What the Giants Were Saying
The November air was cold, but not cold enough to still the energy of the great white towers. They spun and spun as always – huge sails whirling around, always seeming just slightly faster than they should be.
What the Giants were Saying is a dark-hued and surreal fable on the theme of creativity. It is an extreme horror tale of artist's block, tattoos, Don Quixote, copper wire... and wind turbines! Always wind turbines! It tells of a landscape artist desperately trying to escape his own feelings of mundanity and having hallucinatory encounters both with those great white whispering giants and a wild tattooed girl who pushes creative experience to the very limit and knows that the towers are the key to something remarkable. Tattoos, Windmills, turbines, human skin and copper wire... with these keys a world of supernatural change is unlocked – and supernatural creation. After all, what could creativity be like when such things as pain, life and death no longer have the same meaning?
It's simply a choice between one life and another.
* * *
Cal pinned the tattooed girl's skin to the small artist's canvas and stood looking at it, a tear trickling down his cheek.
What the Giants Were Saying is accompanied here by the shorter work that inspired it, Red Fire, a piece that pushes the boundaries of extreme horror into a visionary and surreal world of love and pain, great white moths and tattooed skin, and above all, into the world of story itself.
I cannot see any more – and you want me to read you?
These two connected tales are both horror writing at its most spectacular and extreme.
Readers also enjoyed
David Rix
David Rix (born in England in 1978) is an author, composer, editor, artist and publisher active in the area of Slipstream, Speculative Fiction and Horror - not to mention hints of absurdism, miserablism, naturism and pissed-offism. Contemporary classical music, the seashore, urban underground, railways, rocks and canals. His published books are What the Giants were Saying, the chapbook Brown is the New Black and the novella/story collection Feather, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill prize. In addition, his works have appeared in various places, the most notable being many of the Strange Tales series of anthologies from Tartarus Press, Monster Book For Girls from Exaggerated Press, Creeping Crawlers from Shadow Publishing, and Marked to Die from Snuggly Books. He also runs and creates the art for Eibonvale Press, which focuses on innovative and unusual new slipstream writing. As an editor, his first anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, a collection of Slipstream stories connected to the railways, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category.
More books by David Rix
