The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 10: A Small Tail Was in My Pants

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Sigh...

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Okay, let me tell you how I first heard about Carlton Mellick III. Actually, I can't tell you exactly. All I know for sure is that, many years ago, I was dicking around on Amazon, browsing through random books, presumably in my chosen genres, by authors I'd never heard of before. Somewhere along the way, I came across a book called Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III. The cover of Satan Burger told me pretty much everything I needed to know about Mellick, and I imagine I wondered idly if he was of legal drinking age yet. Or voting age, for that matter. I'm not going to include an image of Satan Burger's cover in this post, because I will not have the good name of this blog sullied in that manner, but some of you are going to want to see it, and instead of being all superior and telling you to look it up yourself, I will include this link. However, be aware that this link is NSFW, and not because it's sexy and awesome. Whether or not you choose to view that link, I will take a moment to note Satan Burger's cover blurb, provided by one "Vincent W. Sakowski" (talk about a get!), which reads: "This generation's Vonnegut!" If so, then may God have mercy on us all.

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Jump ahead a bunch of years, and I'm shopping for horror anthologies in preparation for posts such as the one you're reading this very moment. I find two massive ones edited by John Skipp, one called Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within and the other called Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead. Taken together, these collections contain short stories by, among others, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, John Collier, Saki, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Theodore Sturgeon, and Neil Gaiman. And both collections boast a story by Carlton Mellick III. That's some mighty high-toned company for a guy who looks like this on purpose...

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...and is undoubtedly a massive GWAR fan to be keeping. Is it possible that I let a book cover and a generally snobby attitude cloud what I like to think is my open mind about such things? Was I wrong about Carlton Mellick III? Is it possible that he's actually a talented writer?
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NO!!! What, are you fucking kidding me? No, not at all. But I have evidence now to back this up, as I read both stories offered by the two Skipp anthologies: "War Pig" from the werewolf book and "Lemon Knives n' Cockroaches" from the zombie one.

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So "War Pig" takes the werewolf myth and turns that motherfucker on its ear because instead of the guy turning into a wolf he turns into a pig. And also it's sort of like The Running Man, but the movie, not the book. What happens is, in the future poor people can't make any money, but there's this sport where first you go through this series of "serum" injections that turn you into a part man, part animal creature, and then once you're enough of an animal, they put you in the ring with another manimal, and you both fight until one of you is dead. The winner gets money. The title character is the reigning champion, but he's taken so much of that serum that he's about to become all pig, and/or die. So his time's running out, and War Pig's son, Tommy, who's still all human, and is our narrator watches on in sadness as War Pig seems set to fall beneath the slashing claws of his current opponent, named Grizzly Titan. Meanwhile, War Pig's manager, an unscrupulous greed-monster named Mr. Crumbly, is trying to entice Tommy to begin the serum treatment himself. War Pig gets wind of this, and is all "Oh no you don't."

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So that's your story, basically. It ends in a fury of violence, described in Mellick's best approximation of high school creativity:
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Mr. Crumbly whistled and three of his fighters came up from the lower deck to protect him. A werewolf, a crocodile man, and a werehorse. But all three were quickly pummeled to death.

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Not the werehorse! "War Pig" develops a surprising sentimental streak towards at the end, when War Pig and his son Tommy bond over the carnage and mend their relationship, which has been fractured ever since the dad started to try to become a pig. But I'd like to break away from my analysis of "War Pig" and focus on this serum treatment business. When Mellick cracks his knuckles and gets down to the task of providing us exposition on this stuff, here's what he lays out:
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Every injection would make you a little less human, and a lot more animal. Which beast you transformed into depended a little on your DNA and a lot on chance.

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So what kind of animal you become has nothing to do with the serum? Your DNA has more to do with it than the frickin' made up serum?? What does Mellick think DNA is? A bunch of human goo mixed with a mystery animal goo, unique to each person, so that while I might have a bit of giraffe in me, my brother might be part seal? I realize this doesn't really matter in a made up story, but Mellick seems to think it does, otherwise he would have left that inanity out completely. Which I guess makes sense, as Mellick is the same guy who, when describing the appalling conditions the poor live in, later writes:

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After paying, I went to the nearby fire pit to cook the meat, passing a rat woman nibbling on her meat raw. The animal people often preferred the taste of raw meat, though they usually ate it that way because using the fire was an extra cost.

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Well why the fuck don't they just eat it raw if that's the way they like it??? You dumb bastard, you just said they liked it better raw! Fire being "an extra cost" shouldn't even enter into their considerations because they don't even want to cook the meat! THEY'D RATHER EAT IT RAW!!

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And speaking of all that, there's this other story, "Lemon Knives 'n Cockroaches". Never mind what it's about -- uh, it's post-zombie Apocalypse, and humans have devolved into filthy underground dwellers who eat zombies and also other humans, and there's these two people, our narrator and some chick named Alyxa, who do all sorts of gross things, and who live in this tribe run by this guy named Thomas who is evil and gay, and who eventually Alyxa and the narrator fight back against and kill, and then feed to zombies, but then Alyxa wants to eat Thomas, also, but then she gets killed by other guys from her tribe because they think she's a zombie and so they kill her the way she used to kill zombies, which is pretty ironic -- because in the story are these things called "lemon knives". "Lemon knives", we are told, are "sharp handmade knives greased with sour acids yellow in color..." Perhaps this is nit-picking, but in order for our narrator to know that the acids are sour, someone at some point in the history of the development of this weapon must have drunk some of this acid and said "Oh hey, it's pretty sour. We should call these 'lemon knives'", just before the acid finished eating through his face.

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Then again, aren't sour flavors often referred to as "acids"? That's what the Food Network continues to imply, because on that channel someone will try some pork dish and say "This needs an acid", which often means "You needed to squeeze a lime all over this plate." So maybe all acids really are sour, and therefore, regarding the lemon knives, our narrator was making a relatively safe assumption.

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Although, you know what lemon knives basically are? They're basically knives, because while a number of people are stabbed and sliced with these things over the course of the story's fifteen pages, at no point is anyone said to have been burned by acid. So maybe it's just a color thing with these people, an aesthetic choice. This theory is given credence by the fact that we are first told about lemon knives when Alyxa "opens her lips to release two lemon knives" into her hands. So they're just tucked up their in her mouth for hours on end until she decides she needs them, and then she opens her lips. Meanwhile, no ill effects due to the acid. On a related note, later on Alyxa is completely naked, but our narrator realizes "[b]y the way she walks" that "she has her lemon knives hidden between her legs". So she's not wearing a stitch of clothing, but she's walking around with two knives between her legs. Just...what, taped there? Or her thighs are locked tight over two knives, and the guy she's about to use these knives on doesn't think "God she's walking stupid. What is between her legs, anyway? It better not be two lemon knives."

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Anyway, so that's what reading Carlton Mellick III is like. Better stories tomorrow, hopefully.