There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood
In between all the wildness of my day job, I read Michael Wehunt's short horror collection
“[T]hey have given their bodies to chance.”
That’s Michael Wehunt describing 17-year locusts, slumbering deep in the womb of the earth. His 2016 collection of short horror, Greener Pastures, is filled with bodily distortions and images showing how narrow is the gap between human and insect, or human and angel… or angel and insect. Wehunt writes from his native land, the outskirts of the Appalachian Mountains, and there’s a loneliness in his writing and a sense that the natural world is closer and more real than other people.
One thing I loved in this collection is its unwillingness to answer its questions. He is just so weird! Speechless women in black dresses plummet from the sky, crashing into the roofs of a trailer park run by a tinpot dictator. Are they angels? Are they demons? Not quite… but not quite neither of those things, either. The weakest stories for me were the ones where the central idea of loss or grief seemed too close to the surface, too much the structure around which the world’s weirdness wrapped. The strongest ones were inexplicable—songs of a “bloodfall” in the mountains, and the darkness between the highway lights.
Wehunt is one of those writers who chooses grabby words, seeking unexpected juxtapositions of verb and referent: “Even as the sac on Daddy Pardon’s back burst into a flexing shower of feathers, the big man lunged at Fen from his crouch, crying out for the money flowering from the boy’s pockets.” That’s a verb suggesting that a person might also be a plant, a tree—in fact a lot of these stories have images of humanity interpenetrated with arboreality. Trees, swans, cicadas, bees: we are not just like them, but somehow open to them, intermixed with them. Very few of the people in this book remain completely human.
Horror fans are more or less guaranteed to enjoy “October Film Haunt: Under the House,” one of those metafictiony things, a series of blog entries by horror nerds who set out to explore a house from an experimental indie found-footage film. It doesn’t go well for them! And as much as this story shows its influences—The Blair Witch Project above all—it veers and skids, and nowhere it goes is predictable.
I loved “Under the House,” but my own favorite was the first story, “Beside Me Singing in the Wilderness,” which, according to the (interesting, totally worth your time) story notes at the end of the collection, was written in a week, starting only from the image of a bleeding mountain. The speed may explain why Wehunt does skid pretty far into recognizable vampire tropes, but this is the only vampire story I’ve ever read where it genuinely felt like the narrator had never heard of vampires. There’s something still mysterious, unnamed and in fact unnamable, something that is about the mountain and not about European legends. And the voice is perfect: “I’d also been wanting to write in a thick Southern vernacular,” Wehunt says. “It was like coming home.” Given the rest of that collection, I don’t know if “coming home” means it felt good or bad!
icymi
I profiled Awake, an organization supporting and advocating survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy and other leaders.
Santa Claus and the Soul Searchers
Addison del Mastro had this charming piece on regional Christmas music, e.g. “Crabs for Christmas” and “Christmas in Austin.” But the DC contribution is a song I’ve never heard, “Christmas in Washington,” and it just sounds sad: “The Tidal Basin lies quiet / The tourists have found their way home / Mr. Jefferson’s standing the midwatch / And there’s a star on the Capitol Dome.” Thanks for this incredibly bland evocation of a place no one lives in, I guess? If you’d like regional Christmas music from the people who live there, let me introduce you to the funky delights of “A Go-Go Christmas.” I discovered this album because they played it on the actual real radio, and it sounds like actual real DC. When you get that notion, put your reindeer in motion!
Caught in the Web
“Getting Hot in Here: Horror and Homoeroticism in the B-Movies of Barton Fink”: A delightful and creepy riff. “In one deeply peculiar scene, Beery forces Brophy to waltz with him, saying that who follows and who leads is a metaphor for class struggle.”
Harrison Lemke’s Advent song series continues.
A DC church used to host one woman’s passion project, in which she attempted to compile hagiographies for all of the day’s saints. She did not finish this project (there are just so many!), but I like to check out one saint for each day; on this go-round I’m reading the biographies for the seventh saint each day, if there are seven. And today’s seventh saint is Blessed Jutta of Diesenberg, the spiritual mother of St Hildegard of Bingen. This is one of the things I love about the communion of the saints: seeing saints care for one another, seeing the way holy people serve and shelter holy people. (Often the relationships of holy women are especially poignant to me, whether those relationships are sisterhood or friendship or spiritual motherhood.) One of the best essays on Catholic spirituality I’ve ever read is Catherine Addington’s “A new name given,” on reshaping her relationship with “all the saints Catherine” after experiencing abuse in the Church, and there’s a moment where one St. Catherine shepherds another! Our earthly loves are part of how we enter the dance which will last into eternity.
Now Playing
“There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood,” obvs. Here sung by Aretha Franklin.
Photograph of a newly-molted Brood X cicada by G. Edward Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
And musically, my personal earworm for the titular hymn is extraordinarily different from Aretha, implanted way back in 1989: https://open.spotify.com/track/5EZKC4O8xB7hvPftW0hZ2Y?si=I9EUV0M5RM6Y2fV9lJ7Z6Q (Yes, I was a young Christian metalhead!)
I have to say: I'd love to do Greener Pastures as a roleplaying game... I don't know what system would support it, or how anyone would react as a player, but I'd love something that uncanny and unsettling.