I stumbled across this fact whilst gaily tromping around Amazon looking at stuff one day. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my dear Jay-CO had written a romance. A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be precise. I had to own it. Because what could be cooler than combining my favorite high-fallootin’ lit author with my seedy love for cheap beach fiction?

Alas, I discovered soon upon the delivery of said tome that, of course, Jay-CO would not write a pile of cheap beach fiction. Instead, she has pulled together some seven hundred pages of a Gothic romance novel. For those of you not acquainted with the vagaries of this term, Gothic romances and modern romances are vastly different. Gothic romances oft feature a lovely heroine swooning about a drafty old mansion, bemoaning stuff left and right, with a narrative style that’s like Dickens humped a thesaurus, full of run-ons, bizarre exercises in vocabulary and odd comma splices. (The affect of said narrative style can be seen here, on this blog post, for it is highly impossible for me to write in any brief, grammatically correct or serious fashion whilst reading such a winding, ornate sequence of words. And there’s lost of whilsts, too.) Whilst there’s still bemoaning in modern romances, the narrative style is, shall we say, far less overwrought. It’s like comparing a long, chaste courtship to a quick blow job.

Jay-CO’s captured the Gothic romance style of writing perfectly, of course; if someone weren’t paying attention to the copyright date, they might think the book was written at the turn of the century. Plus, she uses the opportunity to make scathing societal commentary on the rights of women, the nature of intelligence, and other lofty stuff about the human condition. It’s all very academic, and finely executed, but that also means that the book is freakin’ unreadable. Only the most hardcore English geeks can get all the way through this book and enjoy it.

Sadly, I am only a slightly hardcore English geek.

Doubly sadly because, in my haste, I decided I must have not only A Bloodsmoor Romance, but the prequel and sequel, Bellefleur and Mysteries of Winterthurn. Alas, my hapless husband bought them all for me as an early birthday gift. Now I have to read them, all eighteen hundred some-odd pages, and I fear that, by the time I finish, I shall be mad.

Yes, quite mad, in fact. Quite.

Crossposted from my other blog, Typeworm, which is a bit more civilized.

I doubt I shall ever recover.

The movie was Band Baaja Baaraat, via Netflix, which is of course where I get all my viewing entertainment. (Screw cable.) The romantic leads–because 99.9% of all Hindi movies are love stories, it’s a scientific fact–start up a wedding planning company together and heartwarming antics ensue. Now, I love heartwarming antics, especially when combined with vibrant costumes and song-and-dance numbers. Bollywood has this joy and earnestness to it that is mostly vacant in American filmmaking. I love it in spite of myself, really.

That means I’m used to a certain level of piety in my Hindi film experience. So are Hindus, from what I understand; love stories and kama sutra stuffs abound, but the depiction of lip locks is totally taboo. It does not happen.

But it happened here:

For thirty seconds, they’re hovering slowly around each other’s face, which is usually the only thing that happens. Just face-floating. But then, there’s a tiny little connection of lips, and I’m like oh God, no! No they di’nt! That kiss–nothing I would bat an eye at if it were an American movie–downright scandalized me.

I’m sitting on the floor, staring up at the TV, my jaw hanging open and I think Make it stop! But they kept going–the actors just started making out, right there on the screen, moving straight into a suggested sex scene. Again, nothing I’d bat an eye at if it were American; just a bare shoulder here and there, some smooth musak. But, in a Bollywood movie, where the genre is defined by explosive emotional love stories that result in nothing more than a poignant hug, such half-naked rolling around felt so obscene.

I wasn’t sure I could go back to my beloved Hindi film habit. Everything felt dirty. I felt dirty.

But then I watched Aja Nachale, which is about a joyful theater director enriching the lives of her fellow villagers through dance and song–and everything was better.

Come and dance with me, my friend! The sounds of jewelry chiming!

and

Taken from “The Key to Love and Sex (in eight volumes)” by Joseph McCabe, copyright 1929. Aside from the lovely ads for additional literature in the back, which I have plainly displayed here, all eight volumes are pretty boring, actually. They’re all like, “women deserve equality” and “masterbation’s not all that bad.” Snore. I don’t want progressive, right-minded vintage psychology out of my beat up magazines; I want bat-nuts crazy backward ranting. Seriously.

 
But, to top it off, here’s some Saxon Violins. (Or Sacks and My Lunch.)

But then came the Frankenstein mask, and the Dracula mask, and the rubbery full-body fishman suit molded to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

“You look more like Swamp Thing.” Adele said when Dave crawled on top of her.

They made love like that for weeks, half-costumed and grunting B-movie dialogue until Adele started to wonder if her husband needed professional help. It wasn’t unpleasant when Dave ravaged her while dressed as the classic Universal monsters, but when he branched out into late-70’s slasher flicks, Adele decided she’d had enough.

“I am not spreading my legs for Leatherface.” She said.

Of course, by the time she’d filed for divorce, the whole suburb had been invaded by that genital-eating mind control parasite—the one she’d heard about on National Public Radio—so at that point, having a spare monster around was kind of handy. Sure, Dracula was useless, but when the neighbors started shambling after her (intent on devouring her genitals, no doubt) Dave scared them off by appearing at the door in his best Cenobite costume.

So Adele eventually gave in. “Okay, you can put on Pinhead. But no oral.”

And Dave pounced on her in delight.

I am a fragment of the person I once was. Never in my life would I have imagined that I could be covered in so many various fluids at once. Puke, milk, sweat, poop (because breastfed babies have a slushie-like texture to their hideous excrement, it is a substance not of this world); and then there’s of course pee, tears, spilled coffee and the silvery strings of drool dangling from my darling spawn’s precious lips.

Never in my life would I have imagined that my every waking thought would so revolve around bodily functions. Not just those of my darling spawn, but my own. When, oh when, shall I ever be able to know the bliss of a normal poop again? C-sections continue to play hell on your innards long after they’ve stuffed your guts back in you and sewn you up. They don’t tell you these things until well after you’re already doomed to a life of eternal straining.

Never would I have thought that a bowl of Corn Pops and a twenty minute shower were extravagant luxuries.

At this very minute, I sit in the dark, huddled on the couch, shivering in my tattered robe, my face lit only by the grey glow of my laptop screen, eeking out what few minutes I can just to have a moment to myself without anything or anyone attached to my tit. The fact that I’ve been able to string together more than four words in a (possibly) coherent sentence amazes me. It makes me think: maybe I’ll make it. Maybe I can beat this nightmare that is called Motherhood and manage to scrape together enough brain cells to make for a normal life once again. Just maybe.

In other news; check out my kid! He is so freakin’ cute! He will eat your head with his awesomeness.

So many millions of tiny, horrifying things…like the last smudge of coffee at the bottom of the can at 6-o-clock in the morning. Or, the grinding of a frozen Netflix buffering bar on the TV. Or, the sound of the landlady slipping some mysterious notice through the crack of your door right after having a conversation about how you’re too freakin’ pregant to care that there’s a Fall-o-ween party going on in the parking lot and no, you will not be bringing anyone candy because who brings me candy, huh? Just give me my damn rent receipt before my head spins and why am I crying all of a sudden?! You see? Horrors like that.

But, to no life comes a horror so vast, so excruciating as the horror of the English major’s daily subjugation to the wills of early American Literature–specifically that insidious torture that is known as James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Prairie.

This novel is a level of awful I cannot even begin to explain. Maybe once I’m over this head cold and I have pushed my squealing babe out twixt my nethers I will have the mental capacity to expound on why it’s so freakin’ bad. Cooper makes me rue the day Gutenberg was born. He makes me dream of fleeing the English Language altogether and running off to some obtuse Mediterranean island to learn Esperanto and prostitute myself to unsuspecting Canadian tourists. He makes me think that maybe, just maybe, this whole literature thing is not good for us and maybe we should all just stop writing before it destroys us all.

And I’m only halfway through the book. The horroah.

In other news, I’m really fond of oatmeal these days, and my husband has been making some awesome home made granola, but one thing has been troubling me: if you eat them together, is it an odd form of grainy cannibalism? Or just redundant?

Discuss. There will be a twelve page paper due on Friday.

Within these pages, there are bureaucratic necromancers, murderous craft items, furniture with a taste for blood, phantasmagorical family pets and inappropriate evening wear. Thrill to the drug-addled antics of The Bowels of the Couch! Chill with the sophisticated depravity of A Most Dangerous Gun! The Lobsters of the Damned and the Night of the Garterawait you, whoever so haplessly stumbles into their midst, but take care not to wake the sleeping giants of Frankenrocket and Zominique!

But, wait! There does happen to be, in fact, more.

Also included in this diabolical tome is the never-before-seen short story A Modern Family’s Guide to Vamping, which promises more schlock and terror than any dental hygiene PSA to ever have come out of the fifties. Wail in dismay as Sue Glossman’s sewing machine breaks down! Cower in fear at the mad subatomic physicist who moves into the neighborhood! Shriek in sheer madness at the red chiffon dress that will awaken the very beast within you and slaughter all of your friends!³

Anyway, should you dare embark on such a strange, harrowed journey, then all you must do is click on any of the links I’ve scattered throughout this post. For best reading, resize to 100% (stupid Adobe) and use the hyperlinks in the table of contents to navigate. go to Smashwords and download it here. You will be hence transported into a realm of darkness, where only sheer courage and a mild case of dyslexia can save you!

And, hopefully, it might be fun to read. Good luck!

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1 – Like, three or four people. Plus my Mom.

2 – Did I mention it’s free? I guess that makes you a benefactor and not quite a customer. Unless we think of any payment coming in the form of heaped praise and flowery, gushing compliments—in which case, your recompense would most likely make me uncomfortable, so we should probably just part ways in silence after you read the damned thing. It’s for the best, truly. Or, you could send me one jar of home made strawberry preserves! Or, a comment would be fine, too.

3 – Figuratively speaking.

Anyway, yes. That’s a mere eight dollars for hours of fun and excitement and, not to mention, valuable life lessons! Because what did I find among those musty pages but a brilliant treatise detailing the harrowing tale of a woman gone too far into a free-wheeling, midnight world of sex and money–

Look how on the loose she is.

But what exactly could have drawn this otherwise normal and obedient housewife into a life of crime? Drugs, alcohol, unrestrained sexual pleasure? No, none of these things–in fact, it’s something far more dangerous than any of those illicit delights:

Bingo.

Long story short (and I mean long), Daisy Doright encounters the world of Bingo, falls in love with the thrill of Bingo, and promptly loses all her money to the Monster Bingo, after which a seductive mobster lures her into a torrid scheme to swindle cash from the innocent Bingo callers. Shocking! To think this mobster has taken valuable time he could’ve spent laundering money, hijacking, or murdering the members of rival families to teach this hapless woman how to snipe $25 a night from the Bingo pool. This is back when $25 was a lot of money!

Eventually, the cops catch up to them, right when Mr. Mobster is about to tarnish Daisy’s “good name” in his lovenest suite. She goes on trial, and her martyred husband stands by her during the whole ordeal. What a relief! Because I know if I ran amok in a smoky Bingo Hall swindling the dollars out of old ladies’ pockets, my husband would…okay, he’d probably laugh at me. But, at least in court, I’d have done some good!

Thank goodness for that.

On next week’s episode, we discover the steamy secret that casts two people’s lives into torrid chaos! Chaos that apparently delights them, based on this artistic depiction:

This is the most hilarious hobby ever.

She yawned as the dead may yawn once raised from their graves at the end of days, or as the beast may yawn from the seas that one doomfull morn shall rise forth to swallow the earth in immitigable pain and terror!

And so, as she stumbled and yawned, so did the cat’s water dish knock upon her small toe, stubbing it, and upon stubbing it, she cursed, as deep a curse as black Rasputin cursed upon his own disembowelment. A tiny slop of water fell upon the carpet, rank with the wretched saliva of her feline, but she paid it no heed.

And after some time of this stumbling, yawning, and stubbing, so did she come to the kitchen—that bleak, untended kitchen in which laid in wait the most calamitous dismay that ever saw fit to besiege the heart of humankind! That kitchen, it’s vast stretches cloaked in darkness , it’s secrets held unknown until that first, most gruesome folly of her finger upon the light switch.

And the light switch did flip.

The bulbs vibrated in their fright, for they knew what unspeakable knowledge that man was not meant to know—that knowledge that she herself was about to fall haplessly and madly into a whirling umbra of howling consternation from which no sane mind ever returned! She—tragically, unwittingly—reached forward and grasped the horrifically ergonomic handle of the plastic coffee container and—blindly, trustingly—plucked at the black lid that hid the most heinous secrets from her sight—

She looked within the coffee container and saw.

It held coffee no more.

And she screamed—screamed the scream of a thousand screaming screams—and as the dire truth of her folly spun within her head like the Banshee’s wail of impending death, and her thoughts all but sputtered out as the most loveless flame lit upon the candelabra of a soulless existence, leaving nothing. Nothing more than a vast cavern of empty agony within her.

She laid down upon the unforgiving kitchen linoleum, and she wept.

2. You have dreams of Alien chestbursters exploding out of your lower abdominal area, and are delighted. If still a bit unnerved.

3. You have nick-named the unborn spawn “Creature,” much to your husband’s chagrin.

4.You imagine your uterus as a throbbing, purple beast most likely out to destroy you as it stampedes through your slimy innards, trampling your organs  in order to make room for the expansion your unborn spawn requires. And are delighted.

5. Your writing is suddenly rife with fuzzy bunnies, kitties, and butterflies. That burst out of people’s chests.