Orphaned Books: "Flesh Mob"

All writers have these things. Projects you drop cold in the planning phase, or you write 10-20 pages and realize you don't care enough to keep going.

I'm no different. So I thought it would be fun to share the details on one of these because why not?

Context

Multiple choice- The year 2010 was:

a) the best of times
b) the worst of times
c) all of the above

Answer- You guessed it. c)

My personal life hit a wall and I was left in an existential void trying to sort out who I was and what was real and what (if anything) mattered.

Now I also made a bunch of new friends and I was getting out there and doing and trying a lot of new things. I was learning to articulate myself and see different possibilities and that was all great, too.

One of the things I tried was writing novels. I'd always loved horror, so I wrote that.¹ Over several months of intense, Monster Energy-fueled writing binges, I cranked out three horror novels.² They're flawed and have obvious rookie mistakes, but dangit- I finished them!

I was right about to start this next book, "Flesh Mob," when my personal life hit ANOTHER wall. And this wall was so hard, it made the first one seem like a gentle, silk-coated, softly-padded cushion.

So thanks to a months-long psyche-shattering nervous breakdown, I never wrote it.

I've written a little of this and a little of that since then,³ but I've never done a full-on horror book since. And even if I did return to that genre, I have other ideas that are way cooler than this novel, fun as it is. Enjoy that which never was and never will be!

Intro⁴

Jeremiah decided that he needed to get closer to God. The inspiration came from one of the passages in the Old Testament that he actually paid attention to while running his eyes over it. One of the ancient prophets, he couldn’t remember who, had eaten some scripture pages and found that they were sweet as honey. Jeremiah thought that sounded like a good idea.

He tallied up the length of his Bible and, subtracting the Topical Index and Bible Dictionary, found it totaled 1,152 pages. He estimated that if he ate 3 pages per day, one with each meal, he would finish the Good Book in less than a year.

He was dismayed to find that it didn’t taste like honey at all. His ex-mother’s 1958 edition tasted more like glue and fiber. And no matter how he tried, he couldn’t break any of the pages into chunks smaller than a piece of chewing gum. He chewed page 6 for 10 minutes and still made no progress. As always, it went down as a lump.

On the third day, disillusioned by the digestive process, he changed his focus. He sought to minimize the unpleasant taste by pouring an ounce of honey on each page before eating. He remembered the paper-eating prophet’s name when he did that, it was Ezekiel. The honey briefly made the paper more appetizing, but after about 30 seconds of chewing, the sweetness always wore off and he was stuck with that plain glue-and-fiber taste again. He resigned himself to swallowing a tasteless lump thrice a day.

By the second week, he sought to ease his burden by mixing the paper in with water and sugar and putting it in a blender. But somehow shredding the Word of God just seemed wrong, so he reconsidered. He couldn’t blaspheme what his ex-father worked a lifetime to honor.

The customers and co-workers at his job politely ignored the strange rumbling and gurgling noises that emerged from his belly. And Jeremiah ignored the discoloration and strange texture of his feces. He had a divine errand to run, and he would not be sidetracked by some temporary gastrointestinal setbacks. No matter how much they hurt.

At the end of the first month, Jeremiah found himself no longer eating food along with his breakfast and lunch Scripture feasts. He rarely felt hungry until dinner anyway, and he felt he had a few pounds to spare.

He soon found he had overestimated his expendable poundage. By the second month’s end, he had lost 25 pounds and his elbow bones were jutting out of their skin. He noticed that all of his ribs were visible and straining against his chest whenever he showered. He felt betrayed by his bones.

When he grew too weak to stand behind his register for more than 10 minutes at a time, he started to eat lunch and breakfast along with the pages. He regurgitated regularly and he couldn’t completely ignore its red color.

The voices started when he reached Isaiah. He heard his ex-brother plead with him to stop his quest. He couldn’t, though. He was too far along the way. One does not look back at Sodom and Gomorrah.

The ex-brother begged him to let him out of the trunk. Jeremiah knew the voice could not be real. The voices from the trunk always stopped after three days. Always. So he dismissed the voice as an abomination, a temptation from Satan to abandon his sanctification.

There was hesitation in his commitment when the ex-mother and ex-father joined in a chorus whenever he lay down at night. They pleaded with him to end his feast. He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Love them he did, but he had to forsake ex-mother and ex-father to honor the Lord. He remembered when they were just mother and father. Then they fell. It wasn’t his fault. Jeremiah knew that in his heart. He only wished the ex-brother understood, as well. He had been brother then. But he had to fall, as well.

The purification was nearing completion. He needed no food but the pages as he approached Malachi. The promises and covenants would be fulfilled. He would be clean again. He wondered if Heavenly Father would forgive him if he only ate the Old Testament and not the entire Bible. He dismissed such thoughts as temptation. He would not succumb.

The trunk spoke to him every time he walked in the front door. He considered moving it to the basement. He feared a visitor to the house would overhear it. Sometimes he forgot that the voice was only an evil spirit and not a true voice. If only ex-mother hadn’t heard the true voice…

She had told him and told him that ex-father had hurt her. He didn’t know what else to do but to help her. Why did ex-mother run away from his help? She could have stayed mother.

Jeremiah tried to avoid dwelling on such things. He couldn’t change the past. He could only prepare for the Change. He knew now, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he was Becoming. He knew that God had a special mission for him. He knew that once he had completed his quest, he would bring about great things. He knew. Conviction never faded as weeks passed.

He devoured Revelation. He only had a few pages left when the shakes became more persistent. He could make it. He knew he could. He had to Become, he had to cleanse himself. At times he had trouble recalling what dirtied him. He couldn’t remember what had gone wrong. He slipped and drifted and found himself driving home with no memory of working.

He ate the final page on his lunch break and fought the spasms. He waited for the Change. He knew it was coming. He waited to feel different. He had done the deed and marked himself Chosen. He waited for the Blessing to descend upon him. He sat.

Waiting.

Details

So that opening⁵ was an origin story for one of three new bizarro religions popping up in a thinly-disguised version of my hometown.

A mildly clairvoyant outsider drifts into town and gets wrapped up in a murder mystery involving a Bible-eating religion, a militant-pacifism religion, and a blindness-worshipping religion. There's also a sweat lodge pyramid scheme,⁶ a corrupt vision quest company, and a combination brothel/ juice manufacturing facility that protests the IRS.

Thanks to all the weird clubs and services, the town's economy depends on discreet debauchery for an elite clientele. So our main character's digging puts the entire place at risk.

A wild cast of characters- all hiding from their chaotic pasts and seeking redemption of one sort or another- guide him along the way, yank his chain, or fight him. Sometimes all at the same time.

This also ties in to another book I wrote,⁷ as that other book's main couple is drawn to this morbid place by an evil dude with a sentient stomach tumor who's using the town's chaos to conceal his sinister reality-shattering plans.

So you've got cosmic horror stuff, down-to-Earth thriller stuff, religious satire, and lots of colorful descriptions of all the weird religious and non-religious buildings, gatherings, and rituals going on around town.

Here's a few lines from the manuscript that are kinda neat, out of context:⁸

-“Isn't there a conflict of interest there, like concern about someone else taking a slice of your fetish cheese?”

-“My skin is not my own, my house is not my own.”

-"Sheep in wolves’ clothing, my good man. Sheep in wolves’ clothing.”
-"The body attached to the face burst through the front door."

Why Doesn't It Work?

You know, it probably would have worked.⁹

But it would have had all the same problems as the other three books I wrote at the time because I was so busy writing, I didn't bother to study how to write.¹⁰

There are tricks and tropes that writers use not because they're mandatory, but because they work.¹¹

At the same time, you can wig yourself out and get paralyzed if you fret too much about how you're doing everything wrong or that you're obviously forgetting something. You have to be free and let it flow with your first draft.¹² The rules and guidelines are there for you, not the other way around.

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1. I was actually spurred by Leisure Horror's "Fresh Blood" contest where they'd publish your novel if you won. I conceived, wrote, edited, and submitted my first horror novel just in time for the deadline. I didn't win. But in a twist worthy of O. Henry, Leisure Horror went out of business before the winning novel got published.

2. I have two friends who actually read all three of them, though one of them was too grossed out by the third book to finish it. Pretty sure that's a rave review for a splatterpunk novel!

3. Maybe I'm even a best-selling author- you never know what pseudonym I might use...

4. You can tell I was reading a lot of Brian Evenson and J.G. Ballard at the time. Helpful hint- if you're ever depressed, DON'T READ THOSE GUYS!

5. This was a rewrite of a short story I had published in the Sonora Review titled "Feasting."

6. The fourth season of "Arrested Development" basically stole the idea I had here. Pretty sure I'll have to sue them.

7. You could even call this a sequel, if you wanted to. Go ahead. I'll allow it.

8. It was 10,000 words of rambly first draft and I was having a tough time getting to the point early on. So anything that works in the opening bits at all is fortuitous.

9. Though I notice that in the intro chapter, I used The Capital Letters to indicate how the viewpoint character viewed things and I have a friend who read my other books and she HATES The Capital Letters, so she might have dropped this book after the intro!

10. Ah, the arrogance of youth.

11. If you're interested, read Robert McKee's "Story," Christopher Vogler's "The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers," anything by Joseph Campbell, and if you wanna write horror, "Writer's Workshop of Horror" is a great resource.

12. Or when you're planning your outline, however you prefer to fly.

-Phony McFakename

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