Month: May 2020

Published in the debut issue of The Macabre Museum, “Shoulder Pain” is a second-person story that places the reader headlong into a zombie apocalypse. But any preconceptions about the zombie genre can be set aside, as author Chandler Morrison makes a concerted effort to strip away all macho romanticism and antisocial wish-fulfilment:

You weren’t prepared for this.
The movies, the video–games, the television shows…they’d led you to believe that it would be different. That it wouldn’t be so dreadful. That, maybe, it would even be fun.
You imagined yourself lingering up headshots with ease. Hacking off necrotic limbs without breaking a sweat. Cruising down abandoned highways on a big, roaring motorcycle. You weren’t prepared for the bugs in your hair. Bugs that have gotten so big you could name them. Bugs that you can’t wash out because you haven’t bathed in weeks.
Nor were you prepared for the smell.

Continue reading ““Shoulder Pain” by Chandler Morrison (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”

Here we have a first for the Splatterpunk Awards: an audio-only nominee. Donyae Coles’ story “Breaking the Waters” was read by Cherrae Stuart for a joint episode of the podcasts Nightlight and Pseudopod, the latter celebrating its 666th instalment, and can be heard here.

The story begins with a young woman named Bootsie being approached by a man with no face, clad in a pristine white suit. He claims to have known her deceased mother, and makes a strange offer. “This is our proposition”, he says; “you let us impregnate you, use your womb, and track your dreams. Before the thing sinks its tentacles into you, we’ll get rid of it. Everything will be taken care of. You just have to open your legs. You can do that, can’t you, Bootsie?” She is uncertain, but the faceless man makes it clear that he will pay little attention to a refusal: “You can say no but the answer is still the same. The asking is a formality.”

Over the course of three nights, Bootsie submits to the man with no face. She subsequently becomes pregnant, and is visited by a faceless man outwardly identical to the first – although she concludes that he is “a different man, exactly the same but completely different.” He announces that he and his vaguely-defined associates will keep an eye on Bootsie’s dreams “until the beast comes, until she blesses us with the waters of her birth, the milk of her many-titted chest.”

Continue reading ““Breaking the Waters” by Donyae Coles (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”

In another story from The Big Book of Blasphemy (see also Jeremy Wagner’s “Norwegian Woods”) three people – Tilda, Michael and Isabella – awake to find themselves chained to a wall inside a dark building. They are being held captive by a man named Otis and his leprosy-scarred assistant Simon. When asked for an explanation as to why he is holding them prisoner, Otis answers, “I can almost feel the holiness radiating from you.” He knows about their personal histories: that Michael acted as a missionary and medical volunteer in the developing world; that Isabella works in a soup kitchen; and that Tilda witnessed an alleged miracle involving a radiant, bleeding statue of Mary. He also knows that all three live within fifty miles of one another, a fact that he finds deeply significant.

Otis’ theory is that Michael, Isabella and Tilda are living saints, and so he has captured them to make use of their gifts: he wants their help in capturing an angel.

Continue reading ““Angelbait” by Ryan Harding (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”

The Sixth Seal has been opened, the four horsemen are laying waste to the world, and seven archangels are brandishing trumpets – which leaves the eighth archangel, Tabaeth, feeling left out.

“Censered” is part of And Hell Followed, an anthology of stories inspired by Revelation, and it is one of the more humorous pieces in the volume. The central character Tabaeth is the youngest of the archangels, with the foul mouth and tantrum-prone temperament to show for it. “It’s fucking unfair!” he proclaims as the Four Horsemen ride out upon the Earth. “They all get trumpets! They all get to destroy shit!”

It turns out that Tabaeth’s irreverence is not down purely to immaturity: he has been speaking to beings from fallen pantheons, and noticed some suspicious similarities with his own Abrahamic heaven. Could this apocalypse, he wonders, be “just ripping off the Egyptian thing about Ma’at and Apep?” Indeed, pagan belief systems do seem to contain a lot of virgin births, resurrections, and evil serpents, suggesting a degree of divine plagiarism. And he fails to see how Yahweh comes out looking better than any of those rival gods, considering the harsh treatment afforded the likes of Adam, Eve, Lot’s family, Job and Ham:

And, hey, get a load of Mr. Build-An-Ark, wasted off his tits, rolling naked in the mud probably puking on himself; so Ham laughed, big fucking whoop, it must’ve been Goddamn funny! What does he get for it, though? Blammo, systemic bullshit racism for umpty-thousand years.

Continue reading ““Censered” by Christine Morgan (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”