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Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #77: Unsplatterpunk! 7, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek.
The Good News According to Gore
Get ready to gag, cringe and squirm. Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction erupts with yet another geyser of violence and grossness in this seventh instalment in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! smearies. These six tales, covering everything from a nightclub basement’s revolting contents to bone-crushing brawls atop a mesa, inject a positive message into the characteristic splatterpunk barbarity and filth.
A girl with aspirations of escaping her farming town gives a dilapidated scarecrow a makeover. Alternative music brings comfort to a young woman undergoing cruel experiments. The meaning of a phrase inspired by a nineteenth century event mutates from enigmatic to vile to hopeful. In a disgusting retelling of the mice falling into cream parable, two men find themselves stuck in fluid. Hint: it’s not milk. An ancient stranger unleashes debauchery among the self-absorbed patrons at an upscale bar. Kung Fu Sue returns from her last adventure to break, chop, snap and tear her way through the most unsavoury adversaries.
The stories that follow deliver a heaping portion of broken spines, bashed in skulls and severed flesh steeped in a revolting soup of bodily expulsions. When you emerge from it… if you emerge from it… expect to feel besmirched and enlightened.
The cover art is by Edward Villanova. In the Quarterly Review, Douglas Ogurek and Stephen Theaker look at Bludgeon Tools: Splatterpunk Anthology, edited by K. Trap Jones, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, 47 by Walter Mosley, Hell to Pay by Matthew Hughes, The Night Parade by Ronald Malfi, Positive by David Wellington, Stitches by Hirokatsu Kihara and Junji Ito, and Stray Pilot by Douglas Thompson, plus, in the film and television sections, Boy Kills World, Civil War, Geethanjali Malli Vachindi, Halloween Ends, IF, Immaculate and Twisted Metal, Series 1.
Here are the virtuous contributors to this issue.
Brett Petersen is the author of The Parasite From Proto Space & Other Stories, drummer for alt-rock group The Dionysus Effect and copyeditor for CLASH Books. He is also a competent visual artist and tarot reader and is proudly autistic. He enjoys Japanese role-playing video games such as Xenoblade and the Trails series, and he lives just outside of Albany, New York. Everything he does can be found at linktr.ee/brettpetersen.
Bryan Miller is a writer and performer based out of Minnesota. His fiction has appeared in The Drabblecast, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Shadowy Natures: Stories of Psychological Horror, The Monsters We Forgot Part 1, and more than a dozen other journals and anthologies. His work has been featured on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, SiriusXM, the comedy special Panic Room, and two comedy albums: 2020 and All the New Ugly People.
Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (transgressive/gory/gross/violent subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World … One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. Ogurek also guest-edits the wildly unpopular UNSPLATTERPUNK! “smearies”, published by Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. These anthologies are unavailable at your library and despised by your mother. Ogurek reviews films and fiction for that same magazine.
Edward Villanova is a horror author, podcaster and content creator who dabbles in horror-themed visual art, and provides the cover art for this issue. He is inspired by the works of Zdzisław Beksiński and Junji Ito, preferring to focus on the implications of a scene depicted more so than the subject of the artwork. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas and is an active member of the Sicilian community there.
Harris Coverley, a returning UNSPLATTERPUNK! contributor, has had more than a hundred short stories appear in publications such as Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books). He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.
Pip Pinkerton was born and raised in Oakdale, Minnesota. Pip is a wanderer and a dreamer. He loves writing short stories, poetry and screenplays. A former theatre student and current guitar player, Pip co-manages a record shop. When he is not writing or jamming, he is spending time with his trusty rottweiler, Shrimp. Pip’s work appears in Monstrous Femme, and he has a story forthcoming on HorrorAddicts.net.
v.f. thompson is just compost in training. She can be found clowning around Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the editor of Trans Rites: An Anthology of Genderfucked Horror, and her work may also be found in Monster Lairs from Dark Matter Ink, The Crawling Moon from Neon Hemlock Press, The Hard Times, and a smattering of other publications. Her play, Taproot, is set to be performed as part of Queer Theatre Kalamazoo’s upcoming 2024–25 season.
While Dafydd Rhys Hopcyn-Kitchener’s day job is in accountancy, writing is his real passion. He is a fan of short, sharp page-turners, and he writes to entertain. Check out his Westerns (published by The Crowood Press), his romantic novel Stranger from the Sea (published by DC Thomson) and his self-published horrors.
As ever, all back issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.
Submissions are open for UNSPLATTERPUNK! 8 from October 2024 to April 2025. Give it your worst shot!
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