Death Flex

A macabre and surreal exploration of horror and death.

It finally arrived - a pocket-sized paperback with skulls and masks on the cover which tells me full well that the stories inside will deal with life, death, and the transition from one to the other. This third volume in Pilum’s New Voices anthologies dwells on stories and essays inspired by or related to the hangman’s diary of Franz Schmidt, he executioner of Nuremberg.

After a brief introduction by Brian Evanson to set the stage for our stories, the first story focuses directly on our executioner in Thirty One Blows, meeting him as he embarks on a quest to save the soul of - since he cannot save the life of, and bluntly isn’t too inclined to - his brother in-law. This quest takes him down fey paths, by witches huts, and to encounters with various things that should not be a part of this world. The price paid, despite the incidental good done, in exchange for his main goal may have been steeper than was worthwhile.

Brian has really stepped up. I enjoyed his entry in the Wells of Ur, but here, he breathes life into the town, its denizens, and hangman. He paints the environment and events vividly, but economically, slipping in the supernatural so deftly and matter-of factly that one almost fails to notice the transition - that not every reference to the supernatural is metaphorical, until the reality rubs you in the nose.

Alexander Palacio’s Ingenue doesn’t even take a paragraph to set the stage before you’re rereading it, realizing, yes, someone just bit a chunk out of someone’s arm. A party at a fine manor quickly turns into a bloodbath of transformational body horror and feeding monsters.

JB Jackson, who we’ve previously met in Shagduk and its excerpt in The Wells of Ur, weaves a tale at the intersection of the hangman’s diary and his own work, with Inquisition of Der Schleim. It takes the form of a confessional of a misshapen man, born deformed, who proudly took to murder and rape and finally crossed paths with a wizard, specializing in illicit procurement for the sorcerer’s strange hobbies, and finally the vengeance of the witch he betrayed. Just as the language in Shagduk captured not only the 70’s, but Texas, here he leaves the American southwest behind to evoke Germany shortly after the protestant reformation

What Kind of Artist is Jack Vance takes a look at how Vance portrayed good and evil and people and their various flaws and all of their humanity, in life and death and justice.

Maledicta - The tale of two thieves and partners in crime. We meet Pony and Kuntz as they search for the site of a massacred patrol - with hints that perhaps Pony betrayed the patrol to that fate. After a gruesome extraction of prizes, they return to town to watch executions, trade their ill-gotten gains in a positively surreal adventure into the underworld with aspects that echo throughout the rest of the story before and after, only to eventually leave town on a stolen horse and carriage. Throughout, it is obvious that Pony abuses and browbeats Kuntz, taking the best portions and majority of the goods. In the end, it is clear that the hold Pony has is not merely psychological, and the final line cuts deep.

John Daker’s To See the Black Devil borrows from an entry pitching it forward into the modern day with a blend of Lovecraft, PI detective story, and bigfoot. The choice made at the end? Well, you’ll see.

Jeffro supplies another look at gaming, this time at character death in RPGs, and how we’ve shied away from it with successive generations of games.

Finally, Death in Petzu Maal, by C.D. Crabtree - Assassins, barbarians, justice, and emperors in what feels like a cross between a distant gonzo post-apocalypse and a Mayan or Incan style civilization. This story could have comfortably - and justly and appropriately - fit into any of the Pilum anthologies.

Essays aside - and to some degree they deal in this theme as well - all of the stories carry a dreamlike, surreal quality. Even those grounded in the mundane rapidly take on events at and beyond the veil, and not merely the obvious crossing over of dying, but of the boundaries of reality and what we believe to be real. Of not only death, but birth, and dream.