Michael Arnzen on The Vampire Bridegroom

Bram Stoker Award-Winner Michael Arnzen on The Vampire Bridegroom:

Do NOT let the title of this collection fool you: for one thing, there is far more in this thick collection of poetry than just a vampire, and for another, the vampire bridegroom is NOT what you think it will be. I don't want to ruin the surprise. Get this book and you'll be surprised on every page. It's rife with hilarious retakes on classic tropes of the genre -- from queerings of canonical creatures to masterful mash-ups of fairy tales. Helder has a vivid imagination and the rare capacity to make you feel differently about the world...and a wicked sense of humor. If you enjoy this sort of thing, be sure to look for his other book -- the Pop-Up Book of Death! Neither of these works are for children -- this is not their playground...it's ours and it's a blast.

Phantom Hitchhiker

The first time I heard the "Phantom Hitchhiker" story as a child, I completely believed it, so in that sense it really was presented to me as a bonafide urban legend (a story typically told as being true and believed by the storyteller and the listener--despite a thread of skepticism--as opposed to an oral fairy tale that no one believes to be true). I've always been fascinated with the connections between folkloric urban legends and the horror genre. The first time I read Jan Harold Brunvand's "Vanishing Hitchhiker," I was amazed by how many of the legends I had heard and believed as a child. I love "The Hook," "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs," and "The Killer in the Backseat," all of which I remember hearing and believing. Strangely, I have no memory of who told me these stories, but I have vivid memories of the versions I created in my mind--always set in my hometown, or even my own neighborhood. For example, I grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, so "The Hook" I envisioned as taking place at Horsetooth Reservoir. It's kind of creepy that I don't remember anyone telling me all these stories, but I remember all of the stories and their specific settings. Even though I love the urban legends that established the roots of slasher movies, it's really the supernatural urban legends that I love the most, which seem to be a rarer specimen--specifically "Bloody Mary" and "The Phantom Hitchhiker" (I'll write about "Bloody Mary" in another post).

Since Brunvand's introduction to "Vanishing Hitchhiker" was reprinted in my English 101 textbook, I taught an essay unit about urban legends numerous times. In the intro, Brunvand uses a folklorist's lens to define the species of folklore called urban legends and explain how folklorists track and analyze them. Then, my students had to select an urban legend from a database and use Brunvand's approaches to analyze them. This assignment always had mixed results with my students, but the assignment always seemed to work best with the horror urban legends because the societal anxieties fueling the horror legends always seemed to be more accessible and interesting--basic, primal fears about life in the modern world--everything from serial killers to children being abducted. Interestingly enough, the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" seems more difficult to analyze--not as easy to pin down as something like "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs," which seems clearly linked to anxieties related to coming-of-age and the first steps of independence outside the home for adolescent girls. And "The Vanishing Hitchhiker" is quite an old story--even going back before automobiles, all of which is contained in Brunvand's excellent book.

But many years before I started teaching an urban legend unit in my writing class, I wrote my own version of "The Phantom Hitchhiker" in the advanced poetry writing class in college. I was only 22-years-old and very new to the craft of writing poetry, but I really hit something that worked in the poem. The poem is a first-person narration of a young man who picks up a Phantom Hitchhiker, the young woman gives a strange monologue about unrequited love and the nature of her death, and the poem concludes with a very peculiar scene, which I won't spoil here. In the poetry class when I first wrote it, I remember a student in the class said he didn't think it was really a poem because it was too much like a prose story. I'll never forget how the professor responded--he defended the poem by saying that it was a poem because of the fact that almost every line focused on metaphor and imagery. I've always carried that with me as the most important thing about poetry (at least for me)--even if a poem is technically written in prose (non-metered language), or if it has a story, the focus on metaphors, vivid images, and other uses of figurative language set it apart as a poem, which focuses on the art of language.

I was never able to get the poem published, and I could never let go of it. Years later I revised it and added to the hitchhiker's monologue, and then I started trying to revise the ending. I can't tell you how many times I revised the ending of the poem. But I'm happy to report that after fifteen years, I finally came up with the ending of the poem when I completed the final version of The Vampire Bridegroom earlier this year, so I'm very excited for people to read it.

Here is the first part:

The gravel runs beneath my tires like a phonograph
as the Miller house emerges in my headlights
and passes back into darkness
with the speed of a locomotive that derails
and derails every midnight for a hundred years.

I pick up the hitchhiker beyond the bridge.
She brings the smell of sunburn and clotted blood,
pursing her lips, embracing herself
they way a patient would
if discovering the amputation of both arms
to be just a nightmare.

She speaks to the dashboard
before I ask of destinations.

The Vampire Bridegroom

Here is the title poem, which originally appeared in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. I was so proud of the way it turned out in the magazine, I decided to name the entire book after this poem.

Here is "The Vampire Bridegroom" from The Vampire Bridegroom:

For my birthday,
my parents gave me a little vampire
in a hamster cage.
I named him Bram.

I dressed him in that outfit from the
Barbie "Vampire Bridegroom Playset,"
and I slicked back his hair
with shoe polish on my thumb
to accentuate his widow's peak.

I added pinprick blood droplets to his water bottle,
from which he nursed
by licking the silver ball stopper,
all the nourishment he needed.

But during the full moon,
he turned into a little puff of mist and
escaped through the bars,
leaving behind his opera cape and bow tie
on the cedar chips.

You see, my id invited him inside,
unwittingly.
Like a bat seeks out a cave,
the little mist-puff slid up into my rectum while
I slept unaware.

Now the Vampire Bridegroom runs in
the hamster wheel of my heart.

My parents took me to all of the best doctors;
at first the specialists wanted to remove him, of course.

They captured glimpses on the ultrasound
like Bigfoot exposed in a forest clearing.

In the X-rays, they found him nestled behind my
sternum like a papoose,
but when they cracked my chest open in the OR,
they only found his abandoned campfire
and old fingernail clippings.

He must like it there inside me
where it's always night and there's lots of
blood to drink,
where he navigates my innards like
a rabbit in a comfortable warren.

Sometimes he leaves bloody handprints on
the whites of my eyeballs
like a little child on the inside of a
bus window,
to say hello I suppose.

He perches next to my jugular like
a hiker might reflect by a scenic waterfall.

The vampire learned to play my optic nerve
like a friendly uncle might play a banjo string,
and he shows me funny pictures of
Elizabeth Bathory's rubber duckies
and Gilles de Rais playing hide-n-seek
in the castle.

And yes he haunts my
private underworld where
a strawberry patch of strange desires
has sprouted inside my underwear,
and during wet dreams
he rubs my prostate like a zookeeper
might pet a beloved elephant.

The doctors tell me that one day
I will pass him
like a kidney stone,
but I know that the Vampire Bridegroom will sit forever
next to my heart
like a husband next to a plump wife
in the church pew
where he studies me from the inside
like a weaver who controls the loom.

From The Vampire Bridegroom

Dirty Old Peter the Scab-Eater

Boys Beware:
Dirty Old Peter haunts the park shadows
outside the public toilets.
Former denizen of the (Nightmare/Shadow/Mirror),
a scrawny, shriveled, imp-like vampire;
in summer he harvests the knee scabs of boys,
a rare vampire mutation.
His modus operandi:
to knock boys off skateboards and bikes.
At twilight,
he loiters where boys first shed training wheels;
Dirty Old Peter hates training wheels.
He appreciates the taste of boy tears.
Remember this: always skateboard in pairs.

Victims describe his face a hundred different ways.
His face is a nightmare template.

Like all boogeymen, window locks don't deter him;
he sneaks into midnight bedrooms
where he licks beef-jerky scabs right off
with his kitty-cat tongue.
He's fond of stealing ipod earphones from his victims,
dips them into his magic green earwax
and plugs up the ears of sleeping parents
so they won't awaken
when he collects screams for his mp3 player.

He hibernates in the winter when boys wear long pants and sleeves,
hibernates beneath the frozen pond like a frog
and emerges as soon as spring permits boys to ride skateboards in shorts.

After coming up from the mud of his pond,
he molts off the slimy tatters of last year's clothes.
Old Peter never bathes his muddy frog skin,
but each spring he steals a new set of clothes
from a boy he knocks off a skateboard.
He is the size of a boy.
He detests knee pads.

Dirty Old Peter always comes in the night to collect his scab,
perhaps even more skillful than the tooth fairy herself.

Read about more twisted vampires in my collection of poems and tales, The Vampire Bridegroom!

The Barbie Vampire Bridegroom Playset

Back in 2009, my partner and I had just recently moved to Portland. I got a new job working for McKenzie Books in Beaverton, so each day I had to ride the train for a little over an hour.

I soon discovered that the train is a great place for me to write. In the past, I enjoyed writing in busy coffee shops, and I found the combination of motion, commotion, changing scenery, and confinement of riding the train to provide the perfect amount of stimulation and (strangely enough) focus for writing.

I was committed to writing a collection of poetry about vampires, and one evening (on the way home from work), I was brainstorming vampire images in my journal and I hit upon the image of a vampire in a hamster cage.

Next, I came up with the idea of dressing this hamster-sized vampire in doll's clothing, and that's when I came up with the idea for "The Barbie Vampire Bridegroom Playset." I imagined this Barbie playset to be in response to Twilight and the pop-culture obsession with romantic vampires. I pictured the playset to include an old-fashioned wedding dress for Barbie and a Lugosi-esque tuxedo for the vampire Ken.

It seemed like the next logical step in the story of this poem would be: what happens when the vampire escapes from the hamster cage?

I didn't finish the poem on that first night.

The next day at work, I was pulling books for online orders when I saw a copy of Trail Guide to the Body, which is a popular textbook for anatomy students. It has an incredibly surreal image on the front cover of tiny students, dressed as hikers, exploring the inside of a human body and climbing up the skeleton like a rock face.

I love how one of the hikers appears to be resting with a walking stick and some of the hikers have left some of their gear perched on the collarbone. This weird, surreal image from the textbook inspired the rest of the poem: the vampire would escape from the hamster cage and live inside of the persona's body like these tiny hiking students.

After I came up with this idea, the rest of the poem just tumbled out in a series of incredibly weird and surreal images and metaphors.

I was so happy with the quirky and creepy tone of the poem that I decided it should be the "flagship" poem. In other words, I decided to name the whole book after it.

I was also thrilled when Steve Berman accepted the poem for the second issue of Icarus Magazine in the fall of 2009. The folks at Icarus did a beautiful job of the poem's layout, which appears in two colums on one page of the magazine.

Around the same time as the poem came out in Icarus, I read the poem at a literary event in Bellingham where Portland's Chelsea Cain was the star attraction. I was watching her closely as I recited the poem (she was seated in the audience at that point), and I am pleased to say that the poem made her laugh quite a few times (along with the rest of the audience), which felt like a big success. I personally think one reason the humor of the piece went over well is because of the underlying creepiness of the poem, which also put the audience on edge a little bit.

Jump forward almost two years later, and The Vampire Bridegroom (the complete book) had its launch at Stoker Weekend in Long Island.

Here are the first few stanzas of the title poem:

For my birthday,
my parents gave me a little vampire
in a hamster cage.
I named him Bram.

I dressed him in that outfit from the
Barbie "Vampire Bridegroom Playset,”
and I slicked back his hair
with shoe polish on my thumb
to accentuate his widow's peak.

I added pinprick blood droplets to his water bottle,
from which he nursed
by licking the silver ball stopper,
all the nourishment he needed.

But during the full moon,
he turned into a little puff of mist and
escaped through the bars,
leaving behind his opera cape and bow tie
on the cedar chips.

You see, my id invited him inside,
unwittingly.
Like a bat seeks out a cave,
the little mist-puff slid up into my rectum while
I slept unaware.

Now the Vampire Bridegroom runs in
the hamster wheel of my heart.

Of course, you'll have to buy the book to find out what happens after that.

Without further ado, here's the link to a signed copy of The Vampire Bridegroom at McKenzie Books (where I work). It should also be in stock very soon at amazon (see the upper right-hand corner of the website for links).

Frozen Moments: Story Behind the Poem

I wrote a poem called "Frozen Moments," which will appear in The Vampire Bridegroom, my book of poems and tales from Dark Scribe Press (it will be out in July with a pre-release at the Stoker Weekend in June). The poem is a dramatic monologue that features a persona who is obsessed with a boy horror star named Jimmy Duncan. The poem is written in first person; the persona addresses "you" throughout the poem, which refers to Jimmy Duncan. The nameless persona begins:

Once I fell in love with
you Jimmy Duncan,
the boy horror star
with the buzz cut
who started out on the family sitcom
called “Table Scraps,”
a sitcom in the great tradition
of American family sitcoms,
a return to the patriarchal nuclear family,
except in this family the middle son,
played by you Jimmy Duncan,
turns into a grizzled hound
like a little Lon Chaney Jr. doggy werewolf,
your transformation always triggered by
adolescent embarassment.

The nameless persona becomes more than just a fan--he records Jimmy Duncan on VHS tapes, freezing the picture of the boy star to lust after him. By the end of the poem, the persona refers to himself as a vampire feeding on the frozen moments on the VHS tapes.

On one level, this is a satire about grown men lusting after boy stars; on another level, the poem is a satire about boy stardom and the system that "feeds" off of them like the persona feeds off the frozen images.

Jimmy Duncan, the boy horror star, is based on a variety of boy stars from the past and present. My first inspiration was the tragic life of Bobby Driscoll, the Disney star who voiced Peter Pan and died an early death from a drug overdose. Also, the "Table Scraps" sitcom is a parody of Disney's Shaggy Dog, which starred Tommy Kirk, who was fired by Disney for being gay.

The poem also takes inspiration from Victor Salva's Clownhouse and the sexual molestation scandal connected to that film. Salva was convicted of molesting the twelve-year-old star of the film and videotaping the sexual acts. This act of sexual exploitation connects to the poem's theme of the persona's voyueruistic "vampirism" and also implicates the larger viewing audience in the "feeding." While watching Clownhouse, it seems as if the murderous clowns become a grotesque embodiment of the director's desire for the young boys in the film. The concept behind the poem is to mirror this with the vampires that Jimmy Duncan encounters in his film career.

In the poem, the persona narrates the television and film career of Jimmy Duncan, the fictional boy horror star. One of these films involves clown vampires, which refers back to Clownhouse, and there is a fictionalized version of the Salva case in the poem. 

Another inspiration for the poem is the story of Corey Haim, who starred in Lost Boys and Silver Bullet. I loved Corey Haim when I was a young teenager--I remember wishing I could hang pictures of him and River Phoenix on my locker like the girls at school did. In my mind, Corey Haim was the ultimate boy horror star. And like the fictional Jimmy Duncan in the poem, his story became a tragedy--years of struggling with drug addiction and an early death.

To complete the satirical portrait in the poem, I brought in the ongoing scandal of Catholic priests molesting young boys. I came up with a fictional Swiss Surrealist (like Ingmar Bergman) who casts Jimmy Duncan in a black-and-white film where the priests are vampires feeding on the boys:

Then you proved you could really act in the
Swiss surrealist's satire on the Catholic scandal.
You proved you could really scream too.
You played the young orphan
terrorized by a depraved coven of Satanic priests.

The priests draw unclean symbols on your bare chest
with the devil’s lipstick
after they strap you to the altar
and drink blood from your inner thigh

The final stanza of the poem describes Jimmy Duncan's tragic death, and it concludes with the creepy persona describing how he is going to purchase all of Jimmy Duncan's films on high-def Blu-ray, so he can use the advanced technology to freeze the frame on Duncan's body like he did with the VHS tapes, and this is how he feeds on Duncan's "undead beauty." There is also a creepy idea that Duncan will live forever through these film, but this also suggests that the exploitation will also continue.

In this poem, I hoped to create an ambiguous, creepy feeling about the subject, which interconnects child stardom, sexual exploitation, and the taboo of boy love. Hopefully, the poem is open to a variety of interpretations. I wanted to share some of the ideas behind the poem, without attempting to secure the meaning of the poem. I hope you will get a copy of Vampire Bridegroom and come up with your own interpretation.

The Gory Boy

One of my favorite pieces in The Vampire Bridegroom is a fairy tale poem called "The Gory Boy." This story was inspired by Grimm's "The Juniper Tree," one of the grisliest and most disturbing fairy tales in the fairy tale canon. The motif of being murdered by the lid of a trunk also shows up in a horrifying episode of the radio show Lights Out called "The Chest," which I ran across this week.

In addition to the infamous child murder in Grimm's "The Juniper Tree," I found inspiration from Perrault's version of "Sleeping Beauty," specifically the character of the ogre mother in that version (she doesn't show up in the Grimm version or the Disney version)--I loved the idea of a character having a mixed ancestry with ogres, and therefore being susceptible to the unspeakable hungers of the ogre.

The Mirror Witch Bloody Mary, one of the most prominent folklore figures in my own psyche, makes an appearance in the concluding sections of the poem (but you will have to buy the book to find out more about that).

Peter Pan and the Jungian archetype of Puer Aeternus specifically inspired the character of the Gory Boy, who also shares some nasty characteristics with Bartholomew of the Scissors.

Without further ado, here's a sample from the fairy tale poem "The Gory Boy" in The Vampire Bridegroom:

Once upon a time there lived
an honest poor woodcutter;
he married an orphan girl
who harbored a secret:
an ogre in her ancestry,
and the ogre lineage corrupted her offspring.
She bore her husband twelve sons,
all of whom became wielders of axes.
The more sons she bore, the
more the ogre hunger grew in her,
and the more she took on the aspect of the ogre.

In secret, the sons murdered travelers on the road;
they felled travelers as regularly as tree trunks.

The father, outnumbered, said nothing
about the accumulation of strange riches in the house,
tokens from distant lands,
and he did partake of the savory stews in silence.

Then the thirteenth son was born in a torrent of blood
that drained the mother's life force.
The thirteenth son put his mother in the grave.

With his treasure trove of unusual and exotic items,
he attracted a new wife, the daughter of a wealthy merchant
who could find no suitor because of
the red birthmark that blotted out half of her face
like a blood mask.

Unlike his brothers, the thirteenth son was slight,
with a queer disposition and
a knack
for making dolls out of cast-off pieces of wood.

All day, the stepmother prepared stews with the strange meats
her stepsons brought her
while the fey little boy played with grotesque dolls,
always trying to sneak into the attic
where the stepmother kept her prized possession:
the ornate gypsy trunk.

The boy liked to gaze at his reflection in the pond,
liked to pretend he had friends
when he talked to his doll-brethren.

Again, the boy crept into the attic,
and knelt before the trunk.
This would be the last time, the stepmother vowed.
Inside the lid of the trunk: the mirror,
so much clearer than the pond—like a different world
(inside the trunk, the substance of shadow and mystery).
The boy leaned in closer to inspect his reflection.
The stepmother slammed the lid with the sharp metal lip—
chopped off his curious little head.

Read the rest of "The Gory Boy" in The Vampire Bridegroom!

Sample Queer Horror: The Apes

Here is a sample flash fiction tale from The Vampire Bridegroom (this tale originally appeared in The Harrow):

The Apes

In the distant dystopian future, after the nuclear attacks and the revolution, three middle-aged men sit in the day room of the minimum security acculturation center.

Mark, Ricky and Bernard receive injections three times a day to cure their homosexuality.

Each man has a different story about how they arrived at the facility.

Mark: arrested for sodomy in a parked car.

Ricky: turned in by his wife when she found illicit homosexual pictures in the closet.

Bernard: turned in by a former lover who had been successfully rehabilitated.

The state scientists work diligently to abolish homosexuality from society, developing a series of hormonal and psychotropic injections based on their research with the apes.  Genetically, the apes are a mishmash of gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee (only the top level scientists on the project know about the human DNA in the ape subjects).

Each patient has an ape donor that provides the biological material necessary to cultivate the anti-homosexuality serum.

The three apes, monstrous creatures with bright orange hair and black skin, sit together in their cage.  They make love together in the darkness at night, unaware of the night-vision surveillance of the scientists who record the footage for the database.

Mark, Ricky, and Bernard all three dream about the sex between the apes.  As the injections progress, a psychic connection between the men and the apes grows.

They must do something before their identities are obliterated.

The security is too tight to escape, Mark whispers while pretending to knit in the day-room.

But not too tight for them, Ricky says, meaning their ape doubles.

Have you ever read that crazy story by Poe? Bernard asks.

The one with the ape?

The one with the ape and straight razor, Bernard says.

At the animal testing center, the young research student tends the apes.  Darkness and stillness in the cage at the end of the row.   Did the light bulb go out?  The student steps up to the cage to examine the chart.  Massive hands break his neck and crack his head open on the bars.  The keys dangle from a string around his neck.

At the acculturation center, the apes easily breach the security perimeter.  The security cameras register fast shadows moving up and over the fence—the guard turns away only for a moment.   A moment later, his throat is slashed, almost decapitated by the powerful ape with the straight razor.

The three apes find the vulnerable windows selected by Mark, Ricky, and Bernard who telepathically instruct every movement of the apes.  They gain access where no human could climb.

The bloodbath commences: every orderly who insulted them, every nurse who pricked them with needles, every doctor who masterminded their "treatment" meets the vengeance of the apes with the razors.

When the apes breach the cell that holds Mark, Ricky, and Bernard, the apes find a terrible surprise.  The three men all dead—slumped in their chairs, waiting with their eyes open.  In the excitement of the raid, they transferred their entire minds and souls into the apes who now weep over their human bodies.

Cover Art Released for The Vampire Bridegroom

I'm very excited to announce that the cover for The Vampire Bridegroom has been released.

Here's a special thanks to Deena Warner for designing the cover and bringing the Vampire Bridegroom to life.

Vampire Bridegroom art by Deena WarnerInitially, we had a debate over whether or not to give the vampire fangs, and I am very happy with the final result, especially because the position of the blood dribble on his lip has a strong suggestion of a fang (or where the fang would be--the dribble left over from recently striking a messy jugular--he's adept, but he missed a couple drops!). Most of all, I love the blood spatter on his tux and the way his hand suggests that he is about to bow (I do have a special place in my heart for vampires like Lugosi's Dracula who really know how to wear a tuxedo). 

And for those vampire fans out there who hate romantic or sparkling vampires, don't worry--the vampires in this book are very perverse and loathsome (well, OK--maybe a few of the vampires in the book have that sexy gothic vibe going on).

In the titular poem "Vampire Bridegroom" (published previously in an issue of Icarus), the vampire is very small--kept in a hamster cage, in fact--he is dressed in Ken's doll tuxedo from the Barbie "Vampire Bridegroom Playset," which I imagined is a kind of Barbie playset for Twilight fans. However, the vampire becomes a very different kind of bridegroom--just wait until you see what happens in this poem/story! If you can't wait, you will just have to check out this issue of Icarus. Here's another famous vampire in a tuxedo:

Now, back to the cover art--I am also thrilled with all of the textures and intricate patterns of the cover design. And hopefully the text on the back cover will entice and tantalize readers into purchasing a copy. Check out the full wraparound art below.

Thanks to Vince Liaguno and Dark Scribe Press, and thanks again to Deena Warner for this marvelous cover. I'm looking forward to seeing both of you at Stoker Weekend 2011 where Deena Warner will be the Artist Guest of Honor!

 Hooray for The Vampire Bridegroom!Click to enlarge

The Vampire Bridegroom Lives

The Vampire Bridegroom is on his way!

A few years back, I asked myself: what would it look like if a poet (that I admired) wrote an epic response to the horror genre in all its forms? Then, I attempted to write that imaginary book myself, and The Vampire Bridegroom is the result. It's my best attempt--I held nothing back, that's for sure.

The title comes from a poem that was published in Icarus magazine in the fall of 2009.

I had the great pleasure of reading the poem before an audience as part of the warm-up act for Chelsea Cain, a serial killer/thriller writer whom I greatly admire. While I was reading the poem, she was in the audience, and I kept looking up to see her reaction, and I am happy to say that she was laughing throughout the poem--it's definitely intended to be darkly humorous and twisted (like a lot of the poems I write).

I've seen the cover art, and I am looking forward to sharing it with the world.