Stories: MURDER EYES / THE CALENDAR FACTORY

Plus a Don’t Submit piece of fiction and two book reviews, Lizard Brain and Kafka’s Diaries

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a newsletter. Apologies. I’ve been busy finishing up my job and trying to get into the swing of summer. I’ve adopted a concept for my writing: “short story summer.” I want to try to start working shorter as opposed to thinking every idea must be a novel. That is ambitious which is great but it can be very tiring to try to be epic.

Speaking of epic, the George Miller action movie Furiosa is being yanked from theaters due to its lack of money-making success. I consider myself very lucky that I got to see this incredible movie on the big screen before Hollywood bean counters reflexively took it away to make room for other, less daring and idiotic fare. Enjoy Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as comedian heroes, you fools!

I’ve had a little success, if you can call it that, with short story summer since a few stories have been published at some of my usual venues. Just today a crime story called “Murder Eyes” came out at Punk Noir. I still feel like I have crime writer in my DNA even though I’ve moved on from that a little bit. Still fantasize about writing murder mysteries and thrillers. I’ll put the link for this and the other things down below for you to check out if you like.

Other big story is called “The Calendar Factory” up at Misery Tourism. I seem to be still trying to find my voice as a writer and this is me doing a Faulkner impersonation I guess. I live in rural America and I have worked in the rural industrial base for a certain part of my life, and have met many rural characters. This take was drawn from actual events that happened in 2003, year of the Iraq invasion which has captured my imagination since for me it represents a turning point in American history, a Rubicon or however you’d like to see it.

Then there’s a strange prose poetic thing I wrote called “Cursors: Fingerprints of the Demiurge” which fits the template of more recent writing for website Don’t Submit! which specializes in surrealistic automatic writing. My work in progress novel I See Prism Threads (which I’ve been working on since last year) draws a lot from this free form dreamlike style, presenting problems which I am trying to correct by inserting the spinal cord of a more concrete plot.

Here are the links, please explore my stories!

“Murder Eyes” — Punk Noir

https://punknoirmagazine.wordpress.com/2024/06/10/murder-eyes-an-obsession-short-by-jesse-hilson/

“The Calendar Factory” — Misery Tourism

https://www.miserytourism.com/the-calendar-factory/

“Cursors: Fingerprints of the Demiurge” — Don’t Submit!

https://donotsubmit.net/cursors-fingerprints-of-the-demiurge-by-jesse-hilson/

Then, here is the text of the goodreads review I wrote for Lizard Brain from Tragickal Books:

LIZARD BRAIN. Tragickal Books. 2024.

Great anthology of weird horror tales with an unhealthy, subversive dose of the avant garde. Honestly, when I started hearing of this book’s specs, the publisher and the editor and the list of contributors, my eyes grew up out of my head on prehensile stalks and haven’t blinked since. I knew many of the contributors from the ripples they’ve made on twitter where I see them swimming back and forth.

This volume gets you in touch with the unsettling lifeform within. The lizard brain is that evolutionarily leftover aspect of the nervous system that presumably links us with some base, amoral animal millions of years back, just fighting for survival and reacting in sinister ways. Less than human, subhuman — or more human than human?

I read the book in one sitting and will have to go back to reread many if not all of the stories. Some of the more chilling selections from the book were ones that left the human intact and revealed that (this is a cliche of sorts) the alien is us. I have tendencies toward liking crime fiction and Anna Krivolapova’s “The Domovoi” and Charlene Elsby’s “The Upstairs Neighbours” gives you the human being, nothing particularly supernatural but enough to make your skin crawl off your bones and do heebie-jeebie dances. I need to read more Elsby. We all do.

Other highlights from the book: Matt Lee’s “SLLLLLLLLLMRRRRRRRRRE” or a title something similar to that is about the barcode found throughout the modern world for the purpose of sales, drawing from a similar well to the freaky fiction/non-fiction hybrid as his novel Crisis Actor, which was double scary because it was drawn from real life research into our media environment, our culture, our shared history. Lee’s work seems to be informed by JG Ballard’s on some level (or what little I know of it): nothing is so disturbing as our times, our psychology reflected back at us in a mirror cracked.

The book is split up into sections according to divisions of a body’s systems: musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, prosthesis, and nervous. One of the fun aspects of the book is to read the 20 stories and try to figure out what editor David Kuhnlein meant by grouping them like this, what qualifies them for their particular aspect of embodiment.

Another standout story was Chris Kelso’s horripilating “The Yawn That Yearned for Dina” (this seems to be drawn from the same storyline in his book Voidheads, which likewise pulls me in and insists to be added to the TBR pile). By the time I made it to John Trefry and Blake Butler in the “nervous system” portion of the book, my own nervous system was so blasted by the book in tandem with the geoelectric storms from the sun that day that I thought I had died and gone to hell. Trefry’s writing style gives you a seemingly infinite field of information and slips in arcane hints and jokes like background/foreground tests in a psychological experiment. It’s more artistic than your average genre horror story. Many of the stories in Lizard Brain are like this: Trefry, Butler, Shipley, Kilpatrick are working in prose styles to trigger belletristic effects more than they are trying to establish narratives per se. It’s a heady experience that has more to do with writing that knows it’s being read than with the smoothly written tale that disappears into the reader’s mind without leaving a trace (Lizard Brain has those too). You may like the range of stories offered here, you may not, but open minded readers will be able to appreciate the horror angle in each one. Tragickal’s anthology is a good one from the standpoint of introducing a host of writers as they are riding a crest in their respective spaces in the indie lit community. It’s an interesting time. I know I’m going to keep going with many of these authors to see what else they do.

Recommended.

*****

Likewise, the text of my goodreads review for Franz Kafka’s Diaries from Schocken Books.

I did not want this book to end. I picked up Kafka’s diaries, in part, because I wanted to go writing school, as I’ve been keeping my own diary (or journal, or series of notebooks) since 2000, off and on. Kafka is a writer who I’ve only known indirectly through hearing about his obvious cultural and literary resonance and less through reading his own works. I approached Updike in this fashion, too, reading gobs of his non-fiction before ever really going into his fiction. I read the recent bio of Philip Roth having never read his fiction and it was incredibly illuminating — so much so that I’m in no hurry to read Roth’s novels. Kafka is different. It seems to me that going through the diaries has served as the hidden back door into finally reading his fiction which I’ve been avoiding for decades.

What’s in the diaries? Obviously it’s a record of his daily thoughts more or less from 1910 to 1923. It’s where he went to talk to himself and work on the raw materials of a writer’s crafts. He did a lot of observing. His city Prague and the other cities of Europe he visited all get fine-toothed combing over. This was before and during World War One in Middle Europe, the life of a mostly unknown Jewish German-speaking writer in Czechoslovakia. The sections where he is going to see Yiddish theatre productions and engaging in discussions regarding Zionism and Judaism more broadly are fascinating, particularly in this moment currently during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza over Hamas. I found myself turning to the diaries, and Kafka more generally, as a check (a Czech?) against the latent and manifest antisemitism I saw while reading the news of early 2024. History provides a window into the issues of European Jewry.

Kafka famously wondered what he had in common with the Jews, since he scarcely even had anything in common with himself. The diaries paint a portrait of a brilliant, sensitive, somewhat enervated, romantically crippled, genius writer who observed everything. As a writer I relished his descriptions of his fellow human beings, their clothes, mannerisms, voices, the collective aura of humanity seen from an insomniac’s lonely perch. The book was unbelievably inspiring and I’d recommend it to writers confronting the so-called myth of writer’s block. Reading just a few pages and seeing the quicksilver mind of Franz Kafka as he jumped from analyzing his relationships with women to drafting letters, traveling to Paris or Bohemian sanatoriums for his health, and endlessly trying to start a new short story, never really giving up on himself as a writer in spite of his palpable despair. There’s a moment when he writes the short story “The Judgment” essentially in one overnight writing session, out of whole cloth, then sits back and experiences a feeling of artistic self-esteem and clarity that shines through the pages. He realizes that this is how it must be done, with a sense of “indubitableness.” It is incredibly inspiring and heartening to witness since we know this is the same guy who wanted all his writing destroyed after he died. A complicated record of a complicated writer. Now I want to read all his fiction and his letters and everything else.

***

In the future, as I have said, I would like to write more reviews. I worked on a sort of book review/essay for Gabriel Hart’s hotly anticipated print magazine Beyond the Last Estate. I wrote about the book release party for Mathias Mietzelfeld’s non-fiction work Who Killed Mabel Frost? from Short Flight/Long Drive Books. The book was written under the pseudonym Miss Unity which many will recognize. I’ll let you know how to acquire copies of the magazine/zine/publication when I find out more. It’s sure to have a lot of interesting and well-curated content.

Other reviews and things are under way. I need to plot and plan my reading over the coming months. I want to make “short story summer” a real thing and give it real weight and significance. I have all kinds of story ideas and I need to cut them down to the right size.

I appreciate that I have currently not mastered the art of providing smooth links from your email message to things like stories and YouTube videos, and I also appreciate that you might kindly still visit them. Here is a recent jazz favorite, Sonny Rollins’ 1957 Saxophone Colossus: