[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4668: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4670: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4671: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4672: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) Horror World • View topic - Edward Lee's Intro to GENITAL GRINDER by Ryan Harding
Joined: Mon Feb 12, 2007 11:06 am Posts: 177 Location: Portland, OR
The latest release from DEADITE PRESS is a collection of hardcore horror from Ryan Harding (you may remember him from the PARTNERS IN CHYME chapbook). Edward Lee was kind enough to write an introduction for the book and I thought you all might enjoy reading what he had to say:
Quite a number of years ago–at least 15, but my aging gray matter can’t be sure–I was contacted by a fan named Ryan Harding. I’ve always tried to respond to all fan contacts (every now and then, however, you get an obvious clunker, like the ex-con who wrote to tell me The Bighead’s most violent scenes provided him with superb masturbation fodder; or the woman who wanted to know if I’d like to see pictures of her cutting herself–these, yes, are such clunkers. It is advisable for an author never to reply to these red flags) and I was impressed as well as flattered by Mr. Harding’s generous words regarding my work; additionally, he bestowed such words in a manner and air which disclosed a formidable command of the language and a most arresting and cogent creative bent. Moreover, Mr. Harding was a positive acquaintance of several friends of mine; hence, it seemed unlikely that he might be hiding “clunkerdom” beneath a clever camouflage and would later stalk me or, say, start murdering people in ways which duplicated the superfluity of murders in my books. So I chose to pursue correspondence with this young, intelligent, and spirited Mr. Harding. He had aspirations of becoming a writer himself, and flattered me further via the declaration that I was an influence of some significance to him. Then, one day, he asked me if I’d care to read some of his song lyrics–he was into Metal as was I, so I said “sure.” The prospect seemed enticing: I was very curious what this bright, new-generation individual might demonstrate in the way of creative verse; indeed, it struck me as an attractive occasion to observe the tenor of such an enthusiast’s muse, and, doubly, I wondered just what might be the products of that muse?
Well. Here is an inventory of those products.
Psychosis. Misogyny. Misanthropy. Nihilism. Sadism. Necrophily. Erotopathy. Profanation. Alienation. Blasphemy. And every manner of irreverence, aberrant impulse, and outright satanism conceivable and inconceivable.
I’ve long since lost these lyrics (or perhaps I deleted them for fear that their negativity might plunge me into a abysm of clinical depression!), but I recall–and suspect I always will–the final line: “We fucked her good, my knife and I.”
Wow, I thought, this guy’s really fucked up in the head, and then I felt suddenly leery when I appended my conjecture, Wow, this guy’s even more fucked up in the head than ME.
Gore-house smut, enmity personified, and scatology in grand style proved the common denominators hovering amid Harding’s aesthetic elan, and certainly we’ve seen a whole lot of such stuff infiltrating the sub-genre known (among other appellations) as Extreme Horror. Ninety percent of the work is probably worthy of the critical lambasting it receives. Grossness for the sake of grossness. Amateur scribes merely heaping revolting images and disorganized, just-popped-into-my-head scenes of unlikely violence upon the page without any regard to integration, character, story-line. “The bitch screamed as the maggot-ridden zombie rammed its rotten cock into her gaping, reeking pussy and came spurts of pus!” That kind of shit, and personally I’m sick to death of it, as have many readers been for a long time. One time I recall a critic referring to “Extreme Horror” as something akin to a little boys’ circle-jerk club wherein the purpose of each participant is to try to gross the next guy out. I actually quite agree with that (though accurately or inaccurately I disagree that I am a member of that self-same club!) because it appears that what Extreme Horror at large lacks most of all is a discipline of craft. It’s just gross-out sex and gross-out violence that the misguided author thinks will gross the reader out. But it doesn’t gross the reader out. It bores the reader. To tears. And it not only sullies the popular impression of the genre as a whole, but makes the more serious authors out there look just as inept, just as juvenile, and just as I-don’t-give-a-shit.
Which brings us back to Monsieur Harding.
He’s not part of the “club,” folks. He gives a shit-and-a-half about not only the speculative and/or societal points of extreme fiction but also the very craft of it. Over time I read much of Harding’s works-in-progress, mostly stories but also some novel partials, and in them not only did I find those previously stated thematic denominators (gore-house smut, enmity personified, and scatology in grand style) but also a nearly “Strunk-and-White” obsession with prose-mechanics, stylistic feature-through-discipline, charactorial integration, and plot dynamics. It quickly occurred to me that Ryan Harding had (and, furthermore, has) the tenacity, know-how, and wherewithal to become a very potent practitioner in the field of Extreme Horror. Here’s a writer who regards the venue as something rife with value, relevance, and, indeed, meaning. It’s a gore-house world, folks. Just read the paper. This globe is aswarm with enmity personified. (Did you see Daniel Pearl’s beheading?) Scatology in grand style is as real as the mouse button which clicks interested pervertos and other reprobate scum to websites offering bestiality, sex with the severely handicapped, vid-clips of crack-addicted women eating feces ice-cream cones or consuming fish bowls of semen, spit-fights, nose-blow bukkake, animal torture, galleries of deformed children, vomit-swap buffets, etc., ad infinitum.
Ah! The real world!
It’s that same world, too, that Harding’s fiction seeks to delineate in a manner unique unto itself. Some of the stories in this book make notorious writers like, say, Peter Sotos and celebrated madmen as, say, Jeffery Dahmer look like “the veriest tyros,” (to steal a cool simile from Lovecraft). There are times as well when they make, say, Edward Lee, look like, say, a baby in a high chair and making ga-ga noises. Likewise, some of the imagery herein is more disturbing, despair-summoning, and stomach-upheaving than any I’ve read anywhere.
Allow me to make an abstraction--granted, a goofy one probably–or perhaps a “figurative representation” is a better way to put it. As a reader of Harding’s work, I’d like you to imagine that your psyche is a vagina.
That’s right. A vagina.
What Harding’s work provides for you is a raucous, down and dirty, butt-stinky gang-bang with a multitude of demented and very horny participants. You are humped and humped and humped by Harding’s fiction; you are prodded, poked, skewered, and penetrated time and time again; you are stuffed like a turkey, pounded like sod, and plungered like a gas station toilet. (Man, oh, man! You sure got more than you bargained for in this gang-bang, huh? ‘Ho!) Your suitors, I’ll add, don’t like you at all; in fact, they hate you, they hate you for no reason at all. They don’t give two diddlies about you, nor two shits. You’re not a person, you’re not an individual consciousness. What you are to this miscreant crew is nothing more than a hot hole for their penises to have a party in. And there are many such penises, and some come back for a double-dip. Ah, but it’s not typical sperm that you’re being filled like a cannoli with. See, each ejaculation comes possessed of an exclusive constituent, and those constituents are as follows:
Psychosis. Misogyny. Misanthropy. Nihilism. Sadism. Necrophily. Erotopathy. Profanation. Alienation. Blasphemy. And every manner of irreverence, aberrant impulse, and outright satanism conceivable and inconceivable.
Yes.
Now the gang-bang is over. Your suitors are gone, leaving you sore, stupefied, and full of evil sperm. When you get home, you douche at once, intent to flush it all out, but the more you douche, the more you seem to push all that devilish slop deeper. Will you ever get it all out? But at least the nightmare is over, right?
Wrong. Five weeks later you find out you’re pregnant.
That’s what Harding’s work will do to you. It will turn you into a tramp. It will transfigure you into an object for use–a receptacle for all the animus, loathe, and maleficence the human mind has generated, a drain-can for the filth of all the abominations of the earth, and then? It will knock you up.
These are my introspective impressions of Harding’s fiction. He means business. He’s not simply trying to gross us out–he’s trying to make us see. (And I suppose any of us who happen to see ourselves...well, then, such persons are in a heap of trouble!)
So enjoy the tour, friends. Enjoy the gang-bang. You may need psych drugs afterwards, you may need an air-sick bag and a steam shower, but I feel confident that you will be provocatively moved by this book.
Edward Lee August 9, 2011
"Think you're hardcore? Think again. If you've handled everything Edward Lee, Wrath James White, and Bryan Smith have thrown at you, then put on your rubber parka, spread some plastic across the floor, and get ready for Ryan Harding, the unsung master of hardcore horror. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Harding's work is like an acid bath, and pain has never been so sweet." - Brian Keene
“Enjoy the tour, friends. Enjoy the gang-bang. You may need psych drugs afterwards, you may need an air-sick bag and a steam shower, but I feel confident that you will be provocatively moved by this book.” - Edward Lee from his introduction.
Genital Grinder collects the most sought after and most extreme fiction from the diamond in the puke – Ryan Harding.
Contents: Introduction: Enjoy the Gang Rape by Edward Lee Damaged Goods Sharing Needles Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in 5 Acts Development Emissary Genital Grinder II: Dis-Membered First Indications Aftermath: About the Stories
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:35 am Posts: 483 Location: UK
Hey Dutchgorelover,
I'll be sending Deadite an order later this week I hope and see if I can get it shipped from the UK printers, hopefully end up getting it quicker that way, will let you know as soon as I hear back from them.
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:50 am Posts: 110 Location: California
I wasn't going to buy this one, but I'm definitely sold now. I agree about how empty, juvenile, and unfulfilling a lot of extreme horror can be, and my years of reading free online fiction from amateurs has produced about one gem for every hundred yawns. Which is slightly worse than the nine or ten serious worries about author sanity per hundred. With a title like "Genital Grinder," I assumed this would just be a slicker, slightly better-written case of that. But if it's good enough for Ed to write that cool an introduction to, it's good enough for me to subject my brain to some punishment
_________________ He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts
Joined: Sat May 03, 2008 10:49 pm Posts: 450 Location: Winnipeg
I will say though that I long ago grew jaded with the soundbites from fellow authors that adorn all books these days. There does seem to be quite the back slapping club in author circles. Hopefully this is as good as Lee says.
KK: no, no clunkers on this board (but if you could see some of my old fan mail. Now THERE'Re some clunkers!) All: Harding's collection is outrageous, nauseating fun, and I hope you can check it out!
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:50 am Posts: 110 Location: California
I just finished it. This kid is good.
Excellent gross-out writer, and he has a command of the humor needed to keep books like this from being pitch-black unbearable. Genital Grinder II was my favorite of the stories, and the combination of laughs and nausea in it is perfect enough that if you posted the story anonymously to the board here, people would think it was one of Ed's works. That's actually my only complaint about the collection- a lot of the stories feel like very well done cover band versions of other authors' works. It's still excellent, and I look forward to watching Harding grow as a writer and develop his own demented voice.
_________________ He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts
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