Past Indiscretions Read online

  Past Indiscretions

  The Very Best of Splatterpunk Zine

  Edited by Jack Bantry

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  without prior written permission.

  Each individual story remains copyright by its creator

  Cover illustration © 2019 Dan Henk

  Introduction © 2019 Chris Hall

  ISBN: 9781075928710

  Published by Splatterpunk Zine

  Contents

  An Introductionby Chris Hall

  Brats by" Tim Curran

  Fuck Shock by Brendan Vidito

  I’m On My by Shane McKenzie

  Reprising Her Role by Bracken MacLeod

  Wide Load by Kit Power

  Love At First Sting by WD Gagliani & David Benton

  This Is My Flesh by Monica J. O'Rourke

  Ginsu Gary by Ryan C. Thomas

  NSFW by Nathan Robinson

  Threesome by Ryan Harding

  Fair Trade by Jeff Strand

  So Bad by Adam Cesare

  Ricochet by J. F. Gonzalez

  Five Bullets Through the Skull

  An Introduction

  Chris Hall of DLS Reviews

  It was in the bar at the twelfth World Fantasy Convention that US horror author David J Schow first coined the term ‘Splatterpunk’. The title instantly encapsulated the eruption in horror fiction that had been pushing the boundaries of taste, whilst thoroughly embodying how the stories challenged the fundamental fabric of society and its judgemental values of morality. In effect, Splatterpunk was a guttural reaction to the social repression increasingly felt across the western world during the mid-nineteen eighties.

  Of course, Splatterpunk was never going to rival the mainstay roots of horror and the commercial strength of the ‘big boys’ in the broader field of the horror genre. It would be fair to say, although the Splatterpunk subgenre caused quite a stir when it burst out into the world in a veritable explosion of blood and guts and gore, its authors have far from dominated much of the expanding market of horror as a whole, with possibly the notable exception of Liverpool born Clive Barker.

  But Splatterpunk never attempted to chase the lure of the big publishing houses. Splatterpunk was a scowling-faced response to how we collectively seethed at the time. Its very existence was embodied in the need to push a fist into the face of society. To flatten the nose of the socially superior, socially acceptable, socially-goddam-conformative bastards.

  It no longer wanted to quiver behind the covers at the unseen beast which we were always led to believe lurked in the darkened shadows. Instead, Splatterpunk got its hairy balls out on a plate, offering its plums to the beast, coaxing the fiend out into the open for us to see exactly what it was that was so damn terrifying. This was what Splatterpunk was all about. No more leaving the darker depths of horror to the reader’s imagination. It was time to see the fucking nightmares made flesh. To be showered in the cascading blood of our victim’s severed juggler. To stamp barefoot on the entrails of the fallen, as we hurdle every one of the corpses along the way to discovering the true face of evil.

  Splatterpunk was never going to change the face of horror fiction. But at the same time, it was so much more than the proverbial flash-in-the-pan that so many smart-arsed critics thought it would merely amount to. The arrival and existence of the subgenre became the crowbar by which authors would later lever out the unveiling of their own beasts and spurred the graphically visceral atrocities which inevitably followed in its wake. Horror now had a black sheep with which the bar of tolerance had been elevated to.

  Perhaps the days of hearing its name bounded about, in a similar way as one might once have heard the utterance of “Video Nasties”, is long gone. Nevertheless, Splatterpunk’s relevance is still as embedded in horror fiction to this day as it was when Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’ collections were first unleashed upon the unsuspecting world.

  Very possibly, these days more than ever, we need to have our socially acceptable moralities thrown to the flesh-starved lions. Some might say we’re in danger of having our lives whitewashed in magnolia with the “don’t you dare offend me” attitude that the cast and crew of the millennials seem to spout at every minor infraction that crosses their morally superior paths. Okay, so I’m generalising here and no doubt pissing off the generation that’ll one day be holding up my frail limbs when retirement kicks in. But right now I don’t give a flying fuck. We’re talking about a subgenre that doesn’t swerve topics in case it causes offence. It’s ugly and belligerent and bastard angry.

  For a good decade or two the term Splatterpunk had pretty much fallen by the wayside. Nevertheless elements of its lifeblood were still in existence, under the in-your-face guise of extreme horror or chiselling out the next societal “fuck you” in the chaotic maelstrom of unrestrained creativity that is Bizarro. But Splatterpunk, in its original form and its ferociously violent attitude, for a while seemed to have petered out.

  Then seemingly from out of nowhere, issue one of ‘Splatterpunk Zine’ emerged. It was April of 2012. Fanzines of any genre, let alone horror fiction, were now pretty much just decaying roadkill, left in the wake of the juggernaut that is electronic media. Then here we were with a new physically printed zine, daring to breathe life into the rotting corpse of self-made publications. Furthermore, this brave-hearted beast was everything that its chosen subgenre represented. The DIY ethos shrieked a blood-curdling scream from the photocopied, staple-bound pages. The zine was everything that Splatterpunk represented. It encapsulated the very soul of the slumbering tyrant, to hopefully unleash its unparalleled ferocity on the unsuspecting masses once again.

  Jack Bantry is the man behind the sudden resurgence of Splatterpunk. One man’s passion. One man’s bold-faced determination. Seemingly overnight, Bantry had become an advocate for the barefaced guts of the subgenre.

  Issue #1 of his Splatterpunk Zine set the standard. It contained short stories by Jeff Strand, Tim Curran, Dave Benton & W.D. Gagliani and Bantry himself, along with interviews with the likes of Jack Ketchum, Andre Duza and Wrath James White. This first issue was a thirty-two-paged A4-sized brute with bloody fists and a mission. But most importantly, it offered up everything it said it would in those two iconic, near-forgotten words: ‘Splatterpunk’ and ‘Zine’.

  Everything which that forceful, angry, uncontrollable subgenre of the 80’s stood for had awoken once again. In one fell swoop we were reminded of the passion, the beating pulse and gushing veins of the subgenre that held a bloody, shit-caked middle-finger up at mediocre society. We now had a new champion for this frothing-at-the-mouth subgenre.

  Over the eight wholly DIY issues of the Splatterpunk Zine that followed, we were treated to a veritable cacophony of hideous delights. We met with axe-wielding maniacs; feral kids; murderously-enraged spouses; a morbidly obese slob; hallucinogenic toads; ground-down hookers; a hit-and-run tragedy; violent Santas; mask-wearing loners; a search engine which could solve any problem no matter how desperate; a messed-up VHS tape of depravity; sadistic kidnappers; a possessed Ouija board; a colossal beast washed-up along the shoreline; monstrously pissed off ex-girlfriends; a Texas Chainsaw Breakfast Club; poetic justice made arse-splittingly real; a flesh-chomping machine that requires ritualistic sacrifices; a serial killer in complete denial; a brutal cycle of rape between willing partners; amateur ghost hunters; low budget porno films gone horrifically wrong; sexual frenzies turned to bloodbaths; skinless stalkers; and a vengeance-fuelled science nerd and his burrowing larvae of human botflies.

  Of course, that’s not to mention the additional gut-churning stories contained
within the three Splatterpunk anthologies and the glossy-covered chapbooks which Bantry also unleashed into the wild. Should you have missed any of these gritty publications – then fear not – for the collection you currently hold in your sweaty palms contains the very best of these uncompromisingly grim stories. The crème de la crème that the Splatterpunk Zine has dished up on a platter of guts and gore thus far.

  We cannot belittle or dismiss the cultural impact that these brave authors have given us through their collective ventures into the very harshest and untamed of subgenres. In this one collection we are reminded how Splatterpunk remains as relevant and progressively disruptive to this day as it ever was. Its contents are shocking, provocative and obtrusive. The subject matter contained is never stagnant, but seeks out the rawest base instincts within each and every one of us. But possibly most important of all, it never holds back on the delivery of its message.

  Here’s to thirteen of the very best short tales of unadulterated, gut-wrenching extremity, punching five hard-shelled bullets through the thick skull of mainstream horror…

  Chris Hall

  www.dlsreviews.com

  Brats

  by"

  Tim Curran

  Harry’s standing there on the platform waiting for the train back to the city with Bugs and Peak and Summer, who is Peak’s old lady this week. They all light cigarettes, except for Peak because he doesn’t believe in awful soul-sucking addictions of any sort, especially ones you can’t snort or spike into your veins.

  Shit, Harry thinks as Summer lights her own cigarette, Bugs’, then his. Three on a fucking match. Won’t be my lucky day.

  And these thoughts barely register in the somewhat cramped, low-rent regions of his brain when Bugs elbows him. Harry ignores him. After two solid days of drinking and drugging, jury-rigged together by spit and amphetamines, his mind is like a radio that can’t lock onto a signal.

  “Over there,” Bugs says, giving him the old elbow again. “Do you fucking see it?”

  Harry sucks off his cancer stick, trying to make his eyes focus. He’s got an awful twitch in the corner of the left one. Note to self: dropping acid in your eyes causes floaters and jumpy eye syndrome. But he looks. Focusing and unfocusing. What he sees is a tight, well-coiffed pack of suburban nine-to-fivers and corporate neo-cons in gray suits and cashmere overcoats waiting to mainline back to Midtown.

  But then he looks again, seeing something that can’t be real as the roar of the train gets closer and closer.

  “Fuck is going on?” Summer says.

  Peak hasn’t gotten it yet. His eyes are glazed like winter ponds. “Yeah, train’s not even stopping,” he says as it bears down on the platform with no decrease in speed. “We’re gonna be stuck here. Hey…is this the right fucking station?”

  Though he’s right, it isn’t stopping, that’s not what Harry and the others are seeing. It’s not what’s making them stare like puppets with painted-on eyeballs, mouths hanging open, faces cringing in horror.

  Then Peaks sees it.

  He blinks. “What is this…a joke?”

  “That ain’t no joke,” Summer says, gripping his arm a little tighter.

  Harry’s really hoping it’s a joke, too, but it’s all looking real unfunny from where he’s perched. He feels his balls tighten up and the skin at the small of his belly begins to creep like it’s shivering.

  The nine-to-fivers are beside themselves.

  The neo-cons are crying out.

  But it happens fast, so oh-my-God unbelievably fast, that no one even moves at first. They see five or six kids, grade schoolers, buck naked and smeared with bright scarlet slashes of red like they’ve just slaughtered a steer. Their outreaching arms are dyed red. It runs down their faces and is clotted in their hair, their bodies splashed with it. Their mouths are open, lips pulled back from white teeth, eyes like black coals of hate.

  This is what Harry and the others see.

  “HEY!” one of the corporate suits says. “HEY…HEY, YOU KIDS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING! YOU CAN’T—”

  One of the women screams. The man with her looks like he wants to, too. Several of the nine-to-fivers and suburban drones stumble back wanting to get away from those crazy-looking, blood-smeared kids…but as they do so, they trip and fall right over each other and go down in a central heap like bowling pins, including the guy that was shouting. At any other time, Harry would have started laughing, but he isn’t laughing now.

  Like crib death, this is seriously unfunny.

  The kids charge forward, fingers raised like red hooks, glassy doll’s eyes unblinking. Like lions following a herd of gazelles, they’ve already separated their straggler from the pack: some old lady in a raincoat with a plastic bonnet pulled down over her white hair.

  Before anyone moves, they vault in for the kill and seize her.

  “Wait…what are you doing? What in God’s name are you doing?” the old lady says to them, but they’ve yanked her into their embrace where they tear at her, beat her, kick her, and even bite her. “Oh God…oh God…get them off me…”

  Then she starts to scream.

  It’s a wailing, agonized sound like an animal caught in a trap, its leg impaled by scissoring steel spikes. The scream echoes through the station and by then several of the neo-cons are charging in to help her.

  But they’re not going to be fast enough and Harry sees this.

  No way can he get there in time either.

  As the brats beat the old lady senseless, she screams out in a high, hysterical voice: “Help me…oh for the love of God somebody help me—“

  The brats are merciless.

  Mouths lathered with saliva and eyes like open veins, they beat down the old lady with a ferocity that is sickening. Her left leg snaps from its hip socket, three ribs cave-in with a sound like sheared saplings, her nose is battered up onto her right cheekbone, eyes swelling purple-red, half-popped from shattered orbits. Blood is like a scarf unwinding on her head, flapping red and juicing down her ruined face.

  Then Harry is running over there with Bugs at his side, even though he knows the outcome as does everyone on the platform. The train is bearing down, firing down the tube full-blast, throwing out a cloud of steam and grit behind it, moving at full clip. Long before the neo-cons can even get within ten feet of the brats, they take hold of their victim and pitch her off the platform into the path of the speeding train where steel will insect broken flesh.

  Impact…

  ***

  As fate would have it, their victim is Ruth McCauley, who just happens to be a retired elementary school teacher. She’s taking the train north to Rye to spend the week with her daughter. When she sees the train coming, just a-rolling down the track, it fills her tired heart with joy because she’ll soon be with Megan and her lovely grandchildren. For her, that’s like learning to breathe again and feeling the sunshine on her face after a long confinement because her existence is lonely like a book on a shelf gathering dust.

  When she sees the brats coming at her, she almost gags out her false teeth.

  She thinks, too, it must be a joke…maybe some kind of new fad, kids wearing flesh-colored body stockings or something decorated with blood-red streaks. Then they grab her and scratch at her, beat her and bite her, and as she screams, she hears that nagging old lady voice that she perfected in thirty years on the chalk-dust battlefield: They…they can’t do this! Are they out of their trees? There are people everywhere! They can’t just attack me! Not in broad daylight…

  Then she’s beaten to a convulsive, ruptured mass.

  And then she’s flying.

  A split second into that, what remains of her mind realizes they have thrown her directly into the path of the oncoming train. Her body is old and stiff, a catalog of rheumatism, arthritis, and osteoporosis. Even without the savage beating, it’s barely functional. So in flight it does not move as it should, limbs do not splay, muscles and bones and ligaments do not counterbalance. The result of this is that
her spine tightens like an old rubber band and then snaps, her poorly-aligned vertebrae collapsing like a tower of child’s blocks, nerve ganglia torn from the spine itself like clusters of roots in a shearing, white-hot agony.

  This is what she experiences microseconds before the train hits her with a jarring impact that ejects her false teeth from her mouth, the shoe from one foot, her eyes from her face, and a great quantity of blood from every orifice. She feels only that initial eruption of velocity as her body explodes into meat-spray, then…nothing. What is left of Ruth McCauley is dragged beneath the train as it continues into the depths of the tube…

  ***

  “NO! NO! NO! NO! NOOOOO!” a voice is shrieking.

  Harry sees that it is one of the suburbanites, a woman in a skirted business suit who caught a gout of gore in the face when the old lady was struck by the train. She is screaming and out of her mind as are some of the others. And the ones that don’t appear to be dazed or in shock, completely mortified.

  What brings Harry’s mad sprint to a stiff-legged crawl is what he sees as the train smashes into the old lady, sweeping past them all in a blur. Faces. Cartoon-like faces pressed up against the windows of the cars, screaming faces with bulging eyes…the faces of terrified adults surrounded by the bloody faces of children.

  This is what makes everything run out of him and brings him to a stop.

  Not just here at the station but on the train, too.

  As this registers in his mind, those insane little brats turn their psychotic attention to the other adults. They’re bearing down on them, eyes smoldering with kill-happy fever, hooked fingers like hot fuses tearing at faces and throats.

  “What the hell is going on?” Summers says.

  But Harry ignores her. “There’s gotta be somebody in charge of this fucking station…we gotta find a cop or something.”

  Bugs still at his side, he races away down the platform, looking for a transit cop or a maintenance guy changing a light bulb, anybody. As they run, Bugs is on his cell calling 911. “Fucking busy, can you believe that?” he says under his breath. But, yeah, Harry believes it, all right, because if this isn’t a localized thing, if every kid went loco all at the same time, then 911 would be besieged with calls, the operators buried alive in hysterical pleas for help.