Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

Laymon’s note in the book— “May all your travels lead to good things.”

See? Sometimes there’s more to a story about a snuff movie than people being indiscriminately snuffed. Now, no one tell Peter Straub about the Ghost Story homage, okay?

Development—The story that was intended for In Laymon’s Terms. The deadline was running out on me (I actually still have the email I sent to Steve Gerlach asking that I not be disqualified for submitting because I didn’t factor in the time difference in Australia), so I think I basically sat down and wrote all or the bulk of this in 10-12 hours on the last day left. This came before “Sharing Needles,” and I think I was a bit obsessed with the “twist” possibilities from stories which used journals or dictations as a device. I had caught up to Island not long before this, and it was undoubtedly the biggest influence. Well, that and a chance remark from a friend with a job developing film about the kind of snapshots he was seeing on a daily basis. This was before the digital camera age really took over, and these days Carl would probably do his thing with a cell phone (if he could part with the money for one), so that’s why I specifically tagged the journal entries with a year in this version. The irony of the marathon writing day needed to accomplish “Development” is that In Laymon’s Terms would not actually be published for the better part of 10 years, so there was a time capsule sensibility to it when I finally got to read ILT in summer of 2011.

Emissary—The oldest of these stories, written sometime in the late 90s. I watched Faces of Death IV at a fairly impressionable age . . . impressionable enough to believe what I had seen was the real deal, no doubt about it. Years later I discovered otherwise, but those initial impressions lingered and are pretty much echoed by Gabriel in the story. Since I was determined to create stories out of the most extreme things I knew at the time, shockumentaries proved obvious fodder. I had a thing at the time for underdog characters being messengers of a greater calling, probably a byproduct of the Jaffe in Barker’s The Great and Secret Show, a beginning that has always stayed with me. Of course, who can say Gabriel actually was or wasn’t such a person? I’m not even sure.

Genital Grinder II: Dis-Membered—I don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t have reassembled this story. To me, this was the ultimo Von and Greg adventure. Each section was written for a different bracket of an online gross-out tournament hosted by Delirium, grand prize being the publication of the winner’s own short story collection and various Delirium titles for the ol’ bookshelf. I had a few highlights mapped out in advance, but mostly it was written on the fly as needed for each new round. For reasons still unknown to me, I didn’t save the story (but at least I still have that all important email to Steve Gerlach). I thought I had it stored on an email account, but no such luck, at least for all of it. I had parts 3 and 4. The computer I originally wrote it on was long gone, and it wasn’t on any of the disks I had. I asked my friend Darrin if he still had it, because I had emailed him the installments before they went to the tournament. With help from his father, they found part 1 in addition to the aforementioned original Von and Gregless beginning to “Genital Grinder.” Bob Strauss did the proofreading for the Delirium tournament, so I hit him up on the remote chance he might still have part 2 so many years later. He still had a hard copy, thankfully, and emailed me the scans of it. Now what would have been so hard about rewriting part 2 if he couldn’t have provided it, you might wonder. Because apart from the initial dick robbery set-up and woman in the attic, I didn’t remember very much of the story at all. It seems hard to believe that someone could forget reading some of these depravities, much less actually coming up with them in the first place, but that’s what happened. I didn’t remember there was a Slut Necro Lambda, and definitely not what exactly that might be.

As for the aforementioned attic scene, I had to read Jayne Eyre for a lit class in college, and some rather extreme commentary on the book suggested that Rochester hid his wife in the attic because she had syphilis. I thought that was something more befitting my own work when I chanced upon a picture of tertiary syphilis online one day.

I did end up winning the tournament, but Delirium temporarily went on hiatus shortly after and my collection was one of the casualties.

Final Indications—For a time, there were plans to do a Horrornet anthology with contributions by some of the various regulars. Brian Keene was going to be the editor. “Final Indications” was my entry. It never came to pass, unfortunately. I was pleased when excavating it to discover I still liked it, since there was a time when I considered it my best short story. I’ve always said “extreme ideas” were as interesting to me as extreme fiction in general, which is why I always liked the cosmic horror of Lovecraft. This story probably shows a lot more influence in the way of Palahniuk and Ballard, though. When I was a kid, I used to think 2000 was going to be the end of it all. For some reason, I thought this was comforting. I had no such illusions when the time actually came. At 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, I was watching Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox yet again, not expecting anything but a really bad time for Giovanni Lombardo Radice. The Y2K scare provided some interesting “human interest” stories in 1999, though, including one guy who I believe sold a lot of possessions to help fund a self-described “Mad Max” car for his family to have the advantage when it was time to pillage and plunder in the new dark age. At some point, I got to thinking about what someone who really believed in Armageddon would do when it didn’t happen . . . and what if it happened and we didn’t even know it.

This collection gave me the chance to go back and expand some of the ideas in these stories. In some cases they are a little longer than in their original (or intended) publication, while others are almost half again as long. A lot of names have been changed because I had a bad habit of using the same names a lot of times, and it was painfully obvious when the stories were all put together.

I hope to be back soon with other unseemly concepts, “bad ideas” in the grand Travis Bickle tradition. In my bios from publications, I used to tell readers to email me with the subject line “ARE YOU MORBID?” I’m still a big Celtic Frost fan (finally got to see them on the Monotheist tour), so you may do that at areyoustillmorbid@gmail.com. About 8 years since writing the oldest story here, the answer would still seem to be . . . yes.

RYAN HARDINGis the co-author of the Partners in Chyme chapbook with Edward Lee. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies In Laymon’s Terms and Excitable Boys and the chapbooks A Darker Dawning and A Darker Dawning 2: Reign in Black. Right now, he is probably either watching a film involving strange camera angles and a black-gloved killer or thinking about watching one.