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The problem when you haven’t read Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is how to say anything about Logan Berry’s new hybrid thing, Casket Flare.

But I refuse to see this as a problem.

Cos I’ve read the synopsis and, as I’ve said on the other four of these things that I’ve done, with experimental stuff, you can never be right, you probably won’t even come close, and I’m pretty certain I’ll come even less close than someone who’s read Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake so…

What is the synopsis of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake?

‘Camp Crystal Lake is on fire, and everything’s been exhumed!!! In the burning forest it’s impossible to distinguish between the killers, the campers, and the camp counselors. 

A cursed book wrought from a cursed planet, Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is a fetish-object emanating oblique fan fictions and haunted eco-poetics. Where hedonistic teens perform hedonistic plays on an outdoor stage, where Sky Ferreira sings of cow disease, where campers make art out of toxic wreckage–the killers lurk! Berry has created a textualized slasher, brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor, that will fuel your nightmares for years to come.’ 

First off, this clearly has nothing to do with the Friday the 13^th series cos it says campers and most of the films don’t bother with them. They much prefer to slaughter the counsellors/locals.

Not sure who Sky Ferreira is.

The killers apparently lurk in a textualized slasher so there should be murdering at some point within the madness.

Can a slasher work if something more intelligent is going on?

Spec: a group of counsellors are both on their way to and already at Camp Crystal Lake. They have dozens of activities planned out – mostly singing and stage plays – and even when some of them start to disappear or turn up in random body parts, they still persist with the show. Behind the façade is a sad desperation to escape, yet something ineffable in the camp itself will not let them leave. Finally, the killer appears and attempts to drown himself in the lake. As he sinks to the bottom, chained to a plastic anchor, the lake bed gives way and he drops into a shack that he has been living in ever since he drowned as a child. Meanwhile, the remaining counsellor glues the microphone to her hand and sings to the corpses of her friends, something about sunny times ahead. She attempts to cry but shrieks hysterically instead. Shifts right to left, left to right, right to left, left to right while doing so. Cut to: a turtle traipsing slowly over an artificial lunar landscape, in monochrome, with another moon hovering in the near distance.

Hmm, I’m fairly confident with this one…that it’s at least fifteen per cent correct. Maybe the death wish/survival instinct contradiction within the counsellors. That sounds plausible. A contradiction that won’t slip into parody cos then the whole thing could fall apart. Hmm. When I finally get around to buying a copy, I’ll know for sure.  

But what about Logan’s new book, Casket Flare?

This might be a stupid question, but what is a casket exactly?

My existing knowledge base tells me coffin, maybe an American word for it, but don’t Americans use the word coffin too?

Ah, according to Schilling Funeral Home, a casket is for showing the body at the funeral and a coffin is the box that actually gets buried. Is that right?

I’ll assume it is.

Schilling sounds like a name that knows what they’re talking about.

So there’s some symbolism at work here, the simulacrum of death rites, and a flare inside the casket could mean that the main source of entertainment is coming from the death aspect.

How about the synopsis?

‘Every city has that motel. The motel on the edge of town, the mythical place you dare not go. Logan Berry goes there.

The colossal new unclassifiable horror text object from the experiences of Logan Berry. 274 pages of full color immersive madness designed with the inimitable Mike Corrao. This is a fuck around and find out book. Beware.’

Or:

‘The colossal horror tome from Logan Berry. CASKET FLARE follows Berry as he ritualizes the space & history of the most terrifying commonplace feature of the post-American-greatness the budget motel. What really is in the darkness at the edge of town?’

There are several descriptions for this hybrid book, some very long blurbs too, so I think you can get an idea what it is.

I also found something from 2020 that seems to be a short extract from Casket Flare, talking about the author locking himself in the Skylark Motel for three days and holding a self-séance.

Not sure if this is real or a meta-narrative part of the book itself, maybe the former as some of the reviews on Goodreads say flicking through this thing is like experiencing a lonely séance yourself.

One of those books that wants you to forget it’s a book.

Reminds me a little of the zines I used to deal with, especially the art-zines where the design was impeccable and there was a clear concept behind it but did I feel anything? Not really. Most of them just felt incredibly mapped out. And the concept was usually something vaguely pleasant/abstract e.g. memory and the ocean.

To pull this kind of thing off, you have to really go outside your structuring self, I think. Run off/on instinct. Try not to make sense.

Setting/location?

It says above that Casket Flare is attached to the very American icon of the budget motel.

Can’t think of any horror films with a motel off the top of my head. Sure there must be one, at least.

Ah, Vacancy.

Luke Wilson. Kate Beckinsale.

Motel Hell.

Vacancy 2.

Identity.

Claws For Alarm.

And the Psycho franchise, I guess.

This is solid ground to start from. Those old art zines that I clearly don’t have any vendetta against even though one of the zine shop owners said one time that my zine looked cheap and ugly…they lacked this factor. I don’t give a fuck about the ocean to be honest. My memory is not in there. And their images were dull, generic, the text cut-outs-

I just didn’t like them.

Casket Flare looks pretty good. The cover itself seems like it was half-captured on a broken camera and developed in Hell, and some of the sample pages I’ve seen are equally unsettling.

But what is it going for?

Obviously no plot in the traditional sense, something abstract instead, something that will suck me into a lonely séance.

A metaphysical recreation of the author’s own experiences – aural, visual, mental, other realms – forced into each other on the page.

If that makes any sense.

Here we go.

Spec: The first few pages will focus on distorted, jarring images of the Skylark Motel, the place the author is about to enter. A blurry figure will be visible in the window. The text attached will seemingly have no relation, describing random rituals from old Ruggeri diaries. Then we will enter the room of the motel and, for the next forty or fifty pages, see the same interior shot being filtered through a slowly darkening shade of red until, finally, it becomes too dark to discern anything. At the same time, the text will deviate between the bizarre, the abject and the shockingly personal. The author will state terrible things like how he always wanted to have a pet fox and disembowel said fox and then say how deeply he feels when he watches fox rescue vids on YouTube then veer into old autopsy hacks in the morgue he used to work at when he was younger. At this point, the book will pivot to the outside, showing several pages of the author’s silhouette looking tiny against the motel exterior. This will evoke the loneliness that the reviewers mentioned earlier. Then we’ll be taken back inside where tiny details of the motel room have been altered. The bed will be metal instead of wood, the Ernst painting will have disappeared, the lamp light will emit green haze instead of red, little things like this. Yet the text will describe each altered object differently to how it appears in the image. Later, we and the author will begin to hear voices in the walls and then the walls will change themselves too. Will there be space left for rationalisation? The author may start sentences of explanation and then leave them unfinished. Deep down they want this to be something insane. They want to become insane, at least until the book’s finished. And after that? The end. A final shot of the motel as it was in the old days. Or perhaps that’s too obvious, too close to ‘The Shining’. A picture of the motel as it was just before you entered. The windows smiling, the front door slightly ajar. And the author already inside, waiting for himself as the blurred figure in the window.

As always, I’m extremely confident that most of the above is way off base, but I do wonder how the author feels after finishing something like this.

Like Gary J Shipley after watching Begotten on loop for two weeks in order to come up with You With Your Memory Are Dead.

You find a publisher, perhaps one you’ve worked with before and it goes out and then what? Is that part of the process a disappointment compared to the discipline and openness of the books creation?

I would say yes.

But then when someone says your book made them feel lonely, it all becomes worth it. Lonely or unsettled. Or disturbed. You did that to them just like you did it to yourself.

Is this book horror/horrific?

Who cares?

Is it alive/sentient/waiting for you?

Maybe.

You can buy Casket Flare here [and this is definitely a book you should own a physical copy of – in fact, I don’t even know if there is an e-book version, probably not].

Same goes for Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake, which you can buy from 11:11 Press [if they have copies left]