Category: Odds and Ends

Oddtober 2024: The Obscenity Trial of Remy Couture

Ahh, where would we be during Halloween without a good moral panic now and then? Because in some respects, that is the only way to scare seasoned horror fans. It’s a simple formula for fear: take a normie who doesn’t understand that special effects are a thing, mix that with one part idiotic police and two parts puritanical prosecutor, cut it with half a soupcon of angry online Christian moms and you find yourself worried that watching Terrifier 3 could send you to prison.

The case I want to discuss today didn’t make a huge splash when it happened in 2009, but the Remy Couture obscenity trial was a chilling attempt at censorship and moral grandstanding using a legal and judicial system so infested with idiocy that it hardly seems like it could have happened the way it did. I cannot emphasize enough how stupid the case against Remy Couture was.

Remy Couture is a French-Canadian special effects makeup artist who created two very gory films to showcase his skills. The films in question, Inner Depravity 1 and Inner Depravity 2, may strike some as disgusting, and, to be frank, the subject matter and execution were a bit puerile (the first film opens with the silly slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to taste”), but overall any sensible person should have been able to see that the two films were Couture featuring his work in two very extreme shorts. Both films depict the same, masked drug addict who preys on women, killing them, raping them after they are dead, and at times keeping their bodies in barrels so he can defile them again later. The second film features the same killer but this time he has an “apprentice,” a boy whose body language and appearance kind of reminded me of Cha-Ka from the 1970s television show, Land of the Lost.

In 2009, a German Internet user came across the videos and reported them to Interpol as depictions of genuine snuff. Evidently the German man could not read English (or French because I believe Couture’s site at the time had both languages to describe the films) and Google Translate was still pretty new, so perhaps we can understand his alarm. After all, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1990s, national disgrace Charlie Sheen came across a copy of one of the notorious Guinea Pig films, specifically, The Flower of Flesh and Blood, and was so convinced it portrayed genuine torture and murder that he contacted the FBI. Mistakes happen.

But surely one would expect that French Canadian law enforcement might read the description of the films before going off half-cocked and accusing him of murder, but they didn’t. Eventually the investigators were able to piece out that his films were not literal depictions of murders, and when they did they then shifted gears and Couture was accused of obscenity in the first trial of its sort in Canadian history. Ultimately in 2012, Couture won the case against him, but he had to spend $30,000 CAD to defend himself, and the Canadian tax payers had to pay a cool million for their chance to participate in a moral panic.

I had seen the two films in question before charges were brought against Couture, but I didn’t associate them with his name until I read an article about his legal woes and sought out the films in question. When I realized I had seen them before, I could hardly believe anyone was so naive and lacking in the ability to judge films using common sense and context that they could both believe the films could, in any way, depict something that actually happened, or that it would be considered obscene in a time when horror films can be very detailed in their gore.

Please do not think what follows in any way impugns Couture’s skills in his field, because he is pretty good at what he does. But it does beggar belief that anyone felt the two short films depicted actual violence or were anything worse than what one could see in the Saw franchise or in necrophilic exploitation films like Nekromantik. Human beings love them a panic and Remy Couture accidentally gave those people what they wanted – a stupid witch hunt.

I don’t want to upload the videos to this site because it is recommended that only those over the age of eighteen watch them, but if you are interested, you can find the videos here. There are enough warnings on the site that hosts them to cover their behinds and hopefully indemnify me if some middle-schooler clicks over there from my site. Both films involve rough content. Women are bound, attacked, sexually defiled, mutilated and even victims of extremely casual cannibalism. Half of the time, the brutality is so over the top that if it were not so dark it would be funny. Honestly, the little apprentice is pure comic relief for the right sort of jaded viewer (hi!).

On its face, there is no way an intellectually honest person could have believed that Couture recorded his own acts of actual depravity or that the intention behind the two films was to “corrupt morality.” ID1 literally begins with a full-scale police investigation, as cops and forensics personnel are examining the semi-nude body of a sexually violated woman whose death is later shown in graphic detail. If the murders in the film were accurate depictions of genuine murders, it should have taken no more than half an hour to run down the details of the case to determine which police jurisdiction had investigated the murder. Moreover, someone is videotaping the law enforcement investigation from multiple angles without trained investigators noticing someone using 2005 technology hovering around them in a muddy, wooded area. The video taken of the investigation clearly could not have been police video, as it is visually in keeping with the rest of Remy Couture’s style, and is identical to the style used in the later depiction of the murder in the film.

The second film, strangely, is less skilled than the first. In ID2, at about the 3:37 mark, a bound woman’s arm is cut off just above the wrist and it is clearly faked. The bleeding stump looks like something you’d see in a professional horror film from the 1980s. Again, no shade against Couture, but the only way someone could have looked at that scene and worried that it was real was someone who really hoped it was real. Couture did not have film industry money behind him as he made these shorts to showcase his talent. That there may be some elements of the films that don’t deliver perfect believablity is to be expected, and it is astounding that any law enforcement professional could have watched the film and think any of it was real. Then when Couture cuts off another limb, he cinematically films himself taking a bite and then tossing it to his little Sleestak/feral hobbit to gnaw on. The whole scene is shot to include the perspectives of Couture and the woman being killed, which points in the direction of it being staged. Additionally, all of the women portrayed in the films were actresses there on their own free will, and candid behind-the-scenes shots show them laughing and interacting with Couture.

So eventually it became clear no one was killed in either film. Unwilling to let it go and chalk up their idiocy to a mistake, the Crown decided to charge Couture with obscenity with the intent to corrupt morality. They classified the films as violent pornography with no higher artistic purpose and therefore a threat to public morality. That on its face should never have happened because Couture was clear when he posted those videos – they were essentially exhibitions of his skills as a makeup artist, not an attempt to create pornography.  Imagine a Tom Savini proof-of-concept video being used to prove he wanted to corrupt morality. Think about snippets of Greg Nicotero’s work being mistaken as an attempt to prove zombie films are obscene and without artistic merit. But it was staggeringly dense to claim ID1 and ID2 sought to degrade public morality because both films are foul. The public whose morality would be challenged by either film was very small because most people who watch horror content are not taking notes. They aren’t looking at a demented drug addict wearing nasty masks and his little companion gnawing on arms and having sex with rotting corpses and thinking, “You know, working a day job and raising my kids in the suburbs is a loser’s bet. I want to take my son, force him to be a cannibal and live the life of this shambling, filthy necrophile.” Luckily the jury agreed with my assessment and found Remy Couture not guilty in spite of shrill protests from a vocal minority that if you supported Remy Couture’s right to freedom of speech and expression, then you support violence against women.

Unfortunately, while that verdict ended the legal witch hunt against Couture, it hasn’t stopped breathlessly naive people who have no idea Google image lookup is their friend from taking stills from these two films or images from other Couture projects and insisting they depict actual victims of Satanic murder or are hijacked to use in politically charged lies. One particular image of a woman with a crucifix impaled through her throat has been used to fan the flames of Satanic Panic or in political scapegoating. Don’t worry, the actress in the photo is very much alive, the woman whose face is presented next to the gory image is not the actress in Couture’s image, and if that woman was killed for being a Christian, a pox on everyone who demeaned her death in this manner.

No matter how many years pass from the massive Satanic and moral panics from the 1980s through the early 1990s, the sparks that could ignite another witch hunt are always there, burning quietly but steadily, just waiting for a loosely hinged True Believer or political/judicial official in need of a moral platform to spill the gasoline that will save no one from physical or spiritual harm but can burn Western civil rights to the ground. It seems as if Remy Couture’s career did not end due to the absolute lunacy that was unleashed on him when a German internet user had a bad night, but his legacy is still haunted by people completely misrepresenting his work as genuine atrocity, sometimes with racist implications. This particular week of Oddtober 2024 is pretty gross in terms of content, but out of all of the topics I will discuss this month, this is the grossest and the one that should scare you the most.

Oddtober 2024: Haunted Houses by Kathryn Hemmann

Told y’all we’d be talking about some Oddtober-related ‘zines! I know we just got finished with ‘Zine September but the first few Oddtober 2024 entries have been a bit heavy. I need something lighter to end the week and Haunted Houses by Kathryn Hemmann fits the bill. It’s got a creepy bite to it, but if a ten-year-old kid picked it up, they could flip through it without ruining their childhood.

Haunted Houses is an extremely pretty ‘zine, with drawings and seventeen pieces of flash fiction. The inside cover says:

The seventeen short stories in this collection dwell in haunted places. If you get lost in the words, you might be alarmed at first, but you’ll get used to it.

You live here now.

Kathryn Hemmann wrote the stories and created the drawings and through them explores different ways places can be haunted. She explores how people can be haunted, too. Though this is pretty and all together less horrifying than the two books that started Oddtober 2024, there is some very creepy darkness in it as well. An endless hallway that rivals the five and a half minute hallway in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, decaying neighborhoods that swallow people, a person who creeps through houses at night so he or she can smell people when they are sleeping, and more. My favorite is the extraordinarily effective and creepy “Final Project Proposal.” The story is very short, micro-fiction actually, coming in at under 200 words. In that short piece, Hemmann incorporated the trope of the mad scientist, the evil dungeon master, and the miserable experiment forced to live penned up. So effective and so horrible. It’s perfect.

Because this ‘zine is flash fiction, I cannot engage in the in-depth dissection approach I prefer to take when discussing works here. But if you are a fan of the deceptively creepy, always wondering what unnerving things lurk in offices and old homes, you’ll like this little ‘zine. I wish I had not ordered this specifically for Oddtober because I would have loved to give Mr. OTC a copy for Halloween and since he proofreads my entries here, it would have ruined the surprise. If you’re interested in a copy, you can get one here.

Hemmann also continues with the goodwill I’ve come to expect from ‘zine makers, and included a couple of gratis items, including a lovely bookmark. Said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘zine makers are some of the most generous people with their work.

Be sure to keep an eye out for next week because I think I may actually have a book or two even the most ardent horror fans may not have seen. Bug chasers. A Komsomol girl versus a serial killer. Folk horror. And more! See you Monday.

Oddtober 2024: I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

When I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, I watched a movie on television that affected me deeply. I’ve discussed some of my very specific fears before on this site and interestingly all of them were provoked by media and not some innate fear common to children. For example, I get very antsy around people wearing full-face masks or too much makeup, and that was the result of being terrified by an Alice Cooper tour commercial I saw when I was very young.

For all that it scared me, this is actually is a very sad film.

The fear I want to discuss here developed after I watched the film Bad Ronald. Have you seen it? It’s a made for TV film adapted from a novel by author Jack Vance and it absolutely messed me up. The plot of the film is that a divorced mother who suffers from mental and physical illness, has raised her with the hopes that he could become a doctor so he can cure her sickness. Her teen son, Ronald, is awkward and an outsider at school – kind of like a male Carrie but without telekinesis – and one day he decides to ask a girl out on a date. She declines and laughs him down. Later her younger sister mocks Ronald, who pushes her so hard on the ground that she suffers a fatal head injury. After racing home and telling his mother what happened, she decides to cover a door with wallpaper and essentially walls Ronald up in the house so the police can never find him. Seclusion causes Ronald to descend into a fantasy world where he is a prince who is going to protect his princess from an evil intruder. Then his mother dies and the house is sold, unaware that Ronald was living in a hidden room. The new owners have three teen daughters and Ronald decides one of them is his princess and that an older boyfriend is the evil intruder and things go bad but ultimately the only other death is a nosy neighbor who is literally scared to death.

Clearly Ronald never crept into the shower.

For the record, it is not a good movie. Not the worst movie made in 1974 but arguments could be made that it belongs on some sort of “worst of” top ten list. It also stars Scott Jacoby, who was also in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, an early Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen film that also involves a hidden cellar entrance and a creepy man who accesses the house.

Ronald becomes filthy and creeps around the house at night, eating food, stealing family items, watching the family sleep, all while still living in his dream world of himself as a prince trying to protect a princess from harm. The images of him emerging from the dark, dirty and deranged, spying, stealing and moving things around, affected me and eventually every time I heard something creak in the house, I would freeze in fear like a squirrel who sighted a hawk. I began to develop the idea that someone was creeping around in the house between the walls, which would be impossible with the crappy little 1950s house we lived in. I even intuitively understood that we did not have the sort of house that could provide enough room for an intruder to skulk between the walls, but I still could not shake the fear that every time I heard something or felt like something had been moved without me touching it that someone was in the house, stalking me.

This specific fear was cemented during a two month period when both of my parents were working night shift. I was in the third grade and had to be alone in the house from the time I got home from school until my father arrived home after midnight (my parents were broke and had interesting perspectives on child rearing plus we had no family in the area, so don’t think too badly of them). Add to it that at the time we didn’t have phone service, and I spent a nice chunk of time absolutely terrified.

This scenario is somehow still less upsetting than Bad Ronald creeping around the house.

It faded over time, but the fear of someone being in the house would remain a thought in the back of my head until my mother and her new husband moved into a far less ramshackle home. However, even living in a place that made far less noise didn’t eliminate the fear entirely. When Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs came out, it revived the fear and twisted it into a generic fear of someone being in the house. Given who I am, when the movie cycled over onto cable, I watched it every time I could. The titular people under the stairs were portrayed as monsters, but they were made into monsters by their captors and ultimately were forces of good, but the idea of ragged, abused people living under my nose without me knowing, was just another wrinkle in the same “someone’s here and watching” cloth.

Then, god help me, I read about the Lalaurie case. Whether or not the details are all true, the accepted story is that Delphine Lalaurie, a demented slave owner in New Orleans, was experimenting on her slaves, chaining them throughout the mansion and performing ghoulish experiments on them that sound as if they were straight out of Nazi research or Unit 731. A fire broke out in the house in 1834, allegedly started by a slave who was chained in the kitchen and was hoping to draw attention to her plight, and the fire brigade discovered the horrific torture chambers. The abuse was so egregious that even during Plantation era slavery in Louisiana, people were appalled and stormed the house, but Madame Lalaurie was able to escape and is believed to have fled to France. No one had any idea she was doing this, torturing, maiming and killing slaves right under the noses of her neighbors. I’ve often wondered if the Lalaurie case was partial inspiration for The People Under the Stairs.

I did not develop a phobia or fear from the Lalaurie case and a Wes Craven film, but the essential premises linked my brain back to Bad Ronald: there may be a hidden place in homes where deranged people are living, or, worse, being harmed. But mostly I forgot about it because I had student loans and the Internet had not been invented yet.

Enter Reddit.

I cannot recall how many times people have found a hidden space in their homes that someone had been living in, or found evidence of someone living in an attic or cellar. Sometimes families lived in those homes for years before discovering someone had been creeping into their house without them knowing, doing god knows what while they were sleeping. When we bought our house, luckily we purchased a more modern built home that is essentially cardboard held together with wall putty but lacks a basement and the only place someone could hide is, interestingly, under the stairs, but we’ve been in and out of that space making repairs over the years, so I know no one is there. Plus an adult male who seldom leaves me alone at night lives here so when the cats do something that produces creepy sounds, he can go and check on it. Also I’m sort of an adult now, and can permit the adult part of my brain to drive me around these days. I still am extremely uneasy when people wear scary masks or wear corpse paint apropos of nothing but I’m not afraid of them. I just wish they wouldn’t. And this is similar. It was never as closely as held a fear as my mask/makeup issues – it’s just something I remember viscerally when “triggered.”

But every now and then, I see something like this and I feel that same sort of chilly creepiness that I experienced the first time I saw Bad Ronald.

Even though this video is fake, it’s still so horrifying I have to include it here. An aspiring actor hoping to go viral concocted this video of a woman living in the crawlspace over his apartment. The premise: he set up the camera because he’d noticed food and things going missing. This woman was descending into his apartment at night, eating food, watching television, and even urinating in his kitchen sink. Because I also have a germ aversion (caused by the same house I lived in when Bad Ronald warped me, a shit heap if there ever was one), the idea that someone could creep around at night and pee in my sink is just too much to think about.

There are a shocking number of videos about this sort of thing happening on YouTube and I am unsure how many have been debunked. It almost veers into the supernatural, thinking about how someone can creep around your home, creating their own home while you sleep or are away, and you never know it until you set up a camera after noticing things going missing, or remodel the house and break through a suspiciously thin wall, or get norovirus repeatedly because a stray human keeps urinating in your sink.

All in all, I have remarkably few genuine fears for someone this neurotic but this was one of those times when the fear that plagued me as a kid actually manifested for other people in real life. But I’m also proud to announce that I watched The People Under the Stairs on Shudder last week and was able to reminisce about my weird childhood rather than force Mr. OTC to search the house top to bottom when our stupidest cat fell off a shelf into the laundry bucket at three A.M.

Tell me about the weird thing that scared you when you were young. Was it the result of unmonitored television time? Did you grow out of it or did it get worse as you got older? Let me know!

Blow My Colon #3 by Anthony Vegue

For weeks, I tore up my office, closet and various bookshelves and could not find this ‘zine. I decided to discuss another ‘zine in it’s place, but before I truly committed I finally asked the long-suffering Mr. OTC to have a look. He sauntered into my office and five minutes later came out with Blow My Colon Issue 3 in his hands. I was relieved that he found it for a variety of reasons but not least among them is that in its place I had planned to discuss the 2020 compilation of The Deprogrammer, which is a hoot (and culturally interesting), but, in tackling it before another election involving Trump, I feared it would result in comments threatening to tar and feather or lynch me and I don’t have the time to run risk assessment. Maybe in 2026.

Blow My Colon Issue 3 holds few qualms in that regard because the target audience of this ‘zine are too tired to give a crap. BMC3 is the delightful “Clerks” edition. It was released in 1996, when Kevin Smith’s 1994 Clerks was still experiencing a lot of social cache and word of mouth. Back then movies could remain in the public consciousness for years. It was a simpler time. When I bought this, I had just quit managing a shoe store in Dallas, a job that left me feeling utter contempt for my fellow man and a new understanding of what causes workplace violence. I departed from that job with an angry nihilism combined with an almost-psychic ability to peg an aggressive asshole or condescending classist in an instant. At the end of the job, a thief could have come into the store with a Red Flyer wagon, dumped the contents of the cash register and half the purse displays into it, and walked out and I would have robotically told them to have a good day.

But this ‘zine reminded me that things could always be worse.

This ‘zine is devoted to the men and women who staff gas stations and convenience stores, especially the night shift heroes who get to deal with drunks, bathroom shit-smearers*, and counting the cigarettes. Always counting cigarettes. Even with the massive change in technology we’ve experienced since 1996, these three issues still plague the lives of the convenience store clerk. This ‘zine tells the stories of the people who work these jobs and the derelicts and deviants who make their lives miserable.

And right about now I feel that I need to warn readers that if you are easily offended or angered, stop reading now.

I think you have to have cleaned a bathroom on Christmas Eve after a person with questionable hygiene had violent diarrhea while everyone else is at home, cozy and drinking eggnog, to fully understand the human experience. The stories of these brave men and women are sobering but mostly hilarious, though a bit gross at times.

For example, take Dave, who worked at a gas station in Erie, PA. He got the job just to stretch out his unemployment benefits, showed up absolutely stoned for every shift but was still praised for picking up the job details faster than anyone else in the store. The only way to make the job more challenging was to get even more stoned. When “massively high,” he’d work slowly, causing the line to pay to become very long.

That’s where it was helpful to wear a hat – keep that bill pointed down, never look the customer in the eye, laugh maniacally to yourself.

Dave also goes on at length about his coworkers and the more annoying customers who treated him like a therapist or vented their repellent political opinions at him.

Click to see a larger version.

Scoth from Indianapolis mentioned the three things that are present in almost all accounts of late night convenience store or gas station jobs. Free coffee, which a clerk must drink until their hearts began racing so quickly there was no discernible time between beats. Second, relentless theft, by employees and customers alike. Third, the cigarettes. Always counting cigarettes.

Josh from Oregon elegantly summed up the customer service experience:

Unless you’ve lived it, you can never fully understand the total impact of this hell on earth. I gained thirty pounds, an additional chin, and bags under my eyes that could pack a family of four. I worked graveyard so my bitterness is perfectly understandable.

He describes a terrible customer who threw milk at him and the utter indignity that waited for him:

He threw the milk jug at me on the way out. I don’t think the dude knew just what that meant to me. Not only was I forced to get up off my lazy ass and clean up the fuckin mess, but I was left with an over-ring. But worse than all the fucking pricks like that was counting those goddamed cigarettes every morning.

Adam from Santa Fe confirmed a lot of things many of us suspected about those in such service jobs:

Sometimes now I piss in the window cleaner. Then I watch all those dumb fucks wash their windows with it all day.

Even worse:

I spit everywhere. Coffee pots and ice machines and in the sandwiches we sell.

And, as always:

The worst thing about this fuck job though is counting the cigarettes.

Such jobs alter the way your brain works, as explained by Joe Gallo from New Jersey.  One night when a seventeen-year-old girl accidentally drove through the front of the store, nearly taking out a line of people waiting to buy Lotto tickets, Joe’s reaction was interesting:

First thing I said: “Holy shit!” Next thing I said: “Awesome!”

Someone helpfully laid out their usual work tasks.

Also hilarious were the product reviews:

Waxie’s Gelled Rite-Away

Ok, this shit claims to remove “graffiti within 6 hours.” Sounds great if your graffiti is lipstick. Or erasable pen. Or a pencil, Or better yet, a piece of paper with “Chaka” sprayed on it, taped to the wall.

Since the clerk knew his boss would “shit a horse” if he saw some painted graffiti on the wall, he booked it to the stall with Waxie’s Gelled Rite-Away and when he was finished, the white paint was stripped down to the metal but the graffiti remained.

The ‘zine also includes a nice list of films from the eighties and nineties that depict the clerk experience, the weird gum you can find at convenience stores, shopping cart racing, a helpful list of ‘zines to read on the clock (featuring Fringe Ware Review, which is worth mentioning because I am almost certain I purchased this at the old FringeWare store on Guadalupe), and many humorous observations about cops.

And in case you were wondering, yes, the clerks frequently have sex in the store. Or at least they did in 1996. I suspect it is more difficult but if the coolers in back are not surveilled, you can probably bank on the fact that if you are waiting five minutes for a clerk to ring you up at 3:45 am, chances are he or she is in the cooler or a random storage closet expressing their love for their partner in a physical manner.

The nineties were the last time when people could be free to engage in compensatory retaliation. Yeah, yeah, spitting everywhere is unsanitary** and “you’re getting paid to work you communist” but I don’t care because being micromanaged with cameras on you from every angle as you spend half-an-hour with a religious fanatic Protestant, who is upset that you are selling Catholic glass canister candles, begging her to give you her credit card so you can charge her so she can leave, is worth a stolen six-pack or a furtive blow job under the counter. Cutting off the working person’s ability to blow off steam at work is probably why we as a nation are ready at a moment’s notice to kill each other. This ‘zine reminds me that I’m kind of old these days, but it was fun remembering the activity that radicalized me more than any politician or religious figure could – working the register.

Unfortunately finding a copy of this  ‘zine will prove to be difficult but sometimes just knowing something this incredible exists is enough.

‘Zine September now comes to a close. I may do this again, especially if I get some good ‘zine recommendations. I also have some ‘zines I want to discuss in October. Except next month is ODDtober, where I hope to discuss creepy and frightening ‘zines, music, books and films.

 

*I once worked at a Half-Price Books. Best job of my life, I loved it but I was seasonal, and I would work there again in a moment, even taking into account the bathrooms. The women’s bathroom was a nightmare. Twice in my brief time there, someone smeared shit all over the ladies’ room stalls. The manager of the store was a rock star of a woman and  and felt it was her responsibility to clean up when that happened but the second time I did it. I volunteered to do it because the manager had just learned she was pregnant. The ladies’ room also suffered from women not using their Diva cups with consideration for their fellow man, leaving period blood smeared on the doors and faucets, and one time, a defiant woman left huge blood clots clogging the bathroom sink.

But the best bathroom cleaning experience came from the men’s room. Someone had peed all over the wall outside of a regular stall, as well as all over the inside of the stall itself. As I was mopping up, I noticed sneaker prints on the back of the toilet – the store was old so the toilets were the sort you find in homes, with a tank with a lid and a regular flush mechanism. Smallish sneaker prints. I am not a forensics expert but I am reasonably sure a pre-teen boy stood atop the toilet tank and just peed all over the bathroom. I could not even be mad at it. I could just feel the degenerate glee that kid must have felt as he soaked the place in piss and wished him well in his future job in finance.

** If you’re eating gas station-prepared food anywhere but Buc-ees, some stoner spitting on your sandwich will be the least of your problems.

10 Best Revenge Movies Written by Women by APac

I ordered this ‘zine recently because it was bundled with some interesting horror film ‘zines, but I am a sucker for these sort of top ten lists because I generally end up with at least a couple of pieces of new media to check out.

There are so many revenge movies that have female protagonists who seek vengeance for terrible things done to them, notably I Spit on Your Grave, The Brave One, and Ms. 45. I tend to thinkCarrie is as well. However, those films were directed by men and this list focuses on those directed by women, which ensured I would find a few films new to me.

Of the ten films, I have seen only three. One is Prevenge, directed by comedian Alice Lowe, which features a pregnant heroine seeking to kill those whom she holds responsible for the death of her romantic partner. I enjoyed it quite a bit, so much so that I watched it three times. My favorite scene is when the protagonist and one of her future victims burst out singing Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good.”

Another is Violation, directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer. I really disliked this film because I disagree with the essential premise. Should a perpetrator who misinterpreted sexual signs, who believed he had consent, be tortured and brutally slain because he got it wrong? None of this was helped by how unlikable the heroine was, because her behavior was so unpleasant that I almost walked away with the belief that she wanted to destroy her sister’s happy life and succeeded in spades. I’m not condemning her by implying she is a “bad victim” but rather stating that her aggressively sexual behavior with her partner and overall behavior with her sister made me think initially that she seduced the man she killed so she had an excuse to kill him. When we saw her perspective later and realized she did feel violated, I was surprised, which points in the direction of inconsistent characterization. If you loved this film, tell me why because I don’t get it but am willing to see other points of view

The third is She-Devil, directed by Susan Seidelman. This is one of the worst films ever made, taking a very serious novel with well-used black humor and turning it into a terribly unfunny slapstick comedy starring Roseanne Barr, Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. I suspect the semi-positive reviews were down to Streep’s presence in the film. However, it was a delight finding it on this list anyway because the screenplay was “based” on the novel The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon. Though I have not reviewed any of her work on this site, I’ve mentioned her often, and it was painful seeing her work so terribly degraded because I am serious when I say the film adaptation sucks a’plenty.

Excuse me as I begin to go off on another tangent somewhat unrelated to the ‘zine in question.

But the book the film was based on is resplendent. No one handles revenge better than Fay Weldon did. In fact, critic Regina Barreca included Fay Weldon’s work in Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. It would be a near-book length entry to discuss the things that happened to Weldon that caused her to seek revenge in her often autobiographical  books, but she took some outrageous slings and arrows of fate and turned them into amusing, startling and provocative books. In the actual novel, Ruth, the fat and unattractive protagonist, loses her husband Bob to a beautiful romance novelist, Mary. Mary schemes to break up the marriage and succeeds and Ruth disappears with little more than the clothes on her back. She spends years making connections, earning money, and setting the stage for her ultimate revenge. Brick by brick, she disassembles Mary’s perfect life via her behind the scenes machinations and the coup de grace was several years of surgeries that left her looking identical to Mary. She even had lengths of her leg bones removed to reduce her height. Looking exactly like her defeated rival, she swoops back in to regain her husband who has been so broken by events that one is not sure if he understands he is now with Ruth, and we leave the novel wondering how much Bob is going to suffer for his callous cruelty and abandonment of his loyal wife.

Snerting at two of the three films in this ‘zine isn’t a slight against the list or those who compiled the list. Though these films are touted as the “best” ten revenge movies directed by women, the fact is that there are not that many films that meet the criteria. There are a couple of films on the top ten list I want to see, namely Promising Young Woman because I initially thought that it was based on the Caroline O’Donoghue novel, Promising Young Women. It isn’t but I adore Clancy Brown and the reviews seem good so I am eager to check it out. There are others in there that seem worth watching but I won’t spoil things further and instead encourage you to check out these ‘zine makers.  I will be discussing another ‘zine from APac for Oddtober.

Though this list didn’t necessarily ring many “best film” bells for me, the creators took the time to  search out films that weren’t immediate ringers that many have seen. I know they were trying to present more obscure films because they placed three of the most famous revenge films women directed in a sort of “honorable mention” list. I’ve definitely seen Baise-Moi, Monster and Jennifer’s Body, and excluding them ensured I got to know about more films I hadn’t seen. I appreciate the attempt to introduce the reader to something new. Also extremely helpful is a master list of all the movies they considered for this list and I was pleased to see that Carrie 2 was on it.

And I really appreciate the opportunity to redirect people from the terrible She-Devil to the darkly delightful Lives and Loves of a She-Devil.

Hawk & Handsaw by Max McNabb

I met Max McNabb when he sent me this ‘zine. I was so excited about finding a fellow traveler in Texana and the weirdness that is so often present in our homeland that I intended to discuss it immediately. However, I kind of got lost posting over here for a while and that didn’t happen until now but I recall bonding with him on Facebook over the Josiah Wilbarger case. We both appear to have encyclopedic knowledge of the man who was scalped by Comanches and left to die. Sarah Hornsby, whose husband was a friend of Wilbarger’s, had repeated dreams telling her he was still alive, as well as where he was, and she finally persuaded a search party to go back out to find them (she called them cowards and goaded them until they finally took her seriously) and sure enough he was exactly where she said he would be. When he recovered he spoke of how his sister Margaret, who was far away in Missouri, had appeared to him and told him to be calm and that help was on the way. He later found out that Margaret had died two weeks before the scalping. Wilbarger somehow lived for over a decade after being rescued.  I photographed the place where he was scalped and wrote an article about him, but I would need NASA to comb through my hard drive to find it.

Regardless, Max and I have a remarkable overlap in interests: Texas, ghost stories (preferably set in Texas), high weirdness, conspiracy theory, folklore and alternative looks at history and politics. All are present in Hawk & Handsaw, which takes its title from Hamlet:

I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

This is a delightful ‘zine, covering a wide array of topics, among them: Texas tales of cryptids, ghost lights and UFOs, an attempt to correct common misconceptions about the Boston Tea Party, an interview with author Max Evans, a list of lesser-known Bob Dylan songs, and an original poem and comic strip. But the topic that interested me the most was a single page where McNabb presents hobo glyphs.

If you are unfamiliar with hobo glyphs, they are symbols that rail riders would carve into train trestles to relay information about the general area to other travelers. Hard-nosed sheriffs, unfriendly townsfolk, guard dogs and more all had their specific symbols so that hobos would know when to step lightly. There were positive symbols, as well, including depictions of people who would give them money to get out of town, towns that served alcohol, and hobo friendly churches.

The symbol that is most important to me is the symbol for “kind hearted woman.” It’s an image of a smiling cat and it indicated that a kind woman lived in a home near the tracks. It isn’t listed in the symbols McNabb presents in his ‘zine, but as I hope I have shown throughout this long look at ‘zines, a good ‘zine often causes these sorts of tangents. My grandparents lived next to a rail line in Lawn, Texas. That train track played a huge role in my mother’s life as she often played near the trestles. The train track was so important in her life that part of my mother’s ashes were spread there. So of course I heard a lot about that train track when my mother felt nostalgic (and I will note that even though she basically roamed the ranch, rode pigs, and wandered all over the train tracks, often barefoot, she didn’t permit me to leave my grandparent’s front yard when we visited).

My mother’s stories may not always come from a place of objective absolute truth because family legends can get garbled – she told me we had a lot of American Indian blood but 23 & Me begged to differ – but I recall her telling me that the trestles near her childhood home bore hobo glyphs, including the image of the smiling cat that represents the “soft hearted woman.” That glyph specifically meant that nearby lived a woman who would be willing to offer them food if asked. I was a child when my grandmother died, and she was very sick during my life, so my main memories are of her being very unwell. However, I know my grandmother exhibited the type of generosity one often saw in people who survived the sort of extreme poverty that the modern American mind has a hard time understanding. If she had food, she would have offered any she had if a hungry person showed up on her porch. I recall her once scraping off table scraps for the feral cats that managed to survive the coyotes, cementing even further the association of my grandmother with happy cats. She made sure my favorite food of hers was on offer every time I visited – her creamed corn was such a family favorite that we’ve all tried to recreate it, but to no avail.

Her influence was seen very clearly in my mother’s approach to food, and in mine, too. My mother loved to cook for people. I would come home from working my after-school job at Michaels to find members of my high school debate team hanging out with her and her husband. They came over because they knew my mother would cook them all kinds of indulgent foods. Fried chicken and mac and cheese were popular but sometimes they would just raid the fridge for leftovers, to her absolute delight. I show similar tendencies, especially with holiday baking.

To see the kind hearted woman pin in more detail, click this image.

The kind hearted woman symbol has carried a lot of weight with me throughout my life, and when I saw a pin that depicted the symbol, I bought it and now keep it with the handful of my grandmother’s remaining possessions I have displayed behind glass. I did not expect to break down in tears reading McNabb’s ‘zine, remembering those lost to me and the stories that are a part of my family legend, but here we are.

I haven’t seen much from Max McNabb across the social media sites where we are “mutuals” and I suspect the social conflagrations of 2020 that degenerated into identity political witch hunts on both sides of the political spectrum may have affected him the way it affected me. I hope he is doing well, and I hope he sees this and knows the unlikely effect a simple graph of glyphs had on me. I don’t see that Hawk & Handsaw is available for sale but there is a “contact me” section on his website where you can reach him to see if he has any copies to spare.

 

Reflection by Compact Squirrel

If this were Instagram, there would be endless comments about how Basic Bitch my perfume tastes are.

Reflection is another artfully folded micro-zine that feels like someone is sharing both their talent and their passion directly to readers. It has the same level of intimacy I found in I Got That B-Movie Autism, and it has the same ability to provoke conversation. The drawings in Reflection are quite pretty, and the message is one that matters less and less to me but is an important one for young women (and possibly men, too) who are grappling with identity and how their appearance shapes their prospects in life. It can often feel like we have to take off our real selves and put on a new appearance as easily as we change clothes and this little ‘zine focuses on that issue in a visually appealing but creepy way.

This is a conversation that each new generation of women is forced to have, for a variety of reasons. It can be easy to place the blame for female self-image problems on social media, the male gaze, relentless marketing that makes young women feel as if they need to change their appearances to achieve what the current arbiters of beauty decide is the new standard. We are currently seeing a cultural shift in how American woman are supposed to look and women who made drastic changes to themselves will find it hard to meet new standards. For example, women who received brazilian butt lifts are out of luck as the thinner silhouette is gaining ground again, and over-filled lips are being replaced by more defined cupid’s bows. What will happen to all the women who got buccal fat removal when it becomes chic to have chubby cheeks?

It’s not lost on me how violent this image is. It reminds me of the skin suits Jame Gumb made in Silence of the Lambs.

However, while culture influences this sense that our appearances are coats we should shed as the world sees fit, the fact remains that what women experience today is what women experienced two thousand years ago. Makeup, hair dye, body henna, altering body shape with clothing, different hair styles from one generation to the next… It almost seems as if pursuing continual changes in appearance are an innate part of the female human experience.

Remarkably, I recall where I got this ‘zine and why I bought it. I got it from Compact Squirrel’s Etsy store and I bought it because the title and the artwork were appealing to me. I’m an Elder Hag so the beauty standards have little significance in my own life, but I’m going to tell you something strange about me: I don’t look like me. And don’t ask me to explain it because I’m not entirely sure what that means. When I talk about it, people assume I am describing some form of body dysmorphia or a lack of face recognition. Neither are at play for me. It’s just that I intuitively know that when I look in the mirror, the face that looks back at me isn’t quite right. Part of the problem is that I look so different from photo to photo that even if I did not have this “problem” I still wouldn’t see the “real” me in photos. But the main issue is that I have what seems like a memory of a face that is like the one I have now but different somehow so every time I see myself it’s startling. It’s not because I am aging because I recall thinking this way when I was a teen.  I wonder if other women feel similarly and find it just as difficult to speak about it coherently. Perhaps my bizarre reaction to my face is secretly common and fuels youthful body and facial alteration. Probably not, but you never know until you speak about it.

Also I feel I need to mention that ‘zine authors are notoriously generous about sending fun freebies with a ‘zine purchase. Along with the ‘zine, Compact Squirrel sent me some tentacle stickers and what appears to be a glow-in-the-dark tooth sticker that I gave to Mr. OTC. Good times!

BeastMeat by Seth Goodkind

Today’s look at ‘zines is going to be a short one, by necessity because it’s an art/comic ‘zine with very little in the way of dialogue.

Let my crankiest cat show you what is what with BeastMeat by Seth Goodkind.

“Do you see the beast? Have you got it in your sights?”

BeastMeat is a fun and fairly nasty mini-zine/comic hybrid. It’s a little bit of gross horror that is meant to be enjoyed for its grossness, but, believe it or not (believe it because I will explain myself shortly), I was able to associate elements of this ‘zine with a recent presidential candidate’s struggles.

BeastMeat consists of black and white drawings of a man who has some sort of worm in his head, speaking gibberish to him and driving him to madness. He shoots himself in the head to rid himself of the worm – I have no idea why I immediately thought “planarian” but suspect it’s just high school biology rearing its less-than-helpful head – and the worm tries to escape, only to be caught by a goat-looking creature. The goat, whom I assume to be the “Beast,” engages in a struggle with the worm and then the man, and I assume they are the “Meat,” but I’m sort of old and have no real idea what is happening. Then the Beast lays or craps out some sort of larvae sac into the man’s neck. The End.

Meet the Beast. Irritate a cat. Make unlikely associations with politics.

But here’s why I absolutely had to discuss this ‘zine. A man has a wormish creature crawling around in his head, shouting nonsense and driving him to madness. He rids himself of the worm but a Luciferian goat comes and makes things even worse with a nastier worm-thing. Is there anything in this comic that reminds you of some current politician? If the Beast had been a bear or a whale, would the association I’m making be clearer?

This comic ‘zine was created in 2014 but I think we all know that Seth Goodkind looked into the future, saw Robert F. Kennedy’s worm-infested brain and his struggles with political darkness and drew this comic to warn us. And the upside to this totally coherent analysis is that you can assign members of the political right and left to the role of the Beast, which means you don’t have to leave me angry comments accusing me of being a Soros-funded degenerate or a Russian Trumpette asset.

I have absolutely no idea where I got this ‘zine but Seth Goodkind still sells this comic ‘zine in his Etsy store. He also has an interesting-looking Instagram account. He appears to be a tattooist, and has inked a card from the Edward Gorey Fantod Pack onto someone’s arm. This means he is awesome and I will send a Fantod Pack to the first person not married to me who knows what Edward Gorey character I have tattooed on my own carcass and posts the answer in the comments. Contest open until someone wins or we all succumb to the brain worm and become BeastMeat or succumb to BeastMeat, the comic wasn’t clear.

I Got That B-Movie Autism by @frankenart13

Mirabelle loves to curl up with a good ‘zine.

It’s a small relief to discuss another single-page ‘zine after Chris Mikul’s much longer, research-heavy ‘zines.  I Got That B-Movie Autism is the work of an artist who goes by the moniker frankenart13 across various social media platforms. I really enjoy little ‘zines like these. They are artfully folded, reminding me of passing notes in school or carefully constructing cootie catchers so my friends and I could hopefully determine who we would marry or if we would be rich when we grew up. There is an interesting intimacy to these small ‘zines that draw me in, and I have a lot of them. I hope to one day find all the ‘zines I’ve stashed all over my shelves and stuck in drawers and behave as if I am collecting these little ‘zines rather than haphazardly accumulating them.

This ‘zine has a very specific mission:

If you’ve ever wanted to be recommended 3 obscure and amazing cult movies by an autistic queer dude, then this is the zine for you!

The three movies Frankenart13 wants to share are Reanimator, The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and I won’t spoil why he wants to recommend them in case you want to buy a copy for yourself.

I will, however, note that The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera are both directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. I enjoyed both films when I saw them, years ago, and had no clue who directed either, let alone that it was the same man, though it shouldn’t be surprising because the two films are clearly siblings with similar aesthetics and style.

I  know about Darren Lynn Bousman because I became very interested in the Saw franchise last spring. With the exception of Saw 3D, also known as Saw 7 (because, shockingly, it was the seventh Saw film in the series) and Spiral, I found all of the Saw movies strangely compelling and compulsively watchable. I had dismissed the films as being little more than torture porn, and in a way they aren’t much more than that, but the character arcs, the plot twists and the grimy visuals ensured that even when the films were bad, they were still sort of good. I found myself watching tons of YouTube videos about the franchise, ranking the best and worst traps, best and worst deaths, best and worst characters, etc.

Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV were directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Chris Rock brought him back into the fold after seventeen years away for Spiral, which was the worst film in the franchise, in my opinion, and I am unable to express exactly why it didn’t hit me the same way the other films did. Others tended to agree with my puzzled dislike. But Bousman’s miss was offset by Saw II, a film that some horror aficionados consider the best horror sequel ever made. They may be right, as I can’t currently think of a sequel that was as good as or better than the first movie. Saw II was pretty good, with interesting character development, some really grody traps (Shawnee Smith in that needle pit…), and some excellent twists. Bousman is a director with a very specific style that I never would have associated with The Devil’s Carnival or Repo! The Genetic Opera. I want to rewatch both and then rewatch Saw II for the umpteenth time and see if I can pick out details that are Bousman-like in all three.

Not all ‘zines will cause this cascade of reaction but it’s always fun when they do. This ‘zine is, in the end, just a piece of artfully folded paper but because of it I’m likely going to spend six hours watching films in a search that has nothing to do with the original content presented in I Got That B-Movie Autism. Good times!

Biblio-Curiosa No. 6 by Chris Mikul

There are a lot of reasons to read Chris Mikul’s work. He’s erudite and has a fondness for the strangeness that is the backbone of this site. He is able to look at terrible literature with a kind intellectualism that I would do well to emulate (there are a couple of books I eviscerated on this site that I want to revisit and see how they read with a more generous, less pedantic eye). He’s introduced me to some amazing books, not the least among them The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Gibbons, which I’ve had in my possession for a while but have yet to read because I’ve wanted to read it for so long that I feel a weird sort of sorrow at the prospect of losing that feeling of joyful anticipation.

One of the best reasons to read him is his deep knowledge of writers who have more or less been lost to time. There are so many excellent and interesting books that for various reasons slip away from the public eye, and Mikul finds a lot of value in researching such books and the authors behind them. His articles that feature books that are lost or nearly lost to modern readers are fascinating, and at times maddening because I can seldom find copies of the books to read for myself.

There are five articles in Biblio-Curiosa No. 6, and I am limiting myself to the cover story, but bear in mind that the remaining four articles are very much worth reading, especially the analysis of William Nathan Stedman, a poet very much in the running for the worst poet ever. I’m discussing the cover piece exclusively because it is such an excellent example of Mikul’s research chops as well as his affection for the topic as he ferrets out information about forgotten authors and their works.

Few know the name Frank Walford these days, and that is a shame because his books were both ahead of their time in terms of content and because the content itself was often completely lunatic. Mikul’s article focuses on Twisted Clay, a delightfully batshit and sordid book about a psychopathic teenage lesbian. This book was initially published in 1933, and contains violence and sexual implication one does not expect to find in pre-WWII literature.

I’ve noticed that people interact with my work more when there is a cat involved. So here’s Mikul’s ‘zine atop my baffled cat, Calliope.

Twisted Clay is narrated by its protagonist, Jean Deslines. She lives in New South Wales with her father and grandmother. She is, as Mikul points out, “sexually precocious,” and at age twelve was already behaving in a very provocative manner, swimming nude in front of neighbors and attempting to seduce the clergyman her beleaguered grandmother asks to speak to her about her exhibitionism (and it sounds like she very nearly succeeded). Jean is primarily sexually attracted to women and sleeps with the housemaid Jenny, and one wonders how her grandmother felt about having two lesbians in her prim household. Later, Jean’s cousin Myrtle, herself a lesbian, tells Jean that she doesn’t like men so she will likely never marry. When Jean pushes her for more details, she tells the fourteen-year-old Jean to look it up.

Jean reads the sexual arbiters of the time (think Freud and Havelock Ellis) and realizes she is a lesbian and is so appalled by this information that she seeks out a boyfriend, sleeps with him and promptly becomes pregnant. Her father arranges an abortion but this does not change Jean much. In fact, she begins to dress in a manner meant to attract men, and it succeeds, because when her Uncle Harry and Aunt Gabrielle come to visit, Uncle Harry develops a sexual attraction to his young niece, a situation that drives her aunt to despair as she tries to make Jean aware of the situation. Jean toys with the woman, fully aware that her uncle wants to have sex with her, but pretends she doesn’t. When she finally feigns understanding, she immediately accuses her of having a dirty mind. When everyone comes to see what the matter is, Jean adds fuel to the already incendiary situation and her aunt and uncle leave the next day.

Jean’s father speaks to the family doctor, Dr Murray, and they discuss what needs to be done with Jean. Insanely, the doctor recommends that she receive a sort of ovary operation to encourage more feminine behavior, as well as psychotherapy. Jean is thrilled at the idea of psychotherapy because she can “mystify the operator by relating imaginary dreams and fictitious incidents!” She is less enthusiastic about the operation, thinking it would kill her personality and that she would be justified in killing her father in defense to avoid such a death. And this is how this strange girl tries to dissuade her father from forcing the surgery:

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Dr. Murray said, if he owned me, he would thrash me. Why don’t you thrash me, to see if it should do any good?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too old to thrash.”

“I’m not, I’m not! See, here’s your walking stick. Beat me with it, beat me hard!”

“Go to bed, child, and don’t talk nonsense.”

With a quick jerk, I stripped off my pyjama trousers, standing before him nude to mid-thighs, clad only in my dangling pyjama coat. “Beat me, Daddy, beat me hard, beat me till the blood flows. I want you to.”

Okay, so by now it should not surprise anyone that some of Frank Walford’s books got banned and that this book is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

To avoid going to Europe for the surgery, Jean fakes interest in a grave site in which someone will be buried later that day. Jean’s father takes her to see the grave and she takes him out with a hatchet to the head and pushes him into the grave. But this was a “from the frying pan into the fire” sort of situation because Dr. Murray is given guardianship of her. Jean, once again with her back against the wall, decides to set up Dr. Murray. She senses he is attracted to her so she tries to seduce him and arranges for a policeman to see the good doctor throw himself at her. Alone finally, her father’s ghost appears to her telling her no hard feelings for killing him, but later she hears a voice that tells her she must go to the grave, dig her father up and wrap up his broken skull. She does so but realizes that she didn’t secure her father’s corpse, which could implicate her, so she pretends that she dug her father up because she had overheard Dr. Murray murmur something about killing him. This causes the town to consider Jean a heroine but the voice again speaks up, wanting her to return to bind his wounds a second time. This time Jean’s luck runs out and the police catch her in the act and arrest her. (The plot makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.)

Sent to a mental asylum, she escapes and turns to prostitution to support herself. She is disgusted by the men she sleeps with but earns a lot of money. Later the voice comes back and tells her to start killing the men who lust after her, and yet again she does what the voice tells her. She runs into cousin Myrtle again, they resume their sexual relationship, but the voice tells her to kill Myrtle, too, and she obliges. Later Jean opens a beauty salon and a gangster takes a shine to her and wants her to join his criminal pursuits. She does and later finds that she is attracted to the gangster and becomes a sort of moll. Life is going as well as it can when one of the policemen who arrested her for killing her father sees her, follows her and manages to get a sample of Jean’s fingerprints. She kills the police officer, but this last murder has her feeling contemplative. She muses about suicide:

Life was not so attractive that I desired to cling to it like a limpet to its rock. I had tasted almost everything but death. Should I…? Why not?

Why not indeed? I leave the reader to wonder what she ultimately does.

This book sounds like a hoot, but the fact that the author was a hoot as well is the icing on the odd cake. Frank Walford was born in Australia in 1882. He was a gifted amateur boxer who could have gone pro had a horse not kicked him in the face, breaking his cheekbones and knocking out a few front teeth. He then decided to purchase a boat and traveled along the Australian coastline and three months later came back to land but the rough company he kept caused him to lose a job with a bank. He then returned to sailing again, and made money fishing and shooting crocodiles. (It’s right about here I need to mention that I am not making any of this up.)

Walton was pretty good with a knife and gun and got to prove his mettle with a knife after a man with a grudge stabbed him in the back, right in his kidney. After he recovered, he challenged the man to a knife fight and severed the tendons in his elbows, ensuring the man would never again stab a man in the back.

He eventually married and had children and began to write. He became involved with a group of writers who called themselves the Blue Mountaineers. Interestingly, the only other member of the group who had some success writing penned a novel that featured an atypical heroine who thinks about suicide when life got too boring. His novel Silver Girl sounds absolutely lunatic. It features a passage wherein a side character realizes his wife gave birth to the protagonist’s child. When the protagonist comes to visit with his new wife, the side character grabs the infant and uses it as cudgel to beat the protagonist’s wife to death.

During WWII, Walford served in the Voluntary Defense Corps and became an avid anti-Communist and continued to write. Mikul observes that it is very difficult to summarize Walford’s style.

He could be coarse…, morbid and willfully perverse, but when he chose to, he could write with great sensitivity and feeling. He had a journalist’s eye for detail, and the settings for his stories are always vividly imagined, no matter how wild the plots became.

I can’t help but marvel that Walford’s work was published, especially Twisted Clay. He really was pushing boundaries, and even now, it seems very likely social media would have come for him and cancelled him had his books been released today. I’ll probably spend the weekend looking for copies of his books and pray they are affordable if I find any.

Check back tomorrow for another Mikul ‘zine before I pivot back to non-Mikul content. Should you decide to purchase a copy, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

ETA: Holy crap, it turns out that Amazon carries Twisted Clay!