We are having, at the moment, a lot of difficulty with the renewal of the M-Brane Press site to which most of my past links to my publications have been directed. This is due to an annoying Google situation too tedious and infuriating to explain. Until this is fixed, I’d ask everyone to visit my author page on Amazon or simply search Kyler Fey in Kindle Books or Books.
Kyler Fey
A few random phone pics that I snapped one after the other in a couple seconds, pics of Luca Belcastro, our team’s new-ish camera guy. He seemed almost to dance as he placed his equipment in the grand foyer and the dining room of the so-called “House of Belial.” Totally unbothered by whatever force was causing interior shutters and cabinet doors to open and slam shut and making the chandelier lights flash, Luca laughed. “You quiet down now!” he scolded. He looked happy—and very pretty—and I felt a warm impulse to take pictures of him. How is it even possible that none of us noticed when Luca was just somehow gone?
Photo #1, subject Luca Belcastro, taken 11/20/26 in 8 Flora Place, the so-called “House of Belial,” as documentation of Case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group [excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]
Viewed on the large monitor in the viewing room by Dathan, Shannon, Keiko and myself. We all reported a sense of being somehow unable to fully focus on the image of Luca, or a sense of his image slightly moving or vibrating within the background of the picture. Keiko says she thinks that he turns slightly away from the camera. Shannon thinks that he steps forward, as if coming closer to the camera. I don’t see that effect. My perception is more like Keiko’s. Dathan doesn’t appear to want to discuss it at all, and he just says “same” when I restate what I saw.
Our team meeting is listless, adrift. None of us recall seeing Luca at any point after the pictures were taken. Other than me, no one even has a solid recollection of Luca even having been in the house that evening. But I took seven pics of him, I say firmly, as if trying to reattach the other members of the team to solid reality. The time/date data on those photos matches that evening in that location. Dathan looks exasperated—and very tired—and he says “No one is arguing with you about it. We just don’t remember it. That’s all.”
He says, that’s all: merely three of the four of us just not remembering something like that from only a couple nights ago. But it’s not just their memories, I realize: I can’t recall anything else about Luca from that night except for him having been in view of my camera for a few seconds. A few seconds of being amused by him but nothing before or after. If he’d come to the house with us that night, I probably would have driven him there in my car, and he probably would have left with me as well. Maybe even came with me back to my house. I might even have tried to engineer it this way because I’ve kind of been crushing on him, and I think he was maybe feeling the same. Dathan had teased me about this a few days earlier. He’d said, “You can’t hide that shit from me, Kyler. You look at him exactly the way you looked at me when we first met.” I don’t like to be teased like that, and I try really hard not to smile, and I just blush.
But I did not bring Luca to the House of Belial that night, nor did I take him away from it. I had no sense that he was even missing until later that night when I uploaded my pics to our team server. Which I did just because that was our procedure: upload any data taken inside an investigation site even if it seems totally irrelevant to the investigation. I would have at least glanced at the seven pictures when I uploaded them, and I am very certain that they did not look fucked-up.
Photo #2, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]
This one is weirder, more unpleasant than the first one. We all agree on that, but we’re also all seeing different things. To me, the image is desaturated, almost black-and-white. Luca seems to nod slowly at the camera, not quite making eye contact with it. He’d be so pretty if his eyes weren’t solid silver. Keiko again sees Luca turn away from the camera, but this time he doesn’t turn back. He faces a wall. “If I look away for a couple seconds and then look at it again, he’s facing forward again, and then he turns again. And stays that way until I look away again.” Dathan says that he’s seeing something similar, but that Luca does eventually turn around. Neither of them see silver eyes. Shannon says that she sees Luca turn to face the wall. And then step into it somehow and vanish entirely from the image. “I can restart it, like Keiko said, if I look away for a bit.” Then she wonders, quietly as if just to herself, if Luca could have “no-clipped.” From our reality. She notices Dathan’s scowl and adds, “It’s a concept from video games.” Dathan says he knows that, and that it’s fucking stupid. Shannon leaves. Keiko goes after her.
I tell Dathan that Luca was not found at his home—a loft apartment downtown—and no one can find anyone who has heard from him. The police say they’re trying to find out if any family members have seen him, but they don’t have any news yet. Because they haven’t found any family yet. And I don’t want news from the cops anyway: nothing they would come up with would be good. I’m scared. Dathan tells me to calm down. He says, “Luca is somewhere. We’ll know soon. It will be fine.”
Keiko convinces Shannon to come back to the viewing room to look at Photo #3 with the rest of us. “It’s getting worse,” Shannon says. “He’s just standing there shaking, juddering, but sometimes he doesn’t have a head anymore.” Dathan also sees Luca as decapitated or as missing his face. I’m glad that I do not, but what I do see is like a jump-scare in a movie: he’s looking away from the camera and then abruptly turns toward it and leaps forward. His eyes are silver again and his lips are a black slash across his face. I see Keiko wipe away some tears. She says she doesn’t want to look at any more of these pictures today. And she leaves. Shannon follows.
Photo #4, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]
Dathan finally, after trying to dodge my questions about what he saw in Photo #4, says this: “It’s not so much what I saw. It’s what I heard.” He pauses for a bit and adds, “It was like hearing an EVP. But it wasn’t coming from anything. Not like it would sound from the DR60. Or, actually it did sound like that but it’s like it was playing inside my head from no apparent source.” This is alarming. Auditory hallucinations would be a new phenomenon of the pictures, a leveling up in what can happen to us as we view them. As much as I do not want to, I decide to go back into the viewing room and look at Photo #4 again and see if I, too, can experience this EVP-like phenomenon. But I exit after probably less than a minute because I am again sickened by the impossible way that Luca seems to reach toward me with bruised and broken arms and stares at me with silver eyes. But I don’t hear anything. I return to Dathan and ask him if he thinks there was actual speech in what he heard, if he had any sense of what the voice phenomenon was saying. He tells me that he can’t keep talking about it right now, that it’s fucking with his mind. “I’ve called Gerri and Portia. They’re coming by tonight. Please stay if you can.” Of course I’ll stay, I assure him. Our friends Gerri and Portia are experts in EVP. Dathan tells me that he wants to see if they can record something. In the viewing room with Photo #4.
______
“Don’t play it again,” Dathan says. “I can’t stand it anymore.” I agree. The noise from the recorder is deeply sickening. Portia asks, “But does this sound like what you heard inside your head during your experience?” Dathan nods and says he thinks so. “And can you hear any words, any recognizable language in it?” Dathan gets agitated now and says he thinks he does but he doesn’t want to repeat it. But I press him to do so, and finally he says, “It says to kill you, Kyler. It says to kill Kyler. It tells me to do it.”
Gerri reaches for Dathan’s hand and clasps it and says, “Just stay calm about that. That may be what you think you heard but that’s in no way definitive of anything. And I can tell that you guys are clearly stressed out. We’re going to load this recording into our voice analysis software and try to filter out a lot of this noise and see if we can hear what you think you heard, Dathan. Or hear anything at all. I will say that I can’t detect words in this, but the overall effect of it is quite alarming. It feels violent somehow.”
Portia concurs and asks us, “Have you guys heard of an EVP recording called File 10?” We say we have not, so she explains: “A few years ago the guys from the podcast Astonishing Legends did an investigation in the so-called ‘Sallie House’ in Atchison, Kansas. It’s an infamously haunted house, like Amityville-level. Some people who lived there in the 1990s claim to have been assaulted by all manner of supernatural activity. Anyway the podcast guys put a Panasonic RR-DR60 recorder like yours in a particular room in the house and left it unattended for a while to see if it would pick up anything. They recorded several likely EVP files, but one in particular—the one they called File 10—was…different. One of the guys played it back and he was so rattled by it that he fled the house. He was absolutely terrified by it. And it is a very unsettling recording. Some people think they can hear words in it, and others feel a sense of anger and malice and maybe evil from it.” She sighs and adds, “This recording that we made here sounds to me a lot like File 10.”
Photo #5, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]
Our attempted group viewing of #5 is a mess. We all see something different, and we all see something horrible. I don’t want to write about what I saw. I can’t. Keiko describes a sense of Luca’s body somehow collapsing inward on its self and becoming a tunnel of bone and blood and sinew. Shannon tries to run out to throw up in the bathroom. She doesn’t make it and vomits into a trash can. Dathan leaves the room and goes back to the workshop after saying something like, “I’d originally planned to ask that we stick it out and view #6 and #7, but I don’t think any of us can stand that right now.” No one argues.
Dathan figures out the next morning that the seven pics of Luca look strange—or terrifying—only to the four of us who were in the house that night. Somehow this never even occurred to me. He gets a kid, one of Shannon’s students in her experimental photography seminar (and one with whom he’s hooked up with a few times), to come by and look at them. And when it’s determined that the kid does not see anything weird about them, he enlists the dude to make more versions of them to see if the effect on the four of us survives different iterations. The art student prints the photos onto photo stock paper in color and black and white and with a sepia-tone filter. He takes Polaroids of the prints to see if putting them into an analog medium does anything to them. He points a Hi8 camera at them and makes a loop, three seconds of each pic, one after the other in sequence and then in reverse sequence. And this repeats a few times. Dathan digs up an ancient opaque projector from somewhere in the bowels of the arts building so that we can project the prints onto a white screen.
By myself, I try the new iterations #1 and #2 only, because those are the easiest ones to deal with. I still have no hypothesis as to why the photos become more unmooring as one goes further into the sequence, but it’s a consistent pattern for the four of us who have examined them. The color printouts of the digital photos don’t seem to behave differently than the electronic original on the monitor. The black and white versions feel somehow more stable. Picture #1 in black-and-white at first appears entirely normal but after a few seconds Luca’s image starts to shudder and vibrate again. The sepia versions of #1 and #2 evoke a strong nausea even though the images themselves don’t seem to behave any differently than in the other versions.
The Polaroids are ultra-weird. In #1, Luca turns fully around and then back to face the camera, and he smiles and blows a kiss, which I have not seen in the other iterations. In #2, he seems to rush at the camera then jump back, and then he does it again, his eyes solid black now. I put these back into their folder after just a couple seconds.
But the worst iteration by far, displayed on the big monitor, is the Hi8 video. I can barely stand to glance at it at all, and the entire time I let it run I am gripped by a mounting sense of terror and claustrophobia, and I realize that I am crying. I start to leave the viewing room so I can find Dathan and ask him to turn it off for me because I’m afraid to even get near the camcorder, as if it’s guarded by a rattlesnake. But, despite how frightened I am, I know that this is absurd. Because what if the effect of the tape could extend beyond the room? What if it would stay with me in particular until it was shut off? Or—most horribly—what if the act of fleeing the room causes the effect of the tape to attach to me permanently, clinging to me forever anywhere I go until I lose my fucking mind?
Looking away from the screen, I force myself to touch and then shut off the camcorder. The oppression vanishes immediately. I hear knocking at the door. “Kyler!” Dathan yells. “Are you okay?” The door isn’t locked. But I know why he didn’t want to just walk in. He knew what I was doing in here.
I open the door. His eyes look exhausted. He says, “Did you watch the Hi8?” I don’t answer. But he knows I’ve seen it. He says, “It’s very…wrong.”
It occurs to me to wonder how the pictures would look on my phone as compared to how they appear to us on the big screen or in the Polaroid versions. “What do you mean they’re not there?” Dathan wonders. I’d uploaded them to the server that night and never thought to look at them on my phone again. “I don’t understand it. They’re just missing. You can see in my image numbers a seven-image gap. They’re not in deleted files. Also, I don’t delete anything. Like ever. I still have email from twenty years ago. I still have porn clips that I spent hours downloading on dial-up internet. I have my high school valedictorian speech.” He doesn’t say anything else.
Shannon and Keiko decide that they’re not going to look try to look at photos #6 and #7 after having been so repulsed and frightened by #5. They’ve seen enough. And they decide to leave town. It’s Thanksgiving week and they’re traveling to Shannon’s parents’ home. For quite a while now they’d been an amiable ex-couple kind of like Dathan and me, but now they seemed to be clinging tightly to each other.
Dathan is detaching batteries from a charging station and popping them into a series of black and silver cylindrical devices, each lighting up with a green LED collar as he does so. “What are you doing with those?” I wonder. The devices are bosonic degaussers. I think I know what he’s planning and I don’t like it. They operate under the as-yet-unproven theory that “stone tape” or some such other such physical medium holds haunting manifestations in a particular place. The degausser releases a charge that “deletes” the stored paranormal energy. In our line of work, we call this process a “fumigation.” It does work. Sometimes. Not every time though. He never does answer me, so I say, “You’re going back to 8 Flora Place, aren’t you?” Back to the House of Belial.
Finally he looks up from his work. “We’re not going to learn anything more by further investigating that place, so I’m going to fumigate it. And I hope that this will also end whatever the fuck these pictures of Luca are doing to us. I’m gonna blast the viewing room here, too, in case something followed us back here.”
“But what about Luca?” I say that and Dathan looks at me like I’ve just arrived from Mars. I say, “What if degaussing that house somehow does something unsafe for Luca?”
Dathan’s not having this. “Kyler! Luca is not in that house. I have no idea where the fuck he is, but he’s not there. Cops have been all over that place and have found no sign of him in there.” I wonder how well the cops searched though, because I heard that they were spooked by noises and unexplained movement of objects in there. Of course they were. That house is rotten with poltergeist activity. The previous residents said their kid had been demon-possessed.
Dathan steps around his work bench and close to me. “Listen to me. I’m worried about him, too. But I don’t see how fumigating that house has any effect on his situation.” Then his mouth opens slightly as if he is about to gasp. “Oh, shit. I know what you’re thinking. No, Kyler. You’re letting Shannon wear on your mind. You’re thinking maybe he really did no-clip. And that if we fumigate the place it could close a door that he might be able to traverse. Jesus Christ. That’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it?”
I don’t deny it, but I feel deeply stupid and I blush hotly and I want to cry. Because I want to know where Luca is, and I want him to be safe, and I very much want the effect of the seven pictures of him to end. It must end, or we’re gonna go fucking crazy. “Okay, you’re right,” I say, maybe because I just want to believe him. “But I’m coming with you, you know.”
“No. Not necessary. And why? I’m just gonna set these things up, bomb that fucking place with them and leave.”
It’s my turn to be concerned about something he’s saying. Even if he didn’t think my help was necessary, why is he specifically telling me no? Typically he’d be fine with me coming along whether he needed me or not. “You’re worried about what you heard in that EVP. That’s why you don’t want me around.”
He shakes his head. “Fuck, Kyler! It told me to kill you! Does that not worry you at all? Because it really fucks me up. I can hardly stand to think about it. I hear that voice when I’m trying to go to sleep. So I don’t want you near me when I am back inside that house. Inside its field of influence.”
I can’t stand this. I pull him into a tight hug. He resists at first, then yields, lets his body lean into mine. I say, “That fucking EVP that you think tells you to kill me was recorded here, Dathan. Remember? Here. If something wants you to kill me, then why wouldn’t it act on you right here? Right now?” I don’t loosen the hug yet and Dathan’s body feels smaller, softer than I’d remembered. It had been at least a year since I’d held him so closely. “Also,” I add, “it’s totally against policy for you to go do this by yourself anyway. There must always be at least two people present and within view of each other at any investigation site. No one is ever to be alone. That’s your policy by the way. You came up with it.”
I relax my arms and let him break out of the hug. “Goddamnit, Kyler. Fine. Let’s go get this done. I’d like to be out of there before dark.”
We’re in Dathan’s car on our way to the House of Belial for hopefully the last time when I receive a text from Portia: I wanted to share this with you first, before Dathan sees it. You’ll know better than I will as to how he may react. We clarified the noise in the Photo #4 EVP and we separated out a voice (that honestly sounds to us a lot like Dathan’s own voice) saying “kill Kyler” and “What do you mean? and something that sounds like “null space.”” I’m attaching the file. It’s up to you what you want to do with this information. If it’s at all helpful, Gerri and I can come back to your workshop and take him through our process of distilling that voice. Let me know.
I reply: I’ll need to get back to you later. And I need to wait til later to listen to the file. Dathan and I are on the way back to that house where I took the pics. We’re gonna fumigate it. Maybe that will stop all this fuckness.
The animating force in the House of Belial seems to be expecting us. As soon as we enter the gigantic foyer, cabinet doors and interior shutters start opening themselves and banging shut. The giant chandelier high overhead sways jerkily like it’s being moved by a giant hand. This is more poltergeist-style activity than I want to deal with right now. I remove a couple things from my bag: a tightly-wound wand of dried herbs and incense and a butane torch. I light the wand and walk the room with its flame and smoke and I say, “I evict you from this room. I deny you permission to act upon matter in this space. I take away your hands.” I throw the smoldering herbs to the floor and shout, “Be still!” The slamming diminishes considerably in volume and frequency though it not does quite stop. But I’ve been heard. It knows that I can reject its influence.
Dathan looks at me, into my eyes, for a moment. He says, “I need to do something also.” He withdraws from his bag a little chrome canister that I know holds coarse pink salt. He brings it close to me and scatters some of it in a wide circle around us. He says “Know that I have the authority to block any entities in this house and that I throw a perfect circle of protection around this man. Know that this circle cannot be breached by any force. Know that we do not fear you and that you cannot harm us.” The chandelier stops flashing.
Questions to answer in Case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group, House of Belial [excerpt from Dathan’s case notes]
I hadn’t brought up this topic with the others, though Kyler kind of confronted me with it when he pointed out that the Picture #4 EVP was recorded in our viewing room. Question: how did the animating force of that goddamned house reach us at our workshop? I ask this because we have testimony that suggests that it can’t reach beyond the house. The property owners who fled the place have stated that their teenage son was possessed by an entity (“demon” in their words) that identified itself as the arch-demon Belial. When they decided it was time to leave the house, they had to somehow drag the boy down from the ceiling of his bedroom and wrestle with him until he was in the car. But as soon as they got just a short distance away from that house, the perceived possession ended. What’s different now? All I can think of is Kyler’s pictures of Luca. Are they somehow the medium that extends the influence from the house into our workshop miles away?
We climb stairs. We pass through an intense cold spot at the third-floor landing, and we ignore it. It was there the first time we checked this place out so it’s already been documented. “If we run into anything new,” Dathan says, “we’ll note it and it add to the file, but otherwise let’s drop these degaussers and do our thing.”
We place three degaussers each on the first, second and third floors. Dathan doesn’t think we need to bother with the attic or basement: “The mag-field will be large enough to cover those areas as well. And I don’t want to go up in the attic or down into that ungodly basement anyway.” The poltergeist, or whatever the fuck it is, plays once again at full blast now, hammering from inside the walls, raising and dropping windows, slamming shutters, flashing the lights and, by the sound of it, ejecting drawers from kitchen cabinets. I guess my command of silence wasn’t effective for very long.
Back on the first floor, we pass through the foyer and back into the big dining room where Dathan had left the laptop that he will use to operate the degaussers. I get out another herb bundle and light it. “I command you to be silent! I remove your power to make noise! I deny you your voice!” The racket does, actually, settle down again. I say to Dathan, “It’s so active today. I’m worried it can fuck with the degaussers.”
He shakes his head. “It’s fine. We’ll just be a couple more minutes before we’re ready to activate. I just need to get each one of them on the Bluetooth.”
And then I see something in one red-and-gold-papered wall of the dining room. At first it’s as if a smoky haze clouds one tall section of that wall, and then the haze darkens into something more like stain, but the stain seems not quite attached to the wall. “Dathan. What is this?” He doesn’t seem to hear me, and I ask him again to look. He just stares unblinking at his laptop. Something’s wrong. He’s not moving at all. I take my phone out of my pocket and open the camera and aim it at the bizarre stain. Which, in the camera’s view, now looks like the opening of a dark tunnel and I shudder at the resemblance to the corridor of sinew and bone that Keiko perceived in #5. “Dathan!” I yell his name twice more and still he does not react. On my phone screen something changes again in the wall and I see a figure take shape, first as an opaque shadow which then, very gradually, resolves into more detail, into a human figure. Who smiles at me. And I snap an eighth photograph of Luca Belcastro.
I hear voices but it’s like I’m hearing them from the bottom of a deep shaft:
“Are you sure we don’t need to call for an ambulance?”
“It’s fine. His vitals are all good. And he’d kill us if we sent him to the hospital for no reason.”
I feel a blood pressure cuff on my left bicep. I think it’s been periodically squeezing and then releasing for a little while. It sort of makes sense. I know that someone always has equipment like this with him. I think I feel a hand cup my crotch and someone says, “He didn’t piss himself this time. That’s a plus.”
And the other voice: “What does that mean?”
“He has a seizure disorder. It’s infrequent. Like maybe every two to five years.” That voice, I now realize, is talking about me. I try to climb the shaft toward daylight. “Hold this for a second.” And I feel one hand move away and another replace it. It’s pressing a steth against my chest.
And then a light is shining into my eyes, and I squint against it. I’m at the top of the shaft. I start to understand. Dathan peers into my eyes. “Are you back with us yet? If not, no hurry. Don’t be a hero.”
And I startle, fully awake, and before I can react to Dathan hovering over me, I see…I see…Luca. And he smiles down at me and says, “Hey, I’m ready to get the fuck out of here as soon as you feel like you can stand up.”
I know that it somehow makes no sense that Luca is right here talking to me, but I can’t piece together why I think that. But I remember something: “Did you activate the degaussers yet?” A crash of glass breaking on kitchen tile answers that question.
“We were waiting for you to wake up,” says Dathan. “Just to be safe. I’ll hit it now.”
I stare at Luca, still confused, and he smiles at me and I don’t want to look away or even blink in case that makes him vanish again. I ask him this: “Where were you?”
He leans in close, his bangs brushing my forehead and he kisses my cheek. “I don’t know. But somehow you brought me back here.”
A loud electronic whine rises and rises and then cuts off abruptly and I can feel a prickle of static electricity all over my body and I smell ozone. The degaussers have discharged. They’ll do it two more times at intervals of fifteen minutes.
“We can get out of here,” says Dathan, stuffing things including a blood pressure cuff back into his bag. “I’ll come back here tomorrow and pick up our shit. I can already feel that the fumigation is working. We don’t need to be here for the next two discharges.” And then Dathan informs me that he’ll be dropping me off with Luca at Luca’s place. “It’s already been decided, Kyler. I don’t want you to be alone tonight.”
I open my phone, find the message from Portia with the remaster of the Picture #4 EVP, and I delete it. We don’t need it anymore.
Appendix to case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group, House of Belial [excerpt from Luca’s case notes]
Kyler told me, once we got home, how long I had been missing in the perception of the rest of the team. I can say that I’m glad as fuck that it didn’t feel that long for me—like maybe three hours. I described for him a sense of total disorientation when I passed into wherever the hell I was for several days, but then a sense of getting my bearings back when I saw him and the other members of the team through what seemed like a series of hazy windows, and I understood that they were trying to see me, but it was somehow not working. Like I was glitching somehow. I described this to Kyler and he said, “Yes, that’s it exactly. The pictures.” I didn’t know what he meant but then he told me about seven pics of me that he took right as I was vanishing into that house. He thinks that maybe they worked like a tether, keeping me attached to the real world. But, as an unfortunate side-effect, they also brought along the extreme negativity of the 8 Flora Place haunting into our workshop.
I needed to see the photos. Kyler said they’d somehow disappeared from his phone after he’d uploaded them to the PWG server. But there wasn’t anything stopping us from logging into the server and finding them there. He really didn’t want me to do this but he conceded to the reality that I was going to do it anyway.
I opened all seven of the photos, and I can’t even imagine now what the other team members were seeing in them. They all look very normal, if perhaps a bit more flattering than a lot of snapshots of me. I think Kyler knows how to take a pic of a boy that he likes. He airdropped the eighth one to my phone and I told him I’d look at it tomorrow because right now we’re going to bed.
END
It cold-opens rather disarmingly with a look at a quartet of young men—who bonded in college and who are now making their way deeper into their adult lives, each with major career ambitions—and in this way it reminded me vaguely of the opening of Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire in which we start with a look at what seems at first to be a couple of somewhat derpy dudes on their way to some kind of low-stakes misadventure…before it become a sprawling story with a big ensemble cast and everyone’s world is rocked and I’m in tears.
A Little Life works somewhat similarly. The author throws down some key information and flair about each of the central quartet, and I found that I could distinguish them one from the other easily and that I liked all of them. I read this book by way of the audiobook, narrated by Matt Bomer, which I characterized in a comment on Bluesky a few days ago as “31 hours of emotional abuse” over the three days that I took this in. Yeah, the abuse. It would have taken me far longer to have the read the text version because I can’t usually work in that many hours per day of reading a physical book or ebook, but I often can with an audiobook while I’m doing something else very quotidian that occupies no major bandwidth such as some of my admin work in my day-job. But also because I would have had to set it down more often due to not being able to see clearly enough through tears because this fucking book had me weeping continually. The emotional intensity of the story is (I think deliberately) exaggerated, out of proportion in service of showing us a drama of deep friendship and found family.
A note on the narration: Bomer is really good at reading a book. He doesn’t do any obvious exaggerated voices for any characters but he does just enough inflection that it’s easy to believe that I’m hearing dialogue and interiority from a bunch of characters without losing track of who’s who.
I’m gonna put a spoiler warning right here in case the one to three people who might read this post also want to read the book, because in maybe two paragraphs from now I will mention something about the character Jude that I think I was able to glean fairly early in the story but which is not fully revealed until very deep into this 800-page book. Let me also drop a trigger warning for sexual abuse/assault and one for self-harm.
For a little while into A Little Life, it seems like it’s going to be an ensemble story with the action being handed off chapter-by-chapter more or less equally among the quartet of Willem, Malcom, JB and Jude, with these characters periodically intersecting each other’s lives. But eventually—not quite sure when this happens as far as how deep into the book—it becomes a story with a protagonist (Jude) and a deuteragonist (Willem—thank you sweet Willem for a legit excuse to say “deuteragonist” in public), and a supporting cast of Malcom, JB, Andy (a doctor with whom Jude has had a long-running and contentious friendship), Harold (Jude’s law professor who becomes much more than that later in the tale) and Harold’s wife Julia, and a slew of other figures who pop up here and there.
The reader can figure out fairly early on that Jude has no family, and that he probably never had a single friend before he was put with Willem, Malcom and JB in college. There’s also some kind of unspecified thing that’s challenging with his body—he walks with a limp, struggles with stairs, has painful episodes of losing control of his movement. We don’t know why this is for a long time and I’m not revealing that here except to say that I literally gasped with horror at the moment that I understood it. And cried again. So many tears spilled on this goddamned novel. I hope it took the author twenty fucking years to write it.
One thing we learn about Jude fairly early in the book—in a horrifying sequence stretching from him waking up Willem in the night through to a late-night visit to Doctor Andy—is that he’s a cutter. If that’s a no-go for you, don’t read this book. He never stops doing this. It will seem for a while that he’s stopped. But then it happens again. At varying levels of intensity from two little cuts to a bloodbath. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a depiction of a cutter in fiction or film that feels as real as this. The author either knows a lot about this first-hand or did some very good and empathetic research.
The other thing about Jude—his pre-college life that he keeps to himself so hard that it hurts the hearts of those around him—is that he was rescued by some monks as a newborn baby abandoned in the garbage, and that he’s a victim of sex abuse as a child. I feel like I understood that he’d been abused a lot earlier in the book than when it’s fully revealed through several flashbacks to his childhood and early adolescence. So I don’t know that it’s a big spoiler really to state it here. But…fuck: the sheer volume and duration of abuse that he undergoes as a kid as detailed in the latter half of the story threatens to tip whole thing over into ridiculousness. Like, all of this happened to one kid in this timeframe? Do we really need all of this to understand Jude? It’s almost like if Dennis Cooper were to script a remake of The Perils of Pauline (but it never gets as funny as that would be; this may be the most straight-faced tale ever).
Do I recommend this novel? I don’t know. I’m giving it five stars on my private List of Things with Stars because I think it’s really well-crafted and the character work is absolutely amazing. But I can imagine some readers not getting at all what I’m getting out of it. Oh, one thing about it that I forgot to call attention to earlier about this novel is that it contains a kind of queer rep quite unlike much of what I’ve seen in “mainstream” and “literary” fiction. In some sectors of genre fiction these things are almost de rigueur but this is a lit/realist book (which adheres to the hallucination that it’s not “genre”). And here there’s a couple modes of queerness and a couple modes of found family, and I love that so much.
And I’m never ever re-reading it.
The other day it occurred to me to listen to some audio of very old science fiction of the type that fascinated me as a child but which I haven’t revisited in very many years. The podcast Lost Sci-Fi has a ton of it. I chose four stories: “The Shambler From the Stars” by Robert Bloch, “The Vibration Wasps” by Frank Belknap Long, “The Red Brain” by Donald Wandrei and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” by HP Lovecraft.
Let me quickly dispense with three of these with minimal comment. “The Shambler From the Stars” is hyped by the podcast as being among the most important and influential sci-fi stories ever. I think that may somewhat overstate the case. It’s a Lovecraftian Mythos story about a struggling pulp writer (sigh) looking for inspiration in forbidden tomes. The story is notable in the Mythos for introducing De Vermis Mysteriis, a grimoire by the diabolical Ludvig Prinn, joining on a frightful shelf such volumes as The Book of Eibon (added to the Mythos by Clark Ashton Smith) and the infamous Necronomicon by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, but otherwise it’s a dreadful piece of juvenilia (Bloch was eighteen at the time) by a writer who would get good later and eventually write a lot of good fiction and also work prolifically as a film and TV writer. Frank Belknap Long’s “The Vibration Wasps” has the kind of sci-fi hook that the real heads geek out about–alien bugs that can pass through walls cuz science–but it’s a dull slog, comprised almost entirely of the most turgid info-dumpy dialogue I’ve ever heard in my life. I considered turning it off at about the halfway point, but I persisted to the end. The Lovecraft story, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” is a rather minor entry by the architect of cosmic horror, but it was certainly the most laugh-out-loud entertaining of this lot due to the narrator’s sustained emphasis on how lowly, decadent, dissipated, stupid, illiterate, and ugly the subject of the tale is.
The one stand-out among this sad collection that I imposed upon myself is the Wandrei story. Wandrei was an early Lovecraft acolyte, corresponding while still a teenager with HPL, and even hitchhiking from Minnesota to Rhode Island to meet his mentor. Wandrei wrote “The Red Brain” at age sixteen and showed it to Lovecraft, who evidently endorsed it for publication in Weird Tales. According to the lore, Wandrei would a couple years later demand that Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright publish “The Call of Cthulhu,” after initially rejecting it, or else Lovecraft would take his stories elsewhere. If true, this threat from a relative youngster worked and the rest is history. Wandrei would later team up with August Derleth to found Arkham House, the publisher that reprinted Lovecraft’s fiction in book form and, in doing so, preserved what may have been a forgotten body of work.
“The Red Brain” is not, in the quality of its prose or in its narrative, exactly something that would be considered “good” by the standards of present-day fiction editors but it expresses a very high concept and rather eerie premise: all the stars of the visible universe, as seen from a planet in orbit of the giant star Antares, are winking out, consumed by a mysterious cosmic dust. This is presented in a way that suggests a timescale of millions of years, like Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men. The Antareans have evolved over the course of the ages into beings that are just big brains. As an OG Star Trek boy, I picture the pulsing brains-in-bubbles titular characters of “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” Everything that the brain people have tried to stop the advance of the Cosmic Dust (evidently including the genocide of the Betelgeuse system) over millions of years has failed, and the end for them is very near. All that remains for them is to prepare for their inevitable extinction and be brave about it. But one of their number, a being called the Red Brain, calls together a conference of brains for the first time in twelve thousand years to present a solution, alas, to the Cosmic Dust situation. SPOILER ALERT FOR A CENTURY-OLD PULP SCI-FI SHORT STORY THAT NONE OF YOU WILL EVER READ….
The convocation of the big brains happens but it all goes to shit quickly because…the Red Brain is mad! And everyone dies by evanescing into a gruesome liquid.
Why do I like this? I think it has much to do with it being the creation of an imaginative teenager. When I was sixteen, I was very occupied with the idea of writing short sci-fi or fantasy or horror of the kind that I read in magazines like Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF and (the too-short-lived) Twilight Zone. It was a very important goal at the time to write things that would be published in magazines like those. I never got anywhere close to doing that, and now I don’t really care. Publishing short stories is of zero interest to adult-me. But back then, I think a lot of my failure to create decent stories had to do with taking too seriously stuff like “The Red Brain” and the like from that era that was already so outdated when I was reading that stuff in old anthologies that I’d grab from remainder tables at Waldenbooks. Toward the end of high school, I somehow caught up with the New Wave (which was also already pretty old) and cyberpunk and eventually the mind-blowing horror of the Dell Abyss books and zines like Grue. And I was like “Why the fuck were you reading 1930s sci-fi and thinking that had any future?” I made it to college and read high modernists and Victorian pulps and eventually William Burroughs and Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany and Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ and Stephen Fucking King (did you know that Cujo’s a fucking arthouse novel?).
Anyway, I grew up to some extent through all of these reading and attempted writing experiences. I’m not that aggrieved now about my writing situation not having turned out like teenage-me had expected, but when I read “The Red Brain” written by a kid with relatable ambitions so many years ago it kind of makes me feel a little bit of that sense of wonder and creative power that I felt when I was at that age.
KINO INCESTO (Italy / West Germany, 1982) directed by Paulo Mastromatteo
After joining a cult of Satanists, a filmmaker finds himself seducing his teenage sons into sex. Soon a dangerous jealousy ferments between the brothers while their father accepts new orders from the cult: make a new film starring his sons. Things quickly descend into diabolical madness and supernatural horror. TV-MA sexual situations, horror violence, smoking
Last night I watched Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge for the first time in many years. But I didn’t watch a good copy of it. Instead I torrented a dirty VHS rip. And this clearly wasn’t just a transfer from the commercial home video release, but rather a rip from a second or third generation VHS copy. Like a copy made from a tape where someone decades ago recorded the movie, maybe even from TV, at SLP onto a tape that probably had two other movies on it, and then maybe someone else copied that tape. It looked like complete shit and, my friends, I couldn’t have been happier. The fuzziness of the image, the tracking lines, the weird visual noise, the washed out colors and indecipherable special effects sent me deep into a warm nostalgia about what it was like to watch tapes when I was a kid. I sat there thinking, “Actually this is how we were intended to see dirty slasher flicks all along.”
And it kept me just a bit tantalized by what I couldn’t see quite well enough. Like the supreme hotness of Mark Patton as Jessie that I had to enhance in my imagination because he was just a bit too blurry in this version. Or the effect where Freddy exposes his brain right after he sexily menaces sweaty Jessie with his blade hand and says “You have the body and I have the brains!” He peels some skin away from his head, but you really can’t even fucking see it in this transfer that I watched. But I didn’t mind. I just felt cozy. Here’s some pics that I took with my phone while the movie played.
Over many years of looking at profile and album pics of dudes on Grindr, I was never very impressed with the pervasive genre of the restroom mirror selfie, and I had generally eschewed that style for my own pics. But this summer, when stopping in various restrooms in Tower Grove Park during my daily walks there, I decided to give it a try. I was actually somewhat impressed with how forgiving a selfie genre it is. Like, you’re in a fucking restroom anyway. The space probably can’t make you look any worse. Here’s a sampling of my pics taken over the past couple months. The last one is somewhat NSFW though I applied some filtering to it to make it less blatant.
Listen to me chat with Projection Booth host Mike White and Michelle Kisner about the astounding film The Wild Boys (2017)! This links to The Projection Booth website, (the ultimate film discussion podcast, in case you didn’t know that) but you can also get it wherever you normally get podcasts. I have a few comments below that I would have made on the show, but it’s new information that I didn’t have at the time of recording…
In our discussion of Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys (2017), we touched briefly on some literary predecessors such as William Burroughs’ novel of the same title, which Mandico himself cites as being within the inspirations for his film. While I don’t think the film has enough in common with the novel to be considered in any way an adaptation of it, I have found something in actual history that reminds me of the raucous behavior of Mandico’s gender- transforming youths and Burroughs’ titular wild boys, and which links them more closely in my mind.
I wish I had found this very interesting article about “The Wild Boy Gangs of Weimar Berlin” by Peter Mann on CrimeReads before we’d recorded our conversation about the film so that I could have referred to it. From the article, this evocative quotation from the French gay anarchist writer Daniel Guérin who, on a walking trip across Germany in 1932, encountered one of these gangs:
“They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums and the most bizarre coverings on their heads: black or gray Chaplinesque bowlers, old women’s hats with the brims turned up in ‘Amazon’ fashion adorned with ostrich plumes and medals, proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelweiss above the visors, handkerchiefs or scarves in screaming colors tied any which way around the neck, bare chests bursting out of open skin vests with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewd tattoos, ears hung with pendants or enormous rings, leather shorts, surmounted by immense triangular belts—also of leather—both daubed with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as Wildfrei [wild-free] or Räuber [robbers]…. In short, they were a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.” [emphasis mine]
It’s not a long distance imaginatively from this real-life gang to Burroughs’ wild boys, and this kind of anarchic repudiation of bourgeois society certainly resembles the cultural pose of Mandico’s boys. It also makes me imagine a combination of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and the Clockwork Orange droogs. Like the droogs, some of these gangs were known to get quite violent, sometimes clashing with Hitler Youth gangs, which is fucking awesome. I love the thought of some wildly costumed gay boys appearing from the shadows and beating the shit out of Nazis. And it makes me wonder if Burroughs knew about these Weimar-era gangs and took them as an inspiration for the mob of queer marauders who sweep over civilization in his amazing novel.
The Wild-and-Free gang engaged in a test of strength in 1932. Image from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000), by Mel Gordon
Thinking about this topic made me wonder if I’d written in any of my own fiction anything about a mob of some kind of wild boys on the attack. It seems like I would have, right? But, weirdly, not so much. I did find, however, this passage from Episode #3 of my Commander Jace serial, The Spunk-Angels of Mars. It doesn’t make a ton of sense here, separated from its context like this, but it’s a chunk of a dream-narrative that the protagonist is experiencing…
You have arrived on the humid and smoky and glittery promenade of a vast space station, and it is boiling with activity from all the aetherships docking at it and spilling out their crews for a brief respite before what you know what will be an incredible offensive against the enemy that lies straight ahead in space and on the moons beyond. Later when you are awake you will remember this milieu and know that it came into your head from the premise of A-R Kanayda’s novel The Red Boys and the White which depicted this: a radical Awana sect has swept over whole worlds imposing their brutal religious ideology and, as their sphere of oppression draws nearer to Earth and all civil order collapses on the human homeworld, an unlikely tripartite alliance of militant Boy Scouts, violent Mormon missionary boys and the teenage acolytes of the Cult Cthulhu forms to block the scourge, save Earth and repel the Awana radicals.
The supreme commander of the Boy Scouts, a twenty-something Eagle, has arrived at the space station to complete preparations for the final offensive against the Awana, an attack that he intends to lead personally even though he knows that he’s likely not come home again from the hellfire that he intends to release: dark and impossible Cthulhist technology, the weaponized cosmic horror that they called the “Nyarlathotep Cascade.”
In this dream version of the story, inside your head, partially under your control, he looks exactly like Trace Battle and now he is, in fact, Trace but he doesn’t know that he has already met you in the real world. He wears grey jodhpur-like pants, a thick metallic codpiece covering his crotch on the outside of those pants, metallic mesh shoes and no shirt. But the skin of his torso is lavishly inked with scores of little designs in purple and black and red and white, and you know somehow that these are “merit badges,” Scouting awards that he has accumulated for various achievements during his years in the organization. He seems not to notice you standing very near him, peering at the tattooed badges on his skin. You know somehow that some of them are for very mundane and kid-like things like knowing how to make a fire, how to tie various knots, how to catch and clean a fish. But some of the newer ones, running down his back along his spine from the nape of his neck down to his ass are for his queer fuck-skills…
And it goes on from there to detail very specifically all this dude’s gay sex skills and achievements. But I’ll cut it off there to keep things rated PG.
As of this posting, The Wild Boys is available to stream for free on Tubi. For some reason, that’s not showing as an option on Just Watch, but I double-checked Tubi a moment ago and it’s still there. It can also be rented on various platforms. I have the Blu-ray which is not exactly chockfull of special features (I was hoping for a commentary track), but it does have some deleted scenes and a short behind-the-scenes film which is interesting in that you can see what the island location of the film looked like in the “real” world before Mandico applied his intense artifice to it. It’s a great film. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do that ASAP.
by Kyler Fey…(previously published in a slightly different version on my Livejournal many years ago)
Last October, the whole world seemed like a slow-mo film that I’d perceived through a layer of stained glass, a place to which I’d been anchored bodily, yet oddly detached mentally. And a weird confluence of public and personal events happened last October, that all had something to do with Hell on Earth. One: a next-door neighbor, Detective Lance Kinderman of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police, who’d been probing into the matter of the local “Gemini Killer” serial murders, turned out to be the Gemini Killer himself, the monster who’d stuffed his victims’ mouths full of rosaries. Two: I got an acting job in the tenth remake of an old horror film, my first such job in a few years and one that I didn’t much like after all. Three: my recently-deceased stepbrother’s son—Regan, age fourteen—became my legal ward and moved into my home; and, four: the Kenner toy company revivified an old thing called The Exorcist Playset, a toy based on a novel from the 1970s.
The original Exorcist Playset was a box of plastic and cardboard, open on two sides, resembling a bedroom, with a plastic four-poster bed in it upon which rested the action figure of a demon-possessed girl. Levers in the cross-festooned base of the toy would raise and lower the bed—SUPERNATURAL HORROR!—and move dressers and other objects up and down on posts—LIFE-LIKE DEMONIC MOTION! The girl-figure was articulated to the extent that you could make her sit up in bed and make her head spin all the way around, though her limbs were mostly immobile. Instead of being equipped with swinging joints, they were instead formed on a skeleton of flexible wire that you could bend a few times before they eventually broke. The press of a button on the playset’s base elicited the scratchy, metallic playback of a recorded voice saying at random such things as “The sow is mine!” and “I am the Devil!” and “The piglet will die!”HEAR THE SHOCKING VOICE OF EVIL!
Action figures of two priests—one old and one young—could be placed here and there in the room, left feet impaled on pegs in the floor, but they always stood frozen in a sort of holy rigor mortis, one forever clutching a rosary and the other forever wielding an oversized Lucite bottle of holy water. A weirdly agnostic toy, the original Exorcist Playset never promised to resolve the tension of the underlying story, instead leaving its outcome to the imagination of the kid playing with this nearly static scene. In that sense, it was a great toy.
Detective Kinderman, on chilly October evening, had brought personally to me the news that my stepbrother Merrin was dead. “Kyler MacNeil?” he’d queried in a tone of somber officialdom, when I answered the door, as if he hadn’t already known my name for years. I wanted him to leave right away because I needed to cry and I didn’t want him to see it. But he pushed his way into my home, like a big wavefront forcing me into a chair, and he watched me cry. I’d thought I could have just said, “Thanks for letting me know. Now, good night.” But it didn’t go that way. Kinderman stood over me, his great bulky frame like some kind of edifice of pure Law Enforcement, informing me that his department would “get to the bottom of it,” since it seemed likely to have been homicide, possibly even connected to the Gemini kill-spree. He apologized for needing to share this particularly horrible suspicion. And he didn’t seem inclined to leave. Eventually I offered him a drink. We drank shots of bourbon and gossiped about the neighborhood until late that night. I wouldn’t have done that with him if I’d known he was the Gemini Killer. Instead, I would have called the cops. But, at the time, he was the cops.
The day after getting drunk with Kinderman, I had to be back on the set of the film for a re-shoot of part of the sequence in which my character flips out and goes on a kill spree. The scene involved me strangling some dude for a minute and then a harpoon shoves through my back, through my chest, and then—horribly—into the other dude’s chest and then out though his back. The reason we re-shot it was because the director hadn’t thought our reactions were convincing enough in the previous takes. You can hear him talk about it in a commentary track on the Blu-ray disc. You can also hear me occasionally disagreeing with him. But as he saw it, we didn’t do a good enough job at imagining that we were being impaled in such an improbable (ridiculous) fashion. But we did try harder after we were shown an animatic indicating what the final shot might look like after the CGI was added. In that version, I looked smooth and faceless. I liked it.
Because my stepbrother and his son had been out of the country for a very long time, I’d not seen Regan in seven years. He wasn’t any longer the tiny-titan version of his dad that he’d been at seven, but rather more a realistic replica of his dad at age fourteen, lean and tousle-haired, his china-white forehead marred by a sparse constellation of zits. “Why do I have to stay here?” he wondered a moment after his arrival. “Because your dad said so,” I said. Regan shrugged and accepted that logic. By the end of the first day he was situated in his new bedroom. But since the house was big, I actually gave him two rooms. The second was a studio that I seldom used. And, upon the drafting desk in there, Regan constructed the new Exorcist Playset.
The new Exorcist Playset was a whole different toy than its old 1970s predecessor. It resembled the old one only in that that its physical structure was still a bedroom with a bed and dressers in it. But it was much larger—it filled the entire big drafting desk in Regan’s study—and it was far more interactive. The action figures were a lot bigger, too, and now called “dolls”—because it had at some point become “gay” to call them action figures—and there were more of them: four different priests, a mom, a dad, a boy, a girl, a cop, an old lady and a whole host of other minor characters. And the dolls could be made to move in a fully articulated, almost creepily lifelike way by setting their feet upon nanotechnological conductors in the playset’s floor. This and all the supernatural goings-on within the playset could be manipulated by a smart-phone app. Instead of the possessed girl just randomly coughing out a handful of canned phrases such as “The sow is mine!” the kid could now direct her to say nearly anything from the dialogue of the novel or new dialogue that he invented himself within the rules of the game. Likewise, the priests and other side characters could be made to speak, move and interact with one another in an almost natural fashion. Nearly invisible nanowires made possible the floating and hurling of objects within the room’s matrix for REAL SUPERNATURAL HORROR!
Another innovation with the new version of the playset was that the possessed girl from the novel could be replaced with celebrity “add-ins.” This was common throughout the toy universe in those days. For example, if one had a Barbie Dream House and wanted Barbie to have a Ken-Doll fuck-lationship with Frank Sinatra or Ethan Hawke or Austin Butler, it could be done easily through dolls and iPhone apps. If one had a Star Trek playset, one could make Captain Kirk confront Dan Rather or Martha Stewart or Pope John Paul II in an encounter at the Romulan Neutral Zone. Likewise, Regan decided to use as the subject of demonic possession his favorite celebrity, the singer Justin Bieber.
The first time I saw the Exorcist Playset in action, under Regan’s direction, I saw a miniature Justin Bieber writhing, tied to bedposts, cackling and groaning. A priest doll stepped close to the Bieber figure and said, “How long will you imprison Justin, this innocent child of Christ?” And the Justin Bieber doll roared and said, “Until he rots, stinking in the Earth!” Regan touched something on his iPad and the Justin doll projectile vomited, soaking the priest in steaming ochre slop. Or seemed to anyway. It was an optical effect. This seemed like an important point in the game’s story, but Regan didn’t appear to even observe it directly, his head bowed to his iPad, absorbed in his manipulations. “Do you want to fuck me, priest?” rasped the doll. “Loosen these straps and you can go at it!” Then I noticed that what was taking place within the playset was also being captured in a little window on the tablet’s screen, against which Regan’s fingers tapped rapidly. During all of this, a Justin Bieber song was playing:
“As long as you love me…as long as you love me…we could be starving, we could be homeless, we could be broke…”
A few nights later, I hosted a neighborhood Halloween Party at my house. It had already been scheduled before Merrin had died. He’d been planning to be there for it, back just in time from his long years at an archaeological dig in Iraq. And he’d not have wanted me to cancel it since he hadn’t seen me in seven years, since I knew that he had been planning to attend costumed as Michael Myers, latex-Shatner-faced and knife-drawn. But I’d considered cancelling it at the last minute anyway because life had started to seem like a thing observed faintly through stained glass and because Regan had fallen ill. In fact, I told Regan that I’d bag the party so as to spare him its noise. “No problem,” he said. “I won’t hear it up in my room. I’ll sleep so good.” As if to assure me of it, he swallowed from the bottle a thick shot of Robitussin. Involuntarily, I kissed him on his sweaty forehead as if he were my own son. He turned away, buried himself in blankets. He seemed to drop away into sleep instantly. As I left his room, I stopped in the doorway and considered his appearance in that bed. I compared it to that of the demon-possessed Justin Bieber doll in Regan’s Exorcist Playset. Like everything else during those days, it was an observation hazed by the dusky glass that had overlain my world.
The Halloween party was bad. It was supposed to have been neighborhood-oriented, but people from work—both my day-job and my actor job—conspired to make me feel like shit. Damien Karras, an ex-boyfriend of mine who still appeared now and then, dominated the conversation in the parlor. Burke Dennings, an actor from the film, laughed raucously at every single thing Damien said. Detective Kinderman was there, and everyone thought he was some kind of homegrown Sherlock Holmes. And Father Dyer, the douchey priest from the rectory across the street, showed up unexpectedly and stayed all evening.
For a while, a few people broke off from the main mass, went into Regan’s study and played with his Exorcist Playset. They competed with their iPhones to make it do stuff, make the action figures say things. But the built-in logic of the game constrained their efforts. If they wanted the bedridden Justin Bieber doll to thrash about and say “Let Jesus fuck you!” then that would work fine. But they couldn’t make it endorse current political candidates—Election Day was approaching. Jam a crucifix in its ass, sure; try to induce it to give a speech in favor of President Trvmp, then no way. “It’s not programmed that way,” Dennings said. “You have to stick with its in-universe content logic, you dumbass Nazi!” But Father Dyer laughed and said, “You could probably hack that shit if you had the time.”
Later, Dyer was back in the parlor banging on the piano, which made me feel like the party needed to end. I considered serving cordials (in narrow little glasses that I’d never used), but instead I just stood in the kitchen for a couple minutes sucking down shots of Jägermeister directly from the bottle. In the parlor, Dyer went all Tin Pan Alley: “Hello! Ma baby! Hello! Ma Darling! Hello! Ma Ragtime Gal” et cetera. He was actually singing it, with drunken Dennings. I hated Father Dyer. I returned to the parlor and imagined him imprisoned in the tiny torture chamber of the Exorcist Playset, and me tapping at an iPad to make the Justin Bieber doll projectile-puke on him.
“Hello, kiddo!” Dyer yelled over his piano-banging. For a second I thought he must have been speaking to me. He was looking right at me. Then he said it again and I divined that he was looking past me, behind me, through me.
And there was Regan, sweaty and sleep-disheveled, clad in a t-shirt and boxer shorts. Cock out, he pissed on the floor. The piano stopped. The piss had all spattered out onto the wood before I figured out how to react. I considered something like this: “Oh my god! Oh my baby! Come with me!” I don’t think I shrieked like that, but I reached forward to grab him, to lead him back upstairs. But Regan shoved me away with startling strength and I almost fell. He stalked toward the piano, bare feet tracking through piss. He said to someone, not sure who, “You’re going to die up there.”
Regan was sick for days. Detective Kinderman came to visit, supposedly just to make sure all was well with me and Regan and to chit-chat about his ongoing investigations. While I brewed coffee, he somehow slipped away and wandered upstairs and into Regan’s room. There was a lot of noise up there, and by the time I got up there to see what was going on, this was the situation: the boy was crouched on his bed, hands outstretched, and he was growling. The window was wide open. I somehow understood that I needed to look out that window, because beneath it was a very long and steep flight of steps that fell all the way from the third floor of our house down to M Street. “What happened?” I said, stepping very slowly toward Regan. “Kiddo. What did you do?”
Regan had stopped growling. He looked at me, stunned, and started weeping. “I don’t know!” he said.
I still needed to look out the window. At the bottom of that flight of stairs lay Kinderman’s corpse, his neck snapped and his head spun all the way around backwards. I could discern that fact all the way from the height of Regan’s bedroom window. It looked almost fake, like Kinderman was just a giant doll down there, its head on backwards. It would be the next day before the news would reach us that Kinderman had been the Gemini Killer and that he’d probably intended for Regan to be his next victim. How Kinderman thought he could have gotten away with it, and with me in the house, I have no idea. Just because we drank bourbon together that night didn’t mean I’d not notice him killing my kid right under my nose. I was glad that Regan had stopped him forever. “You’re going to die up there,” Regan’d said. As it turned out, that was to Kinderman. He’d been standing right there next to Dyer and Dennings during that annoying Hello! Ma Baby! banging on the piano.
Regan recovered a bit from his illness and started spending more time at his desk with his playset. Though Justin Bieber remained pinned in doll-form to the possession bed, I didn’t hear much of that boy’s music emanating from the room. Instead I heard an incessant and annoying tune that Regan called “Tubular Bells.” Evidently it was some old song that had been mixed and remixed again and again by popular artists. It was probably only a matter of time, I thought, before Bieber himself had a version. I didn’t like its creepy tone, its insistent and unending melody.
Damien Karras showed up on Election Day. For some reason he had about ten “I VOTED” stickers on his hoodie. His black hair was a riot of cowlicks and pomade. I let him in, but said, “Now’s not a good time for it, Damien. I’m not in the mood, and the kid is home anyway.”
Damien smirked. “Why do you assume that every time I show up I just want to fuck?”
“Because every time you show up, that’s what you want.” I led him back to the kitchen, where I’d been drinking an exceptionally dirty martini, clouded with blue cheese-stuff olives, and smoking a cigarette and cooking a pot of ham and split pea soup.
“Well, that’s not the case today.” He looked around inside my refrigerator and eventually came out with a bottle of white wine. “Actually, I just wanted to check in on you guys. See how Regan’s doing. He seemed awfully sick the other night.”
“Regan’s been doing OK. He is feeling better, but he sleeps a lot. He’s napping now I think. I hope he will like this soup later.”
“It smells awesome!” Karras leaned over the pot and inhaled. He opened the wine bottle. I handed him a glass. I could tell he really wanted a cigarette, too, but I knew he was trying not to ask for one. So I lit one and handed it to him. He was annoyed but he took it nonetheless. “You know,” he said, “I had a really interesting talk with Father Dyer the other night. Here, at the party.”
“Interesting? With Dyer? How could that possibly be? I know his church traffics in miracles, but really, Damien! This bends belief too far!”
He didn’t laugh. Instead he said, “You’ll hate this idea, Kyler, but I am thinking about returning to the Church.”
I wanted to laugh some more, but it wasn’t really that funny. I said, “Now that is interesting considering that since your last foray into religion all those years ago, you have become an open homosexual and a shrill atheist. What did Dyer think of all this? Are they so desperate for priests anymore that they’d recruit from the likes of you?”
“I’m not thinking about the priesthood again, dumbass! Just about faith and what I might be able to do with it going forward.” True, Karras had been kind of introspective (weird) like this since his mom had died a few months before. His mom had been zealously religious and had wanted Damien to join the priesthood, but she was a nice a lady all the same. Hard to understand though: she’d spoken in some kind of thick Old Slavonic accent. I remembered that she’d always called Damien “Dimmy.”
“Actually, you’ll think this is really dumb,” Karras said, “but what got me thinking about it again was that crazy game, that exorcism thing that Regan has. Some of us were playing with it for a while that night. It is fucked up, son!” He laughed and poured a second glass of wine. “But really kind of—I don’t know—thought-provoking, too.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “It doesn’t come with the Justin Bieber doll, you know. Regan added that.”
“I swear that doll looked at me!”
“Looked at you? It looks all over the place.” It did. It moved with LIFE-LIKE HELLISH AGONY!
“Dude, I swear! When I was playing with it, the doll was screaming ‘It burns! It burns!’ and then I made one of the priests step closer, and then somehow the priest decided to pull up the Justin doll’s shirt and you could see on his stomach this scar that said ‘HELP ME.’ Then the doll looked right at me—right at me!—and said in his own voice and not the devil voice, ‘Help me, Damien!’”
“In his own voice?” I slugged down the dregs of my martini and started, furiously, to mix another, chewing olives. “In Justin Bieber’s actual voice? Really!”
“Well I don’t know if it was Justin Bieber’s authentic voice, jackass. Just that it wasn’t the devil voice!”
“It’s a fucking game! A playset! Come here!” I grabbed Damien Karras by one wrist and led him down the hall toward Regan’s study. If this ridiculous Exorcist Playset was the catalyst to some sort of spiritual awakening in my lame-ass friend, I needed to at least try to make the argument against it before he’d fully flown off to Cloudcuckooland.
The playset was “on” when we entered the room, but not much was happening in it since no one was actively playing with it, kind of like a video game on “pause.” The Bieber doll writhed languidly against its straps, occasionally emitting a low, hellish moan. An old priest paced the space in front of the boy’s bed but didn’t seem about to do anything in particular. Justin Bieber’s horrified mother stood in a doorway, but she too was rendered rather immobile by the lack of any interaction from a human player. “What you experienced,” I said to Damien, “was a coincidence exacerbated by drunkenness. I don’t know how to play with this thing, but I suspect that the words ‘HELP ME’ are always on his stomach and that he will say it to anyone under the right circumstances.” Maybe the doll had even lifted Damien’s name from his iPhone. To prove this, I reached with two fingers into the playset and lifted the doll’s vomit-stained t-shirt. Rather creepily, it squirmed against my fingertips and shouted, “Bastard! Scum! Pious hypocrite!”
But the boy-doll’s stomach did not say in raised skin-welts the words “HELP ME.”
“See?” Damien said.
“He will not sleep!” said the possessed Justin Bieber doll in a voice that sounded like it had been rasped by decades of cigarettes and whiskey. “I will not let the piglet sleep!”
I jumped a little when another voice sounded from behind me. “Hey. What up?” it said. I turned and saw Regan in the room’s doorway, sleep-tousled, clad in gym shorts. He stepped into the room, peered down at the Justin doll. He touched his iPad and the “Tubular Bells” song started up again. Then he looked up at Karras and said, “Hi, Dimmy.”
I only had one nightmare during those days of the stained-glass world, and it was this:
Regan couched on his bed, growling. The window flung open and closed and open again and again
Wind.
It was so cold in that room. I could see my breath and Regan’s.
Detective Kinderman stepped toward the window and then stepped out of it. Somehow, pushed out of it.
Regan howled. And then his face warped into that of Justin Bieber doll. His head turned one hundred and eighty degrees and he said in that rasp-voice, “You see what he did, your cunting little nephew?”
I decided the next morning that I wasn’t going to feel bad about what had happened to Kinderman nor let Regan feel any guilt over it. Kinderman had been planning to kill Regan and stuff his mouth with rosaries. The son of a bitch got what he deserved; no matter how it actually happened, no matter how Regan somehow knew in advance what would happen. I decided I’d talk about it with him.
But when I found Regan in his study, things had changed. Instead of “Tubular Bells,” I heard that Justin Bieber song: “As long as you love me…I’ll be your platinum, I’ll be your silver, I’ll be your gold…” The playset bedroom was dismantled, stacked in heaps of wall panels and Lilliputian furniture. The Bieber doll itself lay motionless on the desk. Unlike when it was plugged into the set, when it moved creepily and moaned under demonic duress, it now looked utterly fake, the most plastic and dull-eyed of dolls. Its dirty shirt was pulled up above its navel. And its skin still didn’t say “HELP ME” in purple welts.
“What’s going on, kiddo?” I wondered, watching Regan stack action figures in a storage case. “Is this all done?”
“Justin died overnight,” Regan said.
I looked again at the inert doll on the desk.
Regan said, “I left it running too long. A couple days ago, I had the doctor priest give him more Librium to calm him down for the exorcism but then the demon didn’t let him sleep for two days, and he went into cardiac arrest and died.”
“So he’s just dead? Really?” I stared at the limp doll. “He can’t ever… ‘live’ again?”
Regan frowned. “Well, I could reboot him and start it again. But I don’t really want to. The whole thing’s kinda sick anyway, don’t you think?” He reached under the desk and brought up the big box in which the Exorcist Playset had originally been packed. DEMONIC HORROR! it boasted. And CAN YOU EXPEL SATAN!? On one side of the box, some bright yellow text said, “Compatible with Kenner Celebrity Add-Ins—Including Pop Phenom Justin Bieber™!”
I picked up the doll and straightened its shirt. I smoothed its hair. I handed it to Regan who carefully slid it into the box.
I’m working on my new book which is the haunted house story that I’ve been trying to unlock for a long time. This is the first draft of the first couple minutes of it…
The white bars of light that passed periodically over Audra’s sandstone face as she drove us down the serpentine road into our deep-exurban destination reminded me of something faintly recalled from childhood that I, eventually, after several dead-end memory-alleys, zeroed in upon: flash cubes. Flash cubes. My father’d had a cheap snapshot camera that he’d bring out for Xmas and maybe July 4 and maybe my b-day and maybe an occasional pool party, and an important part of this camera’s successful exposure of the film (so that we’d actually have legible pics to look at weeks later from the pharmacy) was to get light from a plastic cube that flared hotly and rotated on top of the camera. Actinic, I thought. What the fuck does that word even mean? Actinic. It’s a word that I seemed to remember from Asimov-era sci-fi stories that I’d read in kid-hood while getting ridiculed by other boys for reading, and it seemed to have something to do with a particularly dramatic quality of light that you’d describe in a sci-fi story if you were a writer of that age. Was this it: the brief and harsh chemical light of the flash cube that’d made my little kid eyes still glow red to this day in every single 5×7 faded pic from those days that I still kept in a shoe box?
From sparsely-spaced street lamps, actinic light passed in bars every fifteen to thirty seconds over Audra Kamnotta’s face. Flash and she said, “You still with me, Zach?” and I nodded and maybe made a noise and, when I looked at her, she appeared almost as if she’d become some kind of sculptural element fused naturally with the expensive details of the German luxury car’s interior that surrounded her, like a whitewashed waxen glossed statue that flared occasionally in the actinic white light of the flash cube that twisted and burned every thirty seconds. She’d been my best friend for twenty years and I marveled on this night how she’d somehow looked like no one I’d ever met before. Flash and she said, “He still loves, you know.” And I didn’t say anything, and so she added, “He can’t stand being away from you.”
Flash, and I said that “He certainly didn’t seem to love me anymore when he shut me out of this investigation.” And I looked at her white statue face in austere profile with my glowing red eyes, and I started to say something else, but I didn’t after all because my lower lip started to tremble.
Audra, now an aeons-bleached figure fully fused with her ancient Phoenician luxury car as if she were merely a bas-relief feature of it, said—flash—“I was at the team-briefing the other night. Dathan treated us to dinner. A big mess of pizza delivery and box wine at the house. He really thought you were going to show up. He really did. And he was sad that you didn’t. I could tell.”
“I wasn’t invited.” Flash.
Audra didn’t say anything for a minute, not for the span of a couple more flashes of the actinic light, and then she said, “Well, I suspect he’s inviting you now.” And then the obnoxious klaxon tone of her phone blasted on the car speakers and Siri said, “Call from Ando. Answer it?” Audra glanced at me. I said yes to the phone and said to Ando, “This is Zach.”
“Thank fucking Christ,” Ando gasped throughout Audra’s giant SUV on its many speakers. “How close are you?” I looked at an animation of our juddering progress on the console screen. “Close. About ten minutes.”
“Zach, I cannot overstate how fucked this is,” said Ando. “You are our last hope to get through to Dathan and get him to stop this fucking shit.”
Flash. This sounded entirely absurd. “What do you mean? What shit?”
A sound like a choked sob and then an electronic squelch and then Ando again: “Sorry, I needed to get a little further away from him. Listen: drive faster if you can. I have an ambulance here already just in case. He’d be so pissed off at me if he knew about the ambulance but I had to do it. And he wants to see you now.”
Flash. What the fuck? “An ambulance?”
“Zach, he’s mad at me about every goddamned thing right now but I’ve been keeping a blood pressure cuff on him. He’s at one-ninety over one hundred now. He’s going to fucking stroke out if he doesn’t stop this!”
I couldn’t process this under the actinic light. “What does he need to stop? Why is he in this situation?”
Over the phone speakers Ando gasped and—flash—and said, “He thinks he’s brought an Other entity to the surface. He’s trying to fucking channel it! It’s that thing again, Zach. He’s doing it again.”
Calmly, very calmly, so calmly, my eyes not reflecting the red at all in the flash cube’s light, I told Ando to calm down and don’t worry and that we were almost there and then I ended the call and then I screamed and screamed and screamed at Audra to drive faster.
Flash.
Toward the end of finishing my recently published book The Vampire Circus, I organized some of the music that I was listening to during its composition into a playlist that’s fun for me to think of as one of those soundtrack albums that often accompany movies. With this conceit in mind, here at this link is the playlist on Spotify, and below is the track list as it relates roughly to the events of the novel/imaginary movie…
Opening Credits—“The Dead Walk” John Carpenter
In the Forest—“Vampires” Altar de Fey
In Mircalla’s House—“Death Has Tasted Blood” Cemetary Girlz
The Boys in the Crypt—“There Must Be Somebody” Selofan
Daniel’s Plan—“What Do They Know?” Mindless Self Indulgence
A Circus Arrives—“Do the Vampire and Dance” Dr. Arthur Krause
Daniel in the Woods—“When You Don’t See Me” Sisters of Mercy
Kaper and Lukan Go Backstage— “Thrash Me” Malaria!
The Circus of Nights—“Demons” Altar de Fey
Kill Your Kids—“Vampire Circus” Astrovamps
The Mirrors of Truths and Lies—“Burn” The Cure
Automatic Writing—“Weeping Ghost” John Carpenter
The Boys Are Turned—“Tear You Apart” She Wants Revenge
Kasyn and Daniel in the Crypt—“Psychic Wound” King Woman
Kaper and Lukan Reborn—“You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” My Chemical Romance
The Boys’ Hilarious Prank—“Shut Me Up” Mindless Self Indulgence
Daniel Walking Around Town—“California Dreamin’” (cover) Gilberto Cerezo, Tyler Bates, Dave Lombardo, Rani Sharone
Fuck Now, Talk Later—“Faggot” Mindless Self Indulgence
Using a Crystal Ball—“Fascination Street” The Cure
The Boys Get to Work—“The Metro” (cover) Bella Morte
In the Church—“Vampires Will Never Hurt You” My Chemical Romance
Daniel’s Ascension/Kaper’s Rage—“Where the Shadow Goes” The Awakening
Hi Kitty/End Credits—“Dystopian Mirror” The Bellwether Syndicate
