“Poetic, like religion, myth, has every right to concern itself with the pounding of blood and the rumbling of thunder, with indelicate sensations indelicately rendered; its finesse lies in the grafting on such libidinous roots of the more delicate stems of feeling”.
Even gorehounds have heart.
I know, because I am one myself. As is Joe Linsner. Joe is the latest in a generation of very graphic artist – including Vincent Locke (Deadworld) and Tim Vigil (Faust) – who are gorehounds. Unapologetic gorehounds.
A “gorehounds” for those of you who don’t know, is a person who enjoys violent melodrama, as a release, as a “fix”, as rousing form of entertainment and, yes, for some, enlightenment. In this day and age, it usually applies to apparently rabid fans of horror media. The basest (and, sadly, accurate about 48% of the time) species of gorehounds is the Freddy/Michel/Jason/LeatherFace fixated teenage mediababy who indiscriminately reads Fangoria, Faust, and paperback horrors, devours splatter videos, and dresses up like his/her demented “hero” for conventions and Haloween. This caricature is definitely a disturbing one for most people, and takes many unsettling extremes; from the crass merchandising of these imaginary mindless, cannibalistic pedophiles (have you seen the “Freddy/Jason and Victim” squirtballs in the department store toy racks? Who are these ridiculous and repellent toys meant for?), to the Jason-fixated teenage gorehound from Groonfield, Massachussets who killed a female classmate with a knife before hanging himself in the woods. The abyss that lies between such cynical exploitation and all-too-real human tragedy is dizzying and dark… very dark.
And somewhere in that darkness is the genuine article: horror fiction that is real, human, of substance – that explores rather than exploits, and is therefore of value. By looking into those shadows
with unflinching clarity of vision, confronting our nightmares and fears, we may indeed find enlightenment of a kind.
It would be impossible to plummet those depths – that pitchblack darkness – within the confines of this short introducing. But keep it in mind, dear reader, and its lesson: this material can be dangerous. It can, and sometimes does, bite.
As storytellers and gorehounds, we count on it.
Nor is it this introduction’s job to make the journey into that night; Joe Linsner has done it in the following stories. This is the nightwalk, in Joe’s footsteps, left in the ink and tones on white paper as a map to the darker corners he chose to explore.
Cry for down is Joe’s debut, and its clarity, intensity, and attention to detail – as a storyteller and visual artist – is bracing, it is as ambitious as Berni Wrightson’s own debut anthology, Bat Time Stories, in the early 1970’s. Like Bat Time Stories, Cry For Dawn is also a potent, personal statement of the times: Berni summed up the best of the 60’s quality horror comics and pointed the way for the 70’s, while Joe arguably provides such an individual axis for the 80’s looking into the 90’s. Whether Joe will stand the test of time as well as Berni, who knows? But he has definitely put his best blood-spattered foot forward.
Joe also has heart. Graphic as those tales often are, they are seldom gratuitous, exploring as they do the darker extremes of love, family, and pubescent rites-of-passage.
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