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    Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes
    Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes
    Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes
    Ebook148 pages3 hours

    Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes

    By Chris Kelso

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    About this ebook

    The Slave State: A place where dogs tire of their lovesick masters and compose novels for benign publishers. A place where love and murder are equally important to the development of young men. A place where everyone is a slave to their minds and their hearts. From one of literature’s most daring writers, Chris Kelso invites you to explore his mind-bending universe with nine short stories—a collection that challenges the boundaries of genre and the limits of the heart
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJournalStone
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9780982811993
    Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes

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      Book preview

      Terence, Mephisto, and Viscera Eyes - Chris Kelso

      PRAISE FOR CHRIS KELSO

      ‘Chris Kelso is a writer of almost intimidating intelligence, wit, and imagination. On every page there is evidence of a great mind at work. Just when you’re wondering if there are actually still writers out there who still feel and live their ideas out on the page, I come across a writer like Kelso, and suddenly the future feels a lot more optimistic. One calls to mind Burroughs, and Trocchi’s more verbose offerings—whilst remaining uniquely himself, in a writer as young as he is, is a very encouraging sign: one of maturity that belies his youth. I look forward to reading more from him in the near future.’

      —Andrew Raymond Drennan, author of The Immaculate Heart

      "Chris Kelso sets his photonic crystal gun on KILL and takes no prisoners. My favorite era of science fiction was the 60s New Wave when the British magazine NEW WORLDS took front and centre, and there’s a bit of NEW WORLDS here, kind of like Jerry Cornelius using the cut-up method in a bungalow in Glasgow, with a splash of Warren Ellis added for extra flavour. Kelso has a compelling voice. Somewhere Papa Burroughs is smiling."

      —L.L. Soares, author of LIFE RAGE and IN SICKNESS

      ‘Chris Kelso is an important satirist, I think it’s safe to say.’

      —Anna Tambour, author of Crandolin

      Someday soon people will be naming him as one of their own influences

      —INTERZONE magazine

      ‘Come into the dusty deserted publishing house where mummified editors sit over moth-eaten manuscripts of books that were never written . . . anyone who enjoys the work of my late friend William Burroughs will feel welcome here with Chris Kelso.’

      —Graham Masterton

      ‘Chris Kelso’s prose swaggers like blues and jitters like bebop. Dig.’

      —Nate Southard, author of Down and Just Like Hell.

      ‘Sparky, modern, avant-garde but accessible, Chris Kelso’s book is reminiscent of the most successful literary experimentation of the 60s and 70s, the sort of work that was published in the later New Worlds, but it’s also thoroughly contemporary, intimately engaged with modern life as it is right now. Kelso steams with talent and dark wit and his blend of anarchy with precision is refreshing, inspiring and utterly entertaining . . . ’

      —Rhys Hughes, author of Mister Gum

      ‘This emerging journeyman of the macabre has wormed his way into my grey-matter and continues to seep noxious ichor. I feel like I must devour him. Every little bit of him.’

      —Adam Lowe

      Chris Kelso’s writing is like a punch to the gut that forces your face against the page. The way his gritty prose carries his imagination is like a bar fight between Bradbury and Bukowski, with the reader coming out on top. The worlds he drags us into are so damn ugly that you have to admire their beauty.

      —Chris Boyle of BizarroCast

      ‘Whether he’s writing about a fictionalized William Burroughs, Time Detectives, or Aliens Chris Kelso aims at the interstices or the Interzones because he understands that these are the people and spaces that define modern life—Kelso is also always funny and twisted.’

      —Douglas Lain

      ‘Choke down a handful of magic mushrooms and hop inside a rocket ship trip to futuristic settings filled with pop culture, strange creatures and all manner of sexual deviance.’

      —Richard Thomas, author of Transubstantiate

      "Guaranteed to uplift the heart of today’s most discerningly jaded nihilist"

      —Tom Bradley

      ‘Chris Kelso is the one your mother warned you about. He is a sick, sick man - bereft of cure and heaped with symptom. His words will taint you irrevocably. Your eyes will want to gargle after reading just one of his stories.’

      —Steve Vernon, author of Nothing To Lose

      Bizarro Pulp Press

      an imprint of JournalStone Publishing

      Detroit*San Fransisco

      www.BIZARROPULPPRESS.com

      Terence, Mephisto & Viscera Eyes

      Copyright © 2014 Chris Kelso

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

      Printed in the USA.

      Cover Design: Jim Agpalza

      Interior illustrations: Chris Kelso

      Photography: Blair Dingwall

      Interior layout and e-conversion by Lori Michelle

      www.theauthorsalley.com

      OTHER WORKS BY CHRIS KELSO

      Novellas

      A Message from the Slave State

      Moosejaw Frontier

      Transmatic

      Short story collections

      Schadenfreude

      Novels

      The Dissolving Zinc Theatre

      The Black Dog Eats the City

      Anthologies

      Caledonia Dreamin’—Strange Fiction of Scottish Descent (ed. With Hal Duncan)

      Terror Scribes (ed. With Adam Lowe)

      This is NOT an Anthology

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      FAMILY MAN

      TERENCE, MEPHISTO & VISCERA EYES

      THE STATEMENT OF TOM TRYOUT

      Another uninspired, poorly written metaphor for something no one cares about, okay . . .

      A PAIR SO RAPED

      BAPTIZM OF FIRE

      BIRTH, SEX, DEATH, STIGMATA

      HEART-ATTACK MAN

      THE VERIDANT DREAM

      Come on and die

      In your viscera eyes

      Cataracts close the blinds . . .

      —The Mars Volta

      FAMILY MAN

      The gangplank was covered in slaves, their rags swathed in sand and surf. The waves—a constant stirring of jagged V’s boiled in hot foam—shook the vessel with all the mercilessness of the cosmos. Strange sunlight filled the top of the island with purple sand that glimmered across rows of elm and stretched the sage.

      The Cherry Island marina was a clutter of ugly metal, scows in perpetual hither and thither, drifting landfills atop barges and freighters full of human cargo . . .

      A child slave yelped and is punished just as the ship pulled into shore.

      One slave, a woman—Amna—who was, one suspects, born into captivity, turned to her companion Gertrude and shared a terminal glance. When the slave masters were busy rounding up the men and bundling them into the water, Amna whispered into Gertrude’s ear

      —Do you know what they’ll do to us?

      Gertrude looked straight ahead at the wood-wreathed walls of their cabin, hopelessness her only permanent resident. She would not share another terminal glance with Amna.

      A boy crawled around the deck, blood leaking from his anus. Slave masters stomped around him, kicked away any object the boy tried to grab onto to pull himself up. There was an ugly laughter, the kind only tormenters enjoy performing, and they were just that—tormentors. A meaty palm appeared and clutched the boy by the scruff of the neck. He pulled him to eye view. The meaty palmed man had a foul smirk, his words emitted in low-end murmurs of death breath that seized the nostril and spun the bag inside the belly.

      —My own son—he repeated, again and again until the ugly laughter began once more.

      TERENCE, MEPHISTO & VISCERA EYES

      1.

      —Wait here dog.

      Phil latched Terence’s leash to the railing and went into the store for cigarettes. Terence sat there patiently, waiting for his owner to come back out. There was a dull but bearable throbbing in his groin from his recent castration, like the rend and tear of a rusty saw on a numb, gangrenous limb. He sniffed the air around him. It was a good day to be a dog in Shell County—in spite of his new eunuchdom. The sun rode triumphantly in a curling mantle and he knew it would be Frisbee-throwing weather soon enough.

      Terence often thought about his indentured servility and wondered how comfortable he really was about being someone’s pet. No man or thing is born free, he supposed. A free man is dangerous, like a dog free of its leash. A free man is more likely to descend into entropy; the world around him would decline into chaos. A free man has no fear of God when he is his own god. Any man (or dog) who has been purchased may eat if he has been circumcised. The truth of the matter is that Terence had always been happy being a dog. It was all he’d ever known.

      Phil came out of the store and primed up a cigarette. He huffed his first drag deeply, held the vapour in his lungs for as long as drawn breath would allow, before releasing a perfect cloud into the air and unhooking Terence from the rail. The sky became a tarp of plutonium orange.

      —Come on dog—Phil instructed in a voice as deep as the Mariana Trench.

      They walked through the park. Shell County didn’t really have a ‘park’ for dog-walkers, just a mound of balding grass that led into a carnivorous woodland where local children went missing. Phil pulled at his cigarette morosely while Terence ogled the gambolling bitches and tried to remember that pre-op desire that once lingered in his loins.

      They made towards a bench. Terence’s owner was a depressing creature—a broken spirit trapped in an out-worn cage. His physical appearance suggested a raw deal of some kind. At 27 his hair had gone arsenic white;

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