THE FOLLOWING DRAMATIZATION HAS BEEN RECONSTRUCTED......
Jess Hagemann (Headcheese) has a new novel coming out next week called Mother-Eating. We're publishing it through Ghoulish Books and we are extremely excited about it. This novel is perhaps unlike anything else we've released before, but at the same time it lines up perfectly with the kind of work we've spent over a decade publishing. It's experimental, it's beautifully written, it balances the mix of extreme horror and subtle cruelty with perfection. Daniel Kraus (Whalefall) read an advance copy and said, "Hagemann might be the best horror writer in America," and we can't help but agree. If you haven't read Jess Hagemann's work yet, you are sincerely missing out on some of the most delicious prose published within the last ten years.
What is Mother-Eating about, though? Well, when we first announced the book, we pitched it as Exquisite Corpse meets Lincoln in the Bardo. Here is how Lindsay King-Miller (This is Your Body) described it: "Mother-Eating reimagines the doomed decadence of Marie Antoinette in the world of contemporary politics, child exploitation, and religious zealotry. Wildly original and unforgettable, this book brings history to screaming, bleeding life.”
Ahead of its October 28th release, we thought we'd go ahead and share the opening scene from Mother-Eating for any interested ghouls. Take a gander below, and then pre-order a copy directly through our webstore (pre-orders before this Saturday will be signed & personalized by the author).
THE FOLLOWING DRAMATIZATION has been reconstructed from security-camera footage, speed-trap videos, interviews with eyewitnesses, and the sworn accounts of former members of pseudo-religious sex cult Simon’s Sorrow. They were variously collected between June 18, 1989 and August 8, 1989—when cult leader Louie Auguste was arrested for the torture and murder of software engineer Paul Greer—and again from February 3, 2003 to December 12, 2003, after an anonymous tip implicated Auguste in a missing person’s case. In 1989, Auguste was released before he could be arraigned, but on January 18, 2005, and largely on the strength of the testimonies contained herein, Auguste was convicted of the deaths of nineteen Austin citizens, including two minors. For these crimes, he was executed on January 21, 2007—after which, those Sashes who could still be located brought this documentarian up to speed again.
AT 1:27 A.M. ON Sunday, June 11, 1989, forty-two-year-old Eileen DuBarry dissolved six doses of ketamine, a common horse tranquilizer, into twenty-nine-year-old Paul Greer’s vodka-spiked energy drink while he was in the bathroom. After he returned, she led him by the hand to a darkened corner of the club, where she waited for Greer to pass out. Three male Sashes on the dance floor, disguised as club patrons, watched for the signal: the moment when Greer’s knees crumpled and he folded, a meaty rag doll, into the smiling DuBarry’s ready embrace. Until then, she kissed him, sloppy kisses that left wet trails across Greer’s face and down his stubbly neck, an overlarge Adam’s apple. She slipped a hand inside his jeans and gripped him, his almost-erection already going soft from the drugs, even as he moaned his desire into her ear, all bad breath and sweat beneath the pounding music, the pulsing lights. DuBarry held him and she held him, chanting promises of the pleasures that awaited them, and when finally his whole weight shifted onto her, Greer’s drool-slick chin nestling in the soft dip of her collarbone, she caught him as deftly as honey catches flies, as honey mixed with borax attracts, then kills, the ant queen.
The men homed in from three directions, two of them shouldering Greer like a friend, the happy bachelor who’d had too much. They carried him between them, apologizing to those the third man asked to step out of their way. Near the door, the bouncer offered to call an ambulance. “Nah, man, we’re good,” the first one said. “He’ll sleep it off,” slapping Greer’s back good-naturedly. “Thanks, though—and have a nice night.” The bouncer assumed Greer’s friends had him covered. DuBarry was nowhere to be found. No one would remember seeing the two of them together, though Greer, when he woke up, would think of her. He would wonder what happened to the woman in black, she of the spider limbs and funny tattoo, which hooked around her heart like a rope pulled taut to bind things, and that tightened and relaxed with every shallow breath. Madame DuBarry.
Laying the unconscious Greer across the back seat of their car, at 1:53 a.m. the men began the short drive through downtown, easily navigating Austin’s one-way streets and avoiding the crowded, pedestrian-heavy Sixth Street. West of I-35, they turned north on Guadalupe, hung a hard left on MLK, and disappeared, at 2:04 a.m., down an alley off San Antonio Street. Sash number two drove slowly, obeying speed limits and stoplights, and signaled to indicate every turn. His twin brake lights were red eyes in the dark, the only witnesses to Paul Greer’s abduction.
In a large, soundproofed basement, a group of adult men and women similarly dressed in black, all with matching rope tattoos inked on their middle-left chests, stood ready to receive their sleeping sacrifice. The three men, having carried Greer down the stairs, stripped his clothes, then bowed out, their duty done, as Eileen DuBarry reappeared among those assembled. She held a long rope—and, approaching Greer, began trussing him, wrists above head, knees bent and gathered against his chest fetus-style. He looked like an egg wearing a hat, the steeple points of his bound hands a tricorn.
Pulling a heavy chain down from the ceiling, DuBarry looped the knots at his wrists over the last link’s thick hook. When she retracted it, Egg Greer rose into the air, both shoulders simultaneously dislocating with the weight of his own body. He did not protest, did not scream or wriggle or even hold deathly still, as though refraining from movement might stop all the hurting. Instead he spun slowly, a tire swing on a rope—yet solid, at present, in the middle.
Anxious to get started, the rest of the Sashes prepared the room, dimming overheads, lighting candles, turning the room hazy with incense. They chanted promises of the pleasures that awaited Paul Greer, and grew frenzied with the lather of the predator about to eat. As though heeding their own words, in twos and threes and fours they paired off, mouths finding nipples, assholes, other mouths. Sighs and grunts rose, a carnal incense, into the air, and then fingernails, razorblades, metal screws found skin, pierced membranes and linings, until the copper and dirt of blood and shit streaked faces, became a functional makeup, the mark of the sash. DuBarry, meanwhile, muscled the Judas cradle, a three-foot-tall wooden pyramid, into position beneath Greer’s suspended body. Around 2:45 a.m., she lowered the chain again, slowly, adjusting the speed and angle of descent, so that his anus lined up perfectly with the pyramid’s point. She locked the chain there, allowing fifty percent of his bodyweight to rest upon the Judas cradle—and waited for Greer to wake up. A man of his weight and age would take hours to process the ketamine, and their orgy was just beginning.
Eileen DuBarry felt a tapping on her leg, and looked down to see an initiate Sash at her feet, kneeling and smeared with the fluids of the others. Rolling her eyes, DuBarry obliged the unspoken plea. She spread her legs where she stood, baring herself beneath her skirt, and the Sash adhered at once to her pussy, eating as though he’d stick his whole head inside her, if she’d only deign to swallow his face with her sex. It was considered an honor to orally (or otherwise) amuse the madame, so the initiate kept it up until she came, uttering, as she did, only a polite little, “Ah.” He couldn’t have left, anyway; with her boot, she’d pinned his penis to the floor, bruising it, but not severing it—tonight, anyway.
Meanwhile, Greer’s anus began to stretch over the pointed tip of the pyramid, gravity and his own weight forcing his sphincter open. Tiny cracks formed, tore, became fissures. Blood swarmed beneath the surface of Greer’s sensitive skin, then emerged, bright beads, before unfurling in scarlet ribbons down the cradle’s four flat sides. The blood acted like a lubricant, facilitating the device’s deeper entrance inside Greer. It didn’t move but a centimeter at a time—just enough to, over the course of three days, effectively impale him. Greer would regain consciousness, lose it again, regain it again, and so on, multiple times before then.
All activity ceased when the door opened and Louie Auguste, known as “King Louie” to his followers, materialized. He stood on the threshold, surveying through scented smoke that barely masked the tang of bodies, the messy scene, then stepped down into the room. He moved from group to group in perfect silence, as no one dared speak to him unless spoken to, making minor tweaks to the slant at which one Sash had been working a ribbed glass dildo into the pussy of his partner, while a second had his penis in her mouth, and encouraging the tongue of a female Sash deeper inside her lover’s anus. “Let her know you’re there,” he said. “She wants to feel you wanting her, mining the truest parts of herself for the tastes, the textures, the ridges and folds that are hers alone. Worship her, as you would our Lord, for she has been created in God’s own likeness, and what you do unto others, you do unto God.”
He walked toward a fivesome, all of them frozen in a ring on hands and knees, their right or left hand buried to the wrist in the ass of the Sash in front of them. Approaching one of the males, a former sixth-grade teacher who’d joined them in the last few years, King Louie grabbed the Sash’s erection and milked him, gently at first, and then faster and faster, his hand anointed and frictionless with the man’s pre-cum. The only sounds in the room were the male Sash’s rapid breathing, the rhythmic slap of King Louie’s hand against his balls, and when the man climaxed, a yelp from the Sash in front of him as he bit, hard, into the flesh of her buttocks, stifling his own screams of pleasure. King Louie then withdrew a capped scalpel from his robes, and, unsheathing it, delicately carved the day’s date into the Sash’s otherwise unmarked lower back. In this way, he kept track of who he had been with and when, for it would have been unconscionable not to grant every member equal attention.
“Clean him up,” King Louie told two older Sashes, who on the Outside had been married to each other, and both the man and the woman scuttled over to lick the Sash who had climaxed, as well as the hardwood floor beneath him, spotless. “Now the rest of them,” King Louie ordered, and in unison, the five Sashes removed their fists from the ass of the person in front of them. The older male and female went from Sash to Sash, removing every trace of lube and shit from the Sashes’ hands with their tongues.
Turning to Eileen DuBarry, King Louie asked, “How’s he doing?” nodding at the still-unconscious Greer.
“Proceeding nicely, sir,” DuBarry said.
“Let’s ask him, shall we?” Dropping the scalpel back in its hidden pocket, King Louie now removed a vial of smelling salts. The whole room breathed in sharply, a muffled gasp, in anticipation. Just before he waved the vial under Greer’s nose, King Louie looked back at DuBarry. “By the way, you’re needed upstairs.” Her shoulders sank in disappointment. Regardless of whether a Whore actually needed her, she was being sent away—punishment for disappointing King Louie in some way. Maybe he knew that she’d let an initiate, not yet vetted by King Louie himself, make her come. Or maybe Paul Greer was an imperfect sacrifice. She left proudly, her chest puffed, lest anyone know how embarrassed she really was.
Just after 4:00 a.m., King Louie brought Greer back to life where he hung, the salts shocking the young man’s lungs and nasal passages into reflexively inhaling. He blinked and looked around the room, things coming into focus, in the flickering darkness, one by one. A number of naked people staring at him, plus the fully dressed man to his right. The rancid smell in the room. Throbbing, in his skull, and far away, a sharper pain that seemed important but inaccessible. King Louie drew a finger through Greer’s blood dripping down the Judas cradle and held it up for Greer to see. “That’s you, Paul,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Where am I? What’s happening?”
“You’re at church, of course.”
“Church?” Greer struggled to comprehend King Louie’s words. “I don’t go to church.”
“Ah, but, Paul, everyone must go to church. How else can you atone for your sins?”
Greer’s head lolled, dropping onto his knees, lashed tightly beneath his chin. He was still mired in a K-hole, the tranquilizer depressing his cognition. “I don’t feel well,” was all he said, before falling asleep again.
But King Louie wasn’t done. Activating the automatic pulley system, he raised Egg Greer slightly higher into the air. Where Greer’s blood had coagulated around the tip of the cradle, his skin stuck and ripped open afresh. King Louie then lowered the chain again, bringing Greer’s anus squarely down on the point anew, advancing the wooden pyramid farther up into his rectum. Up and down, up and down, King Louie bounced Greer, and the young man’s eyes fluttered open every time. He could not force himself awake, though, and soon King Louie tired of the game. He walked to the opposite side of the room, where he could still see Greer clearly, and took a seat on a built-in stone bench. He felt a sermon coming on.
“Brothers and sisters,” King Louie addressed the motley Sashes, still in various states of undress. In unison, they sat down cross-legged to listen. “‘The body is a holy thing—a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God.’ That’s Corinthians, which goes on to remind us that although the body is a gift, it comes at a price. You—me—we—were bought at a price. And that price was death.”
Murmurs of assent, the only noise made consciously since King Louie had entered the room, echoed in surround-sound.
He continued: “When Simon Magus”—and at the intonation of that sacred name, a litany of whispered “Lord Simon”s was uttered—“When Simon Magus asked Peter to give him the power to heal people, it was the body that Simon had in mind. He knew, as Matthew chapter six relates, that the body is ‘more than clothes.’ More than flesh-and-blood parts that, individually, are disposable”—here, King Louie gestured toward Egg Greer—“but together create a sanctuary for the divine.”
King Louie paused and looked around the room. “Why, then, did Peter scorn Simon?”
“Peter was selfish,” one Sash ventured. “He wanted the power all for himself.”
“Or he was just confused,” a female Sash said. “Maybe Peter had been taught to believe that money was evil. I know a lot of us have hang-ups around money.”
“So, it was specifically because Simon Magus offered to pay Peter for the power, that Peter rebuked him?” King Louie asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I mean, that’s where the term ‘simony’ comes from.”
“Money is a tool,” King Louie corrected. “Like nuclear weapons or candy bars, money is not, by itself, ‘bad.’ Money builds the churches within which we honor God. Money greases the wheels of governing bodies, which we put in place to guide us and keep us safe. Money buys food—or, as we do at Simon’s Sorrow, the means to grow our own food. Which brings us back to Corinthians. If the body is more than clothes, then tell me, brother”—King Louie addressed a tall man toward the back—“Tell me: Is not life more than food?”
“Yes, King Louie, it is.”
“Then why do we eat?”
“We eat to sustain life.”
“Why else?”
“We eat for the pleasure of it.”
“Ah, yes, pleasure. Food makes you feel good, does it, brother?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It fills your stomach, tickles your taste buds, comforts you when you’re sad, perhaps.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me how much pleasure food gives you.”
Obediently, the man crawled over to the group of women nearest him. He lay down on his back and the first one straddled his face. He moaned appreciatively into her pussy. After a minute, King Louie concluded, “So, food sustains the body. What else sustains it?”
“Deprivation,” the woman sitting on her lover’s face said. She stood, abandoning her pleasure to let the next woman in the group take her place.
“Indeed. That’s why we fast, and meditate,” King Louie agreed. “Anything else?”
“It’s more than just deprivation,” a female Sash on the left side of the room spoke up. “Sometimes it’s pain that sustains the body.”
“Ah. How so?”
She went to the woman now sitting on the male Sash’s face, grabbed her nipples, and twisted. The woman shrieked: an exclamation of both pain and pleasure. She pulled the woman down by her nipples until her chest was flush with the floor, her pelvis still squashed against her partner’s face, and retrieving a hammer and a long, thin nail from her utility belt, proceeded to nail one of the woman’s nipples to the floor. She then straddled the male, who’d become hard while eating out woman number one and number two, and allowed him to penetrate her. Spinning on top of him, she lined up a second nail with his scrotum and nailed it to the floor. Now the man screamed, sounding like a saint in the throes of ecstasy.
“Through pain comes Restoration,” the female Sash said. “We are restored to ourselves and to Christ. It’s the real reason Peter had to punish Simon: not to disparage him, but to save him.”
“What you’re saying,” King Louie reflected, “is that when Simon Magus was struck down from the sky, he didn’t fall.”
“No, sir,” the female Sash concurred. “He flew.”
The Chef
We disposed of Paul Greer’s body, once he’d expired, like all the others, tossing him into the well at the back of the property.
Order a copy through our WEBSTORE or BOOKSHOP.ORG. Alternatively, scroll toward the bottom of Jess Hagemann's website and see if you're near any of the stops on her upcoming book tour! (Psst, she's signing books at our bookshop in San Antonio this Saturday, October 25th, from 12-4pm.)