Fluffy

Here's an inspired approach to creating a limited-edition version of a book. Commendably angry publishers OR Books recently published a collection of noted awful film-maker Ed Wood's pulp short stories, Blood Spatters Quickly.

 

Among many other notable traits, Wood was also a cross-dresser, particularly obsessed with wearing fluffy pink angora jumpers (or 'sweaters', for the Americans in the audience)--see his early movie Glen or Glenda, which heavily fictionalised his own experiences and in which he played the lead...

..and so it's rather wonderful that the special edition of this book comes with its own fluffy pink jumper.

What are the stories like? Pretty much as you might imagine, only even more mad and padded and inept. As an example, the opener, Scream Your Bloody Head Off, which is accompanied by this entirely apt bit of artwork...

..begins like this:

'She was going to send him to the cemetery. He knew that from the moment he saw her flying at him, that knife gleaming over her head.

'It was bitter cold and the blizzard had been grinding across the land for more than two days and there didn’t appear to be any letting up and Stella, Johnnie’s wife, lay dead on the kitchen floor… right where she had fallen dead from the butcher knife wound in her heart – the night the storm had started.

'Sure, Johnnie had screwed the neighbor broad right through. Stella had been so right about that. But he couldn’t figure why she came charging at him with that foot-long butcher knife. She had flown across the kitchen floor at him screaming her bloody head off… screaming like a wounded eagle. She was screaming as if all the devils of hell, the creatures from the grave, had entered her very being. It was not even her own voice. She had screamed at him before… many times before… but there was never the sound of panic, despair, horror in those tones… if the sounds could even be called tones.

'All he remembered about that moment, except the terrifying utterances that gaping mouth made, was that gleaming butcher knife, raised so high above her head and it was coming in his direction… the high-pitched scream… the gaping mouth… the saliva-dripping tongue and lips… the red… bloodshot red eyes which suddenly seemed to have no eyelids… simply blood-red eyes in dark sockets… never blinking…and that black negligee trailing out behind her like sheer bat wings on a heavy breeze.'