James Champagne - Scream from the Abyss of non-existence, a descent into Hell itself, a dream journal of God's nightmares

James Champagne, Grimoire. Mauve Zone Recordings, 2009.

"If all books are gateways to other realities, then Grimoire is a portal into a realm of the most profound darkness, a twilight world of black flowers thriving under the monstrous shadows cast forth across time by the writers and poets of the 19th century French Decadence, the art of the Surrealists, and the weird fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and his acolytes. Each of the eleven stories, or Neo-Goth Narratives, which make up this collection presents the reader with a worldview of cosmic nihilism, a morbid atmosphere haunted by the revenants of the fin de sicle practitioners of black magic. Those who lose themselves in these sunless and Satanic vistas will learn arcane words of power, experience forbidden knowledge, and encounter fantastic and grotesque alien beings whose forms and powers we are unable to comprehend, whose very presence can drive one to insanity. Grimoire is no mere book: it is a 90,000 word scream from the Abyss of non-existence, a descent into Hell itself, a dream journal of God's nightmares. Let the Danse Macabre begin!"

James Champagne's Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange & Unproductive Thinking. Rebel Satori Press, 2015.

The city has long since faded away: all that lingers is its nightmares, in the form of these ten testimonials from the damned, tales of strange and unproductive thinking. Will you open these pages and conduct an autopsy of your own on this dead city? But be warned: the scalpel that dissects the shadows is also the scalpel that cuts both ways.        

“Every city casts a shadow, some longer than others. And the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island casts one of the longest shadows of all. With a population of 40,000 people, it might not seem like the most populated place on earth, but every citizen there has a story to tell, some more sinister than others. Look past the city’s pious Catholic façade and you shall see dead children floating face down in its sewers, witches corrupting susceptible minds with blasphemous books, and demons capering on the frescos of its haunted churches. It is a city where even the most innocent of objects- a quilt, a video game, a snow globe, a notebook- can act as a key that unlocks the doors to Doom, Delirium, and Death. The city has long since faded away: all that lingers is its nightmares, in the form of these ten testimonials from the damned, tales of strange and unproductive thinking. Will you open these pages and conduct an autopsy of your own on this dead city? But be warned: the scalpel that dissects the shadows is also the scalpel that cuts both ways.”

“We stood at the edge of Lovecraft’s tomb in Providence, I and the author James Champagne, on a misty November morning, sun battling with frost. Almost without thinking we sank to our haunches, squatting at the foot of the grave; from nowhere a strange heat came to flicker at our underparts, to toast them, to inflame them. “Do you feel that, James?” “Yes, like a hand caressing me.” Hold on a minute here, I thought, my mind racing in excitement. It was almost as if the hands of Lovecraft himself were trying to wrestle us into the grave with him, down into hell, by the balls if need be. In panic I dropped his hand as the images of Lovecraft’s and Champagne’s haunted fictions began to cloud my mind in madness. Autopsy for an Eldritch City shows once again why James Champagne is one of the most inventive, soulful writers of horror and the fantastic working today. And he can be wicked funny too. Watch at twilight as his wit takes you down the leafy path to damnation.” - Kevin Killian

“James Champagne's AUTOPSY OF AN ELDRITCH CITY is vitally strange fiction. Glimpse TRUE DETECTIVE writ large (you paying attention Mr. Ligotti?) - then you get a little notion. Champagne's work is perverse, elegant, and creepy; I wish I could write this well!” -  Scott Bradley

Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange & Unproductive Thinking is my second collection of short stories, a follow-up to my first collection Grimoire (2012). Like Grimoire, this new one is published by Rebel Satori Press. Initially, I had intended Grimoire to be my last word in the realm of Lovecraftian weird fiction, but events conspired against that stratagem. I finished writing Grimoire in December of 2009. Yet in 2010 I wrote a new horror story, and by the autumn months of 2011 I had a total of 4 new stories, which prompted me to conceive the idea of doing a second collection. The project stalled in 2012 (mainly because it was around then that I began to type out Metatron’s Arch, my long fantasy novel). But then in 2013 I befriended a young man whose interest in Grimoire (and weird fiction in general) got me inspired to getting back to work on the project. Even though my friendship with the person in question eventually faded away to nothing, I can’t deny that my conversations with him influenced the book in a number of ways (for example, he got me interested in the work of Nick Land). In this fit of inspiration, I wrote 5 more stories in 2013, then one final one for the collection in 2014. 

That same year (2013), I realized that what the project lacked was some kind of framing device, a central gimmick. Thinking back to a book I had read and enjoyed in 2011 (Backwoods, by Natty Soltesz), I thought that maybe the collection could achieve some sort of unity if all of the stories were situated in the same setting: in this case, the New England city of Thundermist, Rhode Island, which is a somewhat fictionalized version of my own hometown of Woonsocket, Rhode Island… the word “Woonsocket” being a Native American word that, when translated into English, means “Thundermist” (a brief fun fact: Lovecraft mentions Woonsocket in his story “The Horror at Red Hook”). Another influence in this regard was Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers, which has long been one of my favorite short story collections. I liked how almost all of the stories in The Informers were set in the Los Angeles area, and how characters that played a minor part in one story would become the main character/narrator in another. So I began to rewrite some of the stories I had previously written (as it were, a few had been set in Thundermist already, so those didn’t need much rewriting) to bring them in line with this new scheme. In the end, all of the collection’s ten stories take place in Thundermist, with one exception. I liked the idea of deliberately shattering the symmetry I had created by putting in a false note on purpose, a perverse act of self-sabotage, and what the hell, The Informers has a few stories not set in Los Angeles anyway.
This collection differs from Grimoire in two ways: for starters, while like Grimoire the stories here are all interconnected (and all told chronologically out-of-order), whereas the stories in Grimoire all combined to tell one giant narrative that led to a big climax, there is no such narrative thread that links the stories in Autopsy. As a result, the collection has, I feel, a more jagged, fragmented tone: one visual inspiration I had was that of a shattered Le Corbusier lamp (in much the same manner that Kanye West’s album Yeezus was inspired by a Le Corbusier lamp). These stories don’t really add up to anything: however, I feel that, individually, if you separated them from the whole, they’d hold up better as stories, whereas if any of the Grimoire stories were separated from their whole, they maybe wouldn’t hold up as well. The other big difference between the two is that this new collection is fully illustrated, whereas Grimoire had no illustrations at all aside from its cover (more on that later).
Working titles for my second collection included The Revolting Science of God, Strange and Unproductive Thinking, Sabaziorum, and Opus Contra Naturam. On July 26th, 2013, I selected Strange and Unproductive Thinking as the title. Later on that year, on October 31st, I came up with the title Autopsy of an Eldritch City. The title is partly inspired by a chapter name from Thomas Ligotti’s philosophy book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (the chapter in question being entitled “Autopsy on a Puppet”), and also inspired by the title of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Topology of a Phantom City: I didn’t like that book but thought it was a great title. The use of the word “Eldritch” is, of course, a nod to H.P. Lovecraft, who often employed it in his own tales. Finally, because I like subtitles and still liked the phrase “Strange and Unproductive Thinking” (which is actually the name of a David Lynch song), I decided my new book would have a subtitle as well, and that is how it became Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange & Unproductive Thinking.
The first public announcement of this book (outside of this blog and my own Onyx Glossary blog) was in the author description of myself that appears in the back of the Mighty in Sorrow anthology I appeared in back in May 2014. I mentioned how Autopsy of an Eldritch City was “forthcoming,” which I suppose was kind of a cocky move on my part, seeing I didn’t even have a publisher lined up for it yet… but in my bones I just knew that it would get published at some point, and I wanted to drum up some early publicity. As it was, Rebel Satori got back to me about it not long after that. 

From “The Cursed Quilts”

“I’ve always found attending quilt shows to be a somewhat unsettling experience. It’s not because of the Raison d’etre of such shows: after all, how scary can a quilt be? And it’s also not related to the people such shows tend to attract; generally speaking, harmless-looking middle-aged to older women, the kind of people who read ‘cozy’ mystery novels about cats who solve crimes or who surround themselves with cats in general (or sometimes both). No, what I find unsettling is the looks I get when I myself attend quilt shows. In my experience, I’ve found that you often won’t find a lot of men at such events, aside from the husbands of those women whose work is on display, or, more pertinently, the sons of those women. Therefore, when I go to such shows I feel as if I stick out like the proverbial sore pollex, and I always get embarrassed when the other women would refer to my brothers and me as “Susan’s boys” (Susan being the name of our mother). There are even times where I’ve wondered if it would be less embarrassing were I to go to such shows in drag, to try to blend in with the other women, as it were, and thus escape notice. But seeing as my body is fairly hairy, I don’t believe that such a deception would be all that effective.”


From “Tir-Na-Nog”

“Like many odd children, Halloween was always my favorite holiday. It was to my great fortune, then, that I grew up in the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island: while this city was of a particularly Christian bent, that didn’t stop its citizens from going all-out and getting in touch with their inner pagan as far as Halloween was concerned (and as G.K. Chesterton once observed in his book Orthodoxy, “We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about”). My obsession with Halloween was something that perplexed my parents, but I can’t see why this should have been the case; after all, I was hardly a stereotypical little girl, and while my peers were all playing with Barbie dolls I instead took it upon myself to fashion a miniature eidolon from concrete and rebar, said eidolon resembling, in retrospect, a condensed version of SCP-173. I suppose I was a somewhat precocious child: I was probably the only girl on my block who named her pet cat Dharma. And yes, it was a black cat. My youth was a time of loneliness and isolation, and I didn’t have all that much in the way of friends, aside from a local boy named Frederick (it probably didn’t help matters that I wasn’t the most attractive girl, bearing a strong resemblance to poor Clara, the little tot who’s wasting away in Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, though I have freckles and she doesn’t). I’ve always wondered if this had to do with my family’s cultural heritage: in a city made up mostly of French-Canadian immigrants, a girl with a name like Alice O’Nan kind of drew notice to herself, as Thundermist has never boasted a large population of Irish-Americans. At times it felt as if the only thing I had in common with all the people around me was my Catholic faith and my love for Halloween.”


From “Iridophobia”

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a fear of the sky.” I paused, took a sip from the glass of water that Dr. Roxy had been thoughtful enough to leave on the small wooden end table to the side of my chair, and then continued on with my story. “I have this very distinct memory from childhood where I was hanging out at Vernon Park one day and staring up at this domed hill, and on top of this domed hill there was this one lone tree, and because it was late fall all of the leaves had fallen off this tree, leaving its branches bare. From where I stood, at the bottom of the hill, the tree looked completely black, and juxtaposed as it was with the cloudless blue sky behind it, it seemed almost as if the tree were a crack in the sky itself, and for a brief few seconds the tree/crack seemed to begin to grow before my eyes, and I panicked, visualizing in my mind’s eye the sky itself cracking open and shattering to pieces all around me like big shards of blue glass. The sky as a giant blue Easter egg being smashed against the rim of a frying pan, the rim in this case being the Earth’s horizon. What can I say? As a child, I had quite an imagination. But it wasn’t just the sky itself that scared me. It was also things that came from the sky. One raindrop could have been the precursor to a Biblical flood that would never end. Then there were tornadoes, which scared me witless, even though I’ve yet to ever see one in my life. I often had nightmares of tornadoes, as a child. In these dreams I would often see storm clouds gathering in the sky like the black ships of the Antichrist’s armies and watch in horror as the bottom tips of maturing tornadoes descended from these storm clouds like enormous cobras unsheathing their fangs. Lightning was an electric crack that seemed to shatter the mirror of the sky, and thunder unsettled me. There was this one bad storm I suffered through when I was a child, I may have been maybe 9 or perhaps even 10 at the time, where I was home alone with my father and we were both in the living room of our house, he on his favorite rocker and me on the family sofa, and I guess to try to take my mind off the storm my father was telling jokes, or just making comments that were supposed to be amusing in general. One of these comments (or perhaps observations would be a better word) was that thunder was nothing more than God farting in Heaven. But that comment had the opposite of its intended effect on me: instead of making me laugh, it shocked and even horrified me. It seemed blasphemous to me that he would say such a thing, even though I knew he wasn’t being serious. I looked at my father with a glum face and asked him, in a nervous voice, ‘Dad, will you go to Hell for saying something like that?’ Many years later, during a period of my life in which I found myself studying the Qabalah, I came across a book by William G. Gray entitled Qabalistic Concepts: Living The Tree, that had first been published in 1984. There was this one chapter in the book, chapter 20 I think it was, that was titled ‘Esoteric Excretion,’ in which the author pondered the idea of Man serving as the Microcosm that was made in the likeness of God (and the Macrocosm), and wondered how, if Man has a digestive and excretory system, then does God as well? Or, as the author puts it, ‘does deity produce dung?’ He examined the Qabalistic Tree of Life and came to the conclusion that the Sephira Daath, otherwise known as ‘The Abyss,’ served as a sort of mouth, then conceptualized a second Abyss, in between Yesod and Malkuth at the bottom of the Tree, that served as the anus of God. It’s quite an interesting chapter, really, and reading it one can see how it was a clear influence on Grant Morrison’s The Filth comic book. At the start of the chapter, he wrote how, in the old days, there was a reason why hanging was the preferred method of dealing with criminals. It was believed that when the soul left the body at death, it did so via either the mouth or the nostrils. But when one was strangled, the soul would be unable to escape the corpse using those routes, and would instead be forced to escape via the anus, or the ‘dung gate’ as it was called. It’s common knowledge that when one is hanged one often ejaculates, but explosive defecation is also quite common in such situations. By forcing the soul to flee from the body side-by-side with shit, they believed they were condemning it to an ill-starred afterlife. Anyway, reading all this reminded me of my father’s observation about the farts of God years ago, and got me looking into the topic of intestinal exorcism. One day while I was paying a visit to the Thundermist Rescue Mission I happened to bump into a friend of mine, Padre Pendragon. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and he eventually got around to lending me a book called Glory of the Confessors by Gregory of Tours. In this book he writes about this bishop from the 5th century named Martin of Tours who was known for his ability to exorcise demons from people who had been possessed. At one part of the book Gregory mentions how one of the afflicted men that Martin exorcised ended up expelling the demon from his body in a ‘blast of air from his bowels.’ So I got to researching the topic a bit more and I found out how in the Middle Ages it was believed that flatulence was seen as a way of casting demons out from one’s body. The idea of demons being expelled by flatulence isn’t unique to Western Christianity, however. For example, Ethiopians also believe that when one farts demons escape from the body. And there’s also a certain mysterious voodoo cult in Haiti that worships Ti-Moufette, the lwa of bad smells. The priesthood of this cult conducts rituals in which they try to emit as many bad smells as they possibly can: I’m sure you can imagine what that entails.”

From “The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.”
“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on December 12, 1920. It was a statement that had resonated with Daphne Broadmoor ever since she first came across it many years ago, while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s publication of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horrors and Others, a book that she had stumbled across on her father’s bookcase when she was a child, a book with a green dust jacket featuring a Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. Throughout her twenty-five years of existence, Daphne had known a fair number of people who were fixated on buildings possessing an eidolic glamour: one friend of hers had been obsessed with an old chemical factory situated in the city of Los Diablos (an obsession which had led him to insanity), while another of her friends, Timothy Childermass, adored a local church known for its beautiful (and supposedly haunted) frescoes. As it was, there was one such place she herself was utterly fascinated with, which, though it was not far from her, was certainly strange: Saddleworth Clinic, a hospital for the mentally insane.”

From “The Yellow Notebook”
“Hell is other people!” So wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1944 play No Exit. Little could he have known at the time that this anguished ejaculation of existentialism would become the unofficial credo of the modern day retail employee. Like the chorus of some pretentious yet nonetheless catchy Parisian pop song, the phrase “Hell is other people!” had a habit of repeating itself in my head over and over again during my shifts at Covers, which was the name of the bookstore where I worked full time as a bookseller. It was certainly echoing in my head on the date of October 11, 2012, the evening on which I first laid eyes on the Yellow Notebook. Oh! That infernal Yellow Notebook! If only I had called in sick that day, I could have spared myself from the present misery I now find myself enmeshed in. But, alas, I get ahead of myself.”

From “The Fire Sermon” (note: because this story is one long paragraph, I’ve only excerpted its first page)
“The deliquescent prenatal memories of swimming onetailed through your father’s groinal cathedral, Pre-Ovum, back when Mother used to spend an hour in the bedroom of her parent’s house, listening to “What in the World” off David Bowie’s Low over and over again while putting on her Clockwork Orange-inspired make-up before hitting the local disco, where one September night in 1979 she met your Father (you were conceived when your parents first had sex in the restroom of said disco, while Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” played over the sound system in the background). Father, a physicist who was utterly discredited years later when he wrote that article defending Hanns Horbiger’s World Ice Theory (Welteislehre), stating his fanatical belief, in no uncertain terms, in the doctrine of Eternal Ice and Glacial Cosmogony. Your mother was an archaeoastronomer and a member of ISAAC (The International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture). The year that you realized that most other little boys didn’t have tails and scaly skin and forked tongues and extremely flexible spines. The times when your peers would chase you around the schoolyard, throwing stones at your frail body and calling you “Son of Godzilla” (and oh, how you cried when you got home, in the privacy of your own bedroom, yet at the same time you also took a secret masochistic pride in being called Godzilla’s son because Godzilla’s son, Minilla, was the Godzilla character with whom you most identified). The same jeering peers who only grudgingly accepted you as one of them the year you developed those warts on your right hand (on the webbing in between your thumb and index finger, an area known as the thenar space), and you would chase the screaming girls around the schoolyard, trying to touch them with your warty hands, while the boys whom you both hated and at the same time wanted to impress laughed and cheered: misogyny creates strange bedfellows (years later you would partially redeem yourself by selecting Chun-Li as your preferred Super Street Fighter II character of choice, a partial feminist statement, though a subconscious one). Playing on the beach one overcast August afternoon, digging a large hole in the sand and pretending that it was the hoof print of an enormous horse, the kind of thing one would expect to see featured in a Surrealist painting from the 1930’s, or perhaps the final work of Alan Kirschner.”

From “Dyad”
“In the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan, there is situated, at the northwest base of Mt. Fuji, a forest known as Aokigahara, which is Japanese for “Sea of Trees.” Spread out over 14 square miles and being home to over 200 icy caverns, over the years this notorious forest has acquired a large measure of infamy on account of the fact that not only is it a popular site for suicides (the second most popular site in the world, with the first being the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco), but also due to legends which state that the forest is haunted by angry spirits known as the Yūrei. During the famine years of the 19th century, poor Japanese families would sometimes take their elderly relatives or even their very young and infirm children out into the depths of Aokigahara and abandon them there, an act known as Ubasute, and perhaps it is the spirits of those who were left behind to die in such a cruel way that now haunt the forest.”

From “The Aphotic Zone”
“Good evening, my friend. Please, step a little closer to me; I can’t hear you over the noise of the crowd and this music. I quite like this song, actually: “Underneath,” by Adam Lambert. I find the lyrics, especially those that may be found in the chorus, to be quite touching. Yes, you presume correctly: I am indeed the artist known as Professor Noe. I take it this isn’t your first time visiting the Melanoid Art Gallery? Ah, I was correct in my assumptions, then. Quite a turnout tonight, wouldn’t you say? I’m not quite sure if I understand all the hullabaloo, though: this art is all a bit too minimalist and abstract for my liking. Nothing depresses me more than seeing our lovely organic forms reduced to mere geometrical shapes, and to be honest I’m somewhat appalled by the Cubistic hereticism on display this evening. Did you see that print campaign that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra released a few months ago, in which they took macro photographs of the interiors of violins, flutes, cellos, and pipe organs, so that the insides of these instruments, which we normally never see, took on the appearance of vast, extremely spacious rooms? I thought that the violin photographs, in particular, were stunning: their interiors resembled large wooden chambers, with the f-holes in the ceiling acting almost like skylights. Such art is more to my liking. But there are too many people here for me to talk to you comfortably. Come, let us speak in this less occupied side gallery, where it is quieter and darker, and our only audience will be the shadows, who, even more so than priests, can be trusted to conceal a secret.”

From “The Demons in the Fresco”
“Of the many gifts that Timothy Childermass had received on his sixth birthday, his favorite one had been a kaleidoscope that had been a present from his father. This kaleidoscope, which his father had purchased at a local church bazaar for the grand total of $7.59, was encased in a cardboard tube whose outer surface was decorated with artwork of a Christian nature, mainly depicting scenes of martyrdom. These scenes included reproductions of Guido Reni’s 1616 painting of Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows (this being a work of art that had not only inspired Oscar Wilde but had also led Kochan, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1948 novel Confessions of a Mask, to experience his first sexual ejaculation), Caravaggio’s 1616 painting Crucifixion of St. Peter (which portrayed St. Peter being crucified upside-down on an inverted, or Petrine cross), Jean-Leon Gerome’s 19th century work The Christian Martyr’s Last Prayer (which displayed an Imperial Rome scene in which a small band of imprisoned Christians huddle together in prayer in the center of the Circus Maximus, with lions and tigers slowly approaching them for the kill), and, finally, Rembrandt’s 1625 painting The Stoning of St. Stephen, which depicted the Protomartyr being stoned to death by a mob of infuriated Jews following his trial before the Sanhedrin (this scene being taken from the New Testament’s “Acts of the Apostles”). It seemed a very odd and somewhat morbid way in which to decorate a child’s toy, but years later Timothy had done some research on the kaleidoscope and found out that it had been manufactured by a Waco, Texas-based company (named Mt. Carmel Curiosities) that specialized in the creation of Christian themed children’s toys. Apparently, the illustrations on the front were to remind the child about the sacrifices that Christians are often demanded to make, while the beautiful colors within the tube symbolized the beauty of the human soul, something that can’t be seen on our outer forms.”

From “Ritual Quest”
“Sometimes one can form a surface impression of someone else through the briefest of glances. And most people who saw Alex Vauung for the first time usually came to the kneejerk conclusion, based on his appearance, that he just had to have strange hobbies, like collecting air sickness bags or watching propaganda videos put out by the Heaven’s Gate UFO doomsday cult: he was the sort of man that made one think, “Now there’s an unusual looking chap. He must be a campanologist, or perhaps a man who knows how to best apply Yuggothian Matrices to the To-Gai Null Spaces.” Alex Vauung was indeed an unusual looking individual, a 19-year-old man whose brown hair was done up in an exaggerated bouffant similar to the style sported by Jack Nance in the film Eraserhead, and his clothes were all vintage, threadbare-looking, ill-fitting suits from Victorian times, though the Matrix-style sunglasses he always had on when out and about did give him a sort of cyberpunk vibe. And he did indeed have a strange hobby, in that he was a collector of peculiar and obscure video and computer games. Not necessarily rare games, however: after all, he was a borderline destitute student, and often couldn’t afford such luxuries. His favorite type of peculiar or obscure games were generally the ones that fell within the survival horror genre, especially games that mined a Lovecraftian vein and that tended to include some type of sanity meter in their gameplay mechanics: to name just a few, there was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But even those games, cult as they were, had achieved some mainstream success, however small; still, Alex had managed to add games to his collection that were far less well known, and he usually found such games at equally obscure and unexpected places (such as Kirkbride’s Curios in downtown Thundermist, where he had once managed to not only nab a copy of an old, fairly obscure Commodore 64 game entitled The Silence of the LAMs, but also the legendary Red version of Godzilla: Monster of Monsters).”