Salt City Sinner

posted on 3/5/2019 by the Salt City Sinner: this post originally appeared at Madness Heart Press If there has ever been a better real-life example of idle hands being the devil’s plaything than Archie Comics , I would be amused and delighted to hear about it. (No, really: at me .) From 1942 through 2014, Archie may have received the occasional update or fine-tuning, but he stayed the same basic Archie: redheaded, beloved of Betty and Veronica, safe as milk. Then, recently, Archie and the gang were delivered from the idle hands of his former curators and into the hot little mitts of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, where the devil got delightfully mixed up in things. Aguirre-Sacasa, you see, rebooted the entire franchise from the ground up, giving it an occult twist. This included a reboot of the character Sabrina Spellman, a teenage witch who first appeared in Archie in 1962 and originally had a tween-oriented TV show that premiered in 1996 and ran for an inexplicable seven seaso...

posted on 2/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Love! The stuff of legends; of fleets launched, genocides committed or averted, friends betrayed and loyalties upheld. It’s also the stuff of commerce, serving as a high-fructose additive to movies, music, and other entertainment that might otherwise be too intellectually nutrient-dense for folks to stomach. As such, even those of us sworn to darkness can’t seem to avoid it this time of year. Consider pink glitter to be an appropriate synecdoche; “romance” winds up getting into everything, unavoidably and infuriatingly cluttering up, jamming, and grinding to a halt the everyday enjoyment of life. Now, I’m not here to cast aspersions on pair-bonding, necessarily. There are certainly advantages to such a lifestyle choice, and the vast, vast majority of humans live their lives that way. I’ve even heard rumors (too unspeakable to repeat here) that coupling up is in some way related to the perpetuation of the human species, although,...

posted on 2/12/2019 by the Salt City Sinner I hope that, at some point, Thomas Ligotti’s literary interest in dolls and manikins has extended to Matryoshka dolls – the famous Russian “nesting dolls” that sit, hollow, inside each other in a recursive cascade that (reassuringly) ends with the smallest, solid doll at the center. Ligotti frequently constructs narratives in the style of a Matryoshka. He nests characters, narratives, and themes inside of each other. My favorite example of this technique (and, additionally, one of my favorite Ligotti stories, period) is “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” which is three versions of a horror story hidden inside a single story about a horror author that sits within an essay on the art of writing horror fiction. It’s quite brilliant, and unlike anything I’ve read in the way of avante garde or experimental fiction, let alone “genre” fiction. “Notes” contains no overt references to dolls, puppets, or homunculi – making...

posted on 2/7/2019 by the Salt City Sinner The towering influences of writers like Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelley extend well beyond the boundaries of horror and into the wider realm of literature proper, a point that has been belabored enough that I don’t need to make it again here. Less explored (and perhaps more interesting) are the occasions on which writers who are well-loved and respected outside of the cobwebbed graveyard of macabre literature have slipped through the gates of that cemetery for a midnight jaunt. My favorite example might be the short story “the Comet” by William E.B. DuBois , a brilliant writer not usually known for his ghost stories. “The Comet” can be read as many things – an early science fiction story, a sharp-eyed tale about race, class, and American society, and – with its necropolitan flair -- an excellently-crafted horror tale. I think it is best understood as all and none of these, and a great example of how fluid and arbit...

posted on 1/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Crow! Nobody likes to eat it. For one thing, corvids are highly intelligent and social animals, and for another they taste awful (or so I’ve heard). That said, I’m a fellow who prides myself on my ability to admit when I’m wrong, and thus I present an instance (one of many, but we’ll tackle them one at a time) when I’ve been wrong. Mostly. The year was 2015 ! The newfangled “jazz music” craze was ripping up the airwaves, and women were wearing short skirts and voting! In actuality, 2015 only feels like 100 years ago, due to the horrific time distortion field we’ve been living in recently. Here’s what I had to say then about Senator Mark Madsen’s attempts to decriminalize the devil’s lettuce for medical use:   I will not argue for a single second that [2015’s failed legalization effort] isn't progress – it is. And Senator Mark Madsen's bill regarding medical marijuana only failed by a single vote.  …All of that as...

posted on 1/11/2019 by the Salt City Sinner “So…why Satan?” he asked me. It was a reasonable question – albeit a personal one. I am,after all, a Satanist . I’m not an evangelist, however, and people in the United States are socially conditioned to think of religion as an inherently expansionist, conquering influence. For example: even though Christians are instructed to “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray” (Matthew 6:6) those rascals are obsessed with the spotlight – grabbing it, keeping it, brightening it. It’s why Evangelical Christians erect giant stonemonuments to their god on public land, why they   want to make your mind up for you on any number of subjects, because look at them (please, won’t you?), how good they are, don’t they know best? Even when I was a Christian, I was a Catholic. While Catholicism is certainly a public-facing faith that has no problem whatsoever exerting political pressure on the saved and unsaved...

posted on 1/2/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Hey gang! How was your New Years? Did you have fun getting arrested and beaten and maybe tased until you whizzed yourself and then locked in a box for a few days? What’s that you say? You dodged Utah’s shiny new .05 DUI law by calling a Lyft after having two drinks rather than chancing it? Well will you have a look at that, I guess the system works ! I did no drinking whatsoever on the dreaded night in question and went to bed at (if I remember correctly) 8 PM, because I am a wild man and a party animal. To me, annual New Year celebrations have all of the bad baggage of a birthday – the march of time, a grim reminder of mortality – with none of the fun. Maybe it’s my temperament, maybe it’s the time of year, I don’t know, but for me it’s just a bummer of a holiday. That said, the year ahead ought to prove interesting, and so I present to you my five predictions for 2019. Stand back as my listicles descend! April 1, 2019: ...