Joe Koch

@horrorsong.blog

6107 Followers 1708 Following

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Website: horrorsong.blog Books! The Wingspan of Severed Hands Invaginies https://bookshop.org/p/books/invaginies/20266528 The Couvade Convulsive The Shipwreck of the Cerberus

CARNALIS by Tiff Morris falling onto sheets of slippery plastic.
The sultry eyes of a queer saint implore you to read DISCO MURDER CITY.
FLEISCHEREI leans against a disturbingly textured wall the color of a pale white person's flesh.
Sassy bitch (complimentary) saying Shut up you little baby.
1-900-9099-CRY
Dario Argento (my father) says Murder is very important in my films, it is also very beautiful.
An airplane ascends through a muddled blue sky. The red branding on the chassis says TRANS WORLD.
Package label that says sugar free cookies.
Delightfully spotted green & black & yellow frog with its back to me, escaping through a tangle of grass blades & creeping charlie. The colors of the frog were stunning. My pic doesn't do it justice. The frog was also LORGE.
Sam Neill, all fucked up emotionally, says, "For me God is a disease."
Orange cat with a chunk of what's probably a chocolate Easter bunny face placed in front of the cat's face like a weird little mask.
A selection of book photos including: The Wingspan of Severed Hands as a meal (pic by John McNee), Stories of the Eye book cover (my foray into being an editor), and the table of contents of my collection CONVULSIVE.
Announcement for Dead Boys Don't Cry by Joe Koch, coming out in June 2027, described as a cosmic-erotic slasher and queer anti-murder mystery told through interlocking stories, pitched as Cruising meets Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers.
Laudanum guzzling poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in a beautifully lit red-draped room. Byron pets Shelley's blonde locks while gazing downward and speaking, probably describing exactly what he's going to do to him in bed. (Or on the roof. It's a Ken Russel film, after all.) Shelley gazes upward past him ecststically, glass raised. His eyes say Yes.
An intolerant woman says, "shut up you little baby."
A woman looks intolerant.
David Cronenberg and Clive Barker each holding worm babies from their films. It's the eighties, so they're wearing jeans & button downs like sitcom guys. Script at the top says My Two Dads as if it's really a show that was on TV.
Screenshot from psycho; two handsome, dark-haired men stare intently at one another with competitive or barely repressed homosexual violence. Their hands betray longing, reaching for each other across the desk.
Stormy sky behind concrete and brick buildings in downtown Minneapolis. There's glass with sky in it, a couple of brutalist-type buildings or facades, an old-timey looking one, and everything in frame kinda bends like tropism to where the sun should be.
Stormy sky behind concrete and brick buildings in downtown Minneapolis. There's glass with sky in it, a couple of brutalist-type buildings or facades, an old-timey looking one, and everything in frame kinda bends like tropism to where the sun should be.
An assortment of ikea pride flag sofas.
Original bright yellow cover of cosmic body horror novella The Wingspan of Severed Hands by Joanna Koch (now Joe Koch).
Guy from True Detective S1 begging Rust to stop saying odd shit.
Franco Nero (in shibari) gazes at his wife and co-star Vanessa Redgrave as she holds a knife pointed at his chest. We can feel the palpable tension, consent, and longing; an emotionally naked piece of cinema, but kinda cheeky, too.
Victor Frankenstein in James Whale's Frankenstein
A transam with trans flag paint job
Star trek title card but it has the title of my story "eating bees from the ass of god" instead.
Oh my period started.
Green onions happily stinking up the whole apartment as they grow roots in a jar of water on a formica countertop (that's rather interestingly not actually attached to the cupboard below. Countertop just kind of placed there casually. I found out when I was unfortunate enough to lean on it.)
The Wingspan of Severed Hands book cover.
Minneapolis, on the street where pretti was shot around the corner from my old place: cop idling in a car below graffiti that reads "death to america."
Gena Rowlands on the phone saying, "I'm sorry I sound calm. I assure you I'm hysterical."
The void thing from star trek tng, looking like a sentient mound of aggressive tar; closed caption says "roaring continues."
80s newscaster with pursed lips saying Now it's everyone's problem.
Stab Frenzy by Gary J. Shipley (book is standing upright in one of the more liminal nooks in my apartment which is composed mostly of nooks).
Dean Stockwell in pussy heaven raising a toast. He says "Here's to your fuck."
5 star review: "I have no idea what is happening in this entire book and I love it more than anything."
A dog and a deer smooch in the back of a cop car. Caption reads STAY GAY.
Ken Russell's "Gothic" film shot: Byron & Shelley cuddling & guzzling laudanum. It's a beautiful shot that looks like a Renaissance painting.
An ad for ice cream. Two priests, one spoon. An imminent kiss.
Sam Neill looking unbearably hot and dangerous gazing just to the left of the camera spitting truth as a young freak in Possession and saying, "For me, God is a disease."
Confrontational fan from In The Mouth Of Madness holding a baseball bat yet with the attitude of a youth pastor from hell asking Sam Neill, "Do you read Joe Koch?"
menace and implication within the line level; Joe Koch’s “These Are His Memories” does so by blurring its narrative voice, the “you” of an embedded story and the “you” of the second person narration metafictionally reminded that “you, too, are made of paper”; telling both character and reader that the weird has “so many causes and effects, failures, losses, but lots of them good, the things you worked for and wanted, happy occasions. It’s never one thing. There is no straw. It creeps up on you.” Whether overt or subtle and diffuse, these moments of indeterminacy and unsettlement, these liminal spaces of critical thinking, are where weird fiction happens, where things are weirded.
They only ever have one entrance, usually located beneath the floor of a church or farmhouse, or simply under the flagstones of a town square.
Koch, Joe “All of Our Boys Are Missing,” Bury Your Gays. Koch, Joe “Child of Rawfrog,” CHM 54 December Koch, Joe “Lysergic is the Circle of My Secret,” The Mad Butterfly’s Ball. Koch, Joe “The Wing of Circumcision Hands,” Invaginies.
Screenshot of the word "opulent".
Joe is maybe the closest thing we have right now to a literary Iggy Pop, Kenneth Anger or Butthole Surfers: he doing whatever the hell he feels like on the page and he's got a rock-solid sense of craft with a deep understanding of the form to go along with it. This isn't surrealism for it's own sake, but a whirlwind of distilled fury, passion, obsession, terror, loathing and joy, released as 'horror' and 'surrealism' because they only these forms that can convey these emotions at such intensity. One doesn't quite read these stories as much as they strap in and just go along for the ride. Everything lands, even when you have no idea where, when, who or what the story is doing.
A very Kristy McNichol looking person bites their lip tearfully while on a cordless landline telephone. The caption reads 1-900-9099-CRY with prices following.
We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?'
We Shall Speak Again of The Red Tower, a recent anthology of short stories inspired by or written in tribute to Thomas Ligotti’s classic “The Red Tower”, is a project that feels like it was undertaken on a dare. Like a gang of kids egging each other on to go knock on the door of the haunted house, but no one wants to go it alone, i’ll go if you go, no you first, and pretty soon they’re all inside the haunted house together. Of course, in this analogy, the house is some other kind of construction… Each kid emerges with a different takeaway on what happened to them inside: clinical (Joelle Killian) confessional (Carson Winter), satirical(C.J. Subko), monomaniacal (Jack Klausner), hysterical (TJ Price), metafictional/metaphysical (RSL), but all of them (and srsly they cannot stress this enough) definitely encrimsoned.
List of films from "House of Psychotic Women" I still need to see next to the book and my one-thousandth cup of coffee, possibly spiked as the daylight has begun to dwindle.
Hauntingly poetic prose. Whirlwinds of trauma and destruction. Undoubtedly a great book but having read convulsive first It was brilliant to see Koch's prose has become tighter and more refined, but without it losing that hallucinogenic and poetic aura. Definitely worth a read but perhaps before convulsive, as the latter takes everything great about this one and just elevates it.
Bumper sticker that says please let me merge, my dad is dead.
Minneapolis like a sprawling grey fortress in the distance from a hilltop. The sun glares madly behind two trees.
A Black Swan film poster from Ghana
The Power Company Detective by Joe Koch eligible in the short story category horror lit spec fic is inexpertly plastered on a still from Verhoeven's the fourth man.