DREAD Reviews 5
Dad Reads and Examines Authors while Distracted
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It is a feat of human hubris to divide the world - no, not just the world, but the vast and infinite cosmos in its entirety - between “indoors” and “outdoors.” We behave as if the concepts are somehow equally relevant. It is a necessary strangulation of the imagination without which we would never be able to comprehend our tiny corner of reality. Only in a quiet and contemplative moment can we peek at this window and know we’ll never truly see what’s past it.
In a similar manner, we look into singularities where time warps infinitely and wonder if physics will ever explain how this very common thing could happen. Can its insides ever be observed? It’s almost impossible to imagine how this could be done from where we are now. Here we are, inside time, when reality is mostly outside of it.
We’re the anomaly, my friends. Causality is a convenient fiction and the biggest lie we tell ourselves. From the singularity’s point of view, everything happened all at once, and also never happened.
I hope this message either lights a flame of curiosity in you, or leaves you feeling like life is meaningless. Both reactions are perfectly legitimate. So is an eyeroll and an “Okay Derek, whatever you say man.”
Now that that’s out of the way, I hope you enjoy the stories below. Please click the links and let the writers know how their words made you feel!
Minnie Mayhem writes a poem which unwittingly describes my 8-month-old daughter to a T. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go quietly bleed to death:
I really wanted this to not be ironic. Is it too much to ask just once for corporatocracy to prove itself to be the ideal mechanism in the facilitation utopia? No takers? Damn, one can only dream:
This essay makes a great point about the innate immaturity of mankind and its need for 3rd grade level symbols. I don’t understand American Football in the least - but I always bet my entire checking account on whichever mascot would win in a real fight. The fact that this is horrible as a predictor is besides the point (damn you Chiefs) - it’s the image that matters most, and this is why the Prussian flag is so similar to the US Seal of government. Our ancestors in the good old US learned a lesson from Prussian history and the importance rest periods between wars - this is why we improved on their design by removing the ball and scepter symbol of power and replaced it with an olive branch. This brings me to my own humble solution I wish to offer the great people of the north: Canada should swap out the beaver and begin worshiping the sun god! Hear me out - all they need to start their golden age is accelerate the Earth’s warming. Imagine the rising value of beachfront properties alone, not to mention Canada’s vast riches could finally be exploited for more than 5 minutes at a time (nobody thinks gold and oil is worth losing your fingers to frostbite). I mean you crazies must secretly want this already - in parts of your country the terrain is too bad for railroads and instead you send trucks to skid all over icy lakes, what the hell? Unfortunately, since no country can top China’s incredible output of greenhouse gasses, Canada must instead settle for a more “spiritual” role in championing the destruction of the earth’s habitat by changing their flag into a representation of the old glorious light in the sky. They can satisfy the “Frenchiness” requirement simply by making it look a tad medieval - I mean they didn’t call Louis the XIV the “Sun King” for nothing. Praise the sun:
One of mankind's favorite pastimes is anthropomorphizing animals, inanimate objects, and even abstract concepts. This inevitably leads to artists making anything and everything into something female and sexy, which eventually, of course, men start fantasizing in sexual encounters. Reptiles? You mean snake ladies with tits. I mean how many depictions of Medusa have you seen where she’s not a little sexy? You just have to get past the whole writhing head of snakes and stone cold killer eyes. A river? You mean sexy water nymphs who are ever ready for play. Fish in the sea? Mermaids. Car? You mean a sexy transformer robot car. The moon and stars and all that? I’ll let Graeme McAllister handle that one:
Way out on the frontier you sometimes just want to kick someone's ass. But sometimes, even way out on the frontier, there's these things called rules. Fortunately, sometimes, even way out on the frontier, you have the e4 mafia:
This dive into the unexplainable reminds me of fun times before I was born. A certain New-York based crime syndicate (still known as the Mafia) once owned its own private island; a little place called Cuba. Under benevolent Mafia rule, communism had not yet reared its ugly head, and it was safe for US middle-class tourists to visit, and man, business was booming (these days they limit visits to Hollywood celebrities following strict, carefully constructed iteneraries). The indigenous population of the island, always starved for cash, started selling souvenirs of their culture to US tourists despite all ridicule and chastisement from their peers. Other Cubans noticed how successful these stalls were at the flea market and started copying them. Soon, hordes of Spanish-speaking people who didn't know a single word of the old languages started weaving together random crap they’d invented and selling it. They wore feather headdresses, glass bead necklaces, and would hop up and down like apes while banging finger symbols and little drums, drawing hordes of customers to their magical medicines, spiritual totems, and chicken bone carvings from supposedly mythical sea beasts. The actual descendants of natives went out of business by being boringly authentic in comparison:
A horror author writes an important cautionary tale that makes the case for bathing, laundering your clothes, and trimming your facial hair. You don’t want to be mistaken for some homeless bum or a vagabond. You might win the unique “don't wake up Cthulhu” lottery and get fed to some subterranean cosmic horror:
On a good day I score in the 99th percentile on most intelligence tests. All this means is that I’m keenly more aware of the extent of my stupidity and unattractiveness relative to the normal person. Most of you brothers and sisters of the high IQ world aren’t anti social because you think everyone is stupid, you’re just grumpy because everyone has an easier time being happy. They’re all comfortable with their irrational choices and habitual coping mechanisms. Just because you’re Einstein doesn’t mean you need escape less than a normal person, but in your case your cursed logic center makes it harder by constantly reminding you that what you’re doing is dumb. Me? I finally found my cure for this misery: I married someone smarter than me. Every night when I go to bed I giggle quietly knowing how much I annoy her (please don’t tell her this, I’ve never admitted to being dumber than her out loud):
This story doesn’t give all the details, and the details it does give, I didn’t like, not one bit! So everything from here is my own personal synthesis: A man with insomnia binges The Twilight Zone for a week and unsurprisingly has nightmares. Star Trek reruns play after he falls asleep every night so he also ends up learning Klingon. He takes expired sleeping pills expecting improvement, but the next morning he sees a weird giant mushroom and breaks a coffee cup. He tries to go through his front door, forgetting to open it first, knocking himself out. The wife recognizes he’s having another bad acid trip just like all those years ago and, worried for her children, calls the cops. He comes to and mistakes the cops for aliens or maybe terminators and yet he thinks they’re speaking Klingon so he grabs a knife and shouts: “You’re no warrior! You bring dishonor to the empire!” The cops taze his ass and he passes out again. Thinking the cops are killing her hubby, she assaults one and gets cuffed too. He’s still tripping hard when he wakes up in a jail cell with his wife the next morning. No, I’m not disturbed, you’re disturbed. I’m fine, you’re fine, the human race is fine, this isn’t the Truman Show, thanks for asking:
Death is not well known for his ability to be empathetic. He understands very little of human warmth. Also, scary as he may seem to us mere mortals, he's really just the cosmos' version of a UPS deliveryman. Maybe it’s not so much of a surprise, then, that he loses a bet to destiny about whether some dude is going to die today. Come on, of all people - are we really going to pretend she didn’t cheat on this bet? Now that Death has lost his bet he’s been forced to hang up his scythe and wear a post service uniform for a whole century. Now, when your time comes, instead of black robes and a leering skull, Death will drive up in his little government truck, walk out wary of barking, biting dogs, before he timidly offers you a clipboard and asks you to sign on the dotted line. Please don’t laugh, it hurts his feelings, and you don’t want the box containing your soul arriving in the afterlife with a bunch of dents and frayed panels:
I wonder what Harley would taste like in a stew. Mmm, yummy:
The following message is sponsored by the Emperor of Mankind:
With no humans are around a rock is is just a rock. A tree is just a tree. No empathy for these objects occurs without our people and no memory of them will ever be immortalized in song, poem, or story. These heretical narratives about humanity earning a deserved extinction raise my brow in ire. We are nature’s artists. We are lovers, builders, and creators, no other species in existence can do this with any lasting permanence, and any art they create goes unappreciated by posterity. Humans are children of nature and natural in every sense, including our desire to grow and explore. This insane idea that all of us dying would be good for the world, while ugly, is just one more example of the breadth and beauty of the human experience. Go give a human a hug. We deserve it.
This story is heresy. Death to abominable intelligence. Death to the the mutant, the alien, and the heretic. The Emperor protects:
Arthur’s my kind of man: principled, hard-edged, rich, and on a mission to have the last word! When he sets his mind something he won’t change course, not even when given sage advice by supernatural spirits who warn him of silly things like eternal damnation - what the “hell” do they know? Arthur’s got important work to do. His daughter, as a child, got super upset when he threw a dead bird at her that one time. Obviously this became a teaching moment: “What’s wrong with a little taxidermy? Grow up, no supper for you tonight!” The willful child never forgave him for this for some reason, and daddy’s little girl punished him the worst way a daughter can: she ran off with some loser he didn’t approve of. This definitely got under his skin, but there’s no way he would give up that easily - after a long separation, on his deathbed he decides, “As my last act among the living, I’m going to have the last word,” and he writes her a haughty letter knowing she’ll need to open it because you know, dad’s dying and all. But she doesn’t read it, what a rascal! Dad always finds out about these things even if he’s dead. So he freaking haunted her house like a real man who never gives up, and guess what - he threw a dead bird at her again! Finally she gets it. My man Arthur, you might be gone now, and I’m sorry it’s too late to stop being a jerk. But with this final symbolic act you finally won! Too bad she’s still with that loser though:
My top spot (I swear I’m not using a dart board to decide this) goes to The Last Thing You Will Ever Eat by Ken Miura. It’s well written and full of visuals, but forget all that - this is a story, man! The kind of story that if someone had written it in 4000 BC or earlier it could have become part of our creation mythos and feature in some of the world’s most popular religions. I’m sorry you missed your window, Ken. Imagine if you hadn’t? Maybe some of our prophets and mystics would have been cooks making delicious food instead of generals, escape artists, or peace-makers and the like:
You all outnumber me and it’s not fair. Once again I have to dig into the past to sneak a promotion of my own work. By issue 10, you talented writers and your output will have me sharing awful stuff I wrote in high school, and by issue 20 all I’ll have left to share are baby pictures! By issue 30 I’ll just be an empty, meaningless husk writing nothing but DREAD Reviews.
Here’s a story about the most intelligent man the galaxy has ever seen, with the fallible arrogance to match. Oh and it has one of my favorite themes, a great person completely undone by love. Sucks to be him:
Thanks for reading!
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Thank you for including me in such an incredible lineup.
I wish I had a clever response, but without any dead birds to throw around I'm at a loss for how to tie this all together. I'm sure you understand. :)
I've read some of the authors that you posted about. Very good! I will come back here and read the rest. Thank you for honoring me. If you would like to be a part of THIS IS GASTROMANCY, then hit me up in the DMs.