Men love me for my cadaver swag. The way my skin is cold like a corpse, my off-putting demeanor, and the way I stand in the threshold of the still-living and the dead.

Lamb of God, sheer your fleece.

For now thou art an unholy beast.

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ask and ye shall receive my works and despair or something, the old annihilation ecogothic deathscapes essay is up on the website too, don't mind the sublimely terrifying and beautiful artfully lit mould, she's still a tad musty from lying long forgotten in the attic...well that and on account of being an essay about bodies growing crazy, delectable mould i guess 💀 bon appetit

ANNIHILATION (2018) dir. Alex Garland

do i take inspiration for my writing from other literature? intertextuality, but of course! what kind of literature? ahem...you know..the classics*...,,

(*translation note: paper mario: the thousand year door [2004, nintendo gamecube])

You feel you’ve been here, once before — a memory that was not quite yours.

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

Oh.

I literally forgor 💀 You can read my whole 15,000-word Obra Dinn-ssertion about Pope's use of the virtual dead body as text, as a game, and a Gothic medium in Return of the Obra Dinn on muh website. WOE. cadaver nerd essay be upon ye.

horror is always like oh no they're possessed by a demon well what about possessed by an angel? angelic possession is also horror.

while i am on the topic of bungou's author-characters btw, i think i understood how it's fictionalisation real writer figures works better once i realised bsd characters aren't caricatures of the authors as people, but more personifications of the collective literary oeuvre of said authors; the characters are adapted from their writing, rather than the people. obviously, the line gets blurred fairly frequently, for instance in references like the iconic photograph of dazai sitting cross-legged on the bar stool, but a degree of ambiguity is natural, when the boundary between real writers' construction of their selfhood and the construction of their artistic creations is so unstable anyway, hence why it's natural and smart to have bsd's author-characters so often motivated by trying to write narratives of their own selfhood, once again blurring the boundaries in this sort of many-layered tension between irl author's selfhood vs their fiction vs fictionalised bsd author's selfhood vs their fiction vs the fiction they are a part of (asagiri's). but generally speaking though. i think the characters are easier read as representations of the author's work, than as loose recreations of the authors themselves

Gertrude Hermes (British, 1901 - 1983)

It's been years and I still dig the absurdist view bungou stray dogs takes on death, because back then I think a lot of what appealed to teen anana was how its sort of language of the body, pain, and death was blatantly ridiculous but also strangely authentic in feeling. Like, there are plenty of points where death and dying are treated very bleakly, either with a somber, reverent quietude that gives room for lengthy poetic speeches or with loud, grotesque horror. And it undercuts that by having main characters just refuse to die constantly and should-be fatal injuries just like,, get better. Actual Death is less a looming threat and more a memory of the past, and artefact, a symbolic evocation to be witnessed, so as to represent a change in said witness of the highest magnitude. So we have dying as this horrific, traumatic thing that happens to these people, being relentlessly poked in the back with it without ever culminating, to maintain an anxious state of perpetual near-misses, as if to inscribe on paper and flesh the frailty of the human body by contorting it and ripping it up into grotesque shapes, each drop in the veritable geysers of blood splattered painstakingly and with almost divine impunity. And then on the other hand we've got piles of detached human limbs being thrown around like water balloons with a slasher movie air of darkly comical excess about it. Try as he might to perish in some poetic, self willed way as a means of self-writing, etching some of his own agency into the narrative of his life experience, worthy of the sublime terror of death imparted by the philosophical musings of these author-characters, instead Dazai always manages to end up faceplanting the ground with his ass in the air, somehow very much still alive. The human body is paradoxically both perilously fragile and also mind bogglingly resilient - and both tendencies can and often do manifest in situations that are frankly ridiculous. The story recognises the constant creep of inevitable death as something frightening and affects people terribly, particularly the ones who are still alive to have feelings about it, but it doesn't cede much ground to dread. It finds strange beauty in carefully etched images of the misshapen, dismembered body, hell, scratch beauty, there's sensuality, eroticism in the ways taking apart a body implies the touch of another, physical contact is given supernatural power, increasing proximity to being dead means proximity to another in a sort of symbiosis, the art revels in all the ways it can imagine rearranging human body parts only for them to pop back into place to go again, blood like water off a duck's back. What does it take for someone to actually Die in this fiction? Death has no rules, it makes no sense at all. Hell, none of these characters should really be in the same space to be forever trying and failing to meaningfully kill each other. We know that clearly many of these figures are separated by human mortality, but bsd doesn't care about when people are supposed to live and die. Much in the way real death doesn't seem to much care for timelines and rules and how we feel about what makes sense. In the knowing, winking unreality of its fictional world, it manages to mimic some of the reality of living with everyday death. It understands living and dying in a mortal body is massive and inescapable and arbitrary, sometimes violent and painful and sometimes stupid, and utterly absurd, and so it tears it and stretches it and mixes all these aspects up and plays around with it like a squeaky toy. Bonkers in a curiously cathartic way.

Skull Studies by a follower of Giovanni Battista Franco (1563)

|Conduit|

Hound of ill omen.

From my new gothic fantasy novel THE PALE QUEEN.

it all comes down to blood