Short Fiction Spotlight: “The Lothario from an Unknown Zone” by Bob McNeil

A man-sized mosquito descended on 43rd Street and 7th Avenue amid a warm afternoon. The horrific creature’s presence made me scream. However, my legs, quite inexplicably, could not flee the fearsome scene. Amazing still, I was the only person who noticed the otherworldly invader. So, as a result, I concluded the scenario was a hallucination. My confused brain felt like a strange terrain. I did not enjoy dwelling in it without the weapon of reason.

The being that defied a logical category stopped and stared at the metropolitan masses. Fascinated by the pedestrians, cars, and buildings, the creature used one of its legs and reached under its left translucent wing. Right from beneath that aeronautical appendage, the thing pulled out a camera. Fearful of its appearance and amused by its actions, I unexpectedly laughed. Taken aback, I concluded the weird winged entity was a tourist, if you will, a shutterbug.

Any notion that my day could not get more unearthly flew away when a naked woman approached the inexplicable vermin. This lady on the street was Aphrodite of Knidos incarnate. Mystifying yet true, she hugged the insect. The being, thereafter, fondled her with desire.

Unconcerned with the masses around them, they walked hand in hand towards the Hotel Retcher. Silent as a leopard, I followed them. Unfortunately, at a distance of around ten feet, I could not hear their conversation. An orchestra of car noises and crowds obscured any chance of hearing the discussion.

The bizarre pair entered an ill-famed tan-colored hotel. Known for its cheap fee, murders, suicides, bed bugs, and filth, the 24-story establishment was appropriate for them. Already registered there, neither the insect nor his mate went by the greenish-white front desk with numerous clocks above it. I, overcome with curiosity, looked at the clean pate of a pale clerk who was gazing in a westerly direction.

East of understanding what was going on, I followed the couple into a lobby that looked like the 1970s threw up all of its cheesiness on the place. The vomit was composed of a mirrored ceiling, pleather-adorned lavender couches, machine-made marble columns, and Polywood tables.

Fear prevented me from entering the same elevator with the two beings. Unconcerned with me standing outside of the closing doors, they hugged and kissed. Obsessiveness made me look at the display of ascending numbers on the wall. Staring upwards, I saw that they got off on the thirteenth floor.

Either perversion or concern, term it what you want, motivated the following action. I got on the next elevator after them, and it was surprisingly quick. It was fast enough for me to observe the couple enter room 237. Aware of my presence, they both turned around, stared at me, and slammed the door. Accepting my stalker status, I was impervious to disgrace. Undeterred, I resumed my investigation.

Hesitantly, I walked out of the elevator. A crud-and-bubblegum-dappled reddish carpet met my well-worn teal sneakers, and sneak I did. My oracular sense was Orwellian when I went to the room and got a keyhole view of their activities. No amount of bizarre internet searches or horror movies could have acclimated my mind to what I saw next.

Standing upright, the humanoid pest presented its long and erect member. Irrefutable exultation was tattooed on the female’s face while her legs bestraddled two wings. Either because of the stinger it stuck into her foot, or the phallus stuck in her orifice, she screamed in a way that reminded me of mating cats. From then on, the couple utilized just about every known position in the Kama Sutra for about an hour.

Sated with their mating, it appeared the two were ready to rest. Moments from falling into fatigue, the female turned towards her male counterpart and said in a blissful whisper, “Promise me that you will not get this buzzed for some huzzy.”

Pausing for a moment, her surreal inamorato responded in a tone that sounded similar to an electric saw. He said, “Only a bugged-out being would forsake you.”

At peace with the answer, the female cooed then fell asleep.

Amid her snores, the male got up and crept towards the door. Afraid of being discovered, I inferno-footed down the hallway by the time the thing opened its means of departure. Somewhere safely away, I saw the mosquito come out of the room.

Cupped in the odd anthropoid’s limb, something on the order of an iPod sat. He whispered, “I’m waiting for you, lovable owner of my libido, on the thirteenth floor.”

More or less, the distance between us was equivalent to 100 feet. Furthermore, I hid behind the corner of a wall that led to another section of the floor. Unluckily, my shadow revealed where I was.

“Each of my eyes has hundreds of lenses, and they all see you, annoying voyeur. You want to know who I am, don’t you?” the creature said after spinning its head in my direction.

Sheepishly, I peered around to view the freakish speaker.

“Let me reveal the guy behind the disguise,” the surreal spieler said as it stood up and turned into a tall nude man. That was not what amazed me. What summoned enough awe to make my heart quake in my chest was the newly made human form changed its colors over and over again. No joke, for quite a few minutes, it donned every shade known to humanity. I mean, it was black, then white and every hue in between. Obstructed by the distance, I could not make out miscreation’s facial changes.

“I am as humdrum as a housefly. 20% of the male population that cheats in relationships is no different than what I am. Based on your expression, the General Social Survey (GSS) stat does not make you adore my existence. Nevertheless, you have known and will know more men of my kind.”

Pleased with his last declaration, he laughed, pitched the phone aside, and transformed into what I assumed was an English mastiff. Not being an expert, I think its skin had a brindle look to it.

No sooner had it transformed, another female trod out the elevator. This other lady reminded me of a fertility goddess I saw in a book. Aside from being nude as well as zaftig, her pallor and hair were stone-grey. Her voice, contrary to her size, was small and tinny.

“My dog, are you still sugary and servile? Am I still your only mistress?”

“Of course, I’m a loyal whelp,” the canine replied in a low growl.

That ended their exchange as the two took the elevator.

Fixated on information, I bolted over to the lift. Numbers above the machine indicated they went all the way down.

By way of the stairs, I ran to the ground floor and out onto the street. For my effort, all I got was sweat. The duo went somewhere beyond my two viewfinders.

The clerk peered out the entrance and asked, “Sir, is something wrong?”

I replied, “It bugs my brain the way some men are more promiscuous than dogs.”

Confused, he tilted his head leftward while I rightly questioned the saneness of mine.

The End

© Bob McNeil 2020 All Rights Reserved.

May 27, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

The History of BigBoobenstein (Including Why I Took Out The Dumpster Fire Ending)

by Jeff O’Brien

Back in 2002 I was something of a scenester. The term “hipster” wasn’t really being thrown around back then but “scenester” certainly was. Looking back, I suppose it was the same thing. It was a term applied to someone who spent the majority of their nights either playing at rock clubs or just hanging out at them with all the other bands and fellow scenesters.

The term was always taken as an insult; no one would ever admit to being a scenester – just like the hipsters of today. I was also an “emo-boy” since I played in a band called Starla, and was skinny with a mop of emo hair on my head. That moniker, I wore like a badge of honor. Still do.

It was a different time. You could still smoke indoors at most public places. My Nokia brick phone was considered fancy. The majority of my porn was still watched via VHS. If you wanted random hook-ups but didn’t want to be social you had either Craigslist or Friendster. Maybe even MySpace if my memory of the time serves me right.

Certain derogatory terms now almost universally frowned upon and deemed as hate-speech were thrown around freely in most circles. Now, before you go getting the wrong idea, I’m not including that last bit with even the slightest hint of nostalgia. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that some words ever even came out of my mouth. I’m just painting a picture of the setting, and for good reason. Unfortunately, some of the ignorant, privileged male mentality hadn’t been fully shed and outgrown by the time BigBoobenstein came into print.

Anyhow, the point of this exposition is to bring you to the place where BigBoobenstein was unknowingly born. Well, maybe not born. In 2002 I’d at least been impregnated with the seed, and it would take eleven years for the monster to come to term.

I was friendly with a group of metal musicians who formed a comedy-gimmick band called Foam n’ Mesh. They dressed as redneck truckers and sang filthy songs. One in particular was a song called “Big Boobens Time” (sp). I misheard the title of the song as “BigBoobenstein” and felt like quite a fool when I told the band – in front of a large crowd of people – that I thought the song title was the greatest song title ever.

This sounds like a minor faux pas, but in such a shallow crowd where everyone is young and superficial and trying to be cooler than the next person, you get your balls busted something fierce when you misspeak like that. It feels almost like wearing a Misfits shirt you got at Hot Topic and being asked by a real punk to name three Misfits song and you can’t do it. I mean, I know every Misfits song, so I don’t know what that’s like. I’m just a shitty writer trying to get a point across, okay? I know how outdated that analogy was. Anyways, the point is that the ball busting in this case lasted many months.

Roughly eleven years after all that, a good friend from back then named John Davidian – whom the book is dedicated to – messaged me one day and said something to the extent of: “Hey, dipshit. Remember that time you said BigBoobenstein instead of Big Boobens Time in front of all those people? That shit was hilarious. You should use that as a book title.” In 99.999 out of 100 cases in which people suggest things like that to me, I ignore them. About two months later I was uploading the book file of BigBoobenstein to Createspace and anxiously awaiting my proof copy.

Strangely enough, in the time between me sending that file and the book making it to print, I found myself sitting before a psychic with my now ex-wife – at her behest. I had zero interest in such an affair, nor would I ever pay to experience it. But there I was.

The psychic told me that my next book would be “the one”. She didn’t specify what she meant by “the one”. She didn’t say it would bring me great fame and riches. She didn’t say it would sell 100,000 copies either. So I guess for once a psychic was spot on with their predictions. But she was also accurate about my next book being “the one”. I’ve written over twenty books, and BigBoobenstein is the only one to crack a hundred ratings on Goodreads. So I guess it’s the one.

It was also a book that spawned two sequels and what I had hoped would be a fourth, which instead turned into four short stories that are now all compiled along with all three books in BigBoobenstein: The Complete Saga, also know as BigBoobenstein: OmniBUST Edition. It’s also the only book of mine to spawn a puppet. But more on all that in a bit.

So…what is BigBoobenstein? Well, for those of you who haven’t read it – and I know there are many of you – BigBoobenstein is the tale of Adelaide De Carlo. Adelaide was 19. She was one of those kids who graduated high school and did not have college in her future. In fact, it didn’t seem there was much future in her future either. She had friends, but that was about all she had going for her. She was broke. Lived at home. Had an abusive, scumbag boyfriend. Hated the way she looked. Hated herself. Had zero self-esteem and overcompensated. Smoked and drank fiendishly.

So, in answer to the question “What is BigBoobenstein?”, the answer is that it is my most truly autobiographical book to date. To elaborate on that any further would be purely solipsistic. There’s a bunch more meta symbolism in the book too that I think is super fascinating, but I guess if David Lynch doesn’t explain that shit then why should I? I’m supposed to be writing this as a means of convincing you to buy the damn thing and read it. Not to summarize it. Maybe if I shut the fuck up there will be hundreds of YouTubers making 5-hour-long videos about the meaning behind BigBoobenstein twenty-five years from now. Why am I even flapping my big fat gums?

Anyhow, without getting too specific and telling you the whole story, BigBoobenstein is a tale of beauty. Yeah, I just called my own work beautiful. FIGHT ME! It’s a tale of hitting rock bottom, fucking yourself up to the point that your very vessel is broken beyond repair, giving up entirely, and somehow rising up when you shouldn’t ever have been able to do so.

But it’s not that simple, you see. And anyone who has lived this tale knows it. Rock bottom is a scary, desolate, and dangerous place. And while it is possible—though very unlikely—to rise back up from it, should you succeed in doing so, you aren’t the same person on the trip back up that you were before the crash. Without explaining my art and demanding that you appreciate and comprehend the sheer and utter brilliance that it is, what I mean to say here is that BigBoobenstein is an inspirational tale.

And now, the sequels…that no one really liked. I know…they are not deep and poetic and meaningful like their predecessor. Thing is, I was 100 percent committed to writing them that way. And why the fuck would I write them any other way?

Have you ever hit rock bottom and successfully turned your life around and succeeded in rebuilding yourself far beyond your own or anyone else’s expectations? And if so, did you then make the conscious decision to fuck your life up again and do it all over just for the sake of adventure and experience? Of course you didn’t, ya’ big dingus. You appreciated the beauty of the world and the people around you. You savored and cherished those things. You enjoyed your new freedom of being able to be lighthearted and fun and overly sexy. Just like the sequels.

 

And sure, there is some tragedy in both Groom of BigBoobenstein and Daughters of BigBoobenstein. Such is life. But after rising back up from unfathomable depths you take those tragedies and you take those close to you and hold them closer and you go forth understanding the importance of love better than you did before. For fuck’s sake I wrote the most beautiful saga to ever feature a talking, shit-drooling, anthropomorphic hernia and porn-obsessed bridge trolls and horny Martians and undead strippers and all you people care about is… wait…I don’t know what it is you people care about.

As I write this I realize I’ve let my ego completely take over. What lies have I been living all these years? I’m so lost in my own asshole that I can’t see the world around me. When Silent Motorist Media asked me to write this I thought I was some kind of interesting wordsmith as deep and dark as the chasms of Moria. I now realize I am merely another mediocre white man with a computer who can’t even come up with a decent Tolkien reference on the fly. Fuck. Hold on, I’ll be right back.

Hi. I’m back. I just had my wife do that thing with the paddle board and the hot sauce and I’m feeling much better. Now I will discuss the dumpster fire of an ending the original printing of BigBoobenstein had, and why I took it out.

In 2013, when I started writing the book, I was far from the same person I am now. In short, I was the kind of person who thought that ending a book with a man getting raped by a group of trans women is funny and/or shocking. At that point in my life I hadn’t actually met or spoken to a trans person, and had given very little thought to the idea of rape culture beyond simply believing that rape is wrong and hating it very much. I was plain ignorant. But in the following years, with all the brilliant and amazing writers and artists and poets of all cultures and walks of life I’ve come to meet, that ending I once thought was so funny and clever began to seem less and less so, to the point where I took all the BigBoobenstein books out of print until I could figure out what to do. I had to decide how I was going to be able to promote work that I’d poured my heart and soul into only to realize it was tragically/thoughtlessly flawed.

Do I just keep them out of print and pretend they never existed? Disavow them forever? Rewrite them? Add a disclaimer at the beginning of the book? Add a disclaimer at the end of the book? Well, obviously you know the answer already since it’s in the title of this post. I took the damn thing out and put a little note to the reader in its place.

The very reasons I was advised against doing this were the very reasons I finally did it.

“No real artist changes their work to please other people.”

“No real artist is true to themselves if they worry about offending so and so.”

“Political correctness is killing comedy!”

Yeah, I heard all that shit. And the kind of people who say those things are the kind of people that brought Adelaide De Carlo to the point of jumping off a bridge (Not really a spoiler – just sayin’). Adelaide wasn’t allowed to grow because of people who feared her growth. They wanted her simple and basic, kept on a low enough level that they could appreciate her and hold power over her in their limited capacity to do so.

The art of comedy is suffering the same fate from the same “PC CULTURE IS KILLING COMEDY” morons. Actually, no. I take that back. Comedy is doing just fine and evolving and growing as it should. Just because some basic dudes created a fake war around it doesn’t mean I have to buy into that shit.

If altering my work turns those people off and away from it, then holy shit! What was I waiting for!?

BigBoobenstein is about finding utopia in a world full of alt-right fascist scum and toxic masculinity. It’s a book about fighting all the things I hate. BigBoobenstein is my utopia. Just because I fucked it up the first time doesn’t mean I can’t rebuild it, alter it, and make it better and more welcoming with fresh, new life. After all, that was literally the whole fucking point of the book to begin with.

November 2, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media

If Desire is Scarcely More Than a Spark: An Interview with Danger Slater, “Impossible James”

By Gordon B. White

Silent Motorist Media: First and foremost, tell us about Impossible James. What is this novel about and what kind of people should read it?

Danger Slater: It’s about death and birth and families and corporate greed and love and a whole bunch of other really weird horrible things. A terminally ill man impregnates himself his with his own clone, setting off a series of events that may or may not be the cause of an unstoppable existential apocalypse. Anyone should read it because I wrote it and I am awesome.

SMM: What was the genesis of the novel? Because its tendrils touch on so many different themes—parenthood, the struggle to create, existential despair, climate change, near-terminal stage capitalism, gooey and gross body horror—which of these was the seed? Looking back on it, you can trace the growth of it into the Impossible James we have today?

DS: I just thought it’d be funny to write a book about a guy who gives birth to his own clone. Like, how would that even work? What are the personal and philosophical implications of that? From there, I figured out the themes of the book and different characters, and built out a few plot points that seemed interesting to get too, including the ending, and I slowly started building up from there. The son character and narrative style came into play as the story fleshed itself out.

SMM: Is there a passage you could offer us to whet the appetite of those readers who haven’t yet acquired the book? One that maybe captures the james ne sais quoi of the book?

DS: There’s a sentence several people have quoted so far, and it goes like this: “If desire itself is scarcely more than a spark, what’s an arsonist to do when everything is already burning around them?”

SMM: There’s a fascinating fatalism to this book (it is, in fact, subtitled “ a book about death”). The novel kicks off when James Watson Sr. receives a fatal diagnosis of a black spot on the brain: it’s a malignancy that’s sure to kill him…in just a couple of decades, give or take. This confrontation with his mortality is enough to drive him on to quit his job, clone himself, find a partner, and set out to change the world. None of which ultimately makes him happy, however. If a reader were to approach Impossible James as a cautionary tale, what is it warning us about? Is it cautioning us towards anything?

DS: As a cautionary tale, I’m not too sure, because the book deals a lot with the unavoidable nature of who we are as human beings, and it’s hard to caution someone against something that’s inevitable. I suppose its more about acceptance, and trying to find meaning and fulfillment in things that aren’t going to last.

SMM: Impossible James presents us with two warring impulses or, perhaps, strategies for confronting the absurdity of modern existence: Hyper-expansion and hyper-constriction. Maybe ironically, however, the final form is both impossibly tiny and impossibly huge. Is this a tension you see in the world around us? Is this something you’ve looked to tackle in your recent works?

DS: That is EXACTLY what I was going for so thanks for pointing it out! There are these pictures on the internet of like brain neurons and they look identical to clouds of swirling galaxies in space. The separation between the big impersonal things (the universe) and the tiny hyper-personal things (your own thoughts) is not as wide as it seems and may even loop back in on itself if extrapolated far enough. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s certainly a fascinating prism in which to view life.

SMM: In your 2018 novel He Digs a Hole, you employed an unnamed narrator who broke the fourth wall in fairly meta-dramatic ways to express authorial angst. Here you again employ a style which directly addresses the audience, but the narrator is a specific character — James Watson Jr. — so it feels more “grounded” in the story. What is your interest in using this kind of narrative style? What accounts for the differences between the two, particularly the more traditional sort of use of it in Impossible James? Are there any other authors who employ these sort of aesthetic flourishes that you admire?

DS: Oh I really liked the 4^th wall breaks in He Digs a Hole, but when I started this book I was trying to think of a way to weave it more organically into the story, so to have a character in the book (who isn’t the main character) narrating the story of the main character directly to YOU the reader, I could employ whatever perspective and narrative techniques I wanted. Kurt Vonnegut used to do this all the time with his books, from inserting himself as the author, to his proxy character Kilgore Trout, so that’s kinda one of my favorite examples of an artist doing it.

SMM: Astute readers of your previous novel, He Digs A Hole, might recognize a few familiar elements here, particularly with regards to Sycamore Lane. The neighborhood where James Sr. lives is also home to Harrison and Tabitha Moss, the protagonists of HDAH, and features cameos from them, as well as neighbors Brad and Jen Flatly.

I was fascinated to see these characters again, and was wondering how you view their use. Do He Digs a Hole and Impossible James take place in the same universe? Or perhaps parallel dimensions? Or is it more like American Horror Story, where the same actors play different roles every season? What sort of advantages or disadvantges does working with these repeated elements present?

DS: Haha. YES, thank you for noticing that too! I just liked the setting of that book and when I was thinking of where to have Impossible James take place, I figured why not put it on the same street? There are lots of crossover characters, but there is no continuity between the two books, so they function more like Easter eggs without the events in any book prior affecting the others. The characters aren’t even necessarily the same, personality-wise. So yeah, I guess it would be like parallel versions of the neighborhood, but I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms. In fact, in my next manuscript I’ve finished I do it again, not set on the same street, but there are callbacks to Sycamore Lane and even a reference to my book Puppet Skin. It’s just fun for loyal readers.

SMM: Finally, what’s next on the Danger-scope? While we’re interested in hearing what you’re working on next, what are you going to be working on next next? What are the projects that are still fever dreams and nebulous nightmares?

DS: So the next book is about a group of five unwilling astronauts who were sent to the moon in 1906 and get trapped there for the next 900 years. I’m calling it ‘Moonfellows’ right now, but that might change, of course. That book is actually finished, but there are no plans for its release anytime soon. What I want to write after that is a book in which someone starts mobilizing all the people in their neighborhood to work together to build an impossibly huge tower to get past the sky so they can climb into heaven and confront God. I haven’t started working on that one yet, but it’s coming together slowly in my head.

Danger Slater is the Wonderland award winning writer of I Will Rot Without You as well as other works of Bizarro and horror fiction. You can follow him on Twitter, where he’ll be making bad jokes all day: @Danger_Slater

Gordon B. White has lived in North Carolina, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Pseudopod, Daily Science Fiction, Tales to Terrify, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. Gordon also contributes reviews and interviews to various other outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, and Hellnotes. You can find him online at http://www.gordonbwhite.com.

July 6, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media

Impossible James by Danger Slater – Book Review

Impossible James

By Danger Slater

Fungasm Press, 2019

Reviewed by Gordon B. White

Impossible James, Danger Slater’s latest novel, is a book about the tensions of finding meaning in an absurd world, about tensions that rupture into paradoxes. It’s about growing larger, but also becoming smaller. It’s about fighting a system, but surrendering to it. It’s about creating a legacy and destroying history in the process. It’s also funny, gross, bizarre, and even a little touching. It’s a trip.

What is Impossible James about? The plot is simplicity itself: James Watson (soon to be James Watson, “Sr.”) is diagnosed with a malignant “black spot” in his brain that will kill him … in fifty years or so. Driven to despair, he loses his job at the multinational conglomerate Motherlove, burns his belongings, and gets a screwdriver through the brain which both pins the black spot in place and sparks his creativity such that he can clone himself through a very disgusting process and, eventually, cure death.

As James Sr. grows less and less human, his first clone, James Watson Jr., narrates the story from the end of the world, alternating between his father’s history and the imminent collapse of the universe beneath a plague known as the Gray Tide. Got it? Good.

While the above description should make it clear this is a fine and pulpy story, Slater has a way of writing that belies the danger of his underlying ideas. The plot careens forward and the writing is almost always conversational and, sometimes, willing to derail its own narrative and draw attention to the mechanics of the novelistic structure. The cumulative effect is a story told by a friend, holding on to your arm and shaking you at the good parts. To focus on just the presentation, though, hides the real heart of Impossible James.

Impossible James bears the subtitle “A book about death,” and this is no joke. At every moment, the specter of futility and the void hangs over the proceedings. It has thematic overlays of capitalism, climate catastrophe, existential dread and more. None of them fit completely, but they do so in a way that evokes the unease that all of them do. It’s about setting up Impossible Goals and Impossible Defenses, but being unable to escape the Impossible End. It’s about giving oneself to the world, but also the sheer egotism that doing so takes.

It’s a very strange book about self-centered sacrifice and catastrophes, and the human moments in the face of both, which are by turns poignant and useless. It’s a book about frustration and how as one’s goals explode, one becomes smaller and smaller. It’s about the selfishness of creating a life filled with doubt, but also the catastrophe of abandoning that doubt — and how that doubt which may be the only thing keeping us in check, or at least placated.

Because it’s that sense of doubt — that question of “What’s it all for?” — that might be keeping us from turning into unrestrained sociopaths. In fact, by abandoning that doubt, James Sr. becomes both a society and a pathology in himself. What’s that mean? Well, you’ll have to read it to see.

But all of this is the paradox of Impossible James: a way to balance these warring impulses of the insignificant and the psychotically grand; the crippling doubt against the destructive untethering. And in the end … well, James Watson Jr. has to make a decision. It’s a decision we all have to make, although it isn’t easy to make and even harder to tell if the decision is the one that’s “right.”

With Impossible James, Danger Slater continues slipping his readers existential poison pills beneath a shiny, gleefully gruesome candy coating. By turns humorous, horrifying, and even heartbreaking, Impossible James struggles to make sense of a modern world collapsing under its own bloat and the human but absurd drive to create — be it meaning, purpose, art — in the face of that catastrophe. Is it impossible? No, but it’s Impossible James.

June 30, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media

The Profane by Vincenzo Bilof – Book Review

by Ben Arzate

Lana, a woman possessed by an angel, has been kidnapped by a cult of Satanists who want to exorcise the angel for their own evil purposes. However, her lover Michael has infiltrated the Satanists. With the help of him and her training to use the angel’s power, the two plan to destroy the cult and take down the sadistic Satanic priest Father Willard.

“The exorcist closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell of human wreckage filled him, caused his lips to tremble on the verge of a smile. Yes. Shit and pain. The dungeon smelled like shit and pain, and this was good. It was like coming home.”

The Profane is an inverted exorcism story. Rather than a priest attempting to cast out a demon to save a person, it involves Satanists who engage in a parody of the exorcism ritual to harvest the power of an angel residing inside a person. The core of the story, however, is still one of a clash of good against evil. Lana, the possessed, is not tormented by the angel inside of her but by the cult that tortures her to bring out the hate and pain in her and eventually cast out the angel so the cult can use its power.

The book begins with Lana in the dungeon of the Satanists’ castle. The castle is above a fissure called “the abyss” which seems to be an entrance to Hell and creatures called “the damned,” humans corrupted into perverted monsters, wander the halls. To cope with the pain of their torture, Lana escapes to a mental landscape called “the garden.” There, she speaks with a manifestation of Father Dacius, the man who trained her to fight the cultists. She finds solace in the garden and in her memories of watching Star Wars with Michael. Michael, meanwhile, is acting as the dungeon jailer until the time is right to strike.

Much of the story is told in flashback, revealing the backstories of the various characters. We learn how Michael and Lana met as orphans, the man named Pa who recruited orphan children into the ranks of the Satanists, and how Father Dacius trained Lana to fight the cult. The battle between Lana and Father Willard is largely psychological. While Willard torments Lana to try to get to the angel inside her, Lana uses the angel’s power to show him images of his past and his long-lost brother. Throughout the story, Bilof gives us some very disturbing imagery.

“Inside the old man’s long, wire bear, tiny creatures writhed. Tiny forms moved, twisting inside the mass of hair.

Maggots.

Inside of Pa’s fist, maggots.

Inside of Antonio’s orifices, maggots.”

The way Bilof tells the story make the experience of reading it like being shown a dark and hazy picture that gradually becomes clearer, its horrifying images becoming more apparent and its blood reds and burning yellow fires becoming more vivid.

In between its psychological aspects, the story also gives us action sequences of Michael fighting the damned with axes and firearms and countering Willard’s Satanic exorcism with a Catholic one. Bilof makes these various elements come together very well. The story is chaotic with a timeline that jumps around a lot, however, most of it feels controlled.

There are, however, a couple parts that didn’t work as well as they could have. There are parts that imply the Satanic cult is descended from Nazi occultists and intend to bring about a “Master Race.” This aspect is only ever partially explored and seems something that should have either been explored further or cut. There are also chapters which are journal entries written by Lana. These give insight to her mindset leading up to her capture by the Satanists, but don’t give much new backstory to Lana. They also end a little suddenly, making their inclusion feel somewhat anticlimactic. These don’t detract much from the overall story, however.

The Profane is a well-written work of supernatural horror. It’s a fresh take on an exorcism story full of vivid and disturbing imagery and engaging psychological drama. Fans of religious horror stories will especially get a lot of this.

May 8, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media