Matthew Barney comes to life — It’s still Halloween somewhere in the world, probably, so one more creepy post for November, before we get into the holidays. November’s archive is The Candidate, a story based entirely, directly, and totally off Matthew Barney’s goat character in the Cremaster films and his former relationship with a famed Icelandic…

The Fictional Obituary of a Butthole Surfer — For October’s archive post, I’ll channel some Halloween spirit with the obituary of Johnny Smoke. This story was written as something of an ode to the band Butthole Surfers, specifically John E. Smoke. It was also a vehicle to express some formal invention, following the quasi-cubistic type of story I…

Last month for my Medium archive piece I posted a Buddhism-inspired short story that had disappeared off the interwebs as online literary journals practice the Buddhist property of impermanence, so this month I will follow with an essay in the same spirit that suffered the same fate. …

Location Report for a Fictional Low Budget Action Movie — To: frankie@blackxxxxxngneon.com From: eric@radixxxxxxnes.com.vn Location: Mui Ne, Vietnam is situated roughly halfway between the commercial hub Saigon and the large southern coastal city Nha Trang. Mui Ne is a traditional fishing village that, through mysterious means, has transformed into a luxurious resort town clustered around a cove on the South…

A short story inspired by the Diamond Sutra — This story appeared in the Manhattanville Review in 2016. It’s inspired by the Diamond Sutra as explained by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion. The visuals in my head for the setting were Chicago. after Thích Nhất Hạnh Once upon a time…

A genre-bending French Kung-fu werewolf flick — Brotherhood of the Wolf has been sitting on my computer for ages and I just hadn’t taken the plunge. Killer wolves, cool! French period drama, meh. Oh my, what an entertainingly messy spectacle I had been missing! This movie has just about everything. There were several JAWS-like sequences of country…

a different perspective of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” — This story has disappeared from the interwebs for some reason, so I’ll reprint it here. It was originally published in 2019 and was really an exercise for me as I endeavored to write “The Story of an Hour” from the perspective of the husband. The Kate Chopin story is one…

This story appeared in PANK in 2009 and was my first big publication. PANK was making a bit of splash at the time and was edited by Roxanne Gay, among others. This is also the story that got me into the Alabama MFA program, I’m told. Two Jackasses stare at…

A slice of kombat nostalgia — I started out wanting to do a retrospective review of the 1994 Street Fighter film as a counterpoint to the newly released Mortal Kombat movie — Street Fighter 2 is the superior of the two epic 90s 2D fighting video games in my opinion — but then I watched the…