Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (2 page)

Logan Rapp

Edward J Rathke

Caleb J Ross

Bradley Sands

Axel Taiari

Richard Thomas

Brandon Tietz

Gayle Towell

Paul Tremblay

Pela Via

Craig Wallwork

Nic Young

Booked Podcast

The Velvet

Copyright

Edited by Pela Via

With a Foreword by Steve Erickson

Introduction by Logan Rapp

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

Exclusive to the eBook:

Afterword by Jesse Lawrence

Final Thoughts by Livius Nedin and Robb Olson

Warmed and Bound: Up Close by Phil Jourdan

Interview with Pela Via by Phil Jourdan

The Multiple Voices Inside Your Book by Jay Slayton-Joslin

Booked Podcast: Warmed and Bound Sessions

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

Photography by Charles King

The Fuse

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

—Steve Erickson

author of
Zeroville
and
The Sea Came in at Midnight
 

It’s Velvet Noir. Welcome.

What began as a love letter . . . 

Foreword

by
Steve Erickson

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

Steve Erickson

Introduction

by
Logan Rapp

You don’t know what you’re doing

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

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

It’s what they want you to do

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

Dear Johnny

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

Oh Lucy if you had only asked me for this

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

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

Then I found they had an online community. 

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

The Velvet warms and binds

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

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

I am Phineas Poe and this is how it begins

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

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

Stay warm and bound.

—Logan Rapp