Flayed Corpse and Other Stories

Simmons follows up his harrowing anthology, The Furry Trap, with an eclectic mix of short comics, many of them collaborations with other indie artists, including Tara Booth and Anders Nilsen. The scenarios are sometimes subdued but unsettling, other times graphically gory; all share a similar nightmare logic, in which ordinary-seeming conversations are interrupted by bizarre violence or people stoically accept outlandish situations. A huge man throws people off a bridge; an artist lives placidly with demons in her ceiling; a village endlessly cleans up after a monster called “The Great Shitter” (“He never sleeps, he’s always angry, and he’s forever shitting,” the narrator explains). The onslaught of weirdness threatens to grow repetitive, but the whip-crack shifts in tone, dark humor, and the visual variety provided by rotating artists keeps things off-kilter enough to sustain strong-stomached readers. Like Jorge Luis Borges or David Lynch, Simmons recognizes horror in the unexplained and inexplicable, inviting readers to see significance in even the most irrational or repulsive material. As a character comments, “You’d be surprised what people put up with if it’s in the name of ‘art’.” [em](Mar.) [/em]