The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge
The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge (Matthew Simmons, Keyhole Press 2010, 51 pages)
Woe to you, oh, Earth and Sea, for the devil sends the beast with wrath because he knows that time is short. Let him who hath understanding reckon the book of the beast, for it is a human book, it’s title, The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge by Matthew Simmons.
Simmons' prose feels like it was dipped in fire, banged into shape with Thor’s mighty hammer and then sharpened on the tooth of a mighty sea serpent. His muscular language lands on the page with a thud like the battle boot of Odin. The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge contains some of the finest, most well-wrought fiction I’ve read in a long while.
This collection's six stories exist in a rift in space-time, an alternate reality where heavy black metal, tar dark metal is the main idiom from which culture and mankind is born. The stories, existing somewhere between Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Cradle of Filth’s Midian and Aggaloch’s Marrow of the Spirit, explore themes of isolation, rejection; Simmons summons characters that create new worlds and then destroy them. Three shorts explore one-man metal bands and are inter-cut between three longer pieces that, although not really about black metal, seem to somehow still be about metal, but about that earthy darkness that metal exists in – pithy and opaque prose that would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
My personal favorite story in the collection comes fifth in sequence, titled, Wrath of The Weak. It begins with the bombast and crust of a Mayhem album, like Euronymous himself is not just writing this passage, but exists in this passage, chained and captured:
A man in New York has nothing but fists for fingers. Fists for each finger. For him, guitar playing is just punching, punching.
Simmons carries the heaviness through, always surprising the reader with sharp and dense phrasing; it reads like Simmons forced words through Lemmy Kilmister’s gravel throat and what survived was this:
He wants no one to touch nothing. Or anything. He wants someone to touch nothing. Or none of anything. He wants you to touch nothing of his. Yours, yes. Not his. Nothing. Not anything.
It’s his.
It’s like razors, his shoulder blades. It’s like razors.
It’s like barbed wire, his eyes. It’s like barbed wire.
It’s like spoiled milk, his voice. It’s like spoiled milk.
And all that’s fuck it, fuck all.
The entire story is only a page and a half, yet feels as dense as a dark star. Simmons is master of impossibly black, brooding imagery, atmosphere and emotion. It reads like Tony Iommi’s flatted fifth interval guitar sound. The sound of evil. The sound of the Devil. Simmons conjures the darkness, captures it and then sets it loose upon the reader’s subconscious.
Before you leave Midgard and wage battle against Surtr in Muspelheim for the final battle of Ragnarök, light the candle in the horned ox skull you have by your wall of curved blades and bastard swords, sit in your throne fashioned from the bones of your slain enemies, cover up your fragile human body with your thick dragon skin blanket, drink deep the blood of the Frost Giant and read this collection of short stories to your army of human barbarians – it will give them the courage of Odin to spill Surtr’s blood, wade into his army of horse-beasts, cut out their living guts and make it into strings for a most holy electric guitar to shred uponeth and free the minds of humankind.
Simmons prose is infectious. It reminds me why fiction is still so important, why I read it, why I write it, why I love it.
Buy a copy of The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge from Keyhole Press before Matthew Simmons makes a chandelier for his dining room out of your mortal human bones.
And read "Daredevils" by Matthew Simmons here on Smalldoggies Magazine in the Fiction section.
Or consider following his Black Metal Column: CLVRSKLL here on Smalldoggies Magazine, monthly.