The Music Of The Rending Of The Night by Kare Mois
A dark fantasy. An extreme horror novel. A spiraling into moral, spiritual, and physical depravity. A headlong spin into nightmare with no possibility of awakening. A one-way journey to the bone room.
WHAT’S LOVE, BUT A LITTLE LOSS OF BLOOD?
‘In the depths of the night, by the smoky tallow obfuscations of candle flames, we enact these private rituals to the petty drums of the camp. We push the metal in our veins, we draw the blue snuff in our lungs, we swallow the violet pills.’
In a series of disturbing, flickering images, glimpses in the black, we witness Winnie grow and change in ten year leaps: from the innocent girl running in the eternal summer of a Cornish childhood to the beaten woman pounding through a wilderness of flashing neon and casual abuse.
We see the innumerable facets of Danny reflected in her eyes: the brother she loves, the partner she covets, the abuser she requires. Throughout, we find ourselves in the thrall of blood – that moment when the knife goes in, when the wound gapes open, just before the pain begins. That moment of pure, visceral shock.
‘You look like an army surgeon. You’ve got that dazed horror behind your eyes. You’ll never get used to the infliction of injury but it’s what you need, and more than anything else in the world. We’re a perfect symbiosis, you and I. The man who loves to wield the knife and the woman who loves to receive the knife. There’s no victim. This is a victimless act of living human mutilation.’
Chapter titles:
- A Skin Of My Own
- We Move Like A Virus Through The Deep Drugged Dawn
- A Hundred Years Of Nanking
- The Bone Room
The Music Of The Rending Of The Night was the culmination of a number of experiments with dark fantasy and extreme horror. Its style is hallucinogenic, angry, obscene, obscure, intoxicating, toxic. In ways large and small, it has informed everything else I’ve written.
It’s impossible to say what niche this novel should occupy, for those who feel compelled to assign it a genre. Each of the four chapters is different: in order, perhaps, Arcadian childhood fiction, magic reality, dystopian thriller, and nihilist nightmare. Needless to say, it is an adult novel with language and themes that will offend.
For all that, Winnie is perhaps my favorite character in all my fiction. She is made of pure energy, fueling everything around her. With her brother Danny at her side, hard metal armoring her soft flesh, she is literally invincible. Even as her world plunges into darkness, she learns to be fearless.
Some will see this novel simply as transgressive excess, but I think of it as the purest of all love stories.
90,000 words : 334 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B00B5N4VD8
Buy at Amazon US : $6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £5.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1520793731
Buy at Amazon US : $13.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £12.99
Read my post about The Music Of The Rending Of The Night here.
Above: ebook cover
Above: paperback cover
EXCERPT
The Ambient boys are looking for a fix. They know their target. They’ve got her in their sights. Messages pass between them by staccato telepathy like snatches of organic TV transmissions. They watch the way her hips move, the way her hands clutch her throat, the way her socks rumple at the ankles. They trade among themselves the contraband of creaking swings and rusting roundabouts. They distribute in alcoves and alleyways the plunder of ponytails and scuffed red shoes. In huddles by crackling bonfires, under the bowed, bleeding metal of melting courtyards, in the shadow of the Abattoir, they apportion the hairless mouths of genitals, the hard white buttons of breasts, they formulate their monotonous plans of assault.
I run, feet clattering on the grill, heart stabbing in my stomach, breath a cold gasp in my mouth. Behind me the passageway reverberates with footsteps. I hit a corner, slam into a balcony, perspectives widen on the amber courtyard, wrench off sideways and send myself scuffing through the debris of split dustbin liners along the gangway, headed for the next stairwell down.
Calls echo in the tightening air.
‘Slam the bitch!’
I reach the top of the stairs and throw myself down them, lurching toward the gangway in shrill shrieking panic.
‘Pointless fucking flight syndrome!’
One of the bastards leans out of the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. Spray can hiss in the face. I double up choking, stinging hot chemical in the throat, eyes blind, the first familiar seize in the muscles.
Hands clutch at my clothes, material rips. I realize it’s paint, only paint, only spray paint, and lash out. One fist impacts with soft groin. I twist to aim a kick in the face and crumple bone and teeth. The dress tears open a ragged hole. I break free leaving him moaning by the steps.
‘Bitch! We’ll mince you!’
Black paint smears on my fingers. I hurtle into a wall and tumble sideways along it, glimpse the broken boarded-up entrance to an apartment a few feet ahead, aim my shoulder at the barricade and crash through into darkness.
A doorway, carpet covered too deep in dust and debris to determine the pattern. I trip on a pipe wrenched out of the floorboards and fall headlong onto a stained musty mattress, hacking up sticky gobs of paint.
I hear their feet pounding down the gangway. They go smashing glass with crowbars.
‘We know where you live.’
‘You can’t run forever.’
‘We’ve got your baby!’
The cries shimmer and diminish. I sit up and peer around me through searing, tear-fogged eyes. The abandoned apartment seems to be some kind of den. Dark wet patches on the mattress, carpet heaped in black bags spilling out their contents, decaying flesh writhing with threadworms and maggots. Flies swarm at windows blotted with cobwebs. The recognizable bodies are mostly dogs and cats, fur hardened to ruffs by dried blood, not flesh but gray eruptions the consistency of jelly.
I fumble my way back to the entrance and look out through the wrecked barricade into the blazing spotlights beyond.
The boy stands at the end of the gangway, one hand in his pocket, leaning on the balcony and watching me with bored certainty. I wonder if he’ll make the first move. I’m wounded, out of breath, disabled, unable to run fast enough to escape him.
Perhaps this is his den. Perhaps he will lay me on his mattress afterwards, and disinter these shreds of womanhood slowly, strapped down in the darkness, fingers scrabbling at the muddy glass as if hoping to take to the sky.
After a while he levers himself up from his comfortable position on the rail and prepares his approach. I don’t hesitate now he’s made the move. Yelling to galvanize my muscles, I plunge into the light and hurtle toward him. The metal booms under my shoes. He hasn’t even withdrawn his hand from his pocket when I reach him, hunched for impact. Loose bones jangle through the sinews of his emaciated body, light as air, carrying him backwards into the balcony. I drive him over the lip into the open air.
He tumbles away silently, making eventual impact with the boiler on the roof of a tower four floors beneath me, coming to rest sprawled on his back in the light. I ram up against the balcony spitting drools of black paint after him.
Two days later I pass with my pram and pause to watch the orange-smocked Caretakers prizing the frost-hardened corpse from the empty boiler. They load him in a shapeless black bag.
Shuffling man in trench coat offers them condoms for the bag. Transaction takes place pocket to pocket. The Caretakers share the currency and rip up the paperwork.
The Ambient boys gather in dingy vandalized shops, ram-raid debris littered with cubes of glass, map out their conquests on obsolete Clore blueprints in illegal drinking holes in the shadow of the Abattoir. The girl swings her satchel, old enough to walk the gangways alone. Mother watches her dwindle toward school, sent out for the hyenas of Clore to tear to pieces, inevitable stage in her education, boyish body scrubbed clean the night before in a tin bath, handled open since she was a child to make it painless when it happens.
Today they converge on the whistling child.
‘Where you going, Jenny?’
‘School.’
‘Why you going there?’
‘Mother said so.’
‘What’s the point of that?’
‘Mother said if I was clever they’d let me Outside one day.’
‘Your mother knows jack.’
Butchers of Clore: they barter the body on the frontier, poking for bootleg in the moist flesh.
‘Don’t go to school, Jenny. Come here with us.’
‘Mother said I had to go straight to school.’
‘Do you always listen to your mother?’
‘Course not.’
‘Then come here. I want to show you something.’
They ease up her pleated skirt, digging their fingers in her white paper panties.
‘What is it?’
The hard metal horn of an aerosol can slips in her mouth with a sigh like bored desire.
‘And if you’re a good girl you’ll get it both ends at once.’
90,000 words : 334 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B00B5N4VD8
Buy at Amazon US : $6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £5.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1520793731
Buy at Amazon US : $13.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £12.99
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