Hello friend,

This is your monthly reminder that my novel Chokeville is available as an ebook and, even better, an audiobook. You can also now get it from the library via Hoopla (I think) or get a DRM-free version (possibly) via Bookshop. As ever, reviews and word-of-mouth are desperately appreciated.

Yesterday was Father’s Day, so here’s the story of Bat and Mina’s father, a section I cut out of the book because it felt “too off-topic,” which, if you know anything about Chokeville, is really saying something.

Let’s talk about Hugo Hull, son of contract privateers, literally born in the sea (his mother, slanted on juniper, slipped off a pier at an inopportune moment and went into labor), then left to his own devices amongst the sweaty reprobates of Fort Hook.

Unlike his parents, who abandoned him to roam the high seas looking for men to gut like fish, Hugo was a gentle soul, a wee waif who loved nothing more than drawing pictures of bugs and birds and flowers. He was very bad at it but then he got better, and when he hit puberty he got much better, inspired by a sailor who doffed his shirt to show off his belly tattoo of a pretty lady with boobs and legs. When he sucked in his gut the lady would do an awkward sort of hula dance that made his compadres hoot.

Young Hugo found this very inspiring for a number of reasons, and he proceeded to draw boobs and legs of all shapes and sizes, thoroughly exploring the theme. His oeuvre soon drew the attention of other horndog 13-year-olds who deeply appreciated its aesthetic passion and anatomical detail.

Soon, however, he realized that the real spark of inspiration was not the subject matter but the medium: ink permanently stabbed into human flesh. Now that was how you did art. He loved how the lines moved and stretched in ways that paint on paper couldn’t. The ways they breathed.

FUN FACT: Fort Hook is a stopping point for seafaring knaves of all stripes, so naturally we have about one million tattoo parlors. Some bodegas will even give you a free one if you spend over $25. More than once I’ve seen a burly guy with an infected chest tattoo that said: Ace’s Emporium • Open til 2AM • Limes Lengua Loosies

And so Hugo marched into The Pinprick, the tattoo parlor right there on the docks, always ready to ink up any drunken ninny on shore leave, no design too regrettable, no body part too obscure.

The proprietor was Madame Sunshower, vast and slow, who gave him one look and said, “I’m thinking a big bearded centaur across your back with the words FEAR MY THUNDER in graceful script lettering.”

“I do not want a tattoo,” Hugo said, dropping to one knee. “I want to tattoo. Please teach me your ways. I want to learn.”

Sunshower laughed. “Can’t learn it til you felt it, kid. Now how about that centaur.”

Hugo spent a full week howling under her needle and at the end was the owner of a disturbingly grandiose back tattoo and a thousand-dollar debt. When he explained that he had no money and had never had any money, Madame Sunshower said, “Yeah no kidding, you’re gonna work it off.”

So he sterilized the gear, dabbed the sweat off customers’ brows, mopped up the blood and vomit, massaged Sunshower’s hands and, weirdly, feet. But mostly he observed her meticulous work, anchors and scorpions and skulls and names of the dead, all handcrafted with one tiny stab after another.

Eventually she showed him the ropes, letting him practice on some spare pig hides and then on passed out customers…

Yeoman Jasper Grinnich awakens from a three-day bender, somehow back in his bunk in the torpedo room of the submarine Capelin, so hungover he feels like his mortal soul set itself aflame and exited roughly through his anus. Whilst sadly brushing his teeth he notices a smudge by his left eye and goes to rub it away but it won’t rub away, which is when he learns there will be an extremely poor rendition of a flaming eight ball on his face for the rest of his life.

…and finally for paying clients who’d heard tell of the young man with the steady hand and a special gift for boobs and legs.

Late one humid summer night, Hugo was tattooing a comely demon in a martini glass upon the buttocks of a local schoolmarm while Sunshower unwound with a Godfrey’s Cordial (sassafras, opium, ginger).

“Madame,” he said, “do you believe that for every person there is the perfect tattoo? Like, the perfect match between art and body? I do. I believe what I just said.”

“Funny you should ask,” Sunshower said.

“Oh good! I enjoy making people laugh.”

She squinted at him to see if he was kidding (he wasn’t) and then said, “There is a special technique called blood anima. The Inker can create…well, not the perfect tattoo, but one that perfectly embodies the Client. Not how others see them or how they see themselves or how they want to be seen, but the real them. A picture of their very soul.”

Hugo stopped what he was doing. “How do they do that?”

“A macabre ritual of some sort. Auras intertwining and the like. The Inker’s hand is moved by a spectral force. She has no control over the Ink, or even where it goes on the Client’s body. She is just a vessel for, you know, spiritus mundi.”

“This all sounds like a terrific pile of hooey.”

“Doesn’t it? And even more implausible is that the tattoo changes as the soul changes. It moves. It lives.”

Hugo had entirely forgotten his work and was now using the buttocks as an armrest. “Balderdash,” he said.

“Indeed. This method takes weeks. Months. Excruciatingly painful for everyone involved. And most the time, the Client regrets it.”

“Now why would that be?”

“Tell me, Hugo. Would you want to know what your soul looks like?”

“Yeah! I think?”

Sunshower gestured at his work in progress. “What if it’s, say, a demoness resting her heaving crimson bosom on the rim of a cocktail?”

“I’d be pleasantly surprised!”

“Well I’ve learned that most find the surprise to be decidedly unpleasant.”

“And how do you know of this technique that is real and not made up?”

Sunshower finished off her drink. “Because I invented it.”

“What!” Hugo cried, in a way that sounded just like his not-yet-born daughter Batya. “I demand you teach it to me immediately!”

“Okay,” Sunshower said, and she did. Hugo was very excited at first but got much less excited as the months turned into years. In addition to mastering advanced tattooing and ink-making skills, he had to learn the ins and outs of the dermis and epidermis, subcutaneous tissue, the vascular and endocrine and lymphatic systems, plus a detour into neuroscience and pharmacology. Then some ontology and oneirology and parapsychology, hand-picked elements of various ancient religions, a deep dive into cleromancy and tarot and the zodiac and a local card game called carrick.

There was a lot of guided meditation and stretching and sitting completely still, all of which Hugo found unbearable. There was a lesson that involved him losing his virginity, which also went poorly. There were seances and mind-journeys. In her quarters above the parlor, Sunshower set up a rough approximation of a confessional booth where Hugo would have long conversations with total strangers about intensely personal topics. She also made him learn how to sing and play the piano, which had nothing to do with his training but she thought it’d be nice for him to know.

Finally, six years after he first walked into The Pinprick, it was time to try his first blood anima tattoo. The client was Sunshower herself, which was cheating a little bit because part of the challenge is getting to know the person you’re tattooing, but nevertheless: it went perfectly. Hugo went into a kind of trance for seven days and when he came to, the work was done.

There on the back of Sunshower’s neck was what he thought was a Jolly Roger but upon closer examination revealed itself to be an opal lotus above two crisscrossed keys. It undulated like it was underwater, and it would change from a cobalt blue to a gleaming platinum.

She wept when she saw it (with the help of several mirrors) and the next day she died.

There’s more about Hugo’s tattooing career and how it led him to meet Bat and Mina’s mother, but that is a story for another time/email.

Anyway please tell all your friends about my book or, barring that, tell yourself about it.

xo
josh