Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
Read Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Online
Authors: Cody Goodfellow
“Cody Goodfellow’s work is ’80s vintage horror with a contemporary edge. An exemplary wordsmith, his prose sticks a needle in your brain and gives it a twist. This stuff is Lovecraft on acid.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
is anything but quiet: it announces Goodfellow’s continued presence among the leading cohort of modern horror with a thunderclap.” —Laird Barron, author of
The Imago Sequence & Other Stories
“Cody Goodfellow is a force to be reckoned with. Grab this book, but keep your arms inside the vehicle while you’re turning the pages. There are things within these pages with teeth on ‘em. You’ve been warned.” —Norm Partridge, author of
The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists
and
Dark Harvest
“The writing here is sharp, rife with a mixture of clever allusions and metaphors that glint with ingenuity. Goodfellow is one of those writers whose voice sweeps you away like the undertow of a tsunami, and once you’re in, he’s got you pinned.” —Mike Arnzen, author of
Proverbs for Monsters
and
Play Dead
“[I]t is obvious that if Cody Goodfellow is a writer of ‘extreme’ stories, then it is as a writer of concomitantly ‘extreme’ ideas —the thinking person’s extreme writer.” —Bill Breedlove, editor of
Mighty Unclean
and
Like a Chinese Tattoo
“A new and original author bursts onto the scene. [H]is descriptive passages leap off the page, his dialogue snaps and crackles with the authenticity of real life.” —Jack Olsen, Edgar Award Winning author of 31 books, including the best-selling
Doc: The Rape Of The Town Of Lovell
and
Son: A Psychopath And His Victims
.
Swallowdown Press
PO Box 2466
Portland, OR 92708-2466
WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM
ISBN: 1-933929-02-2
Hinterland originally appeared in
Westwind
Vol. 35, Spring, 1993. Baby Teeth originally appeared in
Dark Discoveries
11, Spring 2008. El Santero originally appeared in
Horror Carousel
5, Spring 2007. A Drop Of Ruby originally appeared in
Third Alternative
41; Spring, 2005. Champagne Room originally appeared in
Horror Quarterly
, 2, Oct. 2005. Feast Of The Ixiptla originally appeared in
Three-Lobed Burning Eye
15, Summer 2005. Magna Mater originally appeared in
Dark Passions: Hot Blood Vol. 13
, September, 2007. Burning Names originally appeared in
Cemetery Dance
51, Spring, 2005. Atwater originally appeared in
Black Static
4, Spring, 2008. In His Wake originally appeared in
Dark Recesses
10, November, 2008.
Copyright ©2009 Swallowdown Press
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Copyright ©2009 by Cody Goodfellow
Cover art copyright ©2009 by Alan M. Clark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for satirical purposes. This is a work of fiction.
Acknowledgments
For encouragement, education, inspiration and support, the author thanks Victoria Goodfellow, Carolyn Goodfellow-Carter, Matt Carter, Adam Barnes, John Skipp, Aaron Costello, Steve Cordova, Rob Winfield, Jeromy & Claudia Cox, Travis Hoecker, Chris Frandsen, Ron McPhee, Irwin’s Conspiracy, Nancy Curren, Doc Hansen, Art Schor, Nancy Holder, Richard Chizmar, Brian Freeman, Andy Cox, Jeff Gelb, James Beach, Ed Bove, Ryan C. Thomas, Darius Shahmir, David Agranoff, Paul Stuart, Mike Arnzen, Zak Jarvis, Clay Wittrock, Eunice Magill, Scott Bradley, Amy Wallace, Alan Clark and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
“For Hailey and Madeline... my secret weapons.”
A How-To Introduction by John Skipp
The brain is a muscle. Many people forget that. If you exercise it, it gets big and strong. If you strap it down, leave it laying around, it gets feeble as veal, but with none of the flavor.
But if you work it insanely, it bulges out of your braincase, rippling with a trillion mini-minds of its own, firing lightning bolts of pure mentation that blow holes through the shrieking skull-meat of the weak.
That’s what you get with Cody Goodfellow: a man who works his brain so hard it’s like a Mr. Universe Pageant every day of the week. Sweat pours from his quivering fissures. Literary tendons flex and howl. Bones groan, snap, mutate, and come back together in ungodly configurations.
And yet—from the crazy-ass grin on his face—you’d think it was a walk in the fucking park.
This is to say that Cody works harder at being more prodigiously ripped in the cranium than most of us will ever begin to achieve.
And he does it for fun.
The best reason there is.
He does it because he loves the weird shit that squeezes out of his head, every time he flexes his absurdly overdeveloped story gland. The globules that emerge contain fully-formed universes, simultaneously batshit crazy and painfully sane, each of them containing enough complexity to power a full-grown novel, usually in 7-10,000 words.
Within them, every genre he’s ever devoured is broken down like Brundlefly vomit, laced with bottomless bloodhound research data, stitched together with gonzo bravura and an anarchist’s total disregard for whose sacred cow just got dynamited up the ass.
This is high-end psychological surrealist horror meets bottom-feeding low-life crime in a techno-thrilling science fiction world full of Lovecraft and magic that probably isn’t magic at all, but merely an uglier science that less-flexed brain-muscles would probably worship as a series of unfortunate gods.
But even that oversimplifies the weirdness—the extremely high weirdness—of these fucked-up Cody tales.
I don’t want to daunt you, but here’s the truth from my experience: virtually every one of these stories gets better, every single time you read them. Because there’s so much going on. Between the virtuoso wordplay and the staggering “bet you never thought of THAT one before” ideas and Young Master Goodfellow’s tendency to bury the lead—which is to say, drag you out and keep you guessing—it’s almost impossible to get it all, the first time through.
But is it worth it?
Oh, my fucking god.
This isn’t a Greatest Hits collection—give it a couple of years, and that shit will begin to sift itself out—but there are some definite highlights for me.
If I’d had my druthers, I would have called this collection The Phantom Pornbooth, and Other Stories. Because “Magna Mater”—a story I’d fuck and fall in love with blindfolded if it was a woman, and I were doomed—was originally called “The Phantom Pornbooth.” And I liked that title. But not as much as I love the story, a thorned rose by any other name.