Tormented Flesh

A bit of a digressive response to the publication of my mass shooting story as part of a new collection of fresh takes on the body horror fiction subgenre

A new body horror anthology, Tormented Flesh, edited by James Nulick and published by Anxiety Press, dropped this week, and it’s a stunner.

My story, “Shooter,” is another one I wasn’t sure I expected to find a publisher for, mainly because of how violent and angry it is, in the form of a letter written by a mass shooter to a woman he’s been stalking. Here’s the first few lines:

I need help. Seriously. With the thing I was telling you about in the previous Messages re: the secret. I don’t need you to help me help me, I just need you to do something for me: Stop Reading These Messages. Seriously. What I’m going to probably start saying from here on out is stuff you really don’t want to mess around with.

I happened to be working on it the day Trump faked an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024. Hard to imagine it’s already almost been a year since then, and that following it, the prevalence of mass shootings on news media has taken a back seat to all the other malevolence.

It would seem the idea should be we are not supposed to acknowledge these things happen, much less that there’s anything to be done about it. In some ways most of my writing since 2020 has felt like an attempt to not be squashed, though I can’t say I’ve felt a ton of solidarity on either side of the fence.

Amazing in a bad way to watch how business as usual shapes the behaviors of even the artists still willing to rear their heads in public putting on an ego show as if no matter what else is going on in the world, they’re still an intellectual in waiting who needs to be admired to feel sane.

Sometimes writing feels like what cracking open what exists of the world that isn’t a part of the world. Maybe the problem with contemporary literature in general is that it feels the need to want to appear alive when it’s obviously not living. Hearing a blowhard spout the novel is dead tends to make me feel more excited about both writing and reading, and not in a morbid way. In the opposite of a morbid way, whatever that means.

Meaning is created by direction. Most sentences only have one direction, especially if you’re not holding them in your mind and moving them around. Like many things, you can probably take someone saying “the novel is dead” or “literature is dead” as an expression of them telling on themselves. They’re complaining that a corpse won’t fuck them.

Writing this story was a great delight to me, even in the pain it portrays, which is very real. If I had written it holding in mind the possibility of showing it to anyone, I wouldn’t have written it, and instead would still be holding in my heart the pain that makes me want to make violence with language. Rather than simply an expression of violence, it is doubly an expression of anti-violence; that I would rather speak using text than weapons, which is a choice.

I often think about Squeaky Fromme telling the media, “Anybody can kill anybody,” a few months months before she would attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford on September 5, 1975. In that same way, anybody can write anything. It’s literally a matter of knowing which buttons to push.

Every text that is written on a computer is the result of someone knowing exactly which buttons to push in what order, including the editing process. This is a different thought than the millions of monkeys on typewriters thought experiment, which assumes that randomness is what drives action when the subject is not logical in the way that the language is when shared with humans.

It means that all writing requires performance. It continues to be an underdeveloped notion in the creation of novels that we give liminal space and liminal thought a larger share of the consideration when attempting to communicate that is less literal, and more abstract. We fear what we don’t know, and if there’s anything true about there being a “culture war,” it appears to frequently revolve around the recommended means of handling one’s fear.

A dead literature would be imo one where the speaker of the text has their head so far under the sand that it can’t breathe.