Books of Blood: Volume One

I don't want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat, and lies... "In the Hills, the Cities

There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air.

Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.

He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood.

Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.

Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.

Minds weren't pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked "Cunning," the next, "Impressionable." They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.

There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?

The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.

Lo tocó como nunca antes se había atrevido a hacerlo, acariciando su cuerpo con la punta de los dedos muy, muy suavemente, recorriendo la piel levantada como una mujer ciega leyendo braille.

Logic is the last refuge of a coward.

He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

There is no delight the equal of dread

(...) An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.

So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to it's knees?

This is a forsaken place...I can think of no use for a place like this, except that you could say of it: I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.

There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.