Category: Writing

It’s started again. They found four bodies. Kids. Just like before. They found the first one around midnight. Fat kid. Say he drowned. The second one turned up at the resevoir. Naked. Bloated. Discolored. She’d bled out through a thousand little cuts all over her body, like she’d been through a cusinart.
An hour later, they found the third one. Her body had been left at the landfill, half buried in garbage. The others, they were nobodies, but she was one of those heiress types. A couple more years, and she’d have had her own reality show. Trashy pop album. Celebrity sex tape. The works. Instead, she’s hip deep in shit with a broken neck. They can’t find her dad either, but the press doesn’t care about that yet. Not when they’ve got a serial child murderer to fawn over.
It was dawn when the last body turned up. Another boy, just like I knew it would be. The news is saying he was tortured, medieval-style, his small body broken on a rack. I know better. I know he thought he was having the time of his life. Having a great adventure. Right up until his arms popped out of their sockets.
Maybe things would be different if I’d stayed with him, all those years ago. Maybe I could have played along, played his game. Let him dress me up like his little Mini-me. Maybe it would have stopped. Or maybe I’d have ended up like my friends.
Friends? No, not really. I’ve spent the last twenty years telling myself they were, because it was easier than the truth. The truth is, I hated the others. Thought they deserved what they got. I didn’t get it, not till later. They were just kids for Christ’s sake. They weren’t perfect, but who the fuck is? I can tell you, I wasn’t no prize. Just some cheery little shit who could smile and look pretty and not give a fuck as long as it was happening to other people.
It was only later that I got it. That I understood what he’d done to the other kids. What he wanted to do to me. So I ran. Dyed my hair and lived on the streets for a couple of years. I never went home again, because I knew he’d find me. I read in the papers what happened to my family a couple of weeks later.
No one ever linked it to him. No one ever linked what happened to my family to what happened to the other kids. I don’t know why. No one’s going to link these ones to him either. No one’s even going to suspect him. But I know he did it. I know. And I have to stop him. Because I’m the only one who can.
Willy Wonka must die.

A short story cryptically titled “Document 5274.45-024.NA107.TMpl-Cltp.16947.0087”, was featured on episode 92 of Dr. Pus’s “Library of the Living Dead” podcast. This is a short epistolary story which I wrote under the name “Redshoe”, and aired as part of a segment called “Letters from the Dead”.
My story appears around 11:44 into the program (Or 7:46, if you care to hear Dr. Pus’s zombie-themed rendition of Joe Cocker’s “The Letter”, used to introduce the segment), and is a bit sad.
The podcast can be found here: http://dr-pus.podomatic.com/entry/2009-10-16T22_06_26-07_00
If, having listened to my story, you find that you want more, the entire “Library of the Living Dead” series can be found at http://dr-pus.podomatic.com/. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, embodying both the strengths (If you’re reading this blog, you know I have a thing for eschatology) and the weaknesses of the genre (Sturgeon’s Law and rabid survivalist fantasy), but leaning heavily toward the awesome, and definitely worth a listen if you’re into that sort of thing.

So, Sargent over at Live Granades was compelled by his wife to follow suit on this meme whereby you look at this list of the 106 books most often left unread on library shelves, and mark the ones you’ve read.
So what the hell, I’ll do the same. Read in bold, partly read in italics, seen the movie in underline
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (It’s not underlined because Man of La Mancha doesn’t count)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (But I didn’t really pay attention)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park (And so did Leah; it was our first date.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (But I regretted every word of it)
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers