Unspeakable Horror!

Once in awhile, amidst the mass-market horror and slick movie remakes that permeate much of the genre, along comes something different, something wickedly perverse and gleefully gruesome. Such an event is the release of The Turn of Invisible Methods: Queer Horror Poems & Tales, an intriguing new audio CD by Washington-based horror poet and storyteller Chad Helder. Experimental, edgy, and visceral, The Turn of Invisible Methods is at times as disquieting as it is reassuring in its horrors.

Broken up over six audio tracks, the 18 short stories and poems here range the gamut from traditional horror themes (vampires, zombies) to some inventive premises (parasitic waterbed creatures, Satan re-imagined as a leather daddy). Heralded by an atmospheric blend of ambient sounds and music tracks, each track chillingly comes to life in the voice of the author himself. Helder’s intonation and diction are skillfully bereft of distracting inflection or nuance here, allowing the tales to be delivered untainted to the listener who is free to imagine Helder’s vivid and always poetic imagery in the unadulterated hues distinct to one’s own horror palate.

In “Apes”, Helder paints a bleak post-apocalyptic world in which detainees at an acculturation center receive hormonal and psychotropic injections to cure their homosexuality. Through telepathic communication with hybrid apes – a veritable smorgasbord of guerilla, orangutan, and chimpanzee, with a little human DNA thrown in for good measure – three men plot an escape with heartrending results. In “Car Crash Vampire” and its seeming sequel “Car Cash Detectives”, Helder delivers a grisly and unnerving tale of one bloodsucker’s penchant for using auto wrecks to trap his prey. See if his dramatic descriptions of the titular fiend slithering through broken windshields to feast on the mangled bodies of car crash victims doesn’t make your skin crawl. “Under The Ice” is a creepy tale of a gay bashing-turned-murder that leads to ghostly revenge set against the chilling backdrop of a frozen lake.

The three standouts here are “Bob, The Anti-Christ”, in which Helder serves up an allegorical tale of gay cruising in which Satan is a leather chaps-wearing daddy bear looking for love with a heavy metal-loving teen poet who just may or may not be his long-lost progeny (think a Jesus-nun bride relationship versus icky father-son stuff here, Helder assures us), “Hansel and Gretel”, a disturbing re-imagining of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale in which forests morph into suburban malls and cannibal witches become tech-savvy child predators for the digital age, and “Dracula in the Corn”, a virtuoso vampire story in which a wealthy billionaire builds the ultimate Midwestern horror attraction using the actual bricks of Dracula’s Transylvanian castle. Helder would be wise to mine deep this last tale of vampire horror in the heartland – there’s a brilliant horror novel here that could very well be the Jurassic Park of vampire lore.

In The Turn of Invisible Methods, Helder takes listeners on a deliciously horrifying audio ride through the subversive workings of a keen horror storyteller. Like the finest haunted house attraction, it’s a ride you’ll want to take again and again in all its ghastly glory.