Although we don’t publish complete works by Garth on this Website, here is an excerpt from his upcoming novel Descendant as well as from his new and previously published short stories, essays, drama and poetry.

Raf was an elementary school principal, a very good profession if you want to get close to children, yet also fraught with complexities because if he was ever accused of anything criminal, his career would be finished. That’s why he made certain he never killed any of the children in his school. Now, one would think that could be considered good fortune for the school’s children, who never knew they had a free pass not to be murdered. All of those from kindergarten through grades 1-6 knew, however, that Principal Ellard was to be feared above all. It was instinctive. Many a child in the four decades or so that he worked at the school had awakened in wet blanket terror, dreaming of Principal Ellard’s long arms stretching from the front of the classroom and reaching over the desks to seize them around the waist with his arthropod-like fingers.

~ from D E S C E N D A N T (a novel-in-progress)

For a while the CounterAKT gave me some intensified happiness, even though all along I knew it was false happiness, drug joy, not real joy. I was able to think about the next five months much in the way I used to when I was at home on Earth. It was just a few months. Enough time to make plans for a damn good vacation. And the speckled black blister around me was just like a brittle night sky in the dead of winter – you could almost hear the stars twinkle like miniature Christmas bells. I was trying to absorb the whole experience of being mentally unburdened, and at the same time record some visual logs for myself in case I went so mad afterward that I forgot who I was or why I was here. While my poor IPTV was gliding along toward its inevitable journey’s end on Jupiter’s richest moon, I would become a sickness in its stomach that would churn and cramp its innards until it vomited me out at my destination.

~ from Make Mad the Roaring Winds (publication forthcoming)

September stood abruptly, and stepped away from him. She backed away, as if in mortal danger. Blood clung in a meniscus around her lips, slid down her chin like wet paint, washed over her neck and breasts, and flooded into her bra and panties. What she could not drink, she could not absorb, and this ecological spill of human proportions was vast across her slender frame, coating it in brilliant but rapidly darkening rouge.

He was dead.

So many times before she had wilfully retracted her bite, betraying her thirst to save her partner from certain death, but this time he had pressed her into murder, grasping her in a deadly grip that said, “Keep drinking; I have more to give you, pour me out like water.” She could not help but oblige his need, for hers had an equal desperation; when she drank, she was not just drinking for one; she had the “thirst of a thousand,” in the words of an ancient story she had read, and the longing sometimes made her half-mad. His willingness had made it harder to cease, to cease NOW, and in the end she had drunk him into dryness, a cup of nothing.

~ from Thirst of a Thousand (Sex and Murder)

Then he heard his father’s voice. Nearer than before.

His father was some distance behind him, in the direction he came from, but still far enough away that his voice seemed to come from everywhere, and nowhere. The boy ran, this time forgetting his bag, and plunged through the woods, branches slapping his face and eyes, scratching his neck and jabbing into his sides like daggers. His breathing was hot and painful, burning his throat and lungs. The sweat he accumulated in his earlier run was reactivated, and it oiled the flesh beneath his clothes, causing him to overheat and recklessly toss away his jacket as he galloped along like a frightened fawn.

The darkness seeped into the evening like a stain. Some distance away, the boy’s father stopped, bent over and picked up the plastic bag with the items the boy left behind. He looked around trying to ascertain which direction the boy had fled only minutes ago, then turned and set off at a 30 degree angle north of the path the boy had actually followed.

~ from Will the Circle Be Unbroken (SNM)

Not only did Poe pioneer the short story as an artform in its own right – partly because poverty led him his from his vocation as a poet to his career as a writer of short magazine pieces in periodicals such as the Southern Literary Messenger — but he also developed the sensational style of writing a story as if it were a true account, or at least that the narrator of the story believed to be true. In The Tell-tale Heart, the narrator convinces us of his sincerity even as we increasingly begin to believe that he is mad. Poe developed this style of “reality writing,” hoaxes with verisimilitude, for a very practical reason – to help create a sensation among readers and sell copies of magazines. These stories were, in Poe’s own words, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” This approach has since become a convention for horror writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King.

~ from Forevermore: The Iconic Poe of the 21st Century (Clarkesworld)

Above, beneath and throughout the two Voices and the False Silence is the voice we all dread and deny because to many it is either the sound of divinity or the monologue of madness, what the prophet Elijah heard as a “still, small voice,” or what serial killer Herbert Mullin called ”sing the die song.” It is the Alien Voice, the one that is not our own, or does not seem to be our own, yet arises somehow through our consciousness and may sometimes even speak aloud, and penetrate our waking thoughts.

~ from The Temple of Tongues (publication forthcoming)

MOSES:
So tell me the story, please? I’m going to close my eyes, so I can pretend to see it..

CARL:
(GRIMLY) I don’t know if you want to see it. (BEAT) It was back about ten years ago. They wrote about it in the papers. That’s the only way I could get famous. (BEAT) I had some money. A four day binge. I was pouring anything down my throat. Bootleg. Then cooking wine. Then I started on the Lysol and antifreeze. I blacked out, and ended up on the train tracks somehow. Who knows? Maybe someone laid me there as a joke. Anyway, all I know is I was right on the tracks, my whole body. Like a dead cat lying on the road. And then, somewhere inside me, I could hear this noise, this earthquake noise, and everything was vibrating under me. It was– it was kind of soothing. But the noise started getting louder and louder, and I guess it shook me awake a bit– just enough. It was early morning, light was coming up in the sky, just a trace of light. The kind you see on a spring morning. A soft, soft colour. My face was on the railway ties. I lifted my head a few inches– never saw the train, but I began to see the metal rails, and hear the horn blastin’ out so loud you’d think the sound alone could knock you off the tracks. And man, I sobered up for a second or two, and threw myself onto my back, to try to clear the rail. And the instant I was on my back, I saw the face of the locomotive, and the headlight, and even the engineer, with his mouth wide open. My right arm was still on the track, though. Right on the rail. Those big, gray wheels sheared it off without even jerkin’ the rest of my body.

~ from Land of Milk and Honey (Manitoba Association of Playwrights, Von Buchholz Books)

The trembling frost
Breathes stillness on the meadow it loves;

Winter itself is lonely.

~ from Winter Itself (Zygote)

She bends color and cuts light
Her hands extend into quickening thoughts
Shaping phrases into choral voices
Eyes scan vastly across the echoing green canyons of possibility

~ from Silence Ascending (Nefarious Ballerina)

Mad shadows dance in the corners of my room
See them sink like paint into the walls
Hellfire! If they had caught me unawares
Where’s the game in that, my friends, I’d be dead but

I have eyes in the back of my head.

~ from Mad Shadows (publication forthcoming)

“There,” said he,
“Observe the rat —
It makes its nest within the shell
of this, the ancient Citadel.

“Note that many greater souls
who once did walk these gath’ring grounds
have died, and are again born, and
that very rat now hears their sounds!”

I asked “What sounds?”
He cackled, “These:
On the rat, a thousand fleas.”

~ from In the Basement of the Citadel Hotel (Return of the Raven)

The roof’s a pagan green this morn,
Witless, bland and overcast,
A drawn and sober death

(Which I can feel vicariously,
If for too long I hold my breath)

As feckless as a drunken whorer.

(Horror) on the streets,
Slanted down,
So early risers tumble to foregone conclusions,

The glow pretends its light:
Unmerciful,
And cold as guilt.

~ from Industry in Morning (publication forthcoming)