The Lovely Corpse

  Welcome to the first entry in our new non-fiction series In Praise Of… , where we talk about a person or element of horror pop-culture that we feel is worthy of praise. This week we discuss... Little wolf skin boots And clove cigarettes An erotic funeral For which she's dressed Her perfume smells like Burning leaves Every day is Halloween -Type O Negative, “Black No. 1” Naturally, I fell in love with Halloween as a child. Any celebration as a child is magical. Christmas, Easter, hell, even other people’s birthdays. It’s a break from the norm, the boring dullness of not being allowed to do anything you want. And people may even give you stuff! For me as a child, and I suspect most children feel the same way, Halloween rivaled even the be-all-end-all kid’s favorite holiday of Christmas. Sure, there was trick or treating and dressing up in scary costumes, which is always fun. There was also the lead up though: Trips to Party City, endlessly thinking about what your costume was ...

Dustin finished with work and he immediately went to her room. She was laying on a bed of richly appointed velvet, purple in color. She was radiant, her porcelain white skin and ebon hair, lips affixed just so. Makeup done as if by a master. She was gorgeous, and she beckoned to him, with her soul more than anything else. He didn’t know much about her. He knew her name, Olivia, but he didn’t know why she was here in this place, or why she would call to him so. He wasn’t terribly lucky with women. They didn’t seem to like him much, and he’d long given up on carnal pursuits in favor of keeping his head down and living his life, the little of it he had. But she called out to him from the moment he laid eyes on her. He was transfixed by her, and she him. At first he doubted her interest in him, but the more time he spent with her the more he knew she cared for him, just as much as he did for her. Her care was more in a figurative sense than a literal one as his was, but it was there noneth...

  Part I: Party In The USA It was 7pm and James was sitting in a booth in the diner that he’d been frequenting lately, nursing a cup of black coffee. His head was killing him, he was sweating profusely, and he felt freezing cold despite being in a small southwestern town at the ass end of summer and wearing a denim jacket. James was at the end of a hardcore bender, one that he wasn’t even sure you could recover from.   He knew the name of the town he was in, Rancin. And he knew that the name of the diner he was in, simply called ‘Diner’, but had no idea what state Rancin was in. He’d been wandering the country for a while now-Weeks? Months? He couldn’t remember- a drug fueled trip around and right through the heart of America.  Rancin was in the southwest, he knew that much. How could one think otherwise? It was a dusty little strip of land surrounded by desert. Calling it a town was being generous. There was the diner (DINER in big bold weathered letters on it’s rus...

I opened my eyes. (how long had they been closed?) It was a hallway, white and grey, lockers lined the walls. (where was I?) It was cold, but not unpleasantly so. A slight breeze tousled my hair. I stood motionless, serene. (what else was I to do?) I thought I heard a voice. Definitely a noise. It echoed off the concrete walls. Fluorescent lights buzzed above. There was the noise again. It was definitely a voice. I started walking down the hall. There was a door at the end of the hall. (was it there the whole time?) I reached out my hand. (I don’t think this door was here a moment ago…) The knob was cold to the touch. It looked like it was stainless steel, but it indented when I grabbed it. (this isn’t right. none of this is right.) I turned it. It opened. The room on the other side was small, about 15 x 15, lit only by a fire in the corner. I saw two figures crouching. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. No, only one figure was crouching, the other was laying on a rusty steel tabl...