Horror Panegyric

FIRST

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SAVOYBOOKS 446 WILMSLOW ROAD WITHINGTON MANCHESTER M20 ]BW ENGLAND [email protected] WWW.SAVOY.ABEL.CO.UK

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KEITH SEWARD 2008

THE 'LORD HORROR'

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LORD

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NOVELS OF SAVOYBOOKS

KEITH SEWARD 2007 HORROR

DAVID BRITTON & MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH 1989

MOTHERFUCKERS: THE AUSCHWITZ OF OZ

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DAVID BRITTON & MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH 1996

BAPTISED

IN THE

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BRITTON

DAVID

BLOOD

OF MILLIONS

& MICHAEL

BUTTERWORTH

2000

A CIP CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLEAT THE BRITISH LIBRARY EXCEPT THIS

FOR THE

BOOK

PURPOSES

OF REVIEW

MAY BE REPRODUCED

ISBN 978-0-861

NO PART OF

WITHOUT

]0- I 18-8

PRINTED IN GRE"'T BRITAIN

PRODUCTION:

DAVID BRITTON & MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH

DESIGN:

JOHN COULTHART

TYPESETTING:

SARAJANE INKSTER

PERMISSION

THE LORD HORROR NOVELS OF SAVOY BOOKS 'A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.' Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

An appraisal of the three Lord Horror novels by Savoy Books' David Britton & Michael Butterworth: Lord Horror (1989), Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz (1996) and Baptised in the Blood of Millions (2000).

PROLOGUE A masterpiece is like pornography: it is difficult to say what it is exactly and yet, as the Supreme Court judge once said of porn, I know it when I see it. I know that a masterpiece, like porn, excites me when I see it. I know that, like porn, it reveals something to me. I know that, like porn, it tends to avoid sentiment, which is another way of saying that it has deep connectionsto truth. I know that, like porn, a masterpiece can often be shocking or scandalous. I know that I not only know porn when I see it, I know the difference between good porn and bad-and a masterpiece is always like good porn. And above all I know that, just as porn makes me want to fuck, a masterpiece makes me want to create. It's a stimulant, an incitement that does to the aesthetic sense what porn does to the libido. Rimbaud excites. Dostoievski reveals. Burroughs inspires. And Lord Horror?

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BACKGROUND Lord Horror

is the creation

of David Britton and Michael

Butterworth, founders of Savoy Books in England. Savoy has a long and colourful history that began with independent ventures-bookshops, writings, underground zines-by Britton and Butterworth in the late 1960s. In 1976 they joined forces to launch Savoyand nearly became William S Burroughs' UK publisher in 1979. The ink barely dry on a contract for Cities if the Red Niaht, Savoy's bookshops and offices were raided for the nth time by Manchester police, perpetuating what would become two and a half decades of harassment and witch-hunting by a constabulary with clearly repressive ambitions. Savoy was forced into bankruptcy and Britton obliged to serve a term in prison for selling publications deemed 'obscene' (but which were openly sold elsewhere in the country). Determined to carry on, Britton and Butterworth resurrected Savoy by publishing an eclectic mix of books ranging from musicology to sci-fi, from a bestselling tome on KISSto works by esteemed British fantasist Michael Moorcock. They also branched out into making music and it was here, in 1986, that Lord Horror made his public debut. On a 12"single attributed to the Savoy Hitler Youth Band, Lord Horror appeared as a vocalist covering New Order's 'Blue Monday'. Listeners must have been perplexed: the tune was savaged; the packaging exhibited a sensibility that was transgressive, confrontational, smart; but who was this mysterious new songster? The following year Lord Horror appeared on another 12"single, a cover of Iggy Pop's 'Raw Power'. After having been born as a voice

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on the first single, Lord Horror now appeared as a vision: the back of the sleeve featured an illustration of Lord Horror, based on work in progress, by Kris Guidio. However, less noise was made by the music than by the satirical 'quotes' on the packaging, which included Prince Charles ('Only dickheads die from cocaine. The best people used it and are still using it.') and Mother Theresa ('I always give cocaine to niggers. It helps them to produce healthy babies.'). The British tabloid press had a field day with these scurrilous 'quotes' alone. Clearly a writer of power was lurking in the background of this music. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say writersof power, since Lord Horror is the product of a symbiosis that begins with Britton (usually credited as the writer) and Butterworth (editor and contributor) and then extends to a family of artists (Guidio, John Coulthart), musicians (PJ Proby et al), and motley inspirations. This authorial phalanx with Britton at its head made its literary debut in 1989 with the publication of the landmark novel LordHorror. Lord Horror is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer. Warping him from Haw-Haw to Horror, the novel views the rabble-rouser DJ through a glass darkly. It turns out to be a double negative-after Auschwitz, can you view a fascist any more darkly?-that catapults the narrative in the other direction, into exuberance, extravagance, and excess. (In the novel, Hitler's penis suffers from a gigantism that seems to epitomize the over-the-topness of the book itself.) Lord Horrortakes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War 11 and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips,

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esoterica. It's a 'what if the other side had won the war' trip like you've never seen before. Though they were blind to its literary qualities, the Manchester police could not ignore the novelty and daring of the book. Once again they raided Savoy, confiscating more than half of the book's already small print run. A court declared the book obscene, less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters, and sent Britton to Strangeways Prison for four months. Though this made Lord Horror the first literary work to be suppressed in England since Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, advocates of free speech paid little heed to the plight of Lord Horror's creator. If this had happened ten years later, Britton would have become a cause celebrefuelled by online petitions and blogger outrage. But in 1991 there was not much of an internet, and liberals had already blown their wad on Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verseshad been easy to stump for. It pit the good enlightened West against the bad repressive East. Lord Horror, with its exaggerated depiction of British collusion, occupied a more disturbing terrain. It wasn't us versus them. It was us versus ourselves. Constant harassment-which

continued into the late 1990S-

from an obsessed constabulary would have quashed most publishers, but Britton and Butterworth operated under a maxim more along the Nietzschean lines of 'what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.' Far from folding up shop or retreating into less controversial publications, the two launched an all-out assault. Though the novel Lord Horrorwas effectively suppressed and remains difficult to find even today, the character Lord Horror multiplied, made appearances in

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different media, spawned other characters who in turn featured in their own books, comics, music. In short, the death of the book was the birth of a twisted empire, a Reich of deviant imagination that neither Allied nor Axis powers would ever have recognized. A funny thing happened, though. Savoy escalated the conflict, even won the war since it now publishes with impunity works of greater transgression than those for which it had once been raided. But the victory seems to have left Savoy in a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it's over. Their franchise of Lord Horror productions is provocative, original, visionary, and contains at least one outright masterpiece (Motheifuckers).Young writers should be looking at it the same as they do Naked Lunch, Le. as a work that shows them what the possibilities are in the hands of a master. Academics should be crawling all over it with their magnifying glasses trying to figure out what it means and what it says about society. Anyone interested in literature should be reading and experiencing the damn thing. A few cognoscenti are there already, snapping up the first editions of Lord Horror before everybody else catches on and prices them out of the market. But the victory celebration hasn't happened yet, and it is hard to understand why.

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AN APPRECIATION Though I'd been aware of Savoy for some time, the first of their tomes that I read was the novel Motheifuckers:The Auschwitz if Oz, which was the follow-up to Lord Horror. Honestly what caused me to buy the book was the subtitle, which promised a collision of blood and whimsy, horror and delight, jackboots on the yellow brick road. The 'Auschwitz of Oz' reminded me a little of Marilyn Manson, a name which-regardless of what you think of the man, his music, or his shock tactics-nattily

combines the screen queen

and the cult leader, glitter and doom. It's a good name, and I thought Motheifuckers:TheAuschwitz cifOz was too. Motheifuckers'principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to 'scientific' experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors-the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing p~ramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A ClockworkOrange,though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz. To the first chapter or two of MotheifuckersI warmed slowly. The prose was dense, the language somewhat exotic. I wondered if, as an

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American, Iwas struggling with a particularly colloquial British slang. I worried that the book might be another Trainspotting.Personally I don't enjoy the Scottish ebonics of Irvine Welsh ('The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.'). But then I realized that it was not a regionalism I had run into. It was something else. Feeling very self-conscious about people-a melting pot of them-reading over my shoulder, I stood on a New York subway scanning a chapter full of nigger jokes, and I knew that what this book offered was not a slang but a mindset, an attitude, a vision. It was like hearing rock and roll for the first time and knowing that, however much you'd enjoyed music till then, you'd just found something more intense. At this point, I felt the shock of recognition. I knew it when I saw it. This book was a masterpiece. I was energized by its style and inventiveness. I was amazed by the sheer balls that it must have taken to write and to publish it. That's right: balls.Who, I wondered, would subject his obvious talent to being so misunderstood and maligned? Sure, there are writers who 'push the envelope'. But Motheifuckers does not just push the envelope. It beats at it with its fists, kicks, bites, and stabs the envelope. No matter how jaded a reader you are, no matter how much you've read your Henry Miller ~nd Marquis de Sade, this is the book that will leave you feeling bad for the envelope. After Motheifuckers,it will never be the same again. 'This thing,'.I thought to myself,' out-Burroughs Burroughs.' It did something I did not think possible: it carried the Boschian method of Naked Lunch to a new extreme, and it did that with exceedingly controversial subject matter. I almost didn't know what to make of it. Was this book an explosive new entry in the contemporary literary

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game? Or the feverish rapture of some British mind fucked up by the Blitz? In this respect it sometimes reminded me of Pink Floyd's The Wall, in which the mental heritage of World War 11is a psychopathy expressed in Technicolor cartoons and fascist rituals reenacted in private ways that drain out the fascism and leave shell-shocked brains wandering in the ruins. But I had categories for this: Pink Floyd was a band, TheWallan album and a film. What was Motheifuckers? I figured it out when Herbie Schopenhauer, the philosophical Volkswagen, meets Elvis Presley in Dachau. Elvishappens to say:'The same sun that brings out the lilies brings out the snakes.' [MF 142] Eureka! I knew it. There is only one place in the world where that saying appears:Ted Morgan's LiteraryOutlaw, a biography ofWilliam S Burroughs. Recognizing this, I knew where the author sought inspiration, and consequently I knew where to situate Motheifuckers.My intuition had been right. The book may out-Burroughs Burroughs, but that is its domain: the same avant-garde, cultish, transgressive form of literature produced by the author of Naked Lunch. Its delirium is not demented but deliberate. Motheifuckersis a literary work of the most serious intention and the highest art.

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THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN In 1993 the American Jewish Year Book, which chronicles antisemitic events around the world, noted that in Britain 'racist literature continued to cause concern.' Discriminatory publications included The HoIohoax by 'Simon Weaselstool', an Examination if Anti-GentiIism, and an edition of The ProtocoIs if the Elders

if Zion.

In

addition 'LordHorrorby David Brent [sic], published by Savoy Books and based on the life of British World War 11traitor William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw"), was banned under the Obscene Publications Act, though no reason was given.' No reason was given because the book was railroaded, banned not by a jury but by a judge-pause on that: there was no recourse to 'community standards', just the subjective assessment of one man who was unable to see the difference between being and satirizing hate speech. (This was particularly ironic since anti-gay rhetoric by the Chief Constable of Manchester had been transposed into the book, replacing gay with Jew-in other words, transforming real hate speech into satire.) Other books, such as Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Norman Spinrad's TheIron Dream(1972), had utilized the 'what if Hitler had won?' premise without causing much controversy. Postwar pulps regularly eroticized the Holocaust, using Nazis and Jewesses-never did the starving inhabitants of death camps look more buxom than on the lurid covers of pulp fiction-ps stand-ins for sadists and masochists. These failed to rume feathers partly because the 'politically correct' mindset dominant at the time of Lord Horror'spublication had yet to prevail, and partly because the works

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themselves were clear about their moral positions. Spinrad appended a fake scholarly analysis to his tome to ensure that his intentions would not be misunderstood. And no one considered the pulps anti-semitic because it was obvious what their game was: to beat the censors, S&M bodice rippers posed as historical novels about the war. Savoy has occupied a more ambiguous terrain. Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ('don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you'). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?

=

Potentially the most anti-semitic passage in Lord Horror depicts the protagonist literally ingesting a Jew. The description, which carries on for several pages, also happens to be the most brilliant and farcical moment in the book. After swallowing half the Jewwhole-Lord

Horror: ' .. .heaved himself onto his feet. He propped

himself unsteadily against the wall, wreathed in steam, with the two bent legs of the Jew brazenly dangling from his mouth. He raised his hands to the pain in his head, clasped it, stared up at the big moon.

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When the white orb tossed down light, the loose legs swung and crossed one over the other as though the old Jew inside had seated himself casually in a roomy armchair.' [LH 160] Anti-semitism? Or Surrealism?The appeal here is not to haters of Jews but to lovers of art. It is a Max Ernst image with echoes ranging from Goya (SaturnDevouringHis Children)to DaH(AutumnCannibalism). The burlesque is completed by Lord Horror's revelation that 'his body could literally accommodate thousands of Jews. He had struck on the perfect Final Solution-he could eat and digest the Jews of the world!' [LH 161]Jonathan Swift had argued in A ModestProposalthat the solution to famine was to eat the children of the poor. Here the solution to ethnic 'degeneracy' is to eat the degenerate. Plainly this is the type of epiphany that occurs not when you want to resurrect Nazism but when you transplant Auschwitz to Oz. As if its anti-anti-semitism weren't obvious enough, the novel continually undermines its own protagonist's hatreds: 'Lord Horror's avowed anti-semitism was a cartoon, a burlesque, a technicolour replica of Hitler's own Jewish stance... Horror was just a brush stroke in a tapestry without substance, his actions far too Grand Guignol theatrical to be truly convincing.' [LH) 7] Impressed by Mengele's (imagined) experiments 'grafting white limbs onto black bodies', Lord Horror tries 'duplicating Mengele's achievements... by tacking gentile anatomical characteristics onto Jews.' [LH 90] Such copycat behaviour is expressly condemned by the book itself: 'Hitler had lain in the wound in the heart of mankind, not just in the wounds in the hearts of the Jews. He had become a token reminder to the world that the seeds of its immolation lay

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in blindly inherited behaviour.' [LH 188] It is difficult to fathom how this, particularly when compared to genuine hate speech, could be mistaken for anti-semitism. Still, let's presume the worst. Acknowledge that Savoy must have some sense that hate is the new outre. It used to be that you couldn't say Juck without causing matrons to overturn their teacups. Nowadays it's nigger,kike, paki. (Interestingly, though, the word kike does not appear in Motheifuckers,currently the only one of the three novels whose text is searchable at Amazon.) Certainly Savoy is aware that its subject matter is inflammatory. Britton and Butterworth relish their ability to scandalize, epaterle bourgeois.They are guilty of this much. But does that make their work dangerous? Perhaps the only way to avoid answering this question subjectively, as did the magistrate who banned LordHorror,is to look at books whose potential for danger has actually been translated into action. In 1995, for example, Timothy McVeigh cited The TurnerDiarieswhich is freely sold in England and America-as an inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed one hundred and sixty eight people. In 1999, Oavid Copeland committed nail-bomb attacks against London blacks. According to a news account, 'Copeland told police that he was inspired-as so many right-wing American terrorists have been-by The Turner Diaries, a race-war novel by William Pierce, head of America's neo-Nazi National Alliance.' The 7UrnerDiaries is not just dangerous in principle. It has a rap sheet showing that it has been dangerous in practice. By this criterion, Savoy's Lord Horror franchise-encompassing more than a decade of novels, graphic novels, comics, records and

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COs-is no more dangerous than The Little Prince. It is not lauded on skinhead discussion boards or promoted on neo-Nazi web sites. The only acts of violence it has inspired are the ones that have been committed against it. Or perhaps, in some strange and insidious way, Lord Horror has committed violence on British authorities by bringing out their own worst traits, even latent propensities for the Blackshirt. The authorities might not like to acknowledge these little clusters of fascism in their own hearts, but what else do you call book-burners?

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DEGENERATE ART There are all sorts of moral codes at play in the Lord Horror novels, and there is even the odd maudlin moment: 'Nobody knows how it feels to put a child into the ground. Unaccustomed tears would come to Ecker. Every monster imagined by mankind had died and was reborn a hundred times more terrifying in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.' [MF 6,] But fragments of morality do not make a book moral. 'Dangerous' books are often justified by claiming that they possess some latent or even superior morality. Simone de Beauvoir used this tactic in 'Must We Burn Sade?' William Burroughs has been almost forcibly moralised by his supporters, as in publisher John Calder's obituary: 'Like Swift, (Burroughs] was a moralist torn between horror and gloat.' This may not be entirely untrue, and no doubt the same could be said of Savoy's productions. For example, Motherfuckersmakes the point that it is not the vanguardist who holds nothing sacred. It is the businessman. 'Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes orTarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life... In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca-Cola.' [MF69] But emphasizing the rectitude of these books seems disingenuous. The importance of Sade is to have mapped out a terrain of

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sexuality beyond good and evil. The importance of Burroughs lies not in his morality-a mind-your-own-business ethos typical of certain classes of American-but in his art (his vivid language, black humour, routines, cut-ups). So too with the Lord Horror novels. You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons. But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books. This disjunction between ethics and aesthetics plays an important role in the novels themselves. What may well scandalize some readers-especially the ones in judicial robes-is not the absence of moralising but the presence of aestheticising. Here is Lord Horror describing the death throes of a man he has just stabbed: 'Language is truly poetic only in so far as it is used musically, plastically or, only when it is filled with scintillating colour. .. Dying in my arms, Lord Boothby exhibited a similar trait; the purist "visible speech" ofTone-Eurhythmy. How disappointing no sound engineer was there to record his declamation. What came from him were the last soul-qualities of the Human Being giving expression both audibly through speech and visibly through Eurhythmy-music translated into movement-slippery and ethereal. Boothby was not dancing in any real sense of the word but rather paying respects with movement as he prepared to journey from this world.' [BBM 82] He expresses no revulsion at the deed, no self-doubt about the need to kill, no fear of recrimination by society. It's murder considered as a fine art. Moral valuations are replaced by aesthetic ones. Hitler, far from being a failed painter, 'has become the most successful artist of all time, certainly the most studied.' [LH 2o]The insight

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is weirdly true, if you think about it, but it also has the effect of portraying atrocities as artistic triumphs. These aesthetic valuations extend past the fine arts. Lord Horror's 'perfect Final Solution'-to eat the world's Jewry-is given a new form in Baptisedin the Blood if Millions. In an astonishing image that recurs throughout the book, flaming Jews are hurled like missiles through the sky only to explode on impact in sweets--candies, chocolates, parfaits. It is no longer a quirk of Lord Horror to want to eat Jews, for Jews have become very edible. 'A special Jew was flying our way. .. From our bed we watched him coming over the roof tops and through the dusky twilight, flames chopping his path, clouds of hot yellow piss engulfing him, little showers of Oval tine tablets peppering his flight. I wanted to eat him... He surrounded me with his chocolate breath and persona of boiling caramel. Again I was assailed with the aromas of the sweets of my youth: Tangerine Bouncers, Raspberry Times, Radiance Toffee, Lemon Squirts, Fairy Whispers and so many more with wistful names and fanciful delicacies that teased the memories of days long gone by. I ate that Jew, my first, amongst a flurry of chocolate and boilin' blood.' [BBM96] Again slaughter is unaccompanied by revulsion, remorse, or reflection. It is now a matter of tastiness. However, if this gourmand's attitude to ethnic cleansing is not 'politically correct', it most certainly is historically correct. Nazi culture was not only brutal but aesthetic: Hitler loved the Greeks, Albert Speer erected his 'cathedral of light', and a few million murders did not seem too high a price for a blond and blue-eyed

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future. At the conclusion of his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', WaIter Benjamin wrote the most famous denunciation of this Nazi dilettantism: '"Fiat ars-pereat mundus,"says Fascism. .. [Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.' Rather than condemn the aestheticisation of violence from the standpoint of the victim or the man of conscience, Savoy takes the opposite tack: the Lord Horror books repeat the ploy, substituting artistic evaluations where moral ones might seem more appropriate. And while they do this they turn up the volume, carry the tactic to new extremes, attain satire via hyperbole and excess. It's like someone saying to you, 'How would you like a punch in the kisser?' And you respond, 'I'd love that.'You don't really mean that you want to be punched. To the contrary, your sarcasm negates the threat, implies that the pain it promises is no pain at all. So too with Savoy. Fascism says, 'Fiat arts,pereatmundus: let there be art no matter how much of the world gets fucked as a result.' And Savoy says, 'I'd love that.' But you'd have to be a rube or a judge to think ~at that's what they really mean.

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THE BOSCHIAN METHOD IN LITERATURE Far from condemning the work, as the judiciary would have it, the provocativeness of the Lord Horror franchise attests to its power and importance. Isn't that what great works do-not just pose questions about morality and art, which even inferior works can do, but pose those questions in a way that renews and reinvigorates them? Adorno's famous proclamation that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' was meant to show why, in his words, it had become 'impossible to write poetry today' . But Savoy approaches it from the other direction: the strategy is not to refrain but to write in a deliberately barbaric way. But what does barbaric mean in this context? Certainly it does not mean artless. To the contrary, it implies a particular sort of art-making that extends all the way back to Hieronymous Bosch. In TheJob, William Burroughs himself compared his work to the Dutch painter: 'the respectable person doesn't see what's going on in Bosch at all. They don't realize that things are going on there that are precisely what I described in Naked Lunch.' However, Boschianin this case is not a mere synonym for gruesome or monstrous. A :very few works of literature attain something more than that, something more rigorous, a grotesquerie not just of content but of form: a Boschian method. Paradoxical insofar as it causes form to give the appearance of formlessness and order the impression of chaos, the method remains precise in its techniques: -In

the Boschian method, time no longer flows in a straight line.

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It no longer has an arrow pointing in a single direction. 'A work of fiction that would do justice to the Holocaust must take as its first principle the shattering of chronology.' [MF 86] As though to emphasize the fact, Meng kicks a popular book on the topic: 'His boot upturned a copy of A Brig History if Time, in which a flowery message of wheelchair love had been inscribed to him by Stephen Hawking.' [MF 246] Chronology gives way to simultaneity, overlap, anachronism. 'Synchronicity was at work. They had heard from the car just last week. Herbie telephoned to say that he was studying philosophy under Deleuze, at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and would be home soon.' [MF246] -Corollary:

history loses its coordinate points and therefore its

constancy. The fashion model was born in 1970, and yet a 'Naomi Camp bell look-alike' is assaulted in Bergen-Belsen by 'fifteen teethflashing Jews'

. [MF 187 ]The

argot of one era is spoken by characters

in another: in Baptised in the Blood if Millions, Lord Horror speaks a stilted form of old-fashioned English, as though a chevalier's tongue had been affixed to the fascist's brain. 'Past' events mutate as they encounter agents of the future on the plane of the present. In a single episode, Lord Horror tussles with WittgeJ;1steinand then Sylvia Plath. When could such a meeting occur? Only in an ahistorical interval, a time 'out of joint' as Hamlet says. -Corollary: cause and effect are sundered. The anteriority of cause is lost in the simultaneity of time, so that in the Boschian universe causes can take place after their effects and effects can precede their

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causes. Even more radically, effects can occur without cause and causes can produce no effects. After being stabbed and coated in fire, Lord Horror realizes that' on inspection no flesh had been removed from my body, no fire lingered on my skin, and I stood whole and untouched. I can give no explanation for the mystery of how I came to be purged of my wound, except to say I was then living in strange

times.' [BBM120] Strange times: this is the individual experience of Boschian temporality, in which the knife leaves no gash and the cause no effect. -Just as time loses its stages, space loses its divisions. Herbie considers how 'in the physics of Galileo and Newton, both space and time are "deconsecrated"-no place or time is more significant than any other.' [MF 165] In the stead of centre and periphery, there is overlap and profusion. Boschian space fills up with a chaotic abundance of objects and events. Seemingly at random, an elephant appears in the middle of a conversation between Herbie and Mr Toad: 'Oojah the Forgetful Elephant strolled by on his hind legs. Magic imps fluttered around his waving trunk. With his wand he tapped a fallen corpse, which immediately wriggled over and buried itself like a great white centipede in the earth. Members of the "Wilfredian League of Gugnuncs" followed Oojah at a distance, theorising discreetly.' [MF 162] It's not merely an interruption of the conversation but an overloading of the space, a profusion-an elephant, imps, a cadaver, an entire society of'gugnuncs'-undermining what would normally be the centrality of the characters in the dialogue.

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-Corollary:

motion loses its efficacy. On one hand, when space

loses its divisions, characters are able to go from one place to another without motion. After a jaunt in New Orleans looking for Lord Horror, Meng and Ecker suddenly find themselves back in Manchester without having utilized any means of getting there. [MF 127] On the other hand, there are pointless motions, movements that lack any particular destination. Meng and Ecker ride in Herbie the philosophical Volkswagen to Bergen-Belsen, where nothing occurs and there is no reason to go. It's more like a Sunday drive, motion for the sake of motion. Or in the second chapter of Motheifuckers Meng goes for a walk whose purpose seems less to arrive at his destination than to assault random strangers. -Corollary: gravity loses its inescapability. Herbie learns to fly: 'The Konzentrations]agershad not only given him the gift of speech but, lately, levitation had come to his body parts. Truly the suffering of others carried its own rewards.' [MF I}2] Or to look at it another way, if space loses its divisions, then it also loses its-vectors. There is no more up or down, and Herbie can levitate just as easily as he can locomote. -Just

as time loses its stages and space loses its divisions, life

loses its phyla. On one hand, there are personifications, things becoming human-such as Hitler's gigantic penis, or Herbie the Volkswagen who has the most recognizably human characteristics in Motheifuckers. On the other hand, there are depersonifications, humans becoming animals and things. Meng is the 'Half-Man' and

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enjoys sex with dogs, crustaceans, and insects. Sylvia Plath becomes a spider-shades monster:

of Kafka's 'Metamorphosis '-and

Wittgenstein a

'And then Wittgenstein revealed his myriad cunts to me... His broad back presented itself naked, and the movement of skin, which before had moved in ripples, now became chaotic. Whirlpools of mottled flesh surrounded that which I had no difficulty in recognising as vaginas, dozens of which grew in profusion down and across Wittgenstein's back, protected by a small army of tentacles each a foot long, fist-thick and green-hued, and which were dotted, red-tipped like wavingpalm trees, around those watery oases.'[BBM I 12] -Corollary: characters mutate. Just as bodies undergo astonishing metamorphoses, so too do characters undergo transformations from one publication to the next. In Motheifuckers,La Squab is a disgusting black dwarf whom Meng fucks in Auschwitz. In the Lord Horror comics, she becomes Meng's daughter, a sassy Lolita who makes sarcastic comments about her father's bestial behaviour and offers snarky literary judgements about contemporary writers. The Lord Horror of the first book both is and isn't the same Lord Horror who appears

in Baptised in the Blood

if Millions.

It's a Boschian

universe:

logic and character development need not apply. -Corollary: represented

behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios. The

Boschian author does not say 'Don't kill', he shows killing. Antisemitism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, hate-these are the most

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hideous traits of fascism? Rather than condemn them, Lord Horror exhibits them in a way that does not conceal their barbarity: 'Ecker, in the driving seat, leaned out of the window and inserted the barrel of an automatic down the mouth of one of the Jews. 'Behold!' he cried. 'Essau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smoothman!' He jerked the gun upwards and pulled the trigger. The top of the Jew's head smashed into a street lamp fifteen feet above, and hung there, stuck like an eerily-lit, many-legged, red-backed spider.' [LH 61] -Just as time loses its stages, space its divisions, and life its phyla, art loses its conventions. No particular style governs the Lord Horror novels, except perhaps a transgressive style whose imperative is to break its own rules. Divisions between media implode, as the Lord Horror mythos spreads from novel to comic to record album. Genres are like shit thrown at a wall: LordHorrorbegins with a gambit borrowed from George Orwell's Burmese Days, mashes together literature, philosophy, jokes, art criticism, nursery rhymes, cartoons, and then ends with echoes of FT Marinetti-'Tropical heaven, let us kill the moonlight' invoking the Fut~rist manifesto 'Let's Murder the Moonshine'. [LH 192] The progress of a narrative is subordinate to the multiplication of microevents. The periphery challenges the centre. The parts threaten to take precedence over the whole. In its lawlessness and excess, the Boschian method in literature recalls the 19th century concept of 'decadence' in literature. In The Caseif Wanner Nietzsche

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had written: 'What is the sign of every literary decadence?.. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole.' However, for Nietzsche decadentwas a pejorative term. For Savoy, it is something else. Decadent, corrupt, savage-if it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, then after Auschwitz Savoywill write barbaric poetry.

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FROM DEATH CAMP TO EXISTENTIALISM There are an infinite number of topics a writer could write about. How does he get stuck on any given one? For Savoy in general and Oavid Britton in particular, Lord Horror is a sort ofZarathustra-a figurehead, a spokesman, an alter ego, a lightning rod. He is the epicentre of an imaginary universe similar in scope to the Cthulhu Mythos of HP Lovecraft. But why does this Horror mythos stick in the writer's brain?Why Lord Horror? It is a question that Baptisedin the Bloodqf Millions even poses itself. An epigraph asserts that: 'I have taken the liberty of putting my name to this book, although even a cursory reading will clearly reveal the hand and mind of Lord Horror in the text. I cannot account for this. I alone sat for long hours writing this mephitic tale of misplaced braggadocio.' [BBM 1 3] You get the sense that there is a wavering line between the author and his creation. Lord Horror is not a simple projection but rather a form of possession: 'As Horror, I narrowed m~ eyes, letting the

murk spread in my soul.' [BBM201] It puts an existentialtwist to the relationship. The question is not how the character stands in for the author, but how the author withstands the character. Britton has been shy about personal publicity-perhaps

an un-

derstandable result of having been to prison twice for obscenity. The only picture of him that has appeared in a Savoy publication shows a young man in the 1960s affecting a rock star glamdom. He grew up in industrial Manchester, the son of a Christian mother and Jewish father. This fact is either trivial-meaning that his halfJewish parentage has no bearing whatsoever on the Horror world

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in his head-or

it's so deeply Oedipal that you hate even to pursue

the thought. Suffice to say that this is probably an interesting line of inquiry for the writer's intimates, and everybody else will have to content themselves with descriptions of Britton as congenial, inspired, generous, polymathic, fun, a 'xenophobic Lautreamont from Manchester' as artist Kris Guidio once called him. Britton's earliest publications were not texts but images. He contributed illustrations to weird independent zines, eventually joining Butterworth as art director at a venture they called Wordworks.At what point did his artistic output become a literary one? Emerging from his first stint in prison in a self-described fury, Britton took over a novel that Butterworth had been writing called Das Neue Leben.He seemed to do to it what Old Shatterhand, Hitler's creature penis, does to a rare volume of Schopenhauer in Lord Horror-inundate it, flood it with his manic imagination. The literary result was the first novel in the series, and the ironic result was that Britton was sent back to prison. Once there, he must have said to himself: 'They think that's obscene? These fuckers don't even know the beginning of obscene. This is obscene.' He spewed out Motheifuckers,and from there the character and the mythos took on a life of their own. That's the ontogenesis of the character, but it doesn't really explain the nagging question. Why Lord Horror?Why did this vision take hold of Britton's imagination and effectively possess that of his collaborators as well? Probably there are a dozen answers ranging from the psychological to the inscrutable (do any of us really know why we do the things we do?). Perhaps the only answer derivable from the novels themselves is not personal but philosophical. For

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example, Lord Horror excerpts a passage from The Worldas Will and Representation:

'This world, this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who can only continue to exist by devouring each other; in which every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man.' [LH 187] In the original text, from the chapter' On the Vanity and Suffering of Life', Schopenhauer goes on to mock anyone who would 'apply the system of optimism' to this world or who would agree with Leibniz that this is 'the best of all possible worlds' . To the contrary, 'whoever is honest will scarcely be disposed to set up hallelujahs' . Hunger, pain, death, cannibalism-is this not precisely the world of Lord Horror? If there is a philosophical underpinning to the Boschian method in literature, it may well be the pessimism of Schopenhauer. Lord Horror is not an oddity of Brittqn 's imagination or a mass psychosis shared by his collaborators but an excrescence of the world itself when viewed from an essentially Schopenhauerian vantage point. .'For whence did Dante get the material for his hell,' Schopenhauer had asked, 'if not from this actual world of ours?' So too with Lord Horror. The novels are less an alternate universe than an extrapolated one. When Lord Horror eats a Jew, it is to demonstrate that existence as such is a food chain in which every organism is the 'living grave of thousands of others.' Of course, to be pessimistic is not necessarily to be mournful or resigned. Montaigne described how two philosophers looked askance

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at the world, but one chose to laugh at it while the other wept. 'I prefer the first humour, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and is more condemnatory of us than the other. 1 do not think we can ever be despised as much as we deserve. Wailing and commiseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at we consider

worthless.' [Montaigne,'Of Democritus and Heraclitus' , Essays] Can there be any doubt that this is Savoy's position as well? Theirs is a dark vision made bearable by a black humour. When Old Shatterhand ejaculates a 'golden honey' full of bees on a rare volume of Schopenhauer, it is their way of saying that the preferable response to pessimism is an inappropriate one.

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CALL FOR ACTION In a famous essay from the 1930S,'The Author as Producer', WaIter Benjamin called for the writer to control the 'means of production' . Savoy has followed this call in a way Benjamin might never have envisioned. Using the pseudonym Robert France, Savoy submitted the first Lord Horror manuscript to every major British publisher. Needless to say, it was rejected by every major British publisher, and as a consequence Savoy took control of the means of production. Sometimes acting with collaborators, a 'third mind' of Savoy irregulars, Britton and Butterworth have created and published every item in the Lord Horror franchise: novels, comics, anthologies, records, COs. There are distinct advantages to owning the means of production. Benjamin thought that this was how the writer could participate in class struggle. That may be true, and it is worth noting that Britton himself often aligns Lord Horror with the values of Manchester's working class: Horror's hates are theirs, his music is theirs, et cetera. But from an aesthetic standpoint, the primary benefit ~fbeing both author and producer is simply control. The final product is a true representation of the author's vision. No editor has tinkered with the words. No cover designer has slapped an ugly, misleading cover on the words. No marketing director has issued press releases'Greatest romance since Gone with the Wind!'-that will bias the reception of the words. For better or worse, the author as producer presents himself sincere and naked to the world, like Allen Ginsberg taking off his clothes at a poetry reading.

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However, it's a Faustian pact. Aesthetic advantages are balanced by disadvantages of a mostly practical nature. It's very expensive to print a book. A romance publisher can run off half a million paperbacks, but an individual is going to be strapped to pay for a thousand. And once you've printed it, you have to store it, market it, sell it, fulfil orders, shlep to the post office, keep records, fill out tax forms-all when you really should be doing what a writer is supposed to do: write. And when you add to the disadvantages the sort of legal harassment that Savoy has suffered, it's amazing that Britton and Butterworth have persevered at all. As a result of these practical difficulties, Lord Horror is not as well known as he should be. Savoy has done relatively small print runs of the books. No publisher has had the vision or, more likely, the courage to purchase the rights to publish them in America. You can buy Motheifuckersat Amazon, but the two other novels are rare and expensive. The comics have also become collectibles. The smart young people who would most enjoy the works probably can't afford them, or don't know enough about them to sell an old iPod and turn the funds into a copy of the Reverbstormcomic. It is time for that to change. This is a call for action. If you're interested in transgressive literature, buy a copy of Motheifuckers before ~mazon sells out. Watch eBay for Lord Horror-a copy recently sold for about $150-and Baptisedin the Bloodqf Millions. If your interests extend to comics and graphic novels, buy the various Lord Horror comics. If you're into music, try the SavoyWarsCD. Better yet, if you're a publisher or if you want to be the next Barney Rossett (the legendary founder of Grove Press, publisher of Henry

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Miller, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, et al), contact Savoy to inquire about American rights to the books. Publish them all in a nicely designed line of paperbacks, so that they look as well as they deserve but aren't too expensive for the college set. Do you have a web site, blog, or zine? Know a literary agent? Have a platform of any sort that you can use to get the word out?Tell 'em about Lord Horror. Is the natural complement to the author as producer not the reader as distributor?

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EPILOGUE I wish I could convince you how significant I think these books are, particularly Motheifuckers.You can do a clinical trial to show the efficacy of a drug, but it's no simple matter to demonstrate that a book belongs in the canon or, failing that, to show that a particular book is something you really need to read. I can tell you there are half a dozen literary works that, in a lifetime of reading, have blown my mind: Arthur Rimbaud's poetry, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Mollo}, Malone Dies, The Unnameable), Michael Herr's Dispatches, and now David Britton's Motheifuckers. There are other books I love and admire, but these are the ones that raised reading to a new level. I can remember encountering them the same way others remember losing their virginity or smoking pot for the first time. They weren't just books, they were experiences. But really you need to have the experience yourself. A masterpiece is like pornography, and if you pick up a copy of Motheifuckers I think you'll know it when you see it.

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THE FROGMEN Lord Horror, 1989

HORRORFELTINCREASINGLY unwell. A dull pain ached all over him. He hoped that the coming confrontation would put him in a better health for his final tracking-down of the elusive Fiihrer. He turned left. The traffic thickened. The high wailing of the police sirens never seemed to stop. As he continued towards the square, following the directions Izzy had given him, the pedestrians were becoming less of an equal mix. He entered 'Geek' WalkBroadway to Radium Avenue into Times Square-and the ratio of popeyes and blockheads increased. It was something of a chickenrun for the tourist to make it to the theatres without being accosted by some basket-case either demanding or begging money. Horror entered the Square, and walked toward the proliferation of strip clubs and sleaze parlours. He held his breath. His skullcap leaked heavily down his neck. Shaking his head to dispel the droplets, he tried to focus past the flashing lights that usually led up to a migraine. He allowed a tight clamp of pain to ease across his brow, and with difficulty kept his eyes in register. Even so, he felt as though he was looking out through

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splintered glass. When these cumulative effects suddenly left him, he felt light-headed and slightly nauseous. Horror often had these lesser phantoms, which left him feeling euphoric. Moving along the oven pavements of Times-the

one place on

earth that was brighter at midnight than midday-he joined the grizzly procession that had been vomited out of the inner city. Around him were decrepit buildings, their garish neon facades covering years of bureaucratic neglect. They were the Mecca for pimps, hookers, vagabonds and mendicants, victims and offenders. He paused in front of Or Pepper's Burger Diner. Rows of pork ribs were slowly barbecuing on an iron spit. About the diner, brightly-garbed nigras stood in groups eating spiced ribs and grinding the used bones underfoot. From the eat-house grid, vapours of boiled cabbage and peas blew into the night. Crystals of douglmut sugar melted on his lips. Horror tried to slip into a dark place, but the rotating dome lights of the police cars sought out his shape, pushing his wizened mandarin image high onto the advertising billboards above the square. There his shadow flickered between the spray-can calligraphy, straddling the cant and sloganeering. Slowly, from behind the epigrammatic graffiti of the words, 'I am the schizoid octopus man', the black outline of his vagina hat with its poppy-stalk clitorises standing erect began to rise and fall in a fitful rhythm. He steadied his pace, almost falling on a naked steel hook. A small pig hung upside-down on the hook next to it, blood oozing from its tiny pink snout and splashing onto his shoes. Of all the sub-ethnic pervo groups on the Douche, Frogmen were the most eerie, the most feared. They usually went in trios,

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recognisable even among the exotic and quixotic denizens of the Square. Horror's interest in them had been sparked when he had read that Frogmen, or'mung merchants' as the New YorkTimes had picturesquely termed them, were recruited solely from among the Polish Jews of Manhattan. Frogmen wore masks of black latex that completely covered their heads, with protruding Perspex air-pipes feeding into their mouths. They favoured ankle-length rubber smocks, lashed by cum and mung. Bulging enema bags, twined at their waists, swung heavily about their solid wellington boots as they walked. Their marks were usually suburban couples or lone tourists, which they lifted bodily from the streets, carrying them into the catacombs that riddled the area. In the classic Frogman attack one Frogman would hold a stiletto blade to the mark's throat, then gathering Frogmen would lie and supplicate themselves over bins, or mounds of trash. The marks would be made to jerk-off over Frogmen who were rolling ecstatically in the drek. The whip-out complete, the Frogmen strapped their victims down and began inserting their Perspex enema pipes up them. A strong suction, similar to that of a Hoover, would pull at their anuses. In the agony of evacuation a thin stream of excreta would mulch from their bowels. They would allow fifteen minutes for each attack. With their enema bags full, the Frogmen would then leave. To Horror, Frogmen were something of an enigma. These days he usually associated uniforms lem-policemen, soldiers, trait to find among Jews, monetary, biblical or racial

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such proven liars nothing they did or said could be relied upon. He had always known the truth about the Holocaust, that the reported deaths had been grossly exaggerated. He personally believed that less than a million Jews had died at the intervention of the Reich. He moved to the shelter of a nearby alley, which he judged had sufficient light and shade for his purpose. He stood quietly against its wall, so as not to appear too eager, and watched around the corner into the square. Slouching down inside the anonymity of his coat he let one group of Frogmen pass, but it was not long before another trio appeared. They walked purposefully amongst the crowd in Horror's direction. The Frogman on the far right of the group was a huge figure, well over seven feet. He tottered on high heels that made him seem monstrously camp. His laboured breathing, slow and steady through the air-tube of his heavy rubber gas mask, or discipline helmet, carried over the heads of the crowd. A ponderous latex suit swathed his body. Beneath his suit very loose thin rubber bloomers hung. His balls were tightly strapped around the base of his scrotum. That sexual tension, Horror knew, would make him a more exacting biexcreterminator. The head of the Frogman on the far left was enclosed in a tight-fitting helmet of thick moulded rubber. A pressurised gas pipe attached to it, fitted slackly inside his mouth. The air apparatus pushed him towards the ground, and he walked with a peculiar splay-footed gait. Booted fishing waders came up to his waist, and strapped over his rubber-enclaved chest. A long black rubber macintosh (or cape, Horror could not tell) trailed the sidewalk. From the manner of

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his walk Horror was sure that he wore a velvet-lined kitten collar that passed tightly about the base of his scrotum. From the metal canister on his back, gas could be forced into his mouth until his cheeks bulged against the rubber helmet. Once swelled, he looked like a cobra bullfrog stuffed with poison. An acid mouthful of his gas-spit could corrode human skin. The third Frogman, who lagged slightly behind the group, was of a smaller stature, possibly five-two, and from the manner of his walk he seemed much older. Chains and tapes connected his enema pipes tightly around his hips. A dozen or so pipes ran up to his gas-cans. An L-shaped weasel-skinned handle was attached to the top of the pressure pump. The tops of the pumps were held open, ready for a rapid retrieval of anal matter. All three of them carried NumberTens, casually visible and tied to their waist belts. NumberTens were greased rods, two inches in diameter and five inches long, made of smooth plastic or rubber, with a wide base to prevent them entering too high up the anus. Several narrow chains or straps were connected to the bases, and secured tightly up the fronts and backs by waist belts. This ensured that the rods could not be removed except by special welding equipment-and then only under strict medical supervision. Enema pipes, attached by long rubber tubes to the canisters on their backs, were greased and ready to insert. Horror registered the weapons that the Frogmen displayed. The sight of them was like seeing old friends. The Filipino fighting knife-the balisong-protruded from the waders. The urban skinner, a push dagger held like a corkscrew for a twist death, was

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fixed to the waistbands. Horror's teeth gleamed in the neon as he watched the bobbing chiselled armour-piercing black head of the tanto sneak from the sleeve of a Frogman's macintosh. The fixed single-edged stainless steel blade was designed to slash and drive. Held correctly, with the blade running along the forearm, it was almost impossible to block. Horror made up his mind. This would be over before it began. He left the protection of the wall, and strode out onto the teeming carefully they had They him.

sidewalk. He stood with his legs braced, his full hands buried in the pockets of his coat. His legs felt as though been fettered to the floor. He waited. approached him in a rush, and stopped arrogantly before

'Jewboys?' asked Horror, smiling. Only by the infrequent blinking of the eyes could Horror tell that a living man dwelt behind the rubber mask that confronted him. The Frogman removed his air-pipe and cracked. his mouth. 'No, no, my friend, Hispanic, Pachuco.' He waved his arms in a friendly gesture. 'Oh well, have it your way,'said Horror, now oblivious to the people passing around them. 'Spic, Guinea, Polak, Mex-Pachuco.. .it's all Jew-related. What do I fucking care what you pass yourselves off as?' 'Why you are not friendly?' The Frogman's voice came out in a metallic snort. 'You have plenty stuff.' 'Maybe,' said Horror calmly. 'Maybe not.' The second Frogman pulled his mask free of his face. 'An English brown hatter-sweet talmanoani! We are lucky, I think we are going

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to enjoy ourselves tonight!' 'Chief cook and bottle-washer!' Horror laughed. More lubricant from his hat swirled about. 'Hey, hey, Twatolla!' The giant Frogman reached out to touch Horror's face. 'Sic perntii domiscori-cari.You run with us in the alley. Kisda Kafish?' Horror's lips broke into a beguiling smile. 'Why not? We could all benefit from a little exercise.' Despite the Frogman's fearsome apparel and size, close to, Horror thought that he just looked poor and under-nourished. He had seen the same impoverished arrogant look many times in England. Usually, it denoted a bad diet and feelings of ineptitude, or an inability to cope with the world. The political climate in England over the last forty years had reduced the populace to accepting deprivation as their reward for winning the war. Perhaps he should have been less surprised to find a similar attitude in these turd-burglars. They obviously sought to hide their feelings of racial inferiorityand their perverse sexual appetites-behind a mask of bondage. An unaccustomed feeling of pity touched Lord Horror. He glared at them, regretting now that this shortage of time had forced him into a confrontation. These androgynous, chlorotic fagfantasies were rapidly shaping up to be a waste of his time. He was in no doubt what section of America most needed his attention-the American Civil Liberties Union Bleeding Heart Liberal New York Jewish Intellectual. The situation had only deteriorated since he had broadcasted to America in the early I940s. Until now, he had never been sure

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of the reception he had been given. It was apparent America had not heeded his warning. His propaganda speeches had followed on the heels of his old wireless colleague, Ezra Pound. Between 194-I and 194-3 they had recorded for Radio Rome twice a week. The programmes were broadcast by Italy's English Language service, on a short-wave frequency, and later transmitted to England and America. Like himself, Pound had been into eugenics as opposed to race suicide. In the early days of the war Pound too had been an unstinting propagandist for Hitler. 'Every sane act you commit,' he said, 'is committed in homage to Hitler. England's gaols have never before been so full of political prisoners guilty of nothing save their beliefs and convictions.' Times had not changed. Horror feared that it was now too late to turn the tide. The Jew had come to power. Power, he knew, was to the Jew as great a stimulant as money. He was a man standing alone before them. The odds were racked-up. A smouldering anger had long ago been added to his feelings of impotency. His isolation was further aggravated by the influence Jews now held over international affairs. He blamed them totally for his present exile. The English authorities, in a rare act of conscience, had refused to renew his broadcasting licence and had ordered his deportation. In reality they had used him as a scapegoat, a sop to the European Parliament which had placed England under immense pressure to account for its war crimes in the Irish concentration camps of Longkesh and Armagh. Throughout Europe, the Irish suffering, their inhuman treatment and death at the hands

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of the English had been compared to the suffering at Dachau and Auschwitz. Horror's presence had become both a reminder of Germany's alleged war crimes and an embarrassment to the British Government. He had found his name printed next to George Raft's on the Deportation Order-Raft was barred from England and listed as an 'undesirable alien', even though the actor had been dead for some years, which made Horror feel that Raft and he were regarded as two drops of water from the same polluted tap. In his last broadcast from England, Horror had spoken out against the latent hostility the Jew held for the gentile. This hatred was part of the Jew's basic religion. He had pointed out that Germany had done the Jews the greatest favour in their long history. Since the war Jews had been rushing from country to country pleading and gaining entrance on compassionate grounds for the so-called Jew crimes committed against them by Germany. The many had capitalised to an unprecedented degree on the distress of the few. Horror had not been fooled by them for a moment, but he had to watch with mounting disgust as the ubiquitous kike got his foot through the door of countries denied to Judaism for centuries. Jews now had their stranglehold on the world's economy. You couldn't shit without asking a Jew's permission. In America, a

younger and sturdier race, the Jew neededseverelycurtailing.Horror felt that if he could find an effective remedy, here was a continent to succour. Perhaps in America his message would be better understood. The racial discrimination that the Jew-and so-called enlightened Americans-detested in Germany, had possessed the Jew for

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thousands of years, and the Jew would always consolidate his position, in trade or profession, by relentlessly squeezing out the gentile. The colonisation of America by the Jew had resulted in the Jew acquiring more power than at any time in its history. It had turned Israel into the country's 52nd state. If Russia backed the Arab nations in earnest to counteract this poisonous threat of Jewish-American Imperialism on their doorstep, the Jew would once again be responsible for a world war. In the square, a Ford Zodiac repeatedly backfired. There was a startled response from the crowds, who had mistaken the volley of retorts for gunshots. Horror feigned interest. He was reminded of how bodies in the Auschwitz ovens had cracked open when the heat was on, before the Sondercommandos went round with buckets gathering up the remains. The camp doctors would later 'potentise' ashes of the testicles, spleens and portions of the burnt skins of virile Jews in an attempt to find a test control serum as a final solution (the 'Homeopathic Solution' as Himmler had once jokingly told him). Health for the many from the death of the few. Horror brought his hands out of his pockets, holding a pack of Lucky Sevens. 'You moving, Nosferatu?'The Frogman laughed.

.

Horror watched the small Frogman enter the gloom of the alley, closely followed by the giant Frogman who looked back over his shoulder at them. Just before he dipped into the black, Horror saw him withdraw a thin steel tubular cosh from the arm of his rubber suit. He knew that when the cosh was shaken, a ball-bearing on a long chain snapped-out-one hit could knock a hole straight through his skull.

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'Go ahead,' said Horror, drawing a cigarette to the corner of his mouth and lighting it. At least he had forced the Frogmen to enter the alley separately. Now they would have to take him on a one-toone. 'Listen!' The Frogman in front of Horror stepped closer to him. 'What's your fucking game?' He stripped the mask completely back from his head, leaving the latex goggles on the top of his scalp. Horror could smell excreta on the man's breath. The Frogman's features were pure Mexican, tanned and drink-swollen, showing no trace of Polish or Jewish blood. In the brief instant that he stared straight at Horror, the Frogman's face took on a look of anger tempered by fear, as if he knew he was being set-up. He slackened his mouth. 'You move now, or I'll release you right here.' Eclipsed Horror took one step forward, dropped the cigarette and placed a friendly arm around the Frogman's shoulders. 'No problem, I'm your patsy, right? But not in public, old love. There's plenty of time and space in here to become acquainted. We' Il all nip in together, cosy what? More intimate.' He winked, and with his arm still around the Frogman, he pushed past the pedestrians and guided him into the alley's shadows. Too late to stop now; he thought. Perhaps he'd made a mistake. Maybe the other two were Jews. He let out a fatalistic sigh, and carefully sank his free hand back into the pocket of his coat, closing it over the handle of one of his slitters. Suddenly he felt old and ill. He had been here a thousand times, in a hundred different countries, involved in the same wearisome eliminations, and still the Jew spread his web of corruption. This aspect of his life had become an unsolvable burden,

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and he was ready to opt out of the responsibilities of continuing. But what was left?What else could he contribute? There was no cure for his virus-of that he was quite sure. It was pivotal and necessary to his life. He had been its privileged emissary. In that, he could justifiably take pride. It had elevated him above his fellow men, whose inertia had compounded his task. While they had been shirking the problem, refusing to see moral wrong in the Jew, he had stepped forward and clearly said 'NO! 'That they had failed to see his actions as a solution, only condemned them. He lived constantly under his obsessional malaise, killing Jews as frequently as most people took aspirin; and for not dissimilar reasons. Horror's face was clay. He allowed the Frogman to step into the shadow of the alley, then he brought out his slitters, moved directly behind him and cut forward with two vast strokes. The first blade struck the side of the Frogman's neck, and cut just below the mastoid process of the frog skull. The razor sliced through the vertebral artery. He pushed his slitter up the side of the neck, severing the rings of bone attached to the cervical vertebrae. A split second later his other slitter entered at the back of the frog-head, at the point where the trapezius muscle attached itself to-the occipital bone. Horror felt the dome of the Frogman's skull disappearing into the tense neck muscles. Both incisions totally wiped the brain. He stepped deftly into the alley after the Frogman, catching his falling corpse. Holding it from behind in a bugger's embrace, he walked forward with it. Lights blistered before his eyes. Spume shot from his skullcap and crawled into the air. A head pain that would not quit almost

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made him black out. Cream spit from the vaginas clung to his eyes, and in an effort to remove it he rubbed his face against a coat fold on his shoulder. In the still gloom, the small Frogman immediately came at him in a rush, waving his stiletto blade. Horror was forced to drop the frogman he was holding and dispatch his attacker with a kick on the side of his head. The blow crushed the Frogman's temporal bone, sending him collapsing against the wall, and folding him in a wet coleslaw on the floor. Two of the man's enema bags burst as he fell, covering his bouncing head with spreading excreta. Malign Horror looked expectantly for the third Frogman, but in the darkness of the alley he could see nothing. He bent his body low, and listened. Except for the boisterous sounds coming from the square he could hear only the hissing of shite caught on the outside radiators. He kicked the figure of the tall Frogman that lay on the floor. Blood from the man's open neck splashed down his rubber suit. He fell on top of him. Using the Frogman's chest as a knee support he slowly lifted up the dead face. He peered into the lifeless eyes, which had slipped beyond his reach, and prized open the Frogman's jaw. 'Come on, come on!' He wheedled a grim smile across his lips. 'Let's get it down your neck.' He rammed his slitter into the man's mouth, twisting it in a grinding circle. Blood and teeth bubbled and flew from the yawning hole. As he cut, all of the Frogman's face broke in a whirlpool of latex, tissue and bone. Then he put the blade to the man's hairline. When he cut a full circle, he tugged, and the scalp came free-as easy as pulling a pillow out of its slip. He dropped the naked scalp into his coat pocket. On

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his head the vagina lips trembled and spluttered, and from the cap poured a torrent of water that almost blinded him. The leeching moon freed itself from behind the night clouds as Horror arose and danced further into the alley. He hooted and moaned softly and almost fell over a full trashcan. The hot pipes that led out of the wall from a diner kitchen pushed steam in waves across the alley floor. The steam billowed, cloaking his loins in a white sweat. He stripped off his coat and threw it over the trashcan. Humid winds from the square sneaked between the holes of his string vest. His old bones stalked up and down the length of the narrow ginnel. His head shook crazily back and forth. He hopped distractedly around, picking up the scattered enema bags and forming them into a spiral mound similar to a molehill. The crack of the third frogman's cosh being opened somewhere in the shadows alerted him, and he spun round. From an alcove in the wall that he had overlooked, the massive rubber-suited figure of the giant Frogman slowly emerged, holding his cosh ready at his side. They closed in on one another, but before the Frogman could act, Maximum Horror swept his razor in low, easily slicing the blade through the manufactured rubber into the Frogman's testicles. Horror drew back his head while he kept pushing his blade in. Blood spurted past him, and the ripped ball-sacs folded over his fist, soft as dewed orchids, cold as ice mint-juleps. The giant doubled up, his high heels slipping from under him and Horror bent forward. He whispered intimately into the Frogman's ear. 'Just as fresh as new bread, what?' Forming his lips into one terrible, silent scream, the Frogman looked directly into Lord Horror's face. Then Horror opened his

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own mouth and sucked the head in. He snorted and gripped the sweating forehead with his horse teeth. He pushed the teeth hard into the bone. Wrapping his bottom teeth under the man's chin, he allowed his tongue one languid wipe of the enclosed face, before clamping his teeth together and crushing the skull. The musculature of the man's head fell, and slopped, light as a sherry trifle. Horror snapped his mouth open-and-shut in broad crushing strokes. In his cheeks, blood and bone meshed in a stew, and he chewed solidly on the head. Intermittently, he shook it, as a dog shakes a bone. As he ate, the giant Frogman's body jerked in a solo masturbatory dance against his body. Horror spoke through a swell of blood, 'Trying to fuck me, Sonny Jim? I thought you had your 'union card' in fornication; that you were a finished swordsman. Don't forget, now you're a eunuch,you-can't-8et-it-up!' He punctuated his speech with vicious upward staccato thrusts of his razor inside the Frogman's stomach. He kept the head inside his mouth for some time, chewing heavily. Then he let it sink down his throat, and shook out the blood from his mouth. 'Now,' he said. 'I'd say that was tastier than arseholes!' The lifeless man farted, and Horror smelt a dead stool evacuating itself from the man's bowels. He held the huge body at arm's length by two bones that protruded rigidly from the gashed neck. Spinning the body around, he tore the enema paraphernalia from its back and crushed the air canister and tubes with a single bare fist. He let the frogman fall. Gathering up the latex bags, he added them to the mound on the floor. Now, thought Horror, for the peineftrte et dure.

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He walked back to where the small dead Frogman lay, and stripped the rubber suit from its body. He knelt, and held the deathface in his hands. Death seemed to radiate out to him, bathing his head in its glow. He peered into its hooked features. 'Definitely!' he enunciated slowly. Reassuring himself that the man had been of one hundred percent Jew blood, he laid the naked body out on its back in a straight line, then lay down horizontally on his stomach, with his lips touching the top of the dead man's scalp. He swept his arms backwards and forwards in a fish-crawl to clear away the trash from the ground around him. His body surged. Pale-white within the rays of the ocean's tumescence, he imagined he was a deep-water shark, his oceanic insectile mandibles clicking and worrying the steamy air. He pressed his chin against the warm ground. He edged upwards until his nose came to rest against the crown of the man's head. The smell of oil and asbestos and excreta rising from the man's scalp brought his headache close to its climax. He let his body relax. He loosened his mouth, and began feeding the slippery head into his jaws. He resisted the impulse to clamp his large socking horse teeth around it. His mouth was now wet with excreta, and slid easily over the knob of the Frogman>scranium, and he began to prepare the cavity of his own chest. He shook loose its physiognomy in readiness. Keeping theJew head in his mouth, he inhaled deeply. The brown carapace began to heave and slide down into his extended maw. When he reached the four-by-two's neck, he nibbled delicately at the wrinkled skin. Salivating rapidly, he continued the swallowing motions and reached the naked shoulders. He had to stretch his

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mouth to its limit. He felt its corners ripping with the exertion. Spit and blood seeped from the run of his skin and dribbled onto the ground. His heartbeat doubled. Summoning his remaining willpower, he forced his mouth to enclose the dead shoulders, and his teeth chattered with a chill that was more of the spirit than the body. He pumped and inched forward again, gradually sinking the Jew into him. He felt his chest cavity rending under the immense strain of the load. The dull pain of the man's bulk lying tight against the inside bones of his thin body boiled upwards to his head; electrocuting the nerve roots of his vagina cap. He eased on down, and came to a halt at the man's hips. There he stopped. An ague shook through him. He felt his body bump of its own accord from left right across the floor of the alley. In a moment he continued eating, and closed on the hips. A white salad sauce poured in a pale rainbow torrent from his nostrils over the Jew's privates. Inside Horror, the Jew's head breached the lining into his seventh intercostal space, and his stomach showered hydrochloric juices over it. As he reached the Jew's knees he heaved himself onto his feet. He propped himself unsteadily against the wall, wreathed in steam, with the two bent legs of the Jew brazenly dangling from his mouth. He raised his hands to the pain in his head, clasped it, stared up at the big moon. When the white orb tossed down light, the loose legs swung and crossed one over the other as though the old Jew inside had seated himself casually in a roomy armchair.

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The preening lord dropped his arms and gripped the stick-legs by the ankles. He lifted them high above his head, and swallowed. They disappeared down his throat. When they had vanished from sight a sigh involuntarily escaped him. The Frogman lay folded in a great foetus inside, comfortably rained-on by bubbling acids. Pain knifed through Horror's head. He collapsed. He lay full-length on the ground. The Jew was choked inside him. He brought up more sauce from his nostrils. It was tinged with acid. He felt as though he had just inhaled a canister of amyl nitrite on top of a gut-full of goofballs. On the narrow strip of sidewalk where the Square crossed the top of the alley, Horror could see the passing feet of the pedestrians. From this angle they were discorporate legs, shuffling rapidly past him in an Egyptian sand dance; a thousand Wilson, Keppel and Betty's. Beyond the legs, the sodium lights fell on the asphalt, making it appear as a dark timorous lake. The cruising traffic had disappeared, replaced by writhing clusters of black amorphophalli. Horror was nauseated by the sight of the hot, firm stems twisting and turning through the passing crowds. After the struggle, a feeling of wellbeing overcame him. The snivelling unrepentant Jew had been reduced to a dietary menu for the gentile. He closed his sphincter muscle. He would keep the biological roughage inside him for at least a week. His body was its house, a Zion castle, a Jew moat, a meat container. His body could simultaneously be home and grave; his old wattled skin made a fitting outer wall for a Jew crypt.

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It came to him that his body could literally accommodate thousandsof Jews. He had struck on the perfect Final Solution-he could eat and digest the Jews of the world! After his years of wandering this method of decimation was the one he had been searching for. The thought of the pleasure that his achievement would give Himmler, Bormann and Hitler, delighted him. Contentedly, he lifted up his face, letting the steam coat its surface in a wet lather. He could be a one-man Hilton, reserved especially for Jews-or the largest Jew bank in Europe. In moments of depression he could think about the Jew lying inside him. By constantly introducing a new body shape into his system, he could baffle the ravages of his own body. He could use the Jew as a virus receptacle, a chamberpot for his diseases. Thanks to the assimilative powers of the Jew, perhaps he could rejuvenate himself endlessly and free himself from death. He let out a long, wheezling laugh. Perhaps this was what they meant by having 'inner resources'! He dragged his body almost into the full glare ofTimes Square. There he lay, bloated, like some gaffed bonito on a sunlit beach. Wearily, he picked himself up from the floor, and spread out his coat next to the mound of enema bags. He lifted the heavy bags and deposited them one by one onto his coat, then wrapped them up in a swagman's sack and slung them over his back. He walked uncaringly into the sodium neon. Half of the vaginas on his skullcap had died. The vulvas lay cracked and open. The evening's exertions had burst their clitorises. The ones that remained functional twittered in delirium, giving off a diluted silver spume.

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Times Square appeared as a red hell-rimmed crater, crawling with beetles. Lights and gasses spiralled in a frozen emuvium from the open dens and speeding Cawthornithopters. Dizziness gripped him. The ground beneath heaved, as though he were on the deck of a swaying ship. The upside-down position and weight of the Jew inside him was unsettling his balance. A build-up of toxins in his stomach made him belch. A fierce pain crawled across his head. Still clutching the fox-fur coat he fell into the back of a yellow cab. Hours passed. A sickly light, errant and pellucid, thrilled above him. In a drama close to somniaturbula, ganglias of cables and wires, nerve fibres and raunchy buzzing lights radiated down at him from a ceiling, meshed together in a flue. His body felt tropical, infusing him with a chimerical dread. He woke fitfully, his limbs heavy and somnambulant. He was back in his room. During the long night the hotel's central heating had switched itself on. The heat was terrific. His head throbbed, full of virulent stuffs and old memories. He thought he could hear the sound of boiling broth close by. Sulphurous fumes filled the room, and a bittersweet almond taste prevailed in his mouth. He peered from a single drained eye. His room at the Chelsea looked as though the mad hand of a god had transposed it into an everglade sarcopha~s. He lay on his side, his head awkwardly positioned on a once-white pillow. Stuck next to him was a single hank of hair that pushed an umber stain into the cotton. He tried to lift his left hand to remove the hair. The hand moved slowly, as though

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pulling through treacle, then stopped. He raised his head slightly and peered over his naked white shoulders down the length of the bed. Despite an intense light, he could not see clearly. From his chest downwards he appeared to be encased inside a blackish nitrate crust similar to a moth's chrysalis. Beneath this dark surface he could feel a moist second layer that pressed warmly against his skin, snugly cocooning him. Futilely, Horror tried to rise up from his bed of excrement. The chrysalis skin broke, and the smell almost made him faint. From his neck he retched a yellow waxen glue. Defeated, he lapsed back in his warm prison. During the night, monstrously huge poppies, torture-coloured roses and pain-white petunias had grown around him. At his feet, nettles had sprouted from the dark skein. Weeds muffled the metallic clicking of shite flies. Dung beetles scurried everywhere over the crust's surface. Neon tubes wrapped in bald flex pushed through the shite and added their burning light to the room. Myriad phalanxes of wasps had taken possession of the upper cornices. They swarmed about the ceiling like dense waves of black hair. For a moment, he thought he was mad, lying with fallen soldiers in the fields ofFlanders,Ypres or the Somme. The bed giggled and sighed. It heaved with an almost sentient life. It let off a series of swaggering farts that echoed ominously round the room in search of an exit. The lights shook, and a swell of steam rose from the bed. Back it came to him. He remembered packing the enema bags tightly about

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his body before falling asleep. In the hothouse of the night, they had burst. The contents of the bags had settled over him. The temperature had stimulated the growth of the plants. He felt a lugubrious stirring beneath his chest, and a wet rose slid away from the shifting mess. A wavering shape, like a giant painted wigwam, began to materialise between two oscillating neon lights. The room beat white, almost blinding him. a start, he recognised the shape of the - With demon goddess Ammut, Devourer of the Dead. The goddess lumbered forward. The phosphorous fat of her elephantine hips shifted and wriggled with a furious restlessness. She waddled in the neon around the foot of his bed, before coming to a halt before him. Her forepart was that of a crocodile. Her hindquarters those of a hippopotamus. Her middle that of a lion. The long crocodile jaw leered down at him, and even above the stink of the room he could smell her tomb breath. Horror flinched back into his pillow, his now spherical face as small as a child's. An iridescent chrome-backed shite beetle crawled over his head. He began to whimper, and in a small sad voice he whispered, 'Oh Mother Jew, Oh Mother Jew, Israel, I am my father's son.' He glanced up at the demon, who had stuck a jade finger into his bed and was looking bemusedly at him. In a rising voice, Horror continued, 'Being, broad of stride, who comes forth from Heliopolis, I have done no Evil. There is no iniquity in my belly, there is no wickedness in me.' Amm~t withdrew her finger, and stretched toward him. She tapped her wet finger on his hooked nose. 'You naughty boy!' her

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long jaw snapped. 'What have you been doing? What a mess you've got yourself into!' She withdrew suddenly. Raising her massive buttocks to him she slapped them down on the bottom of the bed. A wave ran through the shite, lifting it to the level of his chin. Her back was facing him. Turning her crocodile's head, she regarded him sombrely over her shoulder. 'Well there's nothing I can do,' she said. 'It's too late for all that now. You should have thought of the consequences years ago when you started all your foolishness. You have no option but to dry your eyes, make up, and take your medicine.' Horror struggled with the bed, a babble falling from his lips. 'The Lord is in his HolyTemple, the Lord's throne is in heaven, His eyes are upon Mankind, He takes their measure at a glance.' 'You can stop that right this very minute!' Amm~t arose. She lumbered up the bed towards him, and struck him a glancing blow on the head. 'Didn't you hear me, it's too bloody late!' 'I'll wise-up,' said Horror in a high voice. 'Honest to God!' 'You say that every time I see you, but the minute my back's turned you're at it again.' Amm~t spread her legs. 'Well, not any more. What's inside you will see to that! 'The blue-green skin around her jaw tightened. 'And you've only yourself to blame!' 'Osiris, Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani!' Horror's voice was rising to a pitch close to hysteria. More fissures opened in the scabrous swathe. Before he could turn away, the head of a bovine-eyed foetus pushed through into the light of the room, and he screamed. He felt a fresh movement by his hips, and knew that another unholy birth was occurring. The shite-bed seemed to be acting as an incubation unit, an alternative womb. Dimly, he watched the foetus near his

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chest slip away onto the floor. From the bed sounded a coprophagic intrauterine fugue. 'Shut-up! Shut-up!' Amm~t stamped her great foot angrily. On her head the metal curlers that gripped the short hairs of her scalp jangled together and her long tail wrapped about her swelling hips. 'You wretched little heathen, you'll get your arse tanned good and proper. When I think of how we've spoiled you. We spared the rod and look what became of you!' She looked down at him in exas-

impotent, childlike. From the road outside, the shout of running children rose up to his window. He realised they were a memory. They were school children returning home. He was six-perhaps seven-and he was lying in his bedroom in his parents' house, warm and snug, reading a comic. A daily newspaper serial. The strip described the adventure of two elves who lived on the edge of Leafy Wood. Meng and Ecker often reminded

peration. Horror lay silent, blood seeping from his broken nose. His mouth opened and closed. 'Oh, it's OUTfault, is it?' The crocodile eyes fastened on him in

him of them-although Meng was more of a changeling than an elf. Possibly the comic strip was the reason for his fondness for the

annoyance. Incensed by his silence, Amm~t lashed out and cuffed Horror's head again. 'Well, you can just lie there and take what's coming to you!' She hit him a third time. Horror kept his eyes tightly closed. After Amm~t had ceased striking him, he could still hear the

by a magician in a glade in the wood. A limerick was carved in the stone: 'This is the statue of Whisper- a-Wish. Wish in a whisper, and you'll get your wish!' The two elves had left their tree houses early, to visit Woozel the Wood Wizard, and when they came across this 'Whisper-a- Wish' they immediately wished for a pirate galleon to be delivered to them. When the ship suddenly materialised, caught in the buckling branches of a cluster of oak trees above their heads, they had to wish it away before it collapsed on top of them.

demon shouting and stamping about the room, tugging at wires and killing shite-flies. 'Look what a sight you've made of your room-and the smell!' A;;'m~t sighed. 'And it could look so

Twins over the years. The elves had found a stone statue abandoned

pretty... Of course, there's no point in telling you now. If you had only listened to me. . . ' The voice seemed to go on forever, and Horro~ felt sick. Gasses

Why he should remember that, he could not imagine-except that that afternoon was the last time he had felt truly contented, and safe.

were boiling in his gut. Later, he opened his eyes just once. Amm~t had left, and the room was almost quiet. The weakness he had been feeling for months now seemed complete. The shite had settled back in a comforting blanket around his body. It was ironic that he should end like this,

The house in Streatham was a sprawling Victorian semi, sur-

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rounded by a large garden. His mother and father had returned from China and had been busily seed-planting all summer. The garden teemed with marigold, redbud, japonica and crape-myrtle. Their scents helped obliterate the strong smell of brewery hops that

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:.:

chest slip away onto the floor. From the bed sounded a coprophagic intrauterine fugue. 'Shut-up! Shut-up!' Amm~t stamped her great foot angrily. On her head the metal curlers that gripped the short hairs of her scalp jangled together and her long tail wrapped about her swelling hips. 'You wretched little heathen, you'll get your arse tanned good and proper. When I think of how we've spoiled you. We spared the rod and look what became of you!' She looked down at him in exasperation. Horror lay silent, blood seeping from his broken nose. His mouth opened and closed. 'Oh, it's OUTfault, is it?' The crocodile eyes fastened on him in annoyance. Incensed by his silence, Amm~t lashed out and cuffed Horror's head again. 'Well, you can just lie there and take what's coming to you!' She hit him a third time. Horror kept his eyes tightly closed. After Amm~t had ceased striking him, he could still hear the demon shouting and stamping about the room, tugging at wires and killing shite-flies. 'Look what a sight you've made of your room-and the smell!' A~m~t sighed. 'And it could look so pretty... Of course, there's no point in telling you now. If you had only listened to me...' The voice seemed to go on forever, and Horro~ felt sick. Gasses were boiling in his gut. Later, he opened his eyes just once. Amm~t had left, and the room was almost quiet. The weakness he had been feeling for months now seemed complete. The shite had settled back in a comforting blanket around his body. It was ironic that he should end like this,

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impotent, childlike. From the road outside, the shout of running children rose up to his window. He realised they were a memory. They were school children returning home. He was six-perhaps seven-and he was lying in his bedroom in his parents' house, warm and snug, reading a comic. A daily newspaper serial. The strip described the adventure of two elves who lived on the edge of Leafy Wood. Meng and Ecker often reminded him of them-although Meng was more of a changeling than an elf. Possibly the comic strip was the reason for his fondness for the Twins over the years. The elves had found a stone statue abandoned by a magician in a glade in the wood. A limerick was carved in the stone: 'This is the statue of Whisper- a-Wish. Wish in a whisper, and you'll get your wish!' The two elves had left their tree houses early, to visit Woozel the Wood Wizard, and when they came across this 'Whisper-a- Wish' they immediately wished for a pirate galleon to be delivered to them. When the ship suddenly materialised, caught in the buckling branches of a cluster of oak trees above their heads, they had to wish it away before it collapsed on top of them. Why he should remember that, he could not imagine-except that that afternoon was the last time he had felt truly contented, and safe. The house in Streatham was a sprawling Victorian semi, surrounded by a large garden. His mother and father had returned from China and had been busily seed-planting all summer. The garden teemed with marigold, redbud, japonica and crape-myrtle. Their scents helped obliterate the strong smell of brewery hops that

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wafted through his open window from the distillery at the bottom of the road. He had awoken early with a bilious headache, and instead of sending him to school his mother had confined him to bed. But by lunch his headache had cleared, and he had been allowed to play in the garden. He took with him his box of tin soldiers. Using the tall grass as camouflage he arranged them into three opposing armies. Sprawled on the grass on his stomach he moved the little tin men gleefully through the shrubbery. One group of soldiers were to launch a surprise attack on the other two, and he buried them in the ground beneath the loose top-soil in the centre of the garden. But when he needed to call on them he realised he had forgotten where they were buried. He searched fruitlessly until his headache returned and his mother caught him throwing-up in the back garden grid, and marched him hurriedly back to bed. Years later his parents died. He moved elsewhere, but periodically he returned to the garden to search for the missing soldiers. To the new owners he was regarded as a nuisance. They threatened him with the police. Undeterred, he switched his searches from day to night. On his last nocturnal visit to the house he angrily dug-over the entire garden, leaving uprooted rose bushes scattered down the length of the stone pathway. Why he should remember this he wasn't sure either. The memory had stayed buried inside him like a sick tumour. In death's hour wefind afinal strength.A corfirmation if our malaise: our redeemingchaos. With an effort, Horror raised his head. Stuffs dropped from his face. Abstractly, he tried to see the fading room.

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'Is that all there is?' He spoke softly, his voice a melismatic whisper. His head shook. His bowels opened. A thin bile eased from his mouth. He swallowed. He felt a crawling thing move with swift purpose through his body. 'Fuck this!' Horror ground his teeth. He heard the gold fillings crack. 'And fuck that!' It came from him in a rush-the dead Jew's hand, pushing itself up out of his throat. In a dread coma he watched as before his eyes the fingers of the dead hand loosened. Something fell from the hand onto the shite and was sucked beneath the surface before he could properly make out its shape. The hand tightened again into a fist and pumped back into his mouth with such violence that he was rocked back into his bed. He felt it touch down into his chest. Then pain. A burning torch had been lit inside him. The hand came out again, and dropped a wadge of flesh onto the bed, and sank back rapidly inside him. 'The fucker!' Horror's lips peeled back to reveal red blood on bone. Thefucking Jew is emptying me if

life.

He broke into a slurred speech. 'It wasn't much like paradise...' . . . The entombed

bastard

holds

mass. . .

, . . . amidst the dirt and all. . . ' .. .he passesforth the last sacrament. , ... There sat the sweetest angel. . . ' . . .}e»fucker; live to kill. 'I need you more than ever now.' True, all true. 'I need you more than ever now.' We end our lives in a chaos bubble: it's onlyfitting

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, .. .Fistfuck them all, sad fuckers. . . ' Allfied--all done, lift me on the pyre. '... what goes around, comes around...' Thefeast is overand the lampsexpire. , ... Know what I mean...?' Horror

forced a broad wink.

'Coughdrop?' He lapsed into a dumb silence, passion spent, the only movement within. He waited expectantly. After a spell that seemed to stretch forever, he arched his pale head. He felt a boiling nausea. His lips tricked open and a voice inside thrilled: 'Wobble to death!' The very last thing Lord Horror remembered was the full Jew's hand regurgitated in a swirling pool of white acid that poured from his dead mouth.

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THE AUSCHWITZ OF OZ Motheifuckers: The Auschwitz if Oz, 1996

IN THE DESPAIRINGhiatus before midnight, Doctor Mengele's dog-boys set up a howling metronomic beat. Slapping their haunches in a rhythmic mantra on the wooden floor of their shed their canine throats whined a prolonged a cappellafalsetto which, as Ecker dryly observed twenty years on, was later perfected and made bearable by the Rivingtons. Meng had been kept awake for hours and was not in a good mood. With his sulphurous-red knife unsheathed he had sidled into their barracks and without issuing a sound skinned a big dog-boy by the name of Bundalo. He had hung its slippery pelt above their door. 'If I hear so much as another fart,' the half-man slithered his exposed penis across the rickety wooden walls and held up a gnarled finger, 'this goes up the arse it comes from.' A grievous beast, walking upright on its powerful hind legs, bared its fangs at Meng. 'Another night, Twinboy.' Its words implied a finality, but Meng lingered a busy few minutes to make his point, then left with the severed leg of the dispatched dog-boy tucked in his belt. A morsel to nibble on during the coming day.

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The deviant strain of miradors had learned to fear the Meng above all creatures in Auschwitz save for Or Mengele, the Angel of Death. At the hands of the half-man, many of their brothers lay buried beneath the red clay of the camp's compound. From the other side of night's creep the grotesque land of Auschwitz thrilled into a golden fantasia, and the killing machines of Birkenau buzzed with urgent fire. Lines of waiting dog-boys, their top-heavy bodies bunny-hopping together in a mincing formation, came arrogantly into the dawn light. In a nonce's prowl their thick back legs churned up the red mud until it ranked in vast tiers of bones and excrement. When the dog-boys travelled beneath the arced illuminated sign, 'Arbeit Macht Frei', a myriad fairy mode lights exploded over their dipping forms. Equidistant between the two miles which separated Auschwitz from Birkenau the dog-boys began to move their ungainly jaws in a hideous sucking and blowing melody that was just about discernible as Schubert's melancholy Opus 6. When the approaching trains logged into Birkenau and the crowds of Jews, gypsies, giants and dwarves were unloaded onto the mud compound, the dog-whistling grew into an atonal shriek. Like a monster on the edge of a dream (as Ben Hecht would have said) Doctor Mengele would make his first appearance of the day. He quickly took up the whistling melody, adding to it a new note of order which the pack mimicked hesitantly. Soon, the whole assembly ~ould be whistling a mad, hellish cacophony. When the Doctor idly flapped his folded white gloves against his palm, silence fell instantly, and the rows of immigrants herded

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forward in a shuffiing gait. Loudspeakers crackled to life as a tape-loop playing Lohenglin piped its power chords through the camp, and the dog-boys sank their victims indiscriminately into the killing grounds. Hued smoke spread from chimney to chimney and the Mussulmans-the half-dead-rose from their shallow bunks and set about the day's task of aping life. Ecker often stood for hours watching the eddying lines of humanity, the pitching sodium flames billowing from tall chimneys, his lips pursed, the terrible smell of cooking impregnating every cranny of his thin body. Nobody knows how it feels to put a child into the ground. Unaccustomed tears would come to Ecker. Every monster imagined by mankind had died and was reborn a hundred times more terrifying in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Around him, the saddest sights in the world had metamorphosed their image onto every man and woman on the earth. He and his brother had, in the truest sense, been birthed in those years of chaos. He had always been a vegetarian. But after Birkenau, he had turned vegan. Ecker was a natural ectomorph, his temperament pragmatic. Above his bunk in the mutation barrack hung his philosophy-' Only those who adapt to change survive' -Charles Darwin. Science under Hitler, 'thanatology' (the science of death), named after Thanatos, the Greek spirit who personified Death, had resulted in 'Mengele's Children'-a melisma of dwarves, hunchbacks, twins, gypsies, esoteric cripples and anything in the spectrum that passed for humanity in Mengele's oneiric dream.

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On an overcast day he came across a child holding a tiny green dragon in her frail arms. So much blood had been taken from her she looked as white as the winter snow which covered Auschwitz. Bones were visible beneath her rags. The dragon was slowly bleeding to death from cuts inflicted by the camp's barbed-wire fence. The girl was smiling; to see a dragon was lucky. Legend had it that to see a dragon was a sign that a missing loved one still lived. She placed it on the ground and it ran in a weaving hop across the stony compound, vanishing beneath a wooden hut. Still smiling, the girl walked on. Though dragons appeared infrequently, such anomalies were not unknown in the camps. In the summer of '42, Ecker had witnessed a fall of blue- and-red hoarfrost which had metamorphosed Birkenau into an enchanted glade, a Christmas card of flickering fires, spiralling chimneys and winning splendours, transforming the Auschwitz Movie House (showing a Monte Hale western that week) into a fitting palace for the Son of the Redeemer. One night a mad wind from Treblinka had blown in a flock of succubi. They landed on the roof of a long hut, flowing locks of vermilion hair surging around the open vaginas in their necks. An ague shook through Ecker as he had watched the visitation. They were passing a blind man between themselves. He sometimes thought Or Mengele too was a visitation, a glorious being from some malign planet, Captain Eugenic from Mars, or an houri from the dark side of the moon. They called him the 'Twins' Father' , and so he was, until he had given them to Lord Horror. Of their real father, there was just a distant memory, ephemeral and euphoric, though at times, like the rising of the full moon, Meng

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had insisted that Joseph Merrick-the

Elephant Man-was

his

true parent. Ecker shrugged his thin frame. There were two forms of theatre--comedy and tragedy. Meng was comedy. Ecker was tragedy, or at least its nearest relation. 'Shitfire!' exclaimed Meng, clambering over a carefully orchestrated trajectory of corpses. His fat bulk wobbled. 'Fuck a duck...' He skidded to a halt in front of an SS guard' ...Goofy, is that you?' From inside the brick crematorium a wind-up gramophone began to play a selection from Strauss's Die Fledermaus. The guard looked pityingly at the half-man and said, 'Wein witch fra mine.' With a pig stick he swiped Meng across the head. Meng broke the man's back and deposited the body, minus its black boots, among the hill of dead. 'Here...' He stopped a Sonderkommando '.. .have you heard this one?' Meng scratched his groin, trapping an earthworm with his thumb and squashing it on the inside of his hairy leg. 'Two white men walking through the jungle and they see a lion licking another lion's arse. One of the white men says, "Isn't that a bit unusual?'" "'Not really," replies the second. "It just ate a nigger and it's trying to get the taste out of its mouth!'" The man looked uncomprehendingly at Meng. That morning he had buried a field of dead children waist deep in the earth. In an open wind their bodies had moved like rooted serpents under the nacarat sun. 'You dozy cunt!' shouted Meng, exasperated by the Sonderkommando's lack of response. 'You can laugh, it's a fucking joke.'

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'Please, have you any food?' The man held out his hand. 'You what?' Meng asked incredulously, drawing his body up to its full height. 'I take the time to give you a fucking laugh-and you want a bleeding hand-out!' He cracked a loud fart. 'You're too cheeky by half.' He yanked out a rat-tail that had lodged in his back teeth. 'Here, chew on that.' Disgustedly, he marched off. Meng waxed philosophically. 'I can look into a face and know if it should die.' Beneath his feet the earth was a yellowish clay. Concrete pylons stretched in even rows to the horizon, barbed-wire strung between them from top to bottom. Crudely painted signs warned that the wires were charged with high-tension currents. 'I can know,' he continued, 'if it's ever going to amount to anything. And if it doesn't pose a threat, the next thing I ask myself... Does it deserve to live?' Inside the enormous squares bounded by the pylons stood hundreds of barrack-huts, covered with green tar-paper and arranged to form a long rectangular network of streets as far as the eye could see. 'And if I let it live, will it be of any use?Will it just be taking air from me?' A watchtower of emerald and jade stood in the centre of Auschwitz. From its cruel eye two strobe-lights flooded the camp with flashes as red as the ichor of salamanders. Now Meng stood for a minute in its thrill, his clothes shimmering like the scarlet wattles of dragons. After the operation Doctor Mengele had told him, 'With my assistance, you will be the sexiest man on earth. Are you ready for that responsibility?' Meng had assured him he was more than up to the job, adding, 'Any chance of giving me a two-foot dick.. .or two cunts.. .or both?' His nipples had stood out as firm as corn cobs.

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Up jumped a big frog. The length of a stick is infinite. Auschwitz, thought Ecker, is a semaphore from the past that spelled future. Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes orTarzan.A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard. In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well known globally as Coca-Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario the dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce, assured Horror, his cobra eyes stealing the dark. Sex and death, the Lord's calling card. Horror warmed. On a day trip to Buchenwald, two thousand Hasidic Jews pulled a char-a-banc full of dog-boys. Petrol was rationed, and

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progress was slow. The dog-boys were understandably irritated by the speed of the journey. One dog-boy, barking mad and firing on all cylinders, ripped the heads off a dozen Jewesses, eventually finding one that tasted of lemon meringue. Party hats were well in evidence, hanging jauntily from their slanted heads. Eight of them clambered on to the vehicle's roof and began to rock it from side to side, cheering cockily at the Austrian peasants whose villages they travelled through, beating them about the shoulders with dead Bengal monitor lizards. Meng and Ecker had been put on the bus to keep order. Meng had his work cut out. Strolling down the aisle he forked-in an eye here, a neck there, but to little avail. A mad, gleeful chaos ruled. 'OK. Any black dogs on board?' Meng gave a couple of sharp yelps and banged his foot twice. 'Come on, come on, just one Le Petite Negra Dawg.' A stocky dog-boy, suffering from eczema, lurched from its seat and let slavering jaws dribble over the half-man. Its tongue rolled out thick and fat. 'Fuck off back to Dachau,' it barked. By way of reply Meng gripped its jaws and slowly levered them open. 'See if this fits.' He issued a series of loud piercing whistles. He spoke directly into its mouth. 'This chap went up to a nigger who had two burning tyres around his neck. The chap says, "For fuck's sake, take one off! Nevermix cross-plies with radials".' A roar of approval went round the bus. The snap. of jawbone ricocheted, triggering another burst of applause. Meng hurled the dog-boy's carcass through an open window. It hit a telegraph pole where it hung, upside-down, until

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its head decomposed. Slapping Meng good-naturedly on his back, a breed growled in anticipation. 'You stuffy sod.' 'Chances are you're not wrong,' Meng nodded matter-of-factly. Halfway to Buchenwald, Ecker retired to the toilet with a melon and a basket of apples. From the confines of the latrine he could hear the whole bus singing in German, 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' . Electrics throbbed in the general din. Ecker had to grip the wooden shit-house seat as the bus shook and the toilet roll began to unravel. He could smell the sweat rising from a hundred pelts and hear the savage callings of a strange vision from the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Swirling through the bus came 'Bop Diddlie in the Jungle' by Tommy King and the Starlites. When it faded, Flowers's cut of'Johnny Born Bonney' banged out. For the next hour every Bo Diddley and Arfy-Darfy variation beater sucked a swath through Austria. Attempting to distance himself from the melee, Ecker peered from between the window slats. They were crossing one of the country's large lakes and on its sheenless surface was a great raft of charred corpses. He was reminded of the Morgawr he had once sighted ofTthe Cornish coast. Resting his head against the slats, he let the fresh air cool him. His side still burned with pain where Doctor Mengele's surgical blade had sliced him free from Meng. If they could just stay clear of the random excesses of Mengele's menagerie, or the killing machines of Birkenau or Brzezinka, all would be well. For Mengele's predilection for collecting freaks, he thanked whatever entity watched over them. Clearly, it had saved their lives.

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The day they had been railed into Auschwitz, an omnipotent being must have been alert to their potential. Their train carried Rumanian Jews, and more than the usual rich bounty of freaks-a woman with two noses, one with donkey ears, two sets of quadruped twins and a little girl who had the wool of a sheep on her head instead of hair. He and Meng were the first twins to arrive in the camp who were physically joined together. They had stayed for hours on a deserted croft, clasped in each other's arms, until Or Mengele had made entrance from a squall of rain. He came with a twowheeled wooden donkey cart pushed by a Jew from Kouno. Travel stickers from the killing grounds of Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor decorated the cart. Still clasped together the twins were lifted into it and, with Or Mengele leading the way were pushed through flower beds fertilised by an experimental mash of human blood and ground bone. 'Zwillinge, zwillinge, zwillinge,' breathed the geneticist. Twenty yards beyond Der Weg zur Himmelfahrt ('the way to the heavenly journey'), the Jew and the cart began to sink in a seeping marsh of dirt and blood. There, Meng and Ecker were gently gathered up in Mengele's father arms and carried to the safety of his plantation. And the inhuman glow of Auschwitz KZ Death Head Kommando could be seen a hundred miles away in distant Ravensbriick. In the weekS after their separation, Doctor Mengele had been very attentive to the twins. He bought Meng fine dresses from the House of Dior, Paris, fussing over every satin gown and velvet ribbon

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that incongruously draped the half-man's Minotaur-like physique. The Doctor insisted that Meng wear the brightest red lipsticks while he listened sympathetically to the twin's anguished pleas for, 'a body like Mae West; a non-quitter; curves that just won't stop'. 'Rest easy, young Meng. I will help you to overcome Nature's caprice. After all, that is what we men of science are here for. With our little surgeons' blades we can correct Nature's ever-wilful patterns.'Then the Doctor scrubbed Meng briskly with a bar of soap made from human remains. The soap smelled of Lifebuoy. Bits of bone and grit in the Auschwitz tap water stuck in Meng's black body hair, and Mengele bent attentively to suck them off with his mouth, gripping long tufts of the waterlogged hair between his teeth. When he had finished the Doctor rested back in a wicker armchair, sated, whistling an aria from his favourite Puccini opera and then humming 'The Blue Danube' waltz. One of Mengele's directives was to induce multiple births in the Auschwitz female twins in an attempt to repopulate the depleted German armies. InMeng, he developed the idea ofincubating the firstever male pregnancy. This had greatly interested his Reich masters, who asked for nude photographs of the half-man to be sent directly to the Fiihrerbunker. It was later hinted that Hitler had donated a vial of his own valued semen to be implanted in the Meng. 'Fucking God forbid,' Ecker had commented about the idea of a hybrid Meng and Hitler. 'Haven't the niggers and the ikey mo's got enough bleeding troubles?' Ecker had suspected that his brother's presence threw an erotic switch in Doctor Mengele's already fevered and disturbed mind.

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Was it purely a coincidence that the name 'Meng' was an abbreviation of 'Mengele' ?The half-man had been christened 'Meng' in the mysterious years before their arrival in the death camp and, to his knowledge, the Doctor himself had never been addressed by the diminutive. There seemed to be no obvious way of accounting for the father-son bond which existed between them. No other creature benefited from the Doctor's more humane side in the land where only reality reigned cruel and great. In Dachau a tea-party of goblins discussed the moral implications of infanticide. A Big Nose advanced the opinion that since all children tasted of either seaweed or spinach the question was in the gourmet's province. 'Dat's de stuff!' cried three wise little nigs on leave from Tiger Tim's Weekly. Their piccaninny hair all-a quiver, they offered Afrocentric advice. 'Cooks dem long,' spoke up one. 'Makes dem tender,' added two. Number three licked her lips. 'Never leave a scrap on your plate. . .' , . . .and always wipe your hands after a nice meal! ' they chorused together. Subjective and inconclusive as such discussions usually are, the eternal question was left until last. 'What about art and its implication and application to life?' A berserk dog-boy with a fuzzy dyed vermilion pelt leapt onto the table and kicked over a teapot. A severed Jew hung from its slack jaw. 'Fuck you and the crab you spilled from!' Dropping a

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spray of foul saliva over the goblins, it tore the Jew from its mouth. 'Maximum effort, that's what the Doctor called for and, by fuckola, we gave it.'

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....-

THE AFREET OF DACHAU Motheifuckers: The A uschwitz if Oz, 1996

IT WASA day much like any other in Dachau when the little red Volkswagen drove over the hill. The red car screeched to a halt. Its tyres squeaked, and it revved its little engine excitedly. 'Mon cheri, mon amour!' The voice rolling from its silver fender surprised the car. It had never heard its own voice before. Until it crossed the borderland into Dachau it had never spoken a word in its life. 'I am Herbie Schopenhauer!' the car declared excitedly. It rattled its headlights with pride. 'I have driven Benito Mussolini, Frau Goering, Marlene Dietrich, the Great de Gaulle, Eva, Adolf, Blondie and Ben Turpin. My name is synonymous with chivalry, for I love the ladies, cieste se l' amour pa la frite.' His windscreen wipers whirled. 'I would lay down my life in their honour.' Glowing in the bright sunlight, Dachau looked its loveliest. Its chimneys puffed quaint tracks of sooty smoke over the hamlet and the attached camp.

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'Nick-nack-paddi-wack...' sang Herbie happily, '... this little car comes rolling home!' He looked at the wooden signpost for directions. 'Travellers to the heart of Dachau', it read, 'go left at Nietzsche Avenue, pass the Yellow Hexed Church to the Emporium of Diminishment, progress along Hegel Boulevard to the Chapel of Dispersement, then across Russell Square to Hobbes's Palace of Discorporation. There you will find your heart's desire.' 'Right, I think I've got all that.' Herbie set his gears in motion and chuntered down the hill, soon passing the most splendid charnel house in the world. A cluster of linden trees brought him to Hegel Boulevard, where a burning man raced towards him and melted over his bonnet. 'Enchante,' said Herbie. He swivelled his headlights. This was a noble reception indeed! 'All right then, move along,' said a policeman, scraping the glue from Herbie's bonnet, 'before I put my truncheon up your exhaust pipe.' 'Thank you officer,' said Herbie politely, 'and a good day to you!' A Red Cross hospital with a dozen corpses swinging from its front door failed to dampen the little car's enthusiasm. In a litter of filth and matted grease a number of hulking skeletons eight or nine feet tall appeared. They stood silently watching the cruising Volkswagen. A gaggle of surly pygmies came next and surrounded him with expressions of curiosity. The Amahagger were a race of tiny cannibals exiled from their immortal queen, Ayesha, from the H Rider Haggard

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novel She. A curiously immobile pygmy wearing a 'Pop Against Homophobia' T-shirt tried to open his door. Herbie sounded his horn loudly. 'Monsieur,' he said, 'hands off the chrome, if you please.' 'Don't be a lemon,' responded the pygmy. 'Give us a fucking ride.' 'Nein!' asserted the little car. 'You are far too vulgar to ride in the Schopenhauer.' Depressing the accelerator, Herbie sped off in the direction of Hobbes's Palace of Discorporation. A despairing breeze swept through Dachau. 'Dachau, so beautiful and strange and new,' reflected Herbie. 'Since it is to end so soon, I almost wish I had never visited it...' a bump in the road, which could have been several corpses embracing, shook the car'.. Jor it rouses a longing in me that is pain...' the Volkswagen joggled along'.. .and its music is so sleepy and tender; tragedy masquerading with the vitality oflife.' He hummed a few bars from Tannhauser. An errant mayfly swerved unsteadily, intoxicated, over a pool brimming with blood. Herbie's little wheels paddled through the liquid and skidded to a sharp stop in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. 'Shall we copulate?' he enquired hopefully. The woman was lean and keen-featured. Her head had been shaved and he noticed that a number had been fetchingly tattooed on her arm. She was swathed in rags.

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'Desirable wench, bones of my heart, c' est si bon.' He flicked his headlights coquettishly. 'Brightest of blossoms, finest of flowers, vessel of perpitude. You who are sweeter than the graceful doe, more winsome than the capricious mermaid. . .' 'Little car. Spare me your amorous blandishments. Do something useful. Take my life and free me from this hell.' 'So, mademoiselle, it is a Lebensfrage

('question of life'), or,

perhaps, what Heidegger calls the Seinfrage ('question of being'), that you seek from me?' In the looming arc of a crematorium a Hebrew dwarf performed a shaming service. 'I am at your call,' continued Herbie, 'for such a challenge.' Dancing hares were all around him. 'What small knowledge I possess is at your service. The honour is France's. The pleasure is mine. The credit is Germany's.' Her silence and the black air thrilled Herbie. 'Haughty damsel, free your heart...' he pleaded'.. .and your body will surely follow.' Involuntarily, oil leaked from his motor. 'Jung once defined a dream as a lucky idea emerging from "the dark, all-unifying world of the psyche".' 'There,' Herbie continued, his chassis trembling with emotion. Love was a terrible thing. 'Doesn't that resolve your problem?' A cloud of cheesy-green mustard gas burst from a crematorium

and engulfedhim.

-

'Vide dell a cosa belle / che pona il ceil.' The voice, of equine register, fluted from a band of weasels. They were armed to the teeth, and had. crept rapidly upon a party of skirmishing stoats. Soon the whole assembly of battling animals were clambering over the little car. Torn fur and blood splattered Herbie's bodywork and

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sprayed his upholstery. 'Sacre sword.'

Bleu!' the car shouted angrily. 'Hand me my fighting

He peered anxiously through the green gas. He could see nothing. 'Pardon, mademoiselle.' The melee stormed around him. 'You have gone from my sight but not from my heart. . .ah, there you are!' Her silent form reappeared. 'God's recreation!' A fleeing stoat had stood on his steering wheel. The animals were running from him, still fighting amongst themselves. The last to leave, a humped weasel, leapt from his bonnet and swept a thin blade up to the woman. It let the knife pass across her throat, and she fell dead to the ground. 'Pissoire,' sobbed Herbie. 'The weasel has ruined me.' In grief, the little car blinked its headlights. Red ultima covered him. He felt defiled. He tried to shake loose a dripping brown pelt that had lodged in his door. 'Oye, Dicky Sam the Tin Man!' A wooden truncheon banged on his rear fender. Herbie lifted weeping headlights. A policeman stood brace-legged behind him. 'If you think you're going trolling about Dachau looking like a refugee from a rape project, then the Pope's a fucking Jew.' 'Officer,' said Herbie plaintively. 'I have suffered a bereavement.' 'I don't care if your shit's purple.' The policeman strolled around the Volkswagen, running his truncheon through streaks of blood. He stopped in front of Herbie, an angry expression on his face. 'You're a fucking disgrace.'

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'I am a clean car,' Herbie replied indignantly. 'You're a dirty bastard, and that's the end of it. You'll get yourself cleaned up. We take a pride in our camp. . . ' The policeman pointed toward a large building bearing the sign, BRAUSEBAD (Sprinkleroom). 'Get your fucking wheels in there.' 'God bless, officer. I must admit, a nice hot shower would be most welcome.' Herbie started to cheer up. After all, life must go on. He would feel better after a wash-and-brush-up. He drove across a field livid with muck. So many bodies had been buried there the ground looked like white mud. Flesh and bones shone in the pitch. The little Volkswagen joined a queue of naked men, women and children, lined up in front of the sprinkleroom. He would soon be as clean as a new pin. Herbie's motor purred, and he began to whistle a few bars from Parsifal. In front of him, a near naked woman cut a fine figure. Her shanks were thin, as favoured by the French. Her only apparel, a pair of wooden clogs, were quite becoming. She turned on him the most luminous eyes in the world. A leap of his heart almost stalled his engine. A kapo pressed a bar of soap into his dashboard, and flung a towel on his front seat. Slowly the queue shuilled towards t~o metal swing doors and, presently, Herbie entered the bath house. The brightlylit room was about two-hundred yards long, its floors tiled, its walls whitewashed. Warily viewing a series of faucets in the ceiling, Herbie hoped that the jets of water wouldn't be too sharp or too hot and damage

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r his paintwork. There was an anxious movement in the crowd. Men were barking and women were keening. The little car surmised that they weren't too clean and that, perhaps, they had not wanted to take a bath. He circled around the room, revving his engine discreetly, trying to catch a glimpse of the woman wearing the clogs. 'I'm just another soldier.' Quietly, he sang a favourite hymn. 'And I'm on my way home.' The hosepipes, spouts, nozzles and taps had a curious rusty quality about them. Belatedly, Herbie began to think that the shower water could be contaminated. He was reminded of Husserl's soliloquy, that microbes bred in a slurry of cattle excrement could be used to clean up polluted water. Dachau water was Mister Love. Water utilised to sluice the crematoria was the purest water in the world, blessed by popes. A light opera-Chopin's BRAUSEBAD chamber.

Butteifl)' Etude-flowed

through the

The music triggered instant mayhem, people rushing to all corners of the room trying to find the exits. The doors were now firmly closed. A dancing chorus line leapt over Herbie. There must have been fifty people in the line. Red eyes, blue lips, clicking teeth, and those bald cuckoo heads-bopping, shining, surging with a mad passion. Everyone in the line either urinated or defecated over him. Herbie couldn't believe it. He was getting dirtier by the second.

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'What iz zees?' He tried to get out of their way, but twenty men clung to him, and he was forced to drag them across the floor. He was at a loss to explain their actions. He had never seen people get so excited about a shower. Maladies of the nervous system produced a robust activity amongst the interns. He had rarely witnessed such euphoria. The music played louder. A green gas shunted down from the faucets. . . and people screamed. The little car must have stalled. By the time his motor switched on again the gas was dispersing, and the sucking of the green air had ceased. The terrible silence was thankfully broken by the Exhator ventilators swirling to life. His wheels felt like lead weights. In the centre of the chamber a motionless cone-shaped pile of bodies had appeared. The majority of the women and children were spread across the bottom like the ingredients in the base of a great blood cake. Dwarves occupied a position halfway up. An odd weasel or two, that had wandered inside the chamber more in error or bad taste than for ethnic reasons, was intertwined in the human mass.

.

All the bodies were covered with scratches and bruises from the struggle which had set them against each other. Blood oozed from their noses and mouths; their faces, bloated and blue, were so deformed as to be unrecognisable. On top of the corpses, almost touching the ceiling, was an immense badger, the size of a small hippo, sprawled like a king. Herbie gazed in wonder at the beast. It must have put up a terrible

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fight. Blood globules rolled in a fire off its pelt. Empty eye sockets, eyes torn from its living flesh, stared grotesquely. 'Oh, Lord!' cried Herbie, his lights dimming. 'Not for the world would I have allowed this to happen.' He knew from his reading of philosophy that the French

nobleman Count Joseph de Gobineau (1816-1882) was responsible for the myth of the Aryan race. Perhaps the genes of the French too were responsible for today's bloody misadventure. Goethe was wrong when he said that man's hidden urges generally point him in the right direction. Never trust the art of estrangement. His thoughts were interrupted by the BRAUSEBAD doors swinging open. 'Wakey wakey in there! I've got a six-pack... who wants a snort?' In a series of coiling leg movements, Snuffy the Terrier Man marched into the sprinkleroom. He was at the head of a brigade of kapos. Sonderkommandos with shovels and buckets brought up the rear of his party. 'Yes indeed. Snuffy's here.' His voice fought around the big chamber. 'Blow the bugle, bang a gong!' Herbie followed the Terrier Man's head as it voyaged down between his shoulders. On each side of his jowled face, whiskers, two feet long and thick as looping tails, twitched like antennae. He was dressed in a red top-hat and John Bull waistcoat. His chest swelled. 'Fuck me, yes. Snuffy's Snuff Squad. Best in the fucking land. . .indeed.'

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'Why?' coughed Herbie. His headlights picked up the mass of bodies. Isolated pockets of gas, for all the world like small wandering children, were still lingering in the chamber's crannies. 'Because there aren't enough bullets in the world.' The Terrier Man looked coldly at the little car. 'Snuffy,' asked a perplexed Herbie, 'are you perhaps a Scottish terrier?' With the tip of his boot the Terrier Man lifted a lifeless head. A kapo ran to the corpse and attached a pair of metal tongs to its neck. When the tongs were fastened tight, the corpse was dragged headfirst into the sunlight. A distant boom sent black fire into the heavens. 'I do this.' The Terrier Man sprang to Herbie's side and fastened his index finger and thumb onto a kapo's nose and pinched them tight. Asphyxiated where he stood, the kapo fell dead. He lay unstirring at Snuffy's feet. 'I say this.' His powerful fingers closed, and another kapo keeled over. 'I try this.' A kapo died before he could touch him. 'I do that...' 'Please stop!' cried Herbie. 'I get the picture.' 'Progressive methods of farming. Away lads, let's clear these valentines.' Snuffy crushed a baby with his knee, hooking it with his

foot into the mouth of a waiting kapo.

-

'Let me tell you, Robert Johnson got the better deal.' Disdainfully, Herbie drove himself out into the yard beyond and switched on a hosepipe, allowing the water to cleanse his bodywork. 'If you want a job doing...' he sighed resignedly. Born again. Incandescent.

90

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prototype Beetle dated back to the mid-' 3os. Herbie felt warm inside. Production of the KdfWagen, (Kraft-Durch-Freude Wagen, or Strength- Through-Joy Car) owed much to Hitler's enthusiasm for a people's car. It was Der Fiihrer himself who had lain hands on Herbie's roof as he cruised off the ramp, the first Volkswagen produced in Free Germany. Herbie was proud of his heritage. He was soon as sparkling red as the day he rolled from the production line. 'Now, where was I?' He tracked towards the nearest street sign. 'Hmm, Kierkegaard Mews.. .seems a nice place.' Stretched before him was a glass hotel, on its front a neon sign: 'The Emporium of Diminishment' .The building was surrounded by a neatly trimmed green lawn, a single apple tree at its centre. In the blue sky glided a sleek silver rocket. Herbie recognised the colours of ' Horror's Freebooting Chrononauts' snapping gaily in the wind. By the means of sticking out his semaphore indicators he gave a loyal salute to the craft. The Lord and his flying crew would be on their way to the termination kamps beyond the Humboldt Mountains. Herbie looked into the distance. Silent lightning raked the mountain range, and a great insect-a fractal shape of luminous beauty-accompanied the rocket on its mission to free souls, racing through the heavens. 'Slit my beak. ' Herbie heard the melodious roll from the first voice of Free Germany. An uninvited pipe was fed into his petrol tank and he sensed precious fluids being stolen from him.

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..

'fletchin' devil, move it on up!' Time stopped for the little car. He was stunned into silence. Who could perpetrate such a crime on him? He tried to do a fast turn, but someone had let the air out of his tyres. His wheels were anchored to the ground. 'Don't turn around, Bud,' an ominous voice called to him. 'Once roused,' warned Herbie, 'I shy from nothing.' He did not need to be able to turn round to see Neb of Nog's End, his latexed head metamorphosing into a likeness of Germany's father, standing by his rear, crocodile whip in hand. Neb had corralled and tethered together forty Jews, who were standing about Herbie as though in a holiday group. Neb's free hand held the withered neck of a Jew who was greedily sucking a pipe sticking out of the petrol tank. Petrol was sluishing down the man's throat. Herbie watched spellbound through his rear mirror as the man's belly swelled. The skin over the stomach was stretched as tight as a drum. The man looked as though he had swallowed a football. With each passing second the little Volkswagen felt himself grow weaker. 'C'est

l'emphitl

Good sirs, I will fetch a low price if you

continue to tamper with my clock.' Herbie spoke le~elly, trying to hide his panic. 'Is this how you treat a car who comes to your camp with only the best of intentions?' 'What?' Neb pulled the feeding Jew off the pipe. The man staggered backwards, petrol spurting from his mouth. He spoke angrily: 'You want me to be a cunt like everyone else?'

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r 'Quick, take me to a garage.' Herbie couldn't help the urgency now in his voice. 'Before it's too late.' 'And what about him?' Neb tapped the Jew. 'And all these?' He pointed to the mass around him. 'Where's your compassion?' 'Under normal circumstances,' Herbie tried to sound reasonable, 'I would never begrudge my fellow man a good meal. But 1 scarcely have enough for my own needs. And you know how the Lord abhors an empty vessel.' 'That's what they all say.' Neb was not convinced. 'My licence is up to date.' 'Right...!' Neb shouted at the Jew. 'I obviously stand in my underpants. Wipe that fucking marmalade off your mouth! And give him back some petrol.' The man regurgitated some of the petrol into Herbie's tank. The little car's headlights flickered briefly to life. 'Merci,' breathed Herbie. 'That's enough,' Neb instructed, yanking the Jew off the pipe. His alien form fermented. Autumn leaves dusted from his arms. His many legs percolated. 'You lads had better shape up if you ever want to see Jerusalem again.' Each Jew was intimately tied to his neighbour by a thick rope of paraffin-drenched cotton. The ropes were wound tightly about their torsos, leaving only their legs free. 'Now brace up...' Neb addressed the men, who were dispersing, and falling naturally into a waiting line, ready to continue their journey' .. .it's only twenty miles to Nog's End and Monowitz. 1 want a steady canter, no slacking or queue jumping, and just to give

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you an incentive...' Neb brought the man with the swollen stomach to the front of the line. He produced a large box of matches. He took one out and lit it. A blue flame spluttered close to the man, and a wave of terror swept down the line of Jews. Herbie tried to bring an appropriate quotation from Husserl to mind. But only 'Kairos and Logos', by Auden, came to him: 'One notices, if one will trust one's eyes, the shadow cast by language upon truth.' He would have to look elsewhere for an elucidation of his predicament. Wasn't it Derrida's spirit that was more properly called ironic? 'Chuck-a-butties,' called Neb, holding up another blazing match. 'On the count of three.' His foot stomped three beats. 'Karacho, Karacho,' he yelled. Like shit off a stick, like a bat out of hell, a pack of fever-horses, a stampede of buffalo, Neb and his posse of Jews took off in a billowing cloud of crimson dust, thundering out of Kierkegaard Mews, piston legs moving in one giant insect line, tearing towards the Humboldt Mountains, Neb shouting, 'Hi-yo fuckin' Silver, away!' before roaring off into the Dachau mist. Dante, reaching the frozen Lake Cocytus in the ninth and lowest circle of hell, found Lucifer, the fallen angel oflight, embedded in ice. All worlds inter-relate, thought Herbie. Fact is only a tributary of the imagination. 'Klanga-klanga-klanga. ' The ringing bell made Herbie jump. Now whatis this cometofurther hinderm)'quest?he asked himself.

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A mobile crematorium, on loan from Buchenwald, came klangaklanging down the road. The combustion chamber in the back of the van was small. Already there were so many bodies stuffed inside that the end pieces of burning limbs were dropping out, littering the road. Legs, arms, feet, hands and heads lay scattered like horse droppings along the route. Long wisps of flame and smoke roasted from them. Some were black; burnt to a crisp. 'Corpse carriers to the gatehouse.' The order coming from the public address system almost deafened Herbie. Prisoners on a death march, with a military song on their lips, shouted to their SS guards as they swung past: 'Us today, you tomorrow.' 'Any gas handy?' The little car politely asked a Lagerllihrer. 'Sure, hop in the wagon, cuntface,' the officer said dryly. Herbie eyed the rattling crematorium. Not likely, he thought. It couldn't be much farther to Hobbes's Palace of Discorporation; the dwelling of the Afreet of Dachau. He'd make his way there slowly. Soon, the Being combining animus and anima would be behind his wheel. His reason to exist would be made clear. Schopenhauer had written, 'The capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in Man.' In the novel,

SimpJicius Simplicissimus,

by

JJ C von

Grimmelshausen,

the enigmatic phrase, 'So it goes' , had appeared. How appropriate to his present position I The half-mile journey to the Palace took him two hours. When he approached the Afreet's eyrie, his chassis ached and his exhaust was exhausted.

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He dragged himself past a final brick crematorium, fuelled with coke, where the 'unholy flame ofOachau' leapt a dozen yards beyond the smokestack of dead. A group of inmates were drawing conclusions from the shape of the escaping smoke clouds as to the type of prisoner being cremated. 'That must be a Jehovah's Witness, snaking up like that.' 'Nonsense, did you not notice the alien essence that hung for a second in the air? Obviously a Jew, with a full set of gold teeth.' Herbie registered for the first time that the surface of the road beneath his flat tyres was now crematoria ash. Access to the Afreet's ground was past an iron lattice gate decorated with a series of musical notes. As Herbie approached, the gate swung open and he crawled through into the land beyond. With a final shudder and a glance at the big blue sky he drove onto a pathway across the spreading green lawns.The occasional fire pit and the tops of sunken ovens broke the shorn grass, and several children burned on the stump of a sassafras tree. Two young boys had been crucified on its thin roots. Two more were frying to death. They were not more than a yard away from a stream of tangy spring water which chattered into a stone trough beneath a stern bronze image of Alice Liddell who, because of a fall of uxorious ash, looke~ uncannily like Karl Marx. A group of 'Moslems', men who were broken, who allowed anything to be done to them, threw themselves under Herbie's wheels. As he drove over them he could hear their reduced bones cracking in the bright sunshine. It took all of his resolve to drive on, after he had carefully dimmed his lamps. Then a stillness came upon him, and

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he knew for certain that he had reached the Afreet's dwelling. Would the Afreet turn out to be Thomas Hobbes, or perhaps the misshapen offspring of Old Hob himself? Instinctively he looked up, expecting to see a glorious edifice with obsidian towers and turrets of emerald and ruby shipping into the tireless heavens. A dwelling befitting the Oracle of Dachau. Instead, Herbie found himself confronting a tiny wooden shotgun shack. Its front porch faced a dirt surround, overrun with squalor and brown Tupelo creepers. Its wood frame was rotting, and an air of desolation hung about. A dead monkey lay on a wooden swing. Cows wandered on Old Saltillo Road. Chickens pecked at the rich earth. Herbie thought he heard whippoorwills calling. Gathering his faltering nerve, he revved up a shaky ramp. Twigs from a black gum tree stuck to his windscreen. With an effort he squeezed through the shack's rickety door, and he immediately sensed the presence of a being closeted in dark solitude and deathward ways. 'Satnin, is that you?' asked the Afreet from the gloom. 'It is I, Herbie Schopenhauer...' Herbie's eyes watered, and his vision was suddenly blurred by a migraine. He was assailed by a lethal mixture of chlorine, acrylonitrate and hydrogen sulphide, '.. .come to visit on this bright sunny day,'he finished, spluttering. 'The same sun that brings out the lilies also brings out the snakes,' the voice sighed. Even without seeing the Afreet, Herbie recognised the rich Southern drawl. (In French:) 'Your mother lies in the Memphis earth,' he said to Elvis in hushed tones.

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OUR LORD OF FUCK-OFF CONFRONTS ANGELS Baptised in the Blood

if Millions,

2000

THECRUMP OFanti-aircraft fire sounded. Whistling flackfell everywhere. Then the blackout was broken by searcWights finally illuminating the flames of war: exacerbating the inconvenience of everything. Conflict presents people with a useful area of indignation. It was no longer important to have a matching set of crockery. I lifted my head and listened to the first sound again. Beyond the blaffs of wind which carried big white clouds I could hear the resonant snaps and pops changing pitch. The Jews, flying in the night sky,were drawing closer. That crack of boiling toffee was now so familiar to me that I moved quickly to shield Jessie from the first initial sparking spray of hot caramel, particles of which peppered my naked back. I could smell my scorched flesh pumping vigour into my pipe. Then, with Jessie nestling in my arms, we both observed more Jews rise from the red-flamed horizon, massed like flights of bomber squadrons. The outstretched hands of each individual almost touched the fingertips of his neighbour. I estimated between one thousand and five thousand Yids were flying in unison, furling up against the fiery heavens in a giant swastika formation.

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Soon, the insignia of Hitler dominated the London night. I cannot impart the frisson that churned in me at the sight of these Fishers of Men. A heaven choked with human zeros trembled my pride. Nor was my vanity reproved by their physiognomical unloveliness. And presumably they would receive that preferment to which their suffering had entitled them. Jessie, free from active snobbery, held her face up to mine and said, 'My Dear Sweetie, they drink death like wine, let us hope it gives them the boundaries of solace.' To inculcate a moral lesson from the distress of others demonstrated her qualities, and showed that I was not in error loving this woman. The Jews on the extremities of the formation thundered and blazed with a white fire of godlike intensity, almost an ejaculation of joy. Hot ginger cordial sprayed from them in a constant charming and sylvan rain. I tell the bare truth, and give my vow as to the veracity of these events. A devastating harangue fell on us as the crowded and living Jews soared above our heads. I can relate our surprise when we observed that many of the Jews in the centre of that spill of aerial humanity were frozen solid, prisoners in flying ice. Others still had mobility-with Jack Frost drifting from them in crystallised clouds. Stern fire licked and spurted over their bodies as they shouted their names to us. To what purpose, I could not fathom. As if that could diminish their nightmare! And so, with ill luck clinging like leeches to them, they sailed ever onward. . . 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria man: I said. Horace, as ever, responding with the appropriate quote.

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Many of the chocolate encasements of the outer Jews were foaming and breaking open, prematurely throwing to the earth the fiery Jew inside. One of these fallingJews, we were later informed by the Empire News,took out a full row of terraced houses in Bermondsey. Jessie and I watched a sparky individual hurtle in a greasy fireball to impact against the Chelsea Bun House on Jew's (now Pimlico) Road, with inevitable results to the morning bread. Long strands of expanding bubblegum, bright blues and greens, strapped each Yiddler to his brother. Caught against the roaring glow of the night, they mapped an immense spider's web of faith across the red heavens. Fascism is my firmly held belief; and I bowed to the propagation of my faith. A good propagandist must be a zealot with a healthy dose of cynicism. Over the years I had developed a fairly comprehensive intellectual synthesis around a set of distinctly metaphysical values, based on a solid reading in the Arts. Legitimised by a moral philosophy of life drawn from a steady use of the open razor. That link between art and politics, that mythical repository of character and strength, of which every Fascist dreams, meets its apotheosis in Sir Oswald Mosley, royal descendant to the House of Lyonesse, by Suzerainty of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. 'Don't they look so graceful. Gliding through the heavens like Argonaut candles. They're a fucking miracle, and that's a certain fact,' Jessie calmly intoned. As the wartime whirl increased outside, we closed the windows and returned to my bed. I had made love to various of this world's

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most desirable women-including

Bettie Page and Eva Peran. But

no woman ever had a body like Jessie Matthews, or a mind steeped in so neurotic a worldliness, or more loving a disposition. And there was also this charming peccadillo to her. She had two clitorises. The main one was at least twice the size I had seen on any woman, with the smaller one a more natural size and growing just above the stem of the original. Splaying my right hand, I gently opened Jessie. When my shaft entered her, the extra large numbers of her vagina lips folded back like the peel of a pomegranate. I felt their clustered tips run wavery sensations over my man as it pushed its way home. Then she chomped and squeezedmy length inside her. Holding me in this vice grip for some moments, she surely slid up and down Lord Horror in tick-tock clock fashion. 'Are you all agog?' Lovelocks of her beautiful hair caressed me, her face carrying that beatific smile that had so enchanted the British public. 'But oh darling heart, it is difficult, to say the least.' Concentration was on her features as her hips ground into me, piling me further inside her. 'How came you to enrich the earth?' I had to conceal my inward feelings and as best I could put on a serene facade to this woman. I knew what Jessie was thinking: still

plenty of dog in him.

-

Finding provision for her needs was my priority, and I loved my hand in a valentine. With her I lost the cloak of invisibility so dear to all men except Jews. She eased off me, catching her breath and resting her head on my chest. 'That's done its calling.' Her monny shook droplets of golden

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rain onto my legs. Curling and feeding my dark chest hairs one by one into her mouth, Jessie said, 'Hmm, did you know you taste of semen and oranges?' She held a single hair between her lips. 'Or perhaps it's tangerines? All human life is living in your skin.' Her tongue, slim as a candle-flame and pink as strawberries, began to lick me. I then complimented her on her vagina and its unsuspecting wonders. 'Didn't you guess? My privates are the secret of my success.' Her mouth left my body and she laughed girlishly, folding a delicate hand around hard me. 'All that extra gives my body more fluidity, more sexual drive, so necessary for dance.' 'Your singing voice?' I queried. 'From drinking semen, gallons of it.' She laughed again. 'Yes, I know it's "jolly silly", but my mother told me it is the best tonal lubricant there is.' So, her appearance of spontaneity masked considerable preparation, as did my own. And Jessie was right, the stink of the human race came off my body. Such irony. I, who have spent my life encouraging departings, should carry the genes of humanity in my skin! Destiny had brought into the world a man fated for many years to be the most successful of his species. There never existed a better man, a gentleman to his backbone. , Bunga-bungo-bunga.'

'Never give me cause to call your name in anger,' I said, only half in jest, tickling Jessie under the chin. 'Listen.' She stayed my hand.

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It is remarkable, the various gradations sound has in the night. Noise is in the habit of faring luxuriously every day. When I hear a sunlit death, even if it is a mile from my presence, I feel as if something precious has been filched from me, from under my nose, to spite me. But, oh, The Night. 'Bun8a-bun8a

.'

So it was I perceived the sally of this sound with anticipation. That to which I allude was the frying splutter of the living dead. My carrion head lifted. Even in my spicy room the drench of Alphabet Cachous, Love Hearts, Sherbet Dib-Dabs, Satin Pincushions, Ogo Pogo Eyes, Tiger Nuts, and myriad other sweets came creeping to me. A special Jew was flying our way. [excision] A Jew somersaulting to my left arrived first. He halted suddenly before me and blushedup to his very whiskers, a sardonic smile disclosing one of his dog's-teeth. This coincided with the arrival of a second Jew, to my right, who now also stopped rigid before me, hovering silently in the air. These two were semen-thin. They were naught but finely latticed bone draped in a gossamer skin of choc-rich gold. On their right arms were numerals fashioned from icing sugar piping. I knew straight away they were Auschwitz-born, sent in acrimony to mark my destiny by that archangel, Doctor Mengele, the En8el Der Vernichtun8of Auschwitz-made man.

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The third, a massive Jew, aiming to occupy a position centrally to the others, arrived last. He flew a couple of yards further towards me than the others and there towered above me, licks of fire running up from his skin. (Smouldering fire ignites when it gets a blast of the bellows, instantly blazes up and begins to generate its hydrogen.) And, despite the roaring flames, even though we moved in different worlds (as it were), I recognised him, true and immediately, as the Jew of Linz, Ludwig Wittgenstein. It takes one Manchester boy to recognise another Manchester boy. At an undisclosed hour in the fragmented past (for I was drunk, having downed too many bumpers) I had been introduced to the jetengine philosopher and celebrated fruit at the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, on Oxford Road. Sir Oswald Mosley being our intermediary. I threw better judgement into Constantinople, covered my inhibitions with a coat of black, and slipped into a hairshirt of lust. I prepared to mount this golden Jew with forceful intent, my opinion not yet made as to which orifice to fuck first. Of course, there was no competition. That Jew mind of his, of which he was so proud, I would presently infect. Quick as stick, he rounded that severe head to me. The rippling gold skin of his face was fretus-smooth, and eerie was the only adjective for his chocolate eyes from which pearls of hot milk dribbled. Smashed pieces of caramel hung in his mouth, broken in the flight from Germania. 'Saujud.' I addressed him as an old school friend would.

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'Ich hatt einst einen Diener, der hief3 Horror.' *The stammer for which he was famous had disappeared. He spoke with the high clear voice not uncommon among those who have overcome an impediment. 'My honest friend.' I altered tack, and gave false tongue to this being flown in from an alien world. 'We are poor stage-players sure enough. I'll play you true and fair, and drink again with you 'til you're stiff, if you think proper.' The apostate Jew Wittgenstein snapped fiery fingers at me in irritation, his countenance forming ruffianly and terrific. His gracefully arched back, rising like a rainbow, caused a thrilling horror to seize upon the nerves and muscles of my system. 'Sower of Cockle, the ancient enemy of the human race.. .has declared to sow and make grow pernicious Errors of the irrational Soul.' This was enough to be stiffened. 'The intellectual Soul is not only truly, of itself and essentially the form of the human body but.. .according to the number of bodies into which it is infused, it can be, has been and will be multiplied in individuals.' 'The shape I'm in is the shape I'm in.' I answered obviously. Though tolerably susceptible myself, my heart was at this time my own, and I could not help laughing at the extravagance of his passion. 'If any man has a million mouths and tongues, let that great one * '( once had a servant named Horror.'

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speak.'Morbidezzawas in that submarine Jew's incantation of voice; the very same saliva that fell on the green sod under the gibbet now swept unseemingly over me. 'Give that slip of a pig, Veitel Itzieg, my compliance,' said I, noting a dash of blood appear on my trousers. I am myself no unqualified fatalist; no more than I could enumerate the people I had departed. But from here I will state, by way of episode, the Christ-killer grew nearly outrageous, and swore to me what manner of death he should put me to. Under bitter stars on the vapoury dawn, and making diverse vulgar noises, Wittgenstein conjured 'pointing the bone' and 'singing to death' against me, to small avail. 'Magical effects can be brought about,' quoted Schopenhauer once from the Hermetica,'by violent and immoderate excitation of the emotions.' Calling upon all the Chandalas of India, the outcast and dispossessed, for my personage to be disemboweled, spiced, swaddled, and screwed down in a fucking show-box, the Jew showed me his true substance was not the fine shimmer of gold but the smelting hot iron of Beelzebub's own black forked sword. 'How extraordinary that anything should exist.' 'True for you,' I ambiguously replied. Augurers, Sorcerers and Charmers promote caution in me, which come within my own observations, and I would give small change by way of answer to any of their queries lest my speech should be used against me. 'Who dares say blackis the white of my eye?' This I also said not without a spice of consolation.

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Wittgenstein performed various evolutions in the air, by the moment growing larger, becoming a being of true gigantism, fostering the belief in me that this angel incarnation was descendent from the Nephilim of Mesopotamia-those immense angels who called out the Ineffable Name, that unspoken incorporeal angel of the Hebrew god who brought fire to consume the gate of Heaven. I neither mean to play the vain egotist, nor to determine generals by particulars. Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others-which, from the pit of my red soul, is my true belief. The scrying paraphernalia of my nature, every bit the equal ofDee the Magus, could discern in these vessels of the air (these sky genii) the locus of Jew djinns-those malevolent spirits of Islamic tradition who suffer from a devouring hunger but cannot eat of flesh. In the Land of Nod to the east of Eden, the inhabitants of Auschwitz have like-minded traits and could have saved themselves by eating, with small effort, that other root of the human race. Who is to say what is indissoluble? Above me, topsy-turvy was the motion now adopted by the Jew philosopher. Fizzes came off his golden body and his collarbone disunited, cracking a wadge of thick chocolate onto my chest, and again the boiling smell of sweets-Stickjaw, Buzz-Bars-came on me.

Sky drops, Gobstoppers,

.

Spitting on his thumb, Wittgenstein lowered his angel weight and floated naked before me. 'Ludwig the Sow-fucker we called you,' I whispered, the matter soon becoming developed. 'Hell to the rap of tythe-cess or hearthmoney, and I am not the kind of man to rub two bones together.'

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'The intellectual criticism of Fascism is really this...' the Jew delivered to me his observation with the commitment with which Mr Pip had swum the Serpentine, ' . . .that it appeals to the appetite for authority without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite.' Arnold White and Beatrix Potter had noticed animal characteristics in Jews (the main influence on their own writings, I am sure), but until now I had not associated it with philosophers. The goat, the dog and the lickspittle of apes was wrapped onto Wittgenstein's features-no angel karma or glamour could shield this from me-and the flap of invisible wings assailed the air, breezing me soundly. The bark of primates came chuntling in a hail from him, almost bursting the tympani of my ears. 'Should I now name you Iblis or Azazel, Father of Djinns?' Having an independent mind, entertaining an equal aversion to the arrogance of his thinkings as to his bestial movements, and aware of his unhealthy interest in Carmen Miranda, I was in full glee. By the course of nature, I felt an even harsher sensation arise and operate upon my temper. 'And which side is your lover's heart today?' Giving him scant time to reply (much to his chagrin) I said, 'Here...' indicating my forehead with a finger largely comprised of bone, ' . . .which for a true man is the only palace for so divine an emotion .' Was I not the brightest fucking trick you ever saw? The future would arrive without Lord Horror, but his fingerprints would be all over it.

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'This was my own opinion,' I said, without thought of a mercenary shilling. Again, snapping his tarry finger-posts in my face, and without moving his head, or a muscle of his singular countenance, his one living eye seemed everywhere, omniscient; an almost imperceptible transition moved it from place to place, as if by magic; though, for most of the time, it stayed inflexibly fixed upon me, as if intent on a poisonous collision. His words

to me were a predictable

mix-and-match

of

Schopenhauer, but, of course, lacking the power of the original. All Wittgenstein's philosophy was a blasphemous renegado,diversion and dilution of Schopenhauer, though his presentation of the other man's hard won opinions had improved with time. His expressive features and eloquent actions during this period of our acquaintance harmonised well with each other. Convulsed, and fucking thunderous bravura,he delineated handsomely to me: such that any soul willing to surrender at discretion would have been swept in by his spell. He concluded his exordium by a hyperbole of hatred directed to my good self, which was much more to my taste, and of some originality; I was surprised at the pertinacity with which he pressed his point. 'Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,' I said, the Vent in me.

.

Men smell of cheese and women of fish. No scented chalice can erase for long our body's natural odour. Old Tib has the smell we as individuals credit him with. Nickademus must have knocked his pooh-pipe off to credit angels with the stink of sulphur (which I must confess, at times, I have also smelt).

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Now I could smell semen biscuits and fresh chopped strawberries coming from Wittgenstein's pouch, prick and ball-sacs. The merry tune of the serial homosexual rapist came coiling from him in black lies. In his plaintiff's voice, quite haunting, he sang to me: 'I've got a sweet Jew angel, I love the way he spreads his wings, When he spreads his wings over me, It brings joy in everything.' 'See this man-he comes as an angel yet spins a serpent's tail,' I said, glancing quickly behind me at Jessie, who seemed relaxed and enjoying the spectacle. She sat open-legged, dipping her index finger into her monny and smearing the gloss from her vagina over her lips like the best quality lipstick. 'Rub his neck with hot vinegar,' she sarcastically advised me, intimately whispering' Sweetheart!' , to ease my anxiety. For a moment, I thought I could hear her thoughts. My Darling Heart, she seemed to say to me, with the inky dawnfor background, and firelight illuminating your face, there's a sort

if ciffinilJ'

betweenyou and the angels'flames.Like a salamanderor a devil,you seem to be at home in them. Like Satan in Paradise Lost or a prophet in search

if a creed. Even if, on my part, this was illusion, built up from the PeepO-Day, I was comforted. I surmised the creed was Fascism-and my prophet was Mosley. Both a spit more substantial than adverse

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factions and cotchers would have you believe, or, indeed, anything in the Jew's Tractatus,that unitary of all hypotheses. Big glow-worms, red as cinders, made entrance from his stretched bowels, walking right out, onion-stenched, the colour of niggers dropped smooth on their heads. How could I see this in the flame? I do not know, but answer carefully that all that can be viewed is neverthe full canvas; and stood foursquare before that blaze-topped being resembling (as I have stated) Azazel, the goat shamen, that reviled pig of the Jew. For, despite his animal characteristics, Wittgenstein was no emissary of the Beelzebub of now, but of that ancient being of true nemesis, Belzebub,salt-formed well before the raised hand of Cain cast its shadow over mankind. 'The Here and Now,' saidWittgenstein, as if reading my thoughts. 'Not the By and Then and Over the Way.' He lisped forthrightly, struggling with his words, declaring himself to me as a spoiled, kvetching fusspot. He spun in a fiery conflagration around my head, and I twisted to follow his all-encompassing turning motion. Waxing greatly, I became capital, handsome and readily fantastic in my actions, and executed a tolerably effective gash to his hooked nose, which nearly eased him of that appendage; it holding conspicuous to me.

.

It is an observation I have always made-let

sceptics draw their

own conclusions-that a moral may be extracted from every action, so that a man of high respectability and delicacy of mind could still find himself fucking wrong-footed in spite of his superiority. 'There for you!' Icried, awash for a second time with an inundation

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r of flame, and a splash of ill blood, which in due rotation fell across my right shoulder. 'True for you!' I alluded, without incurring aJaux pas; this forming an ambit of our situation. Big centipedes, red as glow-worms, came gimcracking, landing smack-dab on my suckling person; for my hands had not idled at sentry, and the richly ventilated angel crouched in some discomfort a yard or so away from me. I came forward to seriously grieve. Cool claptrap surged from him, and I roamed disgusted at his trumpery, signalling my roasting man to perch, readying for an inamorato's penetration. 'Who's up for a Spermin8?'My face smeared, layered with phosphuretted oil, in heavenly service, gleamed like "Jenner's Golden

Ale".'I'm at attention to Fuck Outa liver.' You get the drift of my gait here? And then Wittgenstein revealed his myriad cunts to me. Right there, before my eyes, the philosopher prostrated himself; a being inflated. Was his bulk many a ton in weight? Upright did he rise above fifty feet? I think so. His big angel body grovelled steady within my circumference. His broad back presented itself naked, and the movement of skin, which before had moved in ripples, now became chaotic. Whirlpools of mottled flesh surrounded that which I had no difficulty in recognising as vaginas, dozens of which grew in profusion down and across Wittgenstein's back, protected by a small army of tentacles each a foot long, fist-thick and green-hued, and which were dotted, red-tipped like waving palm trees, around those watery oases.

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His tentacles were in constant serpentine movement, preening his skin, sending his flesh scudding in waves down the length of his body, where it hung in breakers about his haunches. They were feeding the minuscule organisms (of Semitic origin) off his skin, lowering the stuff straight into the blue sucking hollows of his cunts. From the back of his fleshy neck, Fry's Five Boys chocolate squirted from open skin punctures like Jews into the Everlasting. 'Look into the pewter pot ITo see the world as the world's not,' said Wittgenstein, laughing at me, launching into a strong philippic on my conduct as I raised a booted foot and mounted his back. In those days men framed their labours with joy. 'Here's your man,' I readily informed the whore-queen; indeed, I bowed to the feminine in that immense angel body. But would nevertheless fuck him without love, out of duty and to bring on the fucking shame of his weakness. To make him less and elevate myself. I did not knock on his door but entered him forcibly, teasing and positioning myself sideways on his back, while his tentacles beat out a semaphore on my Lordly pride. I guzzled at his whore-hole as eagerly as the joust drew the Glee-Men. Whatever Jesus took me for, it can't have been a sunbeam. That spirit of licentiousness that often led me !o moonlight walking had not deserted me, and I fell to with an ensign's passion at Wittgenstein's cunt-bed, much as farriers drench a horse. The smell of my own sperm intoxicated me, and the vulva into which I dipped was a Scheherazade of weighty sensations. That cunt seeped with all the eroticism ofWittgenstein's nature, perverse and neurotic, swelling in tempo with my coruscate shaft until there was no more good in him.

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However, the foundations of my propensities had been too well laid to be easily uprooted; and whilst I certainly could, for a while, indulge in the habits of those around me, I was not at all idle in the pursuits to which I had been previously accustomed. Wittgenstein's continuing rousing yammer, wind song and general thrasonical manner, set my back up, as I gauged it, and, because of his very coarse and ill-natured ridicule, I slit his blazing throat with a happy-dapper's joy. As for myself, I was not unseasoned to the appearance of blood (that costly colour) in the constellation of departing life stuffs. No hurrah fell from my lips, but I was not displeased. The lacy affections of the departing were a Pan's pipe to my nature. The proper hour was neverpast for a late departing. Every recipe is a rebus to an old apothecary. Even when there are always plenty of snarlers to cut up the reputations of substantial and very dapper men. Handicapped by an open throat,

that churlish philosopher

continued remugient. His tongue of misrepresentation still had a bad word or two that addressed my personality and behaviour. So much falsehood and exaggeration he put abroad-so many circumstances he distorted, and so many invented-some of the latter possessing sufficient plausibility to deceive even the most wary-that, if not a duty, it was a proper action of mine to relieve his mind of the burden ofliving. It appears at least not wrong to aid in the refutation of malicious calumnies. In fooling, his acromegalic arms flailed the air. I was up for one final push, and spoke with meagre advice. 'First you take a heart,

OUR L0 R D 0 F F UC K- 0 F F CON FRO N T SAN GEL S

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then you breaka heart.' Feeling settled in my body, I mellowed down easy and again drew my firm blade back across his neck. The solid rumble of distress emitting from him would have vanished a dozen wailing Rock-alas. This was a pleasant and confirming time, and, I registered, here was one of the few instances of all men being equal-when they are part of the food chain. I bent and took a huge wallop, nearly all bone, out ofWittgenstein. As I chewed his meat, I named it Subordinate. Seuechoros, the Babylonian king, believed in bloodsucking beings, and Babylonians paid homage to the most ancient breed of angels-the Edimmu-vampire creatures of the night, who entered mankind's legend as the Weeiro-flying bat creatures-nigra of tool-that nestled on the white necks of unfaithful widows. One blood demands one England. Wiping my lips, with no intention to cornut, I sank to my knees there on his massive back, and slid myself amongst his tentacles, allowing myself to be open. Water, so silvery of hue, spurned from his cunts, hiding me from the world. There I luxuriated as a man of the ocean. In a fury, I fucked at his cunts, beside myself with lust. Vaulting from one to another in a dipping crawl until I had covered every last one of them, I left my sperm stuffs lurid in his fie;y Lady Janes. Blood from his lashing tentacles, so whip-crack pure on my skin,

speckled me.

.

The smell from Wittgenstein's

love juices was beatific. Only

the foul stagnant waters of the River Irwell rising in high summer equalled their sweet pungency. But I extracted joy, unbelievable joy,

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from the pitted Jew. My body thundered with angel debasement; no beast of cloven hoof, no spirit, could do infernal business better than that Yid philosopher. His love was quite quenched in horror.

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..

LORD HORROR TIMELlNE

1986 BlueMonday(recording). 12"single by Lord Horror and the Savoy Hitler YouthBand. 1987 Raw PowerIThe Liquidator(recording). 12"single by Lord Horror and the Savoy King Cocaine Band. The reverse of the sleeve-a graphic panel by Kris Guidio from work in progress-shows Lord Horror jacking-up to the strains of Cole Porter's 'You're the Top'. 1989 Lord Horror (novel). Hardbound with black dust jacket and simple white

type.

192pp. ISBN 08613°°726.

1989, but was published

Appeared

in September

with a 1990 copyright.

Lord Horror 1: Born-A8ain-Atomic-Bomb-

Horror

(comic). Script by David

Britton, art by Kris Guidio, cover by Harry Douthwaite/Guidio. Savoy Schopenhauer Production, 40PP, ISBN 08613°°75°.

A

119

Lord Horror 2: Romance

if Swordand Book(comic). Script by Kris

Guidio, art by Kris Guidio, cover by Douthwaite/Guidio. Kunisada Production, 42pp, ISBN 0861300734.

A Savoy

MenD&...Ecker 1 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Sequacious Production, 38pp, ISBN 0861300742. MenD&...Ecker 2 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Ikonographic Production, 38PP' ISBN 0861300769. 1990 GarbaDeman(recording). 12"single by Lord Horror and the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchestra.

Lord Horror

3-Hard

Core Horror

1: The Romance

if Lord

Horror

and }essie Matthews (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio and Harry Douthwaite, cover design by Harry Douthwaite. A Savoy Venus and Tannhauser Production, ISBN 0861300777. Lord Horror 4-Hard

36pp,

Core Horror 2: Churchill's Tick-Tock Men (comic).

Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio, Harry Douthwaite, John Coulthart. 0861300823.

A Savoy Gustave Flaubert Production,

Lord Horror S-Hard

Core Horror 3: Horror TimeJor Hitler (Wir Nichts

Wissen Konnen) (comic).

120

and

60pp, ISBN

Script by David Britton,

art by Kris Guidio

HORROR

PANEGYRIC

if Sword and Book (comic).

Script by Kris Guidio, art by Kris Guidio, cover by Douthwaite/Guidio. A Savoy Kunisada Production, 42pp, ISBN 0861300734.

Lord Horror 2: Romance

MenD&...Ecker 1 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Sequacious Production, 38pp, ISBN 0861300742. MenD&...Ecker 2 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Ikonographic Production, 38PP' ISBN 0861300769. 1990 GarbaDeman(recording). 12"single by Lord Horror and the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammb6 Orchestra.

Lord Horror

3-Hard

Core Horror

1: The Romance

if Lord

Horror

and }essie Matthews (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio and Harry Douthwaite, cover design by Harry Douthwaite. A Savoy Venus and Tannhauser Production, ISBN 0861300777. Lord Horror 4-Hard

36pp,

Core Horror 2: Churchill's Tick-Tock Men (comic).

Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio, Harry Douthwaite, John Coulthart. 0861300823.

A Savoy Gustave Flaubert Production,

Lord Horror 5-Hard

Core Horror 3: Horror TimeJor Hitler (Wir Nichts

Wissen Konnen) (comic).

120

and

60pp, ISBN

Script by David Britton,

art by Kris Guidio

HORROR

PANEGYRIC

and John Coulthart. A Savoy Ionesco Psychodrama Production, .Ppp, ISBN 0861300807. LordHorror6-Hard

CoreHorror4: EntropyGoinODown Slow(comic).

Script by David Britton, art and cover by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Deuteronomy Production, ,6pp, ISBN 0861300831. Lord Horror7-Hard CoreHorror5: Kino HorrorZero (comic). Script by David Britton, art and cover by John Coulthart. A Savoy Parallax Production, 60pp, ISBN 086130084X. Meno &..Ecker 3 (comic). Scripts by David Britton and Michael Butterworth, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Hungerford / Nilsen Production, 40PP, ISBN 086130081,. Meno &..Ecker 4 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Ian McEwan's Bollocks Production, 36pp. 1992 Meno &..Ecker5 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Strangeways Production, ppp, ISBN 08613008,8. 1993 Meno &..Ecker6 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio. A Savoy Martin Flitcroft Production, 36pp, ISBN 0861300882. Meno &..Ecker 7 (comic). Script by David Britton, art by Kris Guidio.

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TIMELINE

121

A Savoy Post-Prison Michael Winner Production, 0861300890.

48pp, ISBN

1994-

if

Lord Horror 8-Reverbstorm 1: Our Lord FuckOff (comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art by John Coulthart and Kris Guidio. A Savoy Schopenhauer Production, S2pp, ISBN 0861300904. This issue came with a free Savoy CD-single containing three mixes of the song 'Reverbstorm' sung by Lord Horror paramour Jessie Matthews, who features in Hard Core Horror and Baptised in the Blood

if Millions.

Song by Paul Temple.

if

(comic). Lord Horror9-Reverbstorm 2: The Land Love-It-To-Death Script by Oavid Britton, art by John Coulthart and Kris Guidio. A Savoy Metempsychosis Production, S2pp, ISBN 0861300912. LordHorror lo-Reverbstorm 3: The Bi8 Beat if Apes (Bo Diddley Meets William Hope Hod8son) (comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art and cover by John Coulthart. A Savoy Neotenous Apes Production, 44PP, ISBN 0861300924. Men8 &..Ecker8 (comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art by Kris Guidio and Bob Walker. A Savoy Young Turks Production, ppp, ISBN 0861300939. Savoy Wars(recording). A lo-track compilation CD that collects the three Lord Horror singles as well as the radio mix of the song 'Reverbstorm'.

122

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1995 LordHoror(Czech translation of the LordHorrornovel). Introduction by Brian Stableford, translation by LadislavSenkyrik. Published by Volvox Globator, Czech Republic, hardbound, 190PP, ISBN 808576967°. Lord Horror

ll-Reverbstorm

4: The Auschwitz

if Oz (comic).

Script

by Oavid Britton, art and cover by John Coulthart. A SavoyHenry Green Production, 48pp, ISBN08613°°955. Meng&..Ecker 9 (comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art by Kris Guidio and John Coulthart. A Savoy Simpering Nancy Boys Production, 68pp, ISBN 08613°°947. 1996 Motheifuckers:TheAuschwitzif Oz (novel). Hardbound with cover art featuring a detail of William Blake's Ghost if a Flea. 262Pp, ISBN 086130098X.

Lord Horror

12-Reverbstorm

5: The Running

Dogs

if Anthony Powell

(comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art and cover by John Coulthart. A SavoyThanatopsis Production, 48pp, ISBN08613°°963. 1997 Lord Horror

13-Reverbstorm

6: The Razor Kings on Mars (comic).

Script by Oavid Britton, art by John Coulthart and Kris Guidio, cover by The Inimitable Miss M. A Savoy Akathartic Production, 52pp, ISBN 08613°1°°5.

LORD

HORROR

TIMELINE

123

if

The Adventures Mens 8t.Ecker (omnibus of Mens 8t.Ecker comics). Scripts by Oavid Britton, art by Kris Guidio. Hardbound and paperback, 2S6pp, ISBN 08613°°998.

1999 LordHorror(recording). Extracts from the novel read by PJ Proby. A SavoyTalking Book CO. 2000

Baptised in the Blood

ifMillions(novel).

Hardbound with cover art by

John Coulthart. 2HPP, ISBN08613°1°13. LordHorror 14-Reverbstorm 7: Juden Wars(comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art and cover by John Coulthart. A Savoy Soleil Noir Production, 60pp, ISBN 08613°1021. 2005

Fuck Off and Die (omnibus of Mens 8t.Ecker and La Squab comics). Hardbound with ISBN086130II37.

124

colour

and

b&w

illustrations,

HORROR

160pp,

PANEGYRIC

.

Forthcoming La Squab: The Black Roseif Auschwitz (illustrated novel). Lord Horror 15-Reverbstorm 8: Lord Hive's Black DaBSymmetricalKiss (comic). Script by Oavid Britton, art by John Coulthart. Although this title has been announced it will not now appear as a comic but as part of the forthcoming collection, Reverbstorm. Reverbstorm(graphic novel). The comics are to be re-presented in a definitive single volume.

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TIME LINE

125