Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology Read online

  Contents

  Welcome to the Velvet

  Title

  Dedication

  Foreword by Steve Erickson

  Introduction by Logan Rapp

  "Death Juggler" by Axel Taiari

  "Click-Clack" by Caleb J Ross

  "The World Was Clocks" by Amanda Gowin

  "Mantodea" by Matt Bell

  "All the Acid in the World" by Gavin Pate

  "Crazy Love" by Cameron Pierce

  "Chance the Dick" by Paul G Tremblay

  "Soccer Moms and Pro Wrestler Dads" by Bradley Sands

  "Take Arms Against a Sea" by Mark Jaskowski

  "This Will All End Well" by Nik Korpon

  "Midnight Souls" by Christopher J Dwyer

  "The Tree of Life" by Edward J Rathke

  "The Killer" by Brian Evenson

  "Headshot" by Gordon Highland

  "Inside Out" by Sean P Ferguson

  "Laws of Virulence" by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  "Bruised Flesh" by Craig Wallwork

  "Bad, Bad, Bad Bad Men" by Craig Davidson

  "Three Theories on the Murder of John Wily" by J David Osborne

  "The Road Lester Took" by Stephen Graham Jones

  "My German Daughter" by Nic Young

  "What Was There Inside the Child" by Blake Butler

  "Seed" by Gayle Towell

  "They Take You" by Kyle Minor

  "The Redemption of Garvey Flint" by Vincent Louis Carrella

  "Blood Atonement" by DeLeon DeMicoli

  "The Liberation of Edward Kellor" by Anthony David Jacques

  "Act of Contrition" by Craig Clevenger

  "Say Yes to Pleasure" by Richard Thomas

  "The Weight of Consciousness" by Tim Beverstock

  "If You Love Me" by Doc O’Donnell

  "Touch" by Pela Via

  "Love" by JR Harlan

  "Practice" by Bob Pastorella

  "Fading Glory" by Brandon Tietz

  "Little Deaths" by Gary Paul Libero

  "We Sing the Bawdy Electric" by Rob Parker

  "In Exile" by Chris Deal

  Afterword by Jesse Lawrence

  End

  Acknowledgments

  Bonus Content

  Final Thoughts by Livius Nedin and Robb Olson

  Warmed and Bound: Up Close by Phil Jourdan

  Interview with Pela Via by Phil Jourdan

  The Multiple Voices Inside Your Book by Jay Slayton-Joslin

  Interviews with Booked Podcast

  Interview Transcript: Craig Clevenger

  Interview Transcript: Brian Evenson

  Interview Transcript: Stephen Graham Jones

  Interview Transcript: Pela Via

  The Fuse

  Recommended Reading

  Contributor Index

  Matt Bell

  Tim Beverstock

  Blake Butler

  Vincent Louis Carrella

  Craig Clevenger

  Craig Davidson

  Chris Deal

  DeLeon DeMicoli

  Christopher J Dwyer

  Steve Erickson

  Brian Evenson

  Sean P Ferguson

  Amanda Gowin

  JR Harlan

  Gordon Highland

  Anthony David Jacques

  Mark Jaskowski

  Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Phil Jourdan

  Charles King

  Nik Korpon

  Jesse Lawrence

  Gary Paul Libero

  Kyle Minor

  Livius Nedin

  Doc O’Donnell

  Robb Olson

  J David Osborne

  Rob Parker

  Bob Pastorella

  Gavin Pate

  Cameron Pierce

  Logan Rapp

  Edward J Rathke

  Caleb J Ross

  Bradley Sands

  Axel Taiari

  Richard Thomas

  Brandon Tietz

  Gayle Towell

  Paul Tremblay

  Pela Via

  Craig Wallwork

  Nic Young

  Booked Podcast

  The Velvet

  Copyright

  Edited by Pela Via

  With a Foreword by Steve Erickson

  Introduction by Logan Rapp

  Stories by: Matt Bell, Tim Beverstock, Blake Butler, Vincent Louis Carrella, Craig Clevenger, Craig Davidson, Chris Deal, DeLeon DeMicoli, Christopher J Dwyer, Brian Evenson, Sean P Ferguson, Amanda Gowin, JR Harlan, Gordon Highland, Anthony David Jacques, Mark Jaskowski, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Stephen Graham Jones, Nik Korpon, Gary Paul Libero, Kyle Minor, Doc O’Donnell, J David Osborne, Rob Parker, Bob Pastorella, Gavin Pate, Cameron Pierce, Edward J Rathke, Caleb J Ross, Bradley Sands, Axel Taiari, Richard Thomas, Brandon Tietz, Gayle Towell, Paul Tremblay, Pela Via, Craig Wallwork and Nic Young

  Exclusive to the eBook:

  Afterword by Jesse Lawrence

  Final Thoughts by Livius Nedin and Robb Olson

  Warmed and Bound: Up Close by Phil Jourdan

  Interview with Pela Via by Phil Jourdan

  The Multiple Voices Inside Your Book by Jay Slayton-Joslin

  Booked Podcast: Warmed and Bound Sessions

  Transcripts of Booked Interviews with: Craig Clevenger, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones and Pela Via

  Photography by Charles King

  The Fuse

  “The writers of The Velvet are contemporary fiction’s most effective and least self-conscious aesthetic guerrillas . . . The result is fiction at once conceived from high artistic intent and executed with depraved populist energy.”

  —Steve Erickson

  author of Zeroville and The Sea Came in at Midnight

  It’s Velvet Noir. Welcome.

  What began as a love letter . . .

  Foreword

  by Steve Erickson

  I’ve known about The Velvet for a few years now but I still don’t actually know what The Velvet is. I suppose it could be called a collective but that sounds too benign; the implicit anarchy of the thing preempts anything so organized as a movement; and if you called it a school, for God’s sake, its members would reach for their revolvers. They’re an open conspiracy, is how I think these writers must be regarded, laying depth charges beneath a mainstream publishing business (which includes the likes of me more than I care for) that everyone knows is dead except the business itself. The writers of The Velvet are contemporary fiction’s most effective and least self-conscious aesthetic guerrillas and obliterators of “literature,” vaporizing arbitrary distinctions intended to tame a spirit that needs neither distinctions nor quotation marks. The result is fiction at once conceived from high artistic intent and executed with depraved populist energy. At some point in Craig Clevenger’s story the narrator—for whom a series of ever stranger women serve as the odometer of his mortality, assuming the narrator isn’t himself the stranger—utters this anthology’s most dangerous sentence: “I’ve been good my whole life,” and the moment you read this sentence you know there’s a fuse attached to it, you can see in the distance its glint and hear in the background its hiss, this fuse that was lit before you ever picked up the book and which burns closer and brighter with every page turned. In the fiction of The Velvet, fixation and fetish swap meanings and moments, Brian Evenson’s killer reaching out to the reader from the novel within a story, a mouth so mesmerizing to Matt Bell’s voyeur that it swallows up his life, a glimpse of breasts that’s won and lost in a card game dealt by Stephen Graham Jones, the touch of a breast that triggers a defiant meditation on God by this anthology’s editor, a child’s kiss by which Chris Deal
bids goodbye to innocence and hello to an uneasy grace. I read Warmed and Bound over a number of one-in-the-morning nights with the Jesus and Mary Chain on my headphones and, if I were younger, a shot of tequila, until I knew nothing was left of any sleep pattern that I could dream to. For you, the Hour of The Velvet may be high noon and the Soundtrack may be Astrud Gilberto or Scandinavian death-metal. I’m proud to be in this book even in the form of a testament so inadequate as this; accept it as my humble application for co-conspirator, which asks not my height or weight or credit score or for evidence of my good character but rather the mug shot of my psyche, the rorschach of my shadow the last time I glimpsed it, and whether I swear with my signature that every single word I’ve ever uttered is a lie, except for these that you’ve just read.

  Steve Erickson

  Introduction

  by Logan Rapp

  You don’t know what you’re doing

  It’s the Year of Our Lord 2004 and I’m shouldering loneliness like a stick and bindle. I’ve been angry for three years now, with a weekly ritual of viewing videos on the Internet of smoke clouds and falling towers. I hadn’t put pen to paper in that time, not for anything I’d deem worthwhile.

  I would close the blinds at noon and sit in the darkness of my self-constructed cave. I memorized the CIA Factbook on Terrorism as though a test were coming tomorrow. Al Jazeera’s English edition was top in my browser bookmarks. I kept my friends close, but my research closer. I feel bad now, because someone else must have taken on my freshman fifteen. I lost that much in the first six months of college.

  It’s what they want you to do

  I listened to the cacophony of voices, all wanting to imprint their designs upon my clean slate. I fed off their anger and regrets and took a major that would get me to the front lines. I had hatred in my heart and an itchy trigger finger. I wanted to kill a motherfucker, and I wanted the right ones dead. But I had to fire the shot. A girl in my philosophy class gave me every hint in the world, but I was ignorant, socially inept. Mechanical in my direction, I had thrown myself onto the Pyre of the Greater Good, built with the values of God, Family, Country and a Life for a Life. Then I picked up a book.

  Dear Johnny

  The dam I had built cracked, imperceptible at first, a cut from shaving where the skin fights to keep from bleeding. But bled it did. I remembered what it was like to create when for over thirty-six months I had wanted nothing more than to destroy. I wanted to know more. I looked up the author on the Internet, found some interviews, and his brother author.

  Oh Lucy if you had only asked me for this

  I wept. I hadn’t let tears fall since I had acquired my target. I was alone, the beautiful yet foreign sounds of Sigur Ros filling my bedroom, and I was on the floor, shaking as if gripped by a seizure. I felt. I hurt. But damn, if it wasn’t the most important moment in my life.

  I read more books. I finished all of Baer and Clevenger. Read their short stories. Found Jones, devoured his work. I had the hunger and tasted the sweet ambrosia of creation.

  Then I found they had an online community.

  I dove for it, and I connected with people who had similar, but unique, revelations. No one was fighting. No one had an ax to grind. Solely from our connection to these books, we formed something larger than ourselves. It may have been longer, but I choose to believe The Velvet materialized overnight.

  The Velvet warms and binds

  It’s a maxim no one officially claimed, but in the same unexpected way we came together, it came to be what defined us. I was no longer angry. I fed off of the encouragement of friends I hadn’t yet met in person, scattered across the globe. People who defy exclusivity and clique mentality. People who duck away from conversations to write a thought in a Moleskine.

  I changed my major. I changed my direction. In 2008 I moved to Los Angeles. And my best friend, whom I met in this community, was there waiting for me. We proceeded to get wasted that very afternoon, but before the night was over, we were already editing each other’s latest projects. And then one day, I opened my word processor and proceeded to write seventy-thousand words within three weeks. They created, quite possibly, the worst thing I’ve ever made to completion. But when I came out of that fever dream, stumbling into the sunlight as though I’d never seen it before, I had resurrected myself.

  I am Phineas Poe and this is how it begins

  I cannot fully express what The Velvet has given me. I owe a part of myself to it, to the people who inspired it, and to the people who form its core.

  As you read these stories, you’ll find in them evidence of hearts that pump double-time.

  Stay warm and bound.

  —Logan Rapp

  Death Juggler

  by Axel Taiari

  It’s all laughter and nervous giggles until the bombs explode for real. Then the audience’s mood short-circuits fast as a brain stroke: a boom louder than staccato lightning strikes eardrums, a body skyrockets into the air, screams zigzag through the big top, people trample over each other for the swiftest way to the exit. The announcer begs into his microphone for everyone to calm down. A panicked clown runs around, hands flailing high above his head. A bloody stray limb lands into a crying kid’s lap. Whatever’s left of the blown-apart corpse splashes back to the blood-drenched sand. Dense black smoke chokes the air, saturating the massive tent in seconds. A few regulars stand up and applaud as the chaos flourishes around them. Floodlights die. Slaves carrying stretchers sneak through the bedlam. The death artist leaves the blacked-out stage as an unsolved puzzle of meat and guts.

  ———

  Death as an art form took off when boredom set in. There are only so many tricks the audience can enjoy. Pull a rabbit out of an empty hat? Paint them fatigued. Disappear in a cloud of colored fog and reappear at the other end of the stage? Watch them yawn. Make an elephant dance, hacksaw a girl in half then piece her back together? Snore. Card tricks, mind reading, hypnosis, straightjacket escapes, sword cabinets. They’d rather stare at a blank wall.

  As the violence became a daily part of life in the city, Asher Marok realized magic was a professional job of upping the ante. On the way to work, humming citizens stroll past muggings in the streets. Zeppelins wandering between skyscrapers dump propaganda letters by the thousands, a paper rain of paranoid bulletins warning of more murders, more gang wars, let us pray the mayor shall forever keep us safe. Desperate basement-dwellers spike glasses of absinthe with tasteless date-rape juice. Door-to-door choirboys herald another apocalypse with seraphic voices. Conked-out link-heads fornicate with steamers in underground sex clubs. Junkies with jaundiced skins lick toads outside of schools and watch reality sunder beneath their skulls. The world is decaying at light-speed, and mouth-breathing wannabe tricksters expect the populace to care about a little sleight of hand? Please.

  Asher understood it all, even before puberty sucker punched him with a fat boost of acne and strange stirrings. He watched his father step on stage night after night, doing your run-of-the-mill tricks. People came, sure. But they came once, never to show their faces again.

  He managed to do what his father never could. He built a devoted fan base. Yellowed fliers on the crumbling walls in the ghetto advertised: Tonight in Sector 7, come see The Amazing Asher kill himself for your entertainment. Only tonight folks—we deal in death, not resurrection.

  ———

  Asher wakes up to unblinking bug eyes staring at him over stiletto teeth.

  The prodigal son returns, says Callahan, lighting up a cigarette fatter than a pinky finger.

  Almost gave me a heart attack, you bastard, croaks Asher. He sits up, shuddering off the cobwebs of a coma.

  Fucking welding goggles.

  Callahan sucks on the cigarette, exhales a cloud of jet-black smoke. Heart attack. Funny, coming from a man hell-bent on killing himself. I’m here to patch you up, Ash, not turn you on.

  Asher stumbles out of the dentist chair, nearly knocking over a tray full of tools in the pro
cess. Welder, screwdriver, bloody bucket, scissors, endless jars of multicolored liquids, oversized syringes, scalpel. An ugly process.

  The artist cracks his fingers, neck, toes, pinches himself in various places, still not used to the patchwork of scars crisscrossing his ruined skin. He smiles and says, what’s the damage, doc?