I enjoyed writing that last post about David Leo Rice’s The Berlin Wall, and I thought why not extend the streak? Maybe I still have some energy left over for this lit-crit stuff, and David was NOT, after all, the ONLY writer I encountered at that reading. B. R. Yeager cohosted the event, or maybe he emceed? I’m not sure what the word is for his role. He officiated over things, engaged David in cogent, thoughtful conversation about his book, lent a shape and an order to the proceedings, and he also brought along his own book and read a few pages from a Work In Progress. I found him to be an affable and insightful presence, and so I was certainly intrigued to see what sort of stories he would have written in a collection entitled Burn You the Fuck Alive.

First of all, the book design! Not only is the cover gorgeous (with its pink flames gassing off a silhouetted humanesque figure), but the book is filled with mysterious, provocative images. They are mostly produced using a halftone effect (all those dots in a newspaper picture) with occasional TV scan lines or moiré patterns to amp up the spookiness. The book delivers a powerful visual punch, and it’s not overdone; the images are slipped between the stories, mints to renew the taste buds before the next course. They don’t convey literal illustration of the stories, but rather supply an emotional undercurrent that seeps into the fabric of the text, subliminally facilitating the reader’s absorption of the language. It’s a great idea, artfully implemented.

You’re wondering, of course, what sort of stories will the reader be absorbing here, anyway? I mean, duh—they’re meant to BURN YOU THE FUCK ALIVE! Get ready for some HEAT, is all I’m saying. When I asked what kind of fiction he wrote, he said it was “Transgressive Fiction.” I have a passing familiarity with this term from back in the day; it’s at least adjacent to Horror, but I’m no genre scholar, so a hazy Venn diagram in my head is about as far as I’m going to get.

I think the title expresses the sensation of the book rather eloquently, an imperative sentence: “Burn you the fuck alive.” We can ascertain readily that “you” is somebody who richly deserves burning, indeed whose burning the speaker will thoroughly relish: that expletive confirms it. We arrive at an ambiguity, however. We know the speaker is commanding the deed be done, but by whom? The grammar seems to be enlisting YOU to burn you the fuck alive. “My rage is such that you must obey my orders and engulf yourself in agony that never ends (you being alive).”

For all I know, that’s the word of God there. The 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt burn you the fuck alive.” That would certainly reduce the ambiguity. If that’s the case, then maybe the sentence functions less as an expression of rage and more as a statement of what life even IS in the first place. Life is a profane and continuous combustion, and it’s not that God set you alight, but that he issued the order that you had to obey… to burn you the fuck alive… which is what you’ve been doing since Day One. I could probably hover around this particular flame for the rest of the review… so I’ll move me the fuck on, perhaps.

Let’s get to the stories, shall we? The Table of Contents features 20 titles, ranging from prose poems to novellas, a variety of genres, but consistent both in the sense of being transgressive and in the grim authorial voice. A full, satisfying meal: novellas for main courses, short stories for side dishes, prose poems for garnishment, and those visual palate cleansers I already discussed. Along with a great deal of experimentation, playful fuckery, and, of course, gruesome imagery.

I’ll name a few that stuck out to me for various reasons:

• “The Young People” features a young couple who tie up their creepy boss (whom they have deemed, on flimsy evidence, a pedo) in the basement and torture him. A work-from-home Mickey and Mallory for the Pandemic Age.
• “Burn You the Fuck Alive,” the eponymous story, is Pure Revenge distilled into pithy fragments of threat. I thought it was pretty effective, and I was impressed at the author’s self-restraint; he kept it brief. If I’d been writing something like that, I would’ve gone on and ON. Piling them up! (Who knows, maybe he did—then pruned. Leonard Cohen supposedly wrote hundreds of verses for some of his songs, selecting only the best for the final cut.)
• “Highway Wars” is a road rage fantasy (bringing to mind the famous scene in Lost Highway when Mr. Eddy runs down a tailgater). A series of cartoonish assholes get their comeuppance at the hands of a dead-ender who has completely lost his shit. (Shades of Office Space and Falling Down, as well, come to think of it. Classic cinema!) The carnage in this story, by the way, is wreaked all over the specific roadways of Amherst and Hadley, just down the road from ME, ha ha!
• Even CLOSER to home (Northampton!), “Puppy Milk” unravels its characters in a bleak phantasmagoria of modern teen nihilism. Some stomach-turning images in here, in addition to an unnerving, incantatory style that pleased my ear.
• “Arcade,” told in the second person—essentially Grand Theft Auto as an Infocom game—brims with a cheerful sociopathic brutality. Imagine “The Most Dangerous Game” as an entertainment package for 1-percenters looking to slaughter dehumanized serfs in the ghetto for a little R&R. (You don’t even need to imagine it, actually, just watch some Gaza videos online.)

Plenty more stories along these lines. But the centerpiece of the book, “In the Shadow of Penis House,” is also my favorite piece, so naturally I’ve got a little more to say about it. It is the most experimental piece, a mixed-media presentation of graphic arts and text, alternating between a prose poem format in varying fonts and a catalog format, in which the denizens and rooms of Penis House are named and described beneath macabre, unsettling images and sometimes paired with cryptic icons. The text is elliptical and poetic, supplying an atmosphere to breathe, perhaps an ocean’s surface to float upon, but not so much an anchor in meaning. You’ll have to be content to float!

The atavistic center of this story tells you everything you need to know, not only about this story, but about the entire book: “There is always another staircase; another void-drenched catwalk. The monsters with your friends’ and fathers’ faces. Every window a mirror. Every other person a twin. A gorgeous tomb to run through. No need to see sky again. No need for suns or kisses.”

Solipsism. One of the downsides of consciousness is that we are trapped in it. It’s a skin tightly wrapping us that can’t be removed, sliced through, or dissolved, but can only be continuously worn, no matter how uncomfortable and miserable it makes us. Sleep is no escape, either, since we are made to dream. The only escape is roundabout: to create impregnable rooms within ourselves, store the discomfort and misery in them, then shut them off from ready access. That’s psychology in a nutshell.

So the Penis House may stand atop the ur-repression, the place the rest of the stories in this book are attempting to break out of. It’s the Prison Block housing all these characters whose material lives are so frustrating and whose spiritual lives are so depleted that they don’t even have the imagination for escape beyond spreading their own affliction to others, sharing in pain what they can’t find in love.

The daily grind of Civilization compels us to respect boundaries. We are all kept in check by the conditioning of childhood and the relentless punishment-reward cycle of biological, social, legal, and economic relationships. Especially at work or in public, you have to cultivate a persona that is in many ways false to your self-conception, by some measure betraying yourself for the sake of comity and order. This constant pressure on the psyche results in a kind of split personality: smiling on the outside, seething on the inside. Having to PRETEND on the daily costs energy, weakens the will, saps vitality…. The subject feels helpless, joins an incel forum on 4chan, and summons Pepe bodily into the White House.

Transgressive Fiction, possibly, presents an opportunity to reclaim some degree of autonomy without resorting to those kinds of, uh, unhealthy solutions. You may have suppressed that internal shark’s appetite for chum at the office when your boss flashed you that glib frowny face that pisses you off every time, but now, later, at home, in the timeless text, in your cozy reading nook, recollecting in tranquility, you can let it RIP. Chew his motherfucking face off! No harm done. Valve turned, pressure released, and you’re good to withstand the next bit of condescension from high-handed hierarchies. This is the power of language over life! Words can make a new, symbolic reality parallel to the real one, temporary and cathartic. Imaginary? Sure, but real as a heart attack to your FEELS. They can’t tell the difference: their demands appeased, they curl up and go to sleep in the corner. And the Penis House survives another day. Otherwise, you get the Fall of the House of Penis.

(To be clear, none of this is to psychoanalyse the author! I’m psychoanalysing Humanity. Mi Penis Casa es su Penis Casa.)

If you’re a Horror fan with solid Lit chops and a penis or two buried in the back yard, I fully recommend this book. Burn You the Fuck Alive by B. R. Yeager provides excellent reading, provocative prose, beautiful artwork, and thought-provoking ideas… but whatever you do, “don’t let Grandma find out!”