Salt City Sinner

  Every place has its pleasant and unpleasant aspects. For example: I grew up in a deeply religious and conservative community (Bountiful, nestled along a pleasant swell of foothills in Utah). There were certainly drawbacks to my life in our little neighborhood, in those days – ostracism, the closed-mindedness and ignorance of the more devout folk, the extremely disturbing  rates of child abuse   and suicide . However, when I later moved to a *different* deeply religious and conservative place (Tulsa, Oklahoma), I learned that there are aspects of the dominant faith in Utah that I find enormously preferable to the shenanigans of the Evangelical communities I encountered.

  from "Motel Hell" The  second post  that I ever wrote for Madness Heart Press, way back in March of 2019, was a review of  The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 10 , edited by Ellen Datlow. It’s an excellent collection that is well worth picking up. It’s the venue in which I first encountered a short story called “West of Matamoros, North of Hell,” by Brian Hodge. There were many top-notch exercises in horror in Best Volume 10, but “West of Matamoros” is the one that has stuck with me the longest – haunted me, you might say. In particular, I often think of one sequence in which a very frightening, violent fellow has a conversation with another person (I won’t spoil the story for you – you ought to read it for yourself), a calm, seemingly-rational conversation about, and I quote, “the mask behind the face.”

  Where was the belief that evil can wear a humdrum face codified? And does horror fiction provide an additional insight - an invitation to probe beneath the mundane and to acknowledge that the mundane has its own special horror?

In the United States, it’s no picnic being a member of a minority religious community. The US extends an enormous amount of privilege to Christians (especially White Evangelical ones). On the best of days, this ensures a level of political and legal insulation for Christians that is perpetually denied to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and members of the eclectic and scattered communities of witches, pagans, heathens, and other freethinkers. This, despite repeated malfeasance on the part of majority faiths and structures of hierarchy ; this, despite the fact that fear of “the other” in America so often blinds communities to the wolves in their midst .

  "Blessed are those with a voice. If dolls could speak, no doubt they would scream 'I didn't want to be human!'" - Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence