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Peter Schneider

DES SAUCISSES, SANS DOUTE

If you don’t have a sense of humor, I strongly suggest you skip this next piece. As I said in the introduction to Chet Williamson’s story earlier in this volume, horror and humor are strangely and strongly attracted to one another—and you may never find a better example of it than what follows. “Des Saucisses, Sans Doute” is a telling, hilarious, and possibly sick (in the tradition of The National Lampoon) parody, and manages, in a faux introductory headnote and the very short “story” which follows it by the imaginary author Pamela Jergens, to effectively skewer everything we hold sacred and serious in this field.

Peter Schneider’s writing resume is not as long as it should be, but his publishing one is longer than your leg. He’s been a marketing executive at some of the major publishing houses in New York City, as well as the founder of Hill House Books, which produced a stellar edition of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which is still considered one of the finest private editions of its time.

As I warned, if you don’t know how to laugh don’t read this piece—but if you do, prepare to laugh out loud The fancy and ominous-sounding French title, by the way, translates as “The Hot Dogs, Without Doubt.”

Pamela Jergens

DES SAUCISSES, SANS DOUTE

Pamela Jergens is one of our new breed of writers of le horreur, as I like to call it. She’s had a number of stories published in Dead ‘Uns, Lc Journale de Mort, and Cry Like a Baby … A Dead Baby. She’s also the author of the “Fiendish Funsters,” a horror-based young adult series published by Blood Press. Pamela proclaims, “I truly have two lives—my normal, average American life as a professional businesswoman … and my other life, where I live out on the word processor the dark fantasies that come to me, almost unbidden. There is a strict dichotomy between my two lives—one does not encroach on the other. If they did, I would lose touch with who I am … and what I want to be.” In her other, normal, average American life Pamela conducts a high-powered career as a magazine editor (for such journals as Cry Like a Baby … A Dead Baby, Dead ‘Uns, and Le Journale de Mort). She also serves as the publisher and CEO of Blood Press. “I disdain the recent works of the so-called splatterpunks,” says Pamela. “My work is instead the matériel of the night … of the dark places that live within us, expressed through only the subtlest of metaphors and signals … where the true horror may be within ourselves, not in the ravings of werewolves or vampires. I feel my work is in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Max Shulman—the “quiet” horror of Rapaccini’s Daughter or Dobie Gillis—the horror, indeed, of ourselves.” And here you can just imagine the authoress tapping herself on the temple. So now, for those of you in a contemplative and inner-examining mood, is “Des Saucisses, Sans Doute.”

I brandished the severed left tit of the blond chick in one hand. It had not been a clean cut—Momma never got me braces when I was growing up.

She lay, cowering and crying, in the corner of the room, the front of her fabulous bod smeared with blood and offal.

“Hey, baby,” I crowed as I picked up her D-cup bra. “Let’s play David and Goliath.” I plopped the moist handful of tissue into the left cup and swirled the entire contraption around my head, until finally it let go of its grisly burden, which flew, arrow-like, across the room, only to land on the far wall with a hideous groooop, leaving a trail not unlike a snail, only bloodier, as it made its way down the plasterboard of the wall. The pale brown nipple detached itself and fell to the hardwood floor with a faint plumph.

She cried harder and harder, and buried her face in her hands.

I thought back to a few hours before, when I had met Donnalie in the pub down the street from my apartment. She was not beautiful in the classic sense. Her hideous cleft palate, her wandering left eye, and her nose, eaten away by tertiary syphilis