We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe

28/3/2022

We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe
Book Review by Rebecca Rowland

“Above the boy’s bed I scrawled the sigil into the wall with the edge of the spoon’s handle. Once Cameron and the family return, when the dark reaches its umbral peak, the Man with a Face of Teeth with come.
As he came to me.”

With a title as seemingly nebulous as We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, Paula D. Ashe’s collection of thirteen vignettes might have been a weepy romance, a genteel drama, or even a feminist manifesto. The back cover summary boasts that the writer will take the reader into a “dark and bloody world where nothing is sacred and no one is safe,” but don’t most horror releases promise similar results? In this case, however, Ashe isn’t bluffing. From the very first pages, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other lays the splatter on extra thick and double dares the reader to maintain a settled stomach as her tales vacillate between quick jabs of frightening flash fiction and knockout punches of literary torture porn.

Told in an exchange of emails between the managing editor of a BuzzFeed-like news site and a freelance writer, “Exile in Extremis” begins with some questioning about the veracity of a particularly gruesome story concerning a well-known entrepreneur and “the ‘female corpse recirculation’ racket.” As the online story amasses a flurry of viewers and comments, the editor himself begins to investigate the incident, which sets off a much different dynamic between the manager and his contracted employee: “I’m trying to say that these were real people and shit like this just doesn’t happen to real people. Maybe I’m a ‘normie,’ (‘normy?’) but this is just some super fucked up shit and it’s making me super uncomfortable. I appreciate your kind words in your previous message about being afraid of this ‘Priest of Breathing’ person, but I’m really starting to wonder about your ‘methods’ and your angle.” In a fresh take on a creepy cult-found footage mash-up, “Exile” keeps the reader glued to its pages until the very end.

Written in epistolary format, “The Mother of All Monsters” begins with a summary of local child abductions; there have been so many, in fact, that the narrator comments that she’s “never seen a summer so absent of children.” The disappearances are quickly replaced with grisly discoveries of bodies, and with those, a healthy sprinkling of paranoia and despair among the local residents. “Hailey had been abducted a few days after the last day of school from a nearby park…Her parents went on the news, haggard and dark-eyed, pleading for their child’s safe return. There was an Amber Alert and reports that she’d been sighted up near Silver Lake, multiple times. Turns out, it was just a little girl who looked a lot like Hailey. Her parents stop appearing on the news after that.” The rest unfolds into a disturbing journey examining the terrible fruit harvested when the seeds sown are rotten; readers who are also parents, especially those with young children, will be turned inside out in its path.

In “Because You Watched,” Taze and Marissa are siblings meeting in a diner to discuss the younger sister they’ve returned after many years to see. “He keeps talking, giving details, his hand partially obscuring his mouth. I only catch the tail end of his sentences and nothing makes sense. Our sister Lily had given birth. Crazy Lily. Lily, who would play with her own shit and then throw it at you if you bothered her; Lily, who stood outside on feverish spring nights, her arms outstretched, claiming she was holding up the moon…Before Taze’s phone call this morning, I had not seen him since our parents’ funeral six years ago. After that, Lily was placed in an institution. When she turned eighteen, Taze and I left her the house, their money, and the silent plea to forget we ever existed.” When the two return to their childhood home and the sister they abandoned long ago, the smothered memories of what transpired between them flood their consciousness. Ironically, although “Because” is one of the least intricately detailed story in its gore, it is—by far—the most unsettling of all of Ashe’s thirteen tales and one primed to leave the reader with lasting nightmares.

In an age where trigger warnings nervously tiptoe about indie (though, curiously, not mainstream) horror fiction like ghosts weighted heavily with cacophonous chains, Ashe’s slim but mighty collection of extreme horror is a refreshing splash of ice-cold water. Among the misadventures, a hostage is forced to witness a fellow victim’s live disarticulation and then mutilate herself, a killer tucks Easter eggs of beauty—semi-precious stones, flower petals, and so forth—into body cavities and orifices before dumping the victims’ remains to be discovered, and a predator with “yellowing, neglected teeth” and a body of “heavy, sharpened bones” makes a poor choice in his selection of tiny prey. In each of Ashe’s offerings, her lack of censor shocks and intrigues, and at the same time, composes a landscape so viscerally alarming, it is guaranteed to fill the belly of every splattergore fanatic.

We Are Here To Hurt Each Other
by Paula Ashe

With these twelve stories Paula D. Ashe takes you into a dark and bloody world where nothing is sacred and no one is safe. A landscape of urban decay and human degradation, this collection finds the psychic pressure points of us all, and giddily squeezes. Try to run, try to hide, but there is no escape: we are here to hurt each other.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOUND INSIDE BOOK

“Gooey, gory and utterly mesmerizing, Paula D. Ashe's debut short fiction collection reads like the sloppy love-child of Clive Barker and David Cronenberg--Barker for sheer gruesomely sensual intoxication, the language of blood-soaked angels, Cronenberg for bodies flipped inside-out and messed around back-to-front like suppurating biological Rubik's Cubes. I want to study it; I wish I'd written it.”
—Gemma Files, author of In That Endlessness, Our End and Experimental Film

"My god, this book Where do I even begin? The exquisite language. The devastation. The slow, creeping dread. Truly masterful. I’m a new and devoted fan of Paula D. Ashe."
—Eric LaRocca author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"Clive Barker is her Virgil, but Paula D. Ashe is Dante guiding you ever deeper into an Inferno more hellish and cursed than the 14th Century Catholic poet could've possibly envisioned. The only salvation possible for these damned souls is to find rapture in suffering and release in condemnation. Most are lucky just to find the one, true end to all woe. Paula D. Ashe is a Prophet of Pain."
--Christopher Ropes author of These Tales Are Winter: A Phenomenology of Ghosts.

"Paula D. Ashe came to hurt me, refused to apologize, and left me in a forensically unfeasible state of despair. Holy fuck."
—Joe Koch author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands

"The stories in Paula D. Ashe's debut collection are brutal, intense, and will have you questioning what lies beneath the veneer of strangers, of loved ones, and of yourself."
—Doungjai Gam, author of glass slipper dreams, shattered and watch the whole goddamned thing burn

“Poignant, grim, and startling, the remarkable stories of We Are Here To Hurt Each Other shine with luminescent dread. In this collection, Paula D. Ashe reminds us that monsters aren’t just real: they’re here and they’re human.”
—Tiffany Morris author of Havoc in Silence

“To hold the reader’s undivided attention, such a degree of blistering honesty requires an equally high level of storytelling skill, and Ashe does not disappoint. Here is a writer whose impeccable prose grips the reader from the first sentence, and commands attention. The stories in this collection convey a chilling urgency, as all truthful and uncompromising fictions do.”
—S. P. Miskowski, author of I Wish I Was Like You