We Live Inside You

Authors: Jeremy Robert Johnson

BOOK: We Live Inside You

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“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific. Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. These stories have range and style and wit.
This
is entertainment... and literature.”—JACK KETCHUM, author of
Off Season
,
The Girl Next Door
, and
The Woman
(w/Lucky McKee)

“A haunting collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. Jeremy Robert Johnson is one of those rare writers who can see in the dark.”

—PETER CRAIG, author of
Hot Plastic
and
Blood Father
, co-screenwriter of
The Town

“One of the first ‘rules’ of writing you’ll hear is that you’ve got to write compelling characters who a reader can invest in—if not, nobody’ll give a shit what happens to them. Jeremy Robert Johnson’s stories stand as proof to this maxim: you may not always like the people populating these stories but they’re real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them... and in JRJ’s harsh universe,
baaaaad
things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.” —CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of
Rust and Bone
and
The Fighter

“The guy’s a genius. Reminds me of William Gibson—the dark interest in altered states of consciousness, the unrelentingly furious forward movement, and the same kind of unlimited imagination.”

—BEN LOORY, author of
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

“Tongue-replacing isopods, brain-raping copepods and body-warping worms are far from the most insidious parasites that infest Jeremy Robert Johnson’s hapless literary victims. Though the squirmy bits elegantly pioneer new frontiers of sickness, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is at its most twisted and mordantly revelatory when it drops the body-horror metaphors and digs into the real horror of all the parasitic drives that ride us––tapeworms of greed, lust like plagues of crab lice, and the lethal heartworms of true love. So tightly written and so fluidly brutal you’ll want to consume this psychosexual demolition derby in one sitting, but you’ll spend the rest of the night checking yourself under a microscope. This book should come with a list of side-effects.”

—CODY GOODFELLOW, author of
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
and
Radiant Dawn/Ravenous Dusk

“Waaaay out at the deep end of the collective unconscious—where even the bravest of brain cells fear to tread—Jeremy Robert Johnson performs stand-up comedy for the gods. And their laughter is a marvelous, terrible thing. He’s the kind of post-Lovecraftian genius berserker who makes the Great Old Ones new again. As with Clive Barker, there is no glorious mutational eruption that Johnson can’t nail directly through your gawping mind’s eye.” —JOHN SKIPP, NY Times Bestselling author of
Spore
(w/Cody Goodfellow) and
The Bridge
(w/Craig Spector)

“A dazzling writer.” —CHUCK PALAHNIUK, NY Times Bestselling author of
Fight Club

“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales.”—Bookgasm

“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly horror, and when he steps outside the gross-out game he transcends most other straight literary writers.” —Verbicide

“I don’t know if Mr. Johnson sold his soul to the devil to give him this gift for nightmare imagery, but by god, this guy can write. Johnson excels at pathology and perversity. A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”

—Cemetery Dance

“Johnson is probably a few books away from doing for horror what Jonathan Lethem did for science fiction. Plain and simple? Forget horror; this is good fiction.”—Girl on Demand

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 86810

Portland, OR 97286-0810

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 1-933929-06-5

“The Oarsman” originally appeared in
Dark Discoveries #17
. “When Susurrus Stirs” originally appeared in
Bare Bone #10
. “The Witness at Dawn” “The Brilliant Idea” “Cortical Reorganization” “The Encore” “Mercy” & “A Flood of Harriers” originally appeared in
Cemetery Dance #’s 56 and 60
. “Consumerism” originally appeared in
Falling From the Sky
. “Trigger Variation” originally appeared in
The Vault of Punk Horror
. “The Gravity of Benham Falls” originally appeared in
Ghosts at the Coast Vol. 2
. “Cathedral Mother” originally appeared in
The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction #4.
“Simple Equations” originally appeared in
A Dark and Deadly Valley
. “Laws of Virulence” originally appeared in
Warmed and Bound
. “The Musty Cow’s Teat of Death” originally appeared in
Boneyard Babies
. “The Mars Volta’s Descent Into Bedlam” appears here courtesy of Universal Music.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.

Sincere thanks are due to the following folks/entities/collectives for their unending camaraderie, support, inspiration and wisdom: Jessi and Caleb (always), Carlton Mellick III, Rose O’Keefe, Cameron Pierce, Jeff Burk, Mykle Hansen, Alan M. Clark, Cody Goodfellow, J. David Osborne, Brandon Armstrong, John Skipp, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Craig Davidson, Stephen Graham Jones, Kris Saknussemm, Ben Loory, Peter Craig, David Agranoff, Kevin Sampsell, The Velvet/The Cult/Bizarro Central, The Bizarro Brigade, Sam McCanna, John Roome, Dave Lounsbury, Jackson Ellis, Hernan Ortiz, Viviana Trujillo, Fractal, James Beach, Sam Pool, Powell’s Books, the Johnsons, the Wicklunds, Bishop and (most likely) You.