L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings

Extreme, often intimate stories–horrific, bizarre, scary, offensive, funny, absurd, disturbing, or just plain WTF–in turns or all at the same time–when am I going to produce a by-the-rules book that will lure in readers by targeting their comfort zones with words that don’t explode? Not any time soon…

As I write this post, the first goal of which is to show off amazing cover art by Aaron Drown Design, I am getting ready to travel to Las Vegas for StokerCon, the Horror Writers’ Association’s major convention, where I will see print copies of my new short story collection Peritoneum as well as new editions of Leaping at Thorns and Reel Dark for the first time. (For more about the new Reel Dark, see “REEL DARK in the Spotlight,” and for even more about Peritoneum, see “Inside the Peritoneum.”)

As I’ve already posted, Reel Dark has new stories by Michael West and Alexander S. Brown, and since the book’s first edition had very limited exposure, all of it is new to almost everyone, so I’m excited about it. The collection of award-winning authors as well as newer voices spinning tales of movie mayhem is destined to please lovers of dark fiction. Yes, I’ve got a story in it, but unlike the other two books I’m talking about here, this one ain’t about me. I’m showing off a collection of other people’s work, stories and poems I really like, and I’m darned proud of it.

Like the new edition of Reel Dark, the second edition of Leaping at Thorns is bigger than the first, with one tale added in each of the three sections. (Unlike Reel Dark, these stories are all me.) To the “Complicity” section I’ve added “Silence,” about a woman who keeps losing people, literally, after she has a surreal experience in an abandoned house. To “Entrapment,” I’ve added “House of Butterflies,” in which flesh does more than crawl–it flies. To “Conspiracy,” I’ve added “Kindertotenlieder,” about a twentieth-century Pied Piper whose storybook vengeance is even more horrific than the worst version you’ve read. With these additions, the book provides an even better view of the self-obliterating drive toward darkness that binds all the stories together. With the stunning new cover and support from Seventh Star Press–and with the first edition’s enthusiastic reviews–I’m looking forward to Leaping at Thorns freaking out a larger audience.

So what, then, of the newest addition to the bunch–the one with the guts on the cover and the hard-to-pronounce title, Peritoneum? It’s a different kind of animal. In a very small circle of friends I’ve been calling it a Winesburg, Ohio on acid, not because it’s about small-town life (although a significant number of stories focuses on a suburban house… especially its basement) but because the stories share characters and inform one another. In fact, although I published a few stories separately, and a few stories only relate to the whole tangentially, I wrote the vast majority of these tales to stand alongside the other tales. That design makes this book very different from Leaping at Thorns, which has some interrelated stories that nevertheless stand alone. In Peritoneum, I hope you’ll enjoy reading stories individually, but you’ll get a lot more out of them if you read them together. The volume starts with “The Family Pet” and “Blood and Feathers” because they introduce elements that run throughout the book, and it ends with “The Birds of St. Francis” and “The Broom Closet Where Everything Dies” because they tie a lot of those elements together.

Don’t let me mislead you. I don’t promise that the stories make sense when you read them all together. Sure, they make more sense. Some of the WTFs in “The Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion” get answered in the next tale, “TR4B,” and even the comical scenario of “DNA” gets backstory work in “The Broom Closet Where Everything Dies.” HOWEVER–my goal is to offer little eddies of revelation in a greater sea of insanity, where sense and reason fail more often than they succeed. Lots of horror stories have endings that explain the horrors and box them away. Many of them are good. Few of them scare me.

What scares me is the breakdown of sense, the failure of perception. As a result, my stories and the perceptions inside of them tend to break down. Sometimes, I couch the breakdown overtly in terms of the supernatural and/or mental illness and/or drugs (especially in “Patrick’s Luck,” “The Road Thief,” “The Long Flight of Charlotte Radcliffe,” and “Door Poison”), and sometimes I just let them unwind by their own devices. My hope is that the stories, while not always conventionally satisfying, will disturb you on some level–move you to feel afraid, amused, bewildered, and so on–and result in entertainment, albeit of a brooding and uncomfortable sort.

Oh, I worry about things. “Blood and Feathers” has two endings, neither of which is a resolution… “Year of the Wolf” pivots around quotes from an obscure World War Two documentary as well as a scientific curiosity… “Juicy the Liar” opens with a line about eating pussy… I thought of “Bubble Girl” as YA until readers started seeing all kinds of crazy sex stuff in it that I thought was buried well under the surface… “The Broom Closet” goes beyond nasty… much could go wrong in the reading of Peritoneum. But without that possibility, I’m not sure it could really go right, either.

Southern Haunts 3: Magick Beneath the Moonlight is a short-fiction anthology that delivers a delectable range of witch-tastic events and images, successfully indulging fantasies of magical power and a fetish for the history of things weird. [For the rest of my review, keep reading, or for an interview with the book’s co-editor Alexander S. Brown, go here.]

Leaving the most familiar questions about whether so-and-so is or isn’t a witch in the background, and saving the typical witch-hunts for Yankee territory, the stories in Southern Haunts 3 presume the existence of magic and focus on the power’s whats and whens. From these whats and whens readers get a sense of a where, the American South, which is both horrific and mystical. As a result, this collection of stories stands apart from typical witch-horror while affirming, in the Southern Gothic tradition, that regular old “realistic” storytelling doesn’t quite get one of the U.S.’s most culturally diverse and historically troubled regions.

While I’m conflating all the mystic goings-on in Southern Haunts 3 as witchery, the collection’s editors and authors are careful to distinguish among types of magic and related spiritual traditions, naming the book’s primary whats distinctly as voodoo, hoodoo, and witchcraft. “The Apartment House,” for instance, provides a series of bizarre and violent tableaux—death by books is my favorite, but a detailed flaying deserves mention—and ties them together with a lesson on the laws for practicing voodoo the right way. In “La Voyante,” a knowing character explains to a writer looking for a new creative outlet that voodoo isn’t the only game in town:

“No, we talkin’ ’bout Hoodoo. Between the ‘hoo’ an’ the ‘voo,’ there’s a worl’ of difference… though we do tend t’ use a bit of both in these parts.”

Often gesturing toward the diasporic and creolized origins of so-called “pagan” spiritualities tied to hoodoo and voodoo, the stories in Southern Haunts 3 provide a nuanced enough view to add an S to the K in the subtitle, making it a less elegant MagickS Beneath the Moonlight (not a suggestion—the actual title is much better!). Indeed, as the main character of “In the Dark” learns, some magic needs to be practiced only in the day, so “moonlight” isn’t even a consistent feature of proper witchery. Magic refuses easy limits, and while it can be as elegant as the kindly title character of “Granny Wise,” it can also be as ugly as characters’ habits in “Dances with Witches.” The collection tells us that all these magics might fit in a book, and they all show up in the South, but they won’t all fit in a proverbial box. The box mentioned in the title “The Priestess’s Trunk,” then, provides an apt metaphor: you might try to contain and understand mystical forces, but magic will always find a way to push beyond easy categories and simple expectations.

Despite the diversity of magical types in Southern Haunts 3, magical power almost always serves one end: payback. While the book draws its power from many veins, it directs that power primarily toward fulfilling fantasies of justice and vengeance (for comments on this focus from one of the book’s editors, see the interview). The first tale, “Granny Wise,” based on a historical figure, sets the mold: a witch serves locals as a healer, but the price of her services includes righting wrongs. In most tales that follow, witchcraft, as a means for payback, either doles out a kind of cosmic justice against evildoers (as, for example, in “Live Big”) or serves as means for a witch to get some vengeance on (as in “Vengeance,” “The Jar,” “Tell Me Where He Lies,” and “Without Xango there is No Oxalla”). The most salient motive for mystical vengeance in Southern Haunts 3 relates to the South’s legacies of racism, slavery, and lynching. In “The Untold Tale of Wiccademous,” searching for the story behind cursed woods leads the would-be storyteller into a cosmic trap forged from these legacies. “Cursed,” set in the 1920s, takes a more direct look at magic providing justice for a lynching that earthly courts would ignore, and “The Shadows” answers a nineteenth-century slave-master’s murder of an innocent man with a curse that takes “life for a life.” While magical means of achieving racial justice help to advance the book’s Southern identity, magic also serves as an equalizer for women who suffer under the arbitrary rule of despicable men. The mystic in “Secrets of the Heart” learns that her husband’s religious hypocrisy too easily stands in the way of his devotion to her, a betrayal she does not suffer lightly; likewise, when a violent husband crosses “The Bone Picker Witch,” he opens the door for some of the book’s nastiest moments. In most cases, mystical vengeance is overwhelming and horrific, but the justification that goes with it makes rooting for magical victory a source of grim pleasure.

While the fantasy of supernatural justice is fun to indulge, it recurs a little too often within the selection of tales, and the stories that rely on it less end up being my favorites in the book. “The Witch of Honey, Kudzu, and Coyotes” shrouds its title figure in mystery, making her more like a force of nature than a person practicing a secret art. Going further with an interest in storytelling that runs through “The Untold Tale of Wiccademous” and several other tales in Southern Haunts 3, “The Witch of Honey, Kudzu, and Coyotes” opens with an interrupted story that persists in the narrator’s imagination “like a hollow, unformed thing” alongside

“a boy missing from everyone’s memory”

Broken stories and memory gaps make magic powerful enough to reshape thought and perception, reweaving reality’s fabric; as a result, this tale can explore fresh and compelling territory. Likewise, “In the Dark” focuses on the perils of exploring the unknown. A bit rambling in structure, this tale brings its unwise protagonist in contact with strange verse, talking birds, and a host of disturbing images—my favorite is a buck with centipedes pouring from its mouth—that again signal a link between magic and distorted perception that can change the rules for what a story can do. Fans of more transgressive and gruesome horror fiction will likely count “In the Dark” and “The Bone Picker Witch” as favorites along with “Docta Bones,” in which the title character inverts Granny Wise’s benevolence by requiring much harsher payment for the gods’ services, and “Dances with Witches,” which places a human appetite for evil in parallel with a bewitched landscape’s. Chilling acts and images become the main products of witchery: questions of justice and the natural order become secondary to experiencing the full horror of the weird.

A volume about magic and the South invites thinking about cultural and regional history, and with stories set in (or focused on rediscovering) the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, Southern Haunts 3 does a great job of putting together views of the past (and thus it meets its goals–see the interview). As a Southerner, I wonder about the present. Where is witchcraft in the contemporary South? How do hoodoo and voodoo continue to inform life not just in old New Orleans, but also present-day Atlanta, Richmond, and cities in between with “modern” feels that contrast with the antiquarian interests that dominate this book? The book covers solid ground, but by sticking mainly to historical subjects, it might miss some opportunities for innovation.

The opportunities included, however, add up to a satisfying read. Moody, atmospheric, and drenched in regional detail, Southern Haunts 3 gives readers an entryway to the South’s mystic history, places and times to explore with equal amounts of dread and delight.

Southern Haunts 3: Magick Beneath the Moonlight,

Table of Contents

1. “Granny Wise,” by H. David Blalock
2. “Live Big,” by Tom Lucas
3. “The Priestess’s Trunk,” by C.G. Bush
4. “The Witch of Honey, Kudzu, and Coyotes,” by Diane Ward
5. “The Untold Tale of Wiccademous,” by J.L. Mulvihill
6. “Vengeance,” by Linda DeLeon
7. “The Jar,” by Robert McGough
8. “La Voyante,” by Elizabeth Allen
9. “Cursed,” by Melodie Romeo
10. “Secrets of the Heart,” by Louise Myers
11. “Tell Me Where He Lies,” by Greg McWhorter
12. “Shadows,” by Kalila Smith
13. “Docta Bones,” by Melissa Robinson
14. “In the Dark,” by Jonnie Sorrow
15. “The Apartment House,” by Della West
16. “Without Xango There is No Oxalla,” by John E. Hesselberg
17. “The Bone Picker Witch,” by Angela Lucius
18. “Dances with Witches,” by Alexander S. Brown