Robert Lamb

"War and Peace" by Irving Norman (center panel)

The memories and dreams are always the same for Irving Yorke. A spiral descent through unreal architecture. An impression of narrowing. Insane battle cries of “Peel the onion!” ring through every helmet as the ironclad soldiers trudge their way down, layer upon layer, toward the dread heart of the enemy Spherical — towards the antigrav core that transforms the massive steel artifact into a miniature labyrinthine world.

Yorke is just one amid hundreds, another soft adolescent encased like a fool in blue-black armor, molded and trussed into a soldier of the Orthodoxy. Each breast bears the golden Cross of Salvation Not Yet Obtained. Each gauntleted fist grips an instrument of space-age death: barrels ribbed with electromagnetic coil, gaping muzzles and cruciform bayonets to crown the very torture-phalluses of empire.

I love the nightmarish paintings of Irving Norman and this story serves as a kind of love letter to the man.

“The Children of IVA” is the fever-dream tale of a veteran returning to an alien ship, forced to remember the horrible wounds he endured fighting a debased enemy in the name of  a ruthless military industrial empire.

I’d been working on the tormented character of Yorke for quite sometime, but my discovery of Irving Norman really gave me the injection I needed to bring the story to life on the page.

To let you know how grisly the tale gets,  IVA stands for Impelled Viral Autosarcophagy. So don’t expect to escape from this one unscathed.

The tale appears in the excellent “Polluto 8: In Space No One Can Hear You Dream” and you can obtain a digital copy right here or a hardbound copy right here.

~rl

“You ever been to the shanty towns, mister?” she asked. “You ever walk through the Ghettos of New Orleans or Mobile, where they’ll call ya a ‘gene-****’ to yer face? Where the drunks throw bottles of piss or worse at any smouthie they catch walk’n out by themselves?”

“No,” he said evenly, “Can’t say that I have.”

But of course he had.

He’d seen the sea-side sprawls of Nhava Sheva, where slack-faced children wrestled for scraps in third-world squalor, while their dull-eyed parents stumbled out from lean-tos and candlelit temples in the rusted bellies of tankers and where the worst stared out with drooling idiot grins at the broken promise of the Indian Ocean. He’d seen much the same in the seaside slums of Rotterdam, Shanghai and Jersey, where transgenics lined the shit-strewn beaches in grim, malnourished, glassy-eyed misery like something washed up from an oil spill in hell.

Every port — damn near every beach, moving inward with the rising ocean levels. Thus was the world.

The second oil age.

I love the hell out of this tale and maybe someday I’ll expand it all into the full-length novel I have outlined.

“TransGenesis” (think trans-genetic organism) takes place in a future where Big Oil has been forced to make a blood-and-sex-for-oil pact with the Deep Ones to secure otherwise unreachable ocean floor drilling sites with Shoggoth slave labor. When an oil executive goes missing, the surface world sends a swastika-tattooed, knife-throwing emissary down to Mariana Trench Station to find out what gives. A fair amount of bloodshed, intersperses sex and cosmic madness ensues.

It’s kind of a hard-boiled, deep-sea Lovecraft yarn — easily the manliest thing I’ve written and I have to thank the Internet’s Jack Babalon (AKA “High Midnight” author Robert Mosca) for advising me on the knife work and cursing.

You should read this one — and here’s how: You’ll find it in “Polluto 6: Identity Theft & the Octopus Kid,” available in e-book form right here and as a hard copy over at Dog Horn Publishing.

~rl