Genital Grinder

Quite a number of years ago—at least 15, but my aging gray matter can’t be sure—I was contacted by a fan named Ryan Harding. I’ve always tried to respond to all fan contacts (every now and then, however, you get an obvious clunker, like the ex-con who wrote to tell me The Bighead’s most violent scenes provided him with superb masturbation fodder; or the woman who wanted to know if I’d like to see pictures of her cutting herself—these, yes, are such clunkers. It is advisable for an author never to reply to these red flags) and I was impressed as well as flattered by Mr. Harding’s generous words regarding my work; additionally, he bestowed such words in a manner and air which disclosed a formidable command of the language and a most arresting and cogent creative bent. Moreover, Mr. Harding was a positive acquaintance of several friends of mine; hence, it seemed unlikely that he might be hiding “clunkerdom” beneath a clever camouflage and would later stalk me or, say, start murdering people in ways which duplicated the superfluity of murders in my books. So I chose to pursue correspondence with this young, intelligent, and spirited Mr. Harding. He had aspirations of becoming a writer himself, and flattered me further via the declaration that I was an influence of some significance to him. Then, one day, he asked me if I’d care to read some of his song lyrics—he was into Metal as was I, so I said “sure.” The prospect seemed enticing: I was very curious what this bright, new-generation individual might demonstrate in the way of creative verse; indeed, it struck me as an attractive occasion to observe the tenor of such an enthusiast’s muse, and, doubly, I wondered just what might be the products of that muse?

Well. Here is an inventory of those products.

Psychosis. Misogyny. Misanthropy. Nihilism. Sadism. Necrophily. Erotopathy. Profanation. Alienation. Blasphemy. And every manner of irreverence, aberrant impulse, and outright satanism conceivable and inconceivable.

I’ve long since lost these lyrics (or perhaps I deleted them for fear that their negativity might plunge me into a abysm of clinical depression!), but I recall—and suspect I always will—the final line: “We fucked her good, my knife and I.”

Wow, I thought, this guy’s really fucked up in the head, and then I felt suddenly leery when I appended my conjecture, Wow, this guy’s even more fucked up in the head than ME.

Gore-house smut, enmity personified, and scatology in grand style proved the common denominators hovering amid Harding’s aesthetic elan, and certainly we’ve seen a whole lot of such stuff infiltrating the sub-genre known (among other appellations) as Extreme Horror. Ninety percent of the work is probably worthy of the critical lambasting it receives. Grossness for the sake of grossness. Amateur scribes merely heaping revolting images and disorganized, just-popped-into-my-head scenes of unlikely violence upon the page without any regard to integration, character, story-line. “The bitch screamed as the maggot-ridden zombie rammed its rotten cock into her gaping, reeking pussy and came spurts of pus!” That kind of shit, and personally I’m sick to death of it, as have many readers been for a long time. One time I recall a critic referring to “Extreme Horror” as something akin to a little boys’ circle-jerk club wherein the purpose of each participant is to try to gross the next guy out. I actually quite agree with that (though accurately or inaccurately I disagree that I am a member of that self-same club!) because it appears that what Extreme Horror at large lacks most of all is a discipline of craft. It’s just gross-out sex and gross-out violence that the misguided author thinks will gross the reader out. But it doesn’t gross the reader out. It bores the reader. To tears. And it not only sullies the popular impression of the genre as a whole, but makes the more serious authors out there look just as inept, just as juvenile, and just as I-don’t-give-a-shit.

Which brings us back to Monsieur Harding.

He’s not part of the “club,” folks. He gives a shit-and-a-half about not only the speculative and/or societal points of extreme fiction but also the very craft of it. Over time I read much of Harding’s works-in-progress, mostly stories but also some novel partials, and in them not only did I find those previously stated thematic denominators (gore-house smut, enmity personified, and scatology in grand style) but also a nearly “Strunk-and-White” obsession with prose-mechanics, stylistic feature-through-discipline, charactorial integration, and plot dynamics. It quickly occurred to me that Ryan Harding had (and, furthermore, has) the tenacity, know-how, and wherewithal to become a very potent practitioner in the field of Extreme Horror. Here’s a writer who regards the venue as something rife with value, relevance, and, indeed, meaning. It’s a gore-house world, folks. Just read the paper. This globe is aswarm with enmity personified. (Did you see Daniel Pearl’s beheading?) Scatology in grand style is as real as the mouse button which clicks interested pervertos and other reprobate scum to websites offering bestiality, sex with the severely handicapped, vid-clips of crack-addicted women eating feces ice-cream cones or consuming fish bowls of semen, spit-fights, nose-blow bukkake, animal torture, galleries of deformed children, vomit-swap buffets, etc., ad infinitum.

Ah! The real world!

It’s that same world, too, that Harding’s fiction seeks to delineate in a manner unique unto itself. Some of the stories in this book make notorious writers like, say, Peter Sotos and celebrated madmen as, say, Jeffery Dahmer look like “the veriest tyros,” (to steal a cool simile from Lovecraft). There are times as well when they make, say, Edward Lee, look like, say, a baby in a high chair and making ga-ga noises. Likewise, some of the imagery herein is more disturbing, despair-summoning, and stomach-upheaving than any I’ve read anywhere.

Allow me to make an abstraction—granted, a goofy one probably—or perhaps a “figurative representation” is a better way to put it. As a reader of Harding’s work, I’d like you to imagine that your psyche is a vagina.

That’s right. A vagina.

What Harding’s work provides for you is a raucous, down and dirty, butt-stinky gang-bang with a multitude of demented and very horny participants. You are humped and humped and humped by Harding’s fiction; you are prodded, poked, skewered, and penetrated time and time again; you are stuffed like a turkey, pounded like sod, and plungered like a gas station toilet. (Man, oh, man! You sure got more than you bargained for in this gang-bang, huh? Ho!) Your suitors, I’ll add, don’t like you at all; in fact, they hate you, they hate you for no reason at all. They don’t give two diddlies about you, nor two shits. You’re not a person, you’re not an individual consciousness. What you are to this miscreant crew is nothing more than a hot hole for their penises to have a party in. And there are many such penises, and some come back for a double-dip. Ah, but it’s not typical sperm that you’re being filled like a cannoli with. See, each ejaculation comes possessed of an exclusive constituent, and those constituents are as follows:

Psychosis. Misogyny. Misanthropy. Nihilism. Sadism. Necrophily. Erotopathy. Profanation. Alienation. Blasphemy. And every manner of irreverence, aberrant impulse, and outright satanism conceivable and inconceivable.

Yes.

Now the gang-bang is over. Your suitors are gone, leaving you sore, stupefied, and full of evil sperm. When you get home, you douche at once, intent to flush it all out, but the more you douche, the more you seem to push all that devilish slop deeper. Will you ever get it all out? But at least the nightmare is over, right?

Wrong. Five weeks later you find out you’re pregnant.

That’s what Harding’s work will do to you. It will turn you into a tramp. It will transfigure you into an object for use—a receptacle for all the animus, loathe, and maleficence the human mind has generated, a drain-can for the filth of all the abominations of the earth, and then? It will knock you up.

These are my introspective impressions of Harding’s fiction. He means business. He’s not simply trying to gross us out—he’s trying to make us see. (And I suppose any of us who happen to see ourselves . . . well, then, such persons are in a heap of trouble!)

So enjoy the tour, friends. Enjoy the gang-bang. You may need psych drugs afterwards, you may need an air-sick bag and a steam shower, but I feel confident that you will be provocatively moved by this book.