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Meat Shots, Gorelets, Severed Hands and the Uncanny in Your Inbox:
Michael Arnzen’s New Directions in Horror

David Sandner

Frankly, I don’t think Michael Arnzen exists.

He’s just an excess, just the hack job, cutting across unseen wires into your home. Just a harbinger of the inevitable that we refuse until we, ourselves, are refused and become moot. He’s not real; he’s an effect. Or, anyway, Arnzen’s experiments in form and medium are, I argue, but a necessary response to a problem in the horror genre.

The problem is that it’s dead.

All genres experience boom-and-bust cycles. Often a rising wave seems marked by one writer’s phenomenal success and a wake of endless imitators and innovators – for horror it was Stephen King in the 1980s. But no genre experienced a bust as hard as horror in the mid-1990s. Horror sections have vanished from bookstores. Horror today can hardly be marketed as horror, except in the smaller presses. In a recent post to his Stoker award-winning website, the ‘Goreletter’, Arnzen reviews an anthology that ‘doesn’t call itself a horror anthology,’ though ‘if it were published in 1989, it certainly would [have] broadcast its status as one.’ Instead, the anthology’s introduction claims: ‘Come with us and explore strange new worlds through stories that investigate the darkest of fantasies: a New Weird bathed in classic Gothic eeriness and touched by metaphors of human darkness.’ Arnzen writes: ‘one can’t help but notice how unsettled it all is about the terminology. Just look at all the synonyms…: strange, dark fantasy, New Weird, Gothic, eerie, dark. There’s almost an [overt] attempt to disavow the word “horror” in all this. But no matter how you slice it, it’s scary’ (‘The Outsider Looking In’).

What’s scary for Arnzen here? Both, I think, the anthology, reviewed positively, and the disavowal of horror that keeps the editors circling the term like sharks just waiting for it to stop kicking before they feast. Ironically, Arnzen writes about the anthology because it ‘redraws the boundaries of the horror genre in a very successful way,’ though not as horror. However, the refusal of horror is, in some ways (though not in other ways that can adversely effect the actual bank accounts of working writers), beside the point. As Arnzen notes elsewhere in his post, horror as a term is a ‘marketing label’, not the same thing as the ‘genre, per se.’ While horror as a marketing category is moribund in mainstream publishing, the type of fiction it describes, a fiction of fear, bides its time under the bed, sharpening its claws. Or has already emerged under another name. It will not, anyway, long remain nameless. Nor worry long over what name you choose to call it. It will eat you all the same.

As H.P. Lovecraft opens his canonical essay on supernatural horror: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form’ (p. 102). Here, Lovecraft seeks pride of place for a particular kind of horror story for which he would prove to be the foremost practitioner – and any argument that is self-serving should give us pause. Also, we can certainly note how unsettled the terminology is for Lovecraft as for our unnamed anthology’s editors; I, for one, would not recommend calling one’s stories ‘weirdly horrible’ as a generic label. But the point, I think, is made, and well taken. If not the oldest emotion, fear is foundational to our existence for all kinds of reasons, many having to do, finally, with our mortality. We need to write about that. Horror literature is the result, no matter how, as Arnzen put it, ‘you slice it[.]’

The genre of the undead will stick its hand out of the earth eventually. But where? And what will it look like? What monstrous thing, rich and strange, will it be after lying fallow so long? What black flower will bloom from that blood-red earth? The great collapse of the field opens up opportunities to re-imagine the genre, and so, after the wailing and sackcloth, can bring a sense of excitement (that is, until your house payment comes due).

One reason horror busted so hard is that its demise came at a time of upheaval in the process of making and selling books. Technology is moving and reshaping the landscape of entertainment; literature in general is seeking its most profitable future after the rise of video gaming and other forms of immersive electronic entertainment; all literary genres have been affected negatively; and horror found its particular problems of oversaturation of the market compounded. E-literature lurks as a currently unprofitable medium but with potential. But how we read e-literature is going to be different than how we read print. Not necessarily in the radical way foretold by some e-ophile prophets before the computer industry suffered its own bust, but profoundly different nonetheless. We will read differently. We will sell and buy words differently. The experiment to discover how is already under way.

Arnzen’s experiments sending poetry – what he has called ‘Gorelets’ – to Palm Pilot in-boxes or with writing short-short ‘flash’ fiction or ‘jolts’ that can appear in online webzines are representative. In his ‘Introduction’ to his print collection of e-poetry, collectively titled Gorelets, Arnzen writes: ‘…part of my goal’ is ‘to get more readers in the digital age to take notice of poetry. When I began this project I realized that e-books (texts intended to be read on PDAs) were everywhere, but none of them were poetry. And poetry just seemed to ‘fit’ the screen better than long, eternally scrolling documents written for print rather than pixels’ (p. 9). In an online interview reprinted in the appendix of his Stoker-award-nominated collection 100 Jolts, Arnzen notes: because readers ‘aren’t patient enough (or even visually equipped) to read long pieces on screen….flash fiction is ideal for the electronic marketplace’ (‘On Writing Flash Fiction,’ pp. 148-9). Describing his own conversion narrative to writing flash, Arnzen explains: ‘I finally came to realize that e-publishing is one market opportunity among many that are offered to writers, and with the rising affordability of handheld computers (e.g. e-book readers) and broadband internet, I saw the light’ (p. 148). Arnzen’s experiments in flash and gorelets mark an attempt to reconfigure, or just figure out, the horror market and deliver an affordable fiction, no small matter. But his experiments cut deeper than that.

The medium shapes the art, after all, at least as much, if not far more than, any ideal dictate of ‘aesthetics’ alone; money, what can be produced and distributed as well as what readers want, decides the form of art that will be marketed most successfully. Flash and gorelets mark a change in form. As Arnzen notes, because print magazines pay by the word, writers have an economic incentive for writing longer works. But, he writes, ‘the “new economy” on the internet’ rewards ‘those who can write tightly. People who read on-screen don’t want to scroll a lot, so longer stories just don’t work well online. The form is influencing the market and the genre as a whole’ (‘On Writing Flash Fiction,’ p. 149). Jolts and gorelets are designed to ‘fit’ with current technological mediums, instead of being translated into them. Arnzen’s flash fiction and e-poetry, in other words, are demonstrating the effect of technology on horror writing. And as it affects how we work, and how we buy, and how we read, won’t it affect what we fear?

Horror is dead. Long live horror.

Paradoxically, while the future expands before us, the horror field, as represented by the Horror Writer’s Association (HWA), contracts. Arnzen’s e-newsletter, the ‘Goreletter’, won the 2004 Stoker Award for Best Alternative Form. In his acceptance speech, Arnzen ended with a plea: ‘This category may very well be odd, but it’s also important. We are living in an era of alternative forms, and I would like to think that this category allows us to not only recognize that fact, but also remain actively engaged in our era. Ultimately, horror, too, is an alternative form in the literary marketplace.’ Soon after, the HWA voted to eliminate the alternative form category. The ‘Goreletter’ was also a finalist for the last award granted in 2005. As those outside the field have trouble knowing what horror is because they can’t find anything called horror widely available in mainstream bookstores, and those inside the genre turn away from experiments that aim to discover what fiction, what poetry – what words in what order – what jolt, what flash, what gorelet, what odd bit of word play – scares us now, pressure builds, I think, to turn to Arnzen’s experiments, to the words themselves, whether in ink or flickering light, and try to say what we can say about how they mean and what they have to tell us about new directions in horror literature.

An emphasis on structure is characteristic, on a number of levels, including of course as a practical response to the shape allowed by the e-mediums involved – but also in the sense of finding what kind of horror belongs in such mediums – what themes, what narratives work granted certain parameters. In an interview, ‘On Writing Flash Fiction’, Arnzen comments that he doesn’t want to write ‘long stories masquerading as short ones, but fiction that exploits the limitations of space’ (p. 148). For such brief works, extreme limitations of space must not be a limitation at all, but an unrealised advantage to be exploited. But how? Here’s an example: in Arnzen’s poetry collection parody of Martha Stewart’s Living titled Michael Arnzen’s Dying, the poems are designed to read like helpful tips, if you happened to be a psychopath. Here’s the ‘handy’ advice in tip number 6:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.
And it’s all small stuff:
eardrums, thumbnails, kidneys,
elbow nuggets, toe knuckles, eyeballs.
Let them go.

The shortness of the poetry matches the brevity of the actual tips one might encounter in a home-maker’s magazine, perhaps running along the side in its own column, marked out by a bold background colour, or organised at the end of a longer article so one needn’t actually read the article. The home-maker or psychopath on the go in our modern rush-rush society doesn’t have time to read a whole essay of advice, so the well laid-out ‘tip’ with brief generic advice will have to suffice. The implicit idea is: one already knows what the article would say in its details anyway – in other words, one doesn’t read it for new advice, but to reinforce one’s identity in the brief time allowed in the day to do such things. The brevity is possible because the ‘tip’ is only a reminder of who one already is—of something familiar. Yes, the well-placed tip says, I am a frugal, thoughtful, well-organised homemaker/psychopath – I am the best me I can be.

The blandness of the self-help advice here is typical, and even necessary, then, to the form: ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff./ And it’s all small stuff:/…Let them go.’ The reader is assumed to be obsessive – whether, as in the parodied genre of Living, trying to live up to the inhuman home-making standards modelled by Stewart herself, or in the darker way a serial killer may ‘ritually’ mark or clean or keep trophies from a body in oddly particular ways. The advice is so nondescript that it does not ask one to deal with root causes of one’s unease – why one is cleaning the same clean countertop for the twentieth time, say, or, you know, murdering someone for no discernable reason. Instead, one is asked to simply identify and alleviate the symptom. One doesn’t want to cure one’s self – one is only trying to become a better version of what one already is. And what one is is run by the obsession; like a machine, one does what one is told. But one doesn’t want to know that – to know that one is not a rugged individualist, not an American in God-given pursuit of personal happiness, not a bold seeker of bliss, but programmed, pre-packaged, a commodity of our shared culture, someone summed up by a series of ‘tips’ in a magazine.

In Arnzen’s poem, the blandness of the bracketing advice is countered by the surprising specificity of the list in the middle of what one should let go: ‘eardrums, thumbnails, kidneys,/ elbow nuggets, toe knuckles, eyeballs.’ I’m not sure I know what an elbow nugget is—but I am uncomfortable that someone has thought long enough about it to need the word to identify a certain kind of thing discovered more than once in different elbows. The words are all multisyllabic, requiring me to read them out, to notice them, to ‘chew’ on the long doubled vowels or diphthongs – ‘ea,’ ‘ai’, ‘ey’, ‘oe’, ‘eye’ – or even the ‘e’ to start ‘elbow’. One gnaws on the off-beat internal rhyme of ‘eardrums, thumbnails’ that begins the list and then crunches the hard-sounding ‘kidn’, ‘gget’, ‘toe’, ‘ucles’. Numerous alliterations from the ‘n’ in ‘kidneys,’ ‘nuggets’ and ‘knuckles’, to the ‘t’ in ‘nuggets’ and ‘toe’ to the ‘l’ in ‘knuckles’ and ‘eyeballs’, serve as connective matter from word to word, but not through the whole line, slowing down one’s reading as if one cut through gristle. Arnzen’s specific list subverts the blandness of the advice that precedes and follows it, the advice that is itself an attempt to disavow the horror of the list and mediate it; but the mediation is itself an awful thing: one is horrified that someone would attempt to be so calm, so clean and neat, so everyday, in the aftermath of a brutal murder. Then, of course, one may realise that murders, cruel and savage, do occur every day – they are normal. They are bland. Reading a poem, now that’s abnormal.

The poem is uncanny in its bland inability to cover the horror of our physical bodies – their decay and death – like a corpse inexpertly hid under the floorboards, its heart refusing to stop beating in one’s ears. What one doesn’t want to think about, murder, and the simple fact of death become familiar again; and our familiar ‘living’ selves, sweeping up our homes, doing our dishes, become nothing but murderers cleaning those tough spots on our bloodied hands or just corpses cleaning their graves – we are already dead, already helpless before death, and before our love of death that leads us to kill one another every day. This theme, the uncanny return of the body in all its messy ‘bodiness’ against the ineffective mediation of words, of culture, of technology, of all idealisations that try to move us toward abstraction and away from our smelly, gurgling selves, is characteristic of Arnzen’s work. Not new in horror, of course, it may nonetheless be the kind of horror those in the grip of the promise of new technology and its seeming power and mastery over the world needs to hear.

The brevity has the purpose of making the reader realise the story for themselves, to imagine; the plot is not overlooked in flash fiction, but rather implied. An attention to plot is a hallmark of genre fiction; the shape of the plot reveals which genre one is reading; flash fiction is so short that one must supply the story by already knowing it, by being familiar with a genre and its workings. Flash and gorelets are not simply brief. Instead, the short work hints at more – reading these hints requires the active participation of readers who already know the full story, who will guess at it and work it up themselves. These short works, in short, are fragments broken from something larger – they have an implied structure, even if much of it is out of sight. Consider this odd gorelet, ‘Fuzzy Bunnies’:

the eyes roll back
and accusingly glare
when my feet slide forward
and hot rabbit innards
squirt between my toes

only then do I see
why these furry white skins
are called slippers.

Trying to figure out the context here for us to ‘slip’ our reading experience inside is part of what is disconcerting here. Crucial to any reading is the pun at the end – the slippers, so-called because we ‘slip’ them on our feet easily, without time-consuming laces or buckles, becomes instead a foot ‘slipping’ into wet, apparently at least still semi-living actual bunnies. The dead eyes accuse us of forgetting what should have been obvious – the opening here is a wound. The pun marks the important move toward ‘closure’ that is necessary to the form. If the gorelet or flash fiction is to have a larger structure, it must not present only unconnected detail, but seek an ending, a hit, a moment of frisson. In horror, the pay off often requires violence.

If fantasy might have something called a sense of wonder which throws one outward to imagine something else, something new, what we have here might be horror’s sense of dismembering, both a tearing apart and a remembering of what we long to forget. The bunny’s accusing stare makes one see it is staring at us, and has been all along. The gorelet or flash fiction often seeks its ending in the violent ‘meat shot’, the sudden realisation of the body through words that of course can never deliver an actual body. The subversive quality of horror is called into play to jolt us out of the trance of reading to realise our breathing, rotting selves, the forgotten reader implied by any story, no longer allowed to be only something packed in behind the eyeballs, no longer just an ideal self carried in a meat container that unfortunately limits us – but the return to the fact that we are simply the eyeball, the meat container itself. A realisation long and strenuously denied comes upon us suddenly, a ‘meat shot’ indeed.

The poem is accompanied by the familiar picture of one fuzzy bunny slipper against a background of the deepest black. In a newspaper interview, Arnzen recounts that his grandmother had asked him to write about fuzzy bunnies – she should have known better, I think (‘Seton Hill Prof Scares Up Laughs’, p. 4). The poem is, dear grandma, about fuzzy bunnies – but moves to the wet, squishy innards hidden beneath the soft fur that only becomes visible when the poor thing is badly wounded or cut open and dead. Uncanny – homely and horrific – the glass eyes mock our eyes and suggest our glassy dead stares to come; the sewed on smiles become all the more faked in a time of fear, when the human reaction should be something quite different, we like to think, but will become the sameness of the skullhead’s grimace for us all.

Lastly, consider the flash fiction from 100 Jolts, ‘Amputating the Phantom’, beginning with the straightforward scene-setter: ‘I chop off his arms.’ The decapitating narrator is mesmerised by the stare of his victim and feels ‘his phantom hands, beating me….’ The story ends with the narrator batting the phantom limbs away ‘before I move to chop again at the neck, wondering if this will ever stop, wondering if I have a phantom self who is cowering in pain and dying away even as I swing the blade.’ The self-reflexivity is a hint of course. Who is really staring at the narrator? We are – the reader. The character cuts out at us. But we control him with our stares, our eyes flicking from side to side. We make him perform his role, and if we have questions, or just enjoyed it enough, we shoot our look upward to the top of the page (for it is but one page) and start over, making the narrator perform his pain again. The answer is yes, we do have a phantom self who is dying away even as we read – we have a body we have set aside in our eagerness for the story. Reading here is like shaking hands to find only the severed hand in your grasp. The severed hand is something that was a part of us, so crucial to our identity – think of your fingerprint – but a part that is chopped off, separated from us, and we are still we, aren't we? – and it is now it. The severed hand acting on its own impulses after its separation is the uncanny reminder of our fear, maybe even, I should say, our knowledge, that this is already so. For the hand, severed or not, you see, has its own agency. We just don’t want to admit it. It is us. It is under our control. Until it isn’t. Whether through spasms. Or you sleep on it until it falls asleep, becoming for a time a thing attached to you that you must flop and drag about. Or you chop it off.

The horror fragments, jolts, sudden fictions, gorelets offered by Arnzen have their own agency as well. We read them, we take them for ours, are even asked to complete the full arc of the narrative moment shown to us, but then they cut us with phantom knives held in severed hands. Arnzen’s ‘minimalist’ jolts of prose/poetry are designed to easily reconform to the restrictions of, and thus to insinuate itself into, our systems of new technology. Originally available in numerous forms from traditional print to underground webzines to online at his Stoker-winning website to email sent at random times to the in-boxes of subscribers’ palm pilots, Arnzen’s innovations have implications at once for the future evolution of horror as a genre seeking to survive cyclical implosions of popularity in traditional print markets and as a harbinger of the kind of horror conjured up by our technophilic age. Arnzen’s horror cuts at the body with short, sharp sentences, fragments of narrative, his words dismembering, reconfiguring, returning us to our forgotten flesh but rendering it strange to us with a sudden violence, a spurt of text, a cracked narrative, a shock at the ending ‘meat shot’, the fatal blow all the more terrible because undercut by a fatalistic and devious humor. We prefer to not think too closely about our bodies, their ageing and dying, their fragile systems of organs and bones strung together with muscle; we prefer to think of our essence as located ‘somewhere else’, somewhere abstracted, more permanent. We use machines to expand our reach, to extend ourselves through the vast electronic web of information that connects us and confirms us. Arnzen’s short horror, with its compactness of effect, turns our insular systems of control, internal and external, psychological and technological, against us for, if we are careful readers, our intense amusement at the frailty of our own illusions and a shocked satisfaction of desires we might wish we never had.

So, don’t look now: you have mail.

Works Cited
Arnzen, Michael. ‘Acceptance Speech for Bram Stoker Award 2004’. For ‘Alternative Forms’ category. Delivered June 5, 2004, Park Central Hotel, New York. Archived on www.gorelets.com.

---‘Amputating the Phantom’. 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. Hyattsville, MD:
Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2004, p. 92.

---‘Fuzzy Bunnies’. Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems. Auburn, WA: Fairwood Press, 2003, p. 23.

---‘Introduction’. Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems. Auburn, WA: Fairwood Press, 2003, pp.8-9.

---Michael Arnzen Dying. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon, 2003.

---‘On Writing Flash Fiction’. 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories. Hyattsville, MD:
Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2004, pp. 148-53.

---‘The Outsider Looking In’, the ‘Goreletter 3.05: Avian Phlegm’. Sent November 27,
2005. Archived at www.gorelets.com.

---‘Seton Hill Prof Scares Up Some Laughs’. Interview by Drew Hill. Laurel Mountain
Post. Fall 2005, pp. 4-5. Archived at www.LaurelMountainPost.com.

Lovecraft, H.P. ‘Introduction to Supernatural Horror in Literature’, 1927. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Sandner. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004, pp. 102-5.

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