bloglinker
Add
your blog / journal
to
the bloglinker!
mister clin and the secret of the pain makers - excerpt...
Meester Clin had been on most countries' hit lists since 2059. The 2nd United States of America--under the regime of something that refused to be photographed and was so calculated many thought it was a computer--finally caught him last year. He had expected no mercy now that the last of Amnesty International was gone. But they gave him a job. The U.S. 2 had more money than there were trees in the world (literally) and they needed a man who didn't feel pain for an infiltration; Meester Clin had been born without pain thanks to a damaged nervous system and he needed money to find his love, his Sally...the only woman in the world who had seen his face below the gray plastic mask and understood his Way of Blood. So he'd allied himself with America. If only I'd had another choice, he thought dully. But that was beside the point. He'd given his word, a contract...and he always lived by his word no matter how much he didn't want to.
pitaniello speaks...
For years there was an accumulation in my notebooks of weird acts of mutilation, including the frequent "Improper Use of Kitchen Utensils." None of these would have ever made a story by themselves and they're nasty enough that most publishers would probably balk at them. Then Chimeraworld # 3 came around and I had an outlet.
And I had my characters...sort of. Provoked by video game carnage with little to no purpose back in 2001, I wrote a story with an assassin named Mr. Clean. He killed without a scrap of a reason, so he fit right in to my Chimeraworld # 3 tale...except for the fact that the original story took place in the present while the new one took place in the future. But no problem! Make the new one a descendent of the old one and change his name to something that isn't a brand of bathroom cleaner--PLEASE DON'T SUE ME!--and everything works out.
Sally Sociopath--another character I've reused several times--would make a perfect wife of the psycho Meester Clin, even if I still haven't figured out how she survived the generation gap between her other stories and this one (I'm thinking fountain of youth or clones). But I decided to not have her put in an appearance in this story of a futuristic dystopia.
And then I set out to build the country from Hell. It could never compete with Orwell, but I tried, throwing in pain-taxes, military brutality, citizen slaughter, and torture chambers, all run by a government something that probably wasn't human. That last one was no doubt a sarcastic response to the remarkably cold actions of various governments in the past ("The mentally ill are a waste of resources!"). And, though it didn't occur to me at the time, the tour groups to the apartment complex massacre in my story might go back to me hearing that buses of tourists will drive up to Columbine High School and stare. I hope I misheard that.
With the Suicide Pro-Act, on the other hand, there isn't much mystery as to its origin. I read an opinion article saying unwanted children should be aborted because they would just kill themselves in 10 years anyway. Apart from the fact that you can't possibly know what a person who hasn't been born yet will do in 10 years, this outlook disturbed me. Suppose we did know someone would kill themselves in the future. Does that justify killing them *now*? At best, this outlook is disturbingly similar to Spielberg's Minority Report where people are arrested for crimes they might commit later on. At worst, it's saying that people who commit suicide never accomplish anything, never improve another person's life, and are generally just wastes of our time. Either way, I was a little pissed and, surprise surprise, my government from Hell included the Suicide Pro-Act.
As I said, most of the story was pure fiction. But lurking inside are slivers of my disgust at the world, sometimes obvious, sometimes not. There are probably more examples I haven't noticed yet too. I'm no Orwell, but I try, and sometimes the world around me leaks into my fictional tales, insisting that real life can be nastier than anything we make up.
pitaniello bio...
Richard Pitaniello lurks in Latin halls and backwoods forests. His writing is mostly a horror quagmire, though he does venture into other genres and write sci-fi, fantasy, and sometimes literary. His horror goes from one side of the spectrum to the other, from amazingly violent splatter-punk to supernatural stories without a single drop of blood which are meant to be evocative. Which of those he's better at remains to be seen.
free newsletter...
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Hellbound Books, Spring 2006
Plus six other short novels (approx 40,000 words each) that I'm looking to publish in a special 6-pack.
