Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

This side show is interesting, but you remind yourself of the purpose of this quest. The pounding techno is a fraction dimmer here, enough to allow thought. Kevin is not here. You turn to leave.

“Fran?”

The voice catches you in a net of fragility. You glance back at the gurney, and the languid corpse-like form lifts its skull. Unnaturally bright eyes—familiar—peer into yours from deep in their sockets, as if beckoning.

“Kevin?”

“I’m Fran now,” he tells you, and your body jolts with this confirmation. “I need you for the reinventing.”

It is Kevin, or what is left of him. Instantly you move beside the gurney as if it is a coffin. He has no hair, no eyebrows, lashes, no finger- or toenails. His body is covered with pale stitches, like a rag doll repaired too many times.

“What’s … happening to you?” you ask.

“Ecstasy,” he says, his voice more feminine than masculine, the tone otherworldly.

“Drugs—”

“No. True ecstasy.”

You stare at his body, breasts plumped like white plums, his penis gone, replaced by … by … nothing! This is disturbing, but what leaves you unable to speak is his once thick-fleshed frame, now lighter than air, an exoskeleton.

“I’m thinner than you are,” he whispers with a smile so grotesque you shudder.

You can only shake your head, confused, horrified, resigned in your failure.

Suddenly, as if they are meant to distract, you notice the apparatus—clear tubes removing blood, suctioning fat from the body, washing out the intestine’s contents. You watch as one of the attendants pulls skin together over Kevin’s stomach where fat cells have been suctioned out, cuts the flab, stretches the skin taut, sutures …

“My stomach is stapled now, so I don’t need to eat,” Kevin whispers, eyes gleaming.

“What? … why? …” But you can no longer form sentences.

“To be you,” he says, the words so simple. The message clear as a crystal bell. This is your nightmare, your legacy. What you have created in your own distorted image. What you cannot show the world but what Kevin displays on your behalf. You gave him permission to reflect your darkness. Now that you see yourself with clarity, you cannot bear the sight.

He stares at the ceiling as if seeing God, as if he is ascending, and your eyes fill with tears.

Didi gently pulls the coat from your ravaged body, your clothes, then fingers find you through all your barren openings, filling them with black fire.

At long last, the heavy basket slips from your grip. Finally, you descend.

Pop Star in the Ugly Bar

Bentley Little

“Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” was first published in Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Nancy Holder, ROC, 2005.

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I originally wrote this story in 1992 for an anthology titled Shock Rock, edited by the Hot Blood team of Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. They like the story and accepted it, but a month or so later, I received word that Pocket Books’ lawyers were not so thrilled. I was never sure whether they thought the story was obscene and thus open to prosecution, or whether they were afraid that Madonna, who had just come out with her Sex book, might be in the mood to sue. Either way, they banned the story. Three years on, after several rejections in the interim, Poppy Z. Brite accepted it for her anthology Razor Kiss. Unfortunately, she soon got word from the lawyers that they could not allow her publisher to include my story, and I received notice that once again the piece was banned.

Finally, a full decade later, “Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” appeared in the anthology Outsiders, thanks to editors Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and the brave people at ROC. No one sued, the world didn’t end, and now it can be reprinted here for your reading pleasure.