Beside her iron bed, obsessive Scary Jak had installed a slick automated drawer for her cherished collection of dead voices…historic recordings of (future) intellectual suicides on reels of old magnetic tape she had ordered destroyed upon her own exit by a gunshot under the chin. But she would add another reel that night. A comfort for her when falling asleep. The mistakes and intonations and audio cracks soothed all her bad bedtime thoughts. She could admire only the dead, then, who caused no trouble for anyone.
– Excerpt from Stillborn Free, Prologue
Canadian and head writer of the ARTUS collective, you can see his name on many incredible projects, from novels he is working on independently to large collaborations such as Blood and Rust and V2.
Current Projects Include:
Blood and Rust
The Lives of Certain Disputed Saints
Stillborn Free
V2
Artwork above done by Thomas Stetson for Kevin Pinkerton’s masterpiece-in-progress, Stillborn Free.
His glasses were forgotten when he walked out but he wouldn’t need them: he forgot them often and preferred instead to ramble around Toronto blind. Maybe get himself crushed under a car. No eyes were required to tour the city when he was rarely attentive to what he saw anyway. Rarely remembered the streetcorners he crossed or the haggard sidewalk grinning or the rainlight on the roads. He substituted instead the clarity of intuition and viscera. Interesting sights were reduced to cinereal like underdeveloped celluloid. His own hollow where he could ignore their assorted sadnesses. A silent or screaming honesty in this dulled delirium for the person playacting the exile again. And after the series of stillborn suicides off the geometrically-irregular rooftops of Brookfield Place, its steel beams now congealed into an ashgrey sludge surging around K’s feet. Aristocratic alizarin lights around the Royal York lured him to the hotel’s carnelian carpets planted around plastic plants and autographed antique film posters, which he couldn’t really see anyway except as nebulous unspace — abstract blocks, slanted homicidal cold, the friendly plastic manhole covers, anonymous mutilated laughter he often felt directed at him and which stung without his black ears, bought for that infrequent cathartic calm wherein he would hover an insomniac with a hummingbird heartbeat, having overdosed on adderall in bed, substituting tension for dreams.
Excerpt from Stillborn Free, Prologue
ARTUS 