Blog-o-ween 2023: "Impermanent Mercies" by Kathe Koja

Over the course of this year’s Blog-o-ween, we’ve read some stuff that made your skin crawl and your spine shiver. There were also some stronger tales that dealt with subjects or presented images that perhaps made your tummy do a backflip or two. Today’s Blog-o-ween post is the first of this year’s run, however, where I feel compelled to issue a TRIGGER WARNING. If you are adverse to gory tales of animals and trains and moist boxes and immolation, then...

Still with me? Okay. Buck up, campers, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

Today’s story was written in 1991 at the height of the “splatterpunk” movement in the horror genre. What is splatterpunk? I think the tagline of the 1982 Spanish-American slasher film Pieces says it all: It’s exactly what you think it is!

“Splatterpunk” the term was coined by writer David J. Schow in 1986 to describe a new movement that had developed in the horror scene over the decade. Splatterpunks put the splatter — graphic depictions of violence and gore — front and center in their stories. These were writers who weren’t satisfied with just pushing the envelope. They were fully out of the envelope and flopping around on the table. Splatterpunk was seen as a revolt against the more traditional, leave-it-up-to-the-reader’s-imagination style of horror. Splatterpunk qua splatterpunk stalled by the mid-1990s when the market for horror itself bottomed out. The over-the-top stylings continue to this day, however, in the form of other genre offshoots, such as “torture porn” movies and Bizarro. Writers who were considered part of the splatterpunk movement at one time or another are Edward Lee, John Skipp, Poppy Z. Brite, Craig Spector, and today’s featured writer, Kathe Koja.

So, if you dare, let’s tag along with Ms. Koja as she takes us down by the railroad tracks and (like a hungry black widow spider) weaves for us the tale of “Impermanent Mercies”...

Ellis is a photographer. One day, he is taking your typical Norman Rockwell-style pictures of a boy, Andy, and his dog, True, near some train tracks. After the photo shoot, as the trio head off, True gets away from Andy and is struck by an oncoming train. Andy takes off with True’s head, and that is the end of that. Or so Ellis thinks.

Later, Ellis bumps into Andy outside of a convenience store. He tells the boy he was worried about him. Where did Andy run off to so quickly? “I took True home,” Andy says. “Wanna see?” So, Ellis follows Andy home to see.

What he sees is not a cute little grave in the backyard. What Andy shows him is True’s head. In a saltine box. In his bedroom. And what True shows him is...well, I don’t think I can do justice to what True shows Ellis. Let’s just say that True makes David Berkowitz’s dog seem like Benji.

Kathe Koja was born in 1960 in Detroit, Michigan. Although she had been writing stories from a very young age, it wasn’t until she attended her first Clarion Workshop (a six-week workshop for aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers begun by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in 1968 at Clarion State College in Pennsylvania) that she became serious about pursuing writing as  a profession.

Koja’s first novel The Cipher, about two social misfits and a hole in a storage room of their apartment that leads to...somewhere else, was published in 1991 and won the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award in 1992. This novel was followed by others: Bad Brains (1992), Skin (1993), and Strange Angels (1994). These boundary-shifting books were interspersed by numerous short stories, which, shockingly, have never been collected and published together. Beginning in the early 2000s, Koja began to publish young adult books such as Straydog (2002), Buddha Boy (2003), and The Blue Mirror (2004).

Well, that’s all for today, kiddies. Hope we didn’t gross you out too badly. Just remember...to avoid fainting, keep repeating, “Today’s Blog-o-ween story will give me...pleasant dreams...pleasant dreams...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!”