Orange Slab appears in Interzone 301 and is also the cover story.
Although it can be read as a standalone story, it is an important part of my story sequence, The Underkin and Other Stories.
Orange Slab is the story of Kasimir and Kalvin, old schoolfriends from the cursed town of Gyddon but now in their late twenties. Owing to Kalvin’s weird behaviour, they’ve been estranged of late but after another girlfriend breaks Kas’ heart, looking for a sympathetic ear, he pays Kalvin a visit. However, he finds Kalvin even more up to his eyes in online conspiracies than before, his furniture missing and a strange orange slab propped up in his flat. Before long, they are humping the slab across town trying to offload it. Meanwhile, a global pandemic is breaking out, an invasion of weird violet spores that Kalvin and Kas have to outrun as the whole town shuts down around them.
Origin Story
The initial inspiration for a story called Orange Slab came from a freewrite I did based on a postcard of Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture Untitled: Amber Bed (see below). From this, I sketched an idea in which the orange slab appeared in someone’s place much in the way the strange balls do in Kafka’s Blumfield: An Elderly Batchelor. Somehow I had the idea of two people talking and the slab convincing them by osmosis to kill their neighbour, Drake. This was the origin of Kalvin, Kasimir and Mr Smuts, the latter a mysterious removals man whose name I changed from Drake to Kutts and then Smuts quite late on.
The original story was supposed to be about three pages long. However, a bit later, my friend Nick Ruston and I did a Randonautica in Norwich and ended up on the edge of the city, heading up a tiny alley at the end of a strange mews street that was unbeknown to us before we used the app. At the end was an open garage full of harsh white light. This inspired the second half of Orange Slab, and got K&K out of the building, so to speak.
The story was written from December 2020 to February 2021. It was originally intended to be part of FTS, a pamphlet of my writing and Nick Ruston’s art that would include an original story. FTS is shorthand for Fuck that Shit, after Dennis Hopper’s line, ‘Heineken, Fuck that shit’ in Blue Velvet; we were drinking a lot of Heineken during the pandemic and came up with lots of mad art schemes we never delivered on.
When FTS came to nothing and we stopped drinking altogether, I sent Orange Slab to many, many journals who all turned it down. Eventually, Interzone accepted it and put it on the cover. Moral of the story: Don’t listen to rejections. It’s the wrong editor, not a bad story. Find your people.
Extract
In the front room, he was sat cross-legged on the floor staring at his laptop. His head twitched, as if he was flexing his spine. God knows how long he’d been hunched there. I’d not been round to see him for months. I didn’t know what he was into now. He moved a thin paperback book from his hip to the other side of the screen, as if to hide it from me.
All his furniture had vanished. Where there used to be a sofa, an orange slab was propped up against the wall. About the size of a large ironing board and thick as a bouncer’s fist, there was nothing cheerful about its orange colour. It was the orange of slugs or the dirtiest fake tan in the world. I worried I was already infected the longer I stared at it.
Out on the estate all day, and out in the villages – I was still reading meters for Sagittarius Energy then – people were bleating about a sickness that drifted on the breeze. Two men from Gyddon had suffered breakdowns already. The old lady who ran the Queen Bee had freaked out, too. Governments around the world were about to overreact with clampdowns, that was the fear. Fear was mainstream now. It had been loud and blaring in the shriek feeds and nutjob forums for a while. Many referred to the supposedly imminent order to isolate as The Instruction.
The Instruction meant doom.
It meant salvation.
It could mean anything you wanted it to mean.
Whatever the Instruction meant, though, it was coming. If not tonight, tomorrow.
Usually I didn’t pay much attention to the news, but this scare about an airborne fungus that sends you into a frenzy or a stupor, has you hallucinating or sinks you into a coma, rumours were not consistent but whatever, it was rattling people.
Illustration
The cover image for Interzone 301 is by the amazing Emma Howett. I hadn’t shared Untitled (Amber Bed) but Emma avoided the slab image and instead visualised Kalvin’s head exploding with internet conspiracies, each image on the cover corresponding to something referenced in the text.
Emma has described this as: Illustration is mostly monochrome on an orange background. Satirical illustration of the head and shoulders profile of a paranoid spliff-smoking young man, blinded by a disposable face mask held in place by a sprung padlock. Yellow smoke from the spliff pours upwards from the man’s mouth, nose and ears, intertwining with the illustration and publication text. An Ouroboros snake tattoo is on his shoulder. Toadstools sprout from his vest top, face mask and ear. Conspiracy theories manifest physically from his maggoty brain. A rocket launcher fires pill capsules that fly over the man’s head, one is about to enter his mouth. An alien hand with ‘?’ fingerprints makes the V sign. Cans of energy drink spill and cover a strangled seabird in oil. A surveillance camera points out towards the reader. A military figure with a foam thumbs-up hand and TV-head holds the top of the face mask in place. The TV shows a parody of a communist symbol recreated with lobotomy tools and a news reporter at gunpoint, face censored by a smiley face symbol. News satellites bearing identical smiley face symbols hover around the man like mosquitos. One is alarmed by the sprung padlock. A reptilian Eye of Providence sprouts from a tentacled, crumbling pyramid that sits above all. The eye shoots a Wellsian heat-ray, exploding a unique satellite bearing a questioning-face symbol. The satellite carries a key to the sprung padlock symbolising that the young man has gained information that can allow him to remove his blindfold and see the truth.
Reviews
The Supernova Short Fiction Review describe the orange one as ‘tangerine malevolence’ and a ‘story of friendship that feels true’.
You can read the full review here.
Matt Cavanagh at Runalong the Shelves bestows upon the orange one the title of ‘a really brilliant opening story’ and later says it’s ‘highly immersive and a highpoint of the magazine’.
Full review here.
Eeriepedia
Orange Slab is crammed with references to other stories in The Underkin and Other Stories. The sequence is divided into three parts, Before, During and After, with Orange Slab being the last part of Before. Life will never be the same again after Orange Slab.
Gyddon: Cursed post-industrial town in the east of England known for disappearances and occult activity. All the characters in the sequence either come from Gyddon or have some connection to it.
The Swan with Two Necks: Grim pub that features in many a true crime podcast. Appears in Hardrada, Subtemple and others.
The Silent Woman: Slightly less grim pub than the Necks. Often glimpsed. Has rats.
Old Gill: Terrifying former woodwork teacher who has traumatised nearly all of the male population of Gyddon. Possibly a murderer. Appears in Cretaceous and others.
Nabil: Dead caver. Appears in Things Break Down.
1-Stop-Coffee2Go: weird roadside convenience. Appears in Fade to Black.
Georgia: Kalvin’s exe. Appears in Replacement Bus Service.
Lempo: Terrifying fiend straight out of Finnish mythology but sighted in Gyddon and its woods during the Disorder and afterwards. Appears in Fade to Black, Subtemple and others.
The Great Disorder: Pandemic event, the Before, the During and the After, an invasion of lethal psychotropic spores.
Drift/Drifted: death by spores.
Nether Mundham: Woods forest adjacent to Gyddon but maybe not of this earth: don’t go there.
The Underkin and Other Stories by Astrea Themis: Cursed collection that can contains a story called Orange Slab. Either meeting Astrea Themis or reading her book by mistake signals your worst fears will consume you. First appears in The Validations.
The Book is the Book
The Underkin and Other Stories is also the name of the entire sequence.
These fifteen stories of possession, obsession and hauntings become a sequence of strange and eerie short fictions in which the physical book itself opens a trap for the unwary.
‘This is a staggering work, and I am finding it difficult to believe that I just read a story quite like this one, almost as if it has sent me mad.’
Des Lewis, The Gesalt-Real Time Review of Books
Here are tales from Gyddon, a dour, east of England town known primarily for missing persons; Nether Mundham Woods, with its fearsome occult reputation; a worldwide pandemic caused by spores with psychotropic qualities known as The Great Disorder, and the Vex Prismatic, a breach in the space-time continuum opened by excessive feelings of grief or fear that lets things in and out and warps time and space. The book traps you in its telling of worst fears. By the end, you realise you are reading that cursed book. You are now part of it.
‘You should have shunned the Woods. You should have left the town. You should have heeded. You should have listened. You should have put my book down. You should have put out your eyes.’
Lovecraft and Lynch resonate and ripple through a very English darkness, a wonderful and frightening world streaked through with mordant wit and black comedy. Twelve of the stories have already appeared in Black Static, Nightscript, Weird Horror and others. These stories are collected for the first time and include three unique pieces to complete the sequence.
Rights are available. Drop me a line or contact my agent John Baker at BLM
Interzone 301, including Orange Slab is available to download from Interzone
