Hey there! Hello from the wily lands of the splatterpunk subgenre. SO ripe, so fresh, so little known or understood. While I know many find this sub to be less than lovelerly, I, as a punk fiction indie author, am determined to write tales in all the punks. So splatterpunk and I had to find some form of common ground.

A Handful Of Eyes Makes Madness sits at eleven episodes on Kindle Vella. I set it for thirteen originally, and so far I believe it will fit that number. This leaves me two episodes to complete the sordid tale of a woman obsessed with money and the harm she causes to others to get it. Not hard. But, those two, episodes 12 and 13, will be the grossest, bloodiest, most horrific thing I have written, even more than my very first foray into splatterpunk on Wattpad.

Again, I am writing it, but it’s a strange land to walk through when you work hard on something you wouldn’t recommend to most. The notes at the end of many episodes warn readers if they’re weak in the gut, to avoid reading further. So far, there isn’t much beyond what you’d get in most modern horror. Some may read this and wonder why did I bother? Am I saying my own story isn’t worth it? Far from it. I’m a firm believer you should read what you love. Splatterpunk is the king of niche subgenres and people’s phobias. I want you to read what you like. I would never recommend what you don’t, even when I think it;s good work, or as I tell friends, “I recommend it and I don’t recommend it”.

For me, I have a personal goal: write in all the punks! I love them, and I seek, I yearn, to place wordage in every single one of them. So far I’ve thrived in steampunk, dieselpunk/decopunk, a touch of atompunk, working on dungeonpunk. There’s still a lot out there to get a hold of. So splatterpunk was on the list. I did a short story, but shorts never feel to me like really digging my heels in. It’s fun, but a taste. That means I need a full story, at least a novella, in order to get the feel. The full, ugly, bloody slickness. From this view, Handful has been chill, so far.

However, in episode 12, that will change.

Now, here on Threads That Bind there’s been lively discourse in dread, horror, how much/little should exist in the genre. As much as I’ve offered reasons for why younger people like the vicious type of horror these days (well, it’s been forty+ years of it now, so it’s far from recent), spaltterpunk for me is another notch on the punk checklist. I determined to write in all of them years ago, so it required me to do it and do it well.

But, do I like it? Well, I am a fan of horror. Classic, Hammer films, modern bloodfest shockers (though not as many as the previous types). As a subgenre, I find splatterpunk works to tell a story of unbridled, excessive emotion that curdles over into a crescendo of gore as a representation of that character’s extremity of behavior.

In my Wattpad short, I took Michael Jackson’s song, ‘Blood On The Dance Floor,’ (the website provided it to me) and took it to try out splatterpunk. I also took a literal piece of the title, blood, and used it to create a hemocyte version of the zombie apocalypse. The Dead, brought back only in the form of the blood shaped roughly like the living body, literally boiling from rage and seeking to steal blood from the ignorant living. This then made the formerly living a new version of this bloody undead. Lots of vomiting ensued and other things we won’t get into here.

But that was a study of rage, people who died unavenged, literal ‘blood boiling’ as a horror supernatural reality. Handful is an exercise in greed.

So I had human traits to explore to help me navigate splatterpunk, and that made it, not fun like steampunk, or nostalgic like atompunk, but it made me more serious while writing it. It reminded me of suffering, the brutality of real life, now and in the past. The callousness of people. In truth, it opened my eyes more by facing it and its shocking disruptions to human anatomy. Lest we forget that nations and peoples have done much worse to others than any horror movie could envision.

Now that it’s near to completion I can move on and investigate other punks. Splatterpunk isn’t necessarily gone. I have an idea for a massive ‘solar system’ of sorts of worlds, each their own punk, in order to visit each one and cross some over just for fun. There’s a little corner of it dedicated to splatter, but for me to want it bother with it, it must be completely different from Handful and the Wattpad tale. Planty of time for me to think on that. Later.

For now, it’s time to move on to other realms under the punk umbrella. I wonder if mythpunk is busy next week?