t work.”

Well crap, I thought. I’d branded myself a horror writer, and I couldn’t cut the mustard no matter how many rotting demons I summoned. So I sought to challenge my badness in another way. I was selling a lot of nonfiction at the time, a venue that didn’t require exploding dicks so much as an analysis of strange events. So when a friend who worked in the environmental cleanup business told me about a particularly bone chilling job, I decided to investigate and write about it. I would explore the horror of reality, confident that I could handle the transition and blend these two passions into a unique and powerful article. It was a terrible mistake.

The event in question was the suicide of a young man who’d sat on the train tracks one night and waited for death to come. The engineer described seeing the man at the last minute, sitting cross-legged with his middle finger up – a final fuck you to the world. How romantic, I thought.

But no. My mind, I realized, was reacting like this was fiction. And this railroad engineer, though experienced in the realism of the event, was telling it as such, as if it was some ghost story to be dramatized in a hushed voice by a flickering campfire. But it was not such a tale. It was real.

I dismissed the engineer, wanting to move deeper into the realism, past my image of that mysterious lover of death with his middle finger raised to meet his maker. But as I interviewed the supervisor of the environmental cleanup team, the real mortality began. The shattered pieces of this victim’s life, however poetic, were for his friends and family to concern themselves with. It was the shattered pieces of his body that I’d doomed myself to learn about. And in that capacity, I learned this death was far less romantic.

“Bio-haz cleanups are usually voluntary assignments, unless we’re shorthanded for some reason. We’ve found it’s not wise to force the assignment on guys that don’t feel comfortable with it,” the supervisor said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He laughed. “These guys are used to cleaning up oil, gasoline and chemicals. You can’t just toss anyone into a zone strewn with body parts and expect them to perform. If you’ve ever seen a guy vomit into his respirator, well, that can be a worse sight than a splatter of intestines scraped off of a rock.”

I begged to differ on that account, but then who the hell was I but a pampered horror fan? I was still picturing a brilliant red spray of blood, spider-webbed Tom Savini style across a neighboring oak tree. I imagined a dislodged eyeball resting decoratively in a nest of crab grass. Judging by the description I was given, I wasn’t too far off the mark.

Save for the smell, and the insects.

“Sure, the stench can be bad if the cleanup happens in the summer, like this one did. But it has its advantages too. The medical crew comes in first and takes whatever whole pieces of the body they can find; torso, limbs, if there’s anything left. It’s our job to clean up what remains after that; tissue, bodily fluids, tiny parts. That’s where the bees are helpful. The bees are attracted to the blood. There was a whole swarm of them buzzing around this one pile of stones near the tracks. So we shooed them away and dug down a bit, and sure enough, there was a finger in there. We would have missed it otherwise.”

I started feeling queasy, and embarrassed that I planned to sell this piece to a horror magazine. The supervisor rambled on about sterilization, bleach solution, tear resistant Tyvek coveralls and three pairs of gloves on each hand. He spoke of approximations of the region around the body’s initial landing, safety goggles to prevent eye contamination, and respirators over the mouth to avoid accidental ingestion of small body parts or kicked up fluids.

“Yeah, we see identifiable parts, but you try not to think of it that way,” he told me. “Doesn’t matter if you’re using your tongs to pick up an eyeball, a piece of brain, or just a lump of tissue. It all goes into the red bio-haz bags and gets sealed up. You can’t think of it as human. It’s all just waste in the end.”
The professionals had become desensitized to the carnage. How they achieved this indifference is hard to say, and likely catered to their individual mindsets. In the film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz tells us to make a friend of horror, lest it become an enemy to be feared. Could this be what we seek as we expose ourselves to carnage through the filtered lens of the movie director, or the pages of our beloved novels?

Perhaps. And why shouldn’t we? After all, our version is far preferable to that other world, that real world, where life ends in a pile of sealed bags routed for a medical waste facility. In the world of reality, our death is a contaminant to be scraped off of a tree. In our blessed fantasy world, death can be reversed, zombies raised, immortality traded for monstrosity.

The assignment transitioned me back to horror fiction, but not in the capacity I expected. It’s no wonder we prefer to romanticize death. In our coveted fiction universe, blood conducts magical rites, vampirism, opens doors to new dimensions. In the world of reality, blood spawns little more than disease. So has our filtered fiction lens made us a friend of horror, as powerfully cold as the fictional Colonel Kurtz?

Probably not, if we had to use such skills in the real world. Would I be the one to vomit into my respirator if forced to pick decapitated fingers out of gravel? Likely.

And so failing to find my dark side in either fiction or nonfiction, I accepted that I’m not cut out to be hardcore. But as my editor friend so bluntly said, it was never really me to begin with. I’m comfortable now with my quirky, humorous, semi-fantasy Twilight Zone style of writing, and my nonfiction work can be as banal as an interview with a local dog trainer.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t still read horror, and I admit to enjoying the occasional ‘and then his dick exploded’ story. But I keep my filters well in place, and wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a horror fan’s reality, where blood is pretty, bodily fluids are magic, and true death is always optional.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

Adrienne Jones is a talented writer. She’s got a sharp sense of humor that makes her fiction wild, memorable rides. Mundania Press recently published her first novel (The Hoax). Adrienne followed that with Gypsies Stole My Tequila from Necro Publications. Apex fans will recognize Adrienne for her Apex Digest Online column, Atomic Rubble, and her Gratia Placenti contribution, “Party Makers.” Now her latest book, brine, brings back one of her most popular works (“Temple of Cod”) and expands on the original with two new sections to form a novel length work.

Jason Sizemore: Hi Adrienne! Thank you for taking time to do this interview.

Adrienne Jones: Why thank you, Jason. Thank you for taking the time to pick my brain once again.

JS: Tell us a bit about brine.

AJ: Brine is a ghost story. I almost laugh at this simplification, but at the end of the day that’s what it is. It’s the story of a painter, Elliot Newton, who although successful, can
only paint lighthouses. When he tries to paint anything else, he becomes paralyzed with fear. After being dumped by his girlfriend, he decides to get to the bottom of his phobia, and moves into his grandfather’s cottage by the sea–where yes indeed, there is a lighthouse. After getting good and

brine by Adrienne Jones

liquored up, he forces himself to paint something unique, something other than the lighthouse seascape he’s famous for. This unleashes bizarre manifestations that taunt him in outrageous ways, assuring that until he solves their riddle he’ll not be rid of them. After I wrote the first third of Brine four years ago, and published it as the chapbook Temple of Cod, my publisher and I both received emails asking for a continuation of the story. I’d never considered expanding on Temple of Cod, but after bashing my head onto the desk trying to come up with sequels, it dawned on me that the mystery wasn’t quite finished. I’d answered the what but not fully explored the why. Brine answers all those questions, and introduces the reader to some of the wildest characters they’ll ever see in a ghost story. The novel includes Temple of Cod as part one, with two parts added of equal length–Part Two: Shell Shock and Part Three: The Sand Witch.

JS: Sounds interesting, yes. I’ve got a signed copy of the original release of Temple of Cod. Can you assuage my fears of it losing value with this greedy new release of ToC? I was going to sell it ten years from now and use the money to finance my children’s college education.

AJ: Yes indeed. It also has the power to solve world hunger and disease, and possesses the secrets of dark matter in the universe. Encourage all your friends to buy now.

JS: I won’t lie. I haven’t read Shell Shock and The Sandwich. Are they as weird and delightfully disgusting as Temple of Cod?

AJ: It’s The SAND Witch Jason, The SAND Witch! Yes, they are possibly even more fun. I do want to stress that these aren’t three separate stories. Although it’s divided into three parts, it reads like a novel, the continuing sage of Elliot Newton and his paranormal afflictions. Unlike the first segment, which is told completely from Elliot’s perspective, we get to enter other characters’ POVs in the rest of the novel. I hope readers will have as much fun with the new characters as I had writing them, it’s a wild ride with many new and delightfully charming mutants.

JS: That does sound interesting. Now why brine and not Brine? Are you comparing your talents to those of e.e. cummings?

AJ: Well his ancestry and mine are oddly linked with the whole Cambridge/Harvard thing, but to the best of my knowledge he never wrote a poem about fish people. The lower case b in the cover title was a design decision by my publisher Pete Allen, who I trust implicitly. I originally nicknamed him ‘The Font Master’ but have since upgraded his status to ‘Little Lord Fontleroy’ which he likes much better.

JS: Sounds like you and your publisher might be playing some “parlour” games. As your publisher, I am offended by our lack of “parlour” games. At least give me a cute nickname.

AJ: How about Jason Tries-more? Or perhaps Jason Lies-more? You are a writer after all. At the end of the

The Hoax by Adrienne Jones

day we’re little more than professional liars.

JS: Adrienne, you are so clever! And it’s a talent that crosses over into your writing. Does brine showcase your dark sense of humor?

Gypsies Stole My Tequila by Adrienne Jones

AJ: Brine definitely has a lot of humor in it, although it’s less of an all out comedy than Gypsies Stole my Tequila or some of my other stuff. It’s not that there’s less humor, it’s just much darker. The humor is weaved into a very horrific and often emotionally jarring mystery (as most ghost stories are). What I did with this one is create more situational humor by way of things like thrusting ancient beings into the modern world, forcing a cultured, respectable doctor into a strangely primitive form, and taking a journalist that usually reports on banalities such as Cape Cod craft fairs and having her fall into this dark and dirty secret beneath the lighthouse. I suppose the story itself is a mutant hybrid, but I guess that’s what black comedy is.

JS: Now that we have the readers salivating for some brine, where is the best place to get the book?

AJ: Brine is available at all the major booksellers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or support the genre clans by buying from The Horror Mall or direct from Creative Guy Publishing. There are still some limited edition hardcovers left, signed and numbered by my little self, and those must be
ordered from Creative Guy. I’m pleased with the way the book turned out, and the artwork (done by Travis Ingram) looks fabulous on both the hardcover and the paperback.

JS: Wrong. The best place is to order it from the Apex aStore so that we get an affiliate bonus!

But I say to fans of dark humor, no matter where you decide to buy brine, just make sure you buy it!

Thank you, Adrienne, for your time. Do come back to play again sometime.

Get a copy of brine from the Apex aStore.
Get a copy of The Hoax from the Apex aStore.
Get a copy of Gypsies Stole My Tequila from the Apex aStore.

Jason Sizemore is the publisher and editor-in-chief of all things Apex. During his free time he writes weird fiction that can be tracked down from his personal website at http://www.jbsizemore.com. If you’d like a chapbook of his fiction, Webs of Discord can be bought from the Apex Shop.

I dreamed one night that my sister had adopted a skeletal chicken as a pet. It was a creepy little thing, naturally, but she would smile maternally as it skittered around on its little skeletal feet, clacking its wings. “Isn’t he cute? His name is Butterscotch!”

He wasn’t cute, but I woke up intrigued as always by the subconscious mind, thinking Eureka! I’ll write a story about a skeletal chicken called Butterscotch. But before thinking about opening a crisp white word document, I went to Google. Why? Because that’s what writers have to do now when they get an idea, especially in the horror and paranormal genres, where this byline repeats like a metronome…it’s all been done…it’s all been done…it’s all been done.

This mantra divides writers into two teams. The first team insists established themes should be avoided at all costs; no ghosts, vampires, aliens, possessed children and the like. The second team takes the more optimistic it’s not the subject, but what you do with it that makes it original stance. They’re both right. The bummer comes when you think you’ve carved out an original idea, only to find out after the story’s published that someone else had the same original thought (usually Stephen King). This is why I had to Google a damned skeletal chicken while drinking my morning coffee. For all I knew there was an entire underground genre for skeletal chickens I just wasn’t hip to yet.

Of course some enjoy repeatedly reading a certain theme, evidenced by the row of mass market mystery thrillers in your local drug store. We’ve all made a stop on the way to the beach when the library or the local Borders was too much of a pain in the ass, and we needed some fast food entertainment. I did this recently, scouring the back cover blurbs of one paperback after another. Beautiful women are being murdered, the first one told me. A serial killer is targeting beautiful young girls, said the second. When the mutilated bodies of beautiful women start washing up on the shore… And so on down the line. Damn, aren’t ugly people worthy of killing anymore?

But I suppose every genre has a limited pool to choose from. In the past year I’ve read three women’s fiction novels about a gal who returns home for a family emergency only to discover the real problem is her own sheltered life, until a mysterious stranger awakens her spirit, and her vagina. So why do paranormal writers agonize so much over originality?

Perhaps it’s because the paranormal is so unlimited…in theory anyway. We don’t have to pick from a grab bag of beautiful dead women or eccentric yet wise old neighbors if we don’t want to. We can make new creatures and concepts, outrageous ideas unlimited by the confines of reality. Or we can explore the angle Hitchcock and Stephen King use so well; familiarity gone awry. Take something normal and comfortable like birds or cars and twist it into a unique shape to form a novel idea.

Butterscotch?

But the challenge is part of the lure of writing, isn’t it? And those rare occasions that we’re sure our imaginations have stumbled on something fresh, and we’ve successfully researched the archives of skeletal chicken literature and found no like minded stories, we relax a bit, and open that crisp white word document. And struggle to block out the voice that tells us someone on the other side of the globe has plucked the thought from our mind, and is writing their skeletal chicken story even as we peck.

But at the very least, we can try to get there first. Now if you’ll excuse me, Butterscotch is waiting.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

Strange books. Books bound in human skin. Books signed in menstrual blood (more on these two later). Books embellished with gold and precious stones – strange books are a collector’s delight, and never more so than in the realm of science fiction, a genre that had made specialist presses a cornerstone of its existence, and which attracts collectors like flies to a particularly gory, succulent corpse. I should know. I’m one of them.

The following three books are each a unique work of bizarre art and collectors’ lore. They are rare, precious, and somewhat strange. I have never seen them in the flesh. Each is a holy grail to a band of questing collectors. Feast your eyes, then on–

Self-Destructing Poetry: William Gibson’s Agrippa

William Gibson is the author of Neuromancer, one of the most influential science fiction novels ever written. The true first edition was a US paperback. The first hardcover – and the most coveted edition therefore – was the UK edition published by Gollancz. The closest I’ve come to owning one is the tenth anniversary edition published in the UK by HarperCollins. It’s inscribed by Gibson, but otherwise it’s not particularly valuable, except to me. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead is a poem written by Gibson following his father’s death. The full text is currently available on Gibson’s web site. Now…

Agrippa was published in a book – or rather, artefact – published by Kevin Begos in New York and designed by artist Dennis Ashbaugh, featuring copperplate aquatint etchings and pages of DNA sequences set in double columns, the whole thing coming in a bronze box. By all accounts it is the epitome of minimalism and restraint. What makes it interesting beyond its art-object nature is the centrepiece, if you will, of the whole thing: Gibson’s poem, which came on a – supposedly – self-destructing computer floppy-disk. The disk, or the software, was designed to display the poem only once, each page being erased as it was read. Whether it worked or not is open to debate. The text found its way onto the Internet (which seems rather fitting) while this fabulously rare, bizarre collectors’ item continues to exist mainly in story form. Gibson himself, on his web site, says, “Today, there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself…”

Reading This Book Will Give You Cancer: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury is one of America’s most famous writers of the fantastic. Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Firemen in a future America, men whose job is to prevent people reading books by burning them – this was before television did the job all by itself. To commemorate publication, Bradbury’s publishers, Ballantine Books, had a limited number of copies bound in – yup, it was asbestos. Thus, a book about burning books

was itself impervious to fire, and a collecting legend was born. (And if you thought television gives you cancer, try reading this one!) About 200 copies were made, numbered and signed by Bradbury. A recent copy put on auction had an estimate of $12,000-$15000. If you can afford it, by all means get one – just don’t roof your house with it…

Raising the Stakes, Playing for Keeps: Tim Powers’ Last Call

One of my favourite books, this one. I’m a big Powers fan (I’ll talk more about that in a future column) and this unique edition, published by American Charnel House, is a wonderful example of bizarre book-binding. Last Call is the story of card player, Scott Crane, the supernatural history of Las Vegas, and a very odd poker

game. The Charnel House edition, which came out in a lettered edition of just 26 copies, has – I kid you not – end-leaves made of uncut sheets of one dollar bills, a limitation sheet made of uncut two dollar bills, while the front board is embedded with an actual tarot card and two poker chips from the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. There was also a less fanciful limited edition of 350 copies. Prices for the lettered edition, of course, have risen steadily ever since publication. Last I looked (a few years ago) it was around $6000. Who knows what it is now?

So there you have it. Three books to give collectors haunted eyes and sleepless nights. A self-destructing book, an indestructible book, and a book actually made of money. But of course, the greatest, and perhaps the most bizarre, story of a modern binding is that of the Titanic Omar, and I did promise to tell you about that one…

But maybe next time.

END

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.

Five weeks into this APEX DIGEST ONLINE business, I’ve had some people say to me: Sizemore, what’s the game plan?

It’s a bit confusing, but there is a method behind the madness. It goes like this…

Every other week we run a new story. These stories abide by the submission guidelines outlined on our website. Essentially, these are stories you might have found in the print version of Apex Digest. For these, we pay five cents per word. Anybody can submit their work.

On the weeks we don’t run a new story, we run one or more reprints. The reprints aren’t bound by the rules of the online submission guidelines in that they aren’t required to be dark SF. They can be dark fantasy, horror, or SF. Or a combination of those three. Usually the reprint will accompany an interview of that story’s author. And quite often, these authors will be writers within the Apex roster of talent. For instance, last week we published an interview and stories by Wrath James White and Maurice Broaddus. I’m a firm believer in “synergy.”

Most of our reprints are solicited.

I’d like to point out that the new, original stories aren’t bound by anything more than our submission guidelines. We give Random Joan’s submission the same level of attention somebody like Jennifer Pelland might receive.

Another aspect of the game plan has to do with generating web traffic via the short fiction, non-fiction, and other features. This web traffic is supposed to turn into added book sales on the website. The goal is that the additional booksales will support the online content. I am hoping they feed off of each other and both grows and grows!

So I ask from the bottom of my heart to not be shy when looking at some of our excellent book titles.

Finally, articles by Lavie, Adrienne, and myself will be on a near-weekly status. Every week we will feature a Popped Culture comic from Justin. We’re always open to non-fiction proposals.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first month of Apex Digest Online (ADO). Let’s keep that momentum rolling!

END

Jason Sizemore is the publisher and editor-in-chief of all things Apex. During his free time he writes weird fiction that can be tracked down from his personal website at http://www.jbsizemore.com. If you’d like a chapbook of his fiction, Webs of Discord can be bought from the Apex Shop.

Kids who grew up in the 70s were blessed by an abundance of original sci-fi creations, as well as a backwash of reruns from the postwar 50s and 60s when fantasy themes reigned as a tool for taking people’s minds off the reality outside their living rooms. Science fiction dominated our Sunday afternoon viewing, and while our parents might have been placated by the sight of poorly costumed monsters and a boom microphone hanging in the shot, these shows weren’t without a tasty dose of trauma for our innocent yet eager young minds. I couldn’t have been more than a tot when I watched the green giant from War of the Gargantuas hungrily chomp down a screaming woman then spit her bloody dress onto the ground like a discarded peanut shell.

But our revulsions weren’t the only formative stirrings of this impressionable time, before cultural taboos taught us that beings made of fur and scales and slabs of celluloid were inappropriate romantic interests. We were developing our first crushes, and most who delve deep enough will admit that their first loves weren’t spawned on the school playground or at summer camp. They were the likes of Judy Jetson and Flash Gordon and Herman Munster. Okay, maybe not Herman Munster, but mine were just as questionable and twice as disturbing. And so I give you my top five inappropriate childhood crushes from the world of science fiction:

Number Five: Cornelius/Caesar from Planet of the Apes

Okay, I know Cornelius and Caesar were technically two different characters, but anyone would be hard pressed to discern between them from a performance standpoint. Both were played by Roddy McDowall, and the variation came only in the plot timeline of one being the father, the other being the son. But oh, when we first met Cornelius…his deep, smoldering brown eyes beneath that Cro-Magnon cliff of a forehead, such a contrast to his cultured vocal delivery and sickly sweet, inherent goodness. An ape with a British accent and a heart of gold, we loved him even more as the messianic Caesar who led the revolt in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. We got chills when he threw down that mop in the town square, mad as hell and not gonna ape it anymore! I would have followed him into battle, and carried his mop to boot.

Number Four: Mr. Spock

While certainly not alone in my Spock crush, I was grossly outnumbered by the little girls swooning over Kirk in his tight green leotard shirt. But I had no interest in the green shirt. I wanted the green blood. The pointed ears, the cocked eyebrow, Spock was the perfect training ground for girls who would grow up to date a series of cold-blooded, emotionally unavailable men. Sure he was the ultimate challenge, but secretly we convinced ourselves we’d be the one woman that could mind meld ourselves in touch with his human side and reap the benefits of those dexterous, nerve pinching fingers.

Number Three: Enik from Land of the Lost

The thinking girls Sleestak, Enik was one of the original Altrusian inhabitants from before their civilization’s fall. With his divining rod and bracelet of magical crystals, he was an intellectually advanced creature, feared by the postwar, evil Sleestaks. Not only was he multi-dimensional, he wore a stunning red blouse which added a comfort level for those of us made squeamish by the unabashed nudity of the other lizard men.

Number Two: The Brown Gargantua

Antitheses to his fearsome, human eating green brother, this strapping giant from War of the Gargantuas had a hero quality defined by his love of humanity and his less slimy, blow-dried blond fur. While he shared the same ferocious pointed teeth of his green counterpart, his eyes had a gentle, sleepy quality under a swoop of blond mane that gave him a mutant Shaun Cassidy air. He was big and powerful like his brother, but he was on our side, as proven when he finds the slimy green giant contentedly napping amidst a pool of blood from the humans he’d been snacking on. Our beloved brown gargantua does what any noble creature would do, and commences beating our evil adversary with a tree. That’s hot.

Number One: The Great Gazoo

Okay, this is the embarrassing one, but what can I say. I’ve always had a thing for short men with a great sense of humor. I loved The Flintstones, but even as a kid I sometimes found Fred and Barney’s innate stupidity tiresome, so I was always thrilled when Gazoo came around to smack them up a bit. He was exiled from his home planet for creating a doomsday machine, so he’s got the bad boy quality going for him, but since he never actually pushes the button, we give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s a pretty good guy underneath it all. Brilliant, ambitious and out of this world, Gazoo is without a doubt the most eligible bachelor in the Hanna-Barbera universe, and he’d be a hell of a fun date if he ever gets that flying saucer running again.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

There is, on the Internet, a message board dedicated to people who read and write horror fiction. It is an enthusiastic, lively and passionate online community, and I tend to read it occasionally. Many of the conversations – slash debates – slash anarchic flame-wars that take place there are about Horror, with a capital H. When will Horror come back? Why did it go away? Is there a Horror renaissance? What is Horror? Do you care about Horror as much as I do? No you don’t. Yes I do. No you don’t. Yeah? Yeah! You wanna take it outside? Let’s go!

And there is much about the assertion of identity – “I am a Horror writer,” or, “I am a Horror reader,” — that I think is worth talking about, just a little.

Horror, as a commercial genre, has a long history and, like all commercial publishing trends, had come and gone like the tide, receding past the shoreline only to rise again with the full moon. In collecting terms, it is no worse or better than collecting railway manuals, first editions of Booker Prize winners, or books about bullfighting. Collectors are amazingly democratic, even that collector of crime first editions in one of Simon Brett’s novels who shows his extensive library to the detective, the drunken, often-out-of-work actor Charles Paris, only to remark, with a slight upwards turn of the nose, “Of course, I don’t read them.”

But what I think is worth thinking about – just a little, perhaps – is that assertion above, that singular self-definition that seems, from my occasional visitor perspective, to dominate the online discussions: “I am a Horror writer. I am a Horror reader.”

Shaggy Ink Cap Mushroom

The best comparison I can think of is of a mushroom-fancier. “I only gather closed-cup mushrooms,” he says, and can cite numerous references to classic closed-cup mushroom studies, famous monographs on the subject and vital statistics related to the closed-cup mushroom. He might have a collection of closed-cup mushrooms-related paintings or photos hanging in his studies. He might go on trips overseas to the famous hunting-grounds of the closed-cup mushroom, where closed-cup mushroom recipes are swapped and closed-cup mushroom calendars are available to buy, with Miss December being a particularly large and juicy closed-cup mushroom. “I am a closed-cup mushroom collector,” he says, and looks at you with a defiant, half-challenging expression on his face.

But what about porcini? Chanterelle? Oyster mushrooms? Truffles? Shitake? Magic mushrooms?

“No,” he says. “I like closed-cup mushrooms.”

An unvaried diet need not be a bad one. But who wouldn’t want to taste some other foods sometimes? What about pasta marinara, pan-au-chocolat, steamed watermelon, falafel, borscht, or pad thai?

“Do they have closed-cup mushrooms in them?”

I like a bit of horror. I also like science fiction, fantasy, weird westerns, biblio-mysteries, thrillers, crime in all its variations, all and every kind of non-fiction, and the books that get tagged as merely ‘fiction’, or sometimes, to distinguish them from the barbarian hordes of genre, ‘literary fiction’. I like poetry, history, adventure, children’s books, picture books, dirty books, memoirs, the occasional chick-lit, diaries, and nearly everything else with the exception, I admit, of travel books. I have a blind-spot there, but that’s due to the fact I like to travel and prefer gathering (somewhat like mushrooms) my own experiences rather than read those of others. I had a lecturer at university who was tremendously passionate about travel books. Did her PhD on them. It takes, as the English say, all sorts to make a world.

As a reader, I read everything. I have my preferences, as we all do, but although I’ am happy to describe myself as a science fiction fan, for instance (and I have been known to go into Fan Mode on occasion, an uncontrollable and generally mortifying experience), I am equally happy to describe myself as a fan of a number of other types of books. As a collector, I collected signed science fiction first editions. I collected

my favourite crime writers. I collected books about the explorer and missionary, David Livingstone (on which more in a subsequent column). I collected Strange Books – a book on steam engines, a book on electric shock therapy from the nineteenth century (highly popular at the time), a book with odd

David Livingstone

people’s names (Thomas Crapper et al), and various others. I collected books about collecting. I collectedbooks about writing. I collected Israeli children’s books, and twentieth century English poetry, and books by or about Lewis Carroll, and old atlases, and books about witchcraft and UFOs and Atlantis, and books about astrophysics, and books of lists, and cookery books, and and, and, and… at some point I even collected encyclopaedias.

“The horror! The horror!” Kurtz says at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and dies. For me, the real horror – the real Horror – would be to limit myself, as reader or writer, to one thing. To eat, in other words, just the one kind of mushroom. There are so many flavours out there, and I want to taste them all.

The room is full of seated people. Many smoke nervously. There are cups of strong black coffee everywhere. I stand up. “My name is Lavie,” I say, and everyone murmurs, “Hello.” A woman in the circle flashes me a quick smile. Her eyes are compassionate. You can do it, she seems to say.

I gather my courage and continue.

“My name is Lavie,” I say again, and it feels good to finally say it out loud. “And I am a book junkie.”

END

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.

Folks, do you know how scary Apex slush can be?

I’m not going to go into the typical editorial gripes about amateurish writing, unprofessional cover letters, and idiots not following guidelines (god, but I’d like to!). Instead, I want to open a discussion about the stories that we read–their plots, their characters, and their settings.

After 3.5 years of reading Apex slush…thousands of stories…I’m convinced that the “institution” of marriage is the base causation of all the world’s evils. Marriage creates so many dynamics of hate that it gets hard to track.

One popular marriage-hate archetype we receive is the “make it all end” fantasy. This starts with the protagonist waking in bed and thinking: “Fuck, here I awake in this same bed and realize I’m still married to the same fucking loser.” These are a riot. Almost always cigarettes are smoked, the wife/husband list of flaws is provided, and then the protagonist goes off to some boring job. Something happens, pushing the protagonist into a murderous rage, and essentially resets his/her life either by going to jail, committing suicide, or making off to another location.

There’s also the popular “revenge” fantasy. These are not always murderous, but mostly are. The spouse will do something that pushes the protagonist into a rage, that in turn, sets off a series of actions that culminate in the demise of the hated spouse. I have found that these stories typically contain the highest amount of visceral gore, as the writer pours his/her heart and soul into the execution and torture of their beloved.

I’ve had the opportunity to read about protagonists cheating on their spouses just because they can. Cheating in humilating ways, because twisting that knife in the back always jazzes your senses.

A disturbing archetype is the “it’s all your fucking fault” story where the protagonist uses his/her spouse as the fuel for their hate. If you hadn’t done this on our wedding day, then that wouldn’t have happened. These stories will involve the murder of extended family members.

While we’re at it, let’s include the “she/he don’t love me no more” stories.

I’m not laying judgment on people who might write to let off some steam. Hell, I’ve got my own “anti-marriage” short story that was published by Nocturnal Ooze in Nov. 07 and is now in reprinted in Webs of Discord. Writing it all down is sure better than acting it out!

If you’re a writer and thinking of submitting your anti-marriage piece to Apex, it will likely get rejected. Our editors are tired of them.

But the rest of you…if you’re dating or married to a writer, watch your back. Writers love to flex that old adage “Murder your darlings.”

END

Jason Sizemore is the publisher and editor-in-chief of all things Apex. During his free time he writes weird fiction that can be tracked down from his personal website at http://www.jbsizemore.com. If you’d like a chapbook of his fiction, Webs of Discord can be bought from the Apex Shop.

* Names have been changed to protect the urinaters, since ‘Andy’ threw a fit that I told the whole world he peed on the side of the road. Some people are so touchy. *

It’s been several years now since my buddy Andy told me about the homemade shack he’d seen in the woods. We were heading up to New Hampshire so he could visit a specialty motorcycle shop, and I was along for the ride. It was a sunny day and I had the window down as we cruised along a stretch of highway, scenically lacking in civilization.  The road was lined on either side with a canopy of plush trees, full with summer leaves.

Andy pointed at the passing wall of wooded green. “You can’t see it because it’s further up in the woods,” he said, “but some guy built a weird little shack out there. I think he lives in it.”

I was sure he was full of crap. It wouldn’t have been the first time. He once tried to convince me he’d discovered a mummy in the basement of his college dorm, which miraculously ended up being a long lost relative of his. So needless to say, I believed very little of what Andy told me. But this turned out to be one of those rare, “boy who cried wolf” times that he was actually serious.

He claimed he’d stopped for an ‘emergency piss’ and wandered into the woods for fear he’d be spotted by a passing cop, then stumbled upon a homemade shack made from wood scraps and plastic bags. Curiosity getting the better of him, he crawled inside the little hut to look around, where he found remains of a recently consumed meal, a tiny gas heater, items of men’s clothing and a candle. Now I’m not sure that this next part wasn’t added to give the story dramatic suspense, but he claimed the inside of the hut was warm, like the tiny heater had been recently active. So he left, scared of being discovered by whatever vagrant occupied the little shamble.

I dismissed the story with a “yeah, okay, whatever,” thinking the mystery shack concocted less of cardboard and more of Andy’s imagination. Until three weeks later when I got a frantic phone call from Andy in his car.

“You’re not going to believe this. I’m with Mark. We were going up to the bike shop to return some stuff, so I stopped to show him the shack. The guy is there!”

“What guy?” I asked.

“The guy!” he said. “The man in the box.”

The man in the box. That did it. My writer’s brain saw those five words printed on a title page, and I cursed, knowing I was about to jump off another cliff after my friend, and probably land in a big pile of shit.

“Is he homeless? Is he weird? How old is he? Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“No idea,” Andy said. “We were on our way through the trees when I saw him crawl inside. He looked a little dirty, but pretty normal.”

“Did he see you guys?”

“I don’t think so. We turned around and came back to the car. I just had to tell you.”

“Stay there, I’m coming up,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“Because I want to talk to that guy, and I’m not going up there alone.”

After a few minutes of bitching that he had things to do that day, Andy finally agreed to stay there with Mark until I arrived. I grabbed my little tape recorder, praying the man in the box would still be there when I arrived—and that he wasn’t a crazed psychopath who wanted to make a lamp out of my uterus. But just in case, I grabbed my pepper spray on the way out the door.

When the three of us approached the shack, we weren’t sure if the man was inside. I knew we’d find out soon enough, as our approach was not quiet. In their nervousness, Mark and Andy giggled, and in my nervousness, I repeatedly whispered for them to “SHUT UP!”

Then, just as I’d suspected, the man stepped out of the shack to see what the racket was. His clothing was standard camp wear, canvas pants, boots, and a T-shirt. His hair was short, corporate styled despite a layer of dust.

But something wasn’t right about him…something about his eyes. They were rimmed red and glazed, like he was having trouble focusing. If he were a cartoon, he would have had those little spirals circling around his pupils.

“Hello,” Andy said, still muffling giggles.

“You’re trespassing,” the man said. His voice was firm, yet calm. “I know there aren’t any signs posted, but this is my property. It runs back four acres from that point over there.” He pointed to some unmarked spot back the way we came.

I tried to assess his age and came in somewhere around forty. He was well spoken, but seemed disoriented. I suppose he hadn’t been expecting company. For all he knew, we were the ones wanting to make balloon animals out of his flesh.

Andy went into diplomacy mode, explaining that we meant no harm, and how he’d stumbled across the shack in the past, and was merely curious about it.

The man glanced back at his little structure then looked at us.

“What were you doing up here?” he asked.

Andy told him he’d stopped off the road to relieve himself. The man stared off in the direction of the roadway, his face pinched. “I hate to have to put signs up,” he grumbled. “It ruins the beauty of the land to post signs everywhere, but if people are going to just start walking up from the road…”

Andy apologized and told the man that we were just leaving. I wanted to kick him. The guy turned to crawl back into his shack. I wasn’t having it.

“Do you live in there?” I asked.

He paused. “Of course not. I own an old colonial about a mile off. This is just a project.”

“What kind of project?” I pushed.

Andy and Mark stood behind me, waiting to see if I was going to send the stranger into a rage with my probing questions. But the guy grinned.

“Well, I could explain it, but you wouldn’t understand. It’ll sound nuts.”

He’d said the magic words. I knew insanity had to come into this eventually. A grown man who owned a big expensive house with acres of land did not sit around in a childishly built wood shack for any logical reason.

“Try me,” I said.

He made a second attempt to shoo us off his property. I pleaded, flashed my tape recorder and told him I was a writer, and that exploring unusual people was a bit of a hobby. I assured him I’d heard many a strange tale, and doubted anything he could tell me would shock. Andy and Mark backed me up, loyally offering that I too was a bit touched in the head. After several minutes of banter about my psychological state, the man in the box invited us in.

We each pulled up a dirty floorboard and sat in a semi-circle inside the dusty wooden scrap hut. The man introduced himself as Dale and said he owned his own business, which tended to produce a load of stress. Dale found stress affecting him in many ways; his temper, his personality, his relationships, and his health. He realized a few years back that he was all-consumed with running the business, and rarely thought of or did anything else. That’s when he started the shack project.

“I run my own business too,” Andy offered. “But I deal with stress by having a couple of beers when I get home.”

Dale smiled at Andy and shook his head, with that look people get when they’re about to drop pearls of wisdom on your naïve, unenlightened head.

Andy and I exchanged a glance. We both thought we knew where this was going. This Dale character had created a Thoreau style environment to bring him back to nature, combat the rat race and all that hippie bullshit. In essence we were right, but we were about to learn that Dale took the self-exploration to a whole other level.

“Beers at the end of the day,” Dale said, nodding. “If that works for you, cool. Me, I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy altering my consciousness by other means.”

A fat summer bug flew into the shack, smacked into the back wall and frantically buzzed around. Andy, Mark, and I barely glanced at it, but Dale got a strange, dopey grin.

“Beetle beetle beetle,” he said. “Get out of my house, beetle!”

I looked over at Mark, who raised a wary eyebrow.

Dale’s eyes followed the flight of the insect, entranced. “Beetle beetle beetle,” he repeated. “Why don’t you listen to me? You weren’t invited, beetle!”

I knew if Andy looked my way, I’d lose my composure, so I avoided his eyes. Instead, I looked directly at Dale.

He grinned. “Can you see that beetle? Because I’m on hour forty-seven. This is about the time I start hallucinating a little.”

I frowned. “Hour forty-seven. What does that mean?”

“Sleep deprivation. I come out to this shack once a year, when I feel myself getting to that point where work’s taken over my head. I spend three days out here with no sleep. Total deprivation. When I go back home, I sleep for a day or so, and then I go back to my life, a new man.”

I’d experienced the effects of sleep deprivation only once, and that was after a twenty-four hour stretch of partying after graduating high school. I’d had a few fleeting hallucinations that morning before I hit the sack. But this guy claimed to be on hour forty-seven with no sleep.

“Whoa,” Mark said. “Your brain must be whacked right now.”

Dale giggled. “Actually, it hasn’t fully kicked in yet. By nightfall I’ll be in the zone. By day three, I can barely think straight. I’m married, so my wife comes out to get me at the end of the third day, and walks me home. Otherwise who knows where I’d end up?”

“How do you keep yourself awake?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Will power. Lack of comforts. I just force myself to do it.”

Andy spoke up. “Now wait a minute. How does this purge you of stress? I don’t get it. Sleep deprivation makes me crankier.”

Sitting cross-legged, Dale turned his strange gaze on Andy. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“Then explain it,” I said, afraid the guy was going to clam up.

He looked around the shack. “Okay, there’s always a certain point, usually at hour fifty-five or so, when it starts to happen. It’s like everything out here, the trees, the bugs, the ground, it all starts talking to me.”

“Talking to you…” I repeated.

At that moment, Mark lost it. Frankly, I was amazed he’d held it together for as long as he did. Unlike Dale, Mark was no stranger to drugs, and had apparently smoked a joint on the ride up. I felt for him. I was barely keeping a straight face, and I was toxin-free.

Dale turned to Mark, who’d now sent Andy off into a fit of giggles. I was afraid Dale would be mad, but he laughed too. “Are you guys really here?” he asked, which set them off worse.

Sensing that we might be on the cusp of a fruity nut case breakthrough, I tried to lead Dale back to his original thought. “So you were saying these things in the woods talk to you.”

Dale grabbed a cardboard box, dragging it toward him. He pulled three tattered notebooks out. “I write it down. At least some of it. When I’m in that place where it all starts to speak, I write it down. I read it a week later, after I’ve slept and I’m back at work. I find messages in it. I know it sounds crazy, but reading this stuff later keeps things in focus.”

“So it’s the flow of your subconscious,” I said.

I thought my statement would validate Dale, let him know I understood and was hip to what he was doing. I was down with his sickness.

But the comment pissed him off. He frowned at me and pointed to the notebooks on his lap. “This is not some stream of consciousness that came from my brain. The bugs and the trees actually talk to me. Because I come out here and sacrifice my body and mind to the forest. This is my temple where I come to worship them. They understand that, so they share their wisdom with me.”

I bit my lip and nodded, afraid to even glance at my friends.

But then Andy leaned in to me. “I think he’s peaking.”

That was all it took. I let out a snorting laugh. Dale scowled. Sensing he was becoming irritated with us, I decided to wrap things up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what hour forty-eight would bring. He was loopy enough as it was.

“Thanks for talking to us, Dale. I really appreciate it.” I hit the rewind button on my little tape recorder.

Dale looked down at the device. “Hey, can I keep that tape? I’d love to have a recording of one of my trips. I’ve never done that before.”

I told him I needed the tape to reference direct quotes. He looked terribly disappointed so I made a deal with him. If he gave me a passage from one of his ‘in the zone’ notebooks, I’d send him a copy of my write up from our visit. At first he was reluctant. Finally, he agreed, and wrote his address on a small scrap of paper torn from the notebook. After another grueling fifteen minutes of perusing his notebooks for just the right passage, he tore out a hand-written page and gave it to me. “This was from day three, last year,” he said. “It was a magical night for sure.”

We left Dale to his deprivation. As far as the passage he gave me, all I can say is it must have been a magical evening indeed.

‘My poison in your veins, your blood in my mouth. Yes, yes yes. How could I be so dumb? Dumb and blind. Mosquito talking to me as he looks around my temple. Not a predator, a partner, a give and take, a trade, to get to know each other. He needed to give me his poison so I could know his mind, hear his thoughts, and he could speak to me. He needed to drink my blood so he could hear my thoughts, understand my words, and I could speak to him. We are connected now, the mosquito and I, his poison in my veins, my blood in his mouth. Bumpy bumpy lumpies on my skin from your poison kiss!’

Yeah. I doubt I’ll ever return to visit the man in the box, but if I do, I’m bringing Thorazine.  And a big can of Raid.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.

I was going to tell you about the Titanic Omar, but instead I got to thinking about the things Hollywood does to books, and about the forty-five-degree angle, and that led to my bath habits, and–

Let me explain. The forty-five-degree angle first. It’s quite simple. When you take a valuable book in your hands – imagine one of those large eighteenth-century leather-bound books, for instance, but this applies equally to a hyper-modern (as they are called) fantasy first edition – you must never open it at an angle greater than forty-five degrees. Anything over that level could potentially damage the spine or the binding. Simple.

Sounds anal? You bet your ass it does. But it’s also the only way to handle a book, which is to say, gently and with a lot of respect. Now, I know book dealers who, when you bring them books to sell, will immediately – I am not kidding – spread it wide open, with the kind of decisive, no-nonsense clinical approach, to see, as one told me, “Whether the binding was sound.” If the book croaks, they don’t buy it, and you might as well put the book out of its misery. Burn it, perhaps. Or bury it, which is an old Jewish custom (usually only applying to religious texts, alas). If, however, it holds strong (rather like Rambo when he was caught by the Viet Cong), they might consent to buy it. Graciously.

I hate those book dealers.

A person who values books would hold them carefully, rather like a baby, only more so. They might use gloves (human sweat damages books) to handle the book. And they would never open it wider than forty-five degrees. So talking about tender loving care naturally leads us to Hollywood, and how they handle books on screen.

The classic example of this kind is, perhaps, the movie The Ninth Gate, based on Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s best-selling novel, El Club Dumas. The Dumas Club (as the UK edition is called) is one of my favourite novels, a witty, literary novel about book collecting, the devil, and The Three Musketeers (another of my favourite books). As much as I love The Dumas Club, however, I’ve never been able to watch The Ninth Gate to the end, and there is a simple reason for it.

The Club Dumas, Random House

There is a scene, fairly early on, where Johnny Depp, who plays unscrupulous (as if there could be another kind! Ha!) book runner, Corso, is examining a book. It is a large, ancient, clearly valuable book. Depp’s method of examining the book is – in the no-nonsense-take-no-prisoners approach of the book dealer I previously mentioned (or, indeed, of Rambo) – to spread it open on the table at the full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

Ouch.

You could hear the book screaming from the last row of the theatre.

I could never watch past that point. The thought that a professional book dealer, an expert no less, could handle a book that way is preposterous. All suspension of disbelief leaves me at that moment.

Emmanuelle Seigner

Even Emmanuelle Seigner’s presence is not enough. I wonder how many aspiring book collectors had come out of the theatre, hormones charged, and went on to a literary murder spree of spine-breaking and mutilation. Texas Chainsaw Massacre? A Clockwork Orange? Platoon? They’ve got nothing on The Ninth Gate.

It might be worth terming this The Hollywood Butcher School of Book Handling, and it has some illustrious graduates, premier amongst them, Angelina Jolie, who does a good job of murdering hapless books in Tomb Raider, another case of someone-who-should-really-know-better. Never mind. Let Hollywood murder its set props. Just leave the real books alone.

But – real books? What is the point, you might (reasonably) ask, of a book you can’t open? Well, on that I am in complete agreement. What we have to understand is that book collecting is not always, or even often, or necessarily, about the contents of a book. A book, after all, can be read as an electronic file or, for that matter, written in crayon on the white walls of your bedroom (If your kids do that, should you ground them for life, or should you congratulate them on taking a stand on the open source model of book distribution and their courageous views on intellectual property rights? I know which I’d go for). To collect books, one must collect the physical object that is a book. And I’ll be talking about some rare and wonderful (and rather bizarre) physical manifestations of books in a future column. The important thing to realise – whether you agree with it or not – is that there are books to read, and books to keep.

From a collector’s point of view, at least.

Which leads me to my bathroom habits, where, in the privacy of the bath, I turn into my own version of a mask-wearing psycho and do horrible things to books.

I particularly like library books.

I like to read in the bath. I got the habit in London, where the long, cold winters (they last eleven and a half months of the year) require long, frequent baths – either that, or freezing. And so – books. £1 paperbacks from the charity shop. Library books on loan. Book catalogues (I love reading book catalogues, and if you’re not a collector you would never understand it, because it probably is the dullest thing in the world). I’d read the back of a matchbox if I had nothing else. And all my collector’s habits, all my concern for the well-being of books, just… disappear.

I wouldn’t go as far as to actually drop books in the bath. Or at least, that was an accident. Sorry. But I would come close to drowning them. I’ll leave wet handprints on the pages. I’ll fold corners to mark my place. I’ll kill bugs with them. I might even turn to them in the event of running out of toi – never mind (I’ll talk about some of the other uses of books later on). For me, reading-books are for reading. I’ll read them until there is nothing left but a horrible mutilated husk, expiring with a soft sigh of despair – and then I’ll give them to a charity shop.

Like everyone else does.

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.