Cry for Mother
- J.E. Erickson
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
I try to not complain about winter weather, because I prefer the cold to the heat. You can only take so many clothes off and hide so far underground before you're just putting yourself in an oven. Some Minnesotans dream of retiring to Florida or somewhere warm along the Gulf Coast. My dream is to strike it rich and move to northern Sweden or somewhere in Alberta.
Today, though? She's cold out. -7F and a 20MPH north wind (-22C/32KPH).
Okay. So, besides the weather, what's going on?
Gingerbread 2 is underway. I'm about 35K into the first draft and getting to know the characters better. The End of Forever (which henceforth, heretofore, and from now on shall be referred to as "Jo and Lucy") is still in beta/editing. All three books are written, but all three won't come out at the same time. I just like to have things done. My biggest fear is referencing something in book 3 that didn't happen in book 1. I may try doing one book at a time for the subsequent series, but who can know for sure?
As a hobby, writing is making me neurotic.
What else? My hockey teams are doing well. The Frost and Wild are both chilling in 3rd place within their respective divisions. My D&D group is finishing up Rime of the Frostmaiden. I'm considering introducing them to something horror-related, like Call of Cthulhu or Kult: Divinity Lost. It's been a LONG time since I've DM/GM'd a game, so I'm hesitant.
That's pretty much it.
This week's book report
I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know what I was thinking about writing this. I remember buying a bitchin’ premade cover and just throwing together a story in eight days.
Jocks don’t bother me. Was I bullied as a kid? Yeah, but not by jocks. Those guys generally left me alone; my older brother and his friends didn’t. Ten years in the military showed me that jocks are funny. Most of them bark real loud and call themselves ‘alpha males’ but the majority are the biggest babies on the planet. They’ll be the first ones in line to wrestle around, throw each other into shit—the harmless, adolescent guy stuff most of us did all the way to our 20s—but if you hit one a little too stiffly, maybe trip him, they’ll complain like children.
“If I twist my ankle, I can’t play basketball on Friday!”
They’re just so delicate.
Despite how that sounds, I don’t say that to disparage them. The vast majority of what western and world culture has become is spectacle and performance. The only reason jocks, politicians, and law enforcement have this mystique about them is because the general public allows it to exist. Perception makes up seven-tenths of any situation. Some of the kindest, most thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent people who’ve been my friends for a short time have been people traditionally considered jocks.
Lance isn’t much different. What Lance did, his great ‘transgression’ that made him my target, was to be entitled. This is a guy who has done everything exciting in his life and has treated people poorly along the way, be they his friends, lovers, or family. He has all kinds of money to do cool stuff like skydiving and SCUBA, has supportive male friends, is objectively handsome, but has the unmitigated gall to lack so much self-awareness that he’s become bored with life. What a dick.
Some of that may not have come out in the text but there’s enough to get the point across. How long is this book? Forty pages or something. It’s a small canvas on which to paint.
“Lance, you need to die.”
Everyone has had that one plot device of a friend. The one who suggests something stupid, makes it sound amazing, but ends up leading you into the deep end where you both struggle to stay afloat. The really good friends sit in the jail cell with you.
Instead of facing maturity, Lance turns his death grip on immaturity into a drug, and at the suggestion of a friend, he chases that dragon all the way to Dr. FunGirl, who, very clearly, is an analog for Katharine Isabelle’s character in American Mary.
Why include the body mod stuff? Because I think body modification is neat. It takes a lot of nerve to have someone hit you with a body-sized slap bracelet with a chessboard pattern and make it permanent while surgically implanting horns on your forehead. That takes a lot of commitment and self-assurance.
I remember this fake story out of Canada that circulated in the early 2000s. Twin medical students decided to engage in some quakery, where one had his arm amputated at the shoulder and attached under his brother’s arm. The limb, though useless, remained alive. Since they were twins, the immune system of the brother who received it didn’t reject it.
Yes, people (who also happen to be registered voters) believed this really happened despite the improbability of this level of surgery being performed in someone’s basement in fucking Saskatchewan.
Thinking of this when following Lance around, I wondered what the next (fictional) step would be for people who treated body modification as their own sort of drug.
Somewhere between Altered States and Flatliners, Lance is brought to the threshold of life and death and finds that it’s not only the best drug on the planet, but there’s someone waiting for him there.
“Cry for Mother, Lance. Bring her home to us.”
Given more page space, you’d have learned Mother is a cosmic horror who takes the form of a person’s greatest desires. Lance found Mother. This gentle, horrible, and loving force that gives him all the secrets of the universe, but only for a moment.
Personally, I couldn’t imagine a more potent drug. Secrets of the universe? I’d chase the shit out of that, too.
Of course, every cosmic horror has a cult. Who’s Dr. FunGirl? You guessed it. Cultist.
Lance descends into a short-lived mindfuck that, since he isn’t equipped with any kind of emotional parachute, leads to him killing his friend on the way to finding Dr. FunGirl and getting a second fix at the doorway to death.
This time, things go wrong.
Few things frighten at an existential level. Rabies, prion diseases like chronic wasting in deer and mad cow (spongiform encephalitis), and locked-in syndrome. Terminal lucidity scares the absolute dog shit out of me. Imagine being trapped in your own mind and body yet unable to move or communicate. To be perfectly aware in that situation, not brain injured or just a series of firing neurons within a shell without consciousness, and surrounded by unhelpful people who think life is just too fucking precious to help me die gives me nightmares. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and Johnny Got His Gun (which famously served as the backdrop for Metallica’s One video) embody my every existential dread.
Again, poor Lance.
Thanks for reading my book report, teacher.
Do I wish there was more to this novelette? Eh, maybe. It’s not a book that I often think about. I’d just finished Always, in This Nightmare, which is my attempt at a horrormance, and needed a palette cleanser. I find that when I write dramas or love stories, I need to balance it out with something icky. Offerings to the Flower Moon is kind of intense in places, so the comedy-horror sister love of Dust Bunnies rebalanced my brain. Always has this one. Gingerbread and Jo and Lucy pair up well, which is why Gingerbread 2 is going to "slip around in blood" gross. Bicameral and Hot Demon Bitches do the same.
Most of you who’ve stuck around for everything probably notice different kinds of love being explored, even in the really bloody stuff. That’s not going away. All my stories are love stories to some degree. Except for this one. Lance had a chance to at least love himself and never did. He died half-mad, trapped within himself, and so painfully alone that he allowed the people caring for him to strip him bare and destroy everything he was. And he forced himself to see it as a good thing.
Between this one and Gingerbread, I’m beginning to think I have a weird thing for skin removal.