  Sam Richard knows a thing or two about putting together literary tributes. As owner of Weirdpunk Books, he’s edited and published such anthologies as Blood for You: A Literary Tribute to GG Allin, Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to the Misfits, and The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg. Now he’s released his own debut short story collection, To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows (published by NihilismRevised). And though not formally marketed as such, this book is in many ways a tribute to Richard’s biggest influence of all: his wife. In his introduction, the author is upfront about the circumstances that led to this book’s creation. In 2017, Richard’s wife Mo died suddenly and without warning. Nevertheless, her presence is felt on every page here, every sentence and every word, every drop of blank ink and every empty white space. The book is dedicated to her and virtually every story selected for inclusion here has some connection to her, either by virtue of being a piece she herself enjoyed in life or, more often, being directly inspired by her loss. Knowing all that makes To Wallow in Ash a difficult book to read, and an even more difficult one to review. One can only imagine what it must have been like to write. To wit, the opening title story reads more like a confessional than a piece of fiction. Told from the first-person POV in a conversational style, the tale’s unnamed narrator finds himself a widower in a situation that is essentially a retelling of events from Richard’s own life. After cremating his spouse, the narrator returns home with an urn full of ashes and a determination to find some way of holding onto his lost love. The method he chooses is stomach-churning, and his spiraling descent into grief, desperation, and self-destruction is heart-wrenching. That the early half of the narrative sticks so closely to Richard’s own admitted experiences, to the point where the piece initially appears to be a non-fiction essay rather than a made-up story, makes the latter half all the more vivid and harrowing. Though the next tale is much more blatantly fictional it proves no less soul-crushing. “Love Like Blood” focuses on another widower, this one a man who searches fruitlessly for solace at the bottom of a bottle. One drunken night at a local bar leads to a surreal encounter with a woman who seems in every way his late wife’s double. When the man wakes up in bed the next morning, the doppelganger is gone, leaving the poor guy with nothing but a wicked hangover and an even wickeder VHS tape. “Love Like Blood” goes in a very different direction than one might first assume, and ultimately climaxes in a finale that is shocking, yes, but also disturbingly relatable. In any other book, “The Prince of Mars” would be solid piece of entertainment, but here it is more: A welcome mercy. A drink of water. A much-needed gasp of air following the suffocating blackness of “To Wallow in Ash” and “Love Like Blood.” Trading the intimately personal for something more high-concept, “The Prince of Mars” is an inspired mash-up of literature’s two great Burroughs, Edgar Rice and William S. Richard deftly evokes the voice of the latter as he drops the notorious beat author (or at least his thinly veiled alter ego “Bill Lee”) into a fairly straightforward retelling of the former’s first Barsoom novel. Much star-crossed romance, hot man-on-Thark action, and excessive drug use ensues. The juxtaposition of E.R.’s innocent swashbuckling pulp with W.S.’s debauched appetites and hallucinogenic language is riotous. It is also, somehow, surprisingly touching. Surprising in its own way is “I Know Not the Names of the Gods to Whom I Pray.” One of Richard’s shorter tales, this one nevertheless packs a lot of oomph into a small package with its sensual, lyrical, and grisly account of a pair of lovers locked in an endless cycle, killing one another only to resurrect and do it all over again, over and over for all eternity. It’s serves as a gory, gothic meditation on love and loss, on need and suffering. Following that is “The Verdant Holocaust,” the second of To Wallow in Ash’s two pieces written prior to the passing of Richard’s wife, alongside “The Prince of Mars.” However where “The Prince of Mars” sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to the rest of the collection’s material (in truth, that is part of its appeal), “The Verdant Holocaust” feels very much at home. With a plot concerning a pair of punk rockers struggling to revive their friendship after the suicide of a bandmate, it more overtly shares the same themes of death, mourning, fatalism, and attempted (though not necessarily successful) reconstruction that run throughout the collection. That said punk rockers soon run afoul of an apocalyptic backwoods cannibal cult does nothing to lessen the potency of those themes, but it does lighten the mood (in a sense) via a veritable blood-orgy of grisly b-movie splatter. Another cult is at the center of “Those Undone.” Instead of relishing in the excesses of the trope like “The Verdant Holocaust,” though, “Those Undone” soberly explores the emotional and psychological toll of a child growing up in such an environment. Little by little, piece by piece, the youthful narrator is orphaned, first from his parents, then from his faith, later from sister, and finally from himself. It’s a haunting reflection on survivor’s guilt, and on the directionless that comes when everything you knew disappears overnight. Guilt of a different kind features heavily in “We Feed This Muddy Creek,” a story about a member of a gang of serial killers who tries to leave the bloodshed behind when he meets a woman who fulfills a need in him that no body-count ever could. This tragic romance tastes bittersweet before it even begins, with an agonizing sense of inevitability looming large from the first line all the way to the fittingly cruel but strangely serene end. The final two stories in To Wallow in Ash somewhat mirror the first two, being among the most transparently autobiographical pieces in Richard’s oeuvre. In the alternately melancholy and absurd “Nature Unveiled” a married couple engrosses themselves in ancient magick and occult practices. When the wife dies her husband returns her ashes to nature. Soon enough, nature itself becomes a weapon against the living, with even the most unassuming woodland critter suddenly turning vicious and hungry, as if intent to spread the woman’s death to the rest of the world. Finally, in “Deathlike Love,” a grieving widower left alone in the morgue with his wife’s body seeks the comfort of carnal intimacy with his deceased lover one last time. What in another writer’s hands might come off as mere sleaze or shock value is instead imbued with sincere understanding and emotional intensity, and is all the more raw and corrosive because of it. Though it’s not hard to see where this tale is going, that doesn’t make the journey there any less brutal. Indeed, “Deathlike Love” might be the most upsetting piece in To Wallow in Ash since its titular opener. Knowing the truth behind them, even Richard’s most outrageous fictions become unforgivingly real. This collection is not the kind of book one should read all in one sitting, despite the modest page-count. This is a collection best digested in chunks, a story at a time. Anything more is almost unbearable. Nearly every page surges with confrontational energy, a kind of blunt honesty that rarely leaves room for reassurance in its single-minded pursuit of total, aching, human vulnerability. In that way, however, the book does offer one subtle comfort, though it’s one that’s easy to miss. For all its heartbreak, pessimism, doom, and despair, that this collections exists at all is a testament not simply to death, but to survival as well. Simply put, as much as To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows stands as a tribute to a Richard’s late wife Mo, it is equally a tribute to Richard himself.    Comments are closed.
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