Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (48 page)

2007 Europa Editions 
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Last Days
 by
Brian Evenson
 

Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original. 

2009 Underland Press
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Major Inversions 
by
Gordon Highland
 

Your roommate says you should date more, that all those spandex nights on stage paying tribute to hair metal and banging faceless groupies only amplify your Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. That this quicksand town of floozies, fiends, and filmmakers will survive without your commercial jingles. And your narcotics. That you should turn in your daytime security-guard badge and settle down. He’s got the perfect girl, a cinnamon-scented innocent who will bring that elusive substance to your life despite the familial forces that conspire against your union. Always lurking in the periphery, the roommate remains buried in his Master’s thesis, the parasitic puppeteer behind your reinvention, the search for your birth parents, and your all-too-brief film scoring career. A supporting cast of lecherous directors, deluded bandmates, federal agents, and nostalgic exes obstruct your path to closure and ironic revenge in this “revisionist character study.” 

2009 CreateSpace
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Angel Dust Apocalypse
by
Jeremy Robert Johnson
 

Meth-heads, man-made monsters, and murderous Neo-Nazis. Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They’re all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can’t close the door. This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of . . . the ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE. 

2005 Eraserhead Press 
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All the Beautiful Sinners
by
Stephen Graham Jones
 

Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe plunges into a renegade manhunt after the town’s sheriff is gunned down. But unbeknownst to him, the suspect—an American Indian—holds chilling connections to the disappearance of Doe’s sister years before. And the closer Doe gets to the fugitive’s trail, the more he realizes that his own involvement in the case is hardly coincidental. A descendant of the Blackfeet Nation himself, Doe keeps getting mistaken for the killer he’s chasing. And when the FBI’s finest three profilers descend on the case, Doe suspects the hunt has only just begun. But beneath the novel’s pyrotechnic plotting, the deeper psychic cadences of Stephen Graham Jones’s prose take hold. His specific imagery and telling detail coalesce into the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting. But like the other seminal works in the genre (Fight Club, Red Dragon), All The Beautiful Sinners will unnerve you, and it will then send you back to page one to experience its mysteries all over again. 

2004 Rugged Land
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Demon Theory
by
Stephen Graham Jones
 

On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and experimental nuances, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references, and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss. There are books about movies and movies about books, and then there’s Demon Theory – a refreshing and occasionally shocking addition to the increasingly popular “intelligent horror” genre. 

2007 MacAdam/Cage
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Stay God
by
Nik Korpon
 

Damon lives a content life, playing video games and dealing drugs from his second-hand store while his girlfriend, Mary, drops constant hints about marriage. If only he could tell her his name isn’t really Damon. If only he could tell her who he really is. But after he witnesses a friend’s murder, a scarlet woman glides into his life, offering the solution to all of his problems. His carefully constructed existence soon shatters like crystal teardrops and he must determine which ghosts won’t stay buried-and which ones are trying to kill him—if he wants to learn why Mary has disappeared. 

2010 Otherworld Publications
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Old Ghosts: A Novella
by
Nik Korpon
 

Nik Korpon brings us back to a Baltimore we haven’t seen since The Wire and answers the question of what might’ve been if The Grifters’ Roy Dillon had tried to settle down, go straight, and have a kid. A story of brothers and sisters or lovers, Old Ghosts reads like a horror story down one man’s memory lane. —Seth Harwood, author of Jack Wakes Up and Young Junius. 

2011 Brown Paper Publishing
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In the Devil’s Territory
by
Kyle Minor
 

The debut collection of stories and novellas (including “A Day Meant to Do Less,” a Best American Mystery Stories 2008 selection) from a young writer who is, as Benjamin Percy has said, a master of “the dark caverns of the human heart.” A schoolteacher escapes East Berlin at night, swimming the Spree River three times carrying elderly relatives on her back, so she can make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and “ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.” A young husband reckons with the likelihood that his wife’s troubled pregnancy will end with her death before Christmas. A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father’s tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, In the Devil’s Territory plumbs the depths of human mystery, where meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettinesses. 

2008 Dzanc Books
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By The Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends
by
J David Osborne
 

Siberia, 1953. Stalin is dead and a once-prosperous thief named Alek Karriker is feeling the pressure. Trapped in an icy prison camp where violent criminals run the show, betrayed by his friends and his body, Karriker is surrounded by death and disorder. Bizarre Inuit shamans are issuing ever-stranger commands that he must obey. Opium is running scarce and bad magic is plentiful. Razor-tooth gangsters can smell Karriker’s blood and they plan to murder him more than once. The only option: ESCAPE. Enlisting the aid of an aging guard, a cold-blooded killer, and a beautiful, murderous nurse, Karriker must now secure his getaway by finding a “calf”: a gullible prisoner to be cannibalized when the tundra is at its most barren. As the vice grows tighter and life in the gulag becomes increasingly surreal, Karriker must hurry to find his mark and convince him . . . BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE’LL BE FRIENDS 

2010 Swallowdown Press 
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The Way To Get Here
by
Gavin Pate
 

“Against the ominous backdrop of a national blackout, Pate grabs us by the hand and deftly guides us through the darkness of one man’s apocalypse. Stark, urban, and cinematic, The Way To Get Here contains enough wrecked lives to fill up a downtown shelter house and shows us that nothing is more lethal than love.” —Joey Goebel 

2006 Bootstrap Press 
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Abortion Arcade
by
Cameron Pierce
 

A collection of three novellas by one of the shining young stars of bizarro fiction. Cameron Pierce’s work is an intoxicating blend of body horror and midnight movie madness, reminiscent of early David Lynch and the splatterpunks at their most sublime. His fiction will punch you in the brain and leave you gasping for more. 

2011 Eraserhead Press 
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Stranger Will
by
Caleb J Ross
 

To William Lowson, impending fatherhood means an impending stain. His work as a Human Remains Removal Specialist, professionally cleaning the stains left from dead bodies, fuels this belief. His friend and mentor Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal, nurtures and sympathizes with his cynicism, blaming his dilemma on an imperfect world. But she has a plan around this impediment: a group of strangers-a devout collection of kindred minds who have dedicated their lives to cultivating a unique idea of perfection, and she wants William to join. But once he is in can he get out?

2011 Otherworld Publications
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I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin
by
Caleb J Ross
 

Jackson Jacoby, a twenty-two year old boy without a mother of his own finds a plea in a newspaper from a woman, begging for her runaway son to return home. He calls, pretends to be the son, and embarks on a journey to visit this mother, spreading to strangers along the way tales of his participation in the human appendage trade, the history of his missing ear, and anything else that might validate his life like, he discovers, the love of a mother could. 

2011 Black Coffee Press
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Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy
by
Bradley Sands
 

Bizarro humorist Bradley Sands returns with one of the strangest, most hilarious collections of the year. In Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, the pope gets sued, a headless man falls in love with a bowl of rice, and architects dismantle the earth. A war breaks out over greeting cards. A suicidal amputee tries to kill himself. William S. Burroughs becomes an amateur archaeologist and Tao Lin drinks an ape-flavored smoothie. Between a breakfast of clocks, a lunch date with Adolf Hitler, and breakdancing in outer space, anything is possible in the work of Bradley Sands. Just never wear a bear costume to an orgy.