How to Kill People

Whales explode on New York City streets as a sex-crazed, drug-induced genius (our antagonist, Vince Johnson) ventures through the sorrows of that vast metropolis. The summer heat swelters and melts the city, and at night the insane denizens of the Vampire State hunt man and beast alike. Increasing depravity in America brings Vince to the brink of suicide, but he is saved by love. Yet his lust has produced a child that he does not want, and the outcome may spell tragedy for both him and the wealthy mistress obsessed with him. How to Kill people is a dark comedy; here is an excerpt (for more, visit www.dividedcore.com):

The night was pleasant. I walked past row houses in Park Slope and went to a bar where I drank several beers and had a cup of tea. I walked away from the shops and restaurants and wandered through lifeless neighborhoods beneath the faint glow of streetlights and the orbiting moon. I could hear people reciting the Nicene Creed in an old stone building. Through the warped windows of a dilapidated warehouse I saw carriages and white horses chained to the walls within. Lurking beyond were rotting factories and hollow grain silos and decrepit satanic mills. The street lights faded away and the stars came out as I walked through the shattered remnants of a fallen industrial kingdom.

I crossed a steel bridge and saw gas bubbles surfacing in the water of the reeking Gowanus canal. The soft current pushed opaque slicks of oil across the water like jellyfish weaving through reefs of plastic. Enchanted mutagens and glowing toxic sludge dripped from sewage pipes and there was a pale human hand floating upon the water and the ring finger was gone. I heard music coming from further down the canal. I climbed down the bridge and dropped onto the ledge of the wooden embankment. The canal was filled with rubble and shopping carts and trash and I remembered what Pogo said:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I walked toward the music. Across the canal people were smoking in shipping containers and others were nestled in dwellings hewed out from the embankment walls. A man was bathing in the viscous water. Lights flickered in shacks on the banks of the canal and originating from one shack was the rhythmic percussion of drums and the vibrations of stringed instruments. Docks decayed at the base of the embankment where dark children with damaged brains were opening cans of food with bullets and others slept, tranquilized by their own piss, lying in the warmth of their own excrement, and cats licked up their vomit. Two children had pulled a suitcase from the water and they opened it and it was filled with body parts. On the swampy slopes carpet baggers gathered around an oil drum fire and were roasting crows on skewers. And from out a tin hut in which men were hacking apart a dead tiger limped a little Chinese man holding a jar. He approached me.

“You look,” he said.
He held the jar up and turned it. Inside was lard floating in a translucent elixir.
“You buy,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It whale.”
“No thanks.”
“Five dolla.”
“No thanks.”
“Whale meat. Whale meat good meat.”

I passed families huddling in makeshift tents, destitute exiles languishing in scrapheap hovels. A man sat covered in cooing pigeons and pigeon shit and he was speaking gibberish. A stumbling drunk donning rags and a barbed wire crown was slurring in some cryptic gospel, floating in elation with a syringe dangling from his arm. Crippled outcasts with grafted faces slumped like monsters alongside progeria children and paralyzed basket cases. A colony of degenerates wasting time, waiting for the world to end. A native man was convulsing on the ground and frothing at the mouth, grunting spasmodically.