Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (47 page)

Recommended Reading
 

Kiss Me, Judas
by Will Christopher Baer 

During his first night out of a mental institution after suffering a nervous breakdown, Phineas Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude. She drugs him and removes his kidney and leaves him in a hotel bathtub full of ice with a note on the counter that reads, “If you want to live, call 9-1-1.” Phineas, an ex-police officer who had recently been searching for information against the Denver Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit, later finds out that his kidney was actually replaced by a baggie of heroin. While searching for his missing kidney, Phineas actually finds love in his attacker, while he evades the angry police of Denver and tries to unlock the secrets behind his wife’s recent death. 

1998 Viking Press
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Hell’s Half Acre
by Will Christopher Baer 

Kidnapping, snuff films, amputee geeks and a requiem of lost love . . . Cast adrift after the blood symphony of Penny Dreadful, Poe is looking for answers in the form of a woman. He tracks Jude to San Francisco, where he finds her involved with John Ransom Miller, a wealthy sociopath with a mysterious hold over her. Jude is nursing a revenge fantasy against a U.S. Senator with an amputation fetish who wants her dead, but she needs Miller’s help, and in exchange, Miller wants Jude to help him pull off a high-profile kidnapping and make a snuff film on the side. Poe throws him-self into the mix, hoping he can save Jude from herself, make sense of his past, and safely navigate a torturous internal landscape he calls hell’s half acre. 

2004 MacAdam/Cage
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How They Were Found
by Matt Bell 

In his debut collection How They Were Found, Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again. Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled

humanity might yet remain to be found. Contains the story "Dredge," selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010.

2011 Keyhole Press
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There Is No Year: A Novel
by
Blake Butler
 

A wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the birth-wrench of art, evocative of House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, from a novelist rapidly emerging as one of the voices of his generation. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “If the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.” 

2011 Harper Perennial
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Serpent Box
by
Vincent Louis Carrella

In the deep mountains of Appalachia, the Flints of Leatherwood, Tennessee, spread the word of the gospels by handling deadly serpents and drinking lye in front of large gatherings of the faithful. Believing his ten-year-old son Jacob—called Toad or Spud—to be a prophet, Charles, the patriarch, takes the boy down a long and arduous path as they travel the back roads of the postwar Deep South in search of God and plumb the depths of their unorthodox brand of faith. But sudden, shocking tragedy will shatter Charles’s cherished dream of building a ministry and a permanent church—and set young Jacob on a dramatically different course. 

2008 Harper Perennial
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The Contortionist’s Handbook
by
Craig Clevenger
 

John Dolan Vincent is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent’s clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name. 

2002 MacAdam/Cage
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Dermaphoria
by
Craig Clevenger
 

Eric Ashworth awakens in jail, unable to remember how he got there or why. All he does remember is a woman’s name: Desiree. Bailed out and holed up in a low rent motel, Eric finds the solution to his amnesia in a strange new hallucinogen. By synthesizing the sense of touch, the drug produces a disjointed series of sensations that slowly allow Eric to remember his former life as a clandestine chemist. With steadily increasing doses, Eric reassembles his past at the expense of his grip on the present, and his distinction between truth and fantasy crumbles as his paranoia grows in tandem with his tolerance. 

2005 MacAdam/Cage
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The Fighter
by
Craig Davidson
 

Everything has been handed to Paul Harris, the son of a wealthy southern Ontario businessman. But after a vicious beating shakes his world, he descends into the realm of hardcore bodybuilders and boxing gyms, seeking to become a real man, reveling in suffering. Rob Tully, a working-class teenager from upstate New York, is a born boxer. He trains with his father and uncle, who believe a gift like his can change their lives, but he struggles under the weight of their expectations. Inevitably, these two young men’s paths will cross. 

2008 Soho Press
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Sarah Court
by
Craig Davidson
 

Meet the residents . . . The haunted father of a washed-up stuntman. A disgraced surgeon and his son, a broken-down boxer. A father set on permanent self-destruct, and his daughter, a reluctant powerlifter. A fireworks-maker and his daughter. A very peculiar boy and his equally peculiar adopted family. Five houses. Five families. One block. Ask yourself: How well do you know your neighbours? How well do you know your own family? Ultimately, how well do you know yourself? How deeply do the threads of your own life entwine with those around you? Do you ever really know how tightly those threads are knotted? Do you want to know? I know, and can show you. Please, let me show you. Welcome to Sarah Court: make yourself at home. 

2010 ChiZine Publications
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Cienfuegos
by
Chris Deal

These stories render emotion in shades of stark gray. Like sculptures, Deal subtracts from his Cienfuegos superfluous elements, leaving a base from which the reader is allowed to interpret, perhaps participate in, his characters’ disjointed lives. Each word hints at two others; each line implies a life; each brief fiction describes a world.

2010 Brown Paper Publishing
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Lick Me 
by
DeLeon DeMicoli
 

Through the use of dark satire, Lick Me is a wickedly funny tale from an original voice that shows no mercy when writing upon the immoral standards of network television that interprets news worthy headlines by ratings, while an easily influenced culture finds their “truths” in celebrity tabloids. 

2009 P’NK Books
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When October Falls 
by
Christopher J Dwyer
 

Clint Korbis has lost it all: his sanity, his grip on life, and most importantly his wife, Jenna, who disappeared without warning. Exhausted and incapable of coping with the loss, the only relief seems to be suicide, but then a series of happenings indicate that Jenna may not be dead…she may be closer than Clint thinks. 

2011 Brown Paper Publishing 
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Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel 
by
Steve Erickson

In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother commits a desperate act: convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, she determines to stop it and becomes the lake’s Dominatrix-Oracle, “the Queen of the Zed Night.” Acclaimed by many critics as Steve Erickson’s greatest novel, Our Ecstatic Days takes place on the forbidden landscape of a defiant heart. 

2005 Simon & Schuster
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Zeroville
 by
Steve Erickson
 

A film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and-most important to him-the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made.