No Mercy
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About this ebook
From the Bram Stoker Award-winning poet that brought you Eden Underground comes another Stoker Award nominee...
The Lady in Black shows no mercy to anyone; she has cold skin, a job to do, and many lovers on Earth: Despair, Loneliness, Madness, and their soldiers and killers of daily life, armed with blades, hammers, teeth, and illusions. There are strange and bloody stories that tell all about it, if you want to hear them…
Are you sure? Well, you’ve found the right place, but consider that in turning these pages you’ll be thrown forward through time, until you reach the Apocalypse—the last stop.
So, like the Lady in Black, show yourself no mercy—sit down and read these stories, listening to Janis Joplin with a bottle of Southern Comfort cradled in your arm.
Don’t worry, you’ll find both of them inside this book, along with so many other dark pleasures.
“No Mercy is a journey through time and history on a real/surreal road, rocking and rolling with no pity. Manzetti’s poems inspire a transcendent reality, a dream reality that slips in and out of nightmares; earthscape ruled by sensory overload, soul underload and imagination that melts into hunger for love, life and music. I loved this unearthly and yet strangely familiar meal laid before my eyes.”—Linda D. Addison, award-winning author of “How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend”
“Marvelous, powerful work! Manzetti fills his canvases with broken souls –such as Janis Joplin, Frida Kahlo whose lives left footprints in our history. He introduces you to others with Inspiring imagery, giving the reader much to ponder. Simply outstanding, five stars!”—Marge Simon, Bram Stoker Award winner
Brought to you by Crystal Lake Publishing – Tales from the Darkest Depths
Categories:
- Horror Poetry
- Dark Poems
- Horror
- Speculative fiction
- Poetry Collection
- Dark Fiction
- Horror Collection
Alessandro Manzetti
ALESSANDRO MANZETTI (Rome, Italy) is a Bram Stoker Award-winning (and 7-time nominee) author, editor, and translator of horror fiction and dark poetry whose work has been published extensively in Italian, including novels, short and long fiction, poetry, essays, and collections. English publications include his novel Naraka - The Ultimate Human Breeding, the collections The Garden of Delight, The Massacre of the Mermaids, The Monster, the Bad and the Ugly (with Paolo Di Orazio) and the poetry collections No Mercy, Eden Underground, War (with Marge Simon) Sacrificial Nights (with Bruce Boston) and Venus Intervention (with Corrine de Winter). His story collection The Garden of Delight has been nominated for the Splatterpunk Awards 2018 He edited the anthologies The Beauty of Death Vol 1, The Beauty of Death Vol. 2 - Death by Water (with Jodi Renee Lester) and Monsters of Any Kind (with Daniele Bonfanti), Splatterpunk Awards 2019 nominee. His stories and poems have appeared in Italian, USA, and UK magazines, such as Dark Moon Digest, Splatterpunk Zine, Disturbed Digest, The Horror Zine, Illumen, Devolution Z, Recompose, Polu Texni, Nothing's Sacred Vol. 4, and anthologies such as Splatterpunk Forever, Best Hardcore Horror of the Year Vol. 2 and Vol. 4, Bones III, Rhysling Anthology (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018), HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. 3 and 4, The Beauty of Death Vol 1 and 2, Mar Dulce, I Sogni del Diavolo, Danze Eretiche Vol. 2, Il Buio Dentro, and the forthcoming anthologies Midnight Under the Big Top (Cemetery Dance), Rhysling Antology 2019 and Sorrow Anthology. He is an HWA Active member, a former HWA Board of Trustees member, and lives in Trieste (Italy).
Read more from Alessandro Manzetti
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Book preview
No Mercy - Alessandro Manzetti
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE PEARL
FRIDA’S MONSTER
THE MAIDEN
THE BALLROOM
BLUE GRACE
THE RESURRECTION OF THE PEARL
NO MERCY
YUKI
BLUE ARSENIC
THE GHOST SUBWAY
FIVE RED DAYS
THE MERCY OF A REPTILE
THE WINDOW
ELECTRONIC DEATH
YUKI’S MONSTER
A DREAM OF MILK AND BLOOD
MORNING SUICIDE
APOCALYPTIC MASS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I dedicate this book to Janis Joplin,
even though I wrote these poems
listening to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.
THE PEARL
October 4, 1970
Alcohol and Hollywood.
The futuristic stilt house, its windows too large.
The headlights of cars slam into them,
and the blurry faces of passengers
run away fast, followed by trails of their skin,
always somewhere else.
The procession of the rush
and the heroin’s symphony
with a thousand movements.
The shrink’s diamond ring on her finger,
her mom’s artificial teeth with no one to talk to.
Jesus!
The music in the ears,
purgatory vomiting on the red dress
and the crapper of the Landmark Motor Hotel.
The mirror, Pearl in there, appearing and disappearing.
Drifts, shards of glass, the soul moving left and right.
Then, she sticks out her tongue. Fuck you!
The bottle, that taste of dust and crushed ice
in her mouth, which never goes down.
The hands on the windows, the sign
and its frame of light bulbs, down in the street.
Purgatory is full as usual.
Bessie Smith’s Packard hitting the truck,
her arm torn off,
the ambulance,
a tramp who’s pissing himself.
Always the same scene in her head
when the ghost comes,
that golden bitch with its big tits,
beautiful as she will never be.
Now it’s in the mirror, laughing.
But come on, this isn’t a real crapper,
it’s full of people in there, of borderless memories.
Black out, emergency lights, the ghost lifts its dress
and shows Janis its panties stained with blood.
Thirteen years. Port Arthur.
The thorny coat of adolescence,
the smell of the river and summer,
a bra that’s too big.
The ghost is bringing Janis backward,
where it hurts. Fuck you!
The blood that drives the wrong way,
closed eyes, which see farther,
the shapes of the last line, there.
An infinite Texas,
a Nirvana of motionless beaks of oil wells
in a land of intermittent shadows.
Black out, emergency lights.
The carpet on her face and life dripping on the shells of sleeping mites.
No one else knows a thing.
FRIDA’S MONSTER
September 17, 1925
The iron monster, Xochimilco,
was waiting for me round the bend
with electric wires instead of hair,
and his long, curled tail
nailed to the asphalt like a rail.
When he saw me with my strawberry necklace,
eighteen years around my neck,
so red and soft, so delicious,
he shouted and whistled,
screeching on the road with his nails.
So, he stared at me for five seconds,
while he ate a big peach,
or maybe a woman’s severed yellow head.
Xochimilco turned his eyes,
his headlights, his square muzzle,
toward the San Juan Market,
then he started looking at my dress again,
scattered with red euphorbia flowers,
and the rod between his legs,
a giant erection, a steel pipe,
a